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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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The identity of the man who choked Jordan Neely on the NYC subway has been made public.

The man now gets to become the center of a media firestorm, and will certainly be subjected to credible threats, to say nothing of the likelihood that the activists in charge of Manhattan’s criminal justice system will indict him. If he ever gets to live a normal life again, it certainly won’t be in New York, and probably not in any urban blue-heavy environment in this country. Future prospective employers will know him as the guy who murdered a defenseless man and beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who was experiencing homelessness and needed help. This will be how he’ll be perceived by a substantial number of important people who will have the power to determine important things about the future of his life, regardless of any legal outcomes for him, favorable or otherwise.

I told the story previously of how I was assaulted on public transit by a mentally-ill black lowlife, and how I was very close to being severely injured and nobody in the vicinity would have been able nor willing to stop it from happening. (Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.) Since posting that story, a very similar situation happened to me yet again - with a predictably similar antagonist - and once again, I was sickened and humiliated not only by the actions of the schizophrenic loser who accosted me, and by my relative inability to effectively defend myself if the guy had started attacking me, but also by the inaction of the other grown men standing nearby. Without telling the whole story, I ended up in that position because I attempted to stop the lunatic from harassing a different guy, and then that guy stood around and watched the assailant menace me and did not intervene in any way.

I have fantasized about doing exactly what Daniel Penny - the NYC subway hero - did. Except for in my fantasies, I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident; I just kicked the absolute shit out of him, taking him by surprise and beating him within an inch of his life, or stabbing him before he could get a hand in me. These fantasies are just that: unrealistic power fantasies, the stuff I would do if I were a much stronger, taller, more physically-powerful, more experienced with interpersonal violence than I actually am. I’ve never been in a proper fistfight, and even if I knew how to properly defend myself, in both this situation and the previous one, I allowed the guy to close distance on me and get into an advantageous position, such that they had me right where they wanted me.

I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.

I’ve also thought about what would have been the consequences for me if somehow I really had been able to put these guys in their place and seriously injure or kill them. I’ve imagined being at trial - a highly-publicized media shitstorm of a trial, given the demographics involved - and having to answer questions that are designed to get me to hang myself with their rope. I’ve thought about what would happen if they found my posts on The Motte. If they asked me, “Are you glad that Mr. Schizo is dead?” How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed? If they were to ask me “did you do this because Mr. Schizo is black”, no matter how sincerely I would answer “no, it’s because he was attacking me”, how can I be confident that they won’t drag up all my posts here and paint me as a “hate criminal”?

I have no idea how racially-aware Daniel Penny is. I have no clue if he has similar opinions about the scourge of worthless criminal crazies and what to do about them, and I have no reason to assume that his lawyers are lying when they say that he’s devastated that Jordan Neely died, that Mr. Penny never wanted nor foresaw this outcome, etc. It’s very easy for me to say “I’m glad Jordan Neely is dead, you did the world a favor, this was a wonderful thing you did and you shouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt or sadness about it”, but in the actual event that I did what Mr. Penny did, I probably would be pretty shaken-up about it. For most people, taking a life - especially when you hadn’t planned to - is probably pretty psychologically destabilizing, even if it was totally necessary and justified.

Still, though, what if Penny thinks the same way I do about the homeless population? What if he truly does believe, as I do, that Jordan Neely was human garbage who had no redeeming value, and that his death is a great boon to the entire population of NYC? He can’t say that in court, even if it’s true. He would be pilloried and convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. His only legal hope is to vociferously insist that Neely’s death is a tragedy, that he would never have done what he did if he could have foreseen that it would result in a death, that he is 100% innocent of the crime of racial consciousness or animus toward the experiencing-homelessness population. His future depends on his ability to persuasively perform colorblind egalitarian liberalism, regardless of whether or not he believes in it or not.

Outside of the edgy dissident-right spaces I frequent, every other commentator, even putatively conservative ones, are doing the expected throat-clearing about how Neely’s death is a tragedy, that we all wish he “could have gotten the help he needed”, etc. If anyone believes, as I do, that the first step to saving our civilization is for tens of thousands of people to pull a Daniel Penny on their local subway-screaming bum, they’re sure not saying it out loud. The veil of self-censorship and paying homage to liberal pieties will persist no matter what happens to Daniel Penny, and nobody will get the public catharsis of hearing a powerful or important person say out loud that Jordan Neely’s death was a good thing and we need more of it. Those who do say something like that out loud better hope and pray that they’re never thrust into a courtroom and asked to defend those opinions under oath; the defense stand is no place for hard-nosed honesty, and neither is our society.

why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way

This part sounds bad. I am not sure whether you intended it or not, but it sounds like you'd be ok if you were humiliated by you social or biological superiors (wtf is that anyway? More Aryan? More muscular? Longer dick?), but the fact that wrong people assaulted you is upsetting. I don't think it is a very good position.

As I made clear in another comment, this passage had nothing to do with race - I get why people assume that everything is racial in my mind, but actually there are other things I care about as well - and everything to do with the fact that the guy has a massive criminal rap sheet, is homeless and wholly dependent on others, and is a drain on society; also the fact that he has a (currently) incurable mental illness that renders him a permanent danger to other people. He’s a perfect example of someone who needs to be removed from the gene pool, improving the genetic stock of humanity immediately.

As for whether or not I’d be fine with being humiliated by my betters… it depends on the reasons they’re humiliating me in this hypothetical scenario, and whether or not I stand to ultimately gain from it. While I’m skeptical about some elements of the structure and culture of military initiation - basic training, boot camp, etc. - I recognize that the whole “the drill sergeant treats you like dirt and makes a humiliating example out of you” thing has an impressive history of creating an effective fighting force. This would be a scenario where a man is being dominated by his social better, in order to forge him into something improved. He’s suffering a temporary loss in status in order to not only enhance his own status later on down the line, but also to increase the total quotient of effectiveness and status of the group as a whole.

This is markedly different from a situation in which I’m being dominated by my social inferior; it lowers my own status immensely, but produces no corresponding rise in status later on - unless, of course, I respond with force that could get me judicially lynched by a regime that hates me and finds the schizos useful/sacred - and it also immiserates others around me who watch the situation and either feel powerless to intervene, or who have to sublimate the shame of being too apathetic to care.

improving the genetic stock of humanity immediately.

Fuck the genetic stock of humanity. Seriously. Our scientific understanding of population genetics is shit anyway, and so is our understanding of brain functions and much else in our bodies. We are not nearly capable of producing any judgement on the level that would allow to formulate some "improvement" programs as a society, and thousand times less as a petty low state functionary who has no idea about these high-minded things anyway. And, the experience shows all the guys that cared too much about genetic purity of humanity were not the good guys, to allow myself a huge understatement. So I think staying away from all talk about "improving genetic stock" is the only way for a decent person to behave. Not with a 100 foot pole.

I get why people assume that everything is racial

I didn't say a word about racial and did not assume it. I think this is the case of protesting too much.

I didn't say a word about racial and did not assume it. I think this is the case of protesting too much.

You literally asked me if my criteria for declaring someone my superior is “more Aryan”. Don’t pretend you didn’t make it racial.

As for everything else in your comment, I declare unequivocally that the eugenicists were correct, and that what the Third Reich did to Jews was an unforgivable travesty not only because industrialized mass murder is a moral abomination, but also because Jews are a generally high-quality, high-human-capital population. Real eugenicists, of the turn-of-the-century progressive-aligned variety, stayed focused on removing actually dysgenic elements from the population - not via murder, but via sterilization and other non-violent policies - such as the mentally retarded and degenerate populations. The fact that our society marginalized and repudiated them after WWII to retroactively legitimize the Global American Empire was a catastrophic blow to our civilization.

I'm not sure what you think you are getting out of pandering to militant Jews like @JarJarJedi. You ordain the Jews as eternal victims of an unforgivable crime, do you expect any reciprocity or anything? What he cares about is his "shield against the fires of Auschwitz"- and from that hegemonic perspective, undermining the eugenic thinking of your civilization is an indispensable part of that. Seeing it right from the horse's mouth, do you see the problem here yet?

You are of course free to admire the obvious and considerable talents of Jews from an HBD perspective, I do as well, but you should also consider how HBD underpins this dialectic between civilizational order and Jews.

The Hebrew bible is broadly speaking a story of Jewish travelers appearing in conflict among Empires at the height of their power: Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome... HBD explains this dialectic no less than it explains the human capital component. The tall tale of "industrialized mass murder" in gas chambers disguised as bath houses is not the origin of this dialectic, it's only the most recent continuation of this long story. And that story overtly serves as a bulwark to destroy eugenic-minded thinking of your civilization. That, too, is a consequence of HBD.

The shield from the fires of Auschwitz requires undermining eugenic thinking, or in other words, the promotion of dysgenic thinking. JarJar couldn't make it clearer.

I'm not sure what you think you are getting out of pandering to militant Jews like @JarJarJedi. You ordain the Jews as eternal victims of an unforgivable crime, do you expect any reciprocity or anything? What he cares about is his "shield against the fires of Auschwitz"- and from that hegemonic perspective, undermining the eugenic thinking of your civilization is an indispensable part of that. Seeing it right from the horse's mouth, do you see the problem here yet?

This not only overtly culture warring, it's antagonistic, making it about the poster and not the post.

Even if you believe "Jews gonna Jew because Joos," you can't make an entire argument of "This poster is Jewish therefore he's going to Jew."

If anything, you've gotten more slack than you should in the past because your posts are usually pretty high effort, including the effort you make not to come out and state outright what you'd like done about the JQ. But you can't just wage war here.

JarJar couldn't make it clearer.

Yes he could. And you seem to be reading a lot into what he says. Without even going into your object-level discussion of HBD, the truth or falseness of which I have no idea of, I think you're making some enormous leaps to your favorite conclusions based on very little, or at least very little right here. Your post, as it stands, reads a little "schizo" - please provide more evidence regarding @JarJarJedi's perspective if you make such strong assertions about it.

JarJar presented the perspective that eugenic thinking is threatening to Jews, "because Auschwitz." That is a direct reading of his post. So JarJar feels existentially compelled to denounce eugenic or racially-oriented thinking for white people- but of course not for Jews, he himself is an ardent ethnic nationalist while he simultaneously denounces that behavior for white people. None of this is unique to JarJar, all components of it are part-and-parcel of an enormously influential contingent of Jewish thinking and cultural influence.

The next premise is that an ethnically-motivated effort to subvert the eugenic thinking of an outgroup is equivalent to a hostile promotion of dysgenic thinking. This is almost tautological, as "you are not allowed to think eugenically, you have to develop your culture and politics around denouncing eugenic thinking" is by definition a promotion of anti-eugenic thinking, which is dysgenic.

My comment recognizes the dialectic between civilizational order and Jewry, which is on the one hand represented by @Hoffmeister25's concern for civilizational health and survival, and on the other hand represented by JarJarJedi's primary concern for the well-being of Jews. JarJarJedi sees these two things in conflict insofar as eugenic thinking is required for civilizational health and survival. Despite Hoffmeister's effort to smooth his concerns it will never, ever work. I've already presented concrete evidence of this dialectic in the form of the Hebrew bible, where Jews always find themselves in conflict with the hegemonic gentile civilization, whether it's Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, or Rome.

What is Passover? It's the celebration of the Jewish tribal god Yahweh slaughtering the first born sons of the gentiles, after which an exasperated Pharoah expels the Israelites from Egypt. Hoffmeister pays deference to the modern-day replacement for the discredited Exodus story, which is the Holocaust, without seeing the bigger picture: HBD isn't just about the dead horse of race and IQ, it also means taking the Hebrew bible seriously. Those are not just stories, they are myths that emerged from a people and mold the people. I understand JarJarJedi's perspective far better than @Hoffmeister25 does, but in doing so acknowledge that the post-war ideological reformation towards dysgenic thinking that Hoffmeister laments was not accidental, it was planned and it was hostile from the very beginning.

To tie a bow on all this, I'll reference Zygmunt Bauman's work Modernity and the Holocaust. From the wiki description:

Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view obedience to rules as morally good, all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass.

From the book (italicized emphasis in original, bolded mine):

The Holocaust was indeed a Jewish tragedy. Though Jews were not the only population subjected to a 'special treatment' by the Nazi regime (six million Jews were among more than 20 million people annihilated at Hitler's behest), only the Jews had been marked for total destruction, and allotted no place in the New Order that Hitler intended to install. Even so, the Holocaust was not simply a Jewish problem, and not an event in Jewish history alone. The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture. The self-healing of historical memory which occurs in the consciousness of modern society is for this reason more than a neglect offensive to the victims of the genocide. It is also a sign of dangerous and potentially suicidal blindness.

...

Yet the exercise in focusing on the Germanness of the crime as on that aspect in which the explanation of the crime must lie is simultaneously an exercise in exonerating everyone else, and particularly everything else. The implication that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were a wound or a malady of our civilization -- rather than its horrifying, yet legitimate product -- results not only in the moral comfort of self-exculpation, but also in the dire threat of moral and political disarmament. It all happened 'out there' -- in another time, another country. The more 'they' are to blame, the more the rest of 'us' are safe, and the less we have to do to defend this safety. Once the allocation of guilt is implied to be equivalent to the location of causes, the innocence and sanity of the way of life of which we are so proud need not be cast in doubt.

The overall effect is, paradoxically, pulling the sting out of the Holocaust memory. The message which the Holocaust contains about the way we live today -- about the quality of the institutions on which we rely for our safety, about the validity of the criteria with which we measure the propriety of our own conduct and of the patterns of interaction we accept and consider normal -- is silenced, not listened to, and remains undelivered. If unravelled by the specialists and discussed inside the conference circuit, it is hardly ever heard elsewhere, and remains a mystery for all the outsider

It should come as no surprise that Bauman viewed his work and perspective as a continuation of Adorno and the Frankfurt school's work on the Authoritarian Personality, which Bauman criticizes for reducing latent Nazism to a personality type, whereas in his view, it is latent in civilization itself.

When JarJar goes on about his shield from the fires of Auschwitz, this is the context of his thinking and why Hoffmeister's response "well real eugenicists would value Jewish IQ" rings so hallow. They view it as an intrinsic conflict between eugenic thinking - the epitome of civilizational order and rationality, and Jewish identity. This dialectic is not new, the Hebrew bible is a story of these recurring conflicts between civilizational order and Jewry, and this dialectic forms a deep component of Jewish identity.

There's a shorter essay by Bauman, which starts with a quote from Rubenstein and Roth:

Civilization now includes death camps and Muselmanner among its material and spiritual products

Related: Scene from Inglorious Basterds, consider the portrayal of the villain from Bauman's perspective. The villain is an avatar of cultured European civilization, the heroes are the antithesis.

Sorry I did not have an opportunity to respond to your original comment, so I’m now having to reply to your follow-up.

When it comes to the JQ, my stance is that it’s not a Yes-or-No question. There is a whole spectrum of possible approaches to dealing with this very thorny issue. The whole “are you anti-semitic or philo-semitic” thing is a false binary; one can have an attitude toward Jews that is neither wholly negative nor wholly positive.

Regarding the historicity of the Holocaust, I remain persuaded, based on the information I’ve read - including the work of prominent revisionists - that there was a concerted and large-scale effort, carried out by soldiers of the Third Reich and its vassal states on orders handed down from Berlin - to kill large numbers of Jewish people. I agree with you that the specific Auschwitz narrative, with gas chambers disguised as showers, and lampshades made of Jew skin, appears to have been either totally fabricated or substantially exaggerated. I also agree that the “6 million” figure doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny, let alone “20 million”. These issues don’t invalidate the central claim, which is that at some point between 1939 and 1945 the Third Reich’s initial policy of ghettoization and self-deportation morphed into a concerted effort to kill Jews. This effort may have been an ad hoc decision made in the heat of a rapidly-evolving situation, rather than some Final Solution which the Reich knew from the get-go that they’d eventually achieve, but either way, I remain persuaded that some limited form of the Holocaust did take place. Assuming this is true, it was an abomination, although it would be far from the first time in history that an invading army with designs toward imperial conquest did something similar. I don’t dispute for a second that you’re more knowledgeable about the minutiae of historical evidence on the topic than I am, and I’m open to having my mind changed in the future; this is my assessment of the information I’ve consumed up to this point, though.

As for how a white advocate and a believer in eugenics should think about Jews and their relationship with gentiles, it’s obviously super fucking complicated. I’ve offered some thoughts on the issue before, and I’m sure I’ll do so again in the future. Suffice it to say, my stance on the JQ is somewhere softer than yours, but that the issues you raise do weigh heavily on me and that my thoughts are still evolving.

JarJar presented the perspective that eugenic thinking is threatening to Jews, "because Auschwitz." That is a direct reading of his post.

If so, it is very recent attitude, originating in 1960's and 70's, not in 1940's.

Until then, eugenics was seen as uncontroversial progressive and scientific (including by Jews) and militarism, agressive war were seen as the major drawbacks of Nazism.

Nazis were not seen as "pinnacle of modernity", but obscurantist remnant of the primitive past, wanting to retvrn to the Germanic Dark Forest of ancient times.

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_strange_evolution_of_eugenics_steve_sailer/

John Glad, retired director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, wrote an important book in 2011, Jewish Eugenics documenting the Jewish love-hate relationship with eugenics.

The most striking revelation is that, contrary to the current impression, Jews largely approved of eugenics until the end of the 1960s. (The most effective opponents tended to be Catholics, such as G.K Chesterton, author of 1922’s Eugenics and Other Evils.) Glad quotes endless Jewish spokesmen from the first seven decades of the 20th century to the effect that Jews had been practicing eugenic marriages for 3,000 years. The medical profession, which was largely secular and progressive, was enthusiastic about eugenics, and there was little evidence that the sizable number of Jewish doctors objected.

...

Using many hundreds of quotes from contemporary publications dating back to the 19th century, Glad traces the broad enthusiasm for eugenics among Jewish leaders, both progressive and conservative, assimilationist and Zionist, up through the 1960s. Then, following the rise of 1960s radicalism, Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, the UN’s 1975 vote to condemn Zionism as racism, and the subsequent Holocaust memorial movement, there emerged a new historical orthodoxy. Jewish intellectuals such as Gould systematically demonized eugenics as heavily responsible for the Nazis and much else that wasn't good for the Jews.

According to Glad, the first books linking the Holocaust to the eugenics movement did not appear until the 1970s. Yet, by 2004, at least 131 such books had been published, most of them "shrill."

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