OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
I mean, they are okay. It's just demonstrably true that there are a huge number of them in the world and even liberal Westerners treat most of them as legitimate.
I take the subtext of your complaint to be that you think the United States should be an ethno-state, and specifically a white ethno-state. It's true that most Americans don't want that. It's true that liberals generally consider the idea of turning the USA into an ethno-state to be grossly immoral. If you ask me specifically, I think the idea of making the USA an ethno-state is ridiculous - it requires going against the last few centuries of American tradition and it's extraordinarily impracticable.
Perhaps less centrally, maybe it's also that you think European countries should be ethno-states, and my view there is that some are, many are not, and I agree that institutions like the EU think that ethno-states are bad and that EU countries should not be that way. I also think there's a significant groundswell against that point of view, and over the next few decades I expect that groundswell to get stronger.
To get even more provocative, I think that probably you are a neo-Nazi, or at least neo-Nazi adjacent, hence your bizarre attempt to drag neo-Nazism into this discussion. The impression I get is that your worldview is that countries, especially white countries, ought to be ethno-states, that an international progressive liberal consensus forbids this, is gradually destroying the identity and heritage of white countries, and that this consensus treats Israel as an exception to the rule, because this consensus is heavily Jewish and Jews are hypocrites who promote their own racial welfare while undermining that of whites. I trust you don't need me to explain why I think that's wrong.
But ultimately going back to the top-level comment, my feeling is - you, me, and Adam Smith all agree that ethno-states are okay. It's rather bizarre of you to be angry that Adam Smith holds a perspective that you and I both share. I think your real complaint is this:
To all the Adam Smiths of the world. Why is having an ethnostate good for the jews but not anyone else? Why don't jews benefit from diversity in their western style open democratic society like everyone else?
In other words, this is just garden variety anti-semitic rambling about the supposed Jewish conspiracy.
The United States is not an ethno-state, and there is no plausible pathway to making it an ethno-state. This is not because of the Jews. They did not do this to you. America is not an ethno-state because Americans don't want it to be. It's not some sort of Jew-influenced false consciousness, and if you remove the Jewish influence the people will rise up, like what Marxists think will happen if you remove the capitalist class. No, it's genuinely that most of your countrymen disagree with you. Deal with it.
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
The case you are making for Israel is the case every neo-nazi has made for their own country.
I don't think that's the case. Neo-Nazism is a much more specific, narrow family of ideologies than that. The analogy to neo-Nazism is not helpful or relevant here because neo-Nazism is obviously not the same thing as ethno-nationalism simpliciter.
You're not engaging with the contention. We can agree between the two of us to any illiberal view on the world for the preservation of our peoples and whatever else, but what's the relevance of that to the discourse relating to the reigning powers that be who are liberal and don't agree with us at all?
You're talking with me, though. I don't have an army of ghosts behind my shoulder, and I'm not going to take the heat for this imaginary audience you appear to be bothered by. It's not an argument against me if some other group of people somewhere else think ethno-nationalism is always wrong. I don't think ethno-nationalism is always wrong, clearly the Israelis don't think ethno-nationalism is always wrong, Americans who support Israel don't seem to think that ethno-nationalism is always wrong, and as far as I can tell a great many people all around the world don't think that ethno-nationalism is always wrong.
I already explained why this line of thinking is invalid. Ethnostates can only be alleged to be common as a result of history and circumstance. But nigh every first world nation, including Japan, is transforming away from that. That is the direction of modern liberalism. Israel is unique in that it's demanding a different direction for itself for profoundly illiberal neo-nazi reasons.
Well, I don't accept that Israel is unique in that regard - there are plenty of other nations that are ethno-nationalist, some in a quite assertive way. You just don't seem to think they count. At any rate, I think that nations may constitute themselves in an ethno-nationalist way if they want. That's true for Israel, Azerbaijan, or indeed Japan. Who cares about 'the direction of modern liberalism'? Okay, it's true, there are people and organisations in the world who think that ethno-nationalism is always wrong. But those people are not everyone or everywhere, they're not me, and they don't appear to be controlling the situation in the Middle East.
What more do you want me to say? If 'modern liberalism' forbids ethno-states, then modern liberalism is wrong. That was easy.
To highlight this further with your example of Azerbaijan, if Azerbaijan was becoming an economic powerhouse, with opportunity that would make the life of foreign immigrants better, would they or would they not be obligated to open their borders to immigration under liberal priors?
What difference does it make whether they're rich or not? That's not germane to the point under discussion.
Which one of these do you disagree with? What do liberals call people who disagree with their core values? Who do you think you are to them?
I'm sorry, is this meant to be a gotcha? I have said already that I think ethno-nationalism can be acceptable and that ethnic or national groups can set the terms of entry. That implies, for instance, that I think the statement "immigration is a universal good" is false. Certainly it means that I disagree with the statement "immigration should always be permitted". I think it is acceptable to have a preservative conception of an ancestral ethnic identity - come on, I just said that I think you can't blame Jews for wanting to maintain 'Jews' as a distinct ethnic, cultural, and religious group, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Should I keep going through it? I think you've come up with this aggressive maximalist, even strawman, conception of liberalism, and you're... uh... who are you disagreeing with again? You don't appear to be disagreeing with me.
You're clearly angry at someone, but that someone is not me and does not appear to be in this conversation.
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
The Palestinians' current hatred for the Jews is a product of Israel's actions for the past 80 years.
That's true, at least to within a certain approximation, but irrelevant. Today a one-state solution is impossible because the Palestinians and Israelis hate each other.
It's doable with an international peacekeeping force to keep things in control until they stop hating each other.
Whether that's true or not, it's also irrelevant because there is no such peacekeeping force, nobody appears to be willing to provide one, and even if they were, such a massive garrison force would destabilise the region (even more so than it already is) and be hated by all of Israel/Palestine's neighbours.
I just don't think there's any point either arguing would'ves and could'ves, or arguing for ideal solutions that have zero chance of actually happening. It isn't 1948, and there is no giant neutral army prepared to come in and enforce a solution. Can we please be serious?
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Where are you getting neo-Nazis? Do you think that any group that wants to remain ethnically/culturally/religiously distinctive, in any way, is neo-Nazi?
I think a one-state solution in Israel is impossible for pragmatic, historically contingent reasons. This group of people and that group of people are unwilling to co-exist in the one state. You can judge one group or the other or both immoral, but I'm not making a moral judgement. I'm saying that, like it or not, you cannot jam Israelis and Palestinians together into the one state. Neither group will accept that.
I do not blame Jews (or members of any group) for not wanting to go extinct. No group has an obligation to embrace its own obliteration.
You then bring up 'democracy' for some reason even though I didn't touch on that in the slightest. I think that ethno-states are common, and I did not say that ethno-states are morally impermissible. I think that national communities have a right to self-determine and that includes the right to be an ethno-state. The Japanese people are morally permitted to constitute themselves as an ethno-state, for instance. This is a different and unrelated question to that of democracy. You can have a democratic ethno-state, a non-democratic ethno-state, a democratic non-ethno-state, and a non-democratic non-ethno-state. They are unrelated axes.
I don't think Israel is unique in being or wanting to be an ethno-state, and there are plenty of comparable nations. I just mentioned Azerbaijan, for instance. You can say that ethno-states shouldn't exist if you like - that's your own judgement. But I'm not forbidding that. Some countries are ethno-states and some countries are not ethno-states and I'm fine with this.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think that would be reasonable, though at some point we're just arguing about labels. I don't think we have a meaningful disagreement about what Israel is. Israel is and understands itself to be, collectively, the state of the Jewish people. This does not rule out the existence of some non-Jewish Israelis, but it is obviously essential to Israel's existence that it is majority-Jewish and it is run with specifically Jewish interests in mind. In a sense the state of Israel is meant to be a kind of servant of the nation of Israel, that is, the Jewish people as a whole. 'Jewish' is a category is a bit of an odd category that cuts across simple concepts of race or religion, but I think we have a rough idea of what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state.
The United States is not that kind of state. The United States is formally committed to both racial/ethnic and religious neutrality in a way that Israel is not.
I think there is a plausible argument to be made that the United States has implicitly been founded on certain ethnic, cultural, and religious assumptions. The US is the child of a kind of Anglo Protestant establishment. That may not have been written into law, and definitely the US has included other faith communities from day one, but the unspoken assumption has been that the mainstream would remain the mainstream. The US has been able to assimilate minorities that are compatible with those assumptions to an extent, but it has often been a rocky road - Catholicism is accepted in the US now, but it was a difficult process and Catholics themselves changed as well, to accommodate themselves to the country. I take some of the current distress to be about the sense that the implicit Anglo Protestant foundation of the US is falling away.
In that light whenever this argument happens, I think there's a visible envy of Israel. It's a pretty common observation that the most vicious anti-semites often seem to have an envy of Jews, or quietly feel themselves inferior. Sometimes I see something similar in the political realm. Israel explicitly names its religious and ethnic foundations. The United States does not, even though you can argue that the United States has religious and ethnic foundations no less than Israel. I can understand wishing that the United States would say something similar.
In practice I think it would be harder for the US, particularly because British-descended people and Protestants are both minorities at the moment. Maybe individual American states could attempt something like it. But I can understand the yearning.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
My read on Russia is that it's a bit like China in that it is officially multi-national, but there is very obviously a single dominant ethnicity. If the Russian ethnos ever looked likely to cease to be the one in charge of Russia, much like if the Han looked like they might cease to be in charge of China, we would see that definition start to fade very rapidly.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think most people would say that Middle Easterners are closer to Europeans than South or East Asians, Africans, and so on, yes. Arabs are not white, but Arabs are closer to white than Indians or Chinese people.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
The US census considers MENA people white, but I think that if you asked the average competent user of English, "Are Arabs white?", "Are Turks white?", or "Are Iranians white?", they would answer "no", and if so, then I think Mizrahim cannot count as white either.
In general I think the central example of 'white people' is northern and western Europeans. Nowadays I think most people consider Slavs white and consider Italians white, but it starts to get a bit hazy when you ask if, say, Greeks are white. And then Turks or Arabs are definitely not white.
You're free to say that you count them all as white, but I would argue that is a non-standard usage. Mizrahim are, I would say, definitely in the same category as Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and so on, and most people do not consider them white. At the very least, they are not in the same category as northwestern Europeans.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
The idea that the United States is not and should not be an ethno-state predates 1977.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is in no sense responsible for American civic nationalism. What on Earth are you talking about?
Well, I think the Israeli case is somewhat complicated, because Israel understands itself as the state of 'the Jewish people', and that category is somewhat woolly. 'Jews' as a category includes lots of people who are usually considered white, and also lots of people who are clearly not white. In a sense Israel isn't an ethno-state at all, but a religious state; but of course, Jewishness is both a people and a religion. The racist right generally wants to reduce peoplehood to genetics or descent, and that doesn't really work in the case of Jews. Jews are clearly in some sense a people or an ethnos, but defining them genetically or in terms of traditional racial categories is difficult. Aliyah includes everyone from Sephardic Jews in Spain to Bnei Menashe in India, from the obviously white Ashkenazim to the obviously black Beta Israel.
I find it helpful to compare Israel to its neighbours. Is, say, Saudi Arabia an ethno-state? Not... really? It sort of views itself as a nation for Arab people, but not all Arabs belong there. It imports a large non-Arab underclass while enriching its Arab citizens. It's also a religious state, to a higher and stricter degree than Israel is. Ultimately I'm not sure the word 'ethno-state' actually helps us that much. Compare, say, Azerbaijan regularly getting shirty about Iranian Azeris and saying that all Azeris ought to be part of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan clearly understands itself to be the national homeland of the Azeris, it encourages Azeris outside the country to identify with it, and it does horrible things to non-Azeris on territory that it thinks rightfully belongs to Azerbaijan. That seems a lot like Israel.
I think that Israel is a state founded upon a particular religion and a particular ethnicity, with the explicit goal of maintaining the supremacy of that one ethnoreligious group in a particular territory. In that light I don't think it's particularly unique; most of its immediate neighbours in the Middle East are similar. The clash with the Palestinians is notable because the Palestinians are no different to Israeli Jews in this respect. The Palestinian cause is that the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is firstly Arab and secondly Muslim. The Israelis are not unusual for their region, save perhaps in having more money and guns than their rivals.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Well, at least this time you're admitting openly that you think that Jews are malicious.
It seems to me that you're taking a large and common sensibility that is shared across most ethnic groups in the US - that the US is not and should not be an ethno-state - and then implausibly blaming that entirely on Jews/Zionists. The causality here is not at all clear. It's true that Jews generally support Israel, and Israel is an ethno-state, but they are far from unique in that light (that is, people in the US being positively-disposed to a foreign country that they share heritage with), and it's also unclear that there's any particularly strong correlation between 1) supporting Israel, and 2) wanting the US to not be an ethno-state.
I would point out, for instance, that group in America that hates Israel the most is also the group most opposed to the idea of the US as an ethno-state. Support for third-world immigration is surely highest on the left, especially the radical left, and those are the people who hate Israel most.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Well, firstly, Israel doesn't qualify, surely? Let's say that Ashkenazim are white, but Ashkenazim are, though dominant, a minority in Israel. The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi. If you count Israel as a white ethno-state, then I think you have to count pretty much every Middle Eastern country as a white ethno-state.
Secondly... no country considers itself a white ethno-state. Ethno-states tend to define themselves more narrowly than that. Russia is in a sense an ethno-state, but the dominant ethnicity is Russian. When you say 'white ethno-state', presumably you mean 'states that organise themselves around a particular ethnicity that falls within the broad category of 'white'', and some of those do exist? To pick the most infamous one at the moment, surely Hungary qualifies?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Sorry, I should have specified - recent African migrants to the United States. The European situation is different.
I agree that those migrants are heavily filtered. That's the point. It's like Indian migration to the US. You can selectively take motivated, educated, high-achieving migrants. The same thing with Asian migration, actually.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I believe that's only true of ADOS, who are functionally a different ethnicity and demographic to modern African migrants. First and second-generation African migrants today are very different and have assimilated more successfully.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
...huh, I was starting to think you'd left the Motte entirely.
The thing is, once again you're attributing a kind of unique malice and hypocrisy to Israel even though, er, there are lots of ethno-states? Most countries are more like Israel than they are like the US, i.e. they consciously understand themselves to be the nation of a particular ethnic group. This isn't Jews and Gentiles held to different standards. This is the US, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, being weird, and that weirdness originates, I'd argue, in the liberal revolutions of the late 18th century.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I mean, he's correct as to the issue there, right?
A one-state solution is impossible because nobody wants it. The Israelis don't want it, because they correctly believe that it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and it is an explicitly-understood goal of Israeli policy that Jews must always be a dominant majority in Israel. That was the whole reason Israel was created in the first place - for there to be a Jewish state. This isn't a secret anyone is exposing - they say it explicitly. Meanwhile, the Palestinians don't want it, because... I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the Palestinians hate the Jews. They do not want to co-exist with them. One of the reasons why Israeli Jews don't want a one-state solution is because they - still correctly - believe that the most likely result of that would be a lot of dead Jews.
The people saying, "Why can't you just all be one state together with equal rights regardless of faith or ethnicity?" are either being disingenuous or stupid. It is obvious to anybody looking at the situation honestly why that cannot work.
Moreover, don't we allow other states to do this? Israel is not unique in holding itself to be the nation of a particular ethnicity, favouring people of that ethnicity, and making policy with a deliberate eye to maintaining that ethnicity's dominant status in its homeland. Japan is probably the most famous other one, and we generally accept that the Japanese have a right to decide how they want to run Japan. Most Middle Eastern countries are like Israel in this respect - just ask the Turks about nationality.
Israel is different to the United States in being an ethno-state, but ethno-states are common. The US is the weird one, not Israel.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Do you take massive consensus in an academic field to be prima facie evidence that there is political pressure, which requires either reform or closure? Perhaps only in the humanities, since we would expect STEM fields to naturally reach consensus?
I'm trying to work out how to make a principled distinction here. History, for instance, seems like a field that does produce consensus judgements on any number of subjects, and this is not in itself a problem. Every historian agrees there was a French Revolution, after all. Even larger questions do seem like they produce consensus answers, or they allow certain kinds of evidence but not others. If I ask the question, say, "why was France victorious in the Hundred Years' War?", some kinds of answer are acceptable and will be debated, but "it was the will of God that the English be thrown out of France" is not acceptable. This doesn't seem like cause for external invention, with apologies to St. Joan.
On the other hand, as this current crisis shows, it clearly is possible for entire sub-fields to groupthink their way into toxic consensus, and insofar as we reasonably expect universities (especially public universities) to serve the common good and be democratically accountable, it seems reasonable for external actors to come in and sometimes say, "Nope, you've disappeared up your own asses, break it up".
I'm not sure I can draw a clear line in advance. I suppose this is a matter for political judgement and prudence? Academia is responsible to politics. But it's easy to say that now, when academia is a monoculture, and politics remains relatively diverse and contested. If we were in a moment where academia was genuinely viewpoint-diverse and politics was a monoculture, I'd probably feel the other way. I can say "academics should be accountable to politics" in the West today, but if I lived in China and that meant "academic conclusions must be approved by the CCP", I would definitely resist that conclusion.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
For what it's worth I've gotten plenty of dates via app and never had anybody say they would go to a date and then cancel at the last minute.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?
I don't mean this as a gotcha question. I think the current situation is clearly bad, and I'd like to find a better option that still achieves everything we want universities to achieve.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I can't speak for anthropology specifically, but what Rouse says in that interview does remind me a great deal of what I hear from left-wing professors in my field of religion and theology. Take this, for instance:
On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”
To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.
I think she is completely sincere in saying this. From the outside we can see that this is a "fifty Stalins" situation, of course. She is criticising a particular movement, but she is criticising it from the perspective that there needs to be more of it, not less.
Nonetheless, internally, I think she's serious, and simply sees the borders of legitimate scholarship as ending somewhere short of the possibility of conservative or traditional anthropology.
It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world. It's supposed to form its own unique culture, and to be free of the currents of the wider culture around it. Should we have built such a system? Well, probably not. But we did, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised when said tower has formed its own bizarre little culture that's significantly out-of-step with the wider population.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Insert obvious crack about the British being wise to that strategy on small islands across the Atlantic, but blind to it at home?
OliveTapenade
9d ago
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?
I'm in favour of normalising hate speech against clankers, at least.
Anyway, I can sort of see what they were going for here - we know you have concerns, we're listening, we want to take your worries seriously. I don't think they understand how widely loathed their technology is, though, and therefore how much what they're saying comes off as a bad parody or even villainous and sneering.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
If it helps any, in my experience Hinge dates aren't worth going on. I was on Hinge for a while, got my share of matches, went on plenty of dates, and they firstly aren't particularly enjoyable, and secondly are not what you want if you're looking for a serious, long-term relationship. I did eventually quit and uninstall the app because it was obvious that the app is not supposed to help you find a relationship, much less a personal connection or even love. It's a device for setting up lots of short-term 'dates'.
You're really not missing much. Long-term relationships are good, and absolutely worth seeking out, but I don't think Hinge will lead you to one.
Sorry, how does any of that even apply to what I said?
The United States is not an ethno-state today. There is no route to it becoming one, and the reason is because there is no way that the American people would ever support it becoming one. That is not a universalist claim, but a specific, local one. The people of the nation you are talking about would not support that policy.
I don't think I gave you a definition, but no, the United States was not a white ethno-state in the 1960s. I commented on the US just before - the US has frequently had an implicit ethno-religious foundation, but it has not had such formally. The Hart-Celler Act, incidentally, passed with massive democratic majorities (318-95 in the house, 76-18 in the senate), and therefore I'd suggest that the Hart-Celler Act does represent what the American people of the 1960s wanted. Opinion polls at the time showed the majority of Americans in favour - wiki claims 51%, though I can't read this page specifically. Therefore I think what I said was correct. Even if you think that Act was the end of America as an ethno-state, it was that because that was what the American people wanted.
As I've said, I think different nations have the right to constitute themselves as they wish, and to set their own terms for entry. The United States has chosen to be open to migrants. Just as Japan is allowed to have very little immigration, the United States is allowed to have a lot of it. This is permitted! And to that end, firstly, Jews did not singlehandedly foist this on a population that didn't want it, and secondly, if you don't like it, you are free to advocate for reversing it and trying to transition the US into being an ethno-state. You'll fail, because Americans genuinely don't want that, but you are free to try.
Firstly, I'm not Jewish. Secondly, I'm not carving out any exceptions. I'm saying that every country and every people has the right to a kind of self-determination that includes setting its own boundaries and defining its own policies on citizenship and migration. That includes both the right to be an ethno-state and the right not to be an ethno-state.
The same standard applies everywhere. I don't know why you think I'm treating Israel as exceptional when in this conversation I have noted other ethno-states, and other countries with restrictive migration policies. I have no special interest in Israel because I think that Israel is basically a normal Middle Eastern country.
Please don't try to debate an imaginary person or ideology that you see behind me. I am not saying that there is a single correct way for a nation to be. I am saying that different nations constitute themselves in different ways, and that I think this is acceptable. I do not accept responsibility for positions that I do not hold and have not argued for.
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