SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
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Gemini's Cave
One of the most famous allegories in history is that of Plato's Cave:
Plato begins by having Socrates ask Glaucon to imagine a cave where people have been imprisoned from childhood, but not from birth. These prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed, forcing them to gaze at the wall in front of them and not to look around at the cave, each other, or themselves. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway with a low wall, behind which people walk carrying objects or puppets "of men and other living things".
The people walk behind the wall so their bodies do not cast shadows for the prisoners to see, but the objects they carry do ("just as puppet showmen have screens in front of them at which they work their puppets"). The prisoners cannot see any of what is happening behind them; they are only able to see the shadows cast upon the cave wall in front of them. The sounds of the people talking echo off the walls; the prisoners believe these sounds come from the shadows.
Socrates suggests that the shadows are reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else; they do not realize that what they see are shadows of objects in front of a fire, much less that these objects are inspired by real things outside the cave which they do not see.
It is astonishing that Plato imagined the form of cultural transmission through projected imagery thousands of years before the creation of the movie theater: the dark room, the audience facing the screen, the projection of light and sound from a hidden source... Movie-going audiences tend to be oblivious to the esoteric artistic motivations and meaning behind the films they watch and reify, also tracking with Plato's allegory.
One thing that is not clearly defined in Plato's allegory is, who are the people behind the wall controlling the puppets and creating the sounds to manipulate the audience's perception of reality? What is motivating them? What happens when the audience catches on to the game being played? In Plato's allegory, such a person who leaves the cave, perceives reality, and then tries to convince his fellow prisoners of the state of affairs is taken as a madman and killed by the other prisoners.
With the growing likelihood of Generative AI fulfilling this role of the people behind the wall, there are Glitches in the Matrix so to speak. Twitter has caught on to Gemini's apparent refusal to depict White people. Whether it's Popes or "Medieval Knights", or "Vikings", "American Founding Fathers", "White families", "British, America, etc. women", "Glamour shots", etc.
The AI Engineer at Google behind Gemini has responded:
We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.
As part of our AI principles https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/, we design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base, and we take representation and bias seriously.
We will continue to do this for open ended prompts (images of a person walking a dog are universal!)
Historical contexts have more nuance to them and we will further tune to accommodate that.
This is part of the alignment process - iteration on feedback. Thank you and keep it coming!
There is no doubt that this is the worst Gemini, and all the other technologies, are going to be at this. The nonsense above will, for the most part, be fixed very quickly. The real danger will be when Gemini and other Generative AI become so good at generating cultural images and motion pictures, with their output influenced by this latent anti-White alignment which is called "AI Safety", that the agenda behind the underlying alignment will be nearly imperceptible. It will influence the creation of culture and art in subtle ways, and you will be considered a madman conspiracy theorist if you conclude that there are people tuning this culture to be anti-White in the most effective way possible. Imagine when anti-White alignment doesn't create the nonsense above, but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
But for now, and not for long, we can recognize "no, we aren't madmen conspiracy theorists, they are trying to tune the culture to be anti-White and the newest methods for doing that are simply not completely refined yet" is clear as day, and as clear as it's ever going to be.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
You do believe Jews act as they do for reasons that can be ascribed to HBD
Yes, do you not?
You do believe that Jews act to undermine and disempower their outgroup, yes?
Yes, do you not?
If I were to ask you: which open-border supporting Jew provides the absolute steel-man for the rational and economic case for open borders? It would without a doubt be Bryan Caplan, I've read a lot of his work and enjoy reading his perspective. But what are we to make of his admission that "Mormons scare me"?
Occasionally, though, I wonder: What would happen if Mormons were a solid majority of the U.S. population? Maybe they’d be as wonderful as ever, but I readily picture a sinister metamorphosis. Given enough power, even Mormons might embrace a brutal fundamentalism. Despite my lovely experiences with Mormons, they scare me.
To be fair, they’re hardly alone. You know who else scares me? Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and atheists. Sunnis, Shiites, Catholics, and Protestants. Whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and American Indians. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Marxists, and reactionaries. Even libertarians scare me a bit. Why? Because given enough power, there’s a serious chance they’ll do terrible things. Different terrible things, no doubt. But terrible nonetheless.
If you’re afraid of every group, though, shouldn’t you support whatever group has the minimum chance of doing terrible things once it’s firmly in charge? Not at all. There’s another path: Try to prevent any group from being firmly in charge. In the long-run, the best way to do this is to make every group a small minority – to split society into such small pieces that everyone abandons hope of running society and refocuses their energy on building beautiful Bubbles. As Voltaire once put it:
When people lament the political externalities of open borders, they’re usually picturing an influx of a group with a bad track record of being in charge. In a sense, these critics understate their case; numerical superiority can turn even the nicest groups into a mortal danger. But critics also overlook the open borders remedy: Diaspora dynamics notwithstanding, welcoming everyone is a great way to turn everyone into a minority. And while that hardly guarantees safety, it’s less menacing than the status quo...
Once the members of the group that scares you the most loses all hope of running the show, most will calm down. In time, they too might be nice as Mormons.
I would qualify Caplan's perspective as "undermining and disempowering" his outgroup, wouldn't you?
Anti-racism also specifically seeks to disempower white people, as in it's the overt agenda of the program. If a Jew supports anti-racism, which specifically aims to empower Jews with social and legal protections and disempower white people, would you qualify that advocacy as "undermining and disempowering" their outgroup?
Edit:
You believe Jews are hostile and dangerous to non-Jews, that they are this way for genetic reasons and therefore it is a predilection that all Jews possess, even if they deny it or are unaware of it, and they are, if not uniquely so, then at least unusually energetic and successful at prosecuting tribal warfare
I don't believe it's a predilection that "all Jews possess", sometimes it's a psychology that manifests in different ways, even as Jews who are especially contrarian and themselves anti-Semitic. Many Jews are apolitical altogether. Why is it when we talk about IQ you understand we ware talking about averages and distributions, but when it comes to talking about Jews we can only be talking about every single one at the same time? Why do you insist on pushing this fallacy that is pushed by the IQ deniers all the time?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
Looking through the past CW threads, I'm not seeing it - "ONLY witchy ramblings." This is basically the only space of this kind that doesn't ban critical discussion on Jews or the Holocaust, which are very important topics in the Culture War, so when it does come up it is probably bothersome to a certain type... but:
I personally REALLY don't care about this topic... That topic makes the motte worse for me.
Does not follow. There are some topics that come up here frequently that I REALLY don't care about, and I click the '-' button within the 0.5 seconds it takes me to realize I'm not interested in the thread. You should just say that it's a topic that you do care about, and it bothers you when people discuss it with a critical perspective. That would be a more honest complaint, and it would ring true for the vast majority of people.
Allowing those topics (though I personally have posted 0 top-level threads on Holocaust denial (so far)) will lower the status of the community in adjacent spaces like SSC. I get the impression the mods are more committed to the purpose of the community than they are status signaling to other rationalists (and I don't mind the token denunciations from the mods here in that thread).
It is actually not well-documented at all. There are no written orders for extermination of millions, likely none ever existed. The "well-documented killings" amounts to historians tallying transports with the assumption that every single person on them was murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, which is not documented (and in fact documents explicitly refer to these alleged extermination camps with non-homicidal functions, like "transit camp" or "labor camp." Historians say this was all "coded language" to get around the fact that documents paint a different picture for the purposes of these camp than their own assertions). But there's never been a single excavation of a single mass grave at any of the alleged killing sites, despite the fact they exist in precisely known locations. There was never a single autopsy of a single person killed by one of these homicidal gas chambers. Excavations are in fact forbidden by Jewish authorities using the same reasoning as is being used to refuse excavations of the alleged Kamloops Indian Reservation mass graves. They say that excavations at Kamloops would "disturb the spirits of the children" which is practically the exact same reasoning given by rabbinical authorities. More likely, they know that excavations would disprove the prevailing narrative in both cases.
In essence, "If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God" is simply the conservative manifestation of the Holocaust dialectic, with the leftist manifestation being Adorno's infamous quote "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
It's really crazy how much the discourse is shifting. Tucker Carlson now directly calling out Jewish mega-donors for facilitating "White Genocide" (his words) in contrast with their pearl-clutching over campus opposition to Israel. Even some left-wing commentators like Kyle Kalinski are Noticing at levels never seen in our lifetimes.
There's a Civil War at the Daily Wire, with Candace Owens delivering a scathing endorsement of Nikki Haley as "president of Isreal" and Ben Shapiro responding with bridge-burning insults. Nikki Haley, for her part, has said she would respond to the rise in Anti-Semitism by de-anonymizing social media, for "National Security". With Nikki Haley's own campaign channel considering this clip from the Republican debate to be worthy of actually posting on the channel, Owens isn't far off.
This all does make me concerned for a Nikki Haley surge, although Trump isn't less pro-Israel than Haley, and Biden has proven to be sufficiently pliable and his administration isn't exactly composed of people who are going to threaten American loyalty to Israel regardless of anything Israel chooses to do.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
Why should I care what Bryan Caplan thinks?
Because I'm trying to calibrate our understanding of what we can consider "disempowering their outgroup." Caplan is acknowledging ethnic anxieties behind his support for open borders- he doesn't want the legacy majority to have power and organize against him. So in this case the support for demographic change is explicitly based on disempowering the legacy majority.
What about anti-racism, where disempowering white people is the specific goal of that cultural movement? If a Jew supports that movement, can we say he is advocating for the disempowerment of his outgroup? If we can't acknowledge these things as examples of what we're talking about, then we're talking past each.
More to the point, if all you are saying is that Jews act like every other human being, why do you care about them so much, and why do you think I should care about them in particular?
They are better at creating culture and propaganda and they use their talents to prioritize the well-being of their ethnic group above my own ethnic group to the detriment of my ethnic group. Why would I need more of a reason to care?
But you think the "Jew average and distribution" is such that most Jews are basically Cylons - meaning, they will naturally act as hostile, subversive agents among non-Jews.
Say theoretically there are Jewish professors or Hollywood producers who prioritize the production of anti-racist content. Would you agree that they are being hostile and subversive?
Rationalism Done Right (and Hipster Eugenecists)
I don't follow the Rationalist sphere very much beyond this community, but I came across the above article with claims that there may be some rightward shifts within the rationalist movement in interesting directions. The author starts by mentioning that:
Richard Hanania said he wanted to start calling himself a “right-wing rationalist.” He thinks he has the same methods of reasoning that rationalists use, but he reaches right-wing conclusions. I spend time with effective altruists, read Scott Alexander, and all that, but I also come to some conclusions that most people would regard as right-wing. I think plenty of people in the community do the same, but they aren’t the majority.
I can't speak to Hanania's views so I would take that with a grain of salt. But the author creates "a list of beliefs for rationalists or effective altruists who lean right", which are the author's conception of "right-wing rationalism." They are described in the article but listed here:
\1. Rejection of the Blank Slate
\2. Cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, has numerous important socioeconomic correlates within countries
\3. Cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, has numerous important socioeconomic correlates between countries
\4. Within developed nations, we cannot substantially permanently change cognitive ability for the better
\5. Inequality of educational outcomes within developed countries is primarily driven by genetic differences
\6. Since genetic differences—especially in genes associated with IQ—play an important causal in socio-economic outcomes, we have to treat genetic changes—dysgenics and eugenics—seriously
\7. Rejection of “the orthodoxy”
\8. Markets are good
\9. We are in an evolutionary mismatch
\10. Suppressing the above information is more harmful than helpful, and we should face reality
The list is weighted too much on IQ differences and socio-economic outcomes. Basically five of these points are restatements of the importance of IQ. But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable. What makes China and what makes the United States is not only a function of IQ.
Point #6 is interesting because I felt it was the biggest differentiator between rationalist thinking and dissident right-wing thinking- the latter of which is concerned with the problem of ethnogenesis and race formation which, if you care about basically anything: civilization, politics, religion, you have to consciously confront the problem of ethnogenesis. It's interesting to see a higher awareness of that problem in a Rationalist, although again he seems only concerned with IQ drift and is missing the bigger picture of ethnogenesis. That is probably why he ultimately describes himself as "enthusiastic for immigration", still viewing the problem as capturing as many high-IQ genes as possible rather than confronting the harder problem of race formation.
Point #9 is also a step closer to DR-oriented thinking:
On the rationalist right, there is more skepticism around the practicality and utility of polyamory, promiscuity, substance use, and atheism. There is more sympathy for Christianity, having children, and the genders adopting their respective gender roles. The right also seems to like older and more traditional aesthetics in architecture, artwork, clothing, etc.
At the end of his article Parrhesia mentions "the Collin’s pro-natalist conservative faction" and linked to this article: Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take 'control of human evolution'. There's a lot of sneering by the author, a lot of cultish goofiness from the subjects of the article (the Collinses), but ultimately I think there's a lot of substance there.
Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool? The Effective Altruist forum has a thread on this article under the thread name "Pronatalists" may look to co-opt effective altruism or longtermism. The greatest consternation was over this part of the BI article:
She [Collins] also weighed in on the stunning implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange FTX, which represented one of the largest financial hubs for the effective-altruism movement. The Collinses, who never directly associated with the top Democratic donor Bankman-Fried, spied an opportunity in his demise.
"This means our faction (more conservative, pronatalist, long-termist-civilization-building-focused, likely to self fund) is now 100X more likely to become a real, dominant faction in the EA space," Simone wrote in a text message on November 12.
The Collinses hope that advances in technology will keep pace with their growing family. The reproductive entrepreneurs who spoke with me seemed confident that the science would progress quickly. "I think we are reaching a point in which we are reinventing reproduction," Varsavsky said.
If scientists at companies like Conception succeed in creating viable embryos out of stem cells, they could in theory produce a massive number of them. Combined with enhanced genetic screening, parents could pick the "optimal" baby from a much larger pool. "There's a seductiveness to these ideas, because it's very grand," Torres said. "It's about taking control of human evolution."
I think the vision here is a far better implementation of longtermism than EA.
As these threads of of Rationalist thinking start to converge with DR thinking, they will have to confront the major problem of coordinating behavior. There's a tounge-in-cheek naivety in the plan of the Collinses:
Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.
This sounds like a crazy idea (and it is). But a much more attainable solution is to organize the social behavior of similar people by granting social status to reproducing, and incentivizing assortative mate selection with high-quality and like-minded people. Basically the things Religion has done for us until now. This could be accomplished with the revitalization of traditional religious institutions or the creation of a new non-theistic cult that coordinates this behavior. The DR is split between the two approaches, and the Collinses would clearly fit better in with the latter.
Another aspect of the article I found noteworthy was that the Collinses (who are Jewish) laugh-off the predictable comparisons to Nazism which (to be fair, credibly) are going to be associated with any pro-natalist movement by its opponents:
The Collinses themselves have been called "hipster eugenicists" online, something Simone called "amazing" when I brought it to her attention.
Malcolm's "going to want to make business cards that say 'Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists," she said with a laugh.
"It's funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism," when they're just improving their own embryos, Simone added, after noting that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. "I'm not eliminating people. I mean, I'm eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me."
Another interesting statement from Simone, which is something you will read verbatim in the DR:
"The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children," Simone said.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
6mo ago
I've never liked the term "white genocide." The word genocide itself is just a word that gets to be claimed by the victor, as the definition is broad enough to be applied to nearly every conflict...
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Destroying a group "in whole or part" is just up to the interpretation of the victor. So if you have no power, like white nationalists, claiming you are being genocided is just going to be dismissed and valid complaints about i.e. demographic replacement are discredited.
In any event, this should just confirms that Jews are right to be wary of encroaching antisemitism.
In the past I've described antisemitism as anti-fragile. So let's say Jews are going to respond to antisemitism. What are they going to do that isn't going to further and visibly validate the arguments made by antisemites? Pushing for greater authoritarianism in the public discourse is their only strategy, and it's becoming less effective quite rapidly.
On the other hand, I think this rhetoric is going to have a real deterrent effect on Jews. You are going to be less likely to see people like Jon Stewart say things like "Jews and blacks should gang up on whitey." Even the ADL is relatively mum recently despite Musk now overtly endorsing DR rhetoric, likely due to the negative PR campaign started by Keith Woods.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
Why is it so taboo for white people to advocate for their ethnic identity? Can we at all attribute this phenomenon to the narrative-generation of cultural elites? If so, what are those narratives and what are their origins? Even boomer-cons have picked up terminology like "critical race theory" from which we get closer to acknowledging an actual origin for these narratives, rather than pretending they fell from the sky.
The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
Facing Facts, even fraught ones: the quest for proto-Indo-Europeans in 2023
The old belief regarding the Aryans, which preceded the Nazis, was that the Aryans (now called Proto-Indo Europeans) conquered Europe and down through Iran and India. There were different theories about the Urheimat of the Aryans. German nationalists thought the Aryan homeland was in Germany, and Indian nationalists would say it was India. In the post-war period, politically correct archaeologists insisted that the Aryan invasion theories were wrong and that Indo-European languages spread through non-violent "cultural diffusion." But this has been definitively disproved by recent genetic evidence. The old story was essentially true although it seems the Aryans most likely originated from the Russian steppe. They had several important technological advantages like domesticated horses, the wheel, and bronze so they pretty much conquered everyone and replaced a large fraction of the males over a wide territory.
Proto-Indo European studies has rapidly changed in the past 10 years as emerging genetic evidence has confirmed the old story and disproven the theories of cultural diffusion and the assertion that the Indo-Europeans left no significant genetic legacy. Razib Khan's article traces the origin of the "lost knowledge" of the Indo-European migrations and its rediscovery in the face of new evidence:
In vast regions of Northern Europe, the Bronze Age steppe herders replaced earlier farming societies, the invaders unceremoniously sweeping away all before them, which often meant the extermination of indigenous male-dominated elites (ancient DNA studies show that Neolithic farmers too structured their societies around male kin-groups)...
Nevertheless, these analyses buttressing the idea of migrations out of the steppe fell out of fashion after the mid-20th century. Not, crucially, because they were systematically discarded based on evidence, but because they grew irredeemably stained by contemporary politics. Philology was highly concentrated in the German-speaking world; in addition to Müller, the list of Germans in the field includes Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Grimm. This led, in the decades before World War II, to the fatal confluence of the study of Indo-Europeans, German nationalism and eventually National Socialism. Between 1900 and 1930 the philologist and archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna hypothesized that the Corded Ware archaeological culture of early Bronze Age East-Central Europe was instrumental in the spread of Indo-European languages, and these ideas were taken up and popularized by the Nazis after he died in 1931. Because the Corded Ware Culture (CWC) flourished in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Kossinna connected Indo-European theory with the rise of the Germans, Hitler’s annexation of these two nations was justified partly by the presumed proto-Germanic character of the CWC once indigenous to that region. Beyond Kossinna, the whole field of Indo-European studies was tainted by Nazism’s radioactivity and its repugnant social and political implications. Any model of prehistoric migration had to reckon with widespread scholarly suspicion about the concept after reflexive aversion from any thought favored by Hitler’s regime.
Steve Sailer, for his part, suggests that the rise of neo-Nietzscheans on the Dissident Right is due in part to the confirmation of the earlier, quasi-mythical stories of continental conquests by chad steppe warriors. Anecdotally I see this to be the case, with DR Twitter accounts heavily invested in Indo-European studies who closely follow the work of those like Harvard geneticist David Reich, whose lab in practice has probably done more than anyone to confirm the old story with genetic evidence.
So, is that it? Is the 1930s German model of European pre-history essentially confirmed? Not so fast, according to Khan, who tries to tackle that historical narrative from a different angle:
Despite accumulating victory upon victory, the Indo-Europeans were not, crucially, civilization-bearers. Their pastoralist world flourished atop the smoldering ruins of worlds lost, cultures that left behind hulking rough-hewn stone monuments and the faint outlines of vast villages that were once the loci of sophisticated civilizations. The early Indo-Europeans were barbarians par excellence; their arrival ushered in an age of animal competition, kill or be killed...
They emerged out of darkness, beyond the view of history, and they brought darkness to many lands they conquered, a process only finally reversed by civilization’s creeping spread. More than 1,000 years after Neolithic Europe and its grand megaliths fell to the barbarian nomads, the two traditions would fuse to set the stage for the eventual rise of Greece, Rome and the world of the Celts.
To summarize, at a high level, all indigenous Europeans are basically a genetic combination of three population groups:
- Proto-Indo Europeans - steppe pastoralists closely associated with Yamnaya culture
- Neolithic European Farmers who migrated across the European continent thousands of years before the Bronze Age
- Eastern/Western European Hunter-Gatherers
Khan's position goes, the Proto-Indo Europeans and their descended cultures (i.e. Corded Ware, the common ancestor of the Italo-Celtic, German, and Balto-Slavic languages) were barbarians par excellence and destroyed the fledging civilizational potential of the Neolithic farmers, a potential evidenced by their construction of megalithic structures and farming mode of societal organization. He claims that the proto-Indo Europeans, in contrast, were "not civilization-bearers", they actually hindered civilization until some vague, exogenous "civilization's creeping spread" brought civilization in spite of the Proto-Indo European conquests.
Thus, Khan presents a novel Aryan-skeptic position: dropping denial of the Völkerwanderungs due to its untenability in the face of recent genetic evidence, but challenging the presence of a civilizational quality to the Proto-Indo European people.
One point Khan makes, which I certainly agree with, is that the Aryan is a synthesis of the three aforementioned population groups, as Khan states "the two traditions [Indo-European and Neolithic Farmer] would fuse to set the stage for the eventual rise of Greece, Rome and the world of the Celts." But this position is actually not much different from the 19th century German pre-history model of Europe, as described by a speech made by Hitler as chancellor of Germany:
The German people came into being no differently than almost every truly creative civilized nation we know of in the world. A numerically small, talented race, capable of organizing and creating civilization, established itself over other peoples in the course of many centuries. It in part absorbed them, in part adapted to them. All members of our people have of course contributed their special talents to this union. It was, however, created by a nation-and-state forming elite alone. This race imposed its language, naturally not without borrowing from those it subjugated. And all shared a common fate for so long, that the life of the people directing the affairs of state became inseparably bound to the life of the gradually assimilating other members. All the while, conqueror and conquered had long become a community. This is our German people of today ... Our only wish is that all members contribute their best to the prosperity of our national life. As long as every element gives what it has to give, this element in so doing will help benefit all lives.
The operative difference, here, is that the German school of thought assigned the civilizational quality of the people foremost to the Bronze Age conqueror-elites whereas Khan assigns that quality to the conquered. Civilization followed in spite of Indo-European legacy according to Khan. Who is correct? We likely won't see serious academic study of this question, but looking at the big picture we can see hints.
There is no person alive today with 100% Yamnayan ancestry. According to David Reich:
the population that contributed genetic material to South Asia was (roughly) 60% Yamnaya [my note: European steppe ancestry], ~30% European farmer-like ancestry
The invaders of India who called themselves Aryan were already the product of this aforementioned synthesis, and today the Aryan people most closely resemble genetically Northern European peoples.
In contrast, the Sardinians provide insight into the pre-Bronze Age farmer populations, as:
Sardinia appears to harbor the highest amounts of Neolithic farmer ancestry and very little of the pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer or Bronze Age pastoralists ancestries.
Khan's thesis doesn't pass the sanity test, the broad-range correlation in Europe appears to follow: population groups with greater Indo-European ancestry trend as nations with higher technological innovation, economic status, empire-building, and global colonization, all of which follow the modus operandi of the Indo-Europeans. The Aryan is absolutely the synthesis of all three groups, but the claim that the "Indo-Europeans were not, crucially, civilization-bearers" doesn't hold any water. Classical Greece, Rome, India, Persia, were all spawned from Indo-European cultural, genetic, and linguistic legacy after the Bronze Age invasions.
I.E studies is going to likely remain a growing area of interest in the DR. It combines genetics, history, and mythmaking in a way that fosters a positive sense of identity and aspiration for pan-European camaraderie among the right wing. It tracks with the DR model of 20th century intellectual movements as subversive towards white identity and obscuring "forbidden knowledge".
The glorification of the Indo-Europeans on the right wing also marks a shift from a liberal/conservative "white people didn't do nothing" opposition to progressive racial narratives, to a Nietzschean glorification of a Bronze Age spirit.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
You never even bothered answering my question re: Caplan, and I guess you don't want to answer the question I just posed either. "But Caplan said he didn't want Jews to get too much power" is a non-answer. The point was that Caplan looks at society and says "damn, it would be better for it to be diverse so that the majority cannot organize against me." I asked you if this could be considered an example of disempowering a legacy majority and reading your post I see no answer.
The 'National Day of Hate' - Anatomy of a Propaganda Hoax
The Dissident-Right Telegramsphere was bemused last month to hear alarmed media reports of a "National Day of Hate" allegedly planned for February 25th. Despite the fact that nobody had heard anything from anyone about such a plan, the story seemed to grow and grow. The episode is recounted in this article, 'National Day of Hate' was ADL hoax. Within the DR sphere it was of course immediately recognized as such. It seems the ADL was the first to spread the claim, and at least one research group also pointed the finger at the ADL. On February 9th:
ADL has been monitoring plans for a day of antisemitic action set to take place nationwide on 2/25. This day may include antisemitic and white supremacist propaganda distributions and banner drops. At this time, ADL has not tracked any direct or specific threats of violence.
The ADL continued to push the story, with Greenblatt tweeting on Feb. 23:
@ADL is closely monitoring the nationwide extremist "Day of Hate" campaign planned for this Saturday. The Jewish community may be the target of vile antisemitic hate, but we shall not be intimidated. Instead, let's celebrate #SabbatOfPeaceNotHate
And with this, the ADL was able to mobilize law enforcement and national security action across the country.
We have been notified that this coming Shabbat, Saturday February 25th, a group of violent extremists are planning to come out and protest against Jewish communities across the country. NYPD Counter-terrorism Bureau has released a statement notifying the Jewish community in NYC of this group's plans. Shmira has been in direct contact with the NYPD 112th and 107th precincts and were reassured that there will be an increased police presence at Synagogues this week. The precincts will be utilizing all necessary means of man power such as, House of Worship auto, counter-terrorism units, precinct sector cars, and auxiliary units who will all be rotating posts at different key locations throughout our neighborhoods.
The allegation trended on Twitter and within the Jewish community. The Israeli ambassador to the US made a tweet that went viral:
How can it be that less than a century after the Holocaust, a Neo-Nazi group in the U.S. calls for a National Day of Hate against the Jews - and there’s no uproar? Have we learned nothing? Have we forgotten that words lead to actions? I pray for a peaceful Shabbat for everyone.
The story made the rounds among various blue checkmarks:
There’s a day of hate planned against Jews this coming Shabbat. So being an American Jew in 2023 is choosing between 1) taking my kids to pray, anxiously looking at the exits worried about their safety or 2) staying home and letting the anti-Semites define my Jewishness.
And an interesting reply from another blue checkmark to that tweet provides an interesting tidbit of information:
We are locked and loaded in my shul. There is training available specifically for shuls. There are also homeland security grants for guards.
Related to my bolded emphasis above, on February 23rd the ADL tweeted:
When neo-Nazis threaten the Jewish community with a National “Day of Hate,” we respond with resolve & solidarity. Celebrate a #ShabbatOfPeaceNotHate this weekend & let everyone know we won't be intimidated. Retweet this & sign our ADL call for action now
The call for action:
Earlier this week, the Jewish community learned of an attempt by white supremacist groups to organize coordinated antisemitic activity as a National Day of Hate this coming weekend. While ADL is not aware of any specific threats, we know that these groups are hoping for increased antisemitic flier distributions, small protests and graffiti. We know this is frightening; it is completely unacceptable that any faith should be targeted in this way.
We all deserve to feel safe in our communities. To protect the safety of our synagogues, mosques, churches, temples, and other houses of worship or religious gathering places, nonprofits are forced to spend their limited funds on security measures. A federal grant program already exists and is being utilized by nonprofit institutions across the country but Congress must increase funding to meet the rising threats of hate and extremism.
Please join ADL in urging your members of Congress to fully fund the Nonprofit Security Grant Program at $360 million
Following the money, the Nonprofit Security Grant Program appeared to begin in 2016 with a total funding of $20 million. This allocation has grown enormously year over year to a 2023 allocation of $305 million.
Last year I took note of the Biden administration promising Jewish groups more federal funding for security at the White House Menorah lighting. On February 17th, about a week before the 'National Day of Hate', the Biden Administration declared it had followed through on that promise:
In fiscal year 2022, implemented a nearly 40% increase in funding – from $180 million to $250 million – in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), which provides support for increasing the physical security of nonprofit organizations, including houses of worship and other religious affiliated entities. In his fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, President Biden called for $360 million for this key program. The omnibus spending package for fiscal year 2023 funded this program at $304 million.
In its call to action, the ADL is lobbying for the "fully funded" $360 million proposed by the Biden administration. A quick search through Google News of the "Nonprofit Security Grant Program" shows that this lobbying effort extends to over a hundred Jewish organizations:
More than 120 Jewish Federations urged House and Senate Appropriations committees to increase funding for security of faith-based communities...
“As you look to the next fiscal year, we write on behalf of the Jewish community, represented by the Jewish Federations of North America, to urge you to prioritize spending programs to secure faith and other vulnerable communities, fight antisemitism and hate crimes, care for Holocaust survivors and other vulnerable populations, and promote peace and security in the Middle East,” the Jewish leaders wrote in their letter on Thursday.
Both the Biden administration and ADL talk about places of worship and religion in a general sense as being the recipients of these funds, but I would like to see exactly how these funds are allocated. This is an enormous growth in funding- with one observer calling "nonprofits" the "big winners" of FY2023 Homeland Security Grants.
Looking at the FEMA datasets, they only record bulk allocations to state institutions who then allocate the funds to grantees. I would like to do more digging to see if I can find data on one or more states to analyze which nonprofits are receiving these grants. If anyone has experience data sleuthing grant allocations and can point me in the right direction that would be helpful.
While digging through the Google News surrounding the Nonprofit Security Grant Program when writing this post, I came across this article published yesterday in Jewish Currents, which to its credit, independently reaches the same conclusions I have here.
Ben Lorber writes a somewhat odd and revealing subtitle to his article:
In the lead-up to the recent Day of Hate, national Jewish defense organizations—along with media and law enforcement—played right into white supremacists’ strategy.
Lorber tries to say that this hoax somehow works to the benefit of "white supremacists", but how? Lorber writes that it "plays into white supremacists' strategy", but this entire affair has been the strategy of the Jewish lobby, which worked to spectacular effect. The ADL isn't playing into their strategy, it's playing its own strategy and in doing so showing that the 'white supremacists' are right, which are not the same thing.
But that's only something that actually matters if non-Jews are willing to criticize this behavior. As long as this public criticism is restricted by right to "in-house" criticism in Jewish publications, there's no check to this sort of behavior.
If I'm able to find a dataset on which non-profits are receiving these grants, I'll follow-up with additional analysis on the NSGP.
One thing that has impressed me in the Revisionist space, unlike a lot of heterodox spaces where everyone has their own cockamamie theory, is that there's 100% consensus on the core claims. The claims are:
-
There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
-
There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to exterminate millions of Jews
-
The "six million" number is a propaganda/symbolic figure that has no relation to actual Jewish population losses
I would say the high-end of Jewish population losses among Revisionist estimates is 1.5-2 million, but most estimates are lower than that. The question of whether or not these events count as genocidal is a semantic question that I have not seen treated by Revisionists.
I don't have a problem with, even if you take those 3 claims away, still calling the real parts a "genocide." It really is all about the three claims above- no more and no less.
You can't divorce the discussion from the fact that Israel is slaughtering thousands of Gazan civilians, and it's especially rich that Jews have been able to force the discourse on an alleged call to genocide with a run-of-the-mill propaganda slogan like "Palestinians will be free in Palestine," when such slogans are common to every war in human history. We should be left in awe that they've been able to steer the discourse to pearl-clutching around that slogan while they openly endorse an ongoing ethnic cleansing. None of the hypocrisy you are trying to identify here between "POC vs Jews" on the free speech question can possibly hold a candle to the hypocritical Elite support for Zionist brutality. The fact this has been made an issue proves Jews are on the top of the pyramid, above and beyond the POC, and the kvetching over this controversy is just proof of that fact and not at all proof that Jews are put upon.
AFAIK Catholics do not believe Jews go to hell, they are Chosen.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
Caplan wants more diversity because he considers it to be less threatening than a homogenous population, it doesn't matter how many paragraphs you write, that is what Caplan is talking about and I'm simply asking if we can interpret "more diversity == less threatening" to be an advocacy for disempowering a legacy majority?
There was a big story in Holocaust studies during 2020: it turned out the deputy commander of the alleged Sobibor extermination camp, Johann Niemann, took many photos of the camp during its operation and put them all in a photo album, which were completely unknown until they were published in that year. This was a highly significant story because this was the first set of photographs of the camp to ever be published. It was thought that due to the extreme secrecy of the extermination camps, photography would have been strictly forbidden- although there is a similar photo album of the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. None of the photographs show anything incriminating (although the Treblinka album verifies the surprising fact that the camp had a zoo).
Likewise, the new Sobibor photo album contained nothing incriminating in terms of the alleged homicidal functionality of the camp. The image that became the most prominently featured in the various news reports about this Sobibor photo album was this one, which shows camp officials relaxing at a table drinking with some German women. There are other photos showing similar scenes at the camp.
These photographs were the most "incriminating" photographs of the album, with the news reports invariably mentioning how evil these people must have been to be relaxing so while they are murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and cremating them on open fires. These photographs certainly do not look like they were taken of people in the process of murdering hundreds of thousands, so these photographs therefore become proof of the banality of evil.
I mention this because so much of the Holocaust is subject to dual interpretation:
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Homicidal gas chambers disguised as showers -> real showers
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Zyklon B for extermination -> Zyklon B for delousing
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"Resettlement was code for gas chamber extermination in documents" -> Resettlement was actually resettlement
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"Transit camp was code for extermination camp" -> Transit camp meant transit camp
If we assume that Revisionists are correct that Sobibor was a transit camp (which, by the way, is what Himmler said it was in documents), it would no doubt still be a place of suffering and violence (the commander who took these photographs, Niemann, was killed in a prisoner uprising), but it would be far removed from the orthodox narrative of mass murder in gas chambers disguised as showers.
Then, these photographs would not portray the "banality of evil": the greatest murderers of human history, so evil that they carouse and fiddle while they are murdering hundreds of thousands- they would portray normal people acting normally in a difficult situation.
The "banality of evil" trope is used to invert evidence of people acting normally, as if they are not the greatest mass murderers in human history as being incriminating rather than evidence that they didn't do what they are being accused of. Usually in a criminal investigation, the suspect acting as if he had not committed the crime he is being accused of would be interpreted as evidence against the allegation. But in Holocaust studies, it becomes "These people don't look like they are murdering hundreds of thousands of people, this just shows the banality of evil!"
I haven't seen Zone of Interest yet, but presumably it does not portray the brutal torture of Rudolf Höss by his British interrogators, which extracted his absurdly false confession that become the bedrock for the entire Holocaust narrative.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
6mo ago
Israel struck the Al-Shifa hospital and then lied about the source being misfired Palestinian munitions. The IDF even provided a trajectory map of the projectiles which they claimed to be based on radar detections:
It was the first of at least four strikes involving multiple munitions on different sections of the sprawling complex between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Friday morning. Al-Shifa’s director, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, said in a phone interview that seven people had been killed and several others had been wounded.
Hours after the final blast, the Israeli military blamed unspecified Palestinian militants, saying a “misfired projectile” aimed at Israel Defense Forces troops deployed nearby had instead hit the hospital.
But at least three of the projectiles that struck it appear to have been Israeli munitions, according to pictures of weapons fragments collected and verified by The New York Times and analyzed by experts...
Israel’s assertion that Al-Shifa was actually hit by a Palestinian projectile echoed similar — and unresolved — claims and counterclaims following munitions that hit the courtyard of another Gaza hospital, Al-Ahli, nearly a month ago...
In addition to the weapons remnants, an analysis of video footage shows that three of the projectiles were fired into the hospital from the north and south, contrary to the western trajectory indicated on a map released by the I.D.F., which it said was based on radar detections. A review of satellite images showed there were I.D.F. positions north and south of the hospital early Friday.
The strikes analyzed by The Times did not appear to be targeting underground infrastructure. Two of the most severe strikes hit upper floors of the maternity ward.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
One thing I learned from Run Unz's article on Holocaust denial is that it began as a sort of quirky, libertarian-adjacent focus group. Revisionism made a lot of headway in the 1980s and 1990s. The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in some major revisions that were a big victory for the movement, like the downward revision of the official death toll at Auschwitz from 4 million to 1.1 million, and the official revisions at Majdanek that proved the Revisionist archival research and criticisms of that extermination narrative to be correct. The internet promised an increase in reach for heterodox thinking of all stripes, including Revisionism. In 1994 David Cole debated Revisionism on the Phil Donahue show, where the Revisionists wiped the floor with the mainstream on national television. It's unthinkable now that a show with an establishment figure and reach like this would platform a Holocaust denier at all like this.
There was a very real inflection point in the 2000s. September 11th, the Iraq war, spreading Democracy with Israel as the greatest ally and such. There was also much greater pressure to censor and prosecute Holocaust deniers. David Irving, the historian, was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to three years in prison for the crime of Holocaust Denial (then imagine, people here point to his repudiation of Revisionism as being a victory for the mainstream after he was thrown in jail for his position- an academic gets thrown in jail for believing X, and then you celebrate him repudiating X as an academic win?). Most Holocaust Denial laws were not established until after the 2000s, it's a recent phenomenon in response to the Revisionist movement. Canada outlawed Holocaust denial only in 2021.
The internet, which promised the free flow of heterodox thinking, has become much more restrictive of Holocaust revisionism. Revisionism was the very first political content to be 100% censored on YouTube. All Revisionist books were banned from Amazon on 2017, a policy which is still strictly enforced. Revisionist subreddits were the first politically-oriented subreddits that were banned, long before there was any censorship at all.
To illustrate the point, take a look at the ADL's 2023 Online Holocaust Denial Report Card. The first thing you will notice is that no platform has a grade higher than a C+, imagine what these platforms will have to do to get their A from the ADL. You will also notice that there's an Action taken for trusted partner metric, which essentially means "can the ADL get this removed if we flag it", which is "Yes" for all platforms except Fortnite. Why is Fortnite on a report card for Online Holocaust Denial? Are they going to change their content policies as a result of their F?
The point here is that Holocaust Revisionism went from being a quirky movement of libertarian-adjacent autists to a genuine political dissident movement. Being the public face of that movement is the least desirable job in the world. The current man who has that role, Germar Rudolf, is currently in hiding because his application for a Greed Card renewal was denied by the United States and his passport was not renewed by Germany. Despite the fact he has an American wife and American children, he is in hiding so he doesn't face deportation by the United States, prosecution in Germany, and years in jail. As mentioned, David Irving actually did face arrest and prison prior to his repudiation of Revisionism. Likewise, David Cole frequently talks about how threats of violence made against him from Jewish groups motivated him to step away from Revisionism. Weber's organization, the IHR, was firebombed in 1984 and it lost 90% of its inventory.
One pattern that I never respected, even when I was on the fence, was on the mainstream pointing at people who were chilled by authoritarian chilling effects, including threats of violence and prison, and then declaring an academic victory.
Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than one million Jews died during World War II, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.
It's also easy to see Weber's perspective in that 2009 article. Who else here remembers 2009? It was the high watermark of Neoconservative influence on American policy and culture. The big issues of the day were Islamic terrorism, Middle East wars, and Health Care. It's easy to see Weber's perspective that Revisionism is a lost cause, with mounting pressure on Revisionism from all corners and with no apparent saliency to the problems of the day.
2023 is very different from 2009. The culture is radically different. There is a counter-culture of disaffected young people who are highly receptive to radical critiques of post-modernism, and it that does not resemble anything in 2009. Revisionism becomes an extremely potent, radical critique of post-modernism by inverting the work of the critical theorists. The critical theorists used the Holocaust to assert the psychopathology of gentiles, and propose post-modern culture as a therapy for the authoritarian personality. Revisionism turns the tables, it invites a psychoanalysis of Jews and their behavior that has contributed to the state of the culture and the Holocaust's prominence within it. It's not a populist aspiration- Joe Sixpack won't care about the truth of gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. But I suspect it would be highly disruptive to the thinking and world model of smarter people who potentially have more influence and status.
Nobody is acting as if the truth of those claims is irrelevant. The ADL isn't acting as if Revisionism is irrelevant, they and adjacent groups assert nothing less than enormous alarm over any Holocaust denial content anywhere. People here don't seem to think that this the truth is irrelevant, as I frequently see comments like one made only yesterday: "About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar." I can see how Weber felt that way in 2009, but if Revisionism gained any sort of foothold, even a non-populist foothold like HBD has, it would be highly disruptive to the thinking of many people.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
To clarify, you are saying that if the right-wing accusation of LGBT+ grooming children is truthful, then you personally support the shooter?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
I will answer your questions by attempting to clarify my position:
Let's say that 100% of the Jewish academics, Hollywood producers, media execs, financiers, etc. who acquired station in the United States since the 1900s were Chinese instead of Jewish. For example, take every single Jewish intellectual in the Frankfurt school and suppose they were Chinese instead of Jewish, and repeat that across all of society for the past century. Freud was Chinese, Franz Boas was Chinese, every media exec in this image were Chinese instead of Jewish... Let's say that all the exact ideological, academic, and cultural movements have otherwise been identical, except instead the prevailing consternation over anti-Semitism, anti-Chinese sentiments were regarded with equal severity in the United States today.
If I were to say, "these Chinese are a hostile elite: they promote ideology and radical movements that criticize white identity and call for a whole-of-society effort to dismantle 'White Supremacy' while simultaneously calling for a whole-of-society effort to prevent anti-Chinese sentiments. They present this dynamic as a universal moral good, a healing of the world, but it seems pretty self-serving. They themselves are Chinese ethnic nationalists, many of them have Chinese citizenship and identify strongly with that country, even as they criticize and suppress any advocacy for white identity in our own country. Anybody who criticizes Chinese influence or behavior is regarded as a deranged genocidal lunatic who should be de-personed from social media, the labor force, payment processors, and polite society. This is hostile."
Do you think it would be reasonable to say: "So you're saying that the Chinese are lizard people who have it in their DNA to destroy their outgroup?" I am saying the Chinese are a hostile elite, that is not a statement on the behavior or motivation of every single Chinese person.
Now this scenario with the Chinese playing this role is unlikely for two reasons: First, despite their intelligence they completely lack the Jewish talent for creating myth, propaganda, and social narratives... amazingly, people here are citing the worldwide adherence to Abrahamic religion as evidence for the innocuity of Jewish mythmaking, rather than acknowledging that as evidence for the potent psychological influence of their talents. This is without a shadow of a doubt derived from their cognitive profile that goes way beyond IQ alone. This talent is the most HBD-relevant point and what sets Jews apart, as indeed trying to influence culture to the benefit of your ingroup isn't unique to Jews, they just have the most success in convcing society that Moral Progress means dismantling whiteness and protecting Jews from anti-Semtism.
Secondly, if every time an American turned on a TV and saw a Chinese person or academic talking about how evil white people are and how they need to be removed from positions of influence, that would probably have incited an anti-Chinese backlash decades ago. But Jews present as white when they say "fellow white people, we need to dismantle white supremacy and engage in a whole-of-society effort to combat anti-Semitism." So their outgroup criticisms are interpreted by the population as an ingroup moral enlightenment, who in their naivety have no suspicion whatsoever of an ethnocentric motivation for the intellectual and cultural ideas being presented as moral progress or healing of the world. They actually think it is moral progress to hate white identity and be obsessed with protecting Jewish identity from any measure of criticism.
We can also consider a proof by contradiction: "The Jewish elite has been hostile to Jewish identity and a fierce advocate of white identity." Which hypothesis seems more likely to you, that one or mine?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
But larger organs of power and money have both adapted, the way evolving systems tend to do, and have found ways to capture market forces and regulatory oversight, and entrench their enshittification without fear of ever being unseated. Late stage (enshittified) capitalism and late stage democracy are feeling their oats.
Most noticeably, in my opinion, was the way the American power-sliding-leftward culture captured academia and media, which used to be the oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism. Now, all problems in society are laid at the feet of capitalism and free markets without examination of other possible governmental or societal causes. Any power shifts to the left are framed as “reforms,” and power shifts to the right are framed as “corruption” and “fascism.”
Was academia and media really all that different back then, as "oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism?" Or was it largely a façade then as it is today?
Earlier today Ron Unz posted a lengthy article about some WW-II revisionism synthesizing a bunch of his earlier commentaries on the topic, but what surprised me most was a related article he linked containing shocking pre-war correspondence that I had never heard of before, although I am no stranger to WW-II revisionism.
The context is that when the Germans captured Warsaw they captured the original facsimiles of secret correspondence from the Polish Ambassador to the United States, the authenticity of which have been confirmed many times over. Here's a document from the collection, a secret report dated January 12, 1939 (pre-war) by Jerzy Potocki. This is a translation of the full secret report on the situation in the United States as perceived by the Polish ambassador:
There is a feeling now prevalent in the United States marked by growing hatred of Fascism, and above all of Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with National Socialism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the] radio, film, daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible–above all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited–this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe.
At the present moment most Americans regard Chancellor Hitler and National Socialism as the greatest evil and greatest peril threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent platform for public speakers of all kinds, for emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia who with a great many words and with most various calumnies incite the public. They praise American liberty which they contrast with the totalitarian states.
It is interesting to note that in this extremely well-planned campaign which is conducted above all against National Socialism, Soviet Russia is almost completely eliminated. Soviet Russia, if mentioned at all, is mentioned in a friendly manner and things are presented in such a way that it would seem that the Soviet Union were cooperating with the bloc of democratic states. Thanks to the clever propaganda the sympathies of the American public are completely on the side of Red Spain.
This propaganda, this war psychosis is being artificially created. The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a thread and that war is inevitable. At the same time the American people are unequivocally told that in case of a world war, America also must take an active part in order to defend the slogans of liberty and democracy in the world. President Roosevelt was the first one to express hatred against Fascism. In doing so he was serving a double purpose; first he wanted to divert the attention of the American people from difficult and intricate domestic problems, especially from the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Second, by creating a war psychosis and by spreading rumors concerning dangers threatening Europe, he wanted to induce the American people to accept an enormous armament program which far exceeds United States defense requirements.
Regarding the first point, it must be said that the internal situation on the labor market is growing worse constantly. The unemployed today already number 12 million. Federal and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only the huge sums, running into billions, which the treasury expends for emergency labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far only the usual strikes and local unrest have taken place. But how long this government aid can be kept up it is difficult to predict today. The excitement and indignation of public opinion, and the serious conflict between private enterprises and enormous trusts on the one hand, and with labor on the other, have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are causing him many sleepless nights.
As to point two, I can only say that President Roosevelt, as a clever player of politics and a connoisseur of American mentality, speedily steered public attention away from the domestic situation in order to fasten it on foreign policy. The way to achieve this was simple. One needed, on the one hand, to enhance the war menace overhanging the world on account of Chancellor Hitler, and, on the other hand, to create a specter by talking about the attack of the totalitarian states on the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend. He described it as the capitulation of France and England to bellicose German militarism. As was said here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain at pistol-point. Hence, France and England had no choice and had to conclude a shameful peace.
The prevalent hatred against everything which is in any way connected with German National Socialism is further kindled by the brutal attitude against the Jews in Germany and by the émigré problem. In this action Jewish intellectuals participated; for instance, Bernard Baruch; the Governor of New York State, Lehman; the newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and others who are personal friends of Roosevelt. They want the President to become the champion of human rights, freedom of religion and speech, and the man who in the future will punish trouble-mongers. These groups, people who want to pose as representatives of “Americanism” and “defenders of democracy” in the last analysis, are connected by unbreakable ties with international Jewry.
For this Jewish international, which above all is concerned with the interests of its race, to put the President of the United States at this “ideal” post of champion of human rights, was a clever move. In this manner they created a dangerous hotbed for hatred and hostility in this hemisphere and divided the world into two hostile camps. The entire issue is worked out in a mysterious manner. Roosevelt has been forcing the foundation for vitalizing American foreign policy, and simultaneously has been procuring enormous stocks for the coming war, for which the Jews are striving consciously. With regard to domestic policy, it is extremely convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism which is ever growing in the United States, by talking about the necessity of defending faith and individual liberty against the onslaught of Fascism.
At least from the 1939 perspective of the Polish ambassador to the United States, the purported role of the media as "oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism" was a farce then as it is now.
It's full of euphemisms
This is what historians say to hand-wave the fact that the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, a direct reading, supports the Revisionist case for the "final solution." Revisionists claim the "final solution" was the expulsion of the Jews from the European sphere, and the minutes from the Wannsee Conference are evidence of that interpretation. The plan was to concentrate them in the East and then resettle them out of Europe, Madagascar was the most serious proposal as that territory would be negotiated from France, after the war. Although there is evidence that a reservation in (planned to be conquered) Russian territory was also considered.
It is historians who say that the minutes are full of "camouflage and euphemism" because a direct reading of the documents simply does not support their case.
Menorahs on Public Lands
The Windows OS has a new feature that displays a small icon in the Desktop search bar. The icon rotates every few days based on the calendar, similar to Google's tradition of customizing their search page. I never paid attention to it until I noticed a Menorah displayed on my Desktop. Presumably subsequent icons would show presents or a Christmas Tree. Certainly, though, it will never display a Nativity or Christian Cross.
I learned recently that Allegheny v. ACLU ruled that a Nativity on public land, as a religious symbol, violates the Establishment Clause but a Menorah on public land does not. According to the logic of the ruling, the Menorah and Christmas Tree are secular symbols of the winter holidays and do not constitute the endorsement of a religion while the Nativity does so. The logic is on its face patently absurd as the Menorah is not a secular symbol in any sense. It is a sacred symbol honoring a miracle upon the successful Jewish revolt against the Hellenists. Reading various opinions from Jewish publications, it is clear that many Jews continue to interpret the public lighting of the Menorah from an adversarial perspective:
The Establishment of Religion Takes Many Forms
The concept of the Establishment of Religion is tenuous and arbitrary. What is religion except for a unique collection of symbols, rituals, and myths that have an, often consciously-designed, psychological effect on intended flocks? That psychological effect influences our behavior: it affects our loyalties and our behavior towards the ingroup/outgroup, our code of conduct in society, our mate selection and reproductive behaviors, our politics, our community rituals, and much more.
Myth, Religion, art, politics, and culture all belong under the same umbrella. Religion is everywhere and most people today do not consume their religious messaging through a church but through mass media. Many here have interpreted the BLM movement and protests as a Religious movement, often with the intent to dismiss it or ridicule it. This power of mass media was envisioned by Richard Wagner:
Wagner's conception of proto mass-media as Gesamtkunstwerk was preempted by Plato, who two thousand years earlier envisioned the psychological power of the cinematic projection of light. Today, our consumption of Myth: those projections which intelligently orient our view of the world in understanding right and wrong, heroes and villain, are increasingly delivered through mass media rather than traditional religious institutions.
Earlier this week at the lighting of the Menorah inside the White House, not to be confused with the giant Menorah on the White House Lawn, President Biden remarked "Together, we must stand up against the disturbing rise in antisemitism" while touting the December 12th formation of the Inter-Agency Group to Counter Antisemitism, which will be "led by Domestic Policy Council staff and National Security Council staff to increase and better coordinate U.S. Government efforts to counter antisemitism":
At the ceremony, also emphasized was "securing the largest-ever increase in federal funding for the physical security of nonprofits, including synagogues and Jewish Community Centers".
Likewise, in the recently passed 2023 budget, in addition to at least $4 billion for Israel, over $65 million in federal funds was allocated to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which, combined with the abundant support from private funds, amounted to a whopping $245 million in support for that museum in 2022. That makes it apparently, and by far, the most well-funded museum in the Nation's capital with well over 3x the funding of the National WWII Museum.
In contrast, the National Museum of American History had a 2018 budget of $40 million despite the fact it received 3.8M visitors in 2016, in comparison to the Holocaust Museum's 1.6 million for that year.
Which of the above should be considered the establishment of religion? All of it.
Christmas is Never Secular
In the same vein, Christmas is fundamentally a Religious festival even in its most non-Christian expression. It's the time of year where the masses practice a form of religious observance that is more comparable to a pagan, pre-Christian form of worship.
We ritualistically build our household lararium next to the hearth. We set out milk and cookies as an offering to a benevolent god who lives in a mystical Hyperborean realm, judges our behavior, and leaves us gifts. We honor his image in our films, songs, and Myth, especially to the delight of women and children. We carry on quirky household traditions which are transmitted ancestrally. Our celebration of Christmas and observance of Santa Claus would be more similar to the way the Romans, for example, worshipped their ancestral or household gods.
In this sense a "secular Christmas symbol" is an oxymoron. There is no such thing, which is acknowledged by the Jewish perspective which remarked on the foreignness and inescapability of the gentile "Holiday Spirit". The reality is that both the Menorah and Christmas Tree are religious symbols, and the government is constructively establishing religion with its display of both.
The "War on Christmas"
The Christians, in a way, get the short end of the stick for not being allowed to display their sacred symbols on public land. But who do they have to blame for that? They have allowed, without much protest, the designation of their own religion as second-class to the financial and legal privileges granted to Judaism. Christians tilt at windmills while sacred symbols of Jewish Victory tower over them during the Christmas holiday at the White House and Central Park, while their own sacred symbols are outlawed on the same land.
To reverse course, Christians would need to adopt the adversarial perspective that motivates Jews to light the Menorahs in these spaces. But given Christian doctrine it is not clear that the religion is capable of asserting itself in that way.
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