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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The problem for the dissident right types is that the dissident right only really exists as a subset of the woke. In my experience the average HBD is even more of an ardent true believer in the correctness of progressive talking points than the average democrat. For all the talk of combatting wokeness it's clear at a glance that these people don't want to see wokeness defeated, they just want to reorder the intersectional stack so that thier favored groups are on top. This is why HBDers are always framing their policies in terms of race instead of the problem they claim to be fighting. Some HBDer will make some comment about how we could reduce criminality if we deported all the blacks, and I'll comeback with "What if we just deported all the convicted felons instead" only for them to stammer something about group differences in IQ, the 14 words, etc...

Simply put so long as identity politics and internal vs. external loci of control remain the core points of disagreement between the mainstream right and left, the only place the dissident right has any hope of gaining any traction is amongst their fellow leftists.

Edited to be less inflammatory

I'll comeback with "What if we just deported all the convicted felons instead"

Okay great thanks

This is a real uncharitable interpretation. I have never seen an HBD person ever advocate such a thing, not counting white nationalist subs or 4chan.

I have never seen an HBD person ever advocate such a thing,

Only because you don't pay attention. We had a user do it in this very thread. As @atokenliberal6D_4 points out, if concerns about dysgenics and the national average IQ were the real motivation opposition to skilled immigration wouldn't be as high as it seemingly is.

You can call it "uncharitable" all you like, I still think my interpretation cleaves reality at the joints.

On the other hand, opposition to skilled immigration seems super common amongst HBD people here. While not as egregious, that's pretty close, especially because the definition of "skilled" can easily include things like English ability or other markers of ability to assimilate.

This is the main reason I don't really trust the stated motivations of the average HBD person. Race is at the very best only a super loose proxy for the things that actually matter and you can always easily measure and filter on much better proxies instead. Not noticing this and asking to filter on race is super suspicious.

opposition to skilled immigration

It is a wage suppression scheme aimed at the middle and upper middle class in America. Boring material concerns are probably the real reason for opposition rather than HBD informed racism.

On the other hand, opposition to skilled immigration seems super common amongst HBD people here

Aren't you that South Asian rationalist guy who audaciously implied that ethnocentrism is an entirely alien notion to you since you're not white, and that it is impossible to have «reasoned debate» with people who don't want you to immigrate to their countries, because they have «blue-and-orange morality», so the only way to deal with them is censorship?

You sure are good at assimilating: you can learn English and slatestarcodex lingo and whatever else is needed to «pass». I'm sure you pride yourself on this ability to mimic superficial markers of a cooperating agent. But what matters is not how much you look the part: such «assimilation» is not worth more than changing skin color. What matters is actually, you know, cooperating, including respect for host's values, even irrational ones.

I've already said all I had to say about you years ago.

Perhaps this «opposition to skilled immigration» is not about skill, nor even primarily about race, but is specifically opposition to sociopathic, uncompromising immigration that immediately sides with one's political enemies and gloats about disempowering legacy population.

If anyone reads this, you may explain to them how such an opposition is illegitimate or founded on alien moral precepts.

(On another note, it's really funny how @HlynkaCG has corncobbed himself with his philosophical notion of woke Neo-Nazis and other clever inversions. Will we see him arguing that DEI values follow from literalist interpretation of the Constitution and are more American than apple pie, if another moderately suave progressive happens to aid him in his dunking on woke HBDers?)

Between this post and this one, you seem to be getting overly belligerent and personal.

The fact that you write eloquently, verbosely, and opaquely now seems to be something you're trying to take advantage of (namely, by throwing as many personal digs into your rebuttals as you can). Stop it.

you write eloquently, verbosely, and opaquely now seems to be something you're trying to take advantage of

Is this just a cutesy way to imply that my post is a loquacious personal attack without merit?

Verbose I'll give you, but nothing is opaque in my writing on the subject. On the other hand, this guy is being opaque, circumspect and passive-aggressive with his doctrine of moral aliens, and so I plainly accuse him of being disingenuous and manipulative.

It is fair to point out both the general absurdity of framing nativism as an «alien moral intuition» and the specific issue that his background ought to have contained plenty exposure to nativism as a mainstream policy preference; his rhetoric about it amounts to gaslighting. It is even fairer to keep hammering at the fact that he gradually adapts the framing to make it more palatable, but never responds to this line of critique and falls back on the administrative resource. Between this and his previously expressed tribal antagonism towards Western right wingers couched in opaque lesswrong-style jargon, I think it's perfectly clear where I'm coming from and what I'm saying.

You personally do not give @SecureSignals much leeway with equivocations about trips of DeSantis and minutiae of Holocaust. Why do I have to tolerate this clever talk to the effect that we should all get along, by means of both sides dehumanizing people who don't share his (allegedly universal) values?

Ironically, I'm irritated on behalf of both white nativists and other South Asians, chiefly @BurdensomeCount, whom you sometimes whack for the same gloating attitude of a successful immigrant elite – only revealed in more honest, direct and masculine language. And to think he's accused of being coy!

I am aware you're moderating for tone, not content. But several rules allow to interpret his kind of cleverness as violation, and it makes at least as much sense as what you levy against me here.

Is this just a cutesy way to imply that my post is a loquacious personal attack without merit?

I'm not judging how much merit there was to it. But it was a loquacious personal attack.

You personally do not give @SecureSignals much leeway with equivocations about trips of DeSantis and minutiae of Holocaust.

No, but I don't think I've ever modded him for it, and I definitely don't unload with my unfiltered sentiments about what I think of him personally, even cloaked in eloquent, loquacious verbosity.

I am aware you're moderating for tone, not content. But several rules allow to interpret his kind of cleverness as violation, and it makes at least as much sense as what you levy against me here.

Yes, you could interpret anything anyone else says that you don't like as a violation of the rules. Many people try to do this, especially when they get modded themselves. But I don't do that.

Making arguments you don't like, even arguments you personally (and maybe even justifiably) feel are crappy and bad, is not against the rules.

Making arguments personal, and more about what you think of the poster than the post, is.

Aren't you that South Asian rationalist guy who audaciously implied that ethnocentrism is an entirely alien notion to you since you're not white,

No, I never really participated in /r/CultureWarRoundup nor am I Asian. Not that I see it mattering all that much if I were.

As myself and others keep pointing out, intersectionality/identity politics is basically just a re-rebranding of Marxism with a bunch race and sex stuff in the place of economic class. Maybe you don't notice because you grew up in the Soviet Union surrounded by literal Marxist so to you it's just the default, but to someone like me who grew up in a very "we stand for the flag and kneel for the cross" sort of space where irony was almost a dirty word, it's practically impossible to ignore. There is just something deeply alien and (for lack of better terms) "eastern" and "unchristian" about it.

Guys like you and @fuckduck9000 keep accusing me being delusional and "tying myself in knots" but where have I contradicted myself? If you can point to specific statements of mine that you believe are objectively and demonstrably false, I will do my best to show my work/defend them. The way I see it, the thing that you don't seem to grasp is that our disagreement is not on points of fact, it is on the nature and validity of your entire reference frame.

As myself and others keep pointing out, intersectionality/identity politics is basically just a re-rebranding of Marxism with a bunch race and sex stuff in the place of economic class.

Well, using this mode of analysis, everything is Marxism. When Ugg in they year 2,000,000 BC called his tribe to club heads of the other tribe on the other bank of the river, he was the first Marxist ever.

Other people keep pointing out that words mean something, including people like this lifelong Christian fundamentalist anti communist fighter Gary Kilgore North.

Cultural Marxism Is an Oxymoron

Ignore Anyone Who Says Marxism Is a Threat

But the postmodernist caravan goes on.

Maybe you don't notice because you grew up in the Soviet Union surrounded by literal Marxist so to you it's just the default

Unless @DaseindustriesLtd is really ancient, he grew in totally disilusioned society where it was easier to meet abominable snowman than "literal Marxist". If he remembers anything at all, he remembers indifferent teacher droning something about Lenin to indifferent class.

The teacher knew it was BS, the pupils knew it was BS, the teacher knew the pupils know it is BS (plus all possible permutations).

Well, using this mode of analysis, everything is Marxism.

I get how somone who filters everything through a post modernist lense of "all words are made up" and various things thier leftist poli-sci teacher told them might arrive at that conclusion but thats also the sort of thing i'm talking about when i say that im not just disagreeing with Ilforte on points of fact, i am questioning the validity of the entire underlying framework.

Edit: likewise i feel pretty confident saying that the weird finge guy urging you to lower your defenses is not doing it out of your interest.

If "Seize the means of production to free yourself" is Marxism and "Chop off your dick to free yourself" is also Marxism, what is not Marxism?

Why cannot be "Go to church to free yourself" also Marxism?

Hlynka you're drunk, go home.

Joke's on you, I'm already home.

I've already said all I had to say about you years ago.

Do you mind explaining what the point of your comment is then? Are you expecting this to lead to some sort of productive conversation?

Perhaps this «opposition to skilled immigration» is not about skill, nor even primarily about race, but is specifically opposition to sociopathic, uncompromising immigration that immediately sides with one's political enemies and gloats about disempowering legacy population.

If anyone reads this, you may explain to them how such an opposition is illegitimate or founded on alien moral precepts.

Did your English fail you? Or is this some subtler issue with failing to assimilate into the society and morality of Earthlings after your alt-historical non-tribalist India?

Did your English fail you? Or is this some subtler issue with failing to assimilate into the society and morality of Earthlings after your alt-historical non-tribalist India?

This is unnecessary antagonistic. If you find yourself at an impasse, just walk away.

big difference between "X should not come in" vs. "kick X out"

If HBD/average human capital concerns are that important for you, there isn't really that much difference. Furthermore, shouldn't it be a much lower bar to let people in vs. kicking them out? Unless you're some kind of extreme Malthusian, there are far fewer bad moral side effects to increasing skilled immigration than to forced deportations---like this big difference makes opposition to skilled immigration even more bizarre.

Anyway, I hope you noticed the convenient demonstration of the extreme vitriol bringing up this argument always seems to produce in this community---it's like a pattern match to the storybook reaction to cognitive dissonance. It's also the one topic where the moderation team is ok with constant personal attacks being made instead of arguments.

Interactions here have made it quite hard not to conclude that a very large fraction of HBD-talk here is really motivated by exactly what @HlynkaCG was pointing out in his comment---it's simply a convenient argument for an ultimate goal of a world where people are judged by what they were assigned at birth instead of what they control.

it's simply a convenient argument for an ultimate goal of a world where people are judged by what they were assigned at birth instead of what they control.

You know, this really is something of a blue-and-orange universe. Are you sure you can comprehend Western morality enough to imitate its outward expressions?

Are you sure you can?

The dark irony is that the Nazi-types are directionally correct about Jewish thought-leaders undermining and corrupting the West. Most of the leading figures in early socialism including Marx himself where secular jews after all. Where they're wrong is about who the actual carriers of the disease are because it's not society that's succumbed to corruption but themselves. It is their belief in collective guilt and collective virtue. It is their desire to judge based on nebulous groupings rather than individual worthiness or behavior that marks the true departure from "western morality".

Some HBDer will make some comment about how we could reduce criminality if we deported all the blacks, and I'll comeback with "What if we just deported all the convicted felons instead" only for them to stammer something about group differences in IQ, the 14 words, etc...

Where was this? Stormfront?

Where was this? Stormfront?

/r/theMotte

I got into a top of the thread argument with someone on this very forums previous reddit incarnation on this very topic.

It's not all HBD'rs, but they are there.

I believe the deportation thing, I don't buy that someone quoted the 14 words at him.

They might not have quoted them but I've had someone respond by asking if I ams familiar with them wich I consider "close enough"

You keep making this argument and it keeps making no sense because you conflate HBD types with the white-identity types. The white identity types obviously want to reorder the stack the way you say. I'm pretty sure the majority of the HBD believers would be fine to let the chips fall where they may, and believe that doing so will likely result in black people being worse off and Asian people being better off (statistically) and that's acceptable. An ordinary HBD type might be happy to deport all the convicted felons rather than all the blacks, but get pissed off if you insist that the racial distribution of deportees must match the racial distribution of the population.

You keep making this argument and it keeps making no sense because you conflate HBD types with the white-identity types.

What if it's not a conflation? What if you and @aqouta are two out of the three principled libertarians in a coven of a zillion witches and my reply is "Find me 10 righteous men in Sodom".

That you might have been caught in the blast radius doesn't mean that HBDers on theMotte don't deserve to be bombed.

Non-identitarian HBDers on the Motte used to talk about this stuff all the time. Several things happened. One, the moderators in the previous place (and you were one at the time) became hostile to it. Two, some of the people who used to talk about it left, partially as a result of the moderators being hostile. Three, there really isn't much left to talk about. The numbers are what they are (especially in the US), they stubbornly remain despite all interventions based on !HBD, and no amount of moral suasion or coercion is going to actually change the facts. You and Amadanb want to call me a monster because I follow the facts where they go and don't try to soften them with leftist platitudes or use them to support some sort of transfer system, fine. Eppur si muove. Kenyans are tops at marathons and Asians are tops at the SAT, and that's not going to change because of your smears. So the only people who even bother nowadays are the identitarians -- and usually identitarian trolls, at that. Doesn't mean the rest don't exist.

I wonder sometimes if your recollection is really this faulty or if you just aren't capable of framing things in a way that fits actual events and not your internal narrative.

One, the moderators in the previous place (and you were one at the time) became hostile to it.

I wasn't a mod at the time, yet I still remember this. What happened was that HBD was sucking up all the oxygen and the mods got sick of HBD dominating every single thread all the time, and the heat and lack of light it generated, so they put a temporary moratorium on it. To this day, you and a few others have carped "The mods banned HBD discussions because they were afraid of The Truth!" to death.

Two, some of the people who used to talk about it left, partially as a result of the moderators being hostile.

Partially. But mostly because they were pure heat culture warriors who did nothing but post their pet theories about untermenschen and were insulting and condescending to anyone who disagreed with them. They could not follow the rules (unlike our still sizeable retinue of HBD enthusiasts and Holocaust deniers who are still around despite this supposed hostility from the mods) and didn't want to follow the rules because they thought the place was a soapbox for them to proselytize their racial obsessions and not to challenge and be challenged.

Your take is as accurate as saying "marxbro left because the mods were hostile to communism." Which is his take to this day. But anyone familiar with actual events knows that is not an accurate description of what happened at all.

You and Amadanb want to call me a monster because I follow the facts where they go and don't try to soften them with leftist platitudes or use them to support some sort of transfer system, fine.

I've never called you a monster or implied you are a monster. I don't think you're a monster or anything like a monster.

I don't think you're even capable of honestly and accurately describing what I believe about any given topic, let alone what HlynkaCg believes.

@The_Nybbler too, for good measure.

I wasn't a mod at the time, yet I still remember this. What happened was that HBD was sucking up all the oxygen and the mods got sick of HBD dominating every single thread all the time, and the heat and lack of light it generated, so they put a temporary moratorium on it. To this day, you and a few others have carped "The mods banned HBD discussions because they were afraid of The Truth!" to death.

When you say "sucking up all the oxygen", I think people who were not there might be left with the impression that non-stop debates about whether or not Blacks had lower average IQ at the population level were cluttering up the thread. This would lend credence to the idea that The Truth Was Being Suppressed. The problem for me is that I was there as well, and my memory is that this would be a false impression.

What I recall is that HBD was increasingly being used as a fully-general explanation to any question pertaining to differing outcomes of any sort. The initial arguments over whether Blacks had lower IQ were left far, far behind in a spiral of increasingly absurd extrapolations. The picture that emerged, for me, was a belief that higher IQ was the determining variable in all outcomes, period, end of story. A lot of people appeared to believe IQ was the only variable that could ever conceivably matter, in any situation, ever. It became routine to see completely unsupported just-so stories about how some phenomenon obviously was caused by HBD, complete with speculations about the mechanism involved, without a shred of supporting evidence and to a level of granularity that was frankly absurd. Then there'd be a big debate, often between different "HBD" enthusiasts arguing different but equally ungrounded theories for the purported mechanism, without a shred of actual evidence or even logical rigor visible. And when people grumbled about how absurd this all was, the response was "you're suppressing the science!"

A concrete example from this thread might help: take this comment as an example of the form. The chain of logic seems to be that people who get enslaved have lower IQ, slaves who get sold abroad have lower IQ than slaves retained locally, and that any genetic contributions to ADOS from whites can be safely ignored. The first claim is plausible but unproven, with Greek slaves in Rome being an obvious counterexample. The second claim appears completely unsupported, and the third claim is implicit in the logic but likewise unsupported. None of this meshes at all with the frequently-cited statistics about native africans having sub-70(?) average IQs, to point out only one obvious complication.

Comments like that are neither rigorous, nor evidence based. The fact that American Blacks have lower IQ than American whites is, I think, well-established. The fact that Africans generally have lower IQ is a whole lot less well-established, since Africa hasn't had the thorough population-level scrutiny the US has, but I'd grant it as a reasonable hypothesis based on what evidence has been gathered, and partly on the continent's general dysfunction. "Slaves can be safely assumed to have lower IQ because they got enslaved" is not supported at all, and counter-examples spring readily to mind: the many Greek slaves taken by Rome, for example. "Slaves sold overseas can be safely assumed to have lower IQ" is likewise not supported at all. These are just-so stories.

My memory is that just-so stories like this used to be absolutely rampant, and that this rampancy was what the topic ban aimed to suppress. I think it worked reasonably well, though not without considerable cost. Maybe it have been better to just spot the pattern, trace its outlines, and then point it out whenever it showed; that's the pattern that eventually worked on a number of other emergent or engineered problems in the forum. I contend simply that it was a serious problem, and it deserved to be addressed because it was notably degrading the perceived quality of the forum for a lot of users.

Maybe my memory is wrong, and I'd be open to contrary evidence. I waffled on turning this into a top-level post next week, but eh.

Maybe my memory is wrong, and I'd be open to contrary evidence. I waffled on turning this into a top-level post next week, but eh.

No, I think that's a fair summary, but I'd add that I do recall that there were a lot of posters who just seemed to want to turn every thread into yet another polemic about how all problems in the American culture war go back to blacks and their low IQs.

What happened was that HBD was sucking up all the oxygen and the mods got sick of HBD dominating every single thread all the time, and the heat and lack of light it generated, so they put a temporary moratorium on it.

To this day, it remains the only topic that happened to. After an outside article generated that flurry of interest, no less.

I've never called you a monster or implied you are a monster. I don't think you're a monster or anything like a monster.

Uh:

Modern HBDers, by contrast, are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of non-whites. Their approach is not one of trying to improve race relations or the human race. They're tribalists, and HBD offers a convenient narrative why Our Tribe is superior and Their Tribe is awful.

Because I think there is a certain amount of "I Fucking Love Science"-level understanding in the HBD crowd, where they say they are just being race realists, but while the science might support "black IQ scores are lower on average," it does not support Dread Jim-style racial hot takes.

To this day, it remains the only topic that happened to. After an outside article generated that flurry of interest, no less.

What other topic has been harped on in such a singular fashion, aside from election year rounds?

What is your point? What part of what I said do you think was inaccurate?

Uh:

Uh what? Shall we break that one down? Where am I calling you (or anyone else) a monster? Is that how you feel about any kind of criticism of your views?

Not directly related, but in support of your point about HBD (descriptively!) - what happens when we search HBD on twitter? this (you have to be logged in to use search now on twitter, which I'm seething about)

the first result invokes the term "TND", which means "total nigger death".

This doesn't apply to most themotte HBD believers though, who are mostly either non-alt-right rightwingers or libertarian/center, as far as i can tell.

What if you're just typing letters in a sequence that make recognizable patterns but have no real meaning?

This is a 'touch grass' moment, you are setting up and knocking down nightmares of your own creation. There is (virtually, effectively, pick whatever term you like) no one on 'your team' who would not say 'sounds great!' to deporting all the violent felons. The problem is that 'violent felons' are wildly disproportionately black so everyone else screams 'racism!' whenever one of us attempts to be colorblind

Agree or disagree, there's plenty meaning to his words and you well know it.

HBD believers aren't a homogenous constituency, much like those who believe that earth is not flat there are all sorts of reasons to recognize the truth.

Some HBDer will make some comment about how we could reduce criminality if we deported all the blacks, and I'll comeback with "What if we just deported all the convicted felons instead"

My last comment before reading this one was responding to someone making quite a similar appeal and I agreed that there was no reason for it to be racial and yet I believe in HBD. I resent being shoved into a misfitting box by your theories.

If true, what do you think the political implications should be? What policies should follow, in your view? I think it more likely than not that HBD is true also, but I routinely find myself on the opposite side of discussions about what we should do about it.

We should do nothing about it. Well, we should stop doing some things as well probably, but primarily we should treat it the same as if we found out that blondes really are dumber on average and just collectively not care. Anything but constantly trying to make sure every board rooms has a blonde in it and hounding organizations that happen to hire too few blondes as discriminatory. I'm so tired of hearing about race. I never wanted to know these things and I'd gladly forget them if it wasn't constantly needed as an alternate explanation for blood libel.