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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28975 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Greg Johnson

I'm not familiar, so I clicked through, and kind of did a double-take at this quote:

“Blacks don’t find white civilization comfortable. It is like demanding they wear shoes that are two sizes too small when we impose our standards of punctuality and time preferences, demand that they follow our age-of-consent laws, or foist the bourgeois nuclear family upon them. These things don’t come naturally to Africans. White standards like walking on the sidewalk, not down the middle of the street, are oppressive to blacks. Such standards are imposed by the hated ‘white supremacy’ system. But if we don’t impose white standards upon them, we have chaos. We have great cities like Detroit transformed into wastelands.”

Prior to the last two concluding statements, this seems like a take that DEI people would largely nod along with (aside from the age-of-consent dig). Shades of the Ryan Long gag video.

Anyway, I agree, there isn't really any space for a true far-right in the United States. In your link, I think Johnson articulates the reason:

“We White Nationalists claim that the mixing of races inevitably causes hatred and conflict. So it is silly for us to pretend that we are immune to the effects of racial mixture. If White Nationalists who claim not to hate other races are honest, then they are living refutations of their own claim that multiracial societies breed hatred. ‘I am living proof that multiracial societies cause racial hatred.’” [emphasis mine]

Yes, exactly! This is largely self-refuting for most people. If you've actually spent time with people of other races, you probably wound up noticing that some of them are good, some of them are bad, and that group-level forced segregation isn't all that appealing of an ideological tenet. Of course, a few people will disagree, but I don't think they're going to do all that well as a political force. Despite the claims that all white Americans are racist, it sure seems like the stance held by most white Americans is that they don't hate other races.

I'm not fond of language like 'hatred' but by the same token I don't live near poor black people. But even then, groups like Volksfront, a former neo-nazi street gang from the US, that was born out of the ethnic strife between poor whites and poor blacks, did not describe themselves as hateful. But by the same token they probably did do 'hateful things' against black people that they perceived as having wronged them.

What I'm trying to get at is this: I can easily recognize visceral hatred in most self described anti-racist people when the topic of rent comes up where I'm from. But why is rent so high? The market is extremely crowded. Why is it crowded? Well... We imported a bunch of foreigners.

You 'hate' high rent, but you don't hate the people who caused it. That's kind of a dilemma of ones own making. If you forbid yourself from 'hating' the cause of your ills then you will simply have to suffer. That sort of self inflicted suffering might be noble and make you a good person according to some anti-racist humanist 'ingroup everyone' ethos. But it is on some level self destructive and stupid. And I think that finger wagging at the people who notice that is a very easy, but very short sighted thing to do.

I'm not saying 'hating' is a good thing. I can certainly see excessive ingroup and outgroup bias make people act stupid. But I'm starting to lean towards the idea that it might be a necessary precursor for self preservation. I mean, my entire life I have seen nothing but openness and kindness towards the foreigner, and at the same time what I would call genuine living standards have gone down because of it.

Sure, on the level of individuals, group differences are hard to Notice. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't meaningful, or that they don't have implications for the future. Individual trees do not a forest make, but forests are still real and you can get lost in them.

I know, I also wrote this post. I'm well aware of noticeable differences, have no interest in criminalizing or socially shaming noticing, and am against various sorts of DEI measures. My response is to Johnson's statement about white nationalism and hatred - I'm vigorously against racial hatred against people on both the group and individual level and similarly against state-enforced racial separatism.

Prior to the last two concluding statements, this seems like a take that DEI people would largely nod along with

The Smithsonian museum's poster about "white culture" was exactly this.

Weren’t they absolutely thrashed for that?

I take as a demonstration of echo chambers more than something “largely” acceptable.

They were mocked on the internet and issued an apology, but as best I know they paid no price for it. Not even a performative firing of a scapegoat.

They too plainly and in a much too accessible manner stated these norms are actually "white". But others state similar claims outside of the context of an easy to read poster. There's some woke subset of society that casually denounces positive social norms as "whiteness". Poor Smithsonian got unlucky in getting mocked over it.

They had to take it down, but I think 'absolutely thrashed' is rather strong. There were no riots over it, no weeks of non stop media coverage, nobody was turned into a pariah and made to self flagellate over it on national tv. It was only taken down because it said the quiet part out loud, not because it was incorrect - unless I missed the rash of DIE experts and cultural leaders who vocally denounced the poster or the Smithsonian? Did anyone say they were wrong?

You may be right. I certainly can't find anyone talking about it from a left-wing perspective.

While I don't expect riots and public executions, I was hoping to find more backlash...

Did north Ireland work? Is Syria a diverse paradise? Sri Lanka has terrorism from muslims who have lived there for 1300 years against "easter celebrators". Ukraine isn't having a good time and neither is every African country. The most peaceful places in the world are homogenous. The most dysfunctional and violent are multicultural. A giant Heathrow terminal of a society with intense security keeping people focused on shopping would be a bland world.

Diverse societies are low trust, fractured and easily divide. People naturally segregate. People's friends tend to be highly similar to themselves. Getting people to work together is hard and it works best with similar people.

Did north Ireland work?

Northern Ireland's political problems are a massive confounder here. In Scotland, England and the Republic of Ireland the Irish (of which there are millions of descendants in Britain) and British live in peace. You could say that Northern Ireland's problems derive from diversity, but really there were wars being fought over the issue of British rule before the Protestants even settled in Ulster.

The most dysfunctional and violent are multicultural.

Northern Ireland's crime rate is about average for the UK and has been falling steadily since the military conflict ended.

In Scotland

With two highly similar groups, they still have a strong independence movement in Scotland. Even minute differences between groups can lead to centuries of problems. If these differences had been larger they would have been much worse. Belgium is still spit between french and Walloons 200 years later. Yugoslavia didn't work. Iraq hasn't been able to unite.

Trying to get completely different groups to work together is bound to fail.

Trying to get completely different groups to work together is bound to fail.

That may be true or it may not be, but Ulster seems like a bad example as for most of its history they didn't even try. In the recent decades where they have tried to cooperate, things have gotten a lot better.

It's also a tiny area which was inevitably swept up in larger currents. The conflict didn't rise up purely from within, whether it was the old IRA down south or the Jacobite threat they had a lot of external disturbances which caused divide.

Even monethnic societies are assimilating rapidly into the global homogenization of culture, that's driven more by the ubiquity of the internet than by population movements. And many of the most dysfunctional and violent societies are relatively monoethnic, while other multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious societies like Singapore and Switzerland are some of the most prosperous nations on earth. And by 1870 European-Americans were already vastly more diverse than citizens of any Northern European country, and yet they built a much more prosperous and successful society in many ways (and are still substantially richer than their European cousins today).

You are correct, though, that for diverse societies to be successful in the long term they generally need to have a majority core population (Chinese and Germans, respectively), limitations on popular democracy and, over time, a formidable police state. For these (among other) reasons, hesitation around mass immigration to the US is justified.

Diverse but isolated.

People try to claim America as a melting pot without looking at the mechanics(Nevermind that the phrase itself referred to New York City). That's the part that always sticks at me when I look at my very local history and see the various ethnic settlements that developed.

Certainly, you have diverse ethnic settlements that look from a modern standpoint to be very close to one another... but when you stop and take a step back, consider the time period they developed and the lack of coherent infrastructure, and you realize that these self-same settlements were in the middle of fucking nowhere and would take a good number of days to reach the nearest town or transportation hub, nevermind the nearest city.

Diverse, but isolated. Now, there is no isolation; we are all in the pot together, and it's slowly starting to boil.

by 1870 European-Americans were already vastly more diverse than citizens of any Northern European country

Well they did get the most valuable real estate in the world. Fantastic farmland, minerals, navigable rivers and not a single strong enemy anywhere in their hemisphere. I'm fairly confident that the US was the biggest oil producer of all time, they started production way before Saudi Arabia and are number 1 producer today.

Was Switzerland really multicultural? There are French-speakers, German-speakers and Italian-speakers, yet these countries are all right next to each other. From a broad overview, they're European and from roughly the same part of Europe too. This is not really a core example of multiculturalism. By that argument Britain circa 1900 would be multicultural with Scots, English, Welsh and Irish. Yet it is not really considered diverse or multicultural.

Brazil was much more diverse than America (Portuguese, Germans, blacks and a significant number of natives) and did not fare so well. Diversity also enables race quotas which are toxic for meritocracy. They're a major part of life in Brazil, India and increasingly the US. Even the Mongol-run Yuan dynasty had race quotas since the Mongols and their allies weren't able to cut it in Chinese exams - a fact which was very frustrating to the Han majority and one of the causes of the Ming takeover.

Was Switzerland really multicultural? There are French-speakers, German-speakers and Italian-speakers, yet these countries are all right next to each other.

There was a big religious divide which led to some civil wars if that counts.

Did north Ireland work?

Nope, which seems like as clear of a demonstration that the problem isn't race. No one that's not from the isles knows what the hell the difference between Ulster and the rest of the place is. Ireland is pretty ethnically homogenous, but because it has conflict, you define it as multicultural.

The Troubles was a conflict between nationalists (almost all of whom were of Irish descent) and unionists (almost all of whom were of British descent).

If the ethnic differences between Irish and British people are too slight for this to qualify as a "real" ethnic conflict, nationalists were overwhelmingly Catholic, wanted their children to learn the Irish language, sent their children to Catholic schools, got their children playing GAA etc., while unionists were overwhelmingly Protestant, did not want their children learning the Irish language, sent their children to Protestant schools, got their children playing cricket etc. For centuries, Protestant employers would only hire Protestant staff, public housing was disproportionately allocated to Protestants, the police force was overwhelmingly Protestant etc..

Even to this day northern Ireland has the highest rate of hereditary disease in western Europe, made up as it is of two relatively small gene pools which hardly ever mix with one another.

The idea that this conflict wasn't ethno-nationalist in character is preposterous.

The idea that this conflict wasn't ethno-nationalist in character is preposterous.

There's no denying that it was, but there's a question as to whether this was because of an inherent incompatibility or because of particular political problems that shut off other avenues. The Normans were more ethnically different to the Irish than the Scots, they also came as invaders in the name of the English crown, nevertheless the ethnic difference was dissolved (to the point where no ethnic difference is recognized betweens the 'Fitz's and the 'O's).

An alternative history where the United Irishmen got their way would likely see as much division between Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics as exists between French Catholics and French Protestants.

This is as close as we’re getting to a No True Scotsman, isn’t it?

Ireland is pretty ethnically homogenous

Wasn't there a whole thing with loads of (Lowland, Germanic extraction as opposed to Highland Gaelic extraction) Scots settling in the Ulster region that separates them from other Irish?

Well, it was less 'settling' and more 'being forced to move there due to the British crown of the time trying to get rid of two problems at once'. The history of the Scots-Irish is certainly... colorful.

Lowland Scots and Northern English weren't wholly Germanic, and in any case those who moved to Ireland often intermarried with large numbers of ethnic Irish (somewhat less so only in Armagh) in the first two centuries after settlement.

Protestant Irishman and Catholic Irishman can't get along, neither can two peoples who I would have honestly just labeled as Russian, so therefore I as an American descendant of Austrians and Hungarians must ally with Sicilians to keep Spaniards out. Just following the science.

Even referring to the former group as "Protestant Irishman" is a controversial statement. Most northern Irish Protestants consider themselves British (which they are, politically and legally).

You don’t even have to go back that far to find ethnic tensions between different white groups in the US, either. Actually the ethnic tensions between red and blue whites are one of the defining features of our politics today.

Protestant Irishmen and Catholic Irishmen get along just fine in the Republic, and have done ever since independence. They got along just fine in 1798, when the United Irishmen were cross-confessional.

deleted

Put simply the aristocratic land-owning class of Ireland were Anglican, and the urbanised industrial area of Ulster was mostly Presbyterian. Catholics were harshly restricted by the Penal Laws but Presbyterians were deprived of certain rights also.

The United Irishmen, formed in Belfast by Presbyterian merchants in 1791, were inspired by American and French revolutionary ideals and saw the source of their evils in British rule and the Protestant (Anglican) Ascendency. They were happy to make common cause with Catholics, and Catholics were happy to do the same for obvious reasons. There were also some Anglicans involved who ended up making a majority of the actual military leaders during the coming rebellion.

Supported by a (late) French invasion the United Irishmen led a failed rebellion in 1798 to end British rule. Ironically it was the justification Britain needed to deprive Ireland of its parliament and form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which led to another abortive uprising in 1803.

I'll quote Wolfe Tone, one of the Leaders of the United Irishmen, because it's about a concise a statement of Irish nationalism as you'll get:

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissentions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter—these were my means.

This was the first and I think the only time Catholics and Presbyterians worked together under the banner of republicanism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries you started seeing a lot more Anglican figures amongst Ireland's republican and nationalist movements.

In fairness I think ulster Protestants are their own ethnic group that also tends to be confessionally different from republic Irish Protestants.

Right, Northern Ireland's Protestants are a mix of mostly Scottish descended Presbyterian and a minority of English descended Anglicans who fled north during the War of Independence and Civil War.

Ireland's Protestants are mostly the Anglicans who stayed put during those wars.

I was more addressing @functor 's point here.

You made me chuckle anyway. As a fellow American of Paleness, I agree that we have to work with the Sicilians, but I think we can also find potential allies in the notoriously conservative Vietnamese-Americans. On the flip side, I'm leery of the Minnesotan Nords, who are too egalitarian a lot.

I have plenty of complaints about the diversity-is-our-strength paradigm, but examples of strife seem thoroughly cherrypicked to me.

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