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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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That sounds like it should be able to be sorted out, legally. It should be possible to get a green card issued. So maybe talk to a lawyer?

It looks like the process is a decent bit easier if she was here legally in the first place, which it sounds like is the case. Otherwise she'd need to leave the country, which adds complications, as having been in the US illegally could make prevent her from being allowed to return for ten years, so fortunately, you probably don't need to worry about that. She'll need to apply and an immediate relative who is a citizen (your father, if they're married, or you, if you're at least 21, could both work) will file a petition on her behalf. One form for each of the citizen (I-130) and the noncitizen (I-485), it looks like.

It looks like she then wouldn't need to worry about deportation in the meantime before the green card comes in.

I'm not sure how long that will take.

If she married an American citizen she should be fine. Deportation is not a revokation of citizenship.

You should probably have known this already and you should become educated on the subject to correct that immorality.

Is there a statute of limitations on the offense that the mother originally committed (visa overstay)?

Criminally, perhaps. But even if there's a statute of limitations, a person that's present here without authorization is (generally, YMMV, consult a good immigration lawyer) eligible for removal.

If she married a US citizen in the ‘90s, presumably she is now a naturalized citizen. That citizenship won’t be revoked, even in the case of a criminal conviction (AFAIK). But if she is and will remain a US citizen, on what basis could she be removed from the country?

Edit: TIL that denaturalization is a thing. But it seems like that can happen only when a naturalized citizen is found to have become naturalized illegally, e.g. by making false statements on a green card application or whatever, or for various other reasons that don’t apply here (like taking up arms against the US, or holding certain government offices in a foreign country). In this case, the naturalization process itself was (presumably) carried out legally, via the marriage pathway.

You don't automatically become a citizen. There's a process that has to be gone through.

Right, but presumably that’s already happened

It sounds like not in this case?

I think it's like possession where the crime continues for as long as you remain in the country.

As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents.The fact that you haven't even bothered trying shows how blatanly open the border is.

As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents.

If he's 21, which, given that the entrance was in the 90s, and the marriage after, is probably but not at all necessarily the case.

Sponsoring a family member who is already in the US illegally is complicated. Firstly, the anchor baby can only apply if they are 21 and meet the financial requirements. (Although in this case, the US citizen spouse of the illegal alien should be able to sponsor them).

CFR245.1(b)(3) says that someone who entered the country by sneaking across the border ("without being admitted or paroled following inspection") can't adjust status in-country, and on leaving to apply for a visa from abroad they would become inadmissable for (probably) 10 years due to previous illegal residence.

This case is a visa overstay. Most visa overstayers are ineligible to adjust status in-country under other paragraphs of CFR245.1, but people applying as immediate relatives of citizens are exempt from those restrictions. There are various categories of ineligibility due to previous illegal residence, but they don't apply to the case of someone who entered the US legally, overstayed, has not left the US and returned since their visa expired, and had never been in the US illegally before their arrival. OP's mother appears to fit that category, so it is more likely than not that OP's father could have regularised the situation by sponsoring mum on as a spouse of a US citizen.

But the claim "As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents" is mostly false.

Changing birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, since it was created by a choice of wording in the 14th amendment. So you yourself are probably fine. Your mom should probably talk to an immigration attorney regardless of who ends up president.

I know Ramaswamy's argued otherwise, as e.g. children of ambassadors don't count.

Depends on what the clause “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was publicly understood to mean.

It would be odd for it to literally just mean something like personal jurisdiction — that would be the case whenever someone was in the US (ie the clause is surplusage).

There is an argument it meant something differently (ie that the person was somehow legally connected to the US, which is different than an illegal alien or somehow who was just visiting the US).

It would be odd for it to literally just mean something like personal jurisdiction — that would be the case whenever someone was in the US (ie the clause is surplusage).

No, it could mean that there was no bar on the US refusing to treat expatriates as citizens. I agree that it's an unlikely meaning but it doesn't render the clause surplusage.

Usually the meaning is taken to be that they were subject to US jurisdiction at the time of birth (or naturalization I suppose, but I don't see how they could not be) -- so not children of diplomats or invading armies. But I don't know if that was the original meaning.

The case that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is about children of diplomats and invading armies - and in the US context also members of quasi-sovereign Indian tribes, who didn't get birthright citizenship until 1924 - is that those were the exceptions to birthright citizenship under English common law at the time of the founding. (Incidentally, the UK didn't abolish birthright citizenship until 1983)

How much should a host country suffer on behalf of outsiders before they can legitimately demand that they be left alone?

I see the term 'diaspora nationalism' thrown around a lot, where the immigrants are proud of who they are, where they come from, try to live through some of their homelands culture through cooking and music and such... And whilst there is a lot of examples of that in real life I don't feel it captures the whole of what's going on.

In my experience 'immigrants' adopt and invoke a sort of universalist ethos. Immigrantism, for a lack of a better term. The core of it is simple: So long as the immigrant is working hard and following the law, they should be allowed to stay in whatever country they are in.

It's hard to argue against this in practice, since it's a very emotionally confrontational thing to tell someone that they are not wanted despite those things. But at the same time we are seeing first world countries shift towards third world norms. All the hard work, all the faith in the old country and whatever else sentiment carried by immigrantism doesn't change this constant slide towards things becoming worse.

I feel like there needs to be some reciprocation of charity here. Maybe try tugging on your own heart strings as little The good first world folk let you in, now they want you out. Why should they feel obligated to empathize with mix status families with young children when, as things are going, the first world can't effectively have children of their own.

While I'm quite sympathetic to your position, it's harder to be sympathetic to your mother and other people like her. She knowingly and willingly broke the law of a country that was kind enough to let her in. She is, in a quite literal sense, a criminal. Ultimately, laws only work if they are enforced. All Trump is planning to do is actually enforce rules that most of the political class (claim to) agree with.

It's about time that the US got rid of birth right citizenship too. It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason. Like the right of a asylum, it's a gigantic moral hazard. If you want people to obey the laws of your country, you shouldn't reward them for breaking those laws.

While I'm grumbling, the disingenuous conflation of 'immigrants' and 'illegal immigrants' is also very frustrating. Conflating the two is like conflating renters with squatters or shoplifters with customers. Ditto for euphemisms like 'undocumented immigrants' (did they leave their visas at the hotel?) or 'irregular migrants' (A North Korean migrant is irregular, a Mexican who snuck is just a regular criminal).

It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason.

Do you mind justifying this statement more? Here's the standard defense for birthright citizenship: two kids who grew up in the same neighborhood and are equally connected to their surrounding community, equally adapted to the local culture, etc. should not be treated differently under the law just because of who their parents are. Not doing this is extremely inegalitarian---it's not about "rewarding" the parents, it's about not capriciously punishing the kids for something they have no responsibility for or control over.

Given all this, it might even be justified to claim that it's bizarre that it doesn't exist in other countries (particularly European ones) that pretend to buy into classical-liberal ideals. This is in fact my goto counterargument when the inevitable America-bashing discussions start with European or progressive colleagues.

two kids who grew up in the same neighborhood and are equally connected to their surrounding community

What does this have to do with foreigners getting on airplanes while pregnant in order to secure a US passport by technicality?

Not doing this is extremely inegalitarian

Life is inegalitarian, and that isn't going to be fixed any time soon. Make the case that it is bad on its own merits, or don't.

it's about not capriciously punishing the kids for something they have no responsibility for or control over.

Bad things happening to you need not be punishment.

And you don't care about the actual citizens being punished, who also have done nothing wrong and do not deserve to have their citizenship devalued as it has been.

Well as I said, it's a giant moral hazard. If you grant any child born on US soil citizenship, then you allow the parents to stay to look after the child, then you incentivise parents to come to your country illegally. You reward criminals instead of punishing them, which incentivises the crime. The appropriate thing for parents who give birth abroad to do is to go back to their home country, where all three members of the family have citizenship. That's what the rest of the world does and it works absolutely fine. Nobody thinks there's any wrong being done when foreign tourists take their newborn home rather than using them as a tool to stay in a country they are not allowed to be in.

Indeed, the justification you gave conveniently skips the decade or so when the parents could have returned to their home country. There is zero reason for a newborn to stay in a foreign country, even if he was born there. He's not losing any emotional ties or severing any relationships. Indeed, that justification only works if a country has de facto open borders and gives illegal immigrants all of the benefits of legal residence in spite of their crimes. And well, we don't need to speculate about what happens when a country does that.

A lot of things violate equality or hurt the kids other than just saying the kids can't be citizens. What if one kid has a car given to him by his parents, but another kids had parents who stole a car and gave it to him? Should we refuse to confiscate the car and return it to its owner on the grounds that the kid didn't commit the theft and taking it away makes the kids in the two families unequal? What if one set of parents is just ordinary criminals, should we refuse to send them to jail for bank robbery because doing so impacts the lfe of the innocent kid?

If you don't "capriciously punish" the kids, you create a moral hazard that encourages parents to illegally immigrate (or steal cars, or rob banks).

(@4bpp too) Values come in conflict a lot and you need to make trade offs. The cost of allowing theft for sake of children to be ok is much more than that of allowing birthright citizenship. The same holds for the massive wealth distribution equalizing inheritances would require (I think this is another related example people bring up a lot). In particular, the anchor baby problem has been and can still be mitigated in a much more morally acceptable way by tightening border security than by outright getting rid of birthright citizenship---if you make the moral hazard hard enough to actually take advantage of, it'll happen infrequently enough that the cost is an acceptable trade-off, I think for almost everyone's relative weightings of the values. (For full disclosure, I weight the values in way that, for example, much more dramatic redistribution of inheritances than we have today would be a good idea, but I'm trying to make sure this argument works even if you weight differently).

By the way, it's also important to emphasize that most people's morality is actually ok with some level of theft for the sake of children in extreme circumstances---Jean Valjean is the hero of the story after all.

Jean Valjean is the hero of the story after all.

I don't think this is quite what Les Miserables is doing. The book doesn't spend all that much time downplaying his crimes and so forth; rather, it presents him as, at least after some time in prison, a hardened criminal redeemed only by the mercy of the bishop, and who becomes afterward a great man. To be fair though, stealing bread there was to give maximal sympathy, so I don't know that I disagree with your overall point as to what you can draw from that, just, I don't think that his crime was minor is really very related to him being the hero. It's probably closer to a reflection on the legal system as a whole, and so, if anything, would reflect more on Javert than Valjean, even though Javert was, to the best of my recollection, entirely uninvolved.

It's a great book.

Something that may appeal to a few people on this forum is that Thomas Aquinas allowed for theft, or well, considered it not theft, in such extreme cases. This is not unique to him either; there are Protestant authors that say the same, as well as political philosophers like Locke.

There is a model of anchor babies that would see them as comparable to a hostage situation: the parent essentially says "let me stay here (too), or else this innocent child suffers". Do you also believe in a general moral obligation to yield to hostage takers if the hostage can't be saved otherwise, the argument that this encourages more hostage-taking notwithstanding?

and are equally connected to their surrounding community

Except they're not equally connected to the surrounding community, and cannot be, because one of those connections — perhaps the most important connection — is ties of blood, of kinship. This is something I'd say most people in history, from ancient Athens to modern Dubai, have understood well. "Nation" and "state" are not synonyms, and their conflation by many modern people reduces our grasp on the relevant concept spaces.

it's about not capriciously punishing the kids

I think you're smuggling in an assumption here: that the kids in question in some sense deserve or are entitled to citizenship, such that it constitutes a "punishment" for them to be deprived of it. Does a club "punish" everyone to whom it fails to grant membership?

Except that the US as a country has specifically rejected that blood and kinship ties are important since it's founding---I feel like I repeat this so much here but no one ever seems to remember "All men are created equal". This is what enlightenment, classical liberal, or whatever you call it values means! And yes, they are drastically different from any values anyone had before the 1700's---this is why the enlightenment was such a big deal and why we think of older civilizations as morally hopeless and barbaric. We definitely don't think of places like Dubai that are blatantly not onboard as reasonable.

It's also funny to get this reply when I've just had a bunch of discussions here about the prevalence of explicitly racialist values on the Motte. @Felagund, Let's see how much the peanut gallery supports this.

All men are created equal, not all men are created American.

Those other, non-Americans can go on being equal somewhere else.

When the founders said that all men were created equal, what they were endorsing was an equality before the law, and a lack of hegemony. In particular, they were opposed to the deprivation of the traditional English rights from the American colonies, which they saw as antithetical to living freely, and were also opposed to titles and legal birthrights and so forth, supporting rather a republican form of government. If I remember rightly, they considered adding a prohibition on titles to the Constitution. (Yes, all this seems incompatible with slavery, but there's nothing forcing individuals to be consistent.)

So yes, I do think that Dubai and similar, where there is a large labor class with diminished rights would be contrary to American values, even if, given slavery, something more extreme than that already existed. (And even if I personally wouldn't be all that opposed to one existing, consensually of course, in the United States on economic grounds.) And so I do not think it would be American for there to be a class of permanent residents without other allegiance who are not citizens.

In practice, this would seem to mean that having a de facto class of people without birthright citizenship living out their lives in the country for generations would be contrary to American values. This seems to be what @atokenliberal6D_4 thinks removing birthright citizenship would be like.

At the same time, this vision does not seem to require that those with a more tenuous connection be granted the same affordances. So if lack of birthright citizenship were followed by immediate deportation, that doesn't seem to be obviously in conflict to me. An equality among men does not grant them a right to your sovereign territory, and as long as you are being consistent in not setting up a two-tier citizenship, this does not seem contrary to founding principles. I imagine this is what @Capital_Room would endorse.

But that's merely trying to spin out a philosophy from the declaration. The U.S. Constitution, following the abolition of slavery, acquired the 14th amendment, saying, among others,

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This seems designed to, among other things, overturn the effects the infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that people of African descent could not be citizens (and which Lincoln, along with many others, thought was wrongly decided).

I imagine @Capital_Room would lean on the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause, which, from looking online, was originally meant to be excluding foreign nationals and some Indians (cf. "Indians not taxed") from what is under discussion here.

My reading of this would seem to allow for broader exceptions to birthright citizenship than currently are in place. But I'll also note that, contra @Capital_Room this does not seem to be about blood or an ethnic Nation, as this was deliberately to bring in people (Blacks) who were, to that point, excluded from citizenship based on blood.

So, I suppose, I think both of you have points?

Now I want to read Dred Scott and Lincoln on these matters some time. That would be fun.

I don't think most of the political class agree with every variation on retroactive enforcement, especially when it comes to children that grew up here.

And I think this can be earnestly true even in such cases where an individual believes that we should be stricter in enforcement prospectively.

retroactive enforcement

Sometimes it takes time for the criminal to be apprehended, but if the laws which the criminal is said to have broken, were already in force when the crime is said to have been committed, there is no "retroactivity".

What I mean is that the ruling mentioned appears to postdate the actions under question.

This is bait, new account and as others have noted, highly ignorant for being in a life changing problem.

That said, I'll take the moment to pitch my opinion: citizenship should be purchased with a large fine in cases of illegal aliens who have clean records, employment, and obvious means of support. Laws were broken, let them pay their literal debt to society.

Strong agreement. We in the U.S. should be willing to practically sell citizenships for a substantial sum... perhaps $50,000? Given a clean record and lack other risk factors, of course. We let a lot of money to into lawyers pockets when we could get roughly the same outcome but pocket the cash ourselves.

Taxing immigration in general (or an auction) would be a nice policy—it would incentivize preventing illegal immigration, make it easier to pitch for more legal immigration, and would raise revenue.

Edit: I don't know that a new account is actually a good signal of bait in this case, although it would be evidence in that direction.

Peterson vs Fuentes twitter drama

The entire story is shown in this thread. Someone is asking why something is 'like this', Fuentes predictably answers 'Jews', Peterson swoops in to condemn, and then the rest follows.

The AmericaFirst/Groyper movement seems to have finally found another 'gatekeeper' to poke. After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

Bullies thrive on weakness, and whilst it might not be nice to push peoples buttons like this, I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite. The trolls can only do what you allow them to get away with, as Charlie Kirk demonstrated by defusing the avenues of attack. Peterson seems to be doing the opposite of that.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying? I'm not sure how Peterson is doing. Last I heard he did a rather big media deal with Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. Whilst the AF 'conference' or whatever it's called, didn't do so well.

  • -10

What did Charlie Kirk do?

Started using the term 'anti-white'.

He used to get 'invaded' a lot by AF/G, both online and in real life. He could hardly hold an event without the open question line being filled with AF/Gers asking about his stance on immigration, demographics and the relationship between Israel and the US. Most notably asking him over and over about the USS Liberty incident.

Charlie, to his or his handlers credit, changed his tune a bit. Becoming more aggressive against anti-white rhetoric. There's a layer of irony here, but there was definitely a change. But if there's lore here I'm missing I'd be happy for someone to correct the record on this. I'm not as tuned in to politics as I used to be.

After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

What did he do? I mean in general Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, it’s clear he’s in another dimension to the whole AF wing.

Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

The impression I'd got from this article in Unherd was that Trump doesn't like Project 2025 because:

a) He's the big boss and nobody tells him what to do (in his self-conception). He's not interested in being some pencil-neck's sockpuppet.

b) He thinks that small-state conservatism is stupid and electorally unpopular.

How accurate is that? I don't really know much about the Heritage Foundation.

Trump didn't write it and hasn't read it. Reporters keep asking him questions about it and he doesn't like how those questions hijack his messaging strategy.

More or less, with a side of project 2025 being way overblown and not coordinated well enough with Trump.

Quick compilations:

It's amazing watching these figures collapse into a deluded schizo-philosemitism. These figures used to represent the "Right of mainstream" perspective but that is falling apart as this nauseating Israel worship gets exposed to increasingly skeptical audiences.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying?

What do you mean by "this part of the right wing sphere" here? I wouldn't consider Peterson and Fuentes part of the same sphere. I also wouldn't consider the AF 'conference' being canceled an indicator of that sphere dying. Engagement on X is probably the biggest indicator for the growth of those spheres. And Fuentes was able to ratio the Petersons handedly. And yes, ratios matter- they are the memetic fitness signal among the genetic algo of X discourse.

There also appears to be an enormous proliferation of DR engagement on X. It's quaint to imagine not too long ago where the most "radical" decile of the right wing youth would be listening to Glenn Beck or something. But now they are on X signal-boosting DR talking points and engaging in WWII revisionism. The engagement is huge and appears to be growing.

Another area in which X discourse seems to be changing is Holocaust Revisionism. I am increasingly seeing posts alluding to or outright endorsing Holocaust Revisionism and WWII Revisionism with high engagement and high numbers of likes. The ranks of "Holocaust Deniers" are certainly bigger than they have ever been before and appear to be growing judging by the number of accounts I am seeing endorse it on X. The taboo is collapsing, and it is largely because of the actions of Israel and the collapse of the credibility of the Jordan Petersons and Glenn Becks unable to corral young right-wingers any longer.

"Western civilization would die without Israel"

It's takes like this that are utterly baffling to me. And I say this as someone who's very pro-Israel and who generally likes Jews (even though I generally hate their political leanings). Like Nikki Haley saying Israel doesn't need us, we need them, it just strikes me as a completely delusional way of looking at the relationship between Israel and the West. I'm more than happy to sell Israel all of the weapons they need to glass Gaza or replenish the Iron Dome or bomb Iran or whatever tickles their fancy, but I'm not happy to be the one paying for them via our foreign aid. Israel has clearly been very dependent on us for both arms and the funding to buy those arms, and it's completely insulting when people like Shapiro and Haley suggest that we need them and not the other way around.

Fuentes is charismatic but not very intellectual. I'd guess that he's been embarrarassed in public a few times by being unable to compete with Ashkenazi verbal ability.

Also there are a bunch of Middle Eastern groups eager to fund anti-Isreali speakers on the right, so I imagine that plays a part.

Whenever left wing activists hear someone on the right complain about powerful rich New Yorkers, they immediately respond with "Oh, so you hate Jews?!?" I think that Fuentes has embraced that to a certain degree.

If you come from a working class background and have a non-HBD world model, it's easy to assume that it's Jews who are making decisions that negatively affect your community. If he was a bit more worldly he'd realize that upperclass gentile blue tribers also hate him.

He's been attacking Steve Sailer recently because a bunch of the more intellectual groypers read "Noticing" and were discussing it's contents. Previously Sailer's work was scattered over decades of posts on different sites, it was suddenly more accessable.

Fuentes couldn't really engage so he started attacking Sailer as a secret Jew. Sailer is adopted and despite his interest in genetics has never done a DNA test, I think he feels it would weaken his connection to his adoptive parents.

But fundamentally Fuentes is reactive not reflective. He caters to lazy anti-intellectuals.

The default low-IQ tradcath take(which Fuentes either is or pretends to be, even if he’s more of a racist than anything else) is some kind of antisemitic conspiracy theory. Fuentes being not that intellectual…

What is going

On with Peterson’s

Spacing, capitalization, and punctuation

In that thread

Been reading e e cummings?

It makes a little sense if you try to do a Jordan Peterson impression when you read it.

I think it's because JP spend a lot of time thinking about evil, and he seems to have learned about the human capacity for evil by studying WW2 and concentration camps. He knows how easy it is for somebody to fall into an ideology like nazism and rationalize ones hatred for an outgroup, and he's quite determined to keep this from happening (again, this is just my view). Sadly, because he feels so strongly about this, he seems unable to pick up on the patterns relating semitism and wokeness.

Ethos is downstream from Mythos, it really is as simple as the boomer-internalization of the gas chamber mythos.

What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?

The Revisionist position is the same it has always been: the story that millions of people were tricked into entering gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower was wartime atrocity propaganda. This propaganda originally centered around the Western camps until those claims were proven false after Allied investigation.

The mainstream position admits the gas chamber story in the Western camps was a hoax, created by false testimony and confessions, but then they claim that the "extermination camps" conquered by the Soviet Union were all totally real. Revisionist scholars have spent decades proving that the gas chamber story was likewise a wartime atrocity propaganda hoax in the currently alleged Eastern 'extermination camps' like Majdanek.

So the Revisionist position is simply that the gas chamber story is as real in the Eastern camps as it was in the Western camps. The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West but totally real in the camps "investigated" by the Soviet Union, where they fabricated evidence and denied access to Western observers.

The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West

[citation needed] that it is mainstream position

The mainstream narrative says that the six alleged death camps were in the east. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps

Notice how all the camps in the west were not death camps. So in the context of the mainstream narrative, how do you explain contemporary newspaper articles from the time confidently claiming otherwise? Obviously they are understood to be propaganda. In other words, a “hoax.”

Can you link mainstream position confirming that camps on West were described as extermination camps?

(It was claimed upthread that "western extermination camps were hoaxes" and want to see confirmation of that)

(again: it would not make big difference to me whether they gassed people to death or starved them to death in Auschwitz, but I obviously prefer to have an accurate info)

At Nuremberg, the series of Eastern camps allegedly responsible for the majority of gassing victims were barely mentioned at all in the trials. What was filmed and submitted as evidence were allegations that the camps liberated by the Western allies were the centers of extermination. Here is the Nuremberg Concentration camp footage which was submitted as evidence and shown in the trial courtroom supposedly showing a gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp, here's a short transcript of that part:

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided...

Even mainstream historians admit today that the clothing hanging outside the delousing chambers was not from prisoners executed in gas chambers, but that these were real delousing chambers use to disinfest clothing to prevent epidemic typhus. Dachau was one of the camps mentioned in the document I cited earlier, admitting that this claim was a hoax created by false testimonies and confessions:

The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, ...

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that the confessions had been extracted by tortures and the testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.

The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates, who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.

The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. But it insists that the identical claims made in the camps conquered by the Soviet Union, the camps where the Allied Commissions of Inquiry were not allowed access to investigate, are the only camps where those claims were actually real.

Revisionists though have shown that likewise these Eastern camps which are currently claimed to have been extermination camps are the exact same story as the Western camps: real delousing facilities and shower rooms which were fabricated as gas chambers by Soviet propagandists, tortured confessions, and false testimonies.

Fun fact, if you review the Wikipedia page of the Nazi Concentration Camps film submitted as evidence and screened at the Nuremberg trial, the "Contents" section omits Dachau entirely and makes no description of the falsely alleged gas chamber described in this film. This is part and parcel for Wikipedia treatment of the Holocaust topic as a whole.

It’s funny that JP’s own hero Solzhenitsyn, who he quotes and praises endlessly, wrote a ~1000 page tome on the influence of Jews in Soviet Russia, criticizing Jewish Russians as well as gentile Russians. Yet Peterson is unable to discuss the topic as it applies today. As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900. I think this is just part of his boomer programming. Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption. Not far from the original circumcision-exodus narrative, just applied to gentiles.

is this part of the right wing sphere dying

Nick Fuentes continues to grow in popularity, he is literally ratioing the Petersons and getting shoutouts from the Tate brothers. Fuentes-adjacent Sam Hyde is sitting down with zoomer influencer Matan and KillTony regulars, and also has a bizarre inroad to underground rap through Joeyy. They sorely lack IRL infrastructure but their influence is expanding I’d say.

As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900.

But it is. No way in heck would any Jewish community in either 1900 or 900 have outmarriage rates nearing 50%, for one.

Antisemitism is rising in popularity among younger people in the west. I don’t think that Fuentes is the story- he’s too much of a dweeb- but it’s definitely a thing.

Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption.

I like this metaphor even if I disagree with lots of the specifics. The overall thrust is definitely true in the sense of boomers thinking Jews are special perpetual victims.

The west can’t solve antisemitism because the west isn’t a fact based society. Maybe no societies are fact-based. The left can’t deal with antisemitism because oppressed-oppressor ideology makes the Jews look like the bad guy because they’re the most successful society on earth. The right is probably more aware of the reasons but they still can’t have the honest debate on the Jewish question.

Is the reason “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck”?

they’re the most successful society on earth.

The Jews are America now?

Most successful group in the most successful country

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish. They get the bomb when we did and you just have to guess their intellect is enough to delay D-Day.

That quite clearly didn't work for them the first time they tried it, although I suppose the treaty of Versailles was a better deal than the end of WWII.

Truth there. Taking France so easily completely tilted it. I guess that was the difference. Even Oppenheimer was a NY born German Jew. It’s not hard to imagine the scenario if they got the nuke first if they somehow were friends.

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish.

Who is "we"? Maybe we never get into a war with Herr Schicklgruber; he nukes Moscow and unites Europe under a 6-armed swastika, and the US just deals.

Point being that a WWII Germany that's pro-Jewish is so different that you can't really assume anything will be the same.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

He hates Fuentes for the same reason he hates the feminists.

His reaction to complaints from UofT pro-trans progressives was to liken them to Maoists. He accuses Trudeau of having a "murderous equity doctrine" for defending gender equity. Anything that blames/focuses on groups earns his ire as the revival of some murderous 20th century movement.

If feminists are like murderous communists and pro-trans activists are Maoists, how should he feel about anti-Semites?

There are absolutely philosemites nakedly driven by shared enemies (Douglas Murray comes to mind) but Peterson has always leaned towards unhinged rhetoric about people if he feels they resemble certain baddies. We don't need an explanation. What would be strange is him having any patience for Fuentes at all.

  1. Peterson should know by now that he's really bad and unpersuasive at X-posting. Every time he gets in an argument there he comes across much worse than when he's talking.

  2. As is often then case with X threads, it's kind of hard for me to evaluate what's going on. It's like everyone is sitting around drinking absinthe and yelling at each other (in free verse? And drawing angry pictures?), I walk into the room for 5 minutes, and then walk right back out again thinking that maybe I prefer social contexts with babies and tea after all. Except that it's conducted in a public online venue, which is weird and probably not a good idea.

You know, I forget the interview I was watching. Maybe it was Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. They stumbled onto the topic of Worlds War II history, and how "infected" it is. Which is to say, you can question the facts, the narrative, the scholarship, the normie understanding of virtually any other historical event. "Well actshually..." to your hearts content. "Just asking questions..." all you want. But you do that with World War II and people lose their god damned minds, as though you were poking an infected wound.

Now in the interview, they mostly take this framing, and talk about how WW2 was the dawn of the American Empire, and all the stories we tell ourselves about how America is a force for good in the world. This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since, not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so. And it all goes back to the story we aren't allowed to question at all about how we were the good guys in World War II.

Now they don't go down this rabbit hole, but I will. Wrapped up in our unquestioning moral superiority that gives us the right to intervene anywhere in the world we want, is that we stopped the holocaust. And so philosemitism is baked into that story that is holy to our civic religion. Jews are our chosen people, and protecting them gives us the moral standing we need to bomb brown people for any reason what so ever.

This is an example for how X discourse influences the Tucker Carlson's and creates a feedback loop. Carlson will wade further into WWII Revisionism as it continues to gain ground on X. These twitter Spats actually matter.

This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since...

When did this idea become so popular? Korea was a stalemate that has sharply bettered the lives of many people in the long run. The US won in Grenada, in Panama, in Kuwait, in Haiti, and so on. Maybe the results suck anyway or maybe these are just too lightweight of opponents to be treated as serious, but the United States does win military conflicts. Iraq was a stupid idea, but Saddam Hussein is emphatically dead. Muammar Gaddafi doesn't think he kicked the Americans out of Libya, notably because we came, we saw, he died.

When did this idea become so popular? [...] Maybe the results suck anyway

When figuring out what someone is trying to say in a compound sentence, it helps to read the part after the comma

not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so.

Yes, you have correctly restated my point that even when we "win" on the field and have a great big "Mission Accomplished" celebration, we are worse off for it.

Perhaps you didn't intend to use "and" to join those clauses, but there it is, clear as day. Many of these conflicts were won militarily. In fact, many of them even achieved the publicly stated foreign policy goals.

I suspect that in two to twenty years we will have retroactively lost the Korean War.

Can you explain?

In other words, I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle. If that happens, it will be difficult to look back at the 1950 Korean War and call it a victory, even if it really was a mostly successful military operation at the time. A similar thing happened with the first Gulf War, which is now much less rosy in the American memory after the 2004 Iraq war and the current state of Iraq now.

I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle.

That is certainly a bold prediction. I don't see it going quite so well for the Norks. Say whatever you will about the US military's ability to deal with insurgent groups, if you give them a stand-up fight against an organized state military it'll be Christmas at the Pentagon. Generals who cut their teeth as butter bars in Desert Storm will weep tears of pure joy.

I suspect that any scenario in which Kim goes for it will involve the US military being tied down elsewhere.

The US Military is highly effective. The US State Department is completely unable to do any of the "establishing a peaceful liberal democracy" tasks that it thinks it's capable of.

But the State Department is also where people who study international policy dream of working, so they push it's failures back onto the military.

That sentence also stuck out to me as very strange. I generally think of it the opposite way. The US has generally won every specific engagement its been in. They seem very good at winning battles. The rare times they do lose become rallying cries for the improvement and betterment of the armed forces.

The US achieving its foreign policy goals seems heavily related to just how realistic and specific those goals are. If the goal is something specific like "kill that guy, or destroy that small country's military" then they do well. If the goal is more nebulous like "spread democracy, or prevent the spread of communism" then they seem to consistently fail.

Did Vietnam result in meaningful improvement? Judging by Iraq our counterinsurgency skills were still lacking.

South Vietnam didn't fall to insurgency. Both the Ngo family and the later variants of kleptocracy were able to handle the VC. South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese tanks, and the US military is quite good at conventional warfare- both in 1975 and today. In actual fact, US involvement did prolong the life of the South Vietnamese kleptocratic minority-rule dictatorship(which is what it was) meaningfully- the ARVN couldn't have stopped the Tet offensive on its own, and required US air support and political advisement to stop the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive.

I thought the general goal with Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism. They failed at that.

Vietnam seems like it's in a good place nowadays, my guess would that the Vietnam war made that happy ending take longer.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

I understand it to be similar to my own embrace of Zionism - I just despise Israel's enemies. If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly, I would apply a great deal more skepticism to things like their colonization of the West Bank. As it is, I just need to pick sides and the choice is very easy. Notably, this extends to the spillover of the causes in the United States, where enthusiastic Zionists are no real problem for me, but the Hamas enthusiasts are spectacularly annoying leftists.

the enemies of the West and free civilization

The West and free civilization seem to have led inexorably to everything you now decry. Are you sure this makes sense?

Are you sure you're thinking of me? I am quite literally proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. Disagreeing with my fellow Americans about whether Chevron deference or Skidmore deference is the appropriate degree of license for administrative agency discretion does not shift me to wishing I had more Islamic theocracy in my life.

If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly

They aren't. Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived. Assad fights to keep Syria together. Israel fights to cause a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. AIPAC and ADL want to open the borders to the west and ban right wingers off twitter. Israel financed jihadists in Syria while bombing the country. Meanwhile, israAID was shipping migrants to Europe.

We heard similar arguments for invading Iraq. The result was a giant refugee crisis, a spike in islamism and a disaster for local christians. Israel is not the anti-islam option, it is the pro Islam option.

Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived.

Must be a really great place. I can't imagine anyone fighting that long to stay in Jersey City or Bayonne, NJ.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

Because your standards for being a philosemite are absurdly low such that everyone seems to be defending the Jews too much.

This is how I know the Trump assassination attempt was done by a rando. He tried going for a headshot. You never go for a headshot, you aim for center mass. People who think a headshot is what you do get their ideas from games and tv shows.

This article makes the same argument.

It's always funny to see these blogs where some random nobody (or at least, nobody with any credentials relevant to the case) gives a detailed argument in support of a definite claim that turns out to be entirely and utterly wrong.

Yeah true.

photos and eye witness describe it it being a riffle

it instantly killed one of the audience members after being hit to the head

snipers regularly aim for the head ,as the secret service had done for example. they didn't shoot his torso

Shooting from an elevation into a crowd, head hits are more likely.

Snipers aim for whatever's showing.

To be fair, his head was probably all they had to shoot at if he we peeking over the peak of the roof from prone.

Thank you for using the right word. I see everyone using "peaking" nowadays and it's driving me crazy.

"Sniper peaking on the roof" like damn, he really enjoys his work

I'm seeing online (so let's take a grain of salt) that this shot was from 130 or more yards away. Maybe this is just how good this guy's aim is. Bullets flying wide. We don't know where he was aiming.

I think after seeing he missed his initial shot realized he only had a few seconds left, so unloaded as fast as he could

trump was wearing body armor . Given that Trump had medical staff within feet, the killer's only choice was a headshot which would have been instantly lethal. even aiming for the upper torso could have been survivable with armor and rapid medical attendance.

Trump wasn't wearing some fancy battlefield armor with ceramic plates. Meaning any rifle round apart from (maybe) hollow point small rifle ones would have gone right through.

Also, he was being shot from the side, which is a direction where soldier armor doesn't have ceramic plates so rifle rounds are lethal.

Really, had the shooter used a better gun, practiced more and went for center of mass, he could have killed him easily.

Odds are cca 50% that a torso hit with a .30 rifle kills a person. And he's a spring chicken only when compared to Biden.

Odds are 50% that the shot would have splattered Trump's brains. And it's not a non-zero probability the body shot would have missed as well.

Apparently the shooter missed because Trump turned his head at the last second pointing at the poster that was there..

The reason that you shoot for COM is not that it's a bigger target, it's that heads bob around a lot and centre-of-mass does not. (as anyone who's done defensive line in hockey, soccer, or football knows perfectly well)

Trump's (20"x20" or so) torso is surely not a killshot -- but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is, .223/.308/doesn't matter. This is kind of a textbook case against headshot efficacy -- Trump literally moved his head just after the guy decided to pull the trigger; if he'd shot for the heart with the same accuracy we would be living in a very different world today.

but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is,

Theodore Roosevelt not only survived being shot at torso, but even continued his speech for 1.5 hours after being shot.

.223/.308/doesn't matter.

of course it does, size of bullet and whether it rotates on impact makes different size hole, .22LR might fail to reach heart vs. vest + rib at that distance.

Here's what cheap-ass .223 ammo does to soft armour:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T71ku4Fjn3w&t=479

Note all the action in the ballistic gel -- this is not something you want going on anywhere in your torso, and absolutely makes you D.R.T. if your heart is in that area.

Yes, .22LR or whatever bullshit pocket pistol cartridge was used on Roosevelt are quite a different thing -- these are literally an OOM less powerful than centrefire rifle rounds, even .223.

Sorry if ".223/.308/doesn't matter" was unclear -- the 'doesn't matter' refers to centrefire rifle rounds; any of them (with very limited exceptions; .22 Hornet maybe?) will go through soft armour like butter at this range, and retain enough energy to create a hydrostatic wave which will shred/explode one's heart given a true COM hit. Other parts of the torso (eg. lung shot) might be survivable with prompt medical heroics, but would still have been a pretty bad time for Trump.

I don't think you need to penetrate body armor at all. You just need to pump enough kinetic energy into the heart area. And at trumps age chances of it being fatal are not low.

Fat standing between unpenetrated vest and heart area would distribute kinetic energy pretty much

How do you know he wasn't aiming for center mass?

You don't know whether he went for a headshot.

It's a common joke really. "1: nice shot, you got him right in the head." "2: I wasn't aiming for the head"

You don't aim for center of mass if your target is wearing body armor. I don't know if Trump was (probably not, it was too damned hot), but the shooter had to consider that possibility.

Can't rule out that line of thinking, but no normal soft ballistic vest will protect against rifle rounds. They're certainly not strapping up presidents with ceramic plate armor these days, right?

Correct. A soft vest wouldn't stop rifle rounds.

Not at short range, but this was a pretty far shot. The bullet would be going much slower than muzzle velocity when it hits.

556 at around 100 yards easily goes through soft armor. Velocity should be at or a bit lower than 3000 ft/s. Let's call it high 2000s ft/s depending on barrel length and ammo.

this was a pretty far shot.

This isn't a far shot for the cartridge (5.56 is effective out to 800ish yards, but 450 is about the practical maximum if you're not fiddling with the sights) and it'll still defeat soft armor at those distances provided you're using the appropriate ammunition. It won't defeat the cutting edge of body armor, though (the newest-gen UHMWPE stuff).

It put a hole in a hydraulic lift, so I suspect it would easily penetrate a soft vest (unless that shot was really lucky and actually hit a hose). But I think a sniper wouldn't want to count on that with a .223.

I would assume hydraulic hoses are significantly easier to penetrate than any armor, soft or otherwise.

They're pretty hefty actually, I wouldn't be so sure -- hydraulic fluid is at like 5000+ psi, there's several layers of steel/rubber/fibre in there.

Anyways unless he was using some frangible coyote round .223 absolutely does penetrate soft armour at 150 yards, this is not even a question.

agree. this center of mass rule is for police shooting at ordinary civilians who do not have body armor

Basically. There's various youtubes and articles out there about the difference between military (1000 yards/meters+ center of mass) and police snipers (<200 yards/meters head shots) and what they aim for. Assassins are in the later category. Today's events is a case in point. Look how close the shooter got.