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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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On one hand, this is a nothingburger. On the other, I might be sheltered but it does surprise me when people in positions of seniority, especially Europeans, reveal such base, zoological prejudice, grounded more in axiomatic disgust than in any moral outrage about population replacement, decay of trust, death of the national Logos or whatever. This was striking in older Germans complaining about Turks – they didn't actually have some abstract case for preserving the racial composition of the Faterland, a sense in which it deserves to exist as a separate project of humanity *; they straight up hated how these foreign people look, smell, move, laugh and decorate their dwellings, on some reptilian brain level. It became much clearer how this nation could take so well to Himmler's gibberish.

But this attitude, unpopular within the ranks of elite human capital, probably explains political woes of the far right somewhat. (And Europeans on average are still much less susceptible to zoological racism than the rest of humanity, WEIRD and all that).

Of course, this is also what is most resistant to indoctrination. Ideological ethno-nationalism is somewhat complex and fragile, it can be discredited and memory-holed through institutional means. Just 'ate 'em can survive with juvenile shitposting alone.

* Of course, people needn't consciously reflect on themselves as members of any such project to carry on its intent, especially if we take the HBD angle seriously. Say, the «project» defended by The Finns would be just their compatriots being maximally Finns. I am partial to project and proposition nations, though.

On one hand, this is a nothingburger. On the other, I might be sheltered but it does surprise me when people in positions of seniority, especially Europeans, reveal such base, zoological prejudice, grounded more in axiomatic disgust than in any moral outrage about population replacement, decay of trust, death of the national Logos or whatever.

I suspect this is actually how pretty much all cases of xenophobia throughout the world, and throughout history, operate(d). It never actually mattered who the outgroup was, or what their real behavior was, or even if they had personal spaceships while you lived in a cave. That just means they were crass materialists while you were in touch with the spirits of the world. It's this meme, but unironically, because the meme was always an accurate depiction of reality. It's only relatively recently, and only in some parts of the world, that things like empirical evidence and logical argument started to be considered as valuable, or that beliefs should flow from them rather than the other way around. And so people need to at least come up with a plausible-sounding explanation, grounded in some sort of logic rather than pure visceral tribalism, as to why the other actually is a civilizational threat this time.

I don’t think there’s any difference in base level individual prejudice between WEIRD and outsiders. The stuff one hears (as you said) older Germans say about Turks isn’t all that different from what one hears Turks say about Syrians or Tunisians and Moroccans say about sub-Saharan Africans. The difference is that in the non-WEIRD countries bonds of extended family and local community extend far beyond the nuclear family (which usually doesn’t really exist in the same way anyway, obviously) so they can ‘mobilize’ this contempt more aggressively. The current anti-immigrant race riots in Tunisia are one example.

What does the typical Indian think of Turkey?

It's a below average choice for the meat in a Subway sandwich, that's it.

(And Europeans on average are still much less susceptible to zoological racism than the rest of humanity, WEIRD and all that).

One could argue they need racist bigotry more than anyone else on account of their tendency to favor outsiders.

If you're nice and cooperative to people who will be nice and cooperative back at you because they're the same kind of weird moral mutant, it's mutually beneficial.

It's not advantageous to you to be nice to some subcontinental who is far more ethnocentric and is going to ruthlessly take advantage of your niceness and then keep on lecturing you for years on how racist you are.

How to solve the problem of groups with different levels of favoring their own coexisting in a multiracial framework ?

It seems rather thorny.

Austro-Hungarian ethnic politics were kinda a handful and those were between peoples who were genetically almost identical and only differed by native language and a few cultural differences.

The Prisoner's Dilemma, pretty much. Of course, if you always co-operate, it's obvious what the action of your enemy is going to be.

More generally, this is why people advocate for ethnostates. Of course, states still compete with each other on a political level, so you're merely transmuting the stage of competition to a geopolitical one—unless you go all isolationist, of course, but that's pretty much akin to dropping out of the game entirely.