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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Okay, well, to be honest I’m not really interested in getting you to buy it. I’m comfortable with the fact that a great many people on this sub, and obviously a far vaster number of people not on this sub, are fully committed to seeing this liberal democracy experiment through to the end. Maybe I’ll crack the code at some point and figure out the best method to dissuading these people, but I am humble enough to recognize that right now I’m simply not going to be able to make an effective enough case to persuade dyed-in-the-wool liberal democrats. Obviously I used to be a liberal democrat myself, so one would naïvely think it’d be as simple as reverse-engineering what arguments led me to change my mind and then deploying those to try and change your mind; however, it seems not to really work that way.

Much of my writing here is targeted toward people who are already at least part of the way along the journey away from liberal democracy the same way I am. The goal of at least trying to get people such as yourself to see people like me as somewhat palatable, or at least not obviously crazy and requiring immediate censorship and destruction, is a secondary goal.

I can't say I wish you the best, but at least you're honest about your intentions.

I hope for all of our sakes you and people like you never gain a significant amount of power. I don't think you understand the scope of the horror you will bring back into the world if you achieve your goal of widespread political violence.

It's always the naive ones that want it bloody, and ruin things for the rest of us, unfortunately.

widespread political violence.

Who’s asking for “widespread” anything? I very explicitly said that I’m advocating targeted consequences for a relatively small number of specific public officials. The premise here is that this will be basically welcomed by such a large majority of people that it will not require a civil war or anything like that. It’ll be more like a “truth and reconciliation commission” with the power to hand down criminal punishments.

Now, I also advocate widespread violence against criminals and profoundly mentally ill, but my fervent hope is that this is all done through formal criminal justice channels and does not mean widespread vigilantism. The only way this happens, though, is a massive clearing-out of precisely the public officials who are making this impossible at this time. They’re not going down without being taken out. Those are the sorts of people I want persecuted. Not you, not random people who disagree with me, not “everyone from a particular ethnic group”, etc. Does this help clarify things a bit for you?

I very explicitly said that I’m advocating targeted consequences for a relatively small number of specific public officials.

Does there have to be violence? What if we just jail them for their callous disregard of virtue and the will of the people, would that satisfy you?

Now, I also advocate widespread violence against criminals and profoundly mentally ill

I'm... generally fine with this, as long as we aren't talking about brutal beatings and murder. I think criminals and the profoundly mentally ill do need to have far more consequences than they get today in the West.

The only way this happens, though, is a massive clearing-out of precisely the public officials who are making this impossible at this time. They’re not going down without being taken out. Those are the sorts of people I want persecuted.

This does help clarify, thanks for sticking with the conversation long enough to get here. I'm used to seeing wignats, depressingly more and more often on this very site, unironically call for another civil war on racial lines. I appreciate that you have a bit more nuance.

Again, I'd argue that it's likely that we can manage this political turnaround without resorting to extra-judicial violence. I also firmly believe that even if it takes 10-20 years longer, it's worth doing the purging the right way in order to prevent a spiral of political violence, like the one that took down the Roman empire. But I do understand your points and have found more areas of agreement than I thought there were.

I'm glad we resolved this - I generally like your perspective and really enjoyed your post about increased pushes towards monastic orders, so I was sad to (mistakenly) see you devolving into a full-throated violent revolutionary wignat.

Well, I do think that the establishment of something resembling a black ethnostate - my hope is that it will be a formally sovereign separate nation, but it’s possible that it’ll just be a de facto black part of the United States with special carve-outs and autonomy - will be key in preventing widespread racial violence. Since I do not want widespread racial violence, I believe that separation between whites and blacks will be necessary. It doesn’t have to involve every black person in the country, although as I’ve explained before, I want it to actually succeed as a functioning nation, and that will mean it’s going to need the best and brightest people - the ones who are a “credit to their race” like some of the black people I know - to run things and to do everything they can to make it thrive.

I’m not really interested in having that larger discussion right now; I would say “you can peruse my back catalogue of posts to see more about my views on that issue”, but I post a lot, and this site has no search function to help you find what you’d be looking for! In any case, I’m not a “white nationalist”, in the sense that I don’t think white people cannot peacefully coexist with any non-white people, but I am a “black nationalist”, in that I believe that on the whole black people cannot coexist with non-black people. (Again, I’m talking in society-scale terms, and not about specific individuals, many of whom do not fit this pattern.)

I am a “black nationalist”, in that I believe that on the whole black people cannot coexist with non-black people. (Again, I’m talking in society-scale terms, and not about specific individuals, many of whom do not fit this pattern.)

Do you think this is an immovable problem due to genetics or some inherent 'nature', or a cultural one that can be solved over time?

Culture has a genetic substrate. “Cultures” didn’t just fall from the sky and pick different peoples at random. Certain cultural “technologies” can be spread in a coordinated way, and thus produce changes in the way that certain peoples live, and this can even sometimes produce changes that get people to reliably work against their own genetic proclivities, but this is a messy process that fails more often than it succeeds.

The best we can usually hope for is some sort of “synthesis”, where a people commits to adopting as many parts of a foreign culture as they can and then they morph the incompatible parts of that culture into something that works for who they are as a people. This is the story of Christianity in northwestern Europe. I could point to East Asian countries’ adoption of a syncretic, non-individualist and non-“liberty”-oriented form of liberal democracy as well.

I’m not ready to say that ADOS blacks are totally incapable of adopting any sort of syncretic, attenuated form of first-world civilization. That’s the way it looks to me right now, but maybe “in the fullness of time” that prediction won’t bear out.

What matters to me is how things are right now and the manifestly evident failure of the massive society-wide attempt - AKA the “Civil Rights Movement” that you seem to love so much, which was actually just a Trojan Horse for race communism - to bring blacks up to our level. If blacks are going to make it, they’re just going to have to make it on their own. Non-blacks simply cannot be held responsible for making that happen anymore.

What matters to me is how things are right now and the manifestly evident failure of the massive society-wide attempt - AKA the “Civil Rights Movement” that you seem to love so much, which was actually just a Trojan Horse for race communism - to bring blacks up to our level. If blacks are going to make it, they’re just going to have to make it on their own. Non-blacks simply cannot be held responsible for making that happen anymore.

Hah, I just used it as an example of how change can happen without political violence. Of course there were some pretty serious race riots, but to me that's very different than violence specifically against political figures. I find the latter far worse, even though it may be more fair in some sense.

I mean I don't think we're that far off in terms of how we view this situation. The Civil Rights Movement was a great and understandable idea at the time. I think that most clear-thinking folks at this moment have realized the problem is much more complicated than we thought at first, and we need to go back to the chalkboard and rethink some of our basic assumptions around racial equity.

That being said, I'm optimistic there are gentler, more cultural solutions as opposed to just creating racial ethnostates. We've seen where that path leads, and it's not a good one.

The Civil Rights Movement was a great and understandable idea at the time. I think that most clear-thinking folks at this moment have realized the problem is much more complicated than we thought at first, and we need to go back to the chalkboard and rethink some of our basic assumptions around racial equity.

Did you intend this to be read literally? If so, I think it's straightforwardly false? More than 50% of intelligent and capable people in politics, and also not in politics, believe strongly in racial equality in exactly the ways you're saying aren't correct. Most of the remainder thinks the problem is culture, welfare, affirmative action, etc. And of those who believe there's a genetic component to racial iq gaps, the ratio of clear-thinking to not is about the same as the general population (see the replies to any popular twitter post about it).