site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 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.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

An obscure figure from the old Alt Right takes the Hanania Pill.

The main reason I am posting this is not that, but to highlight his insider's history of the 2015-2017 era Alt Right which makes up much of an accompanying article.

1: Hanania's apparent survival of cancellation for past extremism via telling his story and disavowing his most extreme past views may have been quietly influential. This is the 2nd guy I've seen do it without even being forced to by exposure.

2: This guy claims to have been a quietly very influential figure and tells a story where his actions had a very outsized effect on the world. Maybe truly, maybe not. But his general account of events besides his own part in them is an insider's history of that much-mythologized period of the Alt Right, which was very influential and did have have a very outsized effect on the world, and his account seems to be a reasonably well-calibrated explanation of how their influence rippled into events.

I think he seems to have realized a terrible truth for a lot of WNs who are deeply used to their particular kind of persecution complex and enemy hierarchy, which is that much of the state of the modern west is a direct product of the ‘white temperament’ and white population preferences, possibly on a genetic level.

Someone posted a Twitter video of a Fox News interview with locals in Seattle or Portland or something during the (ongoing) violent crime wave in reply to my Seattle post last month. It’s become a popular online meme because it’s all these very annoying looking white people saying it’s not a problem at all, they don’t notice an increase in crime, ‘what, do YOU pussies have a problem with homeless people now, does it bother you, bitch?’ aggressiveness to the reporter. Just the most annoying kind of stubborn middle aged person, and I would add white because for all the many, many, in most cases worse flaws of other groups I’ve never seen their peoples behave like this, the grandiosity, “no u”-ness, general pigheadedness of their denial is on another level. For all their varied and whacky politics, many Jews I’ve met in NYC would press the button to delete the homeless if they could, and wouldn’t think twice about it. I couldn’t say the same for many Northern European whites. They don’t have it in them, until they do, and then they’re just as pigheaded and stubborn in the other direction.

It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy. Like a Church of England relic unable to deal with the fact that the church becoming a retirement camp for delusional elderly middle-class hippies could be a reason why attendance is down 90% in 50 years or whatever. Some (politically involved people, one a former MP) will even admit the current levels of immigration are a catastrophe, but then suggest in the same breath that what happens will happen, and that above all the focus should be on preventing the far right from making too much hay of the situation and “destabilizing” things. What can you do with such people?

I find @BurdensomeCount’s occasional gloating at whites unbecoming, but when you live here you understand it. Oh, how I have been lectured about tolerance by people who are actively destroying their own country. Oh, the sanctimoniousness I have sat through. Gradually, I began to feel a pull towards a certain contempt for some of the English, for they were destroying not only their own civilization but that of their greater ancestors, and their unborn and innocent descendants, and even that of those various non-Anglo hangers on who had, like myself, found themselves as productive and (mostly) happy guests in their society. They did not understand how precious what they had created was.

What can you do about such a people? They have no will to power, no will to survive. Whatever vitality they once had, they lost. I would gladly sacrifice Israel for a Britain that was both tolerant of Jews and actively pursuing the greatness of its own once-proud civilization, that’s how much I like it here. But I may be faced with no choice but to cast my lot in with my ancestral homeland (real or imagined) because these people have given up, and they’re proud of it.

As the saying goes, you can’t respect people who don’t respect themselves.

If I can quote a speech from everyone’s least favorite 20th century antisemite, not to be edgy but to demonstrate three separate points:

The Jew, who is himself a nationalist more than any other nation, who through millennia did not mix with any other race […] this same Jew preaches every day with thousands of tongues, from 19,000 papers in Germany alone, that all nations on Earth are equal, that international solidarity should bind all the peoples, that no people can lay a claim to a special status etc., and, above all, that no nation has a reason to be proud of anything that is called or is national. What a nation means, he, who himself never dreams of climbing down to those to whom he preaches internationalism, knows well.

This speech was made in 1920, two years after Hitler received his “punch a Nazi” treatment for giving a similar speech on German nationalism by a crowd disgusted by his extremism. The history of “white identiarianism” or whatever we wish to call it is not linear. Americans as late as 1960 overwhelmingly believed that “white” was a primary identity marker and wanted a white majority in their country. Yet Germany went through a period of progressivism in which German national identity was attacked, only to swing the complete opposite way, only to swing again in the complete opposite — and today it may be swinging once more with the rise of the AfD. Russians, too, went from nationalism to internationalism and back to nationalism. I think this precludes any possibility of a genetic explanation and instead shows that ideology and culture are what shapes these things. And I think this is also an antitode to doomerism because we can’t predict the future based on the past.

The content of the speech is interesting because it highlights the disconnect between American Jews and white American gentiles. I would argue that Jews are the most nationalist people on earth today. They engage in ancestor worship on a weekly basis, they are obsessed with bloodlines, they unite Race and Religion together and choose the former whenever questions of membership arise, their very nation bans religious intermarriage and protects the priestly bloodlines even from the (rare) convert. They put barriers in the way of orthodox conversion yet welcome any “born Jew” with ease. Secular Jewish culture has cross-pollination with religious Jews, and so secular Jews receive an implicit influence of positive racial identity.

As such, it may be hard for even a secular Jew to imagine what it is like growing up in a culture with no such positive identity indoctrination. A white gentile can’t get a free meal at his local university Chabad house where a racial leader talks about how important their DNA is and how the universe has specifically chosen their race to lead the world. He doesn’t go to a church that talks positively about the history of his people. And the stories told in school are not about the triumphs and glories of “the whites”, as a Jewish school teaches about the great Jewish sages and advisers. While his school does teach about great American figures without mention of race, when race is mentioned he learns that his are the villains, the enslavers and the oppressors. The Jews, of course, believe that they were the slaves and the oppressed, in Egypt before God freed them, in the Middle Ages despite opulent wealth, and in the holocaust, that “burnt offering” which established the state of Israel.

Now, to disagree with Adolf Hitler, I do not think that most of the Jewish internationalist voices both a century ago and today are involved in an explicit conspiracy to aid their race by reducing the solidarity of other races (although they would have every motive to do this, it would be morally permissible in their religion and perhaps even morally obligatory given that it helps Jews). Instead, I think it’s easy to push for greater immigration when you know that your host country is not your real home — your real home is every Jewish community and Israel. The Jew’s neighbor is never going to be the new Guatemalan, because the Talmud specifies that “love your neighbor” means only other Jews. So these voices don’t realize that they are blinded to many of the drawbacks of immigration, because their implicit or explicit identity protects them from ever considering the prospect of assimilation with potentially deleterious low-culture migrants. Dan Gertler may fund the Chabad House of Central Africa, indeed he may siphon off their blood diamonds and become a billionaire in doing so, but never in a million years would he consider assimilating there. And the wealthiest billionaire gentile families who push immigration for profit have a similar bias because they know full well that their childrens’ elite boarding school is far from Haitian gangs and Honduran cartels.

Finally, to answer the main question: why do the whites harm themselves? Because they are indoctrinated at a young age from the propaganda which (ironically) the arch-villains of the 20th century warned against. The neural circuitry of in-group preference is the same as familial love: you need to raise children up with positive identity, otherwise they will never truly establish the communal bond. It’s like how an abused child that doesn’t form a bond with his parents will grow up to be avoidant of relationships; even if he rationally understands that his impulses are illogical, they are still there. This is why — as you write — even the conservative Brits are too polite. They logically know something, but the instinct is not developed in the heart. Identity is not primarily rational but instinctive and emotional. And the religious Jews know this, so they fiercely protect their right to indoctrinate their children, such as by launching an international legal effort when Sweden wanted a Rabbi’s children enrolled in a public school.

Finally, to answer the main question: why do the whites harm themselves? Because they are indoctrinated at a young age

Sure, but they are indoctrinated predominantly by their own people, who truly believe in their ideology and who in substantial part invented that ideology and its ideological foundations.

But it’s not just that, because as I think anyone would admit, whites hardly have the monopoly on believing in stupid shit bad memes. Every people has its bad memes and sometimes those memes are so catastrophic they result in the actual extinction of a civilization, fine.

This isn’t really a complaint about that. It’s about the idea that there might be something specific in the (especially Northern) European mind that leads to this inanity, this combination of blasé arrogance and naïveté. I always think back to something I recall @DaseindustriesLtd saying once about Germans. How the brazen, ironclad stubbornness in their refusal to admit that importing a million Syrian men might be a bad idea really wasn’t actually that different from the brazen, ironclad stubbornness in refusing to admit that killing millions of Jews wasn’t actually necessary to avoid the victory of Bolshevism or whatever even as they were losing the war. You even saw it in the way that the DDR was the most zealous communist state in embracing mass surveillance, the most resistant to implementing Gorbachev’s reforms, the harshest in just subtly ruining the life trajectory of people who disagreed too hard. Whatever feeds the machine, 150% compliance, ideology irrelevant.

The scots-irish are also northern European.

screed

This is my favorite thought-stopping word. It gives me some nostalgia for when it used to appear all the time in progressive editorials. It doesn’t really signify anything except that the reader was insulted by the writing (which also doesn’t signify anything).

intermarriage

This is complicated:

  • the influential and regenerative kernel of Judaism is the orthodox/conservative, their billionaire funders, their political influences, their attachment to Israel. This cohort creates all the rabbis and most of the leaders of the Jewish community, eg run all the Chabad houses. Orthodox Jews do not intermarry, I think like 1% do. They have the highest birth rate and are inheriting Judaism. There’s lots of articles on this.

  • It’s true that reform intermarry, but the data is still more complicated, because what counts for “intermarry” may be Jewish+JewishAtheist. I have yet to find data on the number of Jewish+OtherReligion marriages but maybe someone smarter can find that. From Tablet: “The Pew study offered respondents who were parents a wider range of possible responses. Among respondents with a non-Jewish spouse [[61% as of 2020, 53% when this article was written]], 20 percent were raising their children Jewish by religion, 25 percent partly Jewish by religion, 16 percent Jewish not-by-religion, and 37 percent not Jewish.” So 37% of 61% are being raised without Jewish affiliation, or about 22%. I would like more clarity by demographers on what the intermarriage rate is for “Jewish+non-Jewish-ancestry”, as this gives us a better picture on intermarriage given how many non-religious but self-identifying Jews there are. The question the polls ask is “do you have a Jewish spouse” which doesn’t really tell us the future of Jewish affiliation. From Tablet again: “Admittedly, the secret of Jewish survival may be the propensity to panic about our fate. The grim predictions made in the 1990s may have proved wrong because Jewish organizations, federations, and private foundations did what they needed to do to turn the tide. They funded massive new investment in Jewish summer camps, Hillels, Taglit-Birthright Israel, and innovative startups—all programs that reach a fairly wide spectrum of Jewish children and young adults”.

tell me you don't know anything about Judaism

Everything I have read indicates that the Orthodox love to convert by-birth-Jews into their conservative flock. This is why they do the man on the street interviews Jewish outreach campaign by asking Jewish-looking people if they are Jewish. Heck, this is why they fund Chabad centers all over the world.

It varies, to some extent the ultra orthodox are more tolerant of sincere orthodox converts of other races than liberal Jews for whom it’s more of an ethnic and cultural identity rather than a religious one.

Re the spouse thing, your ‘37% of 61%’ only seems to encompass those Jewish parents raising children of actively another religion, since one imagines atheists would pick category 2 and those raising their kids with a mix of, say, Jewish and Christian holidays would pick 1.

Most secular Jews still identify as Jewish, and certainly their religiously-identifying-as Jewish spouse would likely identify them as being Jewish in that case, so I’d guess only a very, very tiny percentage of ‘intermarriage’ figures capture unions between religious Jews and atheist Jews. I don’t know any Jew who would describe that as an intermarriage on a census form or in a survey.

I think it’s quite strong evidence, honestly. Other tight-knit groups like Pakistanis in Britain, Copts in Egypt, many of those tiny Christian sects that survive in the Middle East, all have very low intermarriage rates compared to Jews. The supposed lack of orthodox intermarriage is overstated since Orthodox Jews who marry unconverted gentiles just become reform or secular Jews.