This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Richard Hanania is a man whom I do not always agree with but do appreciate for successfully pissing off people both on the left and the right. The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.
Well, Hanania has allegedly been linked to a pseudonym. The allegation is that about 10 years ago, he was routinely saying taboo things about race and gender issues under the name "Richard Hoste".
Some quotes:
It's nothing very shocking for those of us who read dissident right stuff, and it's not even really that far away from Hanania's typical under-his-birth-name writing. But it may be a bridge too far for much of the more mainstream audience.
What I wonder is, which way shall Hanania go?
Own it, say "yes I am Richard Hoste and I did write those things"? He would gain praise from some people for honesty, but he would also stand probably a pretty good chance of losing book deals, interviews with some mainstream figures, and so on.
Deny deny deny?
Ignore it?
I think that it is an interesting case study, the attempted take down of one of the more famous examples of what is now a pretty common sort of political writer: the Substacker whose views are just controversial and taboo enough to have a lot of appeal for non-mainstream audiences but are not so far into tabooness, in content and/or tone, to get the author branded a full-on thought-criminal.
I'm not familiar with this guy but I think the obvious solution is to never, under any circumstances, apologize for sins against the Left. I'm reminded of the scene from Darkest Hour where Churchill, referring to peace talks with Hitler, yells "you cannot reason with a tiger when your head is stuck in its mouth!" The Left -- that is, the mass of men and women who are in control of nearly every relevant channel of Western power and influence -- aren't interested in conversation. They're interested in grinding their enemies under heel. They are the tiger, and even the most well-meaning attempts of conservatives to roll over and play the deferential gentleman get them eaten. But oh, how very gracefully those posh conservatives bowed their heads and accepted martyrdom! It won't achieve anything. The Christians with whom I stand should model themselves after the crusaders. More Richard the Lionheart and less Thomas a Kempis.
Rightists do change their beliefs like any honest person. They should be candid about that. But these changes should be framed as intellectual corrections or, at worst, correcting youthful intemperance. Never, ever, should they use Leftist semiotics (saying, "I commit to doing better," or "I apologize for my past hurtful words" is self-immolation). In other words, if you're being accused of right-wing dogwhistling then you're doing it right. Either way the Left hates the Right. They should make themselves worth the hatred.
If all that seems too rigid, then know I think these rules necessary guardrails against the conservative inclination to seek compromise. That leads to the "speed-limit conservatism" of the National Review crowd. Those people exemplify the chief problem with conservatism. The problem isn't a lack of clear policy goals or manifestos or books about the glories of Western civilization. Books are dead when their words don't fill the chests of men. The problem is that conservatives are old and bloodless. Bronze Age Pervert's book isn't a sane or articulate political project. It voices a spirit which moves and animates everything else. The actual content of the book is all performative insanity -- nobody would seriously consider comparing Mitt Romney to Alcibiades unless they're joshing around. BAP is a full-on thought-criminal who attracts just the people he needs to attract: serious young men with spines who are looking to armor themselves for the eventual crackdown their overlords will visit upon them. These men don't need another thought-piece about changing the Leftist orthodoxy from within. They need to find communities of other, understanding men with whom to build themselves against the world.
If it seems like I'm not addressing your main question, then know that's partly because I'm not familiar with Hanania (though it looks like I should be!). The best option you present appears to be #3: ignore what's going on. Not because he's ashamed or looking for approval, but because it isn't worth his time to explain himself. His silence is the answer. Eventually he might be forced to address the issue. Then he should just be honest about why he's changed his views, using parameters similar to what I outlined above. Avoiding an apologetic tone is crucial. The very young men the dissident right appeals to will sniff that stuff out as weakness, and deservedly so.
To the extent that this is not just a tautological redefinition of "the left", this strikes me as factually inaccurate. The right of center has significant support among the the police, military, non traditional media, and a large minority of traditional media. Republicans routinely win ~50% of elections at all levels, a supreme court in their favor. A majority of high-wealth individuals are Republican.
The good advice in this post is for Hanania to be honest with himself and his beliefs. It is a virtue to courageously stand up and truthfully say "yes I believed this, but here is why I changed my mind" or "I used to believe this; I still do but I used to, too". It is obviously cowardly and expedient to apologize if he does actually hold those convictions.
On the other hand, large swaths of this post are deeply uncharitable and indistinguishable from a self-fulling siege-mentality worldview (which may or may not be in accordance with reality). Many leftists have an exactly symmetric but opposite narrative, just as passionately and deeply held. I suppose you can both be right, but you both can't have the moral high ground.
The police in cities and the military are both controlled by the left; only the lower ranks are otherwise.
So? The police in smaller municipalities aren't.
The military is controlled by the commander in chief, the sec-def and the combatant commanders which are political appointees.
As was demonstrated in at least two incidents under Trump (Afghanistan and refusal to quell the DC BLM riots), the deep state has more control than this would imply.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Historically security apparati have sided with whoever the lower to mid ranking officers have supported in the event of civil strife, not with who the top brass threw in with. For a recent example, Niger’s new President is a captain, not a general. Police departments are constrained by the opinions of the sergeants and lieutenants at least as much as by the chiefs. And according to people that are in the military, the military is in practice a lot less woke than it tries to come off as because the captains and majors aren’t on board.
This is just selection bias. When the military stayed loyal, there was no civil strife.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I honestly think this is cope for the fact that BAP and people who like him genuinely believes a lot of straightforwardly false ideas. "The mean of the white IQ distribution is significantly higher than that of the black IQ distribution and that means more white people should have positions of influence than black people" - okay. "Race mixing pollutes the nobility of the Nordic Races and races have different spirits. white people are superior to asian bugmen" - not true at all. (ten more examples elided). And, yeah, it's pointless arguing whether or not BAP 'really believes this', maybe it's all a big joke. But a large portion of the internet far right he associates with, e.g. people he retweets on twitter, clearly do believe it - both from their public posts and (if you imagine they're joking too) private conversations. These are precisely the serious young men you mention. What prevents this resurgence of far-right ideas from descending into romantic fantasies and failing to accomplish anything? Those "serious young men with spines" satisfy their animals spirits translating old texts or dreaming of conquering a small african country, while ... lifting weights and posting on twitter, or plotting to reduce illegal immigration by 30% or introduce tariffs in the next Trump admin.
You can imagine your Based Marketing Firm or Based Dating App is a mannerbund all you want. It's still responding to the demands of the market, selling slop to consumers. The 'world' isn't going anywhere - technology's taking it over, the 'liberal' global economy is more capable than ever and 'satisfying consumers' as well as it ever has.
Seriously, it's worth meditating on the lack of practical meaning within this statement:
How are they 'armoring themselves'? 'Communities of men building themselves against the world'? I keep hearing stuff like 'build brotherhoods of men / institutions that will survive the collapse, and pick up the pieces in the harsh world to come'. But ... that isn't happening. AGI catastrophe is more plausible than that. It's hard to think of a material way that 2020 is worse off than 1980, and 1970-1980s america didn't collapse.
You surely know but BAP isn't too keen on HBD and IQ-focused discourse; or rather, his notion of evaluation methodology, «racial hierarchy», desirable qualities and perhaps even the mechanics involved are all entirely different from the Sailerite school of thought (which is why I'm pissed when everyone on the dissident right is rounded up to a Nazi; no you fools, at least appreciate the vibrant diversity of other doctrines which are every bit as irreconcilable with yours, it's an honor to be hated from so many different angles!). And it's not about Nordics as such, he preaches exactly what it says on the tin – Bronse Age mindset, bodybuilders on horseback.
I dislike the phrase "techno-solutionism" but it ought to be recognized how much of our "not worse off" depends on outracing the decline. Opinions differ as to how sustainable that is. I do not foresee or dream of a collapse, but I'm also not looking forward to this kind of dysfunctional culture being empowered by technology indefinitely.
He's made many positive comments about IQ, HBD, and such, alongside negative ones. I'm arguing his other 'evaluation methodologies' are more literary hallucinations than they are real.
In his twitter or podcasts, he makes many specific claims about races! I think these are almost always false.
I specifically mentioned 1980 because of the crime wave - property crime rates are down significantly since then (both by statistics and by anecdote/vibe). I don't think there is an advancing decline along any material standpoints. Any such theft or damage is bad, and simple but somewhat harsh policy changes would easily deter those people and similar, but I don't think there's any active decline, just stasis or improvement atm.
Rates of family formation, real purchasing power among people who earn a salary, energy consumption per capita (never recovered from the 1970s crisis!), fentanyl addiction rates, US homeless population, oil discoveries, increased rate of adverse weather events due to climate change, rise of a surveillance state, rise of a surveillance marketing system, US military corruption, US manufacturing capacity, US infrastructure maintenance...
I strongly appreciate engagement with my point!
It's reasonable to replace this with two factors: fertility rate, and % of children living with two parents. The current fertility rate is .001 off from the rate of 1980! I think a lot of that is immigrants having higher birth rates and arbitrary luck that 1980 happened to be the lowest fertility of that era. I agree that not having two parents isn't ideal, but it's plateaued since 1990, and doesn't represent a meaningful decline for the middle and upper-class americans who still have reasonable families. It's still unfortunate.
This is misleading imo, like citing coal consumption per capita or 'pharmaceutical consumption per capita' as targets. The development of computers has allowed the same amount of useful work to be done with less energy. Is it bad that, instead of shipping physical books, we now transmit bits over cables? When we miniaturize a chip so that it does the same work with 2x less energy, something that happened many times in the 1960-2000s - energy consumption maybe 'declines', despite nothing bad happening.
I'm not sure what statistic you're referring to - 'real' means inflation adjusted, generally, and googling I only found this, which seems to go up. And the percent of the population that earns a salary only decreases with time bc aging, so changes in composition can't be the reason.
I agree these have risen and are bad! Homelessness has doubled since 1990. But they are sort of ... qualitative issues for the majority of people, not quantitative ones. Some people have it very bad, the majority of people still have it fine. What I'm discussing is more material / economic / functional declines for everyone.
I don't think this is true, really. The shale oil boom in the 2010s helped make the US a net oil exporter.
This doesn't really fit with the original topic of human-caused decline, and I'm pretty suspicious of its truth anyway. Maybe there are more of some events in some areas and less in others. However that actually means 'genuinely uncertain', not 'secretly believes it's totally false and is JAQing', it really could go either way.
The US government is incredibly respectful of privacy, tbh. There's no technical reason your computer doesn't send all your keystrokes to the Anti-Crime Division or whatever, but we don't! We have all sorts of anti-privacy laws that are mostly respected. Most of the threats to privacy are private actors who sell data to other actors. Getting cancelled from your job for a political heresy by entirely private actors isn't great, but that's not a 'surveillance state', it's basically the default during all of human history.
I am entirely unfamiliar with this topic, but find it plausible corruption isn't much worse than it was in the past. Especially the 'this is just the way we do business' kind of 'corruption'. Analogous to political machines. Again, entirely unfamiliar.
Manufacturing output has plateaued, not declined (note I'm not confident that graph means what I think it does). Manufacturing employment has declined, obviously - but this is just because our service jobs are more useful than manufacturing jobs. There's a reason manufacturing employees in Bangkok or Shanghai earn les than coders or financial analysts in America, and it's not because we're tricking them - the exchange rates between us and them are set by their demand for our products, compared to our demand for theirs. Foreign countries with a lot of manufacturing want to participate in & purchase our services enough that they're willing to price their labor at a lot lower than ours, per capita! We're just specializing in more complicated and capital and IQ intensive work. China wishes they had our service jobs and we had their manufacturing jobs! They'd swap in an instant. As would Thailand, Mexico, and Niger.
Not informed. This might refer to two things: One, the 'our infrastructure is old and not being upgraded quickly enough' thing, which I think is arguably true but I'm not sure it's that important, or that it was that much better in the past.
The other is (probably not what you meant but) that building and bridge collapses are in the news every so often, and twitter RWers quote tweet these with 'AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS DESTROYING OUR SOCIETY'. I assume that isn't your argument, but 1970s and 1920s newspapers also had lurid details of infrastructure collapses at arguably higher rates.
So of your points, I agreed with partially 'rates of family formation' and entirely agree with 'homeless/fentanyl', and wasn't informed on a few more. If my understandings are correct, I think this supports my point, mostly - things aren't really getting worse on the whole. Like, nations are big, you'd expect a few things to get worse on the net no matter what, alongside many other improvements.
If you're going to measure the fertility rate like that then you need to start looking at individual populations and demographics as well. The "immigrants having higher birth rates" part is the real killer - I think that is actually masking a drop in fertility and family formation among the original population, and the fecundity advantage of immigrants disappears within a generation or two. You've actually just pointed out that the problem is even worse than it appears, because the numbers are being artificially inflated by recent immigrants. Remove them from the equation and look at the original population and their descendants, and it becomes clear that something is wrong. Importing populations high in fertility but low in human capital and mean IQ (the kind of mean that matters for regression) and claiming that this fixes the problem is like saying that you don't have a debt problem because you can borrow more money to cover the existing debts.
While some of these changes are due to increased efficiency I think that a lot of it represents a real decrease in productive work being done - outsourcing is something I view as largely bad for the nation engaging in it and that would also have shown up in these figures. Some of the factors driving these changes are absolutely good, but some of them are very much not.
I actually made a mistake - I meant Americans who earn a wage rather than a salary, so my fault here. I also think that inflation statistics are massaged in order to mask this decline and make it less obvious when compared with the methods used in previous decades, and if you calculate inflation using historical metrics the decline becomes a lot starker.
There are tent cities forming around multiple state capitals, and the homeless population is causing large problems in San Francisco and other cities. The amount of homeless people doubling in 30 years isn't a warning of decline or a signal - it IS decline. Those homeless people obviously have a lower QOL than they did before (and they are probably using less energy too), and they also decrease the QOL for the people near them. It doesn't technically hurt everyone (the people on Martha's Vineyard won't give a shit) but it very clearly represents material decline.
It doesn't matter what you think here because you are wrong - oil discoveries are down and have been continuing to decline. The shale oil boom is in my view a temporary mirage, but that is immaterial here considering they don't represent new discoveries. Shale oil fields have been known about for some time, but were largely considered uneconomical to extract. As a source of oil, they have a much lower EROEI than conventional light sweet crude, and this creates an energy tax on the rest of society. Dipping into the crumbs at the bottom of the oil barrel is not a sign of a recovery!
I think climate change is a real, serious issue and one that is directly caused by human activity - we are already starting to feel the effects of it, and those impacts will continue to get worse over time. But actually litigating this would be a massive undertaking beyond the scope of this comment.
You should go back and read the Edward Snowden disclosures. The US government is absolutely not respectful of privacy and there are ultimately no protections against oversight-free surveillance. They were willing to violate the privacy of Donald Trump during crossfire hurricane despite having explicit knowledge that there was no real Russian collusion, and pass on private details to the political campaign of his opponent. People being cancelled for heresy is also bad and a sign of decline (failing power structure desperately tries to remove critics to strengthen popular perception) but that's a bit more vague and hypothetical than something like declining oil discovery rates.
I don't find that plausible at all, but statistics on this are hard to come by. I have seen a lot of news stories about corruption in federal procurement contracts (million dollar bins etc) and there have been multiple expensive boondoggles which have not resulted in any actual military advantage - I think the F-35 has been an incredibly expensive loser, for instance, but I also admit that I can't really prove that objectively without throwing them into combat with equivalents from the Russian/Chinese military.
I also have my doubts about that data but I cannot see exactly how it is generated and if there are any nasty tricks that obscure the kind of decline in capacity that I'm talking about here. More importantly, total output isn't what I was talking about - there are severe bottlenecks in multiple important manufacturing industries (defence, shipbuilding etc) and supply-chain requirements. A lot of chips and other vital components are manufactured in China, to the point that it is actually a serious military issue and there are frequent prosecutions of people who sell Chinese-manufactured gear to the military.
But more importantly, what I said there was capacity. I'll switch to a specific category now - shipbuilding. Right now the US shipbuilding industry has undergone a catastrophic decline, to the point that China has roughly 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the USA according to the navy. There's more to manufacturing than just GDP output - the knowledge-base, supporting industries, infrastructure etc all take time to build up (or mothball), and if there's any kind of crisis that impacts international trade then those differences will become extremely relevant.
Transportation, clean potable water supply, reliable electricity - and I'm talking largely about the flyover states. There are real, serious problems in the American heartlands that aren't just "black women made this bridge that then fell down". The statistics for rural life in America show clear and undeniable signs of decline in a huge variety of ways.
My position is that the US is declining on the whole, and this is obscured by financial chicanery and the uneven distribution of the decline. Some areas are prospering, and combined with massaged financial statistics the overall decline is obscured and hidden - but it shows up in a few places if you know where to look.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've been reading which I think put this distinction we should be making between cultural and material progress quite well. From Eisel Mazard's No More Manifestos:
silly tangent
I googled No More Manifestos, and found my way to the author's youtube channel.
It looks like he was a vegan debater in the past. His most popular video is about a /r/drama tier internet dispute where someone sent him death threats (or something, I haven't watched it).
His popular videos are all 7ish years ago - he still posts, but gets many fewer views.
From a recent video - he wanted to move to the US, but was unable to, due to the intricacies of immigration law! He's also never driven a car.
Yeah his YouTube can be very off-putting. I first got interested in it as a curiousity and then he surprised me with how well read he seems to be in history and political philosophy. His other writings are mostly academic style articles where he claims that millions of Buddhists have been mislead by scholars on the embarrassing role of flatulence in breathing meditation present in the ancient Pali texts:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My pipes have changed, though? They're plastic now, instead of metal - cheaper and less likely to put metal ions in the water. And there's a water filter in my house between the pipe and my mouth. The city, itself, is using improved water treatment tech. And these changes have entirely been enabled by science, technology, and society.
My table also has changed. It's a bit cheaper, and the antifungals are less toxic now. I can have a new one delivered if I don't like it. Maybe I have a standing / treadmill desk. Maybe I don't have to use the table as much, as I go on a walk in nature while chatting with friends or listening to podcasts.
The concrete formula itself has improved quite a bit too, and is
10x cheaper. (edit: 1.1x cheaper, I rewrote this a bit and missed that)"Technology isn't changing the social aspects of society", he says on the anonymous political internet forum.
I think he extended that table metaphor a bit too much, but the point is that technological progress can go hand in hand with stagnation in universities, police departments, parliaments etc, though it gives the illusion that these things must also be obviously better than they were in the past.
The idea of stagnation in universities is also subtle. Ethnic and gender studies are a festering wound. But ... if we're looking to the past, we have to compare them with psychoanalyis, theology, continental philosophy / idealism, marxism ... is it really obvious things are much worse? A lot of ruin in a nation etc.
And back to the original topic, I think the factual accuracy of (most of) the internet far-right including bap is now comparable to that of the ethnic studies people. The far-right carries forward a bunch of accurate claims, but is accreting an ever-growing ball of nonsense onto it. Part of hanania's popularity comes from not being like that!
Aside from the cost, things aren't obviously much worse than they were in the past 50 years but they're not very different either. Asking what subjects are taught is one way of evaluating a university, but I'll just throw some ideas out to illustrate that there are other avenues where innovation could have been made but wasn't.
How about asking if some of the subjects are being taught to an objective standard at all? There are language courses where you get your degree and can't speak the language, Buddhist studies taught by true believers who won't bring your attention to the ugly aspects of its history etc, and a lot of dishonesty about whether this degree will help you in life at all (employment being the obvious one). It's taken for granted in some industries that your degree has not prepared you for the job at hand and the necessity for further training is a given, but there doesn't seem to be any incentive for the university to care about this.
Then there's the format. Why is a lecture hall with hundreds of students the unquestioned standard? There is a surplus of PhDs in many fields, it wouldn't be that expensive to drastically increase the student to teacher ratio (or the professor to admin ratio to get more directly at the cause). As much one on one tutoring as possible seems to be the ideal but apart from PhD students no one is even aiming for that.
And lastly, how can you encourage critical thinking amongst students when, in the liberal arts especially, the person with the power to fail them is also the someone who they are supposed to be confidently and credibly accuse of bullshiting?
I don't disagree, though the guy I'm quoting from is definitely not of the far-right. The original topic is a few comments back so I'll have to reread and maybe edit lest I misunderstand you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That’s a non-falsifiable belief that by definition can’t be proven wrong.
Eh while there are a bunch of non-falsifiable woo-spiritual idealist components to it, it is in large part falsifiable IMO. And it's not just, like, a single dumb belief that doesn't affect the behavior of the internet racists very much, it's something many of them are very deeply rhetorically and personally invested in.
Why it's falsifiable, in theory: The most obvious interpretations of it all make direct claims about what people do in hypothetical but theoretically realizable situations! Some anti-racemixing people just think other races are inferior, others think different races have different noble 'qualities' and mixing is degenerate relative to both races. Both are falsifiable - you (god-king or alien or whatever) could just take a bunch of 'pure' nordics and a bunch of mixed people and put them in various 'ancient bands of men swordfighting' situations, and see which group acts 'nobler' according to your criteria. You could, similarly, put white and asian people in situations that test whatever standard of strong independent man-ness you think asians lack, maybe they have to speak out against their boss or lead a revolt against a corrupt lib regime or whatever. And then see which race statistically does the thing more. This all sounds absurd, of course, but it's what a literal reading of the statements these people make would suggest.
I think that, though no perfect natural experiments like that exist, one can falsify the claim by just observing the behavior of half-white / half-indian/asian/arab people compared to pure white people & observing the behavior of whites/asians.
We already had that experiment historically. The Aryans got bodied by the North-East Asians.
If you're referring to the mongol invasions, they never managed to conquer areas that are properly Aryan- just some eastern Euro slavic speaking lands.
The Turks and Mongols took over the entire Central Asian steppe that was previously dominated by Aryan tribes. They also conquered India and Iran. You know what Aryan actually means right? The Afanasievo were pasturing in Mongolia long before the Mongols ever took up the horse and bow.
And BAP’s followers do not use aryan to refer to Hindus.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link