site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.

For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.

The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.

Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)

Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.

The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.

As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.

I think there's an extra pole in there. My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again. It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case. It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict, and in the battle for hearts and minds.

Basically, you've got a three-pole attractor scenario, a lot like male lizard mating strategies 1. I'm also open to better name suggestions for the three groups, but I feel that the names I picked are evocative enough to justify them.

In this specific type of lizards, you've got monogamous lizards, alpha large-territory-holding lizards, and pass-as-female-to-sneakily-mate-with-the-actual-females lizards. Monogamous lizards get driven out by alphas, alphas get cucked by infiltrators, and infiltrators don't pass well enough to fool monogamous lizards and can't successfully cuck them.

It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case

The teutonic war machine didn't lose to Audie Murphy and his ilk.

It lost because it was an industrial war and German war making potential would only have approached that of the US had it conquered and fully repaired the entirety of European industry, from Normandy to the Urals.

It lost because Americans were competent fighters enjoying immense material superiority. Something like 5:1 vs tanks on the western front, and 10:1 in planes, probably at least 4:1 in artillery throw weight.

For more information, see e.g. 'Wages of Destruction' by Adam Tooze.

The only path to win for Germany would have involved defeating the USSR.

It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict

This is again bullshit. American military in Afghanistan barely ever lost any battle. Taliban and Afghans in general aren't great fighters, and they had barely any equipment.

Taliban won simply by surviving and disrupting the government, that's all they had to do.

America simply had no viable strategy how to turn Afghanistan into a functioning state. It was never willing to send in enough soldiers - you'd probably have needed a million and then keeping them there for thirty years while creating a fair civil administration and so on.

The teutonic war machine didn't lose to Audie Murphy and his ilk.

Except that they very manifestly did...

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how was it that the "hopelessly miscenginated" and "distinctly lacking in Nordic warrior spirit" US was able to out produce the Reich not just in absolute terms but in per-capita terms as well?

...Likewise, for all that Anime and World of Warships fans swoon over the IJNS Yamato, the simple truth is that in the one time she actually fought an enemy ship in a gun-on-gun surface action she and he accompanying task-force got absolutely trashed by a detachment of 4 escort ships commanded by a half-breed Cherokee and who individually weighed less than half as much as one of Yamato's gun turrets. As I keep saying. These sorts of things don't happen in a sane world run by math and autistic notions of genetic destiny. As such the only reasonable conclusion is that we do not live in such a world.

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how was it that the "hopelessly miscenginated" and "distinctly lacking in Nordic warrior spirit" US was able to out produce the Reich not just in absolute terms but in per-capita terms as well?

Why do you keep repeating this nonsense? The Anglo-Saxons are a Germanic people, English is of the Germanic language family! They were every bit as Aryan as Germany even by the standards of Hitler- the Nazis regarded the term "Aryan" as a pan-European designation, even including Italians and Poles under the umbrella according to the racial laws of the time, the "Aryan means blonde hair and blue eyes" is purely post-war propaganda meant to straw man what was a pan-European racial concept (one that has been vindicated by modern genetic analysis).

The diaspora and colonizers of the British Empire lacked the "Nordic warrior spirit", that is just so hilariously backwards. You know they conquered the continent right? They were the greatest examples of such a spirit, leaving civilization to conquer savages, tame the wilderness, and build a new civilization...

You openly deny and despise what were their greatest qualities.

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how

Whose strawman are you attacking now?

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

We do need these things.

And in any case you'd be hard-pressed to find any non-drooling racist who'd tell you that he believes anglo-saxons are inferior to Germans.

So I'm really not sure what you're aiming at here.

It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

Why doesn't it determine the acquisition of material resources and foodstuffs?

I honestly don't think I'm being uncharitable or an ass to ask this. The term is "biodeterminism", but now we're talking about resources and food, presumably tied to arable land. That ain't genes any more, is it? We can soften the theory to say that superior genes give a considerable advantage that tells in the long-term, but then there's the problem that the only long term we can test this against is the past, which we already know the results of, and we're not actually going to be around to see a similar stretch of the "long-term" future, are we?

It's typically relevant when talking about outcomes for individuals sharing a culture.

Like you said, if you want to talk about outcomes for nations, there's too many variables.

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

There was a passage you posted once, that talked about how if you stepped through the last few hundred years in fifty-year increments, reasonable predictions would be completely blown out every time. I can imagine reasons why that sort of pattern might not continue, since there's good reasons to think the last few hundred years have been unusually prone to chaos... but why would one be sure the chaos has concluded?

You talk about Anglos devouring the light-cone, an eventuality that, accounting to translation, I think I agree would be less than preferable. Are they going to devour the light-cone because their biology determines it?

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

For the most part, SAT scores and the like – the distribution of individual human traits.

It also explains how North Koreans can have a functional, technologically sophisticated, orderly society in a situation that would have caused any African nation to implode in months.

It goes without saying that HBD is a skeleton key to a lion's share of American political enigmas.

But you probably understand the intellectually serious version of HBD at this point anyway; this flirtation with Hlynka's «Aryans of pure blood r superiors und prevail» Hitlerist gibberish is not something I need to knock down once again. And, of course, Nazis are less prominent in this school of thought than Jews.

HBD is a powerful framework for intra-social analysis; it allows us to ponder questions like these and its answers gracefully stand the test of time, while their rejection is a festering wound of academic culture.

I concede this is far removed from predicting international events, because the way people with different traits are assembled into a society is not trivially determined by those traits. It would have been interesting to discuss whether there is an inherent biological – or any other – reason explaining why, say, Ukrainians can have meritocratic leadership, while closely related (despite certain protestations) Russians are ruled by back alley thugs such as Zolotov and produce headlines like «“Russian Elon Musk” died from rape and torture in jail». And the OG Elon Musk's own biological potential did nothing for South Africa. Von Neumann, too, did relatively little for Hungary and Germany. I dabbled in theorizing about slots for qualitatively different expressions of human potential that some stable societies have and others lack. But it's a difficult topic.

I don't think Anglos (who are «basically mid», again) will devour the light cone; I'm no Cecil Rhodes who explicitly aspired to that nor someone who takes his racist delusions seriously. I'd guess that Musk is a mutt in Hlynka's terms, and Von Neumann's case is obvious enough. Those are the sort of people you need to come up with the idea of tiling the universe in self-replicating probes and the logistics to bootstrap this process.

The thing is, at least one of Anglo-derived societies had assembled the full stack of necessary slots. And it sure looks like their biology, which molds their moral instinct, played a role in making that possible.

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

Only when it is convenient to the woke Bay-Aryan's current argument for it to be so, otherwise it's an uncharitable strawman. ;-)

I think you know as well as I do.

The sort of person who uses words like "racial homogeneity" and "Hajnal line" without a hint of irony.

'Hajnal line' is a real thing. People from inside of it are kind of peculiar. I'm not one of them, as far as I know.

As to racial homogeneity.. do you really think we have any people who're very much in favor of that here ?

As to racial homogeneity. do you really think we have any people who're very much in favor of that here ?

Yes. Absolutely.

Not that this is any better, but it tracks with the Geeks, MoPs, and Sociopaths framework.

If you're looking for alternate descriptors, I'd use Leaders/Founders/Builders, Followers, and Parasites. Basically one small class of people who can catalyze change, the vast majority of people who follow the first group and by doing so produce surplus value, and third group that does not produce value but instead consumes it.

My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again.

This sounds pretty similar to the dicks/pussies/assholes trichotomy popularized by Team America: World Police.

I vaguely recall reading about a simulation of an iterated trembling-hand Prisoner's Dilemma game set that evolved like this. You'd expect "Tit-for-tat" (let's call it "Copycat", because Nicky Case is awesome) strategy to be the natural winner. But once it's naturally won, in a world full of Copycat players of trembling-hand games it pays to be "Cooperator" instead, because unlike Copycat the always-cooperate strategy doesn't get into nearly-interminable feuds when it or its partner makes a mistake. But when the world then starts to fill up with Cooperator players, it only takes a single always-defect "Cheater" mutant to sweep through the population, so Cheater takes over next. And finally, when the world is full of Cheaters, even a single pair of Copycat has enough of an advantage via mutual cooperation to take over again, and the cycle repeats.

Although, I don't recall that simulation showing any equivalent of the "Copykitten" strategy, which you'd think might be able to short-circuit the Cooperator takeover. I'm not sure whether that's because it just never managed to take over or because the simulated agents didn't have that strategy as an option.

grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case

Seeing this repeated is too much for me. If 'Teutonic war machine' lost to anything American, it was the 1/3rd+ of global industrial output and a continent worth of resources supporting the Europeans - and it was these Europeans that Germans lost out to. List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Edison, Dow, Carnegie... of all the things to imply America was short on, you picked titans of industry?

EDIT: wait, I think I misread what you were saying. Nevermind...

I did not say America was short on them, I implied the opposite - by 'if anyone' I meant, if you're going to list any individual to represent the forces that were of foremost importance in US success in the two wars.