OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I accept your compliment!
OliveTapenade
6d ago
This is actually also my experience being an (Australian) tourist in Europe.
I doubt it says anything about race, because English people, who are by any definition the same race as me, were also enthusiastically inviting me to stay in their homes and to give me meals and to take me to the places they felt were most important to them.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Why would you see anything unflattering on Caz's channel? The channel is curated. Obviously he's not going to post things that make him look bad. Indeed, why would you think that you can draw general conclusions about anything from this? The videos are not unvarnished reality.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I'm another Australian and I'm also on the anti-city side, actually. I don't live all the way out in the country, but on the fringe of a city, and I cannot imagine living somewhere that isn't within walking distance of nature. I really value the ability to walk somewhere and just experience... silence. Or not even silence, but rather the absence of artificial sound. Take away the sounds of the human-created world and there is still sound, but wind, water, birds, the creaking of trees, it's all of a different character.
I've travelled a bit and lived in small villages for a time, and I enjoy them much more. I generally find that the extent to which I enjoy being in a settlement in another country is inversely proportional to that settlement's size. New York, London, etc., contained things I wanted to see, but the cities themselves were fundamentally unpleasant places to be. By contrast, living in a small, lightly-settled area for a time has something rejuvenating about it.
One thing I might suggest - have you ever visited a monastic community? Some monasteries, abbeys, etc., host guests, often if their religious tradition values hospitality. They're usually built in quiet places away from major population centres, and you can stay for a week in the guest room. Better yet, they're also often cut off from the internet or telecommunications, so even those distractions are removed. I find it an experience that really helps to restore me to myself, if that makes sense? For the first day or two it can be a bit difficult, but by the seventh I can feel almost a bit brokenhearted to have to go back into the world.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Yes, that makes sense to me - there's an audience of people who like the idea of D&D more than they like D&D itself, and by 'idea of D&D' what I mean is a bunch of colourful zany characters quipping and having lighthearted adventures in a fantasy world.
One of the things I find most striking about D&D fans today is the level of, well, historical amnesia many of them seem to have? In theory one of the selling points of D&D 5e was the idea of legacy. The thing that makes D&D different and special, compared to competitor fantasy RPGs, is its history. D&D has been going since the 70s and it has a tremendous history to draw on. 5e core was definitely trying to evoke a lot of that history.
But if I look at talk around D&D today, I am regularly shocked by ignorance of that history. I don't even mean things like the way that Gygax-era D&D was closer to a wargame, had very little characterisation, and would have four GMs and twenty players around the same table all playing in real time, but even quite broad things in living memory. I recently watched Noah Gervais' take on Diablo and something that shocked me, in the section on the first game, is the way he blandly asserts, "Today the focus of something like D&D is much more about the imaginative aspects, the performative aspects. 90s D&D, AD&D, hewed closer to its name - dungeon-crawling, monster-hunting, complicated rules to facilitate each."
And that's not only incorrect, it's the exact opposite of correct. AD&D2e is the edition that games like Baldur's Gate were trying to evoke. It was the era when story was absolute king, when the game was played via these extremely story-heavy railroaded modules, where every campaign setting under the sun was getting incredibly detailed write-ups, and recurring characters were at their most popular. It's the era of the Drizzt craze, when approximately a million Dragonlance novels were published (based on published adventure modules from the 80s!), and every player had their own good-hearted rebel drow or half-elf archer with a troubled past. The story and setting and continuity got so elaborate that when 3rd edition came around in the early 2000s, it was marketed as a back-to-basics game, dropping all the increasingly-inaccessible storytelling in favour of a return to just kicking down doors and killing monsters. Late 80s and 90s AD&D is the most story-obsessed D&D has ever been.
But this is something that you only know, it seems, if you were around and played D&D in the 90s. I feel like now we have a crop of players who believe that story only started with 5e or with those streamed gameplay sessions, and who mentally write off everything before it as a dark age of decontextualised dungeon-crawling.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I'm in group two. I'm all right with real-time - I didn't mind the later Dragon Age games - but I really don't like the tone and aesthetic of 5e D&D. It's hard to find an actual word for this, but there's the snarky tone, there's a kind of millennial/Gen-Z atmosphere of taking nothing too seriously, and the prominent presence of things like tieflings. (Yes, Haer'Dalis was a tiefling in BG2, but I mean the very standard sexy red-skin-and-tail-and-horns tiefling design that's everywhere now.) I can't define it all that well, but anything pre-3e wasn't afraid to be sincere or even corny, and I find that tone is missing.
BG1 and BG2 contained jokes. I can't deny that. But there's a sensibility that I struggle to put into words. Maybe this sensibility is related to streamers like Critical Role. I don't know, because I've never watched an RPG stream, and frankly think the idea sounds awful and unpleasant. But maybe they were a contributor to a shift like that?
But certainly the reason I steered away from BG3 is because I thought it looked like 2020s-WotC-D&D, rather than 1990s-TSR-D&D. It didn't look like Baldur's Gate.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
How would you say it compares to BG1 or BG2? Do you think it would appeal to the kind of person who enjoyed those games in the 90s?
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I have not played any of them, actually. To be honest I haven't played BG3 either, so I'm relying on osmosis here, but certainly the impression I have received has not been flattering, in terms of worldbuilding.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I believe there's a G. K. Chesterton passage somewhere about age and fatigue in a society. A society created last week might have very high average age, and be senescent and likely to die soon; a society created a thousand years ago might be full of vigorous members of a young age, and set for the future. I wonder if something similar might apply - the more a people's storytelling is obsessed with the young, the new, the innovation, the deconstructive, the more that's a sign of the people's age and stagnation. Meanwhile retelling the old classics is not a sign of decrepitude, but rather one of vigour.
If nothing else, what types of stories do you tell to children? It's the old classics and the tried-and-true. Daring deconstructions are stories for old, cynical people. The young and vital like to hear the same old thing.
That said, I think there are some older stories out there if you look for them, though sometimes you might have to look to non-Western developers. I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
As regards structural changes in how games are made, I wonder if it would be useful to compare similar works written by the same authors?
To take a straightforward example - has Chris Metzen's writing, for instance, gotten better or worse over time? I'd argue that the original Starcraft has a compelling, well-written plot that serves the needs of its gameplay very well, but that Starcraft II is less well-written. This isn't the case for every mission, and of course some blame might attach to other SC2 authors like Brian Kindregan or James Waugh, but given that SC2's epilogue was all Metzen, and it's by far the worst part of that game's story, and of course he was involved in overall story development, it still seems a reasonable comparison.
Likewise his other franchises - World of Warcraft infamously has a horrible, broken plot, but how does it compare to Metzen's works in the 90s and early 2000s, like Warcraft II or Warcraft III? On the one hand, as much as WC3 is remembered as having a good plot, if you read it with clear eyes it's obvious that its script is extremely rough. (I am generally a big advocate for only judging game stories in the context of gameplay, rather than ripped out and read in isolation, but even just on the line-to-line level, a lot of this dialogue is just bad.) Perhaps you could make a case that Metzen's story writing ability was always relatively mediocre, especially when it comes to naturalistic dialogue (certainly his biggest weakness), and as such the restricted environments of WC2 or SC1 played to his strengths and concealed his weaknesses.
So if we consider a few possibilities, it strikes me as plausible that he hasn't gotten worse, but rather the more high-fidelity environments of modern games have made his shortcomings more evident. There might be something like the shift between theatre and stage - in SC1, for instance, detailed character acting is impossible, so every character speaks in long, hammy monologues, and dramatic speeches and over-the-top voice-acting need to carry most of the personality. Characters cannot emote any other way. Metzen's writing suits this style quite well, or perhaps that style trained him at an early stage to write in this super-broad, hammy way. However, this style is much less well-suited for a game like SC2, which has cutscenes shot much more like an animated TV show.
Anecdotally I feel like I see a similar transition in other game series, even if writers there have changed over time. If I compare the writing in Baldur's Gate II to the writing in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's hard to resist the feeling that there's been a significant step down somewhere. Even going from BG2 to the critically-acclaimed Baldur's Gate III, it's hard to avoid the feeling that setting detail and plausibility, immersion, character depth, appealing dialogue, etc., have all taken a step for the worse. (Admittedly for setting this might be in part because BG2 was directly based on the extremely-high-quality setting material of AD&D2e, which for my money remains the apogee of D&D worldbuilding.)
Or even if we step away from RPGs - you're correct that going from Marathon to Halo Infinity feels like a major decline, but even within the same series, I'd argue that if you play the original Halo: Combat Evolved today, its writing is remarkably snappy and evocative, and compares favourably to its successors. As the series grew more popular, it also grew more bloated? Continuity bloat in long-running series can be a serious issue - this may also be one of Metzen's issues with WoW.
But I'm not sure continuity bloat can cover everything. If you go from the original Fallout (1997) to Fallout 4 (2015), there's a decline that I don't think you can blame entirely on franchise bloat. It might just be a less competent writing team (especially since New Vegas was so high-quality); I'd buy "Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer are just good writers, and most people aren't as good" as an explanation (cf. recent well-written games by them such as Sawyer's Pentiment) in that specific case, but there may be other industry-wide trends as well.
So while part might be just that I remember good writing from the 90s but not the bad, I would also speculate that the changing nature of game writing due to technological shifts are a factor, as is the natural course of franchise decline and continuity bloat. Most long-running series, and this goes for literature, film, television, etc., decline in quality over time, and games are no different.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
"Never waste a crisis."
The solution to a crisis is always that thing you wanted to do anyway for unrelated reasons. That much just seems like human nature.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Touché.
Mao seems like a good example of the power of institutional structure and ideology, to be honest. The disaster of the Great Leap Forward didn't happen because Mao was an idiot - or at least, not because Mao had low IQ. Neither did it happen because the Chinese in general are low IQ, or have a racial disposition towards stupidity, laziness, fractious and inability to work together, or anything like that. On the contrary, the usual HBD line is that Han Chinese are unusually intelligent, hard-working, and cooperative. And yet they managed to cause the single greatest human calamity in the 20th century (against some stiff competition), and it was entirely self-inflicted!
If nothing else, it seems like a reminder just that, well, organisation and structure matter, and that bad theory and misaligned incentives can do more harm than any putative lack of intelligence.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
It's also relevant, to the best of my knowledge, that the British didn't even try to conquer China in a similar way to India. They wanted Chinese goods, and for China to be subject to their power, certainly, but when British contact with China really started ramping up in the 19th century, they did not want another India. They explicitly didn't want a second India. One subcontinental Asian empire was enough, and the burdens of trying to directly govern and administer China were more than anyone wanted to assume - especially not when it was viable to instead get everything they wanted from China through less extreme means, going through a subject Chinese government.
There are plenty of reasons why the British didn't conquer China the way they did India, but in addition to China being a unitary reasonably powerful country rather than feuding states, and reaching China almost two centuries after reaching India, I think we have to add the fact that they, as a matter of policy, chose not to try. The expense that would have been involved in trying to conquer China just wasn't worth the potential gain, and that's even before we factor in the other European empires with stakes in China that might have objected. It doesn't seem like we need to rush to racial explanations.
This isn't to say that I am rejecting out of hand the idea that there might be genetic differences between Indians and Chinese. Heck, I'm sure there are lots of genetic differences within each category as well - both 'Indian' and 'Chinese' (even if we restrict ourselves to Han!) include a lot of historically divided subgroups. Rather, I just mean that conquest of one but not the other seems plenty explainable by contingent, non-racial factors.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I am conscious of the fact, actually, that I probably engage in too much meta-posting. I fear that's a consequence of spending most of my time reading the Motte, rather than writing new posts, which I usually only do when I feel like I have particular knowledge to contribute. I think my biggest contributions were on the Australian Voice to Parliament, which was an issue where I thought I had a lot to add. That's not always the case.
But I am probably guilty of being one of those posters who does spend more time talking about what I want to see in terms of curation than I do actually providing what I want to see. I should make an effort to work on improving the ratio, I guess.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I've not got a survey of all Holocaust deniers (or revisionists, if you must) on the internet, but at least in places like the Motte, I do seem to notice a correlation between Holocaust denial and a strong interest in Jews?
This conversation started out concerning SecureSignals, and the common theme in SecureSignals' posting history is not deep and pedantic historical analysis that leads him to question established wisdom on a wide range of issues, wherever he sees anything that seems off-kilter, of which the Holocaust is only a single example. The common theme in SecureSignals' posting is Jews.
He makes a lot of posts about Jews that do not involve the Holocaust. He does not make a lot of posts about historical population movements or statistics that do not involve the Holocaust. The theme is Jews.
So just as an explanation, I feel like "SecureSignals hates Jews" seems to fit the evidence better than "SecureSignals has an extremely high regard for historical rigour". Hell, I'll be gracious here - maybe he doesn't hate Jews. I don't know the inside of his heart. But he seems to really want to talk about Jews, in contexts that seem to me to portray them negatively.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
At least some of it has to be to do with culture, doesn't it?
Comparison: why don't forums like this get tiresome New-Atheist-style religion-bashing any more? It's not because that particular type of obnoxious atheist doesn't exist any more. They're out there, and likely much more widely prevalent than Holocaust deniers. I think it's just culture. If you jump on that soapbox now, you don't get a sympathetic ear, or even that much real controversy. Everyone just rolls their eyes at you and calls you boring. Or why don't we get the opposite - devout fundamentalists here to proselytise? I've been on forums that had intelligent, well-spoken fundamentalists who signed up to do that, and did so articulately even in the face of tremendous criticism, and obviously that demographic is still out there.
If the dominant response to Holocaust denial and anti-semitism here was collective eye-rolling, of the sort that indicated that nobody is interested in hearing about it or even arguing with it, I think it would probably fade. But for better or for worse, people go where they think they might have audiences.
The Motte is currently in that sweet spot where 1) Holocaust denial is allowed, which is what most of the comments so far have been alluding to, and 2) Holocaust denial is listened to. It causes controversy. It appears that there is at least a chance that some posters are convinceable, or at least, are open to engage on the topic. The latter point concerns culture, and can't be reduced to rules or mod strategies.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Just for the sake of rigour:
What makes anyone think that this is another other than more Chinese robbers? That it isn't just two hours of misleading vividness?
There are one and a half billion Indians. It is the largest country in the world. Do I believe that a dedicated troll could find two hours of footage of Indians being disgusting or immoral? Certainly. I would be shocked if that weren't the case. I am sure you could easily do the same thing for China or the United States or Egypt or any country of reasonable size.
Meanwhile let's make a quick sanity-check. If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much. They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage. This is even more the case if we look at history. Broadly speaking, which country has been more productive, in terms of art, science, religion, philosophy, engineering, or any similar field? If there's a Chinese advantage, it doesn't look immediately overwhelming, to me. India and China look pretty comparable.
Why should we take this seriously? We ought to predict that such a film could be made regardless of whether its general claims about Indians are true or not. Knowing that, the film presents no compelling reason to believe that its general claim is true.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
Frequently I was met with incredulity here when I suggested that there were people (besides professional artists themselves) who cared about whether art was AI-generated or not.
There certainly are, though in my experience a significant part of that is because AI art has a consistent style, and is consistently of lower quality and inspiration. It's possible that this preference might change if AI art becomes as good or worthwhile as human art - but of course it's also possible that people continue to prefer human art in an 'artisanal' way, much as people prefer individual handicrafts to factory-produced goods, even if the latter are arguably higher-quality.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
This is part of the issue. There's an extent to which I'm willing to engage in fruitless internet debate, and yell at brick walls about how perhaps a certain group of people aren't the source of all evil, but only an extent.
In general what I want to find are thought-provoking, interesting ideas that I couldn't have predicted or would not have otherwise considered, or perspectives from people with life experiences and areas of knowledge far outside my own. But some of the Motte's most popular hobby-horses are the opposite of that - ideas that are predictable, tendentious, and frankly just not very interesting.
It's not about perspectives being right-leaning, necessarily. I hang out and chat in a number of different right-leaning spaces, and they're all very different. The Motte leans more in the nerdy-libertarian-alt-right direction - very few traditional conservatives here, but a lot of people from over-educated progressive backgrounds who are interested in 'heretical' viewpoints, and as such end up constructing big yet idiosyncratic intellectual frameworks for things, and are usually way too online. By contrast, when I hang out with 'normie' conservatives, God-and-guns-and-low-taxes type conservatives, they usually have a wider range of interests, are much less interested in systematising, and have more straightforwardly anti-authoritarian politics. Or for another, when I hang out with religious conservatives, the ones involved with church and activism and doctrine and so on, again the culture is quite different, with its own language and interests. Notably both the normie-conservatives and the religious-right-types would, I think, utterly hate the Motte. I can just seem them in my mind's eye - the former would call the Motte a bunch of pretentious racists with their heads up their own assholes, and the latter would call them un-reconstructed neo-pagan sophists. The right, much like the left, is full of factions and disagreements. The Motte isn't 'right-wing' simpliciter. It leans in the direction of a very particular type of oddball who has been externally characterised as on the right, but is not really at home there.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
I'm not actually familiar with the entire American media landscape, but certainly if you look beyond America, there are plenty of Chinese-owned newspapers, some intended for general consumption and some that specifically appeal to members of the Chinese diaspora. But again, so what? I'm not even sure what you're talking about now. I thought we were talking about The Atlantic, and The Atlantic is not a newspaper. Now, I'm sure you can find in Western media, if you look, articles by ethnically Chinese people that are sympathetic to the PRC, but that's just what we ought to expect.
You return to this "vertically integrated propaganda apparatus". That's a conspiracy. Let me present an alternative hypothesis - you are likely to find Jewish authors independently, without any particular coordination or malice, writing things relevant to them, which, yes, includes concerns about anti-semitism. There doesn't need to be a grand plan or a racial animus to explain the observations that Jews oppose anti-semitism and that Jews tend to be pro-Israel, and that writing by Jews in the media sometimes touches on those themes.
You say that this "presents ethnic advocacy as journalism", but as I said, The Atlantic is not a newspaper. Theo Baker's article is not presented as neutral journalism - The Atlantic doesn't even do that. It's an opinion piece, and its editorial line - anti-semitism is bad, Stanford students are being unfairly hostile to Jewish students, Jewish students are legitimately afraid - is not concealed. Baker's perspective is obvious.
Is this 'advocating for Jewish nationalism'? I mean, it is taking the strong view that being a Zionist or supporting Israel shouldn't be reason to be bullied or harassed. Is that Jewish nationalism? It relates to the Jewish nation, I suppose. Baker makes zero attempt whatsoever to convince people of Zionism, or to argue that people should be supportive of Israel. He actually is moderately sympathetic to concerns about Palestine, and regularly presents his preferred goal as being open and free dialogue, diversity of opinion, and so on. If this is Jewish nationalism, it's a really poor effort. I mean, read the damn thing. This is his position:
And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.
[...]
At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?
When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.
This doesn't read like Jewish or Israeli nationalism. This reads like, "The world is complicated, it's not all black-and-white, so please acknowledge that there's nuance here and don't attack or harass Jewish students." That is a plea for tolerance and understanding.
Now, sure, the article is written to influence public opinion - that is by definition true of all articles. That is the point of any article. There is no visible unique Jewish malice here.
Look, if all you were saying was, "For so-and-so historical reasons Jewish are disproportionately present in media and journalism" (which is true), and "Jews tend to care about Jewish issues, such as anti-semitism or Israel, more than other people do" (also obviously true), and therefore "media and journalism tend to give greater prominence to anti-semitism or Israel than they would otherwise" (seems a reasonable conclusion), I'd have no issue. I myself regularly complain about the media's monomaniacal focus on Israel - a brief comparison between October 7 and the invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh is instructive, where Western countries were hugely-focused on Gaza while ignoring the other, much more successful genocide occurring on the other side of the Middle East. The obvious reason for that is that lots of Americans care about Israel whereas not very many Americans care about Armenia, and yeah, that probably has to do with the fact that there are lots of American Jews and Jews are a historically successful group in America. They have a louder voice. Meanwhile there aren't that many Armenians in America, and they're a less wealthy group, so even if they wanted to, they would have a hard time telling their story.
But that's not in fact what you're saying. You are saying, as far as I can see, not just that Jews tend to be interested in things that affect Jews, but that Jews are this inherently untrustworthy manipulative group who should be automatically assumed to be lying unless there is strong evidence otherwise, and you specifically attribute this to 'HBD', i.e. some racial difference inherent to Jews.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
You didn't include any of that in your comment, so obviously I didn't respond to it. What I was responding to was the long record you have here of taking any instance of Jews writing anything, whether about Jews or not, and insinuating that it's evidence of some malevolent racial character. I asked whether you jump to the same overblown conclusions regardless of the ethnicity of the author - and in my judgement, you don't. It is a unique fixation on Jews.
I repeat: what we have here is an article by a Jew criticising anti-semitism. I have pointed to articles by Asians criticising anti-Asian feeling, by black people criticising anti-black feeling, and, yes, by white people criticising anti-white feeling. (Even if you don't count Middle Easterners as white, Conor Friedersdorf is undoubtedly white and he was criticising racial rhetoric that attacks or vilifies white people for perfectly innocent behaviour. It counts.) If a behaviour is carried out identically by pretty much every racial group, then it hardly seems to be something unique to Jews.
You might want to argue that specifically white identitarianism is not published, whereas other racial groups can publish identitarian content. This is true to an extent. The Atlantic probably wouldn't publish e.g. outright black nationalism of the same kind as white nationalism, but it does tend to publish explicitly pro-black-identity black authors more than it would white authors. That's a hypocrisy. It's just hard to see what if anything that has to do with Jews.
(As a side note here, I would gently remind you that Theo Baker's article isn't advocating for Jewish nationalism or anything like that either. It is just a straightforward piece against anti-semitism. The thrust of the article is not to advocate for special privileges or carve-outs for Jews - not the way that e.g. black authors openly advocate for reparations and other special privileges - but rather just to say "please stop attacking us". It is purely defensive.)
But this is what you always do - anything a Jew says is evidence of the sinister racial character of Jews, no matter how innocuous the thing, or no matter how much people of other cultures do the exact same thing. You cite "the very long history of Jews presenting their one-sided account of a political conflict as "journalism"" as if it isn't completely normal and expected for anyone's account of a political conflict to favour their own side. Hamza El Boudali's account of the conflict at Stanford is completely one-sided. Political tribalism is a human constant. Jews and Palestinians are no different to, say, pro-life and pro-choice journalists.
OliveTapenade
24d ago
That's a dodge. I didn't ask about that. I asked if you make the assumption about every group.
Let's recap:
There's a story in The Atlantic where a Jewish person discusses anti-semitism. There are obviously lots of stories in The Atlantic where people of other ethnicities talk about prejudice against them: it's easy to find articles criticising anti-black racism, anti-Hispanic feeling, and so on. Here are two pieces by Asian authors criticising anti-Asian feeling, for instance. I assume I don't need to do the same with black authors; we all know The Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates.
There are also Atlantic stories that are, broadly speaking, anti-woke, or which criticising identitarianism. The Atlantic publishes Thomas Chatterton Williams and John McWhorter, for instance. Here's an article criticising a form of black activism (I can't tell the author's race; would that count as black in the US?). Meanwhile here's an article by a black person talking about anti-black racism. If you're interested in white people specifically, here's Reihan Salam (who according to the US census is a white person) criticising anti-white rhetoric. Here's Conor Friedersdorf (clearly white) criticising hateful anti-white rhetoric.
You have asserted that the existence of an Atlantic article by a Jewish person criticising anti-semitism is evidence of "a quintessentially Jewish behaviour" to "manipulate public opinion". Well, I think it's true enough that Jewish people want for other people to not hate Jews, and that sometimes they write things to that effect. But there is nothing sinister about that, especially since the very same outlet publishes things by other groups asking people not to hate them! Black authors, Hispanic authors, Asian authors, and yes, even white authors also get published saying, "Please do not hate us as a group."
The objection I have is that you take something very obvious and understandable - a member of an ethnic group writing an article criticising hatred towards that same ethnic group - and, in a way that you apparently do not do with any other group, immediately assert some sort of pan-ethnic deceptive nature. Are Jews a race of lying manipulators for this? Well, by the same logic, so are blacks. And Hispanics. And Asians. And whites. Because they all publish pieces in The Atlantic criticising racial animus towards them. Jewish authors are not acting remotely unusually here - they are acting the same way as everybody else.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
DeSantis claims to have a working class background, but as far as I can tell it's largely fictional. His parents were more-or-less working-class, but he went straight from high school to Yale, was briefly a teacher, and then went to Harvard Law School. He then into the US Navy as an officer. DeSantis himself has never had a blue-collar job.
There's a point where "my father once had a job where he worked with his hands" doesn't count for that much.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
It's only Jews that you'd be that paranoid around, to be clear? Or does every group get the same assumption of bad faith?
You made a claim about the British colonisation of India and the Aztec response to Cortez. Both of those claims are false, and you were challenged on them, and your response is to... what? Assert that the Indo-Aryans somehow prove it as well? Despite not presenting anything that would plausibly indicate that?
And then you somehow pivot to ancient Greece, where Apollo is actually a deity of many things (including prophecy, music, light, disease, archery, healing, etc.), and the only arguments you make are firstly that one of Apollo's many epithets relates to the founding of cities (never mind that that is also true of many other deities), and that... you think one statue of Apollo looks like some guy on Imgur? Okay? This isn't even considering that an ancient Greek 'colony' is something very different to British India.
This is all, frankly, bullshit. You have some sort of general theory about superior racial archetypes - it's basically just a recapitulation of the old Nordic/Aryan category you get from people like Gobineau - but whenever any specific claim based on it turns out to be false, as indeed it does in both your initial examples here, you leap to some other isolated 'fact'.
Let's try to clarify this a bit.
Motte: More attractive, more physically capable people are more likely to successfully reproduce.
Bailey: There is a well-defined Aryo-Nordic race that is recognised across many cultures for its superior beauty and intellectual capacity.
The motte is true, sure. But the position you're arguing for overall is under-specified, you haven't made any actual argument for it beyond gesturing at a handful of isolated observations that fail to cohere into a theory, and whenever any one of those observations is indicated to be false, you ignore it and immediately jump to a completely different observation, often centuries or even millennia away. This is not a real argument.
What are the actual points of evidence here? Some guy on YouTube makes videos of himself flirting with girls around the world. The British colonised India. The Aztecs thought Cortez was a god. Indo-Aryan peoples conquered northern India around four thousand years ago. Apollo was revered as a founder of cities. One statue of Apollo has a similar nose shape to some guy. Even if all these points were true, they don't cohere into a plausible macrohistorical theory. Anyone could, with a similarly arbitrary process of selection, cobble together a theory of racial superiority from the same random noise. There is no rigour to this hypothesis.
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