site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Without black people, the success of modern day America would not have been possible

Downthread there is a comment from @RandomRanger where he talks about how high income blacks are still just as criminal as low income whites, using this to argue that we shouldn't treat poor people of all races the same and that the negative effects of the black population today are so bad that putting them in the USA leads to social dysfunction as bad as that in modern day Russia.

It's quite heavily implied that blacks are a problem and their presence leads to a worse USA compared to a hypothetical counterfactual where they weren't there. I don't think this is quite right, I actually think an even stronger argument can be made for the exact opposite belief, namely that it is a direct consequence of having so many blacks that the USA is as advanced and developed as it is today and that a USA which never had them would be one where everyone (including whites) was much poorer today.

The argument itself is simple. Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK. This comparative lack of "democratic socialism" and a much lighter touch of the government on private enterprise has paid off in spades for the US which has gone from being only slightly more prosperous than the UK/France/Germany etc. to being significantly more so over the last few decades.

One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy, which consequently lead to it becoming significantly richer per capita as the virtuous cycle paid off. My answer is simple: the US had too many black people for this sort of redistribution to be palatable to the ruling white classes. Hence the US escaped the economic havoc and destruction (compared to the counterfactual) such policies lead to in the long term and was able to grow and expand unshackled which eventually lead to everyone's living standards improving massively. Indeed as the tastes of the ruling class have changed and become more accepting of the sorts of behaviours displayed by low class black Americans so too have we heard louder and louder calls to redirect more and more money to the poor from those who might do something useful with it.

By now it's very well established empirically (just look at Europe) that when white people as a class get governmental power and there aren't too many lower class people around who have a very dissimilar modus vivendi that your average high status white would find disagreeable to fund they introduce "democratic socialism" and start taxing people/companies/transactions (discouraging innovation and hard work) and use the money to set up a welfare state (discouraging innovation and hard work). This predictably leads to less innovation and growth, which leads to large scale economic welfare loss for the population as a whole. The final result of this is that everyone ends up poorer and worse off, little different from the purported negative impact blacks have of the population as a whole.

Just like how blacks (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their elevated crime rate etc. wherever they are, whites (as a class) have a direct negative impact on societal welfare through their very high propensity to introduce "democratic socialism" wherever they are. Now of course there are lots of whites that don't think this way and are honest to goodness capitalists, but equally lots of blacks never steal or otherwise commit crimes. Just like the existance of such blacks doesn't mean blacks as a class don't cause large scale social damage through elevated crime incidences, the existance of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage through promoting bad economic policy.

Indeed because economic growth is contagious and spreads its boons all over the world, it's not just Americans who would be worse off if there were no blacks and consequently American whites had fallen to their instinctive impulses of taxing the productive to give to the unproductive. A lot of the high living standards around Europe and the rest of the world are due to techonologies that were developed and matured and brought to market due to substantial efffort from Americans safe in the knowledge that they would stand to personally benefit from its successes. Without this engine of growth and productivity in America it is well possible that the developed world in this alternate universe 2024 would still have living standards no higher than our world managed in the 1960s.

Many white nationalists are perfectly at home with noticing the bad consequences of black people as a class on the sum economic welfare of the USA. However they fail to notice the more pernicious but potentially even worse consequences of letting white people with their "lets minimise harm, even if it scuttles the economy" approach run rampant over the country like it would have done had there not been a large class of black people 100 years ago the whites were less happy to redistribute money towards.

By now it's very well established empirically (just look at Europe) that when white people as a class get governmental power and there aren't too many lower class people around who have a very dissimilar modus vivendi that your average high status white would find disagreeable to fund they introduce "democratic socialism" and start taxing people/companies/transactions (discouraging innovation and hard work) and use the money to set up a welfare state (discouraging innovation and hard work). This predictably leads to less innovation and growth, which leads to large scale economic welfare loss for the population as a whole. The final result of this is that everyone ends up poorer and worse off, little different from the purported negative impact blacks have of the population as a whole.

You will find very few places in the world that don't follow this "empirically established model" despite having negligible white populations; in fact, this sort of thing is ubiquitous in the third world, just with much worse outcomes. Ghana cratered its own economy by abandoning the successful model left to them by the British and transitioning to a centrally-controlled, price-fixing regime set up in the name of social justice and wealth distribution; that decision was made by third-worldist hero Kwame Nkrumah, and persisted for decades until it was partially abolished by the coincidentally half-white Jerry Rawlings. India has a welfare state and affirmative action system that no Western state can match for its all-consuming presence in the lives of ordinary people. No one on Earth loves redistributionist politics more than black and brown people do. Europe is certainly more socialist than America, but relative to the rest of the world, not so much.

Affirmative Action? Sure, India Numba Wan 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

Welfare? I don't really see that being the case. Both the quality and breadth of amenities available to many Western welfare states I can name, such as the UK, utterly dwarfs the kind of coverage an Indian can expect.

We have free public healthcare. It is not terrible, it manages to provide maybe 50% the care, if not the comfort, of say, the NHS. Medicine, in both senses of the word, has strong power laws. The easy and cheap (free) availability of say, the WHO's top 100 list of essential medications means maybe 90% of patients presenting with a disease can get curative treatment.

But healthcare isn't the only part of a welfare state. There's housing, and India doesn't have anything like free/extremely subsidized public housing, along the lines of council flats and so on.

Food? Well, if you really like rice and lentils. You might even stave off most of the obvious nutritional deficiencies.

The welfare system in India is, of necessity, the bare minimum needed to ensure nobody starves to death or dies without at least one disinterested, overworked and underequipped doctor laying hands on them. Maybe you get cheap electricity and water. Subsidized public transport. Education, and quality at that once you're past high school, IITs and AIIMS (or most government run medical colleges) are far more prestigious than their private, for-profit counterparts.

I can't think of any aspect that makes the welfare state here more all-encompassing, and not just in terms of how much it can offer the average person. Western welfare states almost all offer better and more.