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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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It’s not analysis, it’s just making the case for mass deportation which presumably his entire readership agrees with. The objective analysis would note that, regardless of one’s personal opinion, getting to the stage where stripping people of citizenship and deporting them based on ancestry is inside the Overton window would seemingly involve a colossal shift in public attitudes toward ethnic nationalism, immigration and identity in Western European countries. In France, even collecting data on people’s race is banned, there are people of Middle Eastern and African descent in the highest offices in the land, billionaires, in business, in the arts, in almost every prominent national sports team. People’s acceptance of interracial marriage is extremely high, many French have non-native friends and coworkers.

Consider just how much of a total 180 turn in views on identity, on race and on nation would be required to get to the stage where repatriation is a widespread and popular viewpoint. Then consider that the media, state and other powerful organizations (like the EU) are institutionally opposed. There doesn’t seem to me to be a viable strategy for the far-right activist you link other than hoping the public suddenly “radicalizes”, which they didn’t do after the spate of terrorist bombings from 2001 to 2005 and again from 2011 to 2017, so it seems unlikely they’d do so now.

What do you think?

I read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times almost cover-to-cover (from politics and international to recipes and book reviews and fashion) every single day from the age of maybe 7 until I left home at 19. I also read general interest stuff like NatGeo and Scientific American every single month through my whole childhood. Then in my teenage years I was very online on tumblr, reddit, sometimes other forums. I met people from all over the world through family and in college, and since I started work I've been fortunate to meet some people who have a bunch of great stories. So I have a lot of general knowledge. I very much doubt I'm smarter, though, you've written some well-researched comments and I thought your criticism of some of the QAnon hmmposting a week or two ago was good.

But 'intelligence' is a large component in one's ability to prioritize facts to remember and use them to come up with interesting or novel points to make. And most people who are well read and know a lot across a wide domain still synthesize those facts into mediocre rationalizations of existing ideas or novel babble. On the upper end of that is a Tinkzorg, and on the lower end are internet schizos who ramble into the void. You seem to be one of the smartest mottizens imo, but it's hard to judge intelligence broadly from a single domain, there are plenty of people at the top of mathematics or science whose political opinions are still incoherent culture war stuff.