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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There's a whole raft of powerful policies waiting beyond the Overton Window, e.g., making eligibility for government benefits or government housing dependent on having at least 1 French grandparent. As long as one is willing to address the charge of "second-class citizenship" with 'yes, and so what?', then France can quickly make itself intolerable for its own immigrant underclass.
I’m not sure any of that it possible unless all of Europe does the same. Europe has free transit across borders, so immigrants can get citizenship at the easiest point, then cross borders until they end up in a rich European country. The US has the same problem— a state refusing immigrants would be forced to accept them because California does and the lack of borders between states means a sort of race to the bottom.
From the point of view of the European populist right, yeschad.jpg. The European Parliament effectively forces political movements to organise at a pan-EU level, and the populist right is getting better at it. The bottom-up movement to curtail Muslim immigration is inherently pan-EU.
Also, the problem as perceived by the marginal right-populist voter is irregular immigration, and a lot of work on that issue (border policing, asylum reform, doing deals with transit countries to push "refugees" back) can and should be done at EU level, and increasingly is. Contrary to the "woke EU" memes spread by the Brexit campaign, the EU institutions have proved themselves perfectly willing to actually do anti-immigrant things where the member states let them. The EU (largely under the influence of Eastern European conservatives) has produced
A public statement by the Commission President (effectively the head of the EU executive branch) that countries deliberately facilitating the transit of unwanted immigrants are engaged in a "hybrid attack" on the EU.
A uniformed EU border corps (Frontex). Frontex also has a coast guard that actually turn migrant boats round and send them back (see wokist wailing and gnashing of teeth), rather than acting as a water taxi service. This Samo Burja briefing (unfortunately behind an expensive paywall) provides confirmation that Frontex is for real from a non-establishment source.
The Dublin agreement to stop asylum shopping. (Leaving the Dublin agreement as a side effect of Brexit is why the UK now has a "small boat" immigration crisis that we didn't when we were in the EU)
A deal with Turkey to return Syrian refugees who settled in Turkey before illegally immigrating to Europe.
The only reason why the EU isn't funding border fences is tit-for-tat budget politics.
"If we want to keep the infidel out of Europe, we need to work together" has been a truism of European politics for almost 1000 years by now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While in the US, the country will whiten over the medium-long term if immigration can be cut off, is that the case in France? I mean payments to ethnic French to have more babies probably won’t work, you’d have to rely on natively high fertility rates, and it seems like once you exclude the Muslims and tradcaths France has typical-euro fertility.
I believe, and I think a substantial portion of the right does as well, that the presence and resource cost imposition of all these immigrants is having a serious depressive effect on birthrates and family formation. The resources being used to subsidise the reproduction and immigration of all these new muslims are resources that are actually adding to the competition faced by ethnic natives who are in many cases generating these resource surpluses, not just being removed from them!. When I talk to people in western countries who would like to have children but are currently not, the manifestations of these costs loom extremely large in their mind. I actually think that the impact of diversity in this regard is even more pernicious than just the numbers would suggest - does it really seem plausible that events like the Rotherham cases had no impact on the life-trajectory and family formation of the individuals involved?
More options
Context Copy link
If you break it down further, the white Republican TFR is replacement, while the native black TFR is much lower than the overall black TFR, and the Hispanic TFR is mostly declining. So over the long term assuming no immigration, the red tribe expands demographically while other groups shrink, which looks like a whitening country. The non-white groups having a higher TFR is mostly due to 1st gen immigrants.
Also, when hispanics assimilate they tend to do so into the red tribe- so they identify as white once they’re white passing.
All true, but a key component is net "conversion" from red tribe to blue tribe. The size of red tribe whites is shrinking as some portion of their children become blue tribers and move to cities. The rural stock of conservative whites doesn't have sufficiently high fertility to offset this drain. Red-tribe whites are at about 2.0 TFR and blue-tribe whites are 1.3. This assimilation dynamic means there is no rebounding effect on overall white TFR unless the acculturation/assimilation dynamic stops or reverses.
I see little chance of that happening at present.
The red tribe seems to be slowly getting better at dealing with the assimilation effect, and in any case the assimilation of Hispanics is probably able to at least partially offset it.
Remember that pickup trucks and country music are booming businesses, and that’s probably the best vibes based indicator of the relative strength of red tribe cultural power.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That would mean changing the constitution, since it would create two classes of citizen. That’s kind of the problem for them, under the law almost all the rioters etc are citizens.
I mean we’re on the fifth republic already. It’s not hard to imagine a sixth.
There's a lot of superstructure now that is intended to prevent further such changeovers...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Make revocation of citizenship for crime relatively easy?
I hear far-right commentators excited about revocation of citizenship as if it's the easiest thing when it actually seems like the hardest and most fraught option. Even without the concrete issue of venerable and widely respected international agreements specifically against it, producing an appreciable number of stateless individuals - especially a particularly criminal and undesirable sample of stateless individuals - would be seen as shitting on the international commons. It's not like people on your territory would magically disappear if you revoke their citizenship, and so all you would actually be doing - assuming you don't keep them firmly locked up yourself after revoking their citizenship - is that you would be telling other countries that you will refuse to take responsibility for them or take them back if they somehow make their way into those countries. Doing this would quickly turn you into a pariah state in a way in which no amount of concentration camps, draconian laws or firing squads, targeted against your own, would.
I understand some proponents' attitude towards that would amount to a "so what, sending a big fuck you to the rest of the world is a feature, not a bug"/"if everyone hates us that means more jobs for our people and military", but it seems that many others instead subscribe to a fantasy where if France revokes the citizenship of an nth-generation criminal African then after much wailing and gnashing of teeth some African country nobody can point out on a map will step up and admit that the individual in question is actually theirs (or perhaps that they can run a country-level paternity test that will identify some Equatorial Guinea as on the hook for child support in best reality TV fashion).
International agreements of the 'humanitarian' kind only matter to western nations in any meaningful sense. If they go far right, and it would only take two of the big ones, I don't think anyone will care enough or afford to uphold them.
To that end there would be no problem with France sorting the good from the bad in their society, relegating the bad to some purpose built prison hole in Djibouti.
The point is that it's only superficially about humanitarianism and actually largely about forswearing a type of aggression between roughly equal nation-states that is annoying to defend against.
Who is going to operate the prison hole in Djibouti you are talking about? The Djiboutians would neither be efficient nor incentivised to keep the people in, and would demand a lot of money for it if their internal politics don't randomly whiplash against operating it for any price; for the French running a prison in Djibouti - assuming they can rent the land or muscle themselves into it, which is not so clear - might turn out more expensive than running the same prison in France. (I haven't looked up the operational costs, direct and indirect, of Guantanamo Bay which seems to be the closest equivalent of what you are proposing, but I doubt it's cheaper than your run-of-the-mill federal supermax.)
If the humanitarianism is superficial then what problem are we facing? By the sound of things many on the far right in Europe are not against the EU per se. I don't see why, if we're not maintaining some facade of treating native first worlders and foreign third worlders the same, that the sky will fall as a consequence. European nations can continue working together despite that.
As for Djibouti, the French already have a military base there. Which they could run with an additional prison complex for as cheap as the French can run things overseas given they have the French Foreign Legion stationed there. It would be much less Guantanamo Bay and much more refugee camp you can't leave.
But that's kind of besides the point. I'm not attached to any one mechanism for doing things like that. I mentioned it more in passing than anything. The third world manages to house their criminals. I don't see the task as being impossible or even that hard for France. Nor why it would end up being prohibitively expensive.
If France had third worlders with no land to call home that commit crime, ship 'em out to prisonland.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, people also don’t realize just how much many people don’t want to go ‘home’. You’re not going to move to the Ivory Coast or Mali even if stripped of welfare rights. Mild pressure wouldn’t do it.
The UK did recently strip the citizenship of a woman (who joined ISIS) on the basis that she was entitled by ancestry to Bangladeshi citizenship, leaving her arguably stateless in a refugee camp. But doing it on a large scale would be quite different.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It presents a concrete political objective. A pan-European radical right movement to reform the EU constitution to actually serve European people would have to aim high and dream big.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link