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Hoffmeister25

American Bukelismo Enthusiast

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joined 2022 September 05 22:21:49 UTC

				

User ID: 732

Hoffmeister25

American Bukelismo Enthusiast

8 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 22:21:49 UTC

					

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User ID: 732

It’s this kind of ultra-smarmy response that makes people laugh at you and dismiss you. You’re openly advocating and voting for policies that many of believe are existentially disastrous for this country - that will literally lead to the financial, cultural and generic dispossession of our people and a disappearance of our posterity from the earth - and when people get angry about it you retreat to “we all want the same things, what about the high road and civility, can’t we just all have a calm and reasonable debate, why all the hate, etc.”

No, Chris, we DON’T all want the same things and just disagree on the little details. Our worldviews genuinely are irreconcilable, and no amount of holier-than-thou ostentatious displays of false empathy - the secular liberal equivalent of “I’ll pray for you” - will bridge those gaps. An uncharitable interpretation of your post is that your main goal here was to “trigger the Cons” and to push OUR buttons, using a conversational tactic that was guaranteed to provoke a hostile response that you could pre-emptively forecast to make yourself look virtuous and us look unreasonable.

I can’t believe I of all people am going to defend progressive activists, but I think you and the author are both massively underselling how formalized and sophisticated the theoretical basis for these educators’ approach is. I’m surprised that at no point does the author mention the man whose ghost looms large over so much of modern literacy education: Paolo Freire.

Freire’s The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, along with his somewhat lesser-known book The Politics Of Education, is one of the most influential texts in teacher education of the last century. Freire was one of the pioneers of critical education - which, like any other branch of critical theory, is explicitly Marxist, and seeks to use education as a tool to undermine and destroy the existing socio-economic system. James Lindsay, of the New Discourses website, did a series of lengthy and dense podcasts in which he went through Freire’s work in excruciating detail, explaining Freire’s theories and how they have influenced modern anglophone education. (For those of you who instinctively scoff any time a right-winger calls something Marxist, assuming that this is like when Republicans call any basic government function Communism, I encourage you to look into what Freire had to say about Maoism and Che Guevara.) Every major progressive educator and pedagogical theorist of the last few decades is using Freire’s work as a jumping-off point.

One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.” He believed that the dominant educational paradigm of the 19th and early 20th centuries was one in which students were assumed to be passive and ignorant receptacles, into which teachers can pour all of the approved knowledge that the teachers have decided the students are required to know. This model is hierarchical; the teacher is the Authority - the Knower, who has a form of cultural capital called Knowledge - and the students, who lack the fundamental skills that would allow them to exercise any agency over their own education, are expected to sit down, shut up, and let the Knower deposit Knowledge into them. Freire’s insight was that this educational model, in addition to teaching kids the actual mechanical skill of reading, also smuggles in a “hidden curriculum”: the unstated hierarchical assumption that the point of school is for Society to tell children what they are supposed to know - what information is important and what isn’t - in order to turn them into effective and productive members of the existing society.

In opposition to this model, Freire developed what he called the “generative” or “constructive” model of education. In this approach, the educator strives to minimize any sense of hierarchical relationship between herself and the students; rather than being there as an Authority, the teacher acts as a collaborator with the students. She presents them with basic concepts and resources, and then allows them the greatest possible degree of freedom in choosing which of those concepts or resources to discuss and utilize. The teacher is, in this model, merely a facilitator for the students as they exercise their own creativity and agency. In doing so, the students not only generate their own insights and absorb knowledge, but they also cultivate a sense of their own potential as Creators.

In addition - and this is centrally crucial to Freire’s model - they begin to notice things about the world. See, the teacher has pre-selected the library of works that the students have on hand to explore; if she has a bunch of, say, thinkpieces about structural oppression, or books written from the perspective of poor and marginalized people, then as the students spontaneously discover and read those works, they begin to ask questions about what they find in those materials. And that’s where the teacher comes in; she can provide some answers, or even ask other questions that inspire students to think in a particular way about the society around them. A Marxist revolutionary way, specifically. Freire is not shy about this. Neither is Lucy Calkins, the educational activist and theorist whom the author presents as the primary driver of the “whole language” model. Calkins is very vocal about the centrality of “social justice” in her pedagogy, and about her insistence on exposing children to materials about racism, structural oppression, etc. For these people, teaching your children to read is not the point. The point is to turn them into revolutionaries against the existing society. The point is to give them the tools, and then the ideological guidance, to allow them to deconstruct, criticize, and eventually dismantle the socioeconomic status quo. Again, if you read Calkins and Freire, they’re not hiding this from you.

Now, as with a lot of the larger critical theory and DEI industries, it’s never really clear how many of the ground-level employees actually have any deep understanding of, or buy-in to, the intellectual infrastructure of the work they’ve been tasked with carrying out. I find it difficult to believe that the vast majority of young women going into primary school teaching are all doctrinaire Neo-Marxists. I believe the last time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people. They’re not serious adherents of critical theory. I think that for the vast majority of them, it is indeed true that they are primarily motivated by the sorts of self-aggrandizing narratives around teaching that are presented by films like Dead Poets Society and Freedom Writers: a charismatic teacher with boundless energy and an almost gnostic ability to unlock students’ inner creativity and knowledge-generating potential becomes a sort of mentor or guru for a whole classroom of students, inspiring them to lives of greatness. This model of teaching is inherently parasocial and allows the teacher to act as a manipulator and ideological guiding light for those students, which is why it is so useful for Marxists, but it’s also an extremely emotionally-satisfying narrative for those who are going into what is otherwise a dismally underpaid and punishing career path.

In general, when you are examining the actions of progressive activists, and you are asking yourself, “Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do. The reason educators don’t seem to be doing a good job of teaching children to read is that their actual goal is something else. The reason why Black Lives Matter activism doesn’t seem to actually save any black lives - quite the opposite, in fact - is that their actual goal is something else. While the average schoolteacher is a mediocrity, in over her head and sustained only by self-serving heroic narratives about her Life’s Purpose, the people actually designing the pedagogical model she was trained on were extremely intelligent people with a strong grounding in a storied and sophisticated philosophical tradition. This is not in any sense an endorsement of these people’s methods - personally I would love to see them all in prison or worse - but they’ve got a lot more going for them than just “vibes”.

How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them? Like, have you made any attempt to actually engage with the theories underpinning this educational model? Or are you just defaulting to the lazy idea that “conspiracies don’t happen” and satisfying yourself with that? There’s nothing “bizarre” about taking the literal words of widely-taught educational theory textbooks seriously, and drawing the conclusion that the people putting those theories into practice actually mean them and believe in them.

See my below comment in this same thread about Paolo Freire and Lucy Calkins. You can find a bunch of their work and their public statements on Google.

They don’t want the kids to be dumber, but they do intentionally want to avoid preparing the children to be productive participants in the existing social and economic order. By instilling in children a functional literacy in the values and prestige language of the bourgeois class, you are churning out good little cogs who can, and will, go get jobs in respectable fields. This will allow them to acculturate into the hegemonic order, and to accumulate cultural capital which will turn them into loyal members of society. This will enervate their revolutionary passion.

Like, I wish I was just reporting to you the beliefs of a wacky lunatic fringe, but I’m literally explaining the entire point of one of the most widely-taught teacher education textbooks in America. These pedagogical theorists genuinely believe that making students better at speaking middle-class “respectable” English is actually a bad thing.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother last year. She is a fairly standard-issue Gen X liberal, although somewhat open-minded about certain conservative issues, and guilty of Noticing™️ certain things about race and gender that gave me no shortage of distress back in my days as a dedicated progressive. She caught a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome after 2016, though, and began ensconcing herself ever more deeply into the MSNBC bubble. She and I hadn’t talked politics for years, until last year, when she was ranting about Trump and his voters and how stupid they are, and how she could never imagine having an intelligent conversation with one, at which point I hit her with the “you’re talking to a Trump voter right now”. This was utterly shocking and disorienting for her. She couldn’t imagine that someone well-informed, sophisticated, and obviously intelligent - her own son, no less! - could see any value in Trump. Every conversation she had ever had with a Trump voter up to that point had been like pulling teeth - nothing but Fox News talking points, uneducated ranting, shit-tier conspiracies, and an evident lack of even a basic curiosity about the world.

I brought up an article called [The Asshole Filter] (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html). This article is about how women navigate the dating world, and how for certain women, if they make it clear that any guy who approaches them in public will be rebuked, the only guys who will approach them in public are going to be uncouth assholes with no social tact. If a guy is conscientious and desires to be respectful of your boundaries, and he is aware that you will be offended by his overtures, he’s not going to commit the faux pas of transgressing your explicity- or implicitly-states wishes. An asshole, though, doesn’t care about your boundaries, or isn’t smart enough to intuit them, so he will transgress them without a second thought. Eventually, as this process is iterated, the only strange men who will ever approach you in public are going to be assholes, and you will begin to get the strong impression that all men are assholes, because the only ones you meet are assholes. You unintentionally set up a filter that has screened out all the normal nice men you would have met, and the only men who made it through the filter are the ones you wanted least to meet.

I told my mom that she had unintentionally set up a similar effect when it came to talking politics. She is a very outspoken person, and is not shy about broadcasting her liberal views. Therefore, most people in her life are well-aware of where she stands and the kinds of statements that will make her mad or will start an argument. If they value maintaining a cordial relationship with her - for example, a coworker, or an acquaintance who likes hanging out with her without needing to have a deep level of agreement with her - will be conscientious enough to avoid making those statements. They will let her spout off about her opinions, and they will not challenge her on them or bring up their own more conservative/Trump-oriented views, since it’s not worth offending her or rocking the social boat. However, if someone doesn’t care about offending her - maybe they don’t particularly like her, or maybe they’re just not smart or self-aware enough to predict the negative consequences of expressing pro-Trump opinions around her - then they’ll happily say something Trumpy around her. That means that the only pro-Trump opinions she will ever hear will come from hostile, stupid, or unsophisticated people. All the smart Trump voters are invisible to her because they know better than to say anything where she will hear it.

The vast majority of liberals and progressives have set up precisely this type of political asshole filter. When you go on Facebook and post something like “If you don’t support a woman’s right to choose, unfriend me right now,” you’re not expecting any of the people you see as your actual friends to unfriend you. Your real friends would never have such an ugly opinion; if they did, surely you would know about it. Well, no, they just know how much it would piss you off if they expressed disagreement to you, and they care about your friendship more than they care about winning an argument. So, they stay silent. However, the people who don’t actually care that much about preserving a friendship with you - or the people who are dumb enough to think they’re actually going to change your mind with a public argument on Facebook - will take the bait and argue with you. Of course those arguments will be stupid or hostile; only a stupid or hostile person would have gotten into it with you in the first place. All the smart people realized it wasn’t worth it.

Any right-winger in a heavily left-wing social context - myself, for example - has long since realized the futility of attempts to persuade, or even of publicly outing yourself as a dissenter. They’ve decided to keep their heads down, only discussing politics in (usually anonymous) forums like this where they won’t be dogpiled or doxxed. The fact that this woman was willing to publicly display her GOP allegiance in that context should have been an immediate red-flag: she is either someone with nothing to lose socially, or someone who’s not smart enough to realize she’s about to lose it. A smart conservative would have avoided the whole situation and moved on with her life.

  • 109

FYI, the Law of Merited Impossibility is Rod Dreher’s, not Ann Coulter’s. Coulter’s Law is the principle that when you’re reading a news article about some sort of crime or malfeasance, if the race of the perpetrator is not mentioned, that’s a clear indication that he or she is a racial minority. If the criminal were white, the author would have mentioned it without hesitation.

Name me literally a single person who has ever advocated the first theory. I’ll wait.

When you misrepresent and distort the views of your outgroup beyond recognition, it’s very easy to call them insane.

I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert last night. For those who are unfamiliar with his work, Weird Al is an American comedy/novelty singer, known best for his parodies of popular songs, although he also has a large body of non-parody original comedy songs. I assume that there is a large overlap between the users of this sub - at least those who grew up in America or Canada - and the kinds of people who would be fans of his work. And there definitely is a specific “type” of person to whom Weird Al has always appealed, which is what this post is about.

While the concert itself was a wonderful time - on this tour, Al is only performing his non-parody songs, without the frenetic costume changes and multimedia content for which his live shows used to be known, so this was definitely a “for the hardcore fans only” kind of experience - I was taken aback by something I experienced during the opening act. A stand-up comedian named Emo Philips opened the show. Philips’ onstage persona is an oddball autistic type, and his material is generally self-deprecating, ironic, and full of absurdism and clever wordplay - very much in the same vein as the style of humor that appeals to Weird Al’s fans. The first thing Philips said that raised an eyebrow for me was the statement, “I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who wasn’t bullied.” This got a relatively positive vocal response from the crowd. Then a bit later, he started talking about COVID. “How many people in here have a vaccination card?” (Wild applause and raised hands.) “Now, be honest, how many people here have a fake vaccination card?” (Some scattered hoots and raised hands.) “See, those are great, because you get to have the vaccination card and you can still die of COVID-19!” (Raucous laughter and cheers.) My brother and I, both right-wing COVID skeptics, shared an exasperated look, but the joke sure seemed to kill with this crowd. Later in the set, Philips made some more political comments and jokes, basically along the lines of how “you Californians shouldn’t let anyone make fun of you for being from this state, because they’re just all extremely jealous and resentful.” Now, I am well-aware that comedians play to their crowd, and that this stuff all could have just been naked pandering to the local sensibilities; maybe when he does a set in Tulsa, he tells mocking jokes about COVID paranoia and the scourge of Californian transplants. Still, I found it extremely odd that he would get political at a Weird Al concert - Al’s music is decidedly non-political and infamously inoffensive - and, moreover, that he predicted (correctly) that this type of material would do so well with this crowd in this context.

However, after the show, I reflected on this, and I concluded that it’s not surprising at all. I bet if you took a poll of the political affiliation of the audience at a Weird Al concert in any venue around the country, no matter how deep-red, the results would show overwhelmingly left-of-center. You would get a lot of open SJ progressives - I certainly saw a number of individuals in the crowd whose dress, demeanor, and mask-wearing marked them as MSNBC devotees - and almost certainly the farthest-right you would get would be “both parties are crooked, throw the bums out” apathetic centrism. The demographics of this crowd were overwhelmingly - quite possibly exclusively - white, middle-class, college-educated, and above-average IQ. Even above those reliable correlates of Blue Tribe affiliation, though, there was an additional set of selection effects that would skew the politics of this particular fandom.

Al’s oeuvre - not only his music, but also his cult-classic film UHF and his various other comedic endeavors - is clever, self-deprecating, absurdist, full of obscure cultural references, and, well, weird. His parodies generally take mass-culture popular works, strip them of their cultural context, and transfigure them into absurdist comedy songs totally disconnected from - and appealing to a very different audience from - the source material; many of Al’s parodies, especially his parodies of hip-hop songs, introduced the original songs to an audience who would otherwise have had no engagement with the pop-culture apparatus that generated them.

This sense of being outside of the mainstream, and of only engaging with it in an ironic, deconstructive, and alienated way is a key element of his appeal; this phenomenon is probably best exemplified by his song “White And Nerdy”, a parody of the rapper Chamillionaire’s hit “Ridin’”, which became an anthem for his socially-awkward (and overwhelmingly white) fan-base. I would wager that nearly everyone in that concert venue last night considers himself or herself “an outsider”. Not in any concrete demographic/“identity” sense - fre if any of these people qualify as a member of a recognized “marginalized community” - but in the sense of belonging to a fictive identity centered on personality traits and aesthetic preferences outside of, or in opposition to, “normie” culture.

Decades before the Marvel ascendancy catapulted “nerd culture” into the mainstream, Al cultivated a following among genuine weirdos and the socially maladroit. Even though they’re no longer truly “outcasts” in any important material sense, their internal self-image is still tied to their sense of being simultaneously victimized by and superior to the people who comprise the “normal” or “mainstream” culture. This affective orientation is a central component of leftism in an atavistic, visceral, pre-political sense. People with that orientation, of course, also tend to gravitate strongly toward leftism in the political sense.

There is also an additional component to Weird Al’s music - a slightly “darker” side, if you will - that tends toward poking fun at certain characteristics of what might be considered natural outgroups for the people to whom he appeals. I recall, years ago, reading a thinkpiece - I believe it was in Slate, but I don’t care enough to check - in which the author argued that Al’s song “Word Crimes” (a parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, in which Al assumes the character of a pedantic grammar-Nazi taking the listener to task for making various common grammar/spelling errors) reveals the elitism and “punching down” that underlies much of his work. His popular parody song “Fat” is another great example of this; it’s the type of casual mockery of fatness which would be deeply taboo in most mainstream-media circles today. There is certainly an element of mockery in some of Al’s work, and it all tends to target people who are low-IQ, low-class, and physically unappealing.

While it is indeed odd for a fandom full of self-proclaimed weirdos and outcasts to find such enjoyment in the mockery of other ostensibly subaltern identities, I don’t actually think there’s much of a contradiction there. While being fat, poor, uneducated, and lacking in middle-class cultural capotal are all markers of an “outsider”, they’re markers of a very different kind of outsider than the modal Weird Al fan. They’re the qualities that a middle-class nerd would associate, on a conscious or subconscious level, with the Red Tribe. Never mind what any empirical data say about which identity groups are most likely to be poor, fat, and stupid; in the mind of an urban white nerd, when you say “imagine a fat and stupid person” the mental image conjured is always a conservative rural white. And if you have built your identity around finding ways to be different from, and superior to, that class of people, you will find your prejudices well-reflected in the Democratic coalition. Is it actually true that a white jock is more likely to bully you than a member of the black underclass? Certainly not - unless you don’t know any underclass blacks, and the white jock is the only thing remotely like an enemy that you have any experience with. That doesn’t matter, though; what matters is whom you identify with, or more importantly whom you identify in opposition to, that’s determinative of your political tribe.

I often ask myself, “Why were you a leftist when you were younger. What about it appealed to you?” And the inescapably obvious answer is that it provided me with an outlet to express my sense of contempt for, and superiority to, regular run-of-the-mill non-nerdy white people. It was pure atavistic chauvinism that led me to identify with the “nerd culture” of the time - which had not yet become fully commercialized at that time - and with pseudo-“outsider” figures like Weird Al Yankovic. I was lamenting to my brother that if my political views were somehow made known to those in that room, many if not nearly all of them would want to see me hounded out of the room and banned from any venue they expect to attend in the future. I might be an outsider - in a much more important material sense than whatever these people still think marks them as outsiders - but I’m an outsider of the wrong kind, and there’s probably no longer any room for me in the coalition of the fake, self-indulgent, marginalized-in-their-own-heads community that comprised the people in that room last night.

I mean, look, you’re talking to a white identitarian, so obviously I’m in vociferous agreement that there’s nothing wrong with white men. However, I think you have at best a surface-level grasp of what serious leftists actually mean when they talk about “systemic white supremacy”. It’s far more sophisticated than a simple attribution of malice to white men.

So, I do want to make it abundantly clear that I am a genuinely passionate decades-long fan of Weird Al’s work, and if you’re accusing him specifically of lacking a sense of love and vision, I think that accusation is baseless. I’m intimately familiar with the world of pretentious, artificial status-signaling art you’re referring to, but I cannot stress enough that Weird Al’s work, like his life as a whole, has always been characterized by a palpable sense of joy and authenticity. The people in that room last night were, overwhelmingly, not there to impress anybody or signal status. Al’s work is far too lowbrow and affable to appeal to genuinely pretentious “artsy-fartsy” people, and being a Weird Al fan carries no cultural caché. He’s basically only respected by a) comedians, who largely revere him both for being a legendarily nice and wholesome human being, and b) Gen X and millennial white nerds who wouldn’t enjoy an arthouse film or post-modern novel any more than you would.

Your points as a whole are astute and absolutely well-taken, but I cherish Weird Al too much to let anything I’ve said give the false impression that he himself is a sneering progressive MAGA-hater. I’m confident that his personal politics are standard-issue Gen X California liberalism, but he’s certainly not shoving that down anybody’s throat, and he happily plays to audiences in Red states and Blue. I’m just saying that his work carries a set of implicit themes that naturally appeal to a subset of the population to whom culturally-left politics also appeal, whether or not he has any conscious intent for that to happen.

In what sense are literature, chess, ballet, and figure skating “progressive cultural elements”? If you just mean that in the current year the average Westerner who is interested in one of those four things is more likely to identify as progressive than as conservative, you’re not wrong, but I see absolutely nothing about any of the four that could even remotely be said to be inherently progressive.

This post reads like a right-winger’s uncharitable parody of a rich liberal Jewish douchebag. You spent more money than my entire paycheck on pointless degeneracy, then on a random whim you bought some bum candy - not something useful that might get him through any extended period of time, but a bit of pointless temporary hedonism - sort of like your trip to the strip club, but in miniature - and now you’re congratulating yourself like you’re some kind of saint.

I’m perfectly happy to embrace being your enemy. As far as I’m concerned, what we as a society do with Smokey and Sean and Matt us that we take them far away, to some ranch estate owned by the government, and then they never come back. As for what happens at that estate, I’m not picky. Maybe it’s like an asylum, maybe it’s a labor camp, maybe they just put them to sleep. That’s pretty much where I’m at with it. I don’t need to suffer every day so that you can keep Smokey and Matt around as props to flatter your own undeserved sense of moral superiority or rub them in our faces.

He isn’t, but this piece specifically reads like the Jewish version of the rich liberal douchebag. The unprovoked attacks on supposed Christian hypocrisy, the elevation of telescopic philanthropy over normal human relational networks (at least for non-Jews), the empty moral preening.

The OP calls himself “a heeb”, so his Jewishness was made explicit and relevant by himself, not me.

While I am a strong proponent of conservative urbanism, and I wholeheartedly agree with your choice of Singapore as a model example, I think you’re barking up a wrong tree by positing Singapore’s ethnic diversity as a counterpoint to American concerns about racial issues in contemporary urban society.

Yes, Singapore has a variety of different native East Asian and South Asian ethnicities. None of those ethnic groups is remotely close to American blacks in terms of their propensity to crime, their inability to maintain an orderly and peaceful society, or their glowering hostility to other races, constantly threatening to boil over into stochastic interpersonal violence.

When 21st-century Americans complain that cities are too diverse, what they really mean is that there are too many blacks. Full stop. You cannot possibly make sense of discussions of race in America if you interpret the term “diversity” literally and naïvely. Our cities would work just fine if they were 30% white, 30% Asian, and 30% Jewish. This isn’t my optimal society, but it would absolutely be orderly and pleasant.

Violent crime. Again, Malays don’t remotely compare to American blacks on that axis. Yes, American blacks improved significantly on certain metrics - literacy, legitimacy rates, employment - in the first half of the 20th century relative to where they had been previously, but even that “improved” state was still bad in absolute terms. I really think you’re underestimating the vast disparities in violent crime that define current American race relations.

What even is this comment? The vast majority of the things we discuss in this forum have no objective answer. That’s what makes them interesting, and why they are able to sustain extensive conversation. If there was an objective way to look at things, you could just look it up and there wouldn’t be much to discuss. It seems like your comment is a fully-general argument against most of what this community is all about.

It’s just simply false that /r/nba is immune to conflict. Were you on that sub during the summer of 2020, when the Bucks refused to play a game because of the Jacob Blake thing, and the sub exploded into conflict until the mods came down like a hammer and began micro-managing all conversation involving anything race-related or political?

I second @Nantafiria in admonishing you to take this question to a forum which is not so unanimously “anti-woke” as this one; it’s not that you’re not going to get any insightful answers at all here, but rather that you’re not going to get any insight into what wokeness feels like from the inside, which seems to be what you’re asking for.

That being said, I’m going to give you my best attempt to describe what an actual “woke” (fair warning, I’m going to continue to put this word in scare quotes, because I believe that it’s intentionally under-defined and contains several motte-and-bailey imprecisions which are designed to be exploited) person thinks about when pondering the kinds of issues you’re asking about. Depending on which definition of “woke” you have in mind, I would have qualified as “woke” when I was in college a decade ago. I was exposed to many of these ideas several years before they exploded onto the mainstream, so I feel like I was exposed to a purer version of them, less adulterated and packaged for consumption by the general public than the strains of “wokeness” we see now.

The most important through-line connecting the various strains of “wokeness” is a belief in the centrality of power relations to every aspect of human life and society in a post-agricultural world. In the Marxist-Hegelian telling, the primordial state of humanity - what we would call the hunter-gatherer model of society - was profoundly egalitarian and non-hierarchical; every person was expected to contribute to the collective good in an amount commensurate with his or her ability to do so, and everyone understood the importance of providing for those members of society who could not “pull their own weight” - children, the elderly, the infirm/disabled, etc.

It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture that human societies began to be plagued by the twin evils of surplus and centralized political institutions, which produced a class of rent-seeking parasitic elites who could hoard surplus resources for themselves. This class had to overcome the perception of their own illegitimacy which would have been viscerally felt by all of the vast majority of people who were not members of that class; in order to defuse and redirect that resentment, that class of rent-seekers must have been incredibly adept at narrative-weaving - in creating powerful narratives which legitimated their privileged position. Priest-craft was certainly integral to that narrative-weaving, as was a sophisticated network of power-brokerage in which the privileged class could utilize leverage and patronage to play various factions of society against each other.

Why else would the mass of society, dispossessed by these rent-seekers, and having a vague pre-conscious ancestral memory of the idyllic egalitarian before-times, not simply rise up against these pathetic elites and reclaim their birthright? The fact that they didn’t is a powerful testament to the centrality and potency of narrative - specifically, elite-crafted narratives which legitimate hierarchy, inequality, and state power - in human society.

Hegel even talks explicitly in strangely religious, post-Christian terms about this. He references the metaphor of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, and he subverts this metaphor by saying that there is no literal god or Eden, but that this allegory actually represents the way that humanity was robbed of its idyllic anarcho-primitivist birthright by the advent of inegalitarian states. For Hegel, and subsequently for Marx in an attenuated and less explicitly religious sense, the teleological goal of humanity is to reclaim that birthright: to rebuild Eden, to dismantle the unjust structures who took it from us against our will by weaving webs of lies and cynical narratives.

So, you have an ideology to which the following axioms are central: 1. Hierarchical and unequal power relations are a (contingent) fact of human society; 2. The inherent injustice of those power relations is masked by self-serving narratives created and propagated by the class of individuals who benefit from those unequal power relations; 3. Some of those individuals may be intentionally creating and manipulating those narratives, but the majority of the individuals in the privileged class simply imbibe and repeat those narratives without investigating the truth value of those narratives, since to do so would be to risk delegitimizing the structures that allow their lifestyle to persist; 4. The only way to dismantle these unjust structural power relations - short of mass revolutionary violence, anyway - is to rhetorically deconstruct, attack, dismantle, and replace the legitimating narratives. You must first identify what those narratives are, which means you must constantly be vigilant against them. This vigilance sometimes requires a great deal of sophistication, because the narratives themselves are so sophisticated and are protected by a network of legitimating institutions which grant the narratives the armor of their support.

So, let’s look at discussions about race through that lens. First off, we have a clear example of a form of social capital which some people have and others don’t; those who have it enjoy a position of rent-seeking privilege, while those who don’t are barred from the privileged class and suffer accordingly. The social currency in question is whiteness. (Or, if you want to get even more sophisticated and up-to-date, you might even say “not-blackness”, as many black post-Marxists - see Charles Blow’s recent op-ed about the Nury Martinez debacle in Los Angeles for an example - predict the rise of a form of “lite supremacy” in which the racially privileged caste will continue to expand to encompass Asians, Latinos without significant African ancestry, and any other group that isn’t Black.)

Now that you’ve identified the vector along which this particular dynamic of unequal hierarchy is constructed, you then have to ferret out the narrative that people have internalized in order to legitimate that narrative. Remember: the default primordial state of humanity is egalitarian and does not recognize hierarchical distinctions between individuals, so any time you identify a hierarchy, there must, by definition, be a narrative preventing people from seeing it and instinctively revolting against it. So, what’s the narrative legitimating racial inequality? And, more importantly, what are the institutions that are propping that narrative up by granting it the imprimatur of their support?

The narrative, of course, is that this inequality is inevitable due to some inherent difference between classes of people, and any attempts to rectify this inequality will fail because it’s built-in. Big surprise there - this is the exact same form that every other hierarchy-legitimating narrative takes. The convenience of this narrative for the class of people benefiting from it is manifestly obvious and impossible to miss. How wonderful for you, the possessor of the social capital whiteness, that you just happen to be in the “biologically superior” caste, and there’s nothing we can ever do to change that, because the subaltern caste is just inherently worse than you. Nothing more to see here, folks, now get back to toiling and suffering while whitey hoards the fruit of your misery.

What’s the legitimating institution that protects this narrative? Well, it used to be the church. Their narrative was something like “God cursed Noah’s son Ham for looking upon his father’s nakedness, and now the descendants of Ham carry that ancestral curse which has made them natural slaves to the descendants of Japheth and Shem. It is God’s will, nothing we can do about it.” Or, at other times, instead of the descendants of Ham, blacks were said to bear the Mark of Cain, but the effect was the same. Well, we eventually deconstructed and delegitimated that particular narrative, and the institution which legitimated it now bears only a fraction of the power it once held; very few people uncritically internalize narratives propagated by churches anymore, at least not ones that contradict egalitarianism. So, the privileged caste needed to find a replacement institution to pass the narrative baton to, and they needed to do it in a hurry. Well, conveniently, the institution of Science™️ was there to step into the breach.

Science™️ is a very slick and effective power-legitimating institution, partly because it superficially seems to act in opposition to the old, defeated institutions such as the Church, and partially because it is so good at presenting itself as Objective and Narrative-Free. Once the proto-Marxists (the Enlightenment thinkers) showed up and dealt a knock-out blow to the Church, they had to then be co-opted by a narrative that allowed them to enter the privileged caste! Good lord, power-legitimating narratives are memetically powerful and infinitely-malleable, which is why we have to work so damn hard to relentlessly sniff them out. Now, the practitioners of Science™️ had obtained a form of social capital called Knowledge, and this allowed them to speak authoritatively and to, once again, intimidate the disempowered masses into submission. Do what you’re told, plebs, the Knowers have decreed that inequality is inevitable because some people are naturally worse than others. Conveniently, we the Knowers look and sound very similar to the guys who previously told you that their privilege is natural. Hell, in many cases they’re literally the same guys! But, nothing we can do about it. God - er, sorry, Science - made it this way. Get back to work!

Even if some of what the scientists are saying has some factual basis, that doesn’t excuse the fact that they are helping to once again lend legitimacy to the eternal narrative that powerful privileged people deserve their power. Our most important goal is to defeat that narrative. Everything else is secondary.

My position is something close to White Nationalism, and I’ve been open about that since joining the community. I know that there are others here who hold similar views, although I don’t know how many of them openly identify with that term or that cluster of identifiers.

It seems like you might be setting the bar for “out-and-out Nazis/White Nationalists” very unreasonably high, if “gas the Jews” is the cutoff point. I don’t know a single person, even in the most “extreme” White Nationalist spaces I frequent, who would advocate a repeat of the Holocaust. Obviously that’s not what qualifies someone as a White Nationalist.

Certainly something like Trey Parker and Matt Stone wearing dresses to the Oscars is not remotely sexual. Similarly, many college fraternity houses host events where obviously-straight men dress in women’s clothing as a gag. Your question also made me think of the film Sorority Boys and the TV show Bosom Buddies, as well as a number of the films @FiveHourMarathon named already. In every one of these scenarios, the act is not transgressive of hegemonic gender norms at all; in fact, I would say that each of these instances of cross-dressing actually explicitly reinforces traditional gender roles/presentation by presenting the image of a man in women’s clothes as inherently absurd, gross, and comical. The entire joke is “isn’t it weird seeing these dudes dress like women, look how ugly they are, how hilarious to imagine that anyone could actually fall for this transparently unconvincing charade”.

I would contrast these instances of cross-dressing with drag. Drag, as a tradition, has always been aggressively sexual, involving not only bawdy jokes but also a funhouse-mirror, highly-stereotyped presentation of female sexuality. The recent attempt to whitewash drag as a harmless family-friendly form of clowning is transparently cynical. As an analogy, if I invited Mia Khalifa to come read a book to a group of kids, it would be inappropriate and inherently sexual even if she spent the entire event dressed conservatively and never mentioned her career. This is because I could have invited literally any person on Earth to come do this, but I specifically chose her. I went out of my way to put a porn actress in front of kids, instead of, I don’t know, a firefighter or a trash collector or, hell, any type of performer whose milieu is genuinely family-friendly, like a juggler.

The kids are going to be curious about what the odd-looking person reading a book to them does for a living. They’re going to have questions about why this tall and broad-shouldered individual is caked with makeup and wearing women’s nightwear. They’re going to be tempted to learn more, simply as a result of the healthy natural curiosity of children. The choice to invite a drag queen specifically is engineered to produce this result and to increase children’s curiosity toward, and openness toward, alternative gender presentation which is heavily sexualized.

Recently I was asked, as happens periodically in this forum, to clarify my position on that thorniest of thorny questions: The Jewish Question. Specifically, @faceh asked me, after I had criticized his equating White Nationalism with statements about “gassing the Jews”, whether I would support the removal of all Jewish individuals from positions of power in White countries. Work stuff pulled me away for a few days and I’ve been unable to answer his question, but I think it’s a useful opportunity for a larger post.

I’ve spoken before about how my conception of Whiteness can be modeled as a series of concentric circles. The central circle - the cluster of the most archetypally and uncontroversially representative examples of Whiteness - consists, roughly, of the historic populations of what can broadly be called Northwestern Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia minus Finland, the Low Countries, Northern France) plus the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe and the Tyrol, as well as the diaspora populations of these ethnic groups in the New World. Some ardent Nordicists would stop here and say that only people who fit into this first circle count as properly White, but this is a fringe position and not one to which I subscribe. My ancestry is 100% British Isles on all sides as far back as I can trace it, which is hundreds of years, so I don’t object to the Nordicist position out of any personal conflict of interest, but it seems to me that any conception of Whiteness that leads you to conclude that the Romans weren’t white is just a massive own-goal.

So, then we move on to the second circle, in which we find the populations of Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Southern France, Finland, Hungary, and arguably the West Slavs and the Balts. All of these ethnicities have certain aspects that make them non-central examples of Whiteness - such as partial admixture from non-White substrates, like the Finns and the Iberians, or speaking a non-Indo-European language, in the case of the Hungarians and the Finns. Still, these are very White-looking people, relatively speaking, and their cultures have all played an important part in European history.

Past that, you get to a third circle, encompassing the South and East Slavs, the Romanians/Moldovars, the Maltese, the Sicilians, and the modern Greeks. The boundaries of this circle are blurry, and there are certainly aspects of these cultures which strike members of the central circle as quite distinctly foreign, which is part of why nativists and White Nationalists of the early 20th century vociferously resisted the mass immigration of these peoples into Anglosphere countries. Many of these ethnic groups contain very significant recent genetic admixture from non-European conqueror groups. An argument can be made (and sometimes is made) to exclude this circle from discussions of Whiteness. For me personally, though, any model of Whiteness that kicks out Tchaikovsky and Nikola Tesla is, again, an avoidable own-goal. The outer edges of this circle is where pretty much any commonly-used understanding of Whiteness would stop, though. There’s one glaring exception, though, and that is Ashkenazi Jews.

If you ask the average American if Jews are White, he’ll probably say yes, although it’s likely he hasn’t really thought much about it. If you show him a picture of, say, the Beastie Boys, he’ll readily and without hesitation identify it as a trio of White guys - he might not even be aware that they’re Jewish; still, if he reflects a bit on Jewish history and the fraught relationship between Jews and gentile Whites, he might concede that the question is complicated. And indeed it is! On the Dissident/White Identitarian Right, the question of whether or not Jews are White is generally considered to have been definitively answered - in the negative - and has been for some years now. However, there are some of us in that sphere who aren’t totally comfortable with nor confident about that answer.

I’ve spoken before about my warm feelings toward Jewish culture and Jewish people. The first girl I ever loved was (and still is!) Jewish, and my most recent long-term relationship was with a Jewish woman. The Jewish approach to comedy forms a foundational piece of my sense of humor: clever, heavily verbally-oriented, sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times neurotic, and suffused with a general sense of unease and alienation. From an early age, I strongly related to the Jewish intellectual tradition: contrarian, relentlessly critical and deconstructive, never taking anything at face value or uncritically accepting a proposition. It’s a culture that venerates intelligence, high verbal IQ, and the ability and willingness to argue. I strongly considered converting to Judaism for years, because I suspected that I would feel at home in that tradition. (And could land a beautiful Jewish woman - I have a type, and the Ashkenazi female phenotype epitomizes it.)

So, when I started getting deeper into the Dissident Right sphere, I found the discussion of the “JQ” to be by far the most difficult part to digest. While there is still a healthy Jew-welcoming (or, at least, Jew-neutral) faction of the White Right (Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has never publicly recanted his statement about Jews - “They look White to me!” and Paul Gottfried and Nathan Cofnas are still important rightist voices), the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today. I tend to keep my head down when the Jew stuff comes up in those spaces, simply because I know I’ll be shouted down and potentially singled out for suspicion as a subversive/infiltrator. But, the doubts and reservations I feel internally have not been resolved to my satisfaction.

Basically, I place Ashkenazi Jews in a nebulous fourth Circle of Whiteness. This peripheral circle’s boundaries are in flux, and ethnic groups in this circle can drop out or drift into this circle based on political and material developments within their own cultures. Groups that orbit in this circle also include the Japanese, the South Koreans, Latin American mestizos, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Indian Brahmins, and Arabs. The history of relations between these groups and the more central circles of Whiteness is incredibly fraught, and filled with periods of violence and persecution, conquest, inter-ethnic competition, and mistrust. Arabs and Turks were the great racial/religious enemy of Europeans for centuries, with enormous bloodshed and iterated conquests on both sides; on the flip side, they were on the forefront of scientific/cultural advances during a time of severe cultural regression and stagnation in Europe, and Arab/Turkish scholars were primarily responsible for preserving the works of the great Greco-Roman thinkers during that same time when White Europeans were busy abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of that tradition. Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class, which contributed greatly to the animosity so many Europeans felt toward them; however, they were also massively overrepresented in vitally-important technical fields such as medicine. Something like two-thirds of doctors in medical Germany were Jews, meaning that countless gentile White lives were saved or immeasurably improved by Jews.

The great question, to my mind, when it comes to this fourth circle is: will these groups ever see themselves as White? Obviously these groups are always going to be peripheral to Whiteness; nobody is ever going to see a Japanese person as just as white as a Dutchman. However, with the looming population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more generally, we could be approaching a situation in which it will become necessary for the civilizations of the Global North to begin mounting a coordinated defense against the waves of migration that could soon begin spilling out of the Global South. In the same way that Christian Europeans had to bury their long-standing inter-ethnic enmities in order to present a unified front against Saracen and Turk invaders, it may be necessary for societies above a certain level of material and cultural development to bury the hatchet and form a phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap. If such a scenario arises, civilizations such as China, India and Iran may have to make the crucial choice about whether or not they want to stand with Europeans, in a united Eurasian front - a Fortress Eurasia, if you will - to repel the invaders, or whether to actively join or facilitate the invaders as they overwhelm and annihilate the already weakened and degenerated peoples of Europe and the Anglosphere.

If such a scenario arises, I want these civilizations on my side. (“I never thought I would die side-by-side with an Arab.” “What about a friend?”) Under such conditions, a criterion of “White enough” will necessarily be sufficient. Jews are well within the “White enough” category, as far as I’m concerned, and I wish that others on the White Right would not be so cavalier about continuing to ignite the already-burning bridge with an ethnic group that still has the capacity to become a powerful ally, but which also had the possibility to continue its development into an equally powerful and implacable enemy.

So, the Jewish Question is actually a series of questions, and some of those questions need to be answered by Jews themselves. I don’t know how many Jews, or what percentage of Jews, see themselves as my enemy, or are likely to act as my enemies as worldwide racial conflict begins to boil over. I’m open to believing that the answer isn’t as dire as many on my side believe. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still trying to talk it out.

I think that Jews are White, but that the organized political and economic wing of international Jewry does not see itself that way, and is acting against the interests of White people. This isn’t true only of Jews, though; they have (inexplicably) found eager allies and collaborators among a certain subset of gentile Whites, who are working hand-in-hand with them in the dispossession of Whites. Part of having White racial consciousness is, as far as I’m concerned, wanting to safeguard the welfare even of White people who don’t want the help. Rescuing wayward, confused Whites is non-negotiably important, in my opinion - saving Whites from themselves and opening their eyes to what has been done to them with their own ostensible (if compromised) consent. Basically I think that a great number of Jews fall into that category of “wayward Whites who can still be brought back into the fold before it’s too late”, although my confidence in that proposition continues to waver.