OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Well, yes, if you change the statement so that it's asserting something else entirely, it is no longer obviously false. That's straightforward enough.
OliveTapenade
23d 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
1mo 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
10mo ago
I don't think one has to be a pearl-clutching scold in order to simply not want to hang out in the place with the anti-semites and the Holocaust deniers.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
Well, to be blunt, I think the Motte is indeed at the Seven Zillion Witches stage of subculture evolution, and unfortunately once you reach that point you fall off the side of the cliff and eventually only get witches.
There's some sort of balance that has to be found. You don't want to be so committed to what's 'normal' or popular that any or all dissenting opinions are frozen out. At the same time, if you're radically open, you become a den of witches. Both Normieland and Witchville are bad places to have conversations. I understand and agree with not wanting to become Normieland, but at the same time the Motte is getting much too far into Witchville territory for my liking.
What explosion would this be?
Googling around, combining this piece and this piece, I get about about 8.1% of public school students were ELLs in 2000, 9.2% in 2010, 9.5% in 2015, and 10.3% in 2020. That seems like a quite slow and gradual increase over the last twenty years - hardly worth being called an 'explosion'.
There's more data here - the vast majority, over 75%, of ELLs are native speakers of Spanish, which suggests to me that we're mostly talking about migrants from South and Central America. I'd guess that the slow increase in English language education is probably just a result of the rate of immigration from Latin America increasing.
I see no evidence that the very modest increase is driven by second-generation immigrants living in ethnic enclaves and refusing to learn English. It seems entirely understandable if it's all first-generation.
EDIT: Wait, let me get this straight.
First person makes a huge and unsupported claim in one sentence.
Second person questions that claim, providing hard data that seems to contradict it.
The result is that the first person is upvoted, and the second person downvoted? What? What happened to rationalism? I don't think I was rude in any way - I was asking for evidence for a claim.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Which is an interesting way to frame it, actually, considering that Somalia is not an ethnostate. Only around 85% of Somalians are ethnic Somalis, and there are large populations of Somalis in neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya; and, of course, Somaliland has been a persistent issue however much Somalia would like it not to be. The current constitution of Somalia (it is admittedly provisional; it's not the most stable part of the world) defines the country in terms of 'inclusive representation of the people' (Article 1), in Article 8 asserts that people of Somalia 'are one, indivisible, and comprise all the citizens', and in Article 11 outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, clan, tribe, ethnicity, and birth.
This may not be followed much in practice, but certainly de jure Somalia is not an ethnostate. It does not appear to present itself as the country of the Somalis, not does it seem to aspire to be that, at least officially.
It's possible that Omar is just choosing inapposite words, or appealing to national rather than ethnic identity in an awkward way. It is, at least, clear that Omar feels an identification with Somalia, and her statement that "Somalia belngs to all Somalis" suggests that she would like it to be an ethnostate, even if it currently isn't. Or maybe she's just equivocating between 'Somali' and 'Somalian' - imprecise language being the eternal curse of politics.
Really, I think we could all do with a bit more discussion of what she's specifically angry about - this seems like a reasonable intro. The short version today is that (formerly British) Somaliland is a large chunk of (former Italian Somaliland) Somalia, and it thinks it's independent and operates semi-autonomously. Somaliland recently made a deal to give Ethiopia a strip of land in exchange for progress in recognising its aspirations of independence; the Somalian position, naturally, is that this is illegal and Ethiopia trying to illegally acquire sovereign Somalian territory. Many Somalians outside of Somalia agree with the Somalian position here, and Omar is talking to them.
It's hard to think of a good analogous group in the US - the Somalian situation here is pretty unusual.
OliveTapenade
1mo 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?
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
I think there's a difference between an open dialogue and low effort link spam.
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
I did just say explicitly that I don't support banning SecureSignals just because he's wrong and makes bad arguments. I think the question here is not whether he's wrong (he is) or whether being wrong should be a bannable offense (it shouldn't be), but about whether the recurrence of radioactive subjects like this is a bad thing for the Motte, or otherwise obnoxious, and if so, what if anything we might want to do about it.
I do appreciate all the concerns about freedom to express controversial positions, and I'm on your side most of the time, but I also don't want the Motte to go further down the road to Witchville, as I put it.
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
There's a genuinely difficult problem here when it comes to creating an open discussion forum. If everything is allowed, at least some percentage of that everything will be vile. Many people don't want to be in a space where vile discussion occurs, and therefore will avoid it.
If there's a position that, by virtue of being included, will automatically lead to other positions self-excluding, then including that position may actually reduce the range of potential discussions. How to handle positions like that?
I can already hear the complaint - isn't this just giving a veto to the censorious and intolerant? And certainly it doesn't seem like a good thing to optimise for just having as many people as possible. The goal of the Motte isn't to get as many people as possible, so it definitely makes sense to just go ahead and let 'normies' feel uncomfortable if that's the price of attracting intelligent people with controversial ideas. However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas. So there should be a line, it seems to me?
The line shouldn't be placed at zero, where everything that offends anyone in the majority is banned. But neither should it be at one hundred, where literally everything is permitted including the guy who just likes to scream 'DIE N---ER DIE'. Where should the line be? If we want to curate a healthy, vibrant garden of ideas - where are the borders?
I know this will be interpreted as a call to censor. That's honestly not where I'm trying to go. My preference is to try to maximise the interchange of interesting ideas. It's just that how to do that isn't an easy question. It isn't resolved by just picking an an absolute principle like 'everyone is welcome full stop' and standing on that.
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
It's worth noting that attempting to build consensus is explicitly against the Motte's rules, and the top post of every Culture War thread says:
Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
Shaming.
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
Recruiting for a cause.
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
So when I object to 'recruiting' I am objecting to something that is already forbidden here.
I am not objecting to people being honestly persuaded of things.
I acknowledge that the line between trying to convince someone of something and trying to recruit someone into a movement can be pretty hazy. "Here's why I think Marxism is true" isn't that far away from "you should become a Marxist and join the class struggle" - indeed, if Marxism is true, then becoming a Marxist and joining the class struggle may logically follow from that. But I still think there's some value in trying to allow the former type of post but not the latter, even if the borders are unclear.
To take this specific example, I think cake's posts are very clearly on the recruiting side of the line. He's not coming in here with an idea to discuss, including the possibility of genuine give-and-take or being convinced by his interlocutors, but rather with a manifesto to share. He's since reposted the link here in a more acceptable format, and gone on to make posts that clearly read like political recruitment - I take comments like these as aiming at building a coalition.
So what's my ultimate position?
I don't want a screening test where we ban anyone who might fit a definition of 'white nationalist'. That's impractical and foolish. However, I do want it to be clear that cake-style white nationalist recruiting is unwelcome, and I'd like a more proactive approach to our rules against recruiting and consensus-building. I'd particularly note that rules in favour of kindness, against weakmanning, and in favour of writing like you want everyone to be included seem like they implicit rule out a number of white nationalist arguments anyway. I do see posts here that come off like "so, fellow white people, how do we deal with such-and-such problem?", and those definitely seem inappropriate to me.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
E-X-A-C-T-L-Y. This is exactly what I am talking about. It is a radical critique of Gentile identity because it subverts the identity of America as a white country. I presume you have some sympathies with Israel, what if a bunch of Palestinians somehow had the wherewithal to take control over Israeli cultural institutions, and they made massively-popular superheroes giving moral lessons to Children about how Israel is not a country for Jews?
I have no particularly strong feelings about Israel one way or the other.
That said, I don't think it's any sort of 'radical critique of Gentile identity' to take the position that people of many different races and religons should be welcome and equal in America. Many Jews believe that, yes. But also most non-Jews in American believe that now, and the social forces that led to that change, that led to the broadening of American identity, don't seem to have had anything particularly special to do with Jews.
See, once again what you're doing is just vaguely gesturing towards the idea that anything that happened in a place that any Jews lived that you don't like is the result of a Jewish conspiracy.
I would say again that you are clearly moving goalposts. You asserted that narratives created by Jews, of which you regard Superman as an example, are used to critique Gentile identity. I reply that Superman firstly is clearly a confident defender of American identity and patriotism, and secondly frames this in a way that regards all races as equally welcome. This sure seems like as a literary creation Superman is firstly pro-American-identity and secondly anti-ethno-supremacy. This is directly contrary to the picture you just painted of Jews as ethnosupremacist and alien from their countries! If you read Superman as metaphor for the Jewish experience (which is only one of many valid ways to read Superman), the thrust of that metaphor is that Jews can be fully assimilated Americans.
How did we get to this point where white people are just totally submitted to their own demographic replacement? Slowly, and with propaganda like this. This propaganda was intelligently crafted with a political motivation, it planted the seeds of our current culture.
Are you asserting that Siegel and Shuster in the 30s and 40s were part of a deliberate, conscious attempt to destroy 'white' American culture?
You can look at many examples- take Captain America. Who could have a problem with him right? He's a macho Aryan who is a role model for children. He was also created by a Jewish storyteller, Joe Simon, and Wikipedia relates:
How is it remotely suspicious that a superhero created and drawn and published by Americans in the 1940s was opposed to one of 1940s-America's greatest overseas enemies?
Okay, sure, Jews in 1940s America didn't like Nazi Germany much. I concede this. What is that supposed to show?
This is the frustrating thing about this entire argument from you - your entire strategy is to pick some totally innocuous incident in history and just because it involves a Jewish person, you present it as if it's clear evidence for some pan-historical Jewish agenda to destroy the white race.
What's missing from all of this is, well, any evidence for anything whatsoever. Okay, Joe Simon didn't like the Nazis and made a hero to fight them. He felt that Hitler was an enemy of everyone in the free world, and Captain America represents that commitment. But there are many conceivable reasons why a Jewish-American in 1940 might hate Hitler that do not amount to a deliberate Jewish racial plot to destroy white people.
They fear being victims again, so they cannot allow white racial consciousness or advocacy for the ethnic interests of white people. Their sincerity does not at all alleviate the conflict that is staring us in the face, the conflict that they are conscious of and my co-ethnics are not because they "learned their lessons" from Superman and Captain America, if not from St. Paul and Christ.
What conflict is this?
We've gone from "Jewish people don't want the Holocaust to happen again" (entirely obvious and reasonable) to "therefore Jewish people want to destroy white racial majorities" (do they?) to "SecureSignals' co-ethnics are in a conflict with Jews" (who? how?).
I really wish you'd just be straightforward with all of this - if you could just say it as plainly as "multiculturalism is a deliberate, conscious plot by the Jewish people to destroy whites".
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
I suppose I'd say that seems like a rather arbitrary place to draw the line, and it would make me suspicious of the complainant's motives. I can't recall any requirement that everything at a coronation must meet some standard of Britishness, and neither do I know how you'd define Britishness in this sense anyway. Indeed, it seems that previous coronations have often included elements we would associate with other countries, most famously France.
And it seems as though Charles III and his household should have the right to select the music they wish at their coronation. The gospel music was skilfully performed and appropriate to the gravity of the occasion.
OliveTapenade
1mo 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
9mo ago
I think Jewish posters here are specifically selected for the kinds of Jewish posters who don't mind being in a space that regularly portrays them as some sort of malevolent parasitic subrace. That's not exactly a filter I want to run everyone through.
I'm not Jewish myself, of course, but I have been in online spaces before where my identity is constantly mocked and criticised and portrayed as a civilisational threat that must be marginalised at all costs, and while I can handle that to an extent, it is not a position that I wish for anyone else to be in. Especially not in a place whose purpose is explicitly civil sharing of ideas. The top-level culture war post still links 'In Favour of Niceness, Community, and Civilisation', after all.
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
Right, exactly. I'm really not trying to say that we should just ban all the bad people. It's more - how can we get on and stay on the right side of that fine line?
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I think you're muddling quite a few things here.
For a start, I want to clarify exactly which standards you're using. The global spread and popularity of biblical narratives does indeed seem like evidence that those narratives have some merit. But what I would challenge you on is that there's any particularly unique about those narratives, which implies anything sinister about Jews as people.
After all, you mention other highly successful ancient narratives. I suspect most people on the street who recognise the name 'Thor' do know that he's an ancient Norse god, and Thor is actually a pretty weak example because the surviving corpus of religious Scandinavian literature is so small. But I invite you to consider, say, the enduring recognisability and popularity of Hercules. Consider the enduring narrative power of the Iliad and the Odyssey - even when the entire religious culture those stories were embedded in faded away. People may not specifically worship Zeus any more, but even in the Superman comics you reference, Perry White continues to swear by Zeus! ("By Jove!") This seems like an enduring hold on the imagination by these ancient writers. The power of Greek mythological narratives is such that they've even successfully hopped across cultures - you can find the Greek gods popping up even in Japanese media, for instance.
What I want to suggest is that the existence of an extremely successful narrative or set of images doesn't necessary imply anything nefarious about race. Certainly the success of Greek mythological narrative suggests that at some point in history something creatively fecund was going on in Greece, but leaping from this to the assertion of a unique, genetic Greek talent for myth-making that continues to the modern day and makes Greeks a powerful conspiracy manipulating non-Greeks to their advantage is simply ludicrous. As with Greeks, so too with Jews.
I think you're also tending to single out the involvement of any Jew in any creative endeavour as evidence that the whole thing is somehow Jewish, or part of this cross-historical Jewish myth-making scheme. In practice, however, Jewish influences are often only one of many involved in creating the narratives that you're describing. I was just talking about Greeks, after all, and we have to grant that Judaism in the classical world was extremely Hellenised, and Christianity's early growth involved a lot of fusion of Jewish and Greek ideas. You might say that this shows the power of Jewish narrative to co-opt and absorb Greek thought, but why not the opposite? Why doesn't it show the power of Greek narrative to co-opt and absorb Jewish thought? Why are the Jews, in your telling, always the manipulators and never the manipulated?
Thus with the Superman example. The Christian and for that matter Greek influences on Superman seem pretty clear - Superman has been read as an allegory for Jesus but also as coming from the Greek heroic tradition. There is certainly something very Apollonian about him. Greek or Christian memes flowing through the minds of Jewish people are still Greek or Christian memes. A figure like Superman is pretty clearly an aggregate of diverse influences, some of which are related to the Jewish experience in America, and some of which are not.
If Jewish ideas can flow through non-Jews in a way that, to you, is just Jewish influence (as with Christianity and Islam), it seems like non-Jewish ideas can also flow through Jews in a way that retains their power. If so, perhaps we'd be better off thinking of ideas in less of a race-essentialist way.
In this case, there are some foundational ideas that originate in ancient Israel, yes - monotheism is the big one. Those ideas spread between many different peoples, mixed with different other ideas and contexts, and eventually formed several different religious traditions, including rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At no point in this process do you need a posit a special genetic propensity for myth-making or cultural manipulation on the part of the ancient Israelites.
I'd also suggest that you use the term 'the Jews' in a very vague and general way, such that it's not clear what you refer to or why. For instance:
Abraham and Moses are heroes in the Judaic pantheon, this is like saying "we don't know the genetic profile of Iron Man so we can't say anything about his behavior in that regard", the storytellers are the Jews themselves who keep these myths alive and propagate them among themselves and others with their rituals and behavior.
Who are 'the Jews' in this context?
Read 'Abraham and Moses' as shorthand for 'the people who historically came up with the core ideas and narratives of the Torah'. The point is that we cannot know anything meaningful about the genetics of the community in which the fundamental elements of Abrahamic faith were born.
I note that it is clearly the case that people like Abraham or Moses are revered by people of many different ethnicities. A specifically racialised interpretation seems weak. Muslims say explicitly that Abraham was a Muslim, and reject any significance for race. Christians also say directly that what matters is being a spiritual heir of Abraham, not one by blood (cf. Matthew 3:9, John 8:39, Romans 4:16, Galatians 3:7). Clearly Abraham is a hero and is understood as an ancestor by members of all the Abrahamic faiths - you have to go significantly against how these traditions have understood Abraham to see him as deeply racialised figure.
This even seems consistent with Jewish understandings of Abraham. Converts to Judaism are given the name ben/bat Avraham v'Sarah - son or daughter of Abraham and Sarah. The Jews themselves understand descent from Abraham to be spiritual rather than genetic!
It seems to me that the genetics of Abraham and the other originators of Abrahamic religion are firstly unknown and secondly held to be unimportant by his own heirs, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. So I think you're wrong to racialise this as much as you do.
In order to calibrate our baseline perspectives, would you accept the proposition that HBD provides explanatory power for why Jews tend to be more successful lawyers than non-Jews? I am suggesting that this holds for culture-and-myth-creation, and the cognitive traits that explain this go beyond simply IQ.
I'm wary of and try to avoid the term 'HBD'. I think there are probably multivariate reasons why Jews are overrepresented in professions like the law.
I do dispute, however, the claim that there is a genetic propensity for myth-making unique to Jews. I don't think it's even correct to say that Jews (as in a historically distinguishable genetic community like the Ashkenazim) do have a special talent for myth-making above other peoples.
Secondly, we should dispense with the absurd claim that the Aleinu is not supremacist, if a group of white people all cited some refrain proclaiming that the master of the universe chose them as his favorite people and made them differently from everyone else, and all else will bow under the yoke of the Creator who made Europeans his chosen people, you would unambiguously call that supremacist.
You're taking a very misleading reading of it. What the Aleinu says is that God has called and made a covenant with the Jewish people, differently to all the other nations of the world.
How would we feel if a bunch of other people said something like that? We don't have to speculate. We know, because they do. Americans say something similar to that all the time - that's American civil religion, the unique and special identity of the United States, chosen by Providence to be a beacon of freedom to the world. Americans make this claim all the time.
Judaism is an ethnically supremacist religion, and I don't mean that as a criticism, it is the entire reason it has survived under hostile conditions for thousands of years. Their god is their race, and their race is their god.
Judaism is an ethnoreligion, certainly - it is a religion associated with a particular people (though as I have indicated Jews understand Jewish peoplehood to not be reducible to race or genetics). That's not the same thing as being a supremacist religion - as you just admit in the next line, Jews speak very clearly about Jews not being superior to other people.
Moreover, you're taking an interpretation of Judaism here that almost no Jew would agree with. The God of the Jews, as Jews understand him, is the most high and the creator of the universe. They understand God to be a real being, and a different being to they themselves. They have this in common with every other Abrahamic religion.
I would encourage you to consider how the people you're talking about understand themselves. If nothing else, I'd like to suggest that Jews themselves might understand what Judaism is better than you do. Listen to them.
OliveTapenade
1mo 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
4mo ago
I think his point isn't that their platforms are identical, but that voters don't care about their platforms. The platforms have meaningful differences but they are similar enough to not be that decisive, and GOP voters as a mass just aren't reading them.
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
Certainly, and I would never advocate for the mere accusation of anti-semitism or racism to be a superweapon. We can all agree that definitions of those words that are so broad as to include even people who just state obvious facts are ridiculous and should not be heeded.
However, I'd argue that there are minimalist definitions of anti-semitism, racism, white nationalism, etc., that are much more defensible - and which some posters here definitely meet. A relatively high average IQ among Ashkenazim or overrepresentation of Jewish people in Hollywood are just facts, and being aware of them does not make one anti-semitic. However, when one starts talking about believing that all Jews have an inherent racial tendency to parasitise upon other cultures and subvert them for Jewish benefit, then I think one can plausibly argue that's anti-semitic. The fact that accusations of anti-semitism are sometimes thrown around promiscuously does not mean that, say, Hitler wasn't anti-semitic, and it seems possible to plot people on a spectrum from not-at-all-anti-semitic on the one end to 'literally Hitler' on the other end.
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
The uncharitable strawman version of HBD (i.e. that it's just straightforward racism) is a reasonably accurate description, yes, but I'm not sure how directly relevant that is?
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
It is not completely harmless, because Jews use their station in these cultural institutions to formulate radical critique of Gentile history, culture, and racial identity and use the same influence to protect themselves from any in-kind criticisms.
Do they? Take the example were just discussing - Superman. Is Superman a 'radical critique of Gentile history, culture, and racial identity'? Surely Superman is best-known as an avatar of 'Truth, Justice, and the American Way' - he is a patriotic avatar of American values in a way that is explicitly presented as inclusive of all races and cultures. This does not seem like a radical critique of Gentile identity - on the contrary, it is clearly an affirmation of a particular understanding of American identity that is extraordinarily inclusive of people of different racial or religious origins.
You mentioned Stan Lee as well. Are the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, or Spiderman radical critiques of Gentile history and identity? You're going to have to explain that to me, because it's not obvious.
There are obviously many thousands of Jews engaged in all sorts of creative or ideological activities all over the world, from many different political perspectives, and it's not at all obvious on what basis you can assert that Jews as a group are engaged in a destructive critique of Gentile culture or identity. Is, say, Ben Shapiro involved in such a project? He seems pretty keen on a concept of Western identity that includes Jewish and non-Jewish Westerners on equal terms.
Like I said, imagine an alternative world where every media executive here is Chinese instead of Jewish, but if you Notice that or have anything negative to say about it then you are regarded as mentally deranged at best. Imagine all our social institutions were in complete alignment to punish anybody who has anything remotely critical to say about Chinese influence in media.
If Chinese people in America had the same history as Jewish people? Then it seems likely they would be treated the same way, no?
Of course Greek Myth is formulated with a race consciousness, gods in the pantheon, as in the bible, are frequently representative of groups of people. The Ionians were said to have been descended from Ion the son of Apollo, who scholars directly relate to Javan son of Japheth in the Hebrew Bible. Both Apollo and Japheth point to ethnic identity. Paul is described as "of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews".
Mentioning ancestry in any way is not the same thing as 'formulating a race consciousness'. It's true that ancient Greek writers have some sense of ancestry - all human beings do. But that's a motte-and-bailey.
This is nonsense, the relationship between the Jews and Rome was an ethnic conflict, everybody perceived it, both then and now. As Marcus Eli Ravage put it (1928):
What does that quote have to do with anything? A writer in the 1920s snarking about the accusation of Jewish involvement in the Russian Revolution reveals anything about the history of Christianity in Rome... how, again?
Paul's motives are impossible to disentangle, but in the same way that a Jew today may genuinely believe he is healing the world by promoting diversity, dismantling white supremacy, and punishing anybody who has anything negative to say about Jews, there's no reason to assume Paul had malintent.
My point is that there does not seem to be any reason to suspect Paul of pushing some sort of racialist or Jewish supremacist agenda - on the contrary, Paul's evangelistic program is famously something that surmounts and crosses ethnic divides. Paul's program is not to convert all Gentiles to following 'the God of the Jews' in an imperial sense - he clearly understands God to be the God of all human beings from the creation. In Acts 17 he is accused of proclaiming a foreign divinity (17:18), and his response is to argue that God is implicitly known among the Gentiles in an anonymous way, that they too are God's offspring, and he even quotes Gentile poets to the effect that God is not far from them and they live in his own being. Likewise the diatribe of Romans 1 only makes sense on the understanding that God should be properly understood as the God of the Gentiles as well of the Jews.
In what way, then, does it make sense to accuse Paul of an agent of this Jewish racial consciousness to subvert and manipulate the Gentiles for Jewish benefit? He himself clearly disclaims that - indeed, in the passage you quoted where he recites his ancestry (Philippians 3:5), his whole point in context is that this ancestry is of no significance, and that there is no cause for being 'confident in the flesh'.
It's the same thing I've been complaining about all along - the mere presence of a Jewish person in any context, no matter that person's actions or plainly-stated agenda, is evidence of this Jewish racial consciousness to you. What could possibly falsify your claims?
He influenced the gentiles to reject the gods of their ancestors and worship Yahweh, so he ought to be revered by Jews as the embodiment of Tikkun Olam and there's no reason to suppose his motives were "worse" than Hollywood when they give each-other accolades for the Nth Holocaust movie- they really do think they are guiding humanity on the spiritually correct path, and after all, the gentiles must be taught "Never Again" as the most important moral lesson.
If we strip away the spooky language, what this essentially boils down to is that many Jews - like the woke TikTok girl - want to make the world better and believe that they are helping to do this. I am baffled that continue to find this horrifying. Why do many Jews want to make sure the Holocaust is remembered? Is it not entirely plausible that they sincerely (and correctly) believe the Holocaust was something unimaginably horrible and don't want anything like it to happen again, and to the extent that self-interest is involved, it's because they fear being victims again? Sure, I'll buy that Jewish people want to influence the societies they're in in ways that prevent the Holocaust from ever being repeated. What I don't buy is that there's any malevolence in that, or anything that seems particularly hostile to non-Jewish cultures qua non-Jewish cultures. "Please don't try to murder entire cultures, especially if it's us" seems like a pretty reasonable message to push, and there are perfectly obvious, non-malevolent reasons for doing so.
I'm not sure how much you know about American history, but racialized American identity was entirely central to the concept of being an American until after the end of WWII. The first Congress restricted citizenship to "Free White men".
I'm aware that American citizenship and identity has not been available to all people since the beginning of the United States. Over time the circle of acceptable American citizenship in terms of race has expanded.
But what does that have to do with the point? I presented the United States as an example of a nation that regards itself as chosen by God for a special mission to enlighten the other nations of the world. That was true even when American citizenship was heavily racialised.
When Jews tell me that "healing the world" means the ethnic displacement of my people and the quasi-worship of their own ethnicity with special social and legal protections, and they view that arrangement to simply be the will of Yahweh to heal the world, yes, I am going to claim I understand the latent motivation for this behavior than they do.
I don't believe they do tell you that, not least because thus far you have not given a single example of a Jew saying that, to you or to anyone else.
Oh, where to begin...
Let me clarify my point, regarding Stan Lee and Thor. My point was that just because Stan Lee used a large body of preexisting symbols and myths to craft them into contemporary cultural signals for receptive audiences does not mean he isn't a talented mythmaker, so your point "Judaism borrows from these other myths so we can't give them credit" doesn't hold.
The problem is that you have defined 'myth-making' so widely as to allow you to declare any involvement of a Jew at any stage of a creative process as evidence that the Jews are uniquely talented myth-makers.
Thus if there's a story involving ideas related to ancient Israel, even if no Jews at all are involved in that story's production, this is for you an example of the pernicious influence of Jewish myth-making.
At the same time, if there's a story involving ideas related to ancient Greece (or any other culture), but a Jew was involved in telling it, this is also for you an example of the pernicious influence of Jewish myth-making.
There's no consistency here. Anything touched by a Jew or Judaism or Israel ancient or modern in any way is evidence for your hypothesis, in a way that you don't claim for other ethnicities or narratives or ideas. I am tempted to ask - is there anything Jews could do, any way that Jews could tell stories, that you would not see as evidence of their subtle infiltration and co-option of other cultures?
I have another take. It goes like this. Ideas created by Jews, both ancient and modern, are frequently taken and used by non-Jews in creative ways. Likewise ideas created by non-Jews, both ancient and modern, are frequently taken and used by Jews in creative ways. This is completely normal and a harmless process of cultural exchange and influence.
I don't doubt the success of Greek mythology, and it is another example of the sort of culture-creation I am talking about. I am not saying the Jews are the only ones capable of doing it. Greek mythology was intelligently formulated with a race consciousness. Modern Gentile mythology, like say George Lucas, can be potent and influential but it is not created with a race consciousness compared to, say, Superman whose creators crafted these myths with a Jewish race consciousness that someone like Hlynka could not understand.
What on Earth are you talking about? Greek mythology was certainly not 'intelligently formulated with a race consciousness' - Homer or Hesiod or Pindar certainly had no concept of 'race' analogous to the one you're spruiking. The Theogony or the Iliad are not texts with a strong race consciousness in the sense in which you are using the term.
And I have no idea what you are talking about with Superman. Is it true that one of the influences on Superman was Siegel and Shuster thinking about the experience of Jewish immigrants in America? Yes, probably. To read that as 'created with a race consciousness' is simply dishonest.
Can you imagine a world where Jews denounced the Hebrew god as a false demon, all the old laws as superstitious pagan nonsense and then zealously forced all their fellow Jews to convert to the worship of Apollo? I don't think you can imagine that.
Of course I can imagine that, because that has actually happened before. Back when the state of Israel was founded there was actually a small but real Jewish pagan movement, the Canaanites, who believed something like this. They were heavily influenced by Italian Fascism and wanted to restore an imagined past Canaanite identity. They felt that contemporary (i.e. 1940s) Jewish culture had become effeminate and weak due to centuries/millennia of oppression, and came to understand Judaism itself as an enervating parasite, sucking the spirit out of the Jewish people. They wanted to abandon Judaism, return to a sort of Canaanite paganism, and establish a multi-ethnic Middle Eastern empire along fascist lines ruled by a Jewish aristocracy. They wanted to discard Judaism as a religion in favour of a highly aggressive, masculinised concept of Jewish racial identity.
That movement wasn't successful, thank heavens, but the point is that I can very easily imagine Jews rejecting Judaism and attempting to zealously enforce some new religious or ideologial structure by force. Jews are a diverse group and some among them have flirted with such ideas in the past.
Of course there are Greek elements in Christianity, but they worship a Jewish god. In this alternate universe where Jews decided to denounce the Torah as Pagan sacrilege in submission to the true master of all Apollo, that cult would also likewise retain some Jewish elements, but there would be no mistake regarding who absorbed who.
I think this is simplified to the point of nonsense, especially if you consider it in light of other cases where there's been substantial religious change in a society - take the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, or the way Persia became Shia, or Islam in southeast Asia. Does, say, the spread of Islam in Indonesia constitute the Arabs absorbing the Indonesians? Did the Jews absorb the Romans? The Safavids brought a new religion to Iran, Shia Islam, and they themselves were probably ancestrally Kurds or Turks - at any rate something other than Persian - and yet it seems absurd to say that the Turks absorbed the Persians.
Cultural assimilation can mean multiple different things. When the Roman Empire came to worship the God of Abraham, yes, there's a certain sense in which something of Israel came to dominate the Roman Empire. But to say that the Jews 'absorbed' the Romans seems nonsensical.
St. Paul, the OG "fellow white people, you must love your enemy and accept Jesus or else suffer eternal damnation by the wrath of Yahweh."
This is a gross distortion of anything Paul actually said. He certainly told people - without distinction as to race - to love their enemy and to fear the Lord, but that italicised part is important. There is no basis for seeing Paul as some agent of Jewish infiltration attempting to weaken or destroy a 'white race' that neither he nor any of his contemporaries would have believed to exist. Paul's message is undoubtedly preached to both Jews and Gentiles, and he sees all people who have received it as fundamentally in the same boat and called to the same standard of behaviour. He could hardly have been more clear about this.
There is basically no distinction between the two. Their spiritual status is a blood covenant and membership is inherited. There was no knowledge of genetics in the ancient world, but the phenomenon was captured conceptually with a blood covenant and inherited ingroup status.
The link I provided there was to a modern Jewish website. Contemporary Jews understand what genetics are, and yet they clearly indicate that descent from Abraham, in the sense that it is matters for being a Jew, is a spiritual rather than a genetic notion. You are making bold assertions about the nefariousness of the Jews without any reference to what Jews themselves actually say or do.
The notion that America was just conceived as some idea open to the entire world, rather than a people, is another example of a clever 20th century mythological revision. Americans make that claim you describe precisely because they have long been denied the ability to assert an ethnic particularity as Jews do. They instead have to embrace a conception of America as an idea rather than a people.
Are you asserting that from at least the 18th century, the Jews somehow prevented the Americans from asserting an ethnic or racialised sense of American identity? Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, that would not even be particularly germane to the point. The Americans are, for whatever reason, an example of a nation who assert a particular 'chosen' status for themselves in the eyes of God and accompanying mission to the world. They were talking about themselves as an 'Empire of Liberty' as early as the Revolution itself! The 'City on a Hill' motif has been deeply significant over the last century, and regardless of any quibbling about the origin of the phrase, I think the notion of America as a destined nation specially chosen by Providence goes back well before it.
As such I repeat that Jews are far from unique in having a sense of a covenant nation with a mission to the world.
I guess that puts you in an odd position because you are left to explain the peculiarly disproportionate representation of Jews in these areas of culture creation, which cannot be explained only by IQ.
I don't think there's anything particularly suspicious to explain, really. Jews are a very well-educated creative minority with very large historical populations in centres of American media, most notably New York. Of course there are lots of them in the culture industry. This seems entirely explainable to me without needing to posit some malicious Jewish talent for infiltrating and destroying non-Jewish cultures.
Some certainly do, but others who think "Judaism is not about genetics it's about spirituality", no I actually do understand Judaism better than them and they are fish who cannot tell they are in water. They say that Tikkun Olam means dismantling whiteness and fiercely protecting Jews from any measure of criticism or negative sentiment, no actually, I understand Tikkun Olam better than they do. Believing your own myths doesn't mean you understand them, it usually means the opposite.
I'll be blunt here - when you're telling me that you understand Jewishness and Judaism better than Jews, better than Jewish sacred texts, better than Jewish rabbis... I'm going to be very, very skeptical. When it comes down to it, I trust a rabbi to know what tikkum olam means better than I do a random I met on the internet.
On a somewhat meta point, this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it? I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.
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