site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I think race isn’t the issue with regard to immigration. The issue is that, especially after the civil rights movement, it became less expected for immigrants to assimilate. And the problem isn’t that brown people are coming to America. The problem is people coming to America with a bad set of cultural norms (laziness, lack of respect for education, less law abiding, etc.) and thus importing the attitudes, values and beliefs that make the poorer parts of the world poorer. And to some extent even whites are picking up those values. For example the meme of being entitled to a “good life” without putting in any effort to obtain it, or less emphasis on education or conformity.

Immigrants never assimilated in the first place. The original founding father WASP cultural norms were, through academia, media and finally voting, drowned out by a random collection of immigrants from Europe. Though the WASP's only have themselves to blame for opening the gates in the first place. 'Assimilation' is a self flattering fairy tale Americans, mostly white and conservative, have been telling themselves for a long time now but it's nothing more than that.

The fundamental illustration of this comes from those who self describe as the most culturally American, who also happen to be mostly white and conservative, are also the ones who have nigh unanimously failed to maintain any semblance of American culture from the previous generation outside of gun ownership. Every other value that could or should have been maintained has over time been crushed to appeal to those who have power and money. Leaving the expressed cultural tradition of America revolving around guns, submission and greed.

What white conservative Americans mean when they talk of 'assimilation' is whether or not the immigrant is willing to work under whatever conditions the white conservative American deems acceptable. With no regard for the fact that many immigrants are not as submissive and greedy as they are. Which doesn't help explain why conservatives are seemingly perpetually thunderstruck by the willingness of immigrants to support the political party that promises them more money and status. Leading one to conclude that the final lacking component that makes up the mythical cultural American is delusional arrogance.

I mean based on what? Any culture, even one that doesn’t accept immigrants will change over time. Japan today would be a culture shock to a Japanese person time-traveling from 1950. Musical tastes change (though a fair number of people consider country to be a continuation of traditional American music) which I would contend is something that conservatives have managed to conserve, alongside frontier versions of Christianity (which I see evangelical Christianity as a continuation of), traditional American cuisines and to some extent the traditional values and ethos. It’s not expressed the same way, but what conservatives believe and do can quite often be traced back to very long roots that go back quite far. I would contend that a time traveler from 1860 would recognize a lot more of modern Patriot/conservative culture than he would have modern Liberal/woke culture. But at the idea that it doesn’t count if the culture isn’t preserved in amber completely unchanged (which would probably not even be true of the Amish) to count as preservation is simply demanding too much. Conservatives don’t live as museum pieces, they live as people interacting with a real world.

Japan of the 1950's was in the throes of a Judeo-American imposed cultural revolution. I'm sure the time traveler would be shocked but not surprised that foreign occupation had left his country without its sword. I think that highlights a blind spot to the 'cultural' ideology as a whole. At any point in time can you pinpoint whatever thing is happening and say: 'see, there it is, there's our culture' with no regard for what it was before or how it got to the point it is now. I agree that a culture changes with its people and technology. But that fact does not excuse every cultural change as being a fate bound product that inertly fell from the sky.

As for your overall point I'm at a loss. We seem to have gone away from a cultural definition of work ethic and duty and instead moved towards a cultural definition of what I would call trinkets and hobbies. I don't believe you are saying that if more immigrants listened to Hank Williams that they would be more inclined to work. So I don't understand where we are going with this.

As for country music and similar 'cultural' trinkets. For me, if it's not Southern, it's not really country. I don't mean that in a sense that it has to come from a certain area. But the fact that it has to exist as something opposite whatever it is the 'North' is doing. It has to actually be 'politically' Southern. Otherwise, what even is it? Blake Shelton pseudo rapping with his coolest black friends about tractors? I find it pathetic. Why does he mention in one of his songs that 'his boys' don't listen to the Beatles but rather Coe. Shelton is a living breathing embodiment of a Yankee pop star at this point. Country music didn't grab the South just because they liked the tunes. It grabbed the South because it was Southern. It was as much a product of musical talent as it was a product of a culture war that self described conservatives have long abandoned and disavowed in favor of fortune and fame from the 'North'.

I don't think a time traveler would pretend that the US is even a country after you showed him the state of things. I mean, in the past 50 years the US has seen over 100 thousand white people murdered by black criminals. Race mixing at an all time high. Jews and catholics running the show, the Church supporting gay marriage, a former black president. And to top it all off, conservatives are more likely to support these things than not, aside from gay marriage. Conservatives certainly aren't museum pieces, but I'd have expected their will, want and tradition to lead somewhere other than where they are today. Least of all that there are conservatives that unironically proclaim that the problems with Mexicans and blacks are 'cultural' and not rooted in the fact that they don't belong in the country at all.

What game are you playing? You "ask questions" about jews yourself, then delete them.

I suspect you may be a bad faith far righter.

Hard to tell since you set your account to private and delete your comments, but:

You posted “neutral” questions about the influence of jews etc, but your shtick was getting stale, so now you present as an opponent of the far right while still asking these inviting questions, like the OP, never defending your apparent opposition with arguments. Comments like the above ban demand and “I think these changes have been very positive on the whole” are lies.

@Amadan , forget @hanikrummihundursvin , at least it's open. This guy is the problem.

Quoting his whole comment elsewhere, in case it gets deleted(I added italics and bold):

I don't see how the comment can be seen as anything other than "boo outgroup" (which apparently includes everyone who isn't a white Protestant) and lacking in evidence for its inflammatory claim of a Jewish influenced "revolution". The original comment contained nothing in support of this claim, and the subsequent comment cites a single Jewish woman, who ironically has been lauded by the Japanese government, to argue she's responsible for declining birth rates?

Reasonable arguments can be made that American notions of democracy and human rights strongly influenced the Japanese constitution, though it seems likely that such provisions would have been included in subsequent amendments or otherwise incorporated into law. See Vietnam, a country America failed to conquer, which has equal protection clauses.

Italics: Dishonest use/criticism of the rules.

Bold: You tried to sneak in this ‘has been lauded by the japanese government” as a justification for the other far righter’s argument. What’s ironic about it, if you are what you say you are? “Irony refers to the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of their literal meaning."