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How many levels of tiresomeness are you on?
On one hand I do sympathize, but after a decade of listening to how cis-straight-white-males are responsible for all of society's ills, I'm tempted to ask you to take a number, and go to the end of the queue.
Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
Could we maybe have a few days' break from people repeating their theory that everything bad that has ever happened is due to the Jews? Oh no, I stubbed my toe, those damn Jewish elites! It's worse than incorrect - it's boring.
I agree with you! I can't wait for anti-sionism to be so mainstream that Jews are afraid to publish their pro-Israel opinions and have to get together on obscure pseudonymous message boards to dare express that 'perhaps Jews have a right to self-determination'.
There are, to be fair, plenty of contexts today where you would be afraid to publicly admit to being a Zionist, even by just a minimal definition of it (i.e. thinking it's good that Israel exists and wanting it to continue existing free of attack).
And plenty of contexts where it's no problem at all or even a given. Not quite the same thing as being a White nationalist. Is it OK to punch a Zionist yet?
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what? There's plenty of room for Zionism to be unpopular and provocative and something that might make Jews afraid without it being exactly as bad as the worst thing in modern politics.
The fact that Zionism is not yet as universally loathed as Nazism (though, again, there are certainly crowds people who think it ought to be) doesn't seem to prove anything, to me. Unless you're asserting that it should be?
You're also equivocating a bit between 'Jews' and 'Zionists', so I suppose I'll ask directly. Do you think that Jews should get punched just for being Jews? Or Zionists just for being Zionists?
(And to pre-empt any attempt to turn it around, no, white nationalists or neo-Nazis should not be punched either.)
It seems to me that by any reasonable standard Zionism is quite widely and publicly hated. I mean, anecdotally I know Jews who have been taking self-defence classes and buying more home security and avoiding wearing any outward signs of Jewishness in public because they're afraid of being harassed or possibly attacked. Some of those fears are exaggerated, in my view, but they're not totally unjustified.
When was the last time these billionaire Zionists got punched? Anybody doxxing them like Supreme Court justices?
Well, then that's why you see more white nationalism-adjacent discourse on the Motte than zionist content.
People who want to defend Israel's right to ethnic cleansing can just do so on TV panels, government offices, billionaire whatsapp groups, Fox News ads, SuperBowl ads, etc...
Meanwhile Tom Cotton has the audacity to suggest that perhaps the violence in American cities should be contained and everybody freaks out.
When was the last time a billionaire white nationalist or Nazi was punched? The infamous 'Nazi punch' was one guy and it set off a whole debate on the left about whether it was acceptable. Meanwhile of course Jews get attacked sometimes - the ADL (I know you may not trust them, but I doubt they're all completely fictional) cites 161 violent assaults in 2023.
But I guess beyond this I'm not particularly sure why you're focusing on white nationalism? Yes, white nationalism is an extremely hated and ostracised position in the US. I agree that white nationalism is more hated as a position than Zionism is. What is that meant to show? The fact that there exists an ideology more hated than Zionism does not mean that Zionism isn't hated.
Is your point just that you'd like for white nationalism to be at least as acceptable to argue for in public as Zionism?
In that case - great, good for you, but I hardly see how that reflects badly on Zionists. You can just advocate for white nationalism. No need to bring Zionism in at all.
(Unless the implication is that the reason white nationalism is widely hated is the Jewish conspiracy to destroy white culture and so on, but at that point we're just right back into the tiresome nonsense that I was sick of seeing in the first place.)
My point was included already:
If you want to see less talk of Jews-bad on theMotte, then make Jews-bad talk more mainstream. If SecureSignals could publish his opinions in the NYT, why would it be interesting to post it here?
There was also the whole Charlottesville event when a blue city decided to completely pull police forces from a legally registered protest and let counter-protesters take over and harass the lawfully-protesting right-wingers. The infamous car accident even happened because a driver got confused trying to leave the city, got threatened by a gun-carrying antifa, and then took a wrong turn in a street crowded by illegally-assembled counter-protesters.
Note how nobody at that time dared to publish a headline such as 'Is it OK to run over antifa protesters?' and nobody yet is writing headlines such as 'Is it OK to punch a zionist?', but that may change.
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You could block them. I haven't blocked SS, but I also don't read their screeds about the Jews.
I usually try to avoid blocking - in particular, in a case like this, the result would be that the front page would consistently have these large, highly-active threads, with dozens of responses to something I can't see. Realistically I suspect I'd just want to read the blocked content anyway, just to see what's going on!
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Well again, it's not that I don't sympathize, it's just it seems to be the times we're living in, everybody seems to be looking for a immutable-identity-scapegoat. If it's just two-three people on the whole forum that doesn't even seem to be so bad, compared to places like Reddit. Block, and move on, I guess.
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@coffee_enjoyer provides a source. It may be boring, but in this case it doesn't seem to be incorrect.
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
I get that. I do think it merits discussion, however.
To take a brief tangent into UK politics, the previous leader of the opposition party was a man called Jeremy Corbyn. He was plausibly antisemitic, having literally shared a platform with Hamas. His party was definitely antisemitic, and produced nasty stories about bullying of Jewish members on a regular basis. He was also very far left. I wasn't a fan.
So when a lot of newspapers started publishing articles along the lines of "as a Jew, I'm very upset that the new Prime Minister may be a genuine antisemite" I was very sympathetic. But eventually it got to the point where literally 25% to 50% of the columnists I read on a regular basis had written "as a Jew" articles and the discrepancy between that number and the proportion of Jews in the population at large (275k / 66,000k = 0.4%) started getting big enough that it made me uncomfortable.
In short, I think it's fairly clear that Jews are highly overrepresented in the media at the very least. They also seem to be overrepresented in finance and positions of power generally. I think that that imbalance is a genuine, legitimate problem for society. Especially when you compound it with a (well-founded) persecution complex based on the events of the Holocaust and prior pogroms. It seems to me that it leads to an escalatory spiral where influence is exerted to stop people from discussing the use of that influence, leading to spiralling paranoia on both sides. So I'm reluctant to condemn all discussion of secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation because I think Western civilisation has a right to know if it's being manipulated and I think that Jews ultimately benefit from having the disproportionate influence some of them seem to wield out in the open.
Where it ends up, I don't know. Ideally I would like to see some kind of disclosure and recusement requirements. People (not just Israelis) with foreign ties or ethnic sympathies should be required to recuse themselves under certain circumstances, the way that I am not allowed to interview my friends if they apply to my company. I have no idea how you would turn that into a coherent system though.
What exactly is the nature of this Jewish influence? If we're still talking about the UK, I can only think of the Corbyn situation, and that strikes me as pretty weak. If he'd been openly friendly with the KKK, and refused to even say that associating with them might have been poor judgement, then the gigantic number of articles you'd have seen written by black journalists about how frightened they were by the prospect of his premiership would probably dwarf those written by jews in rough accordance to the ratio of black people to Jews. I wouldn't say that would be an example of "black influence".
The most obvious element is that it is very dangerous to stand up in public and discussion Jewish overrepresentation. Beyond that, I think that the continued mawkish emphasis of the Holocaust in my country is mostly down to Jewish activism; it was horrible, but it happened hundreds of miles away, in a totally different country with whom we were at war, seventy years ago. And yet we are spending 100m of public money in 2024 to pave over a park in Central London so that it can be turned into a Holocaust memorial*, even rewriting our own planning laws because they forbid it, and heavily implying that the only difference between Britain and Nazi Germany is that the anti-semitic fascists happened to turn up there and not here.
Beyond those two points, I have no idea what influence is going on behind the scenes. I hope not too much, but I am not so naive as to think that a group with disproportionate influence is not wielding it at all. Thus my desire for transparency.
*The designer of the memorial has said publicly that ruining the pleasure of people who people who want to use the park is key to the memorial's effect.
I appreciate that but that's true or any minority in the UK . How secure would your job be if you tried to discuss Indian overrepresentation? Or black overrepresentation at the other end? I'm not even sure Jews are overrepresented in the UK. I can only think of a small handful of political figures/journalists. Alan Sugar I suppose?
I'd want to see evidence of that. I'm sure Jewish communities appreciate it being remembered but the Holocaust is emphasised far more IMO in order to underline that we in the UK were on the "right side" of the war, against the indescribably terrible Nazis. It's basically our crowning 20th century achievement! Compare that to our relationship with WWI, where even though we won and didn't lose our empire immediately afterwards, the main sentiment towards it is almost one of national regret that our incompetent (in the public imagination) leadership frivolously threw away the lives of so many young men. Could you imagine any piece of media depicting the role of UK in WWII similarly to how it is in Blackadder goes forth?
I haven't heard about this, so would be interested in learning more. Did this happen because Jews were clamoring for public money to be spent on ruining green spaces in London? I'd assume this is far more likely to be the brainchild of the sort of public sector worker who put Hadiths on the display board in KX, and likes bringing up the Holocaust so they can claim that it's imperative we don't allow "fascists" (i.e. anyone opposed to immigration) to get into power, because clearly we're only ever a hair's breadth at most from what happened in Germany in the 30s.
So apart from not being able to discuss the influence of British Jews, what is the main influence of British Jews (beyond that they're probably up to something)? It's not like they even affect our relationship with Israel that much, tied as it is to American foreign policy in the region. Most of the media left of the Telegraph is pretty relentlessly hostile to Israel, and it's hard to imagine a group with much influence allowing London to be taken over most weekends by thousands of people chanting genocidal chants about them. If anything increasing Muslim immigration is likelier to play a far larger role in affecting our geopolitical stances in the future, and Indian immigration has already led to a member of that group being Prime Minister (the Jews, despite having been here much longer, haven't had one since Disraeli). It seems like Jews are one of the least influential groups in the country.
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Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
To me it seems very simple.
Conservatism in America is deeply connected to religious conservatives, especially Christians. Of those, excepting very small groups like Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Anabaptists, you have essentially three subgroups: confessional Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics.
Confessional Protestants are often very engaged in ideas (they love their long confessions full of them, of course), but they're, relatively speaking, a rather small group, even compared to the shrinking mainline Protestants with whom they have a shared history. Think the Presbyterian Church in America (not Presbyterian Church U.S.A.), the Lutheran Missouri and Wisconsin synods (not the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), and perhaps even the Anglican Church in North America (not the Episcopal Church). I'm not from the region of the country where this form of Christianity is very large, so I can't speak to their absolute numbers, but they're relatively small as far as I understand.
I have ancestors who were members of these churches, but in my family, which is pretty standard for the religious right, evangelical Protestantism predominates. Baptists, Pentecostals, and non-denominational Christians (who I consider, from personal experience, Baptists-in-denial) make up a majority of conservative Protestants in the United States.
So what is there to say about evangelical Protestants? Well, I'm very fond of them. They're a large part of my family. But they also -- and I say this just to be brutally honest -- have a very poor track record when it comes to fostering a culture that values higher education or elite status-seeking. They have much in common, I think, with the pietist movements of magisterial Protestantism, which stress direct experience of God and simplicity in faith, rather than scholasticism, education, and learning. Put more bluntly, their cultural and biological ancestors are mostly the Borderers (Scots-Irish), who never valued education and were associated with anything but book learning.
Today, you look at Pew Research's table of educational attainment by religious affiliation, and you find evangelical groups like Baptists and Pentecostals filling up the bottom. This is simply not a group that produces Supreme Court justices, who are universally elite and educated persons.
This leaves, of course, Roman Catholics. Catholicism has a long and storied history of higher learning, being associated with many of the major historical universities of Western Europe. It also has a strong focus, at least among conservative and traditionalist Catholics, on deep knowledge of faith and resistance to common patterns of behavior. It has institutes of higher education in the United States, like Notre Dame (which another poster discussed), which are considered elite enough to possibly matriculate a future federal judge. And, as others have pointed out, Catholicism has a long history of legal scholarship and a rigorous tradition of religious law that makes legal interpretation a rather natural choice for a smart Catholic to study.
While as a whole, Catholics are middling in their education attainment, this is largely determined by the large numbers of Latino immigrants. Native-born, white Catholics (if I understand correctly), have rather high educational attainment, even if most are liberal or lapsed Catholics. But those who remain in a conservative understanding of their faith -- like Harrison Butker noted above, often have a well-developed and intellectual understanding of their religion and a desire to put it into practice in broader society. This is the right combination to produce elite jurists.
You could of course ask, what about non-religious conservatives? And I would simply respond: "who?" While I have a great deal of affinity for right-wing atheists and know some, this is not a large group by any stretch of imagination. I am inclined to believe there are more Jews keeping the strictest interpretation of Torah in the United States than there are atheists who would even consider voting for a Republican.
So, if Republicans are going to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, and they've gotten to do that quite a lot lately, they've got to be Catholics. It's the only group in the United States that produces large enough numbers of educated, elite, status-seeking, but traditional and conservative, people.
It also helps, of course, that a large ethnic minority in the United States are Latinos who are often Catholic, which means that Democrats also have a reason to appoint certain kinds of Catholics to the Court, as they did with Sotomayor. It's notable also that the one clear, life-long Protestant on the Court is Ketanji Brown Jackson, who identifies as a non-denominational Protestant but doesn't seem to have a strong connection to her faith. There are, as far as I'm concerned, no committed evangelical Protestants on the Court, and plausibly there have never been.
That generally makes sense as an explanation - I would take it as related to the collapse of mainline Protestantism, and more generally the end of the WASP class. Historically the supreme court is almost entirely what we would call 'mainline Protestant', but in the last few decades mainline Protestantism has firstly almost entirely collapsed and secondly gone quite liberal in terms of politics. Religious conservatives, bar a small handful of impressively stubborn confessional types, are almost entirely either evangelicals or Catholics. Evangelical Christianity in the US began as a movement against an intellectual establishment that they perceived as having succumbed to heresy. There may be many good things about evangelicalism, but it has inherited a certain anti-intellectual streak, and it has never managed to reconcile with cultural elites. It was and remains low-class.
So as you say, that leaves Catholics. The Republicans have made heavy use of them.
Yup, I think that’s exactly what’s going on. The mainlines have collapsed.
I also would add that Catholicism, unlike mainline Protestantism, forms a strong cultural block unlike other forms of Christianity. I’ve known many Catholics who hate the Church and are essentially apostate, but if you ask for their religion, they’d say “Catholic.” What’s funny is the only person on the Court known for attending mainline Protestant services is Gorsuch — who was raised Catholic and is often still called Catholic, despite being lapsed and attending Episcopal services!
There’s a line in Leo DiCaprio’s Catch Me If You Can, where the main character, who repeatedly creates false identities, is caught by his fiance, whose immediate response to realizing her life had been totally manipulated was to ask, in tears, “You’re not a Lutheran?” Such a thing is unthinkable today, and was played for laughs in the 2000s even.
So it’s no wonder the court is considered made up largely of Catholics and Jews — they’re both faiths with a large cultural/ethnic component. That means the identification outlives the practice. The other member of the court is a Black Protestant, which is its own ethnic/religious fusion.
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Because Catholic schools like notre dame and Georgetown admit conservative students and feed into Ivy League law programs; colleges which admit conservative protestant students do not. The three liberal justices are affirmative action hires who claim to practice the religion appropriate for their ethnicity, and for Hispanics that’s Catholicism.
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The Catholics on the Supreme Court are sort of a conspiracy as well, right? My understanding was that the Federal Society pushes them as being reliably anti-progressive due to the abortion issue. And some people do Notice.
Never knew that. They did disproportionately well in GB for a long time.
The case of Indians is also complicated: for example, until recently England, Scotland and Ireland were all run by Indian heads of state and that seems somewhat dubious as well.
Agree completely. What concerns me is when bringing up Jewish representation at all becomes defined as Jew-hatred in and of itself.
I agree there's an important distinction to make there. Noticing and talking about Jewish overrepresentation is certainly not hateful or problematic in itself. It's an interesting observation, and one that may have positive and negative effects, for both Jew and non-Jew alike. I believe there are actually some meditations on the theme by Jews themselves.
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Humza Yousaf (whom I assume you were referring to in the case of Scotland) has Pakistani heritage.
By dubious, do you mean the fact that these heads of state come from immigrant families or something more nefarious?
Thanks for the correction, my mistake. By dubious, I mostly mean the former. I doubt there is anything particularly nefarious going on beyond a certain amount of ingroup preference, but the overrepresentation of minorities in the leadership of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales bothers me. I think that people should in general be ruled by somebody of their own heritage and culture, and specifically that Britain is the ancestral home of the British peoples and should be run by and for indigenous Brits. Assuming that the overrepresentation is because of culture and IQ, I don't think that we should be importing people who tend to end up ruling over us at greatly disproportionate rates.
It may be just a temporary moment, but the vast number of major cities that now have Muslim mayors suggest it isn't. I am happy to have guests, but not to import a new ruling class.
(As usual, it's easier to find tendentious factchecks on Google than the original data, so I've just included those).
https://fullfact.org/news/muslims-uk-viral-poster-factchecked/
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/immigrants-not-ruling-britain-ireland-london-contrary-claims-2024-03-28/
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I'd be tempted to answer with "first_time?.png" if I were Jewish.
Touché!
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