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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Speaking of incentives, I just don't see how Jews can let go of ethnic organizing and its fruit after largely giving up on wokeness and the eternal victim card, so some sort of privilege will emerge and be acknowledged.

Jews didn't attain most of their powerful position in society through wokeness and the victim card, they can maintain their position just fine without any need for the kind of explicit discourse shift on the matter you predict. In fact I don't think recent wokeness was even all that beneficial for the Jews, when whites are purposefully disprivileged at high levels that includes the elite Jews that would be competing for those positions; many liberal-left Jews that supported these things are sincerely ideologically universalist and I have not yet seen strong evidence that their positions would be explained primarily in functionalistic terms. I do better understand the prediction when you clarify that you don't have in mind literally formal discriminations, which be would be rather strange.

So I am making the fairly simple to defend prediction of a continuation of the status quo, more or less. I think there is a massive burden of proof on those predicting significant shifts on such sensitive matters. I mentioned Cofnas as that's a good recent example of someone using HBD details to try to refute hostile analyses with other reasons for Jewish success in America; to ask precisely, is that the kind of discourse you imagine being used to legitimate Jewish success alongside the added value judgement that Jews are better and have more rights (by rights you apparently just mean social permission to ethnically organize and inhabit high positions and so on? You say they already do this, so I don't see why the discourse would need to change on it. Acknowledging the existing situation so explicitly just invites hostility).

Also, would you say your position on Jewish power and reasons for it is somewhere between KMac and Cofnas? Should I read KMac if I want the fleshed out details you have in mind with the claims about Jews in power and their doings? Feel free to recommend any other author if there is one with the canonical analysis, presentation of details for you. I'm sure we would disagree on plenty of details, extent but we don't need to go into all of that as I could assume them for sake of argument and still disagree I think on the basic claim about the discourse shift you predict to justify, legitimate, etc Jewish power in next few decades; groups think they are better than the rest all the time but they don't easily get the rest of society to accept such claims in the open and that basic fact plus society's remaining uncomfortability with HBD discourse even if scientific facts are accepted is what makes me fairly confident about your prediction being mistaken; I think you under-estimate how much such claims based on HBD details would be intuitively repugnant to the average American and indeed most liberal-left universalistic Jews regardless of their power and I don't know how I might show that to you.

This state of affairs can hold without any especially significant discourse shift, I also think, which maybe is another reason I am confident:

In the end, if your company's board of directors is largely made of one ethnicity because that ethnicity just has higher board-of-directors PGS, and they act in their collective ethnic interests in ways not available to others, and this is not framed as redressing past wrongs, providing support to vulnerable groups and leveling the playing field – what can such a position be called, if not superior?

Also, on this:

But you are right that there are Gentile white subgroups with lobbying capacity. It's only the central case of whites, normie cishet WEIRD Americans of Anglo-German stock and those who have politically joined them, who cannot advance their collective interests. Some say they don't have those interests and just aren't «a thing», but all sorts of sociometric proxy data correlated with their identity, and identitarian concerns underlying e.g. Trumpism, suggest the opposite; had they their own think tanks and advocacy groups to coordinate explicitly, I believe they'd have been a thoroughly dominant force.

I think WASP elites choose not to advance interests on ethnic lines, this is a matter of ideology. I do not believe they are vigorously prevented by other groups, basically. This is however a complex issue where multiple factors may be at play but I incline against explanations where them being prevented by other groups play a major causal role. Their own ideology is more important and this is what I think happened historically with WASP elites in America by the way, in the 20th century. I can cite to you the book "The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America" by Eric Kaufmann, the narrative of which is summarized as such:

Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.

It seems to me that understanding this historical sequence properly where the facts are all settled can help us evaluate contemporary claims about these groups, so feel free to dispute this further.

Thanks for your effortful comments but I've lost interest in this chain. There are many nitpicks and objections we could discuss (e.g.: Affirmative Action does not substantially harm Jews who, having very high average scores, make it in regardless, but it reduces the relative representation of White Gentiles in prestigious institutions, and accordingly the political power of this competing demographic; iirc Sailer had addressed this years ago, as well as Jewish opposition to AA, that didn't survive this basic observation). What would come out of it, though?

I basically agree with KMac's lens of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, provided in the Culture of Critique. Religions in general are group evolutionary strategies, though the effect is understudied. I also accept broad strokes of his characterizations. Where we differ is in value judgements. I am not that enamored with Northwestern Europeans and their Church-molded mentality, and not that unsympathetic to Jewish traits, doctrines and approaches. Even pretty silly and biased critiques like The Authoritarian Personality have more truth than strongly identifying Whites like KMac, who only recognize humblebrag-worthy faults like «too altruistic» or «not clannish», are willing to admit; if anything, my people have been illustrating this spectacularly since February, and no doubt many NWEs would have gone down the same path with modest prodding. It's not just a libel.

The quasi-conspiratorial issues, leftism, ingroup preference, whatever, those are anodyne. The most devastating and perhaps the most contentious point of those KMac raises is the trait of self-deception prevalent in Jews both on individual and organizational level, its unusual strength, unironically reminding one of doublethink, and its scarily opportunistic nature; though perhaps we need another term, because other peoples self-deceive too, just not so productively on average. Either one sees it, or one does not. It changes everything about the topic, and precludes the possibility of productive engagement between the two camps. In my mind, it's an undeniable reality that cripples your observations like «many liberal-left Jews that supported these things are sincerely ideologically universalist and I have not yet seen strong evidence that their positions would be explained primarily in functionalistic terms».

A very typical case in point:

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948—and Israel’s military victories over larger Arab forces in 1949, 1956, 1967, and 1973, fostered a surge of pride in Jewish Americans. From antiquity until the creation of the Jewish State, Jews were largely people of the book, merchants and scholars. The creation of Israel unified them into one strong peoplehood, with a homeland and with an army committed to defending the Jewish people worldwide. For the first time in centuries, Jews around the world were no longer victims but architects of their own secure haven that they could flee to in crisis. From the establishment of the Jewish State until the beginning of this century, Zionism came to replace religious observance amongst secular American Jews as a core element of their own Jewish identities. […]

The “New Antisemitism,” also known as anti-Zionism or hatred of Israel as an acceptable stand-in for the classical hatred of Jews, initially gained currency in universities and in leftist intellectual circles. It has since metastasized to much of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Today, several U.S. congresswomen have claimed that Jewish Americans have dual national loyalties.

And so it goes, into rather absurd places, including the victim card:

While we undoubtedly face grave challenges as American Jews, we must not give up. Until now, due to lack of information and fear of rejection and persecution, many American Jews have been complicit as anti-Zionism morphs into the new antisemitism. Now is the time to stand up, fight back with all our remaining might and hold antisemites accountable.

We must form alliances with groups that share the same Judeo-Christian values of freedom and democracy, inspire today’s Jewish youth to be proud of their people and the Jewish homeland, and bring Israel back to the center of our Jewish life in the diaspora.

Or straight from the horse's mouth, right at the top of the hierarchy of the party preaching universalism:

"You can be, all at once, completely Jewish, completely pro-Israel and completely American,” he said.

Schumer bellowed a pro-Israel message at the annual event, while calling out fellow politician Rep. Ilhan Omar who had questioned the Jewish ability to be pro-Israel and pro-American at the same time.

Stunning and brave. (Can you be at once completely Chinese, pro-PRC and completely American? It seems you can't even work for civilian Chinese semiconductor companies and be American these days. This is the qualitative difference in diasporal lobbying power).

This self-contradictory doublethink, the demand to support your double standard in deed and vociferously deny the existence of double standard in word, comes naturally to those universalists, and it is swallowed without objection by Americans, so I do not believe there will be crippling problems with the transition to a more explicit state of affairs.

Yeah, it's a big topic where's confident opinions come from holistic impressions based on lots of history, contemporary anecdotes and rhetoric, etc so reasonable to end it with that; knowing where you agree with KMac, I can read him if I want lots more details on your perspective. Obviously there are a lot of crank-ish commentators on this topic so good to know what to look into beyond my present indefinite questioning of your perspective here.

I see how the point about self-deception would eliminate the contribution of various observations, and that actually helps me understand your justification for sudden shift in discourse to ethno-centric HBD legitimation quite a bit. So reading KMac would be very helpful for me to see that, yes.

Even harder to analyze than Jewish power is future trajectory of ideological justifications, discourse; seems like intuitions about what is or is not acceptable and pace of change on them are based on one's reception of the vibes. As one needs not just confidence on Jewish double-think but acceptance in rest of society. I do hope the IQ HBD taboo gets eradicated, awfully annoying in dealing with all sorts of mundane policy issues.

My point with the book reference about WASPs was just to point to the extent native American forces contributed to the same left-liberal political dynamics that helped eliminate WASP hegemony, which could undercut some of the more ambitious claims about how non-WASP elite actors contributed to their decline. But we don't need to prosecute such details further, though I do recc the book if you are curious about 20th century WASP decline.

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