OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
Could we maybe have a few days' break from people repeating their theory that everything bad that has ever happened is due to the Jews? Oh no, I stubbed my toe, those damn Jewish elites! It's worse than incorrect - it's boring.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Haven't you noticed by now?
Anything done by anyone Jewish, or any cause that might be interpreted as positive for Israel, is inherently sinister and evil.
It really is quite tiresome.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
I have to admit, I'm struggling to feel a lot of sympathy for Cooper here. When you put out a bowl of honey, you don't really get to complain that flies show up. When you put a bird-feeder in your yard, you don't get to complain when it attracts birds. When you leave your food scraps uncovered, you don't get to complain when raccoons find their way to your bin. Likewise when you make a name for yourself sharing edgy anti-semitic views on the internet, you probably shouldn't complain when you get a following of edgy anti-semites. What did you think was going to happen?
(If anybody is inclined to quibble, I am taking Holocaust denial and sympathy for Hitler or the NSDAP as reasonable public signals of anti-semitism - that is, as views that a person would be vanishingly unlikely to voice for non-anti-semitic reasons. Even if you think that Cooper specifically is a disinterested truth-seeker who for some reason is inclined to doubt the reality of extremely well-attested historical events, there's no denying that what is communicated by the views he has shared is sympathy for anti-semitism.)
What should I do here other than point and laugh? Fuentes and the Groypers are ridiculous parodies of human beings. BAP and his crowd are also ridiculous parodies of human beings. Cooper attracted them. Well then. Let them fight.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Nothing in the top-level post indicates he's in the United States - I don't even know which country he's talking about.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I think 'directionally correct' in this case roughly translates to 'motte and bailey'. Or perhaps it's worse - perhaps it functions just to sanewash Trump.
That is, I can see an argument that systemic media bias, tech oligopoly, deep state institutions, etc., made the overall political landscape so distorted in the popular consciousness as to make a free and fair election impossible. That makes sense, and I have some sympathy for it as a position.
But that's a motte - that's a sanewashed, 'directionally correct' version of what the stolen election claims actually were.
The actually-existing version of StopTheSteal, the one that Trump endorsed, is not that. The Trump position was not "systemically slanted media landscape", but "literally cheating" - ballot dumps, fake voting machines, you name it.
The sanewashed version might be true! There's an argument that goes something like: "Democratic legitimacy is not merely a result of voting, but rather depends on robust norms of civic participation and deliberation, which must be resourced and facilitated by civic institutions. Such institutions include both public and private bodies, including media such as newspapers, television, radio, online social media, internet news and search, and so on. They also include the sources of information for public debate, such as academia, think tanks, or 'experts' broadly construed. In the United States, however, civic institutions are dominated by the left - by a silent, unspoken but nevertheless well-understood consensus - to such an extent that it is genuinely impossible for conservative or right-wing viewpoints to have a fair hearing in the public square. Such viewpoints can only be expressed in cordoned-off areas of conservative media, which by virtue of their isolation are unable to facilitate the kind of robust deliberation that democracy depends upon. Under these conditions - the total domination of the civic sphere by left-biased authorities - the very notion of democracy is degraded, and large sections of the population are effectively frozen out of democratic participation. No election held under circumstances such as these can be considered 'fair'."
I think that argument is probably true! I think it's not the whole story, but as far as it goes, it's true and it points to the crisis of American democracy.
It just doesn't get you to the stolen election claim that was actually made.
OliveTapenade
1yr 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
1yr 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
11mo ago
Well, sure, but I would have thought that the name of a city by itself wouldn't be enough to make him identifiable, and since the content of the post is a complaint about his local neighbourhood, I feel that knowing where that neighbourhood is, at least in very broad terms, is relevant to understanding the complaint.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
There isn't nearly enough context in that gallery to prove your point.
To be honest, what strikes me most is how unattractive the guys in that gallery are. Gosh, doesn't Finn look like a git? A lot of those guys look like total pillocks. I am glad I don't look like any of those guys, and I regularly get complimented on my appearance by women in real life.
What I see here is an extreme generalisation with firstly little evidence that it's true on dating apps, and secondly little reason to believe that even if it's true on dating apps, it generalises to anything in real life.
OliveTapenade
2yr 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
29d ago
It's now just accepted conventional wisdom... Everybody knows now.
Define 'conventional wisdom' and 'everybody'.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Is this just 'gay furry' as thought-terminating cliché? Heck, why do you keep bringing him at all? Why does TracingWoodgrains live rent-free in your head? He was brought up by someone else a few posts up as an example of someone who, whether you like his hobbies or not, has a place in the body politic, and oats then clarified that his point is to do with oddballs and dissenters of all kinds.
The point is not about TracingWoodgrains specifically, or about homosexuality, or about people who like to wear silly fox costumes, and cannot be addressed by going "lol I hate that guy". Oats' point terminated in the question, "Do you care what happens to yourself?"
Maybe you hope for a world in which the hammer of state power comes down on TracingWoodgrains and not on yourself, but that sure sounds like an awfully precise hammer - the type that squishes one specific type of online oddball but not any other type. How sure are you that a world that crushes one guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums isn't going to crush another guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums?
This conversation started out being about liberalism, not empathy. Whether you like so-and-so isn't really the point. But you're using "screw the gay furry" as an evasion. The point is - okay, sure, you can reject liberalism. You can reject the social compact that allows everyone from you to furries to coexist and even have their own discussion spaces like this. But if you reject it you open the door to a lot of boots stomping on a lot of faces, and maybe you shouldn't be so confident that the boots aren't going to be stomping on you.
If nothing else, your views seem significantly more repulsive to random normies than those of gays or furries or, heaven forbid, gay furries. Maybe a little caution is called for.
OliveTapenade
7mo ago
Your question is a non-sequitur: why do I have to prove anything more? There is clear irregularity in 2020, either give an innocuous explanation for the counting stopped over a water pipe, or concede.
I don't see why a claim of a burst pipe that turned out to be false is proof of fraud? Why should AppleyOrange need to concede anything? There might be many explanations for concerns about a burst water pipe other than deliberate malfeasance. A single bad actor might submit a false report about a burst pipe. A good faith error might have occurred. There might have been a real but small leak that was exaggerated. There are too many possibilities to reasonably jump from a report of a burst pipe to fraud.
But suppose we grant that there was a suspicious irregularity in 2020 worthy of investigation. It's not proof of fraud, but maybe it's something people should look into. Sure.
I think the point about 2024 holds up?
Let's grant hypothetically that large voter fraud in Georgia in 2020 delivered the state to Biden. Let's also grant that Harris outperformed Biden in 2024. There are two possibilities here - either Harris also committed fraud, or she didn't.
If Harris also committed voter fraud, then we should reasonably expect to find evidence of that fraud. Maybe they did it better, sure, but a large-scale operation like state-wide voter fraud ought to leave some evidence. We might also be inclined to ask why, if Harris' campaign is capable of successfully rigging an election in Georgia so professionally, Trump still won Georgia by a decent margin, and why they apparently failed to rig elections in other states, including much more significant swing states.
If Harris didn't commit any kind of fraud, then we'd seem to have to conclude that her performance in the state in 2024 is not prima facie suspicious. If so, then we have a strange question to ask ourselves - why, after rigging it in 2020, would they not bother to rig it in 2024? Moreover, if the Democrats performed better when they weren't rigging it to when they were... that seems strange? That seems like Dick Dastardly stopping to cheat? If Harris didn't cheat in '24, it seems like it just makes more sense if Biden didn't cheat in '20.
Let's consider the four possibilities here: 1) Biden cheats in 2020, Harris cheats in 2024, 2) Biden cheats in 2020, Harris doesn't cheat in 2024, 3) Biden doesn't cheat in 2020, Harris cheats in 2024, 4) Biden doesn't cheat in 2020, Harris doesn't cheat in 2024. It seems like option four just... makes the most sense of the observed data.
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
I was thinking of a particular city or region.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
This reads like just reposting a news or summary article.
Do you have an original comment or thought, or question to ask?
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
2yr 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.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
This is pretty much my take on 'HBD' or what I might term the 'neo-racialists'. It is no doubt true that there's genetic variation, on the population level, across the human race, and these variations to some extent correlate with racial categories. I can't really argue with that. However, the HBDers routinely outrun that observation and draw massive, sweeping conclusions about the desirability of using race as a proxy for a huge number of other issues, and therefore organising society, or even treating individuals, on the basis of race. The whole thing is just a motte and bailey.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
I don't see the connection?
The point I would make - and perhaps I wasn't transparent enough about it? - is that I see no evidence whatsoever that it is 'conventional wisdom' that 'Israel wants to drag the United States into a likely globally-destabilizing conflict on the basis of their insane, racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths'.
I think that SS and his crowd are, to put it bluntly, anti-semites who would oppose anything involving Israel on principle. They just hate Jews. The fact that increasing numbers of Americans are critical of Israeli actions does not indicate that those Americans accept the anti-semitic position. It's entirely possible, even likely, for one to believe that America should not risk getting further involved in conflicts in the Middle East, and that therefore America should either back off from involvement with, or should actively seek to restrain, Israeli aggression, without believing the SS argument about Jews.
Hence my question. I think SS is eliding the difference between declining support for Israel and increasing support for anti-semitism, so to speak. The 'Anti-Semitic Right' school of thought on Israel is both lunatic on its own terms and not accepted by the wider public. I see no strong reason to believe that public criticism of Israeli actions, and specifically criticism of the Iran strikes, indicates growing sympathy for anti-semitism as such.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
Surely the only way to increase the enforcement of the rule of law is to... increase the enforcement of the rule of law? I very much understand and support advocating for the full rule of law in all spheres of life, but if you want to do that, you should, well, do that. Which would include advocating for it here. It's not hard.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything?
Analysing the tribe that Hanania belongs to may be great sport, but it is, surely, completely inconsequential to the points he makes, which the top-level post presumably wanted to discuss?
OliveTapenade
11mo ago
Where's 'here', out of curiosity?
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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