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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.