Hadad
1mo ago
If you're positing a worldwide, decades long conspiracy to fabricate or exaggerate a genocide that never happened, then yes you need to actually say who (specifically) is pushing it and how they are doing so.
No you don't. You can identify something is happening without knowing who is doing it.
Otherwise all you're doing is noticing that millions of eyewitnesses and all serious historians agree that the Holocaust happened, and that many government censor its denial, without actually demonstrating the conspiracy you're positing.
No, people can, have, and will make all sorts of observations, noticing all sorts of inconsistencies and problems, even if they never produce a shadowy mastermind orchestrating it. All that not knowing who is doing it means is that you don't know who is doing it.
Do you think that she is mistaken about the part where they shot her mother in the head? Or the part where she came to live in London because her dozens-strong family back on the continent were all dead?
Possibly all of it, possibly none of it, possibly a mix. Memory and eyewitness testimony are unreliable, and that's true no matter how heart-wrenching the testimonial. It's especially true nearly some eighty years after the fact.
Hadad
1mo ago
Who exactly is 'they' here?
You don't need to know who is pushing something to notice it's being pushed. There are empirically false claims made about the Holocaust; some of them have even been publicly recognized as false (such as inflated estimates of camp populations). The problem is that all the most scandalous and lurid nonsense gets shared, and becomes common knowledge, even though it's totally bogus. There is a machine that vigorously defends the Holocaust -- both its truths and its myths.
And for the record, memory is notoriously fickle -- a child's even moreso. Trusting the field of history is fine, but you should probably not trust the survivor's testimony too much, especially this long after the events in question.
Hadad
1mo ago
I believe you! Which countries are those? If there are still nations out there where the wealthy men are reproducing and the poor aren't, we could learn something from them.
Hadad
1mo ago
Economic incentives shift the paradigm for men, too.
Sure, sure. But I bet in environments that restrict women, wealthy and not so wealthy men have more kids, too.
Hadad
1mo ago
Chemicals they randomly encounter in the modern environment, chemicals they intentionally put in their body, social expectations shifting, economic incentives shifting, the (short term) opportunity cost of kids, the increase in immigration rates, the advent of social media, increasing concentration of people in urban areas, and yeah, the fact that women are now solely responsible for choosing their mates and there are zero restrictions left on their decision process... so they decide to not decide.
A lot of these same pressures show up in subcultures that still manage a superior TFR, though. What changes is how empowered the women in them are. Or do you see something else?
Hadad
1mo ago
Any argument based on "TFR is going down, which clearly shows that X is the cause" is trivially defeated by the fact that ever country has this same outcome regardless of the cultural starting point.
The starting point may differ, but do those countries share any cultural drift? For instance, is there any country that has a lowering TFR over a span of time where women's education and liberty are reduced? I think there's a strong argument that globally, TFR is falling anywhere where women are getting more empowered. The degree and rate of empowerment might differ, of course, but as far as I can tell the root cause everywhere is women in higher education and the workforce.
Hadad
1mo ago
I think everyone is motivated to some extent by their identity and environment, but I don't think Ignatiev's evil is motivated by his Jewish identity. He's embraced globohomo, not Jewish Supremacy, far as I can tell -- but I don't know the man outside of this quote everyone's been debating, so if you have something else condemning him, by all means share. It wouldn't be hard to persuade me against him, I think he's obviously a piece of shit.
And unlike you, I would call him evil.
Hadad
1mo ago
This is the crux of our disagreement. I just think it’s manifestly untrue that white people are “systemically and explicitly oppressed” in any country on earth.
Our perspectives have such a vast gulf between them that I don't think there's any point in conversing on the topic, then. You think it manifestly untrue, I think it manifestly true -- I don't even know how to get across the countless ways whites are systemically pushed down if you don't see them all around. College admissions? Hiring discrimination? Grooming gangs? Massive, lopsided tax disparities, whites having their wealth stolen to fund largesse for groups hostile to them? Suppressed birth rates, combined with the deliberate importing of the third world?
Whites are at war. I don't like how SS talks, but he's not wrong there. And he's not wrong that a disproportionate amount of Jews are contributing to it.
Hadad
1mo ago
On the one hand I don't think Iran has provided the US sufficient reason to attack them
Eh, you say "Death to America" even once and I consider my country wholly justified in destroying you. Talk shit get hit is natural law.
Hadad
1mo ago
Jews do not have anywhere near the level of explicit racial solidarity that whites had in, say, apartheid South Africa, or the Antebellum American South.
No, they don't. But whites don't have anywhere near the racial solidarity of the Antebellum South or Apartheid South Africa, either, and Jews are significantly more in solidarity -- openly -- than Whites have been at any time in the modern era.
Whatever covert influence some powerful Jews have to influence things in their favor at the expense of others, surely you can acknowledge that their actions (outside of, arguably, Israel) are of a qualitatively different form than, say, passing laws explicitly forbidding non-Jews from owning property, voting, patronizing the same businesses as Jews, etc.
Of course, they take a different form. They don't need to ban you from public spaces, just advocate for those spaces to be ruined so that you self-select away from them.
The worst thing a powerful Jew can do to white people in 21st-century America is write a mean book about us, produce a TV series where we’re the bad guys, and attempt (with intermittent success) to legislatively block border enforcement.
No, the worst thing a powerful Jew can do is help irreparably break society and culture through the importing of foreigners. That, plus make life domestically suck.
Contrast that with the worst era of White Supremacy, in which a white person could own a black person as property. The two situations are not comparable.
No, today is not like slavery. But it's also not like slavery for anyone. Slavery's no longer a relevant period of concern that should determine how we respond to prejudice and bias. It is a dead era.
But I don’t believe that Noel Ignatiev has the power to make me a second-class citizen, or that there’s any realistic American future in which white people are explicitly and systemically oppressed based on group identity
We're already systematically and explicitly oppressed based on group identity! That it's not naked slavery doesn't matter one lick.
Hadad
1mo ago
He would simply point out that there is no example in history, with the exception of the few brief periods in which Israel has existed as an insular sovereign political entity, in which Jewish people have had the power to openly privilege themselves as a dominant racial group at the expense of other groups.
Well, besides right now, anyway. And some would argue a few other times within living memory. Right now, after all, Jews wield a disproportionate amount of influence at the expense of western white (and the various non-whites stuck here with us) civilization. Almost all the metrics people use to point out white institutional dominance point an even longer finger at the Jews.
This privilege manifests in many forms, one of which is you can say "abolish the white race by any means necessary" and have an entire elite institution launder this attitude into mainstream acceptability, whereas if you want to say the same about Jews you have to rant on niche internet forums.
Hadad
1mo ago
Oh, yes, assuredly. Ignatiev's creed is abominable, but so long as he also supports the dissolution of Israel and Black identity or whatever, he's evil for non-hypocrisy reasons. That's a thing SS is good at: finding a lot of evil Jews. The problem is they're mostly evil Jews, whereas he thinks they're evil Jews.
It's rough! Ignatiev's beliefs are awful. But not Jewishly awful. Still, SS is more sympathetic than Ignatiev.
Hadad
1mo ago
SS says a lot of pretty nakedly racist things, but man, a screed defending a literal call to abolish the White race that ends in claiming the desire to protect one's culture and homeland from foreign replacement is some vile thing -- as if literally every people don't want to do that, as if it wouldn't be considered mad, bigoted offense to promote this same replacement for minority groups -- is quite possibly the only situation where Secure sounds more sympathetic than the person he's arguing with.
Hadad
1mo ago
It'd be a very odd right-winger of any sort who concerns himself with the Congo. Even a genuinely Christian soul, selfless and eager to help, would probably not then pair it with anti-American conspiracy theories. More than anything, the guy codes as pure crazy, but definitely crazy from a liberal direction.
That said, he's absolutely fucking cuckoo for cocoa puffs, and no one should take any sort of vindication. I'm a right wing man and I don't think him being a Democrat or a left-leaning weirdo is a slamdunk against progressives in general. This guy is actually just mad, and he would have done some mad thing no matter what group he attached to.
Hadad
1mo ago
Only in opinion pieces, the classic way to smuggle insanity. Such as https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/opinion/international-world/protest-black-america.html
Hadad
1mo ago
Despite their best efforts to discriminate, it's just hard to do worse as a class than blacks.
Hadad
1mo ago
The editorial board? Well, what about the NYT being willing to host opinions?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/opinion/international-world/protest-black-america.html
Hadad
1mo ago
Sometimes, the expenditure is justified, even necessary, despite the financial stress. That's why whether the spending is frivolous or not is important. Sometimes you still need gas and groceries, even if you can't afford to splurge on a new video game.
Hadad
1mo ago
I've heard nigger come from my mother's lips a few times over the years, when she was very upset with some criminal banditry, but I got the impression she thinks it's a word she shouldn't say. That's the sort of racism I'm used to from normie Republicans -- they feel guilty over it when it comes out, but it comes out when it's justified. Wouldn't call all blacks niggers, but might call a specific shitty black person a nigger.
I'd love to meet some Arklatex rednecks, though! I appreciate a people that don't bite their tongues for no good reason.
Hadad
1mo ago
The sentiment is one I see a lot of, even if not the specific word 'chink'. Open slurs are very much a hallmark of the edgy, online right, in my experience. Normie Republicans like my own (grand)parents think slurs are rude, but they're comfortable with the ideas they encompass -- the kung-flu is absolutely the fake and gay China virus pushed by the elites to cull the population, but you don't call it the chink virus.
Hadad
1mo ago
No, I don't need another moderator opinion, you're fine. What are the odds they'd side with me after bickering with you, even if I was right?
Do what you will, and I'll do the same. If that means a ban, well, it's just a forum.
Hadad
1mo ago
Alas, then there'll probably be a third time where someone acts out, I tell them to knock it off, and you get conspicuously upset with me instead of them.
This doesn't refute America's incentives, so what you're saying without realizing it is that we're in existential conflict and should eliminate Iran.
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