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The strange place of Jewishness in the culture war
I find that Jewishness has a very strange place in the culture war, and I think it merits examination. I welcome people trying to help me make sense of it and figure out exactly where the battle lines lay. Both left and right fancy themselves champions of Jewishness, and paint the other side as antisemitic. It's very strange how it breaks down, and I don't fully understand why and along which lines.
On the left, they're very eager to portray the other side as fascists, holocaust deniers, and old-fashioned anti semites. We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right. I particularly disliked the handling of Marjorie Taylor Greene last year, where she said something (which admittedly did sound stupid and crazy to me) about Rothschild, and immediately, I was hearing about "jewish space lasers" from every jewish acquaintance I know. While I do agree that Greene sounded crazy, I think there was a few steps and a lot of filling in the blanks between what she said and something that's legit antisemitic.
On the right, everyone I know is very eager to say that the left hates Jews. These people are fans of people like Bari Weiss. I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews, maybe because we've had a run over the past month of a number of cases of the left supposedly championing Jews (like in the Kanye situation). I know that one such thing that people on the right take issue with is the left being very anti-Israel. Though really, I think it does make sense that being anti-Israel isn't the same as being antisemitic.
This state of affairs makes it difficult for me to predict how my Jewish acquaintances will react to any culture warring. I've found that sometimes, the very same people are eager to claim that liberal American institutions hate Jews due to their stances on Israel, but then will also turnaround and claim that Trump was about to start shipping Jews out to the camps for the 2nd holocaust. It sort of seems to me that most of them are so eager to see oppression everywhere, they're like a leaf blowing in the wind, following whatever the current is, claiming that anyone and everyone is out to get them. Instead, to me, it seems more like (almost) no one is out to get them, and instead everyone wants to claim that their tribe is the only REAL supporters of the Jews.
So much has been said on this topic over the centuries, it's tedious.
The long and short of it is that Jews truly have «systemic power» that the left accuses White-cishet-male-etc. outgroup of having; perhaps this accusation is better understood as a deflection. They are overrepresented in positions of power, they are substantially coordinated specifically as Jews, including in those positions of power, via a rich and dense network of Jewish organizations focusing on outreach to/bargaining with/pressuring people in power – well, this «they» necessarily excluding those who neglect their ethnic identity or its illegible political terms (e.g. Greenwald), and the fruit of in-group preference that those factors provide, but in terms of total influence this isn't a noteworthy caveat – and their coordinating structures are dedicated to maintaining and furthering this power, first of all by means of promoting the doctrine of Jewish victimhood (to the point of it having become a kneejerk quasi-religious dogma, with Hitler impersonation being about as taboo as Devil worshipping was in the Middle Ages – at least the medievals could have their Festivals!), and secondly by eroding the capacity of other peoples to coordinate, except to again erode the bigger and stronger group's capacity. So we have Civil Rights support and assorted pro-Black activism including BLM, but the moment Blacks begin to build their identity on the Black Hebrew Israelite/Nation of Islam ideology (admittedly a complete schizo clown show), Jews pull the plug and we see those performative lustrations.
This isn't new. I think the difference this time is that Western elites are progressively becoming, well, less Western, and more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism, especially when powered by genuine differences in capability: for a good illustration, see @BurdensomeCount here. Due to all people nominally having the same rights and obligations, there is no notion of noblesse oblige either, the useful bits of Western egalitarianism being combined with useful bits of Eastern might-makes-right logic.
I think in my lifetime, even with moderately pessimistic estimates (i.e. the next 15 years) I'll see the flip-flop on this topic, a sharp transition to normalization of the belief that Jews, as a politically represented ethnic fraction, are just inherently better and have more rights than Gentiles. Those demands of admitting the advantage, with the promise of recognizing it as valid, are not as clever as people like Roko may imagine.
I very strongly believe in noblesse oblige and perform it when in the midst of my own people. Back home people can basically tell at a glance that I am better than them simply based on my dress (even when I'm wearing local dress my clothes have higher quality fabric are crisper and fit me better due to having been specifically tailored for me) and in such a case I even go out of my way to e.g. at the airport lift my own baggage rather than getting a porter as that is demonstrating the virtue of self sufficiency to others around me. Also when praying I have no qualms to standing next to janitors and ditch diggers, reflecting the fact that while in Earthly matters people have different ranks, in the eyes of God we have all been created equal (and infinitely beneath Him) and that we will be judged for our sins in the same way on the Day of Resurrection regardless of whether one was a prince or a pauper.
When talking to people in my language no matter how low they may be I always use the formal, polite way of referring to them and in conversation always treat them like an equal (because it is possible to tell from my dress, manner of walking, height etc. that I am their superior, I don't need to articulate it). They know they are beneath me, I know I am above them but treating them like dirt beneath my feet isn't going to get us anywhere in relation to the reason I'm talking to them, instead I have a duty of care towards them similar to a parent's duty of care towards their children and I try and make sure that what I'm asking of these people doesn't cross the line over into exploitation (equally I would never ask someone to do something I wouldn't be willing to do myself, I've cleaned plenty of toilets and even once dug a ditch to find out what it was like).
In the west though I don't do any of it, because the proles here believe themselves to be equal in worldly matters to me (lol, lmao even) and so I treat them like equals; much like how my job is focused on figuring out ways to make money off of other market participants in the west these people get to deal with a version of me that only looks after my own self interest, and naturally since they are beneath me they lose out more often.
Once I made close to £500 off a student acquaintance of mine who was making wildly overconfident claims about the probabilities of certain events, I challenged him to trade on it and he accepted, despite knowing I work in quant finance and him being a history & politics student who stopped studying maths at 16. I even pushed to do a big sized trade given how confident he seemed by dangling the carrot of potentially winning £2000 in front of him. Naturally he was wrong, I was right and suddenly he had lost a month's worth of discretionary expenses for him. Had this been back home I would never have proposed the bet in the first place, seeing it as exploitation of those below me in this domain, and even after I had won would probably have returned the money along with a life lesson in being less confident in your assertions but here in the West I was perfectly happy to take the cash as I had rightfully won it from an equal, never mind that it was supposed to be his food money for the rest of the term while it was something I wouldn't even notice (you can probably tell I didn't really like him).
I will pray for you.
The son of God rode in on a donkey and never expected anybody to 'tell at a glance that he was better than them'.
Those who believed in him created the civilization that lucky people like you get to visit and 'work in quant finance' in.
You didn't choose your job? Who forced you to 'only look after your own self interest'? I pray that we all find the alternative version of ourselves that treats others better than ourselves.
Thank you, and I will remember to pray for you too.
While I believe in Jesus and respect him as a prophet bringing the word of god to mankind I'm not a Christian but rather a Muslim. There is an Authentic Hadith that goes:
As well as others like (this is one of the miracles attributed to Muhammad);
In Islam it's pretty well established that Muhammad from his appearance stood out and displayed nobility in everything he did. There is also a Hadith that says:
Islam is rather more of a warrior's religion than Christianity. I find the latter very much reflects a slave mentality that (in my opinion) isn't the best for individuals to hold, for example from the Sermon on the Mount there are statements like “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." and things like "You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you". To me this reflects a warped viewpoint of the world and in this case I identify more strongly with the Confucian doctrine of "treating your enemy the same way you treat your friend is an insult to your friend" (I suppose this provides an example of fundamental differences in the basic beliefs that Western/Eastern cultures were built on that then went on to cause the cultures to diverge further and further as they developed, a bit like different starting conditions in a chaotic system).
True, but those people have gone now and western society is trending towards godless heathenism, that culture is slowly going extinct even though the genes are still there, basically in inverse of how the Magyars strongly contributed to modern Hungarian culture, but very little to their genes. A modern Hungarian saying Magyars were his genetic ancestors would elicit a scoff from me, much like how a modern non-believing westerner would do if they said that the believers in Christ who built the West were their memetic ancestors.
Nobody. I actually always try to treat people I know better than myself, it's just that in the West without noblesse oblige I don't really give a shit about providing direction and being a good role model towards low class people I don't personally know or have relationships at at least the level of "friendly acquaintance". Back home I do indeed look out for others, even random strangers before caring for myself to an extent. It's considered bad form to say how much you give to charity but I give freely to the poor and always have done so, this being a value instilled in me by my parents from an early age. In fact I consider my high paying finance job as sort of a reward from God for freely giving to the poor and needy, indeed I didn't keep that £500 I won from that overconfident western idiot but instead donated it to the Edhi Foundation which provides hospital and ambulance services to the extremely poor back home and saves countless lives a year (Edhi himself was a great man, in Islam it's generally frowned upon to donate organs but even then shortly before he died he asked his doctors if any parts of his body might be of use to patients and they replied that while most of them wouldn't - he was 88 at the time - his eyes could still be implanted so he gave those up too when he passed away, one final act of charity towards those who need it).
I too hope we all find the ability to put others before ourselves.
Warrior of that?
The Christian god very much intend his followers to be obedient to him, but the ideal Christian behavior is not really to be a slave, as Christians have historically rather chosen to die as a martyr than conceal their faith or deny their god.
Any persecution can be tolerated for the sake of the actual life with god, after this worldly one.
What do you mean by that dichotomy?
Do you have a switch on your morality based on where you are located?
One side effect of the Christian behavior of wishing good on your own enemies is that it may potentially lead to a certain admiration by enemies or bystanders for your peaceful, moral behavior.
Perhaps that is one reason you work in quant finance in the West instead of IED development wherever you come from.
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