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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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It's actually insane to me that much of the the left in America thinks white supremacy not only is a threat to America but literally the biggest threat. I have been visiting some family in California this week and I have really gotten to see the white lib in their natural environment. Before this trip I had thought that the complaining about white liberals by conservatives was just a round about way to criticize other groups that aren't acceptable to attack and they were overemphasizing how bad they are. I have actually changed my mind on this and I think they have become quite deranged. Literally everything is seen through the lens of race and white/POC. These were people who had pretty moderate political views from what I remembered but they are no longer moderate. I was so annoyed by their beliefs but I didn't want to argue with them so I just kept silent.

However, I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job. I think we can imagine what a white nationalist government would do.

First of all, their immigration policy would obviously promote having a white majority. The US obviously fails this. Its immigration policy has transformed a country that was once 90% white into a country where whites will be less than 50% of the population in 20 years and this has happened in people's life times. This isn't some slow demographic change. It was deliberate in some cases and merely allowed in other cases. A white supremacist country would simply not allow this to happen. We've seen ethno states from Nazi Germany to Israel. In the case of Israel, they prioritize keeping Jews the majority and try to get more Jews to move there. In the case of the Nazis, the took it to the extreme and exterminated non-Germans. The US does the opposite of either of these, allowing non-whites to become a majority of the young people and of births in about 50 years.

The second things they would do is prioritize whites over non-whites. Does the US do that? DEI and those kinds of organizations and philosophies are designed to hire more non-white people and less whites. On my job review I filled out, I was judged on 20% of my review on DEI type stuff, one of which was hiring more "diverse" candidates. It is illegal to specifically hire whites only and even if it wasn't the country would hate you if you actually did it. All kinds of programs have been set up to get more non-white people into elite institutions through affirmative action and other policies. The isn't a single government program that was created to specifically help whites, but the same can't be said about all other groups. Biden literally said he would only consider a black woman for VP and on the Supreme Court. Their competition in the Republicans would never dream of explicitly saying they'd only pick a white man.

In a white supremacist country ran by white supremacists, white supremacists would also be liked by the population and government. Except again this doesn't happen. If you are a white supremacist openly, you will be hated and fired from your job. If you try to be a public intellectual and organize a pro-white organization, you will be kicked off of social media and be removed from the banking system. People will say it is okay to physically harm you. If you get famous enough, you will be the most hated person in America like RIchard Spencer. You will be sued and attacked by left wing lawfare, again like Richard Spencer. If you want to be like and be successful, being a white supremacist is literally the worst thing you could be other than a pedophile.

This has real world consequences where it makes people think in insane ways. Look at this insane reddit thread I found on rdrama. These people literally think being concerned about millions of people crossing the border a year is racist and white supremacy. I know many people like this, including in my own family. This delusion is then propped up by academics and intellectuals. Probably 75% of every "smart" person out there who is educated in elite institutions believes this to some degree.

I don't really have anything else to say other than I'm just baffled that so many supposedly smart and rational people don't think through their arguments and beliefs. Cartesian doubt is apparently out of style. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy or racism is anywhere close to the biggest issue the US faces.

I don't really have anything else to say other than I'm just baffled that so many supposedly smart and rational people don't think through their arguments and beliefs. Cartesian doubt is apparently out of style. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy or racism is anywhere close to the biggest issue the US faces.

Once again, you can't reason people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. To quote Michelle Obama: "Don't think, Barack, feel!"

If you reason from facts, the United States is obviously not a white supremacist nation. The top countries of origin for immigrants in America are Mexico, China, India, the Philipines, and El Salvador. The highest income ethnic groups in America are, in order: Indian, Filipino, Taiwanese, Sri Lankan, Japanese, Malaysian, Chinese, and Pakistani. Whites are barely average.

"People of Color", as white liberals like to call them, seem to want to come to America, and once they get here, they do so well they outperform white liberals. They even serve in the armed forces in higher proportion than whites.

But those are facts, and white progressivism isn't about facts, it's about feelings.

Progressives believe things that make them feel good. More specifically, they believe things that make them feel like they are a member of a high status group, they have high status in that group, they are secure in that status, and that they deserve that status. That's how they simultaneously claim that you are born with your sexual orientation, but you can pick your gender, that affirmative action is a remedy for past discrimination, but Asian Americans should be pushed out in favor of whites, etc.

There's a greentext floating around saying that some people parse information through a "consensus filter" - they don't ask themselves "is this true", they ask themselves "are other people OK with me believing this". If your world is social, that's probably a good survival tactic. You conform to and behave according to the memes that will cause the group to accept and protect you.

That's how white progressives end up saying crazy things about ethnic minorities that ethnic minorities themselves don't believe.

"White supremacy" is one of those things. By saying that America is white supremacist, you differentiate yourself from your lower or middle class origins where people are patriotic and colorblind. You can ingratiate yourself into and reinforce your position in the PMC. You even get to tell yourself you deserve this status because you have a large circle of care than others.

They don't, in any way, believe in the literal truth of America being white supremacist - if they did, they would ban immigration from Haiti to save the Haitians. You won't get anywhere pointing out the three million people of color risking their lives to get here, or the incredible success so many of them achieve in such short order.

To a white liberal, words don't actually have meaning, they're just the carrier wave that gets modulated to transmit feelings, specifically social feelings about who is cared about and who belongs where.

Trying to reason with them will just confuse or infuriate them.

There's some truth in what you say but I think that you go too far with it. White liberals don't just spew meaningless words, they have plenty of explanations (or, to be less charitable, rationalizations) for their beliefs. Take your Haiti example. The bog-standard progressive explanation for this is "Yes, America is a white supremacist country, but it is still a good thing for Haitians to be able to come to America because white people have destroyed Haiti so much through colonialism that America is better to live in materially than Haiti even though America is white supremacist." You might not agree with this explanation, but I don't think that it's pure status/virtue signalling. If you are convinced of the truth of the assumptions that the explanation depends on, the explanation will seem quite logical to you.

I think that some people really overestimate the degree to which progressiveness is some sort of status-climbing social adaptation. To some extent it is, but I'm not sure that it really is one much more than any other political, social, or religious movement.

And if you want to convince white liberals that they are wrong, I think that you would probably be more effective by doing stuff like subtly introducing them to data that puts their assumptions into question than you would be by going into it assuming that most of them are opportunistic social climbers who do not actually care about the truth.

Some people here don't realize that what is obvious to them is not obvious to others. Yes, you (not you satirizedoor specifically, I mean the generic Motte poster) might be well-acquainted with FBI crime statistics, for example, or with sophisticated logical arguments about why central planning underperforms the free market. But there are a bunch of people out there who literally do not even know that there are racial discrepancies in crime or in the results of intelligence tests, or know anything about the history of communist economies. It's not even that they know about it but have progressive-type explanations for those things, it's that they don't even know that there is anything to explain to begin with.

Of course there are also white liberals who know about those things but have progressive-type explanations for them. And there is a group, probably small in my opinion, who really do simply not care about the truth, like some kind of O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four. My point is, though, that in my opinion the most accurate mental model of white liberals is that most of them fall into either the first (they don't know) or the second (they know but they have progressive explanations for it) groups. Not into the third (cynical social climbers) group.

A lot of them do and you get responses like this:

White supremacists claim the number 90 refers to the percentage of violent interracial crime allegedly committed by African Americans. Some white supremacists cite the 1994 National Crime Victimization Survey produced by the Justice Department as evidence for the percentage. However, this figure does not show up in the survey itself and is not considered an accurate one. In any case, it should be noted that the vast majority of violent crime is intraracial (committed by a person of one race against a person of the same race), not interracial, in nature.

Pretty much any online political person knows about this and they wave it away with all kinds of ridiculous rationalizations. Just search "13/50 reddit" and you'll see they don't even try to engage with it just find some way of deboonking it and moving on. Same with economics.

In any case, it should be noted that the vast majority of violent crime is intraracial (committed by a person of one race against a person of the same race), not interracial, in nature.

A better retort to counter the 13/50 stat would be something like '90% of fraud in the US is perpetrated by whites'. Different races are more inclined to engage in different types of crime. for blacks, it is violent crime.

Best stat I can find shows whites committing about 70% of fraud; this figure is 20 years old and is roughly the same as the percentage of the population that was white. Whites are only over-represented in bribery.

This isn't true though. Blacks commit almost every crime at rates higher than whites. There might be a few exceptions but the general trend is certainly not that different races commit equal amounts of crime but just commit different crimes. The general trend is that blacks commit more crime.