urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
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User ID: 226
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
You've missed the second part of what I said: I said that antisemites often both deny the Holocaust and despise the concept of a Jewish state. If you "believe races in general should have their own nations", but not the Jews, and also don't want to live around them, essentially what you're saying is that the Jews should go away, but there's not any place on earth you can put them... well, that rather sounds like the public position of the Nazi party before the Holocaust. The final solution was final because they decided the other solutions wouldn't work to get rid of the Jews they despised. If someone doesn't want to live around Jews, hates the concept of a Jewish state, and despises mass murder, it rather prompts the question of what exactly they want Jewish people to do.
Which brings me back to my point: the crux of antisemitism isn't about trying to do something with Jews, even though that can spiral out of control -- it's about finding a scapegoat for the ingroup's problems. "Our society would be grand and peaceful and glorious, were it not for those dastardly Jews!" is a refrain heard from Toledo to Berlin to Little Rock; somehow the cause of good German Aryans white liberals being liberal isn't white people's culture, but the Jews, because good German Aryans white people are, of course, the master race with protagonist energy, they've just been duped by the Jews and their damn verbal intelligence. It lets people rectify the purity of the ingroup, by blaming all its problems on the outgroup. But it also says some pretty pathetic things about the ingroup, if you think about it.
I get why Jews make an easy scapegoat -- they do have a strong sense of ingroup-loyalty, they do have a lot of success in fields requiring high verbal fluency, and they do have a unique, even odd, culture, which makes them easily distrusted, especially in pre-modern societies that never prized pluralism. But I think the error of the Zionists who claimed antisemites would be on their side is they thought the point of antisemitism was about trying to not live near Jews or wanting an ethnostate -- in fact the very things you're saying -- rather than getting really, really angry at Jews for problems they didn't actually cause, because they're an easy scapegoat.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
It just seems to me that the relatively low odds of it happening combined with how mild the downside is means that it shouldn't be a major factor in a woman's decision of whether to marry.
Well, in the hypothetical that was brought up, there was infidelity involved -- which is obviously hurtful. I think restricting the possible downsides to the economic ones really limits your ability to understand how difficult this situation would be for people to handle. There are a lot of people who would rather be single and lonely than coupled and vulnerable to the hurt and rejection of infidelity or loss-of-love.
I think the risk is relatively low as well, but people are increasingly terrified even of small chances of hurt. And men do this too, I've heard of men breaking up with their girlfriends because they're terrified she'll use social media to hurt his reputation someday, for some unknown reason; just the raw possibility of a power imbalance is so fearful.
And there's that term again: power imbalance. We're living through a time where any and all power is being questioned, "the rapists are in the sacred institutions", "the media can't be trusted", "the deep state controls the world", "the President is a vegetable fascist", "the billionares are taking over the world", "the bosses are all entitled boomers", "you have to jump ship to get a promotion", "corporations want cattle and not pets"... the very concept of two people in a relationship that involves any sort of power relations instantly conjures to mind images of exploitation, unfairness, and abuse. The just leader is unthinkable. And the very nature of a marriage is that the two members hold power over each other: "For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does."
Given that we live in such a time of profound social doubt, isolation, and distrust in institutions and human virtue, is it any wonder that people have such fears about entering into a lifelong spiritual, sexual, and economic union with another human being?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I actually thought about that very idea before, I'm intrigued to read that a confluence of interests between antisemites and Zionists was hypothetically conceived. It seems logical that you'd want a place you could send Jews if you didn't like them that much.
But raw ethnic antisemitism just doesn't make logical sense to me, if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement, but antisemites deny it happened, and if you think Jewish presence in your country creates a disloyal class, presumably you'd want somewhere to banish them, but antisemites hate even the concept of a Jewish state. Frankly, I've never been persuaded from my core assumption that hardcore antisemitism is just people looking for a scapegoat to pin their ingroup's problems on the outgroup, and if the scapegoat goes away the problems can no longer be blamed on it.
But also, honestly, I don't know that the far-right actually supports Israel in large numbers, although I'm sure it happens. It seems to me that far-rightists who hate Jews tend to really despise the state of Israel for similar reasons to the left, and believe that any support for the Israelis in the West is due to "Jewish control of the media."
Possibly the bluesky poster is saying someone like Trump is far right, but I consider the idea that the firmly pro-Israel part of the right is either far-right or anti-semitic to be laughable. These are the most philosemitic gentiles who have ever existed on the face of the earth, they brag about how much they love Jews and how much they want Jews to like them.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population.
I don't think what most anti-Zionists want is for Israeli Jews to be massacred. The more moderate wing presumably wants a single state with equal rights and no privileged status for Jews (i.e. no right of return, citizenship based on presence on the land, etc) while the more extreme wing wants to send Israeli Jews packing; there are of course people who want Israeli Jews to die as an end goal, but despite some high-profile demonstrations I believe those people are the minority.
I rarely speak up on the Israel-Palestine issue here or in person because it never changes, and will never change, and yet is totally radioactive, so it's almost useless to express an individual opinion. But I personally don't really like anyone involved in the conflict; as far as I'm concerned there are no winners, there are only losers. I can absolutely see the left's point that Zionism was rather colonialist -- the Jews who moved to Israel during the Zionist migration hadn't been in the region for many generations, and thereafter took over governance direct from the British -- as well as essentially religious: the claim of sovereignty over the territory was based, however many epicycles of irony and rabbinical reinterpretation Zionists wanted to invoke, essentially on the belief that God had promised the region to Jews in perpetuity. And so it's really easy for me to see why progressives, who loathe colonialism and hate religion, would see this as fundamentally incompatible with the "rules based international order" that predominated after WWII, and therefore perceive Israel/Palestine as an active non-self-governing territory.
Given that a few generations of Israeli Jews have made their lives there, it certainly seems like ethnic cleansing to say they have to leave now, and I think people who directly call for that are triggering people's Holocaust detectors for good reason. At the same time, I also just don't particularly like that the West straight-up endorsed the foundation of an ethnostate in the 1940s on territory that had just been involved in an active ethnic civil war. There were a lot of good reasons many Jews felt the foundation of a Jewish state was a moral imperative, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely to me that Jews would live in greater peace and security, and lost fewer lives, had European Jewry stuck around in Western Europe, or fled to America. The Israelis can do whatever they want, but I'm just not at all convinced that the ethnoreligious passion of Zionism could ever justify the immense suffering that civil war has brought to both Jews and Palestinians in the region.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Fair enough, it was a dumb comment.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.
The former is historically common and is a great situation for all around, this is a person who took til death do us part seriously and probably retains, despite her loss, the character and personality to maintain a healthy relationship.
In the latter two cases, there’s tremendous baggage, and a strong suggestion of poor relationship characteristics. If she couldn’t work things out with the father of her children, who’s to say she’ll be able to work things out with you when things get tough?
Spousal abuse and infidelity mix things up, and it really depends on how exactly that went down. But I suspect most cases of single motherhood in adults young enough to continue to have children have to do with poor relationship behaviors and poor character, things that should give someone pause even if children weren’t in the mix.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I think a lot of it, combined with cheaper housing like 2rafa said. The problem that afflicts the PMC is they value living an urban and high-status lifestyle over having children, and act accordingly. When they do have children, they stress them out pushing them to become petit elites through prestigious education, so they too can afford a shoebox apartment in Manhattan.
The other problem is a lot of the interesting careers for smart people require geographical clustering in urban areas — and more upper-middle-class people are interested in those careers. Work-from-home was a big plus for people whose main problem was this; it enabled people who were trained in a professional field to work in an area with red-tribe property values. A ton of the COVID-era population shift came down to WFH making it an option for moderate professionals to move from blue tribe areas to red tribe areas.
I’m critical of the impact of WFH on productivity, but I think some element of professional geographic distribution would be the greatest thing that could ever be done to get the PMC to consider having more children.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Most of the great events in world history happened because people made decisions based on gut, and put personal negotiation above political correctness. It obviously has the possibility of causing instability — but the love of stability over significance and valor is the stuff of the neoliberal consensus, which is collapsing.
All things considered, I would prefer to live in interesting times to boring times, and I’d argue the revealed preferences of human beings are the same. Note the way veterans obsess about their service, or the way pledges go through humiliating rituals only to be bossed around and corralled by half-sober frat brothers, and then remember the situation fondly! And moreover: note how inside Russia there’s immense nostalgia for the rule of Stalin of all people, and note how pumped up the Chinese people are to take Taiwan. People would rather, especially in hindsight, live through a time that will go in the history books than one that will be forgotten. People would rather fly high, and end up too close to the sun, than swing low and drown in the deep. Would you rather be Abraham Lincoln, or James Garfield? Both were shot, but only one was shot because he was historically important.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Trump looked a lot less cringe to me. The Colombian president looks deranged, in denial about the massive differences in wealth between Colombia and the United States (it's a bit boring -- really? Is that the takeaway?), and obsessed with applying the racial dynamics of his country to a country it's clear he barely understands. He's trying to be serious, and lobbing all the rhetorical force he has at Trump.
Meanwhile Trump posts a silly picture of himself and restates his position. The point is that Trump thinks the Colombians' posture isn't even worth seriously responding to; he's posting a soyjack in response to a passionate claim of blood and soil. Per internet rules, the one who cares the least wins.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I'm not necessarily sure this is the case; I suspect fewer options encourages more active attempts to garner attention.
More beautiful people can wait for love to fall out of the sky, but less conventionally attractive people don't have this option and tend to have to fight for it. Attractive people can afford to be coquettish, less attractive people need to be direct. You can tell this is the case by how strongly many women react to the idea of asking men out: the implication is that you're a loser if you have to ask a man out -- what are you, a pick me?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I would suggest to the white nationalists that, within their own framework, right now is precisely the correct time for white nationalists to quietly disappear.
That assumes the purpose of white nationalism is to fight anti-white discrimination rather than what their name actually says: establishing a white ethnonation. That's a terrible pipe dream of pipe dreams, but "we're just here to fight against discrimination against our in-group" is the motte, not the bailey, and it's not truly the central goal they want to accomplish. If you take their actual goals seriously, then now is actually the time to become louder: the broader political coalition they like is gaining power and implementing goals they approve of, so they have momentum.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Agreed. Reddit is increasingly siloed and useless, and even the "put reddit after a google search to get good results" is quickly becoming supplanted by AI. I quit after we moved offsite, and I don't have any interest in using it now.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I looked it up, and it sure is true. But in context it almost sounds shocked and horrified rather than deliberately manipulative; he's realizing people have much smaller boundaries than he does and he's startled.
But I also just have unusually positive feelings about Zuck, people keep saying he's a psychopath but I find it hard to see that myself, his complete inability to appear human aside.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction
It certainly has negative traction, but I for one really want the metaverse. I grew up at the height of the virtual world craze, and I really miss that energy. I would absolutely love a credible and full-featured virtual world where you can customize a character, build structures, socialize with people, and play games, especially if it had connections to real-life friends in VR. As it is, these features all exist, but are spread throughout different games and platforms, many of which are dated, like many MMOs and Second Life. I absolutely see the value proposition of the Metaverse, but I would want to see some credible implementations of the opportunity for expansive creativity and socialization.
That being said, this has been the dream of silicon valley and cyberpunk for several decades at this point, and they've never gotten it to take off. But I will absolutely keep the dream alive.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Then sponsored content began taking up a greater and greater percentage of your news feed
Yeah, I left Facebook after they made an algorithmic change that led to my feed being taken up by toxoplasmosis-inducing posts full of scissor statements that generated clicks by being controversial. I had carefully curated my feed to see only posts from local organizations and friends who posted things I wanted to hear, but they spit right in the face of that and filled my feed with things designed by robots to make people maximally angry.
This is the same reason I can't use Twitter or even reddit nowadays, I log in for 5 minutes -- literally -- and I'm overwhelmed by 50,000 people trying to get me to feel fear or anger or hate. But listening to the teaching of the Jedi that these things lead to suffering, and the apostolic teaching that "enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, and envy" leads to ruin, I chose to walk away from such things and focus on "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, and whatever is gracious," which leads not to suffering and anxiety but to peace that passeth all understanding. Iterum dico, gaudete!
I disagree with you that the problem with Facebook was too much personal stuff or memes or pictures of people's kids... IMO that was the nice side of Facebook that gave you a small sense of connection to people you know in real life. I'm not annoyed by calls for sympathy, but I don't talk politics in real life outside of a small group of people I can have motte-style conversations with, so Facebook politics was much more grating to me than it was to you. But maybe this is an agreeableness thing.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
The point of the motte is to promote interesting conversation. If a troll post manages to be interesting enough to lead to a good conversation, I would say it made a contribution, even if unintentionally.
Thinking someone got the best of us by creating conversation in a place designed to create conversation is odd, a thought that could only occur to someone who thinks in-depth intellectual conversations is unfun. But in fact they are fun, and a troll running with glee about how he "really got us" by giving us a chance to do what we love is like a guy who hands out Harris/Walz fliers and thinks he's campaigning for Trump.
The motte isn't a springboard for political action, just a discussion space. If trolls think they're distracting us from "real politics" by making us talk to each other, I'm just reminded of -- and I rarely use this term -- losers like KulakRevolt, who think they're going to start a race war from their basement. We're not trying to change the world, just trying to change our minds through exposure to new ideas.
I don't like trolls because of their insincerity, but they certainly do serve a purpose sometimes. If they're pathogens, maybe we can think of them as part of the site microbiome.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
This is a total non-sequitur.
My point is simple, and really quite humble. I am not saying that the motte is broadly anti-Jewish; I'm saying that the motte has right-wing antisemitic posters, which indicate that right-wing antisemitism is a real thing that some people in the world believe, that it therefore still exists.
While there are certainly antisemites on the left, like the chanters you mention, most progressives -- even most progressives who are critical of Israel were horrified when such things went down. To say those chanters represent the progressive left is to paint with far too broad a brush, or in other words to make general claims about general groups, not specific claims about specific groups.
Is it really so hard to acknowledge that, despite growing antisemitism on the left, right-wing antisemitism is not dead? There are lots of ways you could argue against my point -- saying that right-wing antisemitism has no power, that it's rejected by a larger sum of the right than left-wing antisemitism is by the left, that left-wing antisemites are more acutely dangerous. You say I made a bad argument, but you're not even making an argument at all: just repeating what you already said in a firmer tone, and acting offended that I pointed out that right-wing antisemitism exists, as evidenced by local posters who are right wing antisemites.
What I think has happened is this: you made a massive overgeneralization, treating all your opponents as one bloc and imputing to them the dreaded term of "anti-Jewish," while denying that anyone remotely on your side of the political spectrum holds similar views. You were treating antisemitism like a moral cancer, that pollutes anyone in the blast radius, even uninvolved but similar parties. In a certain ironic sense you were saying that it poisons the well. "Some left wingers are antisemites, therefore antisemitism is left wing." You should know that the left does the same thing with racism, and are every bit as wrong.
Because you were thinking in terms of overgeneralizations and boo lights, when I suggested the motte provides counterevidence, you became defensive, acting as though I had made a similar general claim: "no, we're not anti-Jewish, we tolerate viewpoints, we're not the heretics, it's them." But I wasn't saying what you thought I was saying. I'm not treating antisemitism as a moral pollutant, just as a factual description of certain views, both left and right -- some of which are present here, indicating that they still exist in the world.
The idea that SS is Muslim is... pretty bizarre, and rather reminds me of Hylinka saying right wing identitarians are simply the same thing as left wing ones, all evidence to the contrary.
We don't have to be opposed here, and I'm not trying to start a fight. I just think you made a shady argument and wanted to point out the counterevidence.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
You know who wants to kill the Jews today? It's not right wingers.
I agree that in a raw sense the greatest threat to Jewish lives is Palestinians (and the opposite is also true, of course), but I find it ironic to claim that right-wing antisemitism is dead by posting here, of all places.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
In my opinion, the second election of Trump is a cultural-because-of-generational backlash by "the Boomers" and "Gen X" against changes in the culture brought about by "the Millennials", who I believe have a radical split from previous generations inspired by changing perceptions of childhood emotional neglect.
Among under-30s, Harris and Trump were within a few percentage points overall, white men voted for Trump, white women split down the middle, black and Latino men voted for Trump in record numbers, and the biggest issue for young voters was the economy and jobs. While I agree that Millennials are more progressive than Boomers and Gen X, it seems abundantly clear that the zoomers are not as reliably Democratic as Millennials (though certainly more progressive than Gen X). In fact, the only age group where there wasn't a swing to Trump was older voters, i.e. the Boomers.
This was a referrendum on Biden's governance and the state of the economy, with cultural issues, even abortion, playing a much more minor role in people's voting decisions. We don't need to delve into anecdotal experiences of particular families; we have data on how various groups of people said they voted in the election and the reasons they said were most important to them.
I will, however, note that Millennials and Zoomers -- the purported beneficiaries of the changing perceptions of childhood emotional neglect -- have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses, and research suggests they cope much worse than older generations when faced with major crises like the pandemic. What younger generations perceive as "childhood emotional neglect" may well have been a more natural and healthy way to raise independent, strong children who can stand on their own to face the challenges of life, though I would argue that the last generation to raise their children in the best possible way was the Silent Generation, not Gen X.
I am a zoomer, and this accords with my own experience of friends and peers, going far beyond any sort of change in diagnostic standards or treatment-seeking that could otherwise explain the change. You've talked in the past about your experiences with mental health challenges, and I relate to this -- but I would note gently that such longstanding struggles with mental illness might suggest a genetic component (as it does for me), which perhaps makes your biological family less representative of the emotional and social stability of the average person at various points on the political spectrum.
Or, in other words: it's the economy, stupid.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
We’ve had several posters trying to get people to define woke in the past couple weeks — is this just the current meme again? It seems like there’s been a large increase in trolls and insincere posters as well.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Gulf of Mexico is named from the implicit perspective of America.
French Jesuits called the gulf the Gulf of Mexico (Golphe du Mexique) as early as 1672.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
What?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I agree. Sometimes I feel like the only person who wants both the J6 rioters and the BLM rioters to be punished harshly. Lawlessness is lawlessness, riots are riots, violence is violence, and the fundamental duty of the state is to maintain its monopoly on violence by curtailing violent uprisings with great fire and fury.
That being said, I suspect you and I are more Auth than Trump or Trump supporters are, and at least he got this out of his system so we can focus on other things.
"SJW" was never used all that much, and was mostly used in online and nerdy discourse. Nerds are much worse at playing the social games of verbal politics, and their strategy of reclaiming the term backfired.
And I think it also has to do with social justice discourse spreading much wider than the original, core movement, and gaining ground among people who weren't familiar with the core activists. These ideas were introduced to them as just decent things decent people are doing, there's no politics here, this is just about being a good person, and when they were questioned they found it confusing and impolite, and white-collar professionals hate nothing more than impolite things. This attitude got back-filled in to the activists themselves, because it was useful, and then became the official line against any accusations of woke politics. Then "woke" became something Republicans in the Senate ask judicial nominees, which just bewildered and offended the elite professional jurists who thought they were above such trivialities.
I also don't think "woke" was ever really used as a descriptor for the movement, it was more of a meme, like "it's hard to be woke in a sleeping society" or something by someone vaguely affiliated with the social justice movement. So for normie liberals who got interested in woke politics, it rather sounded like the opposite-side verison of civil rights groups getting very angry about Pepe the frog memes and calling Pepe a white supremacist symbol, because some people on 4chan used Pepe in racist memes. So everyone on the left side of the fence sees the "woke" descriptor as eminently silly, even though they refuse to give anyone a better one.
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