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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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The end goal of white nationalists, as opposed to white nationalism, is to jerk themselves off to a vanilla variation on we wuz kangz to make up for their otherwise sad lives, until they die alone in a dilapidated old farmhouse somewhere.

White nationalist influencers compete to be the most extreme, offering up ever hotter takes and ever fewer deliverables. Trapped in the iron law of institutions, their status within extremely online white nationalism is worth more than the status of white nationalism, or of the white race more generally.

White nationalist followers, they follow for the same reason devotees of any conspiracy theory (most extreme political beliefs are indistinguishable from conspiracy theories) follow, to make up for the sadness in their own lives. The vast majority are failures in one way or another, socially or financially or romantically or professionally, who find in grand racial narratives a reason why their lives are so hard when other people's lives seem so easy. Blame it on the Jews and the niggers and suddenly everything seems so much simpler, there's no blame left for the white nationalist himself.

Just like the Communist imagines that his own life will be so much better once the eschaton is immanent, or the Palestinians imagine that life will be so much better if they just owned that other patch of desert instead of the one they are on, the white nationalist imagines that life will be peaches and cream when they are around people whose complexion is all peaches and cream. They haven't just tried Vermont, "the leaves change colors but the people never do," because they'd still be losers there.

Bio-Leninism doesn't stop when you get to the right of Lenin politically.

There is no realistic universe in which white nationalism succeeds. First, after all, white people would need a cohesive definition of whiteness. White nationalism lacks even a unified understanding of who and what they are fighting for. The census data cited elsewhere in this roundup includes most Hispanics, Aryanism includes Persians but not Arabs, Turanism includes the Turks but not the Chinese, what sense does it make to include Sicilians but exclude spaniards if they lived in Caracas too long, my learned friend in argument Hoff seems to include the damn Japanese. The imagined community is simply too imaginary for anything beyond masturbatory scheming.

On white nationalism, see @HlynkaCG below.

Are you sure you aren’t painting your ideological enemies as objectively immoral losers predestined to have bad lives — and who do not have sex — because these emotionally repulsive characteristics overpower the logical mind? Meaning you no longer need to do the dirty work of considering their line of reasoning or rebuffing their values?

I think people who share socially excommunicable things online have crossed a selection effect filter, and as such are not representative of the median case. Consider porn: despite the fact that 90% of young men watch porn, only the most deranged person online will like and share X-rated posts under their real name. The online presence of these people do not tell you the median life of a porn-viewer, which is decidedly median. This applies to a whole array of things. The people who pine for a white-only nation are either going to post anonymously somewhere, not post at all, or have given up on a normal social life and no longer care about anonymity.

But there are some ways to decipher what these people are like. The “leaders” of the movement who de-anonymize themselves range from run-of-the-mill (Jason Kessler) to the most accomplished you can be as a liberal arts student (Richard Spencer and Costin Alamariu). When Tucker Carlson’s writer Blake Neff was doxxed, and mind you he may have had the most influential job of any conservative writer in America, we learned that he would post racist trolls anonymously in his free time (“Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down”, this ridiculous kind of stuff).

It's important to distinguish here between racism and white nationalism. The former is a proposition one can believe personally and it is or isn't true, whatever. Run your life according to it, you will benefit if it is true, regardless of what anyone else believes.

The latter requires recruiting a supermajority of white people to your cause, a cause obviously doomed once one observes the beliefs of most wealthy successful young whites. It only works as a magical thinking conspiracy theory, as a belief in the Emperor Nero escaped to the East and returning with a great army. It benefits you zero unless everyone believes in it too.

@Folamh3 summarized it well here.

But in general I like @ThenElection 's point here

The most socially attuned straight white men treat wokeness as a man in the 1950s would treat Christianity. Mouth the platitudes, make sure to turn up to the expected group ceremonies, avoid socializing with people who loudly reject it, and certainly don't angrily denounce it yourself. But never go too far in that direction: someone performing a public display of self-flagellation will always be considered a weirdo, no matter how motivated it is by his dedication to righteousness.

The idea of a silent hidden unfalsifiable majority that believes in what you believe strikes me as rather too self serving to be real.

The vast majority are failures in one way or another, socially or financially or romantically or professionally, who find in grand racial narratives a reason why their lives are so hard when other people's lives seem so easy.

I've heard this said a lot, and reinforced in pop culture. But do you have any evidence this is actually the case?

This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely asking - obviously almost every white nationalist (whose job isn't to advance the WN agenda) is only going to express their views anonymously, so I don't see how to know whether they're writing from their mother's basement, or to get their thoughts out after a productive day's work at a high-paying white collar job before having dinner with their wife and 2 kids.

Blame it on the Jews and the niggers and suddenly everything seems so much simpler, there's no blame left for the white nationalist himself.

From what I've read on unz and vdare, there is a bit of hypo-agency in the comments section, and moreover the tone is often just nasty and childish.

But as for (most of) the actual columnists, like Gregory Hood, Jared Taylor, etc - I think this criticism is unfair. I think they honestly believe in good-faith that Jews (actually some of them seem to be in favour of Jews) and Blacks (and various other non-White races), on average, make the life of white people worse in some tangible fashion (the latter due to lower IQs, higher crime rates, etc and the former for encouraging anti-White sentiments)

They haven't just tried Vermont, "the leaves change colors but the people never do," because they'd still be losers there.

Even non-WN Whites engage in White Flight, so I assume actual WNs do so as well. And I assume that a WN would want to take active measures to maintain/increase the white share of the population of Vermont.

There is no realistic universe in which white nationalism succeeds.

If by success you mean White people somehow break off all ties with all of their non-White friends/family and get rid of the non-White population (by mass deportation, genocide, paid emigration or otherwise) and create a 21st century Nazi Germany, then yes - there is no chance of that happening.

But success is a spectrum - it is entirely plausible and realistic to try and stop all illegal immigration, severely limit legal immigration, and make anti-White racism become less acceptable than it is currently. These would all bring the current reality closer to the desired reality of the WN.

First, after all, white people would need a cohesive definition of whiteness.

Yes, you can reasonably disagree over whether various edge cases like Jews, mixed race people with > 75% white ancestry, Eastern Europeans, etc should be included in "White" - but there's clearly a spectrum, and most people who potentially fall under "Whiteness" would just be unambiguously White in any reasonable definition.

By the same logic, all attempts to advance Black ethnic interests in the US (which have been met with resounding success) should have failed miserably - after all what does it even mean to be Black? Everyone seems to agree that Mulattos should count as Black, but what about people with just a single black grandparent like Megan Markle (she looks pretty White to me)?

my learned friend in argument Hoff seems to include the damn Japanese.

If I understand @Hoffmeister25's view of race relations correctly - he believes that the only important distinction is between those with non-trace amounts (>20%?) of Sub-Saharan African/Aboriginal ancestry and those without, and he accordingly defines "White" to be the latter category (which leads to the inclusion of Japanese people)

I think this does sound a bit silly at first - but I think it makes more sense than defining Whiteness as belonging to some subset of European races. Any serious argument for White Nationalism that isn't just petty aestheticism* is based on the fact that Whiteness is a correlator for various traits that are desirable in an advanced civilisation (and also believing these traits are largely genetic, and so are immune to any kind of social/cultural intervention), and so whether or not a race is "White" should be decided based upon the character of that race and their contributions to science and human culture, as opposed to something so trivial as the colour of their skin.

*Well there's also the argument that Whites should preserve the White race simply because it is natural and human to care about those you're genetically related to (and similarly so should all other races) - but I think this is just a bit silly. Yes - your race is just a weaker version of your an extended family, but unlike the HBD argument, this one has much less of a tangible benefit (It can feel a bit alienating being the only person of race X amongst your friends/institution, especially in childhood - but I'd take 100x that emotional pain over the physical pain of being shot or stabbed)

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/smart-people-racism-equality-prejudice/

Adult Racism is negatively correlated with childhood IQ, and with verbal test ability.

Survey respondents with better scores on the verbal ability test were much less likely to have a negative view of black people’s intelligence and work ethic. For example, 45.7 percent of respondents who scored the lowest on the test reported that they think “blacks are lazy.” About one-quarter (28.8 percent) of the highest scorers agreed with the statement.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34922337/

Racist attitudes positively correlated with risk of cardiovascular disease.

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/36645656/AJPS1-libre.pdf?1424109585=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DReexamining_Racial_Attitudes_The_Conditi.pdf&Expires=1697999510&Signature=YAh4tFTCOdz3sOFY-J34tMOQetDgao2Wp3X-qPOa7e6lCQ8Qb1LoIyx8O9tP7D7-VfIKxgiRb2jy6ElZpsesPWgkiL0NWyJjZEcU6lcuigOArY3J6VE76ed2NV6kHnPpGVmOL50nlcQMalMzdxg2TqeN0LQYRaDOACGKOgXb9dWKvuY3HPy0lLbMRkof1ufaMEGQ7IpFtRKD7qgpRVzxkqIcLssiQGkT0zsLiLfoqstb2DOF24bwae5K1Aj5CKbVCHfV2oWYyC3R7zWH5uBa4l4zy1fk9RRsD6gwvS~8n64a67nWVd0V36IFhXHI7qh-KFL4g3JcxhiiZB881pnw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

High socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming less racist, low socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming more racist.

A large body of empirical evidence supports this view, showing that highly educated Whites are more likely to reject negative racial stereotypes, agree with structural explanations for Black-White inequality, and endorse principles of equal treatment (Schuman et al. 1997).

Additional studies show that racism correlates positively with things like going to prison, and that racist attitudes correlated negatively with things like owning a home.

Now one can quibble with all that. Maybe all those things are just measuring college education, and liberal indoctrination on racial issues are just dogma. Intelligence probably correlated with believing in transubstantiation in Catholic Europe and in disbelief in transubstantiation in Protestant Europe, education tells you that societal truths are real. Or one can argue that people lie on surveys. Or that the actual number of true white nationalists is so small that they can hide in the margins of studies like this, though the latter is damning with faint praise.

But this invisible unfalsifiable mass of powerful racists is an imaginary friend/nemesis shared, as @HlynkaCG likes to point out, between woke and wignat thinkers. Look around elite corporations and college campuses, no open racists, but they're all secretly the real racists! It's leftist thinking, it would violate the progressive stack.

Then you look at the visible leaders in the field. You have Richard Spencer, who at last check lived with his mother. You have EOW Kierkegaard, who changed his name and fled the country to escape a $10,000 judgment against him (a judgment for court costs resulting from his own failed attempt at lawfare, a frivolous lawsuit to shut up a critic). No successful first worlder is more than mildly inconvenienced by a $10,000 cost. I'll spot you one of Hanania or Moldbug, though both would deny being in that scene they're close enough to count for half each and they seem to be living well.

RE white vs black need for clear definitions

The difference being that Blacks were a small minority, and sought notional equality. There was no universe where they had an interest in excluding anyone from negritude, and no one so excluded would suffer should they achieve their aims. Where white nationalists seek exclusion. If I join up with the wignat project today, I'm hoping things play out that my wife is considered white by the faction that wins. I'm just trusting in that, as the protection of my family. That's a bad gamble. Because once we live in Wignat land, my half breed kids won't have other minorites to support them because those groups have been thrown out.

The attempt to reframe wignat ideology as purely an anti Black (and maybe Arab?) Coalition assumes that it is all people care about. That makes little sense. Cultural closeness is going to mean more than iq to most people.

Aesthetics are part of it, but things like religion are also important. Things like cuisine, like customs. Evangelical whites are closer to American Blacks than they are to Asian immigrants on all those; without evangelical whites a right wing movement is a joke. I took communion this morning at mass from an African priest; to become a wignat I must reject the Church. That's a big ask.

A white nationalism that rejects Christianity is rejecting the real cultural glue of American and European history.

High socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming less racist, low socioeconomic status groups respond to diversity by becoming more racist.

crude model: it could be explained that his SES, their NAM peers have criminality 0.5% versus their own 0.05% but for low-SES, NAM peers have 5% criminality versus their own 0.5%, even if the difference is ten-fold is each case, the high SES have less to worry about.

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/smart-people-racism-equality-prejudice/

Adult Racism is negatively correlated with childhood IQ, and with verbal test ability.

Thanks for the evidence. As @The_Nybbler has pointed out, you could argue this away by theorising that the smarter racists merely have the common sense not to express overtly racist views in public contexts.

But I think this leads to the question of what it really means to "believe" something - if a man goes through his whole life saying that he believes in God, goes to church each week and baptises all his children, I think he probably ends up "believing" in God in some sense to smooth over the cognitive dissonance.

Now one can quibble with all that. Maybe all those things are just measuring college education, and liberal indoctrination on racial issues are just dogma. Intelligence probably correlated with believing in transubstantiation in Catholic Europe and in disbelief in transubstantiation in Protestant Europe, education tells you that societal truths are real. Or one can argue that people lie on surveys.

Well yes - that's my take on the matter. But that's just an explanation of why WNs are less successful on average (that isn't "you'd have to be an idiot to think something so stupid") - I think a college education is a very good correlator for intelligence.

The difference being that Blacks were a small minority, and sought notional equality. There was no universe where they had an interest in excluding anyone from negritude, and no one so excluded would suffer should they achieve their aims.

Yes - that is a good point. However I was trying to demonstrate that your general principle of any kind of movement to advance the interests of group X requires us to have a precise, legalistic definition of what it means to be X (Black Activists and White nationalists are similar in the lack of one)

If I join up with the wignat project today, I'm hoping things play out that my wife is considered white by the faction that wins. I'm just trusting in that, as the protection of my family. That's a bad gamble. Because once we live in Wignat land, my half breed kids won't have other minorites to support them because those groups have been thrown out.

Firstly - White Nationalism is obviously marketed primarily towards Whites who marry other Whites. It's not an indictment of the movement that you would be opposed to it, anymore than the fact most non-White people would be opposed as well - it's not meant for you!

But also to address your point - as you said it is a gamble, but you seem to ignore the possibility of it turning out well for your offspring - if they are included as "White", then they end up living in a state with a much lower crime rate, less money spent on welfare, etc (This isn't to say it couldn't still wind up as negative expected utility, just that it's not uniformly negative over all possible outcomes)

The attempt to reframe wignat ideology as purely an anti Black (and maybe Arab?) Coalition assumes that it is all people care about. That makes little sense. Cultural closeness is going to mean more than iq to most people.

I agree that most people don't judge others on IQ - but we're not talking about normal people. We're talking about a group that exists on the fringe of the fringes.

However I don't think cultural closeness will be the deciding factor either. I think what will actually inflame passions is violent Black crime.

If you're happy with the current state of affairs (as you and I both are), then any kind of argument about how the IQ/culture/etc of group X doesn't really inspire you to action, it's all so abstract, the harm is all in expected value. And anyway, talking about this sort of stuff could land you in trouble, and even just thinking about it could alienate you from your friends/family ("what are you thinking about?" "...um, nothing") - why not focus on another engaging line of inquiry with less self-destructive potential?

On the other hand, victims of violent crime experience extreme, angry and fearful emotions. And when someone sees a video of the crime (as far right accounts love sharing on Twitter) they instinctually feel some of that fear and anger - and I think that if more and more people start getting exposed to this sort of content, this may very well make them seriously question notions of racial equality (and then maybe even become WNs)

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/smart-people-racism-equality-prejudice/

Adult Racism is negatively correlated with childhood IQ, and with verbal test ability.

The URL alone casts doubt on that. The study seems pretty badly confounded... the higher IQ you are, the more likely you are to know that expressing racist views is taboo. The study's abstract actually has a third proposal (which is the one the authors accepted):

It is commonly hypothesized that higher cognitive abilities promote racial tolerance and a greater commitment to racial equality, but an alternative theoretical framework contends that higher cognitive abilities merely enable members of a dominant racial group to articulate a more refined legitimizing ideology for racial inequality.

That is, the smarter you are the more sneaky a racist you are.