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In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
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Notes -
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
I agree with almost everything you said. If we had six hours, I would've started the discussion with "how do you know who is white?". I tried to pin Walt on some answers about "white interest policies" but there were only so many ways I could rephrase a question. I know a white supremacist I've been talking to for years who has been agonizingly obfuscatory on very elementary questions across many years,
so I didn't have high hopes for clarity.Edit: It was wrong of me to impugn @WaltBismarck by association, especially through a connection he has explicitly abandoned.This thread speaks to something I really don't like about rationalism.
It is incredibly pedantic and overly concerned with explicit formalist truth/knowledge in a way that doesn't reflect how identity and power work in the real world. It comes off as extremely autistic at times. The fact is that reality is nuanced and messy and contradictory, and virtually all heuristics will be inapplicable to some situations. It's sturm and drang, not high minded spergy debate. As a successful propagandist, I know that irrational emotions and especially the invisible rules of prestige/cultural coding are a million times more powerful than beautifully crafted syllogisms.
When it comes to race--The shoreline of England is infinite if you keep zooming in. You can't define the world in terms of edge cases. Sometimes you need the low resolution filter to reflect how people actually behave. And in a lot of situations people will only use (and very frequently, can only use) the low resolution filter. When you are attacked as a white person, it makes sense to defend yourself as a white person, and not as some New Libertarian Man who exists outside of the world's tribal classification schema.
You might not care about race, but race cares about you. In prison you hang out with the other white guys or you get raped.
When it comes to immigration policy, from a WN perspective there simply isn't a good answer as to where to draw the line and any smart WN will tell you this, but that doesn't mean race is irrelevant. Race is clinal, and whenever you try to chop it up into discrete subgroups you will have to make some simplifications that reduce the accuracy of your model. This doesn't mean the variation covered by the original cline/gradation isn't significant. It just makes creating immigration policy etc. that isn't overly accepting or too prohibitive very difficult.
This is something WNs are very thoughtful about and will discuss internally, but when asked by an outsider it always feels very shifty and bad faith. Thankfully as a former WN who hasn't renounced my past, I can still have those discussions with active WNs in a way you can't. If you look at episodes 5 and 14 of my podcast I explicitly grill them on where/how they draw the line, and they make a genuinely good faith effort that leads to very interesting discussion.
I don't appreciate you trying to frame my rhetoric as shifty or evasive, or trying to "pin" me. I'm not some drug kingpin you're trying to prosecute. We're supposed to be gentlemen trying to hash out how the world works, and these are incredibly complex and nuanced issues that need to be answered in an expansive way with the proper historical and scientific context. Sometimes you need to let someone ramble for a few minutes so they can adequately provide this context, but you were grilling me like a prosecutor with very simplistic and direct questions and it felt on many occasions that you were coming at me in bad faith or with an agenda. I don't think that's what you wanted to do, but I also think you have a lot of unexamined biases.
I detected in the first few minutes of the discussion that you weren't interested in a broad historical/philosophical discussion that could get into the meat of the issue, and wouldn't let me provide enough context to satisfy a neutral party. I subsequently gave an extremely direct answer to literally every question you asked. But no, I didn't let you trap me into defending something I don't even believe, because I have a much higher IQ than the frog twitter wignats you're fighting with on Twitter, and can tell when I'm being baited.
This reflects an uncharitable and supercilious attitude I think you should work on. Nobody calls themselves a "white supremacist" first of all, so when you say this you just sound like an asshole who won't let someone define their own beliefs. But I know you're not an asshole, so you should stop this behavior.
Second, I am clearly someone who is engaging in good faith in an adversarial environment, and deserve be treated entirely on my own merits, and not be spoken down to because of your interactions with past interlocuters of an ostensibly similar worldview. But you were acting like I was still a WN and were entirely uninterested in my deeper and more abstract thoughts about race.
If you had let me ramble more and actually flesh out my worldview rather than pressing me to defend tenets of an ideology I had very explicitly abandoned I think the convo would have been more enlightening.
Perhaps we can aim for that in a future discussion?
In general I think formalism is a good thing. If we’re to have a debate on the merits of a certain social system or political ideology, we must know what it is that we’re actually talking about. If I’m advocating for “democracy” or “white nationalism” or “communism” it’s absolutely important to know what the terms actually mean. The first reason this is important is that it prevents people from speaking past each other. If “communism” is formally defined as “state ownership of capital” then we can be sure we won’t get lost in the weeds of talking about things that look like communism that actually aren’t like Kibutz or monasteries or nuclear families. It also avoids the issues of changing definitions and snuck premises. If we don’t define Communism, then either one of us are free to change the definition in ways that suit us. If I don’t agree with communism, I can redefine it to be only totalitarian socialism and dismiss everything else as “not really communism” even if it would meet the definition. If I’m in favor of communism, I can do this in reverse and start including Sweden as a communist country because some utilities and the health care system are state run. It also prevents to snuck premise problem where I talk about things that I really wish were part of the communist system but aren’t.
But there is a related problem there where people try to win arguments solely by definitions. For example, you defined communism as state ownership of capital. What about a state that allows for private ownership of capital but imposes very high levels of taxation and requires regulatory approval to basically make any decision?
But that then devolves into a discussion of “what constitutes high levels of tax” or “approval.”
All of those things are important but frequently when I see someone overly focused on definitions they often forget that the map was made for man.
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