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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28935 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.

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...

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