Replacement

[JairCrawford]

It’s a topic that came up in another thread I made called “The Future Of Democracy”, and it’s something that I find greatly troubling and perhaps thought it deserved its own thread to be discussed.

I’m growing more concerned about this conspiracy theory that is spreading not just in the US, but also in Europe. I’ve seen videos recently in France where the so called “Great Replacement” theory is picking up steam. The comment sections on such videos are inundated by adherents of the theory, convinced that their culture will somehow be entirely replaced by the powers at be somehow manipulating the changes of demographics in some grand scheme.

It’s insane. Demographic shifts are demographic shifts. That’s always happened. There is no evidence that any such shifts are being intentionally manufactured in any way though and such beliefs should be challenged vigorously.

How do we counteract this insanity?

[The Grand Nudger]

You can't. Think about it like this. There's never been a point in time for any group of human beings anywhere..where that shit didn't work.

You can't.

[JairCrawford]

You can't. Think about it like this. There's never been a point in time for any group of human beings anywhere..where that shit didn't work.

You can't.

You don’t think we can use our post-enlightenment education to, well, educate people on this? There was a lot of other backwards crap that persisted for millennia until people collectively realised those traditions were bad for society and we progressed. Can that not happen here? Is this something that is simply too ingrained in our nature?

[vulcanlogician]

You can't.  Think about it like this.  There's never been a point in time for any group of human beings anywhere..where that shit didn't work.  

You can't.

You don’t think we can use our post-enlightenment education to, well, educate people on this? There was a lot of other backwards crap that persisted for millennia until people collectively realised those traditions were bad for society and we progressed. Can that not happen here? Is this something that is simply too ingrained in our nature?

Educating the ignorant is much easier than educating people who are too smart to learn anything. 

Like you, I'm optimistic, though. But, still, it's no easy task.

[Belacqua]

You don’t think we can use our post-enlightenment education to, well, educate people on this?

I think that presenting equal rights as an educational lesson doesn't get very far. 

Like just about everything else, people accept it when it appears as propaganda in pop culture. If it's presented to them as good and cool on TV and in music videos, then it's good and cool. And here is a case where it's propagandizing something good. 

I'm old enough to have seen a hell of a lot of progress in my lifetime. Racial integration, mixed-race relationships, Morgan Freeman playing the President in half a dozen movies. I don't mean that racism is gone -- far from it -- but the Official Version of What's Good, with the stamp of approval of Hollywood, is on the right side of history and is very powerful. 

The racists will continue to fight back and of course there will be blood. But I don't see how they can counter total corporate media messaging. 

When I was a kid gay men were seen as strange and dangerous, and it was the norm to mock them. Now you have commentators on Fox News who say Muslim countries are bad because they don't give gay people equal rights. That's a huge change.

[The Grand Nudger]

Fox News is concerned about that just like they're concerned about rights abrogation of minorities. You know, the white male minority. Misinterpreting that as a change in attitude rather than angle of attack would be a mistake. The white supremacists have made exactly the same change to their own organizing propaganda.

[Ahriman]

Fox News is never wrong about anything. If you think they are wrong about something, you haven't thought about the thing deeply enough.

[Angrboda]

Reading an article this morning about how the use of the term 'RINO' (Republican In Name Only) has become more prominent in the Republican party, and shifted over time from a nuanced meaning of "not ideologically correct" to "not sufficiently loyal," it occurs to me that exclusion and discrimination is somewhat baked into our nature. While concentrating the intensity and energy of the base is useful in some respects, it's also resulting in a fracturing of the Republican party into exclusive, mutually antagonistic groups. Conservatives watch with glee as moderates and progressives in the Democratic party neutralize their effectiveness with intra-party squabbles, the Republicans are creating a similar problem of their own. And it seems to be a long-running theme. Abrahamic religions are a lot about who is and isn't a proper believer. The first such fracture, which I've been trying to figure out how to bring into the conversation, was between Jews and, well, everybody else. And then came the schisms, and eventually things like the 30,000+ different flavors of Christianity. And one might even argue that before that, the consolidation of geographic areas into nations, fiefs, and kingdoms operates on much the same principle. There are people to whom are allegiance is owed, against all the outsiders. As a matter of psychology, people who are conservative politically, place a higher premium on moral themes of loyalty and purity (ref: Jonathan Haidt). So it seems an inevitable dynamic that movements like white supremacy would be more popular on the right than the left. Yet as the Democratic party squabbles make clear, it's hardly a problem solely belonging to certain politics or ideologies.

[brewer]

All those facing 'replacement' rally round the flag. Christians have been doing it for at least 40 years now. It's the prequel to the last gasp.

[Istvan]

It's truly diabolical how the right wing has appropriated the language of the marginalized to make it seem like they're being oppressed. The real irony is that they never made it seem like oppression was anything to complain about until they were the ones doing the whining.

White people in the USA are currently up in arms about having things like slavery and Jim Crow covered in school curricula, and are employing measures originally intended to protect Black people from discrimination as precedents for the campaign. Don't stand too close to the irony meter when you think about that one, it might just blow up.