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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32088 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 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.

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No.

Or rather, it doesn't matter if your baseline is of low intelligence so as long as you have a talented tenth that actually runs things. Sure, you wouldn't be able to get the results of higher SD nations, but you can get something like modern-day Rwanda or Ethiopia going. Not great, but certainly above the (admittedly low) norm.

What is far more impactful is the threat of pernicious ideomemes like communism. You can throw as much high-iq Asians and Slavic technocrats at it to no avail. Even the most degenerate of African states are paradises to say, Pol Pot's Cambodia. Communism, in terms of HBD, is equalivant to a primal reversion to humanity's primate ancestors, an intellect-shredding machine. Even if one must accept the premises of HBD, it gives one hope that the right ideomeme can produce results out of porportion of one's intellectual talents, but we haven't discovered the right solution yet.

Isn't that solution democratic capitalism?

1 day ban.

Please take a look around at other top level posts. There is an expected minimum level of effort.

Edit- increasing ban to ten days. You have been warned and banned before for this exact thing.

Well dang it, I go offline for a bit and I miss all the fun. Is there anything to be learned from what the ban was about, or is that just idle curiosity on my part?

Didn't realize the post was being filtered. I removed it from the filter, so now it should be visible.

It was just a low effort post from a user that has been warned and banned for this issue.

There have also been some other top level posts this week that were on the edge of getting a warning for being low effort, so it was also convenient that their was a post to be made an example of.

Having seen it, yeah, that one deserved a slap on the wrist right enough.

Joggers?

Far-right insulting term for blacks. Comes from some case in the US South a while ago where a black jogger was shot. I think it's popular because the last four letters are G-G-E-R

In certain circles 'joggers' is used as an alternative for a different word ending in '-ggers'.

You may well be right I had thought it was related to the Ahmaud Arberry case (the black guy who claimed to be a jogger not a looter).

My understanding is that it's related? 'Jogger' came to be a euphemism for 'n--ger' because of Arbery, though I am sure that the similarity in the sound of the words helped.

It probably has multiple reasons for becoming popular.

sigh I wish I hadn't asked.

The list of euphemisms for blacks is America is impressively long.

'Joggers' is years old. 'Scholars' is about the most prominent new one.

The word redditors use when they really want to use the n-word. re: Ahmaud Arbery.

I'm almost sure you'd get banned on reddit for jogger now.

I do not find whiteness as a proxy for morality compelling, particularly when it comes from the perspective of joining some white separatist group. As a moral and lily-white person, I can only see the idea of privileging race over morality as some sort of race communism where I have to cover for the moral inferiority of people who have an similar skin tone and see morally superior people with a disfavored skin tone see trouble.

If that isn't the case then why the bait and switch? Have words lost their meaning like they have in the larger culture? Am I instead supposed to share the specific cosmology of some Pagan cult?

I much prefer moral nationalism to whatever this 50th flavor of white nationalism is.

If this is a quote from that article you discussed above, shouldn't it be in quotation marks or at least cited?

You’re not allowed to copy and paste someone else’s article as a top level post.

I've removed this post as it was just a copy-pasted article. Please remember:

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.

In other words, this is a place for discussion. If you'd like to discuss this essay, you may link to it, even quote from it, but then you have to do the work of offering some evaluation or insight of your own. There is no minimum word count, but "low effort" is something that is often evidenced by a low word count.

On a somewhat meta point, this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it? I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.

There was a previous conversation about this for reference. I am interested to hear what policy you're proposing.

I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.

As Naraburns points out in another comment, if you want to stick to spaces where white nationalists are not allowed to attempt persuasive arguments in favor of our positions, you are welcome to try everywhere else on the entire internet. Can you let us have this one teeny-tiny space where we can actually have a respectful and open dialogue with people, allowing them to weigh our arguments without multiple layers of reinterpretation and misrepresentation by media gatekeepers? I do hope that’s not too much to ask.

I think there's a difference between an open dialogue and low effort link spam.

I agree, but you did not express concern with low-effort link spam - your expressed concern was with white nationalists trying to “recruit” people. Given that this is your concern, shouldn’t you be more worried about white nationalists using sophisticated and high-effort argumentation in order to make our side look respectable and interesting, rather than posting shitty low-effort links, which makes us look lazy and bad-faith?

It’s still the same one-JQ-copypaste-post per day guy, and he immediately posted another top-level after nara nuked this one. You appear uninterested in policing this behaviour from your side, you’re content to swim in the sewer he turns the sub into. You’re right, it does not reflect well on your ideology.

I often report low-effort link-spamming by right-wingers in this sub; I would have reported the post in question if it hadn’t already been nuked before I saw it. What I’m defending here is not link-spamming, which I agree is bad for the sub. If you recall, my comments in the kerfuffle about JQ-posting were exclusively in defense of SecureSignals, who is not guilty of low-effort link-spamming, whatever else you think of him. I have never defended link-spammers like Foreverlurker or his alts.

Like I told you last time also, my problem is not with you or SS, but with foreverlurker, cake, and all his alts, who is right now plying the sub with his garbage, while you are all cheerfully pretending the discussion developed organically. Do you genuinely not see it, or this some sort of balancing of the scales for your oppression by society? Do we have to tolerate your blatant, daily astroturfing to compensate for your censorship elsewhere?

More comments

It's worth noting that attempting to build consensus is explicitly against the Motte's rules, and the top post of every Culture War thread says:

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.

So when I object to 'recruiting' I am objecting to something that is already forbidden here.

I am not objecting to people being honestly persuaded of things.

I acknowledge that the line between trying to convince someone of something and trying to recruit someone into a movement can be pretty hazy. "Here's why I think Marxism is true" isn't that far away from "you should become a Marxist and join the class struggle" - indeed, if Marxism is true, then becoming a Marxist and joining the class struggle may logically follow from that. But I still think there's some value in trying to allow the former type of post but not the latter, even if the borders are unclear.

To take this specific example, I think cake's posts are very clearly on the recruiting side of the line. He's not coming in here with an idea to discuss, including the possibility of genuine give-and-take or being convinced by his interlocutors, but rather with a manifesto to share. He's since reposted the link here in a more acceptable format, and gone on to make posts that clearly read like political recruitment - I take comments like these as aiming at building a coalition.

So what's my ultimate position?

I don't want a screening test where we ban anyone who might fit a definition of 'white nationalist'. That's impractical and foolish. However, I do want it to be clear that cake-style white nationalist recruiting is unwelcome, and I'd like a more proactive approach to our rules against recruiting and consensus-building. I'd particularly note that rules in favour of kindness, against weakmanning, and in favour of writing like you want everyone to be included seem like they implicit rule out a number of white nationalist arguments anyway. I do see posts here that come off like "so, fellow white people, how do we deal with such-and-such problem?", and those definitely seem inappropriate to me.

"Recruiting for a cause" is "Hey join my organization" not "my team's ideas are great and you should adopt them because they're great".

shouldn’t you be more worried about white nationalists using sophisticated and high-effort argumentation in order to make our side look respectable and interesting

I personally think attempts to recruit by stating and a clear thesis and defending it by engaging with the central points of the counterarguments would be a significant improvement over the current trend, which seems to be "copy/paste kinda incoherent rants and hope it resonates with someone".

I’ve been here for years making effortful posts with clear theses in defense on my views, and I think I do as good a job as anyone else here of responding to counterarguments. There are a number of other equally effortful and sophisticated posters here with views similar to mine who have been active for some time here and who post regularly. You are pointing to the poor behavior of one specific guy, posting under various ban-evading alts, and acting as if it’s a representative example of a larger trend.

You are not the main problem here, no. Although I don't know who you're referring to as someone who both substantively agrees with you and also engages with difficult questions (rather than e.g. changing or dropping the topic when challenged and then coming back with the same points a week or two later).

Edit: or at least I don't consider you to be the main problem. I don't speak for everyone.

It is too much to ask if those discussions crowd out everything else.

Just on a practical level if white nationalist talk floods the forum, it will cease to be an interesting forum to non-white nationalists.

There's a genuinely difficult problem here when it comes to creating an open discussion forum. If everything is allowed, at least some percentage of that everything will be vile. Many people don't want to be in a space where vile discussion occurs, and therefore will avoid it.

If there's a position that, by virtue of being included, will automatically lead to other positions self-excluding, then including that position may actually reduce the range of potential discussions. How to handle positions like that?

I can already hear the complaint - isn't this just giving a veto to the censorious and intolerant? And certainly it doesn't seem like a good thing to optimise for just having as many people as possible. The goal of the Motte isn't to get as many people as possible, so it definitely makes sense to just go ahead and let 'normies' feel uncomfortable if that's the price of attracting intelligent people with controversial ideas. However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas. So there should be a line, it seems to me?

The line shouldn't be placed at zero, where everything that offends anyone in the majority is banned. But neither should it be at one hundred, where literally everything is permitted including the guy who just likes to scream 'DIE N---ER DIE'. Where should the line be? If we want to curate a healthy, vibrant garden of ideas - where are the borders?

I know this will be interpreted as a call to censor. That's honestly not where I'm trying to go. My preference is to try to maximise the interchange of interesting ideas. It's just that how to do that isn't an easy question. It isn't resolved by just picking an an absolute principle like 'everyone is welcome full stop' and standing on that.

However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas.

On a purely individual level - should they do that? As a matter of fact, what's the harm from discussing disgusting ideas? I think, in an ideal sense, 'taboo ideas' wouldn't exist in the context of discussion. Whether that's 'is pedophilia good, actually', 'is slavery good, actually', 'is eugenics good, actually' - it raises very interesting philosophical questions that flesh out aspects of reality you would otherwise understand less. The writings of history's evil reactionaries deeply influenced the thought of history's foremost progressives, even though they were at odds morally.

It's also not a coincidence that the mainstream lines of thought on every taboo topic is hopelessly confused. That's what happens when you make intellectual inquiry taboo!

At the same time, you have to strictly enforce a quality floor, and be fine with that quality floor having a 'disparate impact' on the witches.

If there's a position that, by virtue of being included, will automatically lead to other positions self-excluding, then including that position may actually reduce the range of potential discussions. How to handle positions like that?

While I think, ideally, everyone should 'not defect' and tell all of the self-excluders to suck it, TheMotte is one of the very few spaces that does that and simultaneously maintains a quality bar (and also an implicit IQ/competence filter), which makes it especially important we allow such badthink.

It's all very well to claim to be above such tribal or social associations - but I very much doubt than anyone here is. I know that there are people interested in the Motte's ostensible purpose but who have quit the community because it contained too many witches, and was going down a groupthink-y hard right hole. The Schism is the most obvious example because it's a public community, but every individual who quits and doesn't advertise it adds to the count, but does not leave an obvious record to point to.

All humans are social animals. If you want to recruit exclusively from people who don't care about social associations, you're going to get only the tiny proportion of weirdos who don't care and the people who genuinely like the social associations here (i.e. the witches). It is not at all clear that the resulting community is going to be one that's maximally open to the discussion of interesting ideas.

I'm not claiming to be above tribal and social associations, that would be stupid - both in that it's untrue, and that it'd be dumb to do so, such tendencies exist because they're very useful!

I am claiming, however, to be interested in talking to people and considering ideas, no matter how disgusting or obviously wrong or taboo the topic is (and that does include far-left stuff, like weird kinks, anarchists, gender-abolitionists, authcoms, etc). And I think everyone should do that. Obviously this goes against natural tendencies and is generally a weird idea.

However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas.

You keep saying that, and keep refusing to back it up. If there are "intelligent" people with "controversial" opinions, who believe that merely being on the same forum as people with views they find vile creates some kind of "association" I very much doubt their intelligence, or the amount of controversy around their opinions. Maybe you can find me a unicorn that is both intelligent and controversial, and who doesn't want to post at The Motte because of the vileness of the views here (I'd love to meet them), but 99.9% of the time this will be the domain of the establishment-adjacent.

But neither should it be at one hundred, where literally everything is permitted including the guy who just likes to scream 'DIE N---ER DIE'. Where should the line be?

The line has been the same pretty much since the start of the community. All ideas are allowed, as long as you're civil. Given that the 'DIE N---ER DIE' dude was never allowed to post here, why are you acting like it's an open question?

Define 'intelligent and controversial'. As I just noted, there are certainly people I would describe as intelligent who cut down on their engagement with or quit the Motte as a result of the last year or two's decline.

It's possible to redefine 'intelligent' on the fly, such that everyone the Motte lost was a thinker not worth keeping. But I would say that's inherently a value judgement, and a very questionable one to boot. It's possible to define the Motte's Overton Window in a way that excludes, say, the Schism crowd but keeps the white nationalists and anti-semites. It's also possible to define it in a way that includes the Schismers but excludes the white nationalists and anti-semites. But it may not be possible to define it in a way that keeps both.

As I recall, the schism originally schism'd not over white nationalism, but over the moral approval of lethal self defense. That's a DAMNED slippery slope you're suggesting we set upon.

Plenty of intelligent people wouldn't want to hang out here, it's the idea that they're both intelligent and controversial part that I don't buy, and the fact that you went for the Schismers as your example proves my point.

Almost all people just don't want to be around ebil nazis, and this includes almost all very intelligent people, even those with controversial opinions. They're are incorrect/wrong to do so, but it's still true. Most very intelligent people are establishment-adjacent, too!

I can already hear the complaint - isn't this just giving a veto to the censorious and intolerant?

Anticipating an objection does not make it invalid.

I know this will be interpreted as a call to censor. That's honestly not where I'm trying to go

You got there anyway. You appear to be trying to erase sharp distinctions (screaming "DIE N---ER DIE" versus discussing white identitarianism) in order to create a continuum where you can play the old game of "you have no hard and fast principles, we're just arguing over the price".

I’m going to ask the same thing I asked Amadan during the discussion about JQ-posting: are white nationalist discussions crowding out everything else? A quick perusal of discussion topics in this week’s CWR suggests precisely the opposite. There are still tons of discussions about all sorts of topics on this forum. If people don’t like the race/identity threads they can hide them, the same way I hide discussions about LLMs or macroeconomics or other issues I feel unqualified to assess or weigh in on.

Amadan and I see additional topics because we are moderators. Plenty of things get filtered out and never removed from the filter. Lately, almost all of that filtered stuff is white nationalist type rants, and sometimes just fully copy pasted articles like above. Since the inception of this website our worst content violations have been ... white nationalist might not be the right word, since I doubt you'd want to associate with them. But users like die[n-words]die, with accompanying images in their profile.

As moderators, we really can't just completely ignore the white nationalist threads. We still have to enforce the rules here. So when fights flare up I have to go read the relevant threads. And the race threads are either consistently causing problems, or common enough that there is a constant influx of reports from those threads.

Basically the white nationalist types are bad neighbors. They move in and cause all kinds of fights and problems. As soon as you allow any of them in you have to create a strict dividing line to keep out their worst elements. And then when you point out these problems we are asked to pretend that they are not coming a single group. That group has claimed that they receive unfair discrimination from just about everyone. Does any of this sound familiar? How would you suggest handling such a troublesome group?

So, this is useful and sobering information for me to have, and I appreciate you sharing it. Obviously without seeing the specific threads you’re talking about, and without observing the behavior of the specific users responsible for them, it’s difficult for me to assess how likely it is that the vast majority of them are trolls or similarly bad-faith users. I would strongly suspect that this is true of the “die[Ns]die” guys, but I recognize my biases as far as that’s concerned. Certainly the more unseemly parts of the racialist right have never had a shortage of thuggish atavistic types and edge-lords like that.

I’ve been honest from the start in saying that my overriding concern here is to stringently oppose attempts to limit my own ability to responsibly present my views in this forum. I believe that my record, insofar as I have never been banned for any length of time by the moderators here, speaks to the fact that such views can be dealt with in ways that are well within the bounds of acceptable discourse here. I acknowledge that topics of race and identity are bound to evoke stronger and more negative emotions than other topics, and I acknowledge that this does create extra work for you guys relative to what’s created by more anodyne discussion topics, but from my non-moderator perspective, that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

All that being said, the analogy you imply in your final paragraph is both clever and incisive. I’m pretty much forced to take it seriously. I’d be a massive hypocrite not to! So, I guess I should probably ask: what, if anything, do you suggest that I personally should do in order to help ameliorate the issue. Is @fuckduck9000 correct that I should be more vociferously calling out apparent bad-faith posters who purport to share some funhouse-mirror version of my views? Would that even help at all? It sounds like the vast majority of these posts are being caught by the filter and never even make it to the sub, so I can’t really do anything about any of those.

So, here, I'm gonna post this in the main thread, but I'll show it to you first (and I guess anyone else who checks my comment page, hi there!) Here's the current prototype for the single-issue-poster rule:

We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.

This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.

This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're fine.

Does that work?

Is @fuckduck9000 correct that I should be more vociferously calling out apparent bad-faith posters who purport to share some funhouse-mirror version of my views?

Honestly I'd like it if everyone did that more often :V

More comments

Its often impossible for us to tell whether they are trolls or sincere users. I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter. If someone posts low effort crap because they are dumb, or because they are smart and running a 4d chess trolling, the end result is the same: there is low effort crap to be cleaned up.

There is very little you can do as a user. The volunteer system is still a thing, and that does help us a bit. Acting as community police can sometimes backfire, because it starts fights rather than ends them. Also I wouldn't be a huge fan of white nationalists policing each other's views and getting into a purity spiral on here.

If you want this forum to stay interesting and healthy I would suggest you cultivate other interests that are relevant here on the culture war threads. Then whenever you come to the culture war thread if you see that a race based topic has already been started you should post about your other interest instead. If you implement this advice and suddenly start to think "hey some idiot wasted my chance to have interesting discussion on the race topic by posting some low quality crap" then you will understand why we try to moderate low effort posts.

I've found that most people that have a single topic of interest have a real blind spot to other people's level of toleration for that topic. If you only like that one topic, you might be fine with 90% of the conversation being around that topic. If you hate that topic then you might feel that even 10% of the conversation spent on that topic is too much. And having interesting conversations with people is the limiting resource on this forum, so don't be surprised when even non-moderators complain about you stinking up the commons. Whatever your preferred amount of discussion about race is, everyone else who doesn't want to talk about it thinks that number is way too high.

I was a moderator over at slatestarcodex when we did the topic ban on race discussions. I recommended against it then, and I'd recommend against any topic bans right now. Based on my general sense from the other mods we are very very unlikely to ever to do a topic ban. The exception to that will probably be if encounter legal issues. But we also aren't going to ban people from saying 'jeez this topic is talked about way too much, we're really beating a dead horse here'. There is a certain amount of community policing that tends to arise on its own for over-done topics. And as I mentioned above, community policing often creates more fights than it ends. This is why I suggest having other interests. If the community heat level on the race topics starts getting too high, switch to your other interest. Without that ability to switch you just become part of a feedback loop.

this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it?

Hmm, maybe not, but wholesale copy-pasting stuff without effort to engage is pretty rare. And last time it happened, it was totally unattributed--this time there was at least a link to the original. Which isn't enough, but it is technically an improvement.

I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.

As opposed to reddit, Facebook, 4chan, Twitter, and literally every other social media site in existence? Also: it's not unusual for a single dedicated troll to single-handedly create the appearance of "people in that sphere." There just aren't that many real "white nationalists" around, and half of them are FBI LARPers.

Anyway, we are a small site and we are known for permitting arguments outside the Overton window, but we do have a rule explicitly forbidding "recruiting for a cause." White nationalists, should any in fact show up, are just as permitted to test their arguments (within the bounds laid by the foundation and the rules) as anyone else. I know some people find it disconcerting to be in a place where moderation genuinely functions on presentation and approach rather than content, but that's the ethos we've adopted here. And we have no shortage of people here who are happy, even anxious, to poke holes in such identitarian arguments as may arise.

I am not a white nationalist and find frequent recruiting posts by low effort white nationalists to be tiresome and annoying, but I appreciate the ability to have civil discussions on the topic with actual white nationalists in one(1) place on the internet.

Yeah. I wouldn't mind some high effort white nationalist posts so their points can be addressed and discussed and possibly rebutted in an intelligent way.

And to some extent, forcing high quality posts from people with misguided views may force them to educate themselves and accidentally de-radicalize in the process.

There's actually a good example today, higher up. A community like this can contain up to the usual defector threshold I would guess. We don't seem to be there yet and the risk in trying to cast people out is it's not always possible to pick good v bad faith.

Presumably there's better, more satisfying places for recruitment. My sense is that people here are open to the challenge of defending their ideas... But I also tend to skip a lot of content...

I've removed this post as it was just a copy-pasted article.

I still see it. Though it took me about 3 zeptoseconds to skip to the bottom and downvote rather than read further.

Gregory Hood illustrates why White Nationalism as it currently exists within the continental US should not be taken seriously as an intellectual movement.

This essay is a load of psuedo-marxist nonsense written from a place of deep historical ignorance that is presumably aimed at disaffected white progressives.

The obvious problem with advocating a for "a white homeland" is that the homeland already exists, it's called Europe. Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans. Funny how that works out. The alternative of course is to move to a state like Iowa or Vermont which is >90% white but living in one of those States doesn't confer the status or "validation" that guys like Hood so desperately crave. A white guy wearing a nice button-up in Iowa is just another white-guy. It doesn't convey the separateness from the laboring class that it might in a far more stratified place like Coastal California.

I don't know much about Hood's background, or whether he would consider himself a "Berkely Marxist", but in any case his writing strikes me as representative of that genere. The choice to place the start of history at the end of World War II is such a common rhetorical trick that it has become something of a 'tell'. The reason that American Marxists might wish to avoid discussing history prior to World War II (and prior to June 22nd 1941 in particular) in anything but the broadest strokes is left as an exercise for the reader.

Hood wants his readers to believe that "World War II is the foundation of our entire civilization." because it is convenient to the narrative that he is pushing. The problem of course is that this patently and obviously stupid. Any story of World War II and the societies that waged it that doesn't at least acknowledge the aftermath of World War I is going to end up an as incoherent mess. It would be like starting the story of the Illiad with Hector already dead. Similarly, you can't meaningfully discuss the story of the US as a nation, without acknowledging it's founding conditions as a frontier colony. Or the bloody crucible of the American Civil War from which so much of our industrial might and martial ambitions arose.

Of course, Hood is not interested in meaningful discussion. What Hood (and I suspect you) are really interested in is this bit here...

Whites of all economic classes are being displaced or prevented from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Smart, ambitious, young whites are the ones who are hit hardest, and that’s traditionally who you want as a revolutionary class. -emphasis mine.

And thus, the mask comes off and the wannabe Bolshevik under the skin-suit is fully revealed. I catch a lot of flak on this forum for pointing out that much of the so-called "Dissident Right" is really just the "Woke Left" under a different name, but it's right there in their own words for anyone with even a modicum of intellectual honesty to see.

"The 14 words" get bandied about a lot in these discussions but I find it telling that those who go on about them the most often seem the least inclined to actually build or secure anything resembling that future. It begs the question "Who's Children?". The funny thing is that in my personal life I am what the white nationalists say they want. I am teaching my kids to read and enjoy the classics. I am teaching them to, hunt, fight, cook, and work as part of a team. I go out of my way to be active in my community, to build relationships with the other folks at my church, my job, the gym, my local sports bar etc... In short, I am working to secure a future for my children. Or at least give them a sturdy foundation upon which to secure it for themselves. What are you doing?

I think the two world wars together were the end of an epoch. The way the west saw herself before, the way she thought about her artwork, her place in history, her religion, etc. changed pretty radically starting right around the world wars. In the before times, it was just simply taken for granted that the West was the civilized part of the world and that our ideas were simply better. Our religion (which was either Catholic or high Protestant) was true and to be spread, we were going to science the fuck out of pretty much everything and build utopia.

The thing is that following the two world wars, we gradually gave up on all of that. Our ideas like democracy, limited government, western philosophy, and the modern scientific method were all, one by one, discredited. We are quite literally the first culture I’m aware of that worries that our kids are too in love with their own civilization. That worries that our kids are reading too much of our own literature.

Now cards completely on the table, I’m more of a western chauvinist than anything. I look at what the west has achieved in the last 500 or so years, and I think it deserves very high praise. 500 years ago, we would be having this discussion via letters delivered by horse and buggy. And that would have been anywhere on the planet. Our philosophy and science is the bedrock on which all of the technology that allows people to argue on the internet (without being arrested), allows people to live so well that most people expect to live into their eighties and childbirth is generally safe, allows us to visit the moon and build giant space telescopes. To lose this not only means slowing progress, but possibly losing the ability to keep the progress made.

I think the two world wars together were the end of an epoch. The way the west saw herself before, the way she thought about her artwork, her place in history, her religion, etc. changed pretty radically starting right around the world wars.

I can see this in the context of western Europe (France and Britain in particular) but I don't think it holds in regards to the US. Victory in World War II isn't the end of an epoch for so as much as it is a culmination. The path we set out upon back in the mid 19th century has been shown to be the correct one.

There can be no doubt. For a glorious moment we were both the city on the hill, and the Lord's terrible swift sword.

Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans.

This bears no resemblance to Hood’s argument. Both he and his interlocutor are celebrating the fact that Europe is full of Europeans, and their disagreement is regarding the degree of international cooperation and unity of identity/purpose that should prevail among those Europeans.

The alternative of course is to move to a state like Iowa or Vermont which is >90% white but living in one of those States doesn't confer the status or "validation" that guys like Hood so desperately crave. A white guy wearing a nice button-up in Iowa is just another white-guy. It doesn't convey the separateness from the laboring class that it might in a far more stratified place like Coastal California.

He is from New Jersey, but lives in rural West Virginia. He literally made the exact choice you’re criticizing him for not making.

I don't know much about Hood's background, or whether he would consider himself a "Berkely Marxist", but in any case his writing strikes me as representative of that genere

Hood - real name Kevin DeAnna - worked in the mainstream conservative movement for over a decade, working for conservative think-tanks in DC. That’s the milieu he came up in, and what he is now reacting against because he has seen it firsthand from the inside.

Any story of World War II and the societies that waged it that doesn't at least acknowledge the aftermath of World War I is going to end up an as incoherent mess. It would be like starting the story of the Illiad with Hector already dead. Similarly, you can't meaningfully discuss the story of the US as a nation, without acknowledging its founding conditions as a frontier colony. Or the bloody crucible of the American Civil War from which so much of our industrial might and martial ambitions arose. Of course, Hood is not interested in meaningful discussion.

Hood writes extensively about Rome, and about early American history. Just because you have no familiarity with his work doesn’t mean you get to accuse him of not knowing about or talking about these things. He does not mean that World War II is the important starting point of Western civilization; he means that it is the founding myth for the current narrative being pushed by academia and the media-political complex. The Boomer Truth Regime.

"The 14 words" get bandied about a lot in these discussions but I find it telling that those who go on about them the most often seem the least inclined to actually build or secure anything resembling that future. It begs the question "Who's Children?"

Greg Hood has, I believe, four children at last count. So, presumably those ones.

You have reduced this man to a straw-man archetype to rail against, but all of your fulminating is completely useless because it doesn’t address any of the basic facts about his actual life or work. It just makes you look ignorant and ineffectual.

You have reduced this man to a straw-man archetype to rail against

I literally know nothing about this guy beyond what writings of his I've read and what you've said here.

If anyone has reduced Gregory Hood to a straw-man, it is Gregory Hood.

  • -22

So you responded to a post, get called out for not knowing the facts, and instead of offering a new culpa you attack? I am always dubious of white nationalists but this just seems like poor argument form.

What facts? I'm not commenting on the guy's home life, I'm commenting on the guy's essay and the wider movement he is touted as representing.

  • -10

You made specific claims about the guy that if the other poster is correct are simply untrue.

You wrote an entire post about how he’s a hypocrite for not living the lifestyle you think he should be living, despite the fact that he does live that lifestyle. You accused him of being a Marxist who doesn’t care about pre-WWII history, when actually he’s a Rome obsessive, a monarchist, and a devotee of Ebola’s esoteric spiritualist tradition.

Just for once admit that you spoke overconfidently about something without doing any research at all to determine if your assumptions were correct. Can you do that? Even just this once? You made multiple easily-disprovable claims about this guy, and those claims are central to your argument.

No I wrote a post about how the specific essay linked was a load of ahistorical psuedo-Marxist nonsense, and observed that both the peddlers and consumers there of tend to be of a certain type.

  • -19

and observed that both the peddlers and consumers there of tend to be of a certain type.

But the writer in question is not of that type. Is that relevant to you at all? Does it give you any pause at all, or cause you to rethink your blanket assumption in any way?

Why do you think that matters? My closing question was not addressed to Hood, it was adressed to @cake and the wider audience.

  • -20

Because I’m not only interested in your closing question. I’m interested in the other 80% of your post that came before it. Are you going to make another attempt to defend the rest of the post, or have you now retreated the motte of defending only the part of it that didn’t make specific falsifiable claims?

More comments

and a devotee of Ebola’s esoteric spiritualist tradition

Explains why his writings make me want to vomit blood

Goddammit, now I have to leave this typo in there.

In America whites identify more with politically-based cultural identities more than ethnic ones(barring genuine ethnic exceptions, but that’s not exactly generic American whites), and in Europe by finer-grained ethnic identities. This process being described is simply not reflective of reality.

The unification of England, Germany, Italy, and many other nations was preceded by centuries of conflict between finer-grained ethnic identities, with any pie-in-the-sky notions of unification an absurd dream held by an elite few. And then it happened, though it didn't fall from the sky- it was created through the will of those with a vision, and it didn't take very long for those concepts to be internalized as Nations, and the dissolution of those nations into finer-grained ethnicities seems equally unthinkable today in any of the important cases in Europe.

These things seem impossible, until individuals make an effort to foster a spirit of unification. I agree with Hood, the issue of pan-European unification is a "Join or Die" dilemma. Decentralization is not an option, petty nationalism is outdated. It's a global world, and ambitions on a global scale are the only option.

Attitudes of the European far-right towards the EU seem to be becoming more supportive, the European far right embracing a pan-European project is not as impossible as it seems, and it's really the only possible solution.

For context, Hood’s essay here is adapted from a speech he gave as part of a debate with Greg Johnson, founder of Counter-Currents; Johnson’s opening statement can be found here, and his subsequent reply to Hood’s statements can be found here. Personally, my stance lies somewhere in between the two poles represented by their respective positions. I also feel like as American I don’t have enough perspective on the identitarian self-conception of Europeans for me to really gauge which position is more realistic and hews more closely to where the hearts and minds of average Europeans are at this time. Naïvely, Johnson’s position seems more in tune with where Europeans are at this time, while Hood’s position appeals more to me philosophically/aesthetically and in terms of how I’d like to see things develop in the future.

@fuckduck9000 does this comment cause you to adjust your priors at all regarding whether or not this guy is a sincere white identitarian as opposed to a troll?

Obviously not. Previous discussions of this sort of claim: 1, 2, 3 .

The binding force behind all "woke" modern movements is anti-whiteness.

A handful of years ago the most prominent SJW focus was feminism, by far. Race got some obligatory mumbling about intersectionality and how white feminists need to listen to the lived experiences of women of color, but then everyone went back to what they really cared about. For that matter the SJW community has been a breeding ground for new identities to champion, like non-binary, demisexuals, otherkin, and plurals, with non-binary being the main one to get traction outside of a handful of sites like Tumblr. The SJW memeplex has relatively little to do with the specifics of the groups it claims to champion, making it quite mutable.

That doesn't make the anti-whiteness any less real, race-based prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine alone killed tens or hundreds of thousands of white people. Even if future SJWs refocus on plurals or something, it is likely that without sufficient pushback captured organizations like the CDC will continue quietly making decisions like that about race. But don't assume they're dependent on any particular identity group or expect them to remain the same while you try to position yourself against them.

I know it's a cliche' talking point that dates back to the Reagan years but that doesn't make it any less true. The Democrats have always been the party of racism in the US.

Hm, the links in the source re supposed race-based prioritization of the vaccine are all from late 2020, which would be the Trump Administration.

Which would be the deep state.

Which, by definition, is not controlled by either party.

  • -10

But it votes Democrat.

No, your enemies are not all on the same page. They do of course have historical myths that they operate from, but there are real divisions between wokes, boomer Democrats, neoliberal NATO hawks, and so on, they are not all part of one overriding imperial monolith that only plucky dissidents like "Greg Hood" dare to fight. Even the wokes do not all have the same orienting historical myth. Some care more about the supposed rise of patriarchy in ancient times, others care more about the start of the transatlantic slave trade in 1619, and so on. I bet that not many black wokes give a shit about WW2. The Jews, understandably, tend to care a lot about WW2. The boomer hippies care about 1950s conformity and the 1960s revolt against it. And so on.

Reading this article, though, gives me more insight into the core neo-Nazi myth:

This is one struggle. We are moving toward becoming one people, if we are not one already. That is the only thing that can justify what has happened over the last century and everything that we are going through now. I am not willing to say that any side won the First or Second World War, or that those wars were anything other than two tragic civil wars where our people butchered each other instead of focusing on the only enemy that ever mattered.

That myth can be stated kind of like this: "World War 2 was a horrible tragedy that happened to us, passive voice, white people were not truly responsible, we were tricked by (((them))). White people are really strong and brilliant but for some reason we keep being brainwashed by the Joooz. If this magic spell of mind control was lifted, that overwhelming fraction of white people who disagree with my politics would wake up as if from a long sleep and would immediately put their shoulder to the task of building EVROPA."

This article is an semi-coherent jumble of truth mixed together with ludicrousness. Take this part for example:

There’s not a country in the West that’s still sovereign. Ethnic identities and even national states have proven no barrier to the imperial creed taking power in every Western nation.

Ok, I think as I read it, you have a point... I wonder what you are going to write next...

The regime that rules from the Potomac uses intersectionality to justify intervention throughout the world

Wait, what? No, they mainly use phrases like "human rights" or "maintaining the rules-based international order" or "defending freedom" to justify intervention throughout the world. Intersectionality is in there somewhere but certainly is not one of the main justifications that they use.

Then there's that good-old standby, the notion of "globalism" as a scary threat:

White identity is the driving force in American politics and the key to American identity. It’s just a question of making it a positive characteristic instead of a negative one. This matters to everyone, American or not, because it’s the power of the Globalist American Empire that upholds the postwar order. If race can break or reverse that order, every nationalist should support it. Every European nationalist, even if he is an ethnonationalist, thus has an interest in white identity.

Ah but my dear Mr. Hood, please allow me to give you an example of a world in which rootless cosmopolitan elites who largely belonged to the same families and hung out in the same social circles indulged in travel and leisure while enjoying the labor of masses of ordinary, locally-rooted, soil-of-the-earth type people who were too poor, weak, and ideologically captured to resist the system.

The world of which I speak is the almost totally white world of 18th and 19th century Europe.

This article rails against one simplistic myth but it itself attempts to reduce the complexities of history and politics into a different simplistic myth.

This article is an semi-coherent jumble of truth mixed together with ludicrousness.

That's basically my take on everything I've read on amren. Extremely well written and inspiring, but the claims and leaps of logic that follow are indeed ludicrous. I understand the allure of the narrative, but trying to map it on to the world as I know it leaves be utterly bewildered.

Putting aside the practicalities of such a plan, how many whites even want one? I suspect the vast majority of whites are in the same category as me: we don't like racism against whites being normalised in the media and in the general culture but we still prefer to live in societies that are classically liberal, with strong rights given to individuals above "collective identities" as the foundation.

It seems to me that most white nationalists simply live in a false, idealised world where all problems would dissipate if there was racial homogeneity. Europe's history prior to WWII was full of internecine warfare and petty tribalism. There is no reason such a "white state" wouldn't eventually fall prey to the same kinds of internal forces even if it became a big success on its own terms (high fertility, strong economy, xenophobic immigration policies).

Ethnogenesis is a constant historical process. "White" identity itself is mostly an answer to racial diversity. In the absence of it, other forms of separatism could well form. What was Southern identity during the 1800s in America? You don't even need a separate language or ethnicity for secessionism! Why do these white nationalists believe that their fantasy state would be any different?

And this all ignores that "white identity" is mostly an overseas Anglosphere thing. In France, Germany or Finland the natives don't perceive themselves as white but rather simply according to ethnicity. So even talking of a broader Western whiteness is a stretch to me.

I think what's really going on here is that the founding Anglos and the later European ethnicities who went to the US, Canada and Australia became victims of their own success in a way. They succeeded far more than anyone could have possibly imagined. They've built the greatest societies on Earth and with English being the lingua franca of ambitious third world elites, it was simply never possible to remain closed. Given that the US can pick the best and the brightest out of 8 billion people, its domestic elites would never choose any other system. They'd be idiots to do so, as being the world's primary human capital magnet accrues compounding advantages over time that are simply irresistible and possibly even insurmountable, as we see now with China's stagnation.

I find these separatist fantasies to be utterly devoid of any contact with reality.

They'd be idiots to do so, as being the world's primary human capital magnet accrues compounding advantages over time that are simply irresistible and possibly even insurmountable, as we see now with China's stagnation.

Whether you consider these advantages at all depends on your metric of success. If you value something else more than material economic gain or technological development, then all the GDP growth in the world is not going to sway you. I wouldn't swap out my family members for people who were smarter and more productive if I were given the choice; for many people the same goes for their countrymen.

I am with you, I fail to understand what white identity even means, what could this group of people possibly have in common culturally.

The reality of the modern world is that it's cut a lot of people adrift from feeling rooted, although with history this was often the case also. Religion, nationality filled the void and created a sense of identity, but they too have fallen away. Modernism together with liberalism created a secular kind of identity that reached its zenith with neoliberalism and the end of history ideas, but that too has fallen by the wayside. We forgot that the conditions of a liberal society are downstream of culture and so fell into the current strand of progressive authoritarianism or neo-Marxism.

The question, if you have not already committed to some ethno-nationalist tribalism, is what next. Here are the parameters as I see it:

We have lost religion but secularism could never take its place so we have religiosity appearing as cult like ideologies.

We have philosophical relativism combined with postmodernism expressed as a superficial liberalism run amok. No, not everyone's thinking is equal - we can privilege good thinking over poor thinking and we desperately need to.

We need to reintroduce economics into discourse so we can agree across racial lines and make race less salient. Aren't a lot of poor whites just victims of changing economics and policy?

We need to stop believing simplistic narratives while at the same time being able to talk freely about things without being projected on for taboo topics. We should be able to critique aspects of different cultures without race necessarily coming into it.

We're actually in an exciting time, on the cusp of changes. It's no surprise religion is being talked about as part of the solution, even as less people profess belief in traditional religions. The secular, materialist, modernist frame has been too flat, it has run its course. This of course doesn't mean we abandon it's best elements and turn ourselves into a postmodern mush, we desperately need a scientific mindset, but it does mean we need to look beyond.

Also, I think there is a growing appreciation for elements of conservatism and self-sovereignty. Culture exists for a reason and we can't just cut it out of whole cloth - there are actually things worth preserving. We need to challenge decadent thinking and reorient to families and child development rather than how to construct a world that entertains rootless adults.

Ethnogenesis is a constant historical process.

We seem to be the only ones who actually appreciate this. You say this as if to mean, since Ethnogenesis is always happening there's no major concern with intelligently directing it, as if Ethnogenesis were just the weather and we have to live with it or something. That couldn't be more wrong, White Identity should be embraced precisely because ethnogenesis is a constant historical process and the outcomes of rejecting the reality of a European racial concept are catastrophic precisely for that reason.

Has a political movement focused on encouraging ethnogenesis ever had a good outcome? I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.

I also mean more than the politics of historical fascism (though those have always had disastrous outcomes). Maybe European nations in the 19th century, in a kind of turning peasants into Frenchmen kind of way? Perhaps, but that was a gradual process taking centuries and itself caused plenty of disasters. Many Eastern European nations would have had a better 20th century if the pursuit of minor identities hadn't torn apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the most common outcome is for ethnogenic movements to just fizzle out: see pan-Slavism.

I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.

This supposes that the development of ethnic identities in the first place was an organic process, when in most cases it was a top-down government policy that forcibly assimilated minority groups through a combination of public schooling, historical revisionism, and state propaganda. Forming separate national identities is not the inevitable result of linguistic, religious, or cultural differences, otherwise the Middle East, China, and India would have ended up looking exactly like Europe. The relative youth of these identities is why there aren't many examples of shoring them up yet.

As to whether ethnogenesis has had good outcomes in the past, the question is good for whom? I would say the Turks have done well for themselves, successfully transitioning from being the head of a pan-Islamic empire into a nation-state with a strong identity and relatively good economic development relative to its neighbors, but that success came at the cost of millions of dead Armenians and Greeks. If places like India and Nigeria succeed in melding their disparate inhabitants into united ethnicities, that would in the long run eliminate most of the sectarian tensions that hold countries like them back, but would in the short run actively inflame them.

I find myself sort of leaning in a separatist direction less out of solidarity, and more out of self defense. And I’m pretty sure I’m not exactly alone here. It’s not about animosity, or superiority, it’s just simply that I feel more often than not, things I hold important are being torn up, people very much like me are being held out of good opportunities they’ve earned because the Imperium has decided that people like me and mine need not apply. I’m not asking for anything else, just leave us alone.

As to what the elites want, sure for a time that’s a good thing. But there are problems. First, as other nations catch up, both economically and educationally, that pool of highly competitive desirable immigrants will dry up. Once that happens, the fact that we’ve mostly cannibalized out education system and have been giving scholarships to barely literate humanities majors might well start to matter. Second, those we import are not culturally like us. Who is a Chinese immigrant most loyal to? Or an Indian? Or whoever? Their culture is from their homeland, their desires are about their own country, family, their values and so on.

...people very much like me are being held out of good opportunities they’ve earned because the Imperium has decided that people like me and mine need not apply. I’m not asking for anything else, just leave us alone.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? I'm a white guy from a rural background, went to non-elite state universities, and simply have not experienced a sense that I'm missing out on good opportunities. I'm aware that there is statistical discrimination, but the opportunities for capable people in the United States are so many that this just hasn't been a meaningful problem.

The creation myth that grew out of World War II is the foundation of our entire civilization. It is the basis of our state boundaries. It defines ultimate good and ultimate evil. It tells us what is sacred.

"Guys, I swear, the first 200 years of liberalism had nothing to do with the West's current predicament. The cultural change that followed 1965 emerged completely inorganically out of the juice's takeover of western civilization (which must have happened very quickly in like what, 20 years?), classical liberals are completely absolved, the founding fathers are completely absolved, the Scottish and French enlightenments are completely absolved, Hegel is completely absolved. Everything bad that has happened to Western civilization is solely down to who won WW2, please disregard anything that happened previously unless it backs up this point."

This is why the MacDonald school can never adequately explain modern Western civilization. You can't disregard liberalism, you can't disregard the French and American revolutions. You can't disregard laicite, disregard republicanism, disregard individualism, disregard the concept of personal liberty and the rejection of primal or atavistic identity as central to Anglo civilization. That Jews and other non-whites had some impact on the development of these memes and their ultimate and eventual transmission is truth. That they invented them is not. Western civilization before 1939 was not progressing in a 'trad' direction. Even the Nazis would - in many facets of domestic policy - have been regarded as absurdly progressive to a European in 1870. The NSDAP was not radically socially conservative in its treatment of gender or sex. German women's enrollment in medical schools, for example, fell from 20% to 17% during Nazi rule, hardly a substantial decline. (Fun fact: this is vastly higher than the proportion of women at American medical schools at the same time.)

The problem for the counter currents crowd (and the wider 'classical' alt-right affiliated with eg. nazi apologism and revionism) is that they are so blinded by their hatred of Jews that they refuse to consider that progressivism/liberalism was not a particularly Jewish invention, and they are so blinded by their obsession with Hitler and his defeat that they refuse to consider that many of the things they hate about modernity actually have their roots much further back in the writings of gentile white philosophers, thinkers, politicians and so on. The enemies must be internal, whites (as this very article implies) are at worst misguided idiots or taken advantage of.

"No more brother wars" goes the far-right chant. Yet there were 2000 years of "brother wars" before the one that they allege the Jews started. The European Parliament is a cesspit of achieving nothing, yet everyone in it is white (actually, apparently 24 out of 705 MEPs are "people of color"), there has never been a non-white European Commissioner etc. Belgium remains as divided as a country as it was when it was near enough 100% white. The East Slavs are tearing each other apart. Getting out of this quagmire requires some humility, and not of the pathetic "how could we let ourselves get tricked like this?" sort, but of the genuine "we made and believed some poor ideas" variety, one that takes some responsibility for the past without blaming the eternal outsider, and which can articulate a positive rather than a vengeful vision of the future.

As for a homeland, the last places likely to be supermajority white are a few poor countries in Eastern Europe with poor economic prospects (Ukraine is a big one), Denmark and possibly Finland, Iceland (which receives a lot of immigration, but largely from Poland and Romania) and - in an amusing bit of irony - Argentina (and Uruguay). I would recommend the avowed identitarian considers acquiring EU citizenship by whatever means necessary (not hard even for the unskilled white American as long as you aim for a lower-tier Euro country, although Germany is pretty generous as it is) and then moving to Denmark, learning the language, and trying one's hardest to assimilate into their society. Copenhagen is actually very nice, I'd stay if I was a Dane.

I don’t think those claims are well founded.

No, I’m a Jewish technocrat / Lee Kuan Yew fan who believes the state has a duty to support prosocial memes and avoid or limit harmful outcomes.

Are you… sure you’re responding to the right comment? I don’t think you are understanding @2rafa’s point. If you truly want the “best and the brightest” then you can’t handwave away so much history of gentile whites.

As discussed in the comment you’re replying too, all the feminism and SJW identities etc that you’re so upset by were created by white people. This is a civil war within white culture, not a war of trad white men against all comers. Until that truth is acknowledged and dealt with skillfully truly smart and learned people will never join this movement.

Yeah. Scott Alexander's post about the four American tribes is pretty insightful here. The Borderer-Cavalier coalition fighting against a Puritan-Quaker coalition. Quakers seem very much like the OG hippies...

No, I meant to reply to cake's OP comment.

Oh, awkward.

These complaints are reasonable against, for example, Greg Johnson, but they are very odd complaints to make about Gregory Hood, because he is a very vocal critic of liberalism and of Enlightenment philosophy, and has written and spoken quite a bit about those very topics. He is not particularly hawkish on Jewish issues; like any white identitarian, he is aware of and recognizes the significance of Jewish influence on the political developments of the 20th century, but he does explicitly place most of the blame on philosophical movements that are pretty much 100% Anglo-European in origin. A perusal of his Twitter account @VDareJamesK will reveal his monarchist and Traditionalist sympathies and his disregard for liberal-democratic ideas.

I don’t expect people who are not personally interested/invested in white identitarian ideas to keep track of the specific positions of various figures within the movement - especially when so many of them happened to be named variations of Greg! - but I think it’s very important not to casually accuse writers of rank hypocrisy without bothering to check if the guy you’re talking about actually holds the positions you’re imputing to him.

I confused my Gregs. I'm usually good about this kind of thing, so I do apologize.

Not really, I don’t think it’s a smart path for the American right.

As for a homeland, the last places likely to be supermajority white are a few poor countries in Eastern Europe with poor economic prospects (Ukraine is a big one), Denmark and possibly Finland, Iceland (which receives a lot of immigration, but largely from Poland and Romania) and - in an amusing bit of irony - Argentina (and Uruguay). I would recommend the avowed identitarian considers acquiring EU citizenship by whatever means necessary (not hard even for the unskilled white American as long as you aim for a lower-tier Euro country, although Germany is pretty generous as it is) and then moving to Denmark, learning the language, and trying one's hardest to assimilate into their society. Copenhagen is actually very nice, I'd stay if I was a Dane.

The fact that this is your best suggestion for a "positive vision" for someone who has sympathies for the concept for a White homeland shows you have no better alternative to what they are proposing. "Retreat to the last bastion until it, too, is lost" is you just saying "accept losing while you retreat as much as you can." You aren't proposing a "positive vision of the future", whereas Hood's proposal of a White homeland is just that.

I think the most positive vision of the future is to elect a competent Republican like DeSantis, build 'the wall' and develop a more competent deportation apparatus shrouded in completely un-inflammatory language (like mandating a beefed-up e-verify nationwide), restricting family-based immigration, ending the H1B visa program (leaving only the O-1 exceptional skills category), ending all rights for overseas students to remain in the US for any period after graduation and restricting family-based chain migration further by implementing a lifetime cap on the number of family members one is allowed to bring over (2 or 3). All this could be accomplished in a GOP trifecta. Then transition the right's public rhetoric into a strongly protectionist, pro-labor movement with some elite tech support (without alienating the evangelicals or small business owners) and become a hardline law-and-order party. Double prison capacity, increase sentencing lengths, 90s-tough-on-crime policy on steroids, with huge federal funding for additional police. Condition federal funding for states on not running afoul of 'civil rights' law, which will be interpreted as any policy designed to specifically support any member of a group in a protected category in any way, either directly or by proxy. Restore discipline in schools by encouraging corporal punishment in problem districts, stick the IRS on every progressive billionaire and progressive corporation, cut a deal with more apolitical tech executives (like Zuck and Musk) to surreptitiously promote 'pro-social' (ie right wing) memes on their networks. Then govern as an American caudillo (and successors) with 70% of the white vote and 40% of the hispanic vote forever.

ie. Steve Bannon's plan, which was realistic and workable for an intelligent leader of a competent American conservative movement.

Unfortunately, American conservatives are largely retarded and so will hand Donald the primary victory over DeSantis, ensuring that even in the unlikely event that Trump wins again, none of the above will ever happen.

Immigration restriction seems to be a big part of your vision, but you are still hostile to the concept of White identity? You don't want White people to internalize any sort of ethnic identity, but you want major policy changes on Immigration. You can't have one without the other.

What about for Europe? What if restricting MENA immigration to Europe were only possible, in earnest, with the creation of a pan-European, white racial identity? Would you support it if that were the case? Or is your "ideal" also, somehow and someway, Europe does a 180 and starts seriously restricting immigration for reasons unrelated to the aspirations of white nationalists and impulse of ethnic identity?

It just seems weird that immigration reform seems so important to your ideal, but then you counter-signal the most important impulse that would bring about serious immigration reform.

The USA doesn’t actually have to do anything else to be majority white in 2100. Literally just stop immigration from Africa and Central America. White identity rhetoric is probably the sort of thing that you don’t want associated with a movement to shut the border down and stop accepting African immigrants- Greg Abbott manages to make his policy of turning back migrants at the border palatable in a state much redder than the nation as a whole by not carrying on about white identity.

Literally just stop immigration from Africa and Central America

Africa, you say? Not China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam or Korea, each of whom send far more immigrants than does Africa

From a long term demographics perspective, migrants with a fertility rate hovering around 1 who interbreed with whites to an extent that their children are considered white in two generations simply don’t matter very much. And obviously a lot of the pathways to reduce African migration also reduce Asian migration, as well.

This Pew report says that the rates of intermarriage among Asian and Hispanic newlyweds is about the same.

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Immigration restriction seems to be a big part of your vision, but you are still hostile to the concept of White identity? You don't want White people to internalize any sort of ethnic identity, but you want major policy changes on Immigration. You can't have one without the other.

Not who you're replying to, but I also oppose illegal/uncontrolled immigration, and my reasons for doing so are irrespective of race. Illegal immigration creates a ghettoized immigrant community that is less likely to assimilate into a national culture, and an "open border" creates many logistical issues not the least of which is that it essentially nullifies a nation's ability to rule itself. The kind of Constitutional/quasi-libertarian project that I would most like to see is only feasible within firmly set and well-policed borders. Whether those borders are keeping out brown or white people makes no difference to me.

I think a lot of Europeans (including white Americans) think direct racial preference in that way is vulgar. They have friends and coworkers, in some cases family members of different ethnicities (much moreso than the average German in 1933 would have had Jewish friends or coworkers), they see them as part of their community, they find the race-baiting and outright extreme rhetoric of the dissident right unpalatable - even smarter people on the dissident right will often tweet or comment extreme racism, including epithets, just for the hell of it.

They aren't strongly attracted to the trad hausfrau / bruderschaft aesthetic which the wider trad right struggles to disengage from. Its spiritual core is muddled and incoherent. They just want to live in a functioning country with a sense of purpose. You would argue they could have this if only they agreed with you, but they want it without agreeing with you. They don't want to listen to a racial lecture about how the friendly black mechanic who services their car is a brute, stupid, lesser, etc. You will say that one could articulate a positive vision of identitarian nationalism without hatred of other people(s), but in practice we can see on the dissident right that even the 'intellectuals' who hold themselves back most of the time can't actually resist outright vulgar, generic hatred of the "those fucking animals" variety in many cases.

This feels especially unfair when most of the victims of wignat policies would be either the descendants of slaves trafficked against their will to the Americas, or descendants of immigrants who complied with the policies established by America's democratically elected rulers at the time of their immigrating. I would feel for the former because their people would suffer twice for the same (white) action, and I would feel for the latter the same way I sympathize with the Indians forced out of Uganda by Idi Amin. Say your father adopts a child and then dies some time later, but before they come of age. Do you not have obligations to him as a sibling, even if you disagree with your father's action? I would say that you do.

What about for Europe? What if restricting MENA immigration to Europe were only possible, in earnest, with the creation of a pan-European, white racial identity?

It's possible, although I don't think this is the main impediment to reducing illegal MEA migration to Europe, which could be best supported by just copying Australia circa 2015 and establishing offshore deportation centers. The main problem in European politics is apathy (an issue that extends far beyond immigration), and I doubt Meloni standing up and saying that 'Europe should remain native' would change that. Still, I recognize that it isn't my place to disagree, and so I don't have a problem with it as long as it isn't explicitly antisemitic (not that I would be able to do anything if it was).

I think a lot of Europeans (including white Americans) think direct racial preference in that way is vulgar.

Nope, they only think it's vulgar for themselves, they accept that same behavior as entirely normal for everybody else, including Jews it must be noted. You seem to think that this is just the way Europeans are, but you ignore the fact that it was less than 100 years ago that European and American beliefs around racial preferences are the complete opposite of what they are today.

You seem to dismiss the obvious, that this continental shift in Race Consciousness so happened to coincide with the aftermath of WW-II and its narratives that permeated the culture of Europe and America alike, but you cannot say that it is just in the nature of Europeans to have no ingroup preference, that sentiment is clearly downstream from the culture that informs our perception of reality.

Most importantly, you seem to acknowledge the importance of managing demographics with what would be considered white nationalist-tier immigration reform, but you somehow think this can be accomplished without European people having any sort of in-group preference, despite all evidence to the contrary.

You will say that one could articulate a positive vision of identitarian nationalism without hatred of other people(s), but in practice we can see on the dissident right that even the 'intellectuals' who hold themselves back most of the time can't actually resist outright vulgar, generic hatred of the "those fucking animals" variety in many cases.

I suppose Zionists never disparage non-Jews, right? You might say "I denounce that behavior from Zionists" but would you present that behavior as an argument for why Jewish people shouldn't identify as Jewish?

The main problem in European politics is apathy

Given a lack of in-group ethnic preference, why shouldn't they be apathetic to mass MEA replacement? Because muh economy? Dey took 'er jerbs? That doesn't work, we already know it doesn't given the experience of the United States.

Nope, they only think it's vulgar for themselves, they accept that same behavior as entirely normal for everybody else, including Jews it must be noted. You seem to think that this is just the way Europeans are, but you ignore the fact that it was less than 100 years ago that European and American beliefs around racial preferences are the complete opposite of what they are today.

They weren't "the opposite", ethnic tolerance developed over time. People will say on one hand that the late 19th century was more racist than the early 19th century, but in general European societies became more tolerant from 1789 with allowances for the occasional blip. The emancipation of Catholics in the protestant countries, the slow emancipation of the Jews in the Napoleonic world and then England and then Russia (and so on) etc etc. It didn't just start in 1945.

Given a lack of in-group ethnic preference, why shouldn't they be apathetic to mass MEA replacement?

It seems to me that they're apathetic about almost anything. See the discussion below and last week about European economic stagnation vs America.

I suppose Zionists never disparage non-Jews, right? You might say "I denounce that behavior from Zionists" but would you present that behavior as an argument for why Jewish people shouldn't identify as Jewish?

I identify as Jewish only in as much as people like you would call me out for it if I identified as 'white'. In real life I almost never discuss Jewishness and what Jewish identity I have is (as I have said before) mainly the result of being exposed to large amounts of white nationalist antisemitism on the internet, much like a lot of white ethnats are such because of various /pol/ collages designed to spread those politics.

Of course I condemn hardcore religious nutters in Jerusalem, which is mostly a shithole. Israel is doomed in part because my co-ethnics refuse to bite the bullet and forcibly assimilate the chareidim at gunpoint; they stick their fingers in their ears (usually well away from Jerusalem or the West Bank) and pretend the problem will go away some day. My fate under ultra-orthodox rule would probably be little better than my fate under the rule of Kevin MacDonald, so I hope for neither.

Israel is doomed in part because my co-ethnics refuse to bite the bullet and forcibly assimilate the chareidim at gunpoint

Do they even need to forcibly assimilate them as opposed to just telling them they’ll starve if they don’t get real jobs? It seems to me that the charedi refusal to engage in normal economic activity to support themselves like everyone else is the crux of Israel’s demographic problem, even as they likely would not make good rulers, and that their gender segregation and 17th century clothing are minor issues that a functional society doesn’t have to care much about.

They weren't "the opposite", ethnic tolerance developed over time.

"Developed over time" is doing a lot of work here, and ignoring the actual cultural and intellectual movements that were most closely associated with those developments, which was the subject of Kevin MacDonald's study. Kevin MacDonald doesn't even present concrete political solutions in his work, his work is dedicated to tracing the influences of movements which were most closely associated with what you call "ethnic tolerance" in the 20th century.

I remember seeing a polll indicating that American troops in WW-II preferred losing the war to ending segregation, it is the complete opposite of centuries of perception surrounding race.

Of course I condemn hardcore religious nutters in Jerusalem

I'm not asking if you condemn it, I am asking if you believe this behavior means Jews should not claim an ethnic identity. With respect to white people, are basically saying that since some white identitarians say mean things about blacks, nobody should have regard for a white ethnic identity. This was also an Israeli guard by the way, so basically police, not just a random hardcore religious nutter making a scene.

In real life I almost never discuss Jewishness and what Jewish identity I have is (as I have said before) mainly the result of being exposed to large amounts of white nationalist antisemitism on the internet

Is affirmation of your Jewish identity in every single high-status institution and culture in the West really not enough? An extremely small number of people sharing memes is enough to influence you in that way? I believe you, by the way, but you undermine your argument by admitting that some internet memes from a relatively small number of low-status people are sufficient to alter your presentation of your own ethnic identity. Then, you should also acknowledge that the European racial self-perception is also influenced by high-status institutions, not merely a small number of internet memes in a couple dark places on the internet.

You talk about how apathetic and demoralized Europeans are, yes, when they should in fact be highly energized if they had a healthy, racial self-regard that you do not want them to have, even while simultaneously admitting the importance of the demographic question.

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The NSDAP was not radically socially conservative in its treatment of gender or sex.

Here is a link https://counter-currents.com/2014/06/heimat/ that discusses Hermann Sudermann's play Madga, and the film made from it. The author claims that the popularity of the film clues us in to what the National Socialist ideology really thought about sexual morality. The article goes into great detail in describing the film. The film is anti-bourgeois propaganda that paints the sexual morality of the time, (play:1893, film:1938) as both rigid and hypocritical; the hero of the piece is the single mother! So the NSDAP is very much not socially conservative.

The author of the 2014 Counter Currents article, Derek Hawthorne, wrote a long and nuanced piece, digging into the weirdness of German culture back then. It is a long time since I read it, and I haven't time to reread it properly to tonight, but it made a big impression on me. The hot take that has stuck with me for nine years goes like this:

There are two sisters. One well behaved sister who conforms. The other sister has a wild side and ends up a single mother. Due to the messed up social conventions of the day, the mediocre, well behaved sister needs her father or other relative to come up with a lot of money for a dowry. Due to the power of the playwrights pen, becoming a single mother make you special and turns you into an opera diva who earns a lot of money and is able to swoop in and save the day by paying her sisters dowry.

A social realist play written for 1893 would have things work out OK/mediocre for the conformist sister and a bit of a disaster for the wild sister because of the social reaction against her getting pregnant outside of marriage. If the playwright wanted to argue for social change, the argument would be the cruelty of the system towards the wild sister. Sudermann's play cheer leads for sexual liberation with a crude propaganda technique: make things work out extra well for the single mother, just because playwrights are writing fiction and can do that. The excellent outcome tends to legitimize single motherhood in the eyes of audience. But it makes no causal connection; it is just crude propaganda.

Back when I first read the article in Counter Currents I still thought that right wing was a single thing, with a core creed. And before the 1960's that creed would obviously include no sex before marriage. Strong families, children need fathers, each child needs their own biological father, not mummies current boyfriend. The social conservative thing. So I'm reading on with wide-eyed astonishment. When do the NAZI's realize that the play is degenerate art? When do we get the theatrical equivalent of the Röhm-Putsch and the banning of Sudermann's Madga? Never happens.

I already knew that the NSDAP was a little bit pagan in spirit. You can see that in the pictures from the time of women athletes in their skimpy attire. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=third+reich+women+athletes&qpvt=third+reich+women+athletes&form=IGRE&first=1

I'm trying to update my views. Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence? Mostly I've stopped believing that "right wing" is an actual thing.

Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence?

An interesting note on this point: later Hitler claimed he regretted helping Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and even said they should have helped the 'reds' instead, because they had idealism and vitality and could have made good National Socialists, while Franco and his crew were just a bunch of ossified reactionaries who would never amount to anything. He even excused the leftist attacks on the clergy and church-burnings in Republican Spain as understandable considering how the church had "oppressed the people" for centuries.

I’ve heard this before but is there any good writing on it?

Like most writing on Hitler and the NSDAP it seems to take out of context verbal derision as important opinion and a leading guide for the inner workings of both Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, when in reality it was probably just 'Franco wont help in the war effort, what a prick.'

Yes it was probably Hitler just blowing off of steam, but his disdain for "reactionaries" was very real.

The answer to your question is they don't because contra the last 80 years or so of concerted effort to paper-over history the Nazi's were never particularly right wing. The National Socialist German Workers' Party was always Socialists at its heart. Nor is it a coincidence that when you get progressives to actually describe their Ideal form of government what they come up with is a an explicitly secular and technocratic regime where in the state is all things to all people, IE inter-war period Fascism. I don't think the Wilsonites (as in Woodrow) ever really truly stopped believing in socialism, eugenics, technocracy, or building a "new world order". The Horrors and excesses of World War II just made it a losing proposition to advocate these things publicly. As World War II and what the Nazis were actually about passes from living memory into myth and legend, it is only natural for their stupidity and evil to return. As the old poem goes...

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire

I'm trying to update my views. Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence? Mostly I've stopped believing that "right wing" is an actual thing.

It's split about 50/50 between the two, with Nick Fuentes and his movement representing the Catholic interpretation and the pagan interpretation not really having any movement of similar influence but a lot of individuals who are hostile to Christianity.

I think there's a lot of stupid stuff happening in this article, but this may be the most egregious:

Whites of all economic classes are being displaced or prevented from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Smart, ambitious, young whites are the ones who are hit hardest, and that’s traditionally who you want as a revolutionary class.

I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that smart, ambitious young people of any color face any truly objectionable obstacles to living a life of choice and value. This is probably one of my biggest annoyances with grievance culture and identitarianism generally: it is a philosophy of total Nietzschean ressentiment, a gospel of pure unanchored envy. "I want more, I deserve more" is a whinge that is just totally hollow coming out of the mouth of anyone with an IQ over, say, 95. There are ample opportunities to be pursued; people just don't want to bear the associated costs. They want things handed to them. Put every single white person into North America and Europe, expel everyone darker than Sardinian fisherman, and I would expect everyone to quickly settle to within a stone's throw of the socioeconomic strata they occupied previously. Nobody is keeping you down, but you.

And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist. There are many interesting arguments for separatism. But right here in the United States people are already free to enjoy some amount of separatism, if they care enough to look for it. There are black majority colleges, Asian majority cities, whole damn swathes of desert owned by pseudo-sovereign American Indian tribes--what's to be gained from cutting ties with them any further? Wealthy, predominantly white suburbs with good schools and attractive amenities are a real thing, and if you're a white person who can't afford to move to them, that's because you haven't earned a place there, just like the non-whites who complain about the existence of wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn't that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists (though it is almost certainly true that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists), the problem is that people can't accept that their problems are almost never the result of systemic anything, and almost always the result of their own internal inclinations and capacities.

I have big, big complaints about the ways we deal with race in the United States, but I do my best to make those complaints from a place of principle--and the principle that governs much of my thinking is that attaching your self-conception or your politics to a group identity instead of to individual merit is stupid. My political enemies are wrong because they think that Blackness and Queerness and Whiteness are important. White identitarians are the poster children of "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." They embody everything they think they can destroy. They are often the enemies of my enemies, but the fact that I regard leftist identitarians as a depressing blend of idiocy and mendacity does not make me willing to abandon my principles to join hands with white identitarians. Theirs are not arguments I'm willing to support unconditionally, as soldiers; theirs are arguments I reject for the same reasons I reject leftism.

You can't convince me that white nationalists are right without convincing me that social justice warriors are right, too--and the reverse is also true.

And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist.

If other people are racist against me how does it help me to unilaterally stop being racist against them? We already tried the race blind thing and every group except white people kept relentlessly advocating for their racial interests. South Africa tried the same thing with identical results. No truce is possible because the other side will shoot you in the face the instant you lay down your gun.

If other people are racist against me how does it help me to unilaterally stop being racist against them?

Being racist mostly imposes costs on you. Not being racist is better for you. If other people are racist against you, they are assuming costs they need not pay. (This is a standard argument re: the fictitious "women's pay gap." If women actually accepted less money to do the same work, then non-sexist companies would out-compete by hiring less-expensive female employees instead of more-expensive male employees. The same is true of racism; if you're a racist company, you're leaving money on the table.)

We already tried the race blind thing and every group except white people kept relentlessly advocating for their racial interests.

We still mostly do the race blind thing. It mostly works fine. The people relentless advocating for their racial interests (whether they are white, black, or otherwise) need to be told, as clearly and repeatedly as possible, that they are wrong.

South Africa tried the same thing with identical results.

No, South Africa is a disaster today because black identitarianism was allowed to overwhelm a liberal status quo that was actually working to everyone's benefit, for a little while.

No truce is possible because the other side will shoot you in the face the instant you lay down your gun.

I'm not saying we should surrender to the identitarians on the left. Of course not! I am very critical of leftist identitarians. But in this thread I am saying that surrendering to the identitarians on the right is in the end the same basic mistake.

The liberal non-racism you desire is not a stable equilibrium. The only chance you have of reaching it is for the various identitarians to reach it as a truce -- and it must be an armed truce, because as has been demonstrated, as soon as one group starts taking liberal non-racism for granted, another set of identitarians overwhelms it.

Being racist mostly imposes costs on you. Not being racist is better for you. If other people are racist against you, they are assuming costs they need not pay.

I don't think that's true (assuming we're talking about a net cost). When racists in the US government diverted vaccines away from white people to black people did that hurt black people? I think it helped them. When Harvard gives black people an advantage in admissions does that hurt or help them?

If I own a store and exclude people of race X because I think they shoplift a lot and are a net drain on the business then that is racist and illegal whether or not I'm correct about how often race X shoplifts. Shoplifting rates by race are a factual question and I may or may not be losing money based on the numbers, but the numbers are irrelevant to whether I'm being racist.

To use your example, if I own a business and I think women are worse workers and hire them with a lower starting salary then I'm being sexist. I may or may not also be economically rational based on the facts but that's a separate question. If my workers are doing hard manual labor all day then I'm probably being economically rational because women are worse at that type of work on average. If my workers are caring for young children then I'm probably factually incorrect and I'm leaving money on the table. But either way I'm a sexist.

Or another example, if I know race X commits crime at a high rate and I find myself walking around an unfamiliar city at night in an area with a lot of X, what should I do? Leaving the area is racist because I'm making assumptions about people based on the color of their skin. But instead of imposing a cost on me it may very well save my life or at least my wallet.

No, South Africa is a disaster today because black identitarianism was allowed to overwhelm a liberal status quo that was actually working to everyone's benefit, for a little while.

Identitarianism is always going to win in a democracy because embracing identitarianism gives you a bloc of perfectly loyal voters. It's not a coincidence that the liberal status quo always gives way to racial strife in diverse societies. You can have a dictator keep the peace by force or you can have a dominant ethnicity holding the reins or you can do the Jordanian thing where you explicitly divide up power ahead of time but you can't have race blindness because sooner or later one political party is going to learn that they can win by abandoning it.

When racists in the US government diverted vaccines away from white people to black people did that hurt black people? I think it helped them.

Sure. So we should complain about racism, not divert vaccines away from black people instead.

When Harvard gives black people an advantage in admissions does that hurt or help them?

To hear Clarence Thomas tell, it hurts them. But perhaps more importantly, trying to judge "hurt" and "help" in terms of who gets to be a Supreme Court justice or Yale law professor, and who is instead relegated to graduating from a top-10 law school and making millions of dollars as a partner at a top law firm (but who doesn't get to tell her friends she went to Harvard) seems like piss-poor reckoning. It's not as though the Asians "harmed" by Harvard's racism (whites actually appear to benefit very slightly, or at least not be harmed, by Harvard's preferences) are facing a choice between Harvard and never going to college. The real harm is so slight as to be essentially invisible, except for the part where we decide to reject racism on principle instead of on the basis of who gets to have the most desirable status signals. Rejecting racism on principle is good.

If I own a store and exclude people of race X because I think they shoplift a lot and are a net drain on the business then that is racist

It's not racist to see facts. If there is an ethnic propensity for antisocial behavior, there's nothing wrong with taking reasonable action as a result.

...and illegal

Right, you can't just say "because black people are more likely to shoplift, all black people are excluded." Instead you should say "we need to construct a law enforcement system which makes it easier to detain and punish shoplifters." There's nothing racist about that. Oh, sure, an identitarian will say there's something racist about that when it turns out that a bunch of mostly non-white kids are the ones who end up actually doing time, but I am not an identitarian, I'm the one arguing against identitarianism.

To use your example, if I own a business and I think women are worse workers and hire them with a lower starting salary then I'm being sexist.

No, that's wrong! This is exactly my point. To call that sexist is the problem with identitarianism! Pay people whatever you want! As a job creator you don't owe it to anyone to pay a penny more than they are worth! And if they are worth more than that, someone else will pay them more. But if you're sexist, you're at a disadvantage versus others who are gauging merit instead. There are of course inefficiencies in the market, this won't work perfectly, but your responses to me are completely mis-targeted because I'm the one arguing against identitarianism! You're criticizing certain bad social practices and telling me "to combat racism and sexism I have to be racist and sexist" but all you've done is accepted the wrong definitions of racism and sexism. Once you do that, it's just "ingroup versus outgroup" all the way down, you lose the ability to complain persuasively about racial and sexual preferences because you've shown that you want racial and sexual preferences for yourself. A black-hating racist and a white-hating racist are just engaged in a game of power, there's no principle to appeal to, just pure in-group preference. But very often it is cooperation, not competition, that we need to coordinate if we're going to get stag.

Or another example, if I know race X commits crime at a high rate and I find myself walking around an unfamiliar city at night in an area with a lot of X, what should I do? Leaving the area is racist

I cannot emphasize this enough: you are just buying the wrong definition of racist here. If you disagree with left-identitarians, why would you let them define your key terms? This is what makes me crazy about the alt-right: they allow their enemies to set the poles of the debate--and that means they are destined to lose. They have lost the game before they have even begun to fight.

Identitarianism is always going to win in a democracy because embracing identitarianism gives you a bloc of perfectly loyal voters.

I agree that democracy is mostly bad and even the small protections of minority rights built into the U.S. system (Supreme Court, Bill of Rights, the original selection method for senators, the Great Compromise, the electoral college) have been much eroded by identitarianism. Proposing to fight fire with fire, however, too often just ends up getting you burned.

...you can't have race blindness because sooner or later one political party is going to learn that they can win by abandoning it.

This is a different problem, though. You're no longer arguing for "the good kind of racism," now you're arguing against the practice of democracy. Because if political parties can't divide people along racial lines, they will just divide people along some other lines. The blues and the greens of the Roman chariot races are the canonical example, I think.

The United States began as an uneasy alliance between a bunch of "white" abolitionists and a bunch of "white" slavers. Later came Germans (now "white"), Irishmen (now "white"), Chinese immigrants (now "white adjacent" for purposes of college admissions), Hispanics (usually "white" within two or three generations)... Native Americans who don't maintain sufficient blood or cultural purity become "white," many blacks "pass" as "white," the way these lines get drawn is political.

And sure, you can say "I would like these lines to be drawn to my benefit," but then you're just doing the same stupid thing the people you're complaining about (indirectly, in your selection of examples) are doing, in reverse. And intelligence is not reversed stupidity.

I agree to an extent. The sort of woe is me type ingroup expression is distasteful. But on the other hand there is another angle to that line of argument.

To keep things simple, as an example, be young and try buying a house. Depending on where you live your quality of life is lower than your parents since the price of housing has so dramatically increased. Depending on where you are in the world, to the extent that the price of housing has increased as a result of increased demand, it is in many places primarily an increase due to immigration.

Now what if I allow myself to imagine what my life could have been like if the price of housing had been lower. What would the job market look like if it was not driven on the expectation that an endless stream of foreigners would be there to pick up the slack? Isn't it possible that the life of the average whitey could be better? Not in a comparison to other whites. But just as a general thing. More purchasing power, cleaner streets, less crime. There would still be class stratification, but so what?

In other words, it's not about what you could have in multiracial America, it's about what you could have in monoracial America. It's not about what you could have compared to the Joneses next door, it's what you could have compared to your mirror image in a different America. Because you can have good things in both Americas. But one of them has some very obvious downsides the other one does not have.

To that extent I don't see ethno-national aspirations of a life free of the White Mans Burden to be a whine any more than the aspirations of foreigners who want to live in white countries to be a whine. Those foreigners imagine a better life in the White Mans Backpack. I've never encountered any righteous indignation directed at them, telling them to stop being so envious. "I want more. I deserve more!" Why can't they just accept their lot? Why aspire for an environment where you are more likely to flourish?

And likewise, I agree to an extent. But I feel like the examples you give, and the more complicated ones you didn't give, fall into "just so" stories, narrow selections of what-might-have-been.

For example: by young and try buying a house. "Depending on where you live" is doing a lot of work in your example of price and other pressures. Houses today are bigger and in other ways far more luxurious than they were 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. Anti-growth environmentalism and government overregulation (including various government subsidies for, especially, first-time home buyers) have far more to do with anyone's housing woes, than immigration. And even so, "Generation Z" is actually tracking as more likely to own a home than their parents were at their age.

Are the streets meaner, crime higher? Well, "depending on where you live," no, for example violent crime has gotten a little worse since the Great Awokening (thanks, Obama!) but is still way down from its peak some 30 years ago. Immigration has probably suppressed some wages, but in the United States the people who seem to be most economically harmed by Hispanic immigration are black Americans who are the next most likely demographic to pick up the manual labor. Oh, sure, maybe some white kid has a harder time getting a good wage at a coding job because the government is handing out H1B visas like Halloween candy, but people have been predicting the total implosion of computer science as a viable career choice for at least two decades that I know of; still doesn't appear to be happening and young white kids with CS degrees are still making a lot more money fresh out of school than, say, me as an educator. There are no solutions--only tradeoffs!

In other words, it's not about what you could have in multiracial America, it's about what you could have in monoracial America.

But what do you lose in a monoracial America? What do other people lose? The identitarian position for white nationalists and black separatists and those who make "stolen land acknowledgments" is always the same: "my people would be better off if everyone else would just submit to our demands!" Well, maybe that's true, but history tells a very different story: trade and liberty (in particular, of movement and commerce) leads to widespread increases in quality of life, in ways that nothing else ever has in all of history. If it is true that white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to non-white people, and non-white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to white people, and both groups set about denying liberty to the other--then the practical result is that neither group is going to be better off in the end, they're just going to constantly be fighting about which group gets to be on top. Better to find intelligent ways to cooperate, than to compete in a zero-sum game (that might not even pan out empirically in the end). Especially since white people are a small and shrinking global minority.

Of course, there is a global ethnic minority that did attempt to build itself an ethnonationalist homeland, and I don't know what history has in store for Israel but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not "peace in our time." Likewise, casino operation has changed this in some places to some degree, but ethnically pure Indian Reservations are in general riddled with poverty and cultural malaise. Even Japan, arguably a shining beacon of ethnonationalism and certainly an economic powerhouse, is struggling with demographics and economics in ways that are changing their historically xenophobic culture rapidly. There just aren't any positive examples of "purge the undesirables" I can find anywhere in history; the most successful one that comes to mind is the ethnic divorce of Greece and Turkey in the 20th century, and neither of those countries are today places ripe with golden opportunity.

Because you can have good things in both Americas. But one of them has some very obvious downsides the other one does not have.

The other one has some very obvious downsides, too.

Those foreigners imagine a better life in the White Mans Backpack. I've never encountered any righteous indignation directed at them, telling them to stop being so envious. "I want more. I deserve more!" Why can't they just accept their lot? Why aspire for an environment where you are more likely to flourish?

Everyone below a certain reasonable threshold should aspire for an environment where they are more likely to flourish. They just shouldn't aspire to get there by hurting other people. And this is where the identitarians always end up, tweeting ("ironically! to start a dialogue!") about ethnic cleansing of one kind or another. It has been tried, it doesn't work.

I said as much to begin with. This is just imagination land and the examples are broad and not universally applicable, but that's not the point. The point is to get to a place where we can imagine and embrace an instance where less brown people is beneficial to white people and see where that leads instead of traversing weeds and red herrings.

Every counter example you gave relies on immigrants existing in the first place. The political landscape without immigrants is not just different, it's more right wing. On top of that, we are not comparing crime rates against time. I think it's a given crime has been trending downwards with time. We are instead comparing crime rates between people. Blacks have a higher crime rate. Hispanics have a higher crime rate. The societies these people come from have higher crime rates.

The point is not to say that living with browns is unmanageable for whites. Sure, you can get a programming job and live well. But would your lot be better if you did not have to outcompete every brown spud looking for a better life in America? If you did not have to bear the burden of a dysfunctional group of browns. Not just you personally, but every aspect of your environment. Are the news channels talking about some politically relevant thing like where best to place the new bridge or are they talking about black kids not knowing how to read after graduating high school? Are we looking to advance education to help our best and brightest or are the best funded schools filled with illiterates?

Sure, you can pick the examples apart, but I'm kind of relying on you not to. Instead hoping you can recognize that in the places where the examples hold up, the idea of white identitarianism isn't any more or less bad than any idea based on self preservation and the pursuit of happiness. And I think we got to that point given your argument shifted away from a basic pursuit of happiness towards a basic pursuit of happiness without doing harm to others.

This new caveat changes things a bit. Since it's kind of de facto true that any action you take can be construed or contextualized to harm others. And since it's obvious that living with white people is much better for browns than living in their own societies, do we just resign ourselves to the fact that brown people living with white people is a sort of axiomatic right of theirs? To that end, who is keeping score of harm? Because my entire argument to begin with was that the harm goes both ways, which is why I think whites have a case to be made from the standpoint of their own best interest, rather than always considering the white mans burden before making up their mind.

Browns don't want for liberty. They want for white mans liberty. No one is keeping them from emancipating themselves in their own countries. They could reach for the stars if it wasn't for the fact they have to live amongst themselves. I don't disagree with the notion that the white man can carry these browns like he has been doing for decades now. The point is what impact this is having on his back. That's harm. And it's harm caused in the white mans homelands, and he has no place to turn to when it gets damaged beyond repair.

(As a sidenote, I'm ignoring the broad geopolitical 'it can't work' arguments. We all know white societies work just fine. Two distinct nations separated by clear and enforced border can still trade. Japan facing a demographically induced economic downturn is a self correcting problem if you don't flood the country with immigrants to prop up an economy that outscales the native population. Conflating political/moral progressivism with technological advancement is not something I agree with. If you can import people you can deport them. If you can prop them up in your own country you can prop them up in theirs until your conscience tells you you've given enough handouts.)

It came to me in a dream.

I don't know what your deal is. You made a decent post on an interesting topic. Was there an ulterior motive? What's the angle here? The accusations that you are doing some sort of White Nationalist operation to secretly 'recruit' or whatever seemed really stupid to me. And they seem even dumber now given how poorly you are going about it if that were the case. You look more like a Rabbi painting a swastika on his own synagogue.

All right buddy, we see what you're doing here and you've already been warned by @naraburns. You apparently think you are a lot more clever than you are.

Here's something you need to understand - putting your profile on private mode does not hide your history from the mods.

Here's another thing you need to understand - we are actually not stupid. We let a lot of stuff slide because we tend to err on the side of letting a bad faith LARper have a long leash, rather than pulling the trigger too quickly on someone who pattern-matches to "troll."

Now, I'll grant that there is a remote possibility that you really are an anti-racist married to a black woman who is innocently JAQing about white nationalism and the JQ out of genuine interest in what other people think.

But I don't think so, and after discussing your case with the other mods, I'm handing you a one-week ban. Come back and do the same thing and we'll just make it permanent. On the remote possibility that you are sincere and not just trying to fuck with us because you think you are a clever, clever lad, start engaging with more than one-liners and randomly asking people about their "white identitarian" sympathies.

Hispanics have a higher crime rate. Do they, after controlling for age (per 2020 census, median age was 30, versus 44 for non-Hispanic whites)?

I remember reading articles on the hispanic crime rate and its convergence with the white crime rate. I'm hesitant to believe those reports given the chronic undercounting of hispanics in crime and incarceration in general. https://apps.urban.org/features/latino-criminal-justice-data/

But besides that, if age is a maximally relevant factor it would only start playing a part if the immigration of young people from South America was at some point halted.

I'm hesitant to believe those reports given the chronic undercounting of hispanics in crime and incarceration in general.

But since your first link is re change over time, that is a valid concern only if the rate of undercounting has increased over time. Do you have any reason to think that is true?

But besides that, if age is a maximally relevant factor it would only start playing a part if the immigration of young people from South America was at some point halted. I am not sure what you mean, but if age is the key factor, then your concern should be about age, not race or ethnicity.

The data in that link is still suffering from undercounting. Point being that fluctuations or a convergence with current data would still not impact the truth value of the statement that hispanics commit more crime than whites.

I am not sure what you mean, but if age is the key factor, then your concern should be about age, not race or ethnicity.

It would be both.

@cake, I have removed this post. (Though something technical is up with thread removal right now, so we'll see if it sticks.)

There is nothing glaringly wrong with this post, except for the way in which it substantially increases my priors that you are engaged in some kind of trolling, baiting, or otherwise dishonest engagement. This is a tough thing to moderate for, because it can be very tricky to know when someone is engaging honestly. But there are ways to weaponize another person's charity, and there are ways to work within the letter of the law to violate the spirit of it. This is why we have the "egregiously obnoxious" rule, and it is a rule that, for example, encompasses single-issue posting.

What you've done here is write a response to another user, that would fit just fine in the thread you already started. But you made it a top-level post, basically the forum equivalent of a "thread bump." Why did you do this? The only reason I can think of, is to get more engagement on the issue. But you already started by copy-pasting a pretty bad essay, then doing just the bare minimum I required of you so you could re-post that essay, and then--even though you generated tons of responses--you barely replied to any of them in any really substantial way. And here you are, instead of replying to other users directly, "bumping" your apparent hobbyhorse.

When someone seems to be doing something sneaky once, we notice! When you do it three times in 24 hours, the fact that you're not overtly breaking specific letter-of-the-law rules is not enough to protect you.

Knock it off.

Can somebody please at least link to the thread where this was supposed to go? This user is banned now (apparently) so I can’t find it in their profile. As it stands this like half of a conversation, which seems worse than if the comment had just been left along (I agree with removing it, just wish there was a link to the discussion)

Yep, banned here


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