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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Well, I guess it was only a question of time before the ADL condemned Dave Chappelle and SNL more generally for "popularising" anti-Semitism.

Chappelle had a SNL monologue a few days ago where he walked a tightrope between supposedly condemning Kanye and Kyrie before slyly signal-boosting some of their talking points. Kanye comes across as crazy and Kyrie as plain dumb but Chappelle is neither, so this is arguably bigger news. Of course, Chappelle has been courting controversy before, such as his perceived anti-trans comments or complaining about college kids being too sensitive these days.

So I am not sure if this is some kind of cultural shift where black entertainment elites are more willing to criticise Jews or if it is simply Chappelle running towards controversy in order to stay relevant. Maybe it is both. Nevertheless, I think the ADL has by and large been enormously inefficient and self-defeating during these past 6 weeks. It seems even some Jewish publications agree.

I really enjoyed Chappelle's monologue. Viewed as a tightrope act, it was quite a spectacle. And really, which part of "wrongthink about Jews cost Kanye one billion dollars" is supposed to persuade us that Jews aren't somehow pulling society's strings?

Of course, in reality there are millions of Jews, and only a very tiny percentage of them have any sociopolitical clout at all, and the possibility that even a large number of those are colluding on such matters is infinitesimal. As Chapelle notes--"there are a lot of black people in Ferguson, Missouri, it doesn’t mean we run the place."

But the way Chapelle ends is trenchant nevertheless.

My first Netflix special what did I say? I said I don't want a sneaker deal because the minute I say something that makes those people mad, they're gonna take my sneakers away. And the whole crowd was like ha ha ha ha ha. Now you see Kanye walking around L.A. barefoot... this guy lost a billion and a half dollars in a day.... It shouldn't be this scary to talk about anything. It's making my job incredibly difficult, I'll be honest with you. I'm getting sick of talking to a crowd like this. I love you to death and I thank you for your support. And I hope they don't take anything away from me. Whoever they are.

I think it would be very interesting to see what Chapelle could do with the Moloch egregore.

Of course, in reality there are millions of Jews, and only a very tiny percentage of them have any sociopolitical clout at all, and the possibility that even a large number of those are colluding on such matters is infinitesimal.

Is there a good way to describe a group like this? All ethnics are certainly not culpable for advocacy done on the behalf by people they didn't elect, much like whites as a group aren't responsible for white supremacist violence and blacks as a group are not responsible for violence committed by black criminals. But describing Jewish advocates like this feels strange and the ADL does seem to enjoy support from many more Jewish people than take active roles in it.

Ethnic descrimination does still happen and the optimal number of anti-discrimination groups is probably nonzero but it does seem wrong that anti-discrimination frequently turns into general advocacy for the group. Perhaps what is needed is some generic anti-discrimination group that handles all cases in a standard manner and rogue advocacy groups should be seen like the KKK as nakedly defecting on the social contract.

Failing that I find it hard to see why I shouldn't interpret an organization that actively advocates discrimination against my group in favor of their own, often more privileged group, as anything but a hostile threat worthy of nothing but disdain.

We should establish a norm that as a blanket rule advocacy groups should not be seen as actually representing the groups they claim to be doing advocacy for, but instead, their own personal interests first and foremost.

That's always been my take at least. And speaking as a liberal, I really do believe that doing this would dramatically reduce the amount of active bigotry that exists in the world. The activists and advocacy groups are creating their own boogiemen out of thin air, more or less.

They're the ones dreaming up the Stay-Puff Marshmellow Man in a Klan hat, and manifesting it into reality.

That’s a weirdly specific example. Please tell me it’s not an actual thing.

What, the Stay Puff Marshmellow Man in a Klan hat thing? No no no. I'm just riffing directly off of Ghostbusters, where I really do think people get to choose "the form of the destroyer" based upon what things they actually bother to react to. It's the best analogy to how I think these things work. At the very least, they get to amplify whatever they want to amplify into the big threat. Then Toxoplasma of Rage comes into play, and everything just gets ugly.

I don't know about the Stay-Puft Man, but Terminal Lance did have a Michelin Man in a Klan hood (I couldn't find the strip, though).

We should establish a norm that as a blanket rule advocacy groups should not be seen as actually representing the groups they claim to be doing advocacy for, but instead, their own personal interests first and foremost.

I'm not really sure that could work in practice or maybe I'm misunderstanding the suggestion. It seems not to fit the majority of advocacy groups, illustrative but exaggerated example: "Advocates for ending child sex trafficking should seen as advocating for their own personal self interests first and foremost" seems somewhat incoherent. I can see how it'd be true in some "It makes me feel good about myself to help others" way, but just the mechanics of advocacy require these groups to try and make their target population's needs feel salient and important.

But perhaps you mean that the group doing advocacy should be required to prove they have buy in to the credibility of the groups they're advocating on behalf of. Such that the ADL could only advocate for Jews in general if they collected vote or polling from the Jewish population and therefore criticism of the ADL would genuinely and legitimately be criticism of the Jewish people and thus the Jewish people would police the actions of the ADL because it would weigh on their own reputation?

I feel bubbling up from my gut sometimes an instinctual flinch away from "advocacy" like a boo word. As soon as I clock someone as an advocate, and it rarely takes more than a sentence, my defenses against bullshit go into overdrive. I prepare for bad faith arguments and to be buffeted by misleading quotes and word games. But advocates aren't only out there for issues that set my jaded culture war heart ablaze, and awarness sometimes should be raised on worthy problems. I don't think it's a good thing that my reflex when I hear that someone wants to make the world a better place is distrust. I hope I can go back to that credulity if we can build a world worthy of it, I hope my kids will live in that world.

I mean, even look at something like child sex trafficking that so often flies off into other things. (And also misses very critical vectors at times). But this isn't to say completely discredit their work and what they're doing...although I share the same instinctual flinch. My guard is certainly up as well. But it's not something we should shift on a larger group, is my point. Their arguments should stand and fail on their own, without being reflective of people outside of those making those arguments. Maybe that's pollyannaish, as usual. But I do think it's a very real problem.

Maybe a better way of putting it is that the power that advocacy groups wield can be dangerous in their own right, and while it shouldn't discredit their argument, certainly it's a reason that we should be careful and wary about it.

rogue advocacy groups should be seen like the KKK as nakedly defecting on the social contract

This is my actual view on La Raza. They are held in some esteem. Respectable ethnically Hispanic Americans visit La Raza meetings and give speeches. I've seen large public murals saying "La Raza".

In my opinion La Raza is the Mexican-American KKK. They are hard-core racists who just happen to be partly-not-white so they get a pass.

What is La Raza? Wikipedia lists a number of separate organizations with that name.

The National Council of La Raza. Which I now see changed their name a few years back. Those big murals still say "La Raza" to identify cultural centers for their racial movement.

La Raza

Translated literally as "the race," it's a conflagration of many organizations, some which are benign community centers, others which believe that the American Southwest should be its own country, or part of Mexico, and ruled by people of "the race."

Is there a good way to describe a group like this?

"Market-dominant Minority"

Note that Jewish people in the United States are not listed as an example of a "market dominant minority." The original article is here and it says:

In First World countries, markets have tended to reinforce the economic dominance of a perceived ethnic majority over those countries' most salient ethnic minorities-hence the controversial calls for (and backlash against) market-" correcting" affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics in the United States." In the developing world, the ethnoeconomic dynamic tends to be just the reverse: Markets often reinforce the economic dominance of certain ethnic minorities. In the First World, democracy poses no radical challenge to economically dominant ethnic groups. 2 By contrast, in the developing world, democracy characteristically pits a politically powerful but impoverished "indigenous" majority" against an economically dominant ethnic minority

So, she clearly sees this as a non-First World phenomenon. And note this discussion in which she defines "market dominant minority as "an ethnic minority, or ethnic minorities, who, along with foreign investors, can be expected to economically dominate the poor, indigenous majorities around them, at least in the near to mid-term future."

Again, she is talking about something more than a particular group being overrepresented in a particular sector. So, Jewish people in the US do not seem to be an example of what she is discussing.

I mean, Koreans and Indians are clearly market dominant minorities in poor urban regions, and Cajuns and Afrikaner’s fill similar roles in parts of the rural south.

These areas might be poor by American standards, but they’re globally very very wealthy, so the concept clearly applies regardless of what academic theories about race say.

I agree that Jews aren’t one, by the way, because they’re usually not owning capital.

Korean and Indians in poor urban regions often serve as middleman minorities, but I think that is a different concept.

TBQH, it seems like the distinction is one that only exists to claim that US whites are systemically advantaged over everyone else, no exceptions.

That would be a strange claim to be made by Thomas Sowell, who has written a fair amount about middleman minorities. As for market dominant minorities, as noted in the original link, Chua's concept is about such places as 'the Philippines, [where] Chua notes that the Chinese community comprise one percent of the population but control 60 percent of the private economy, with the result being resentment on the part of the Filipino majority against the Chinese minority creating an ethnic conflict. Similarly, in Indonesia the Chinese Indonesian community make up three percent of the population but control 75 percent of the economy. Similar patterns occur throughout other Southeast Asian economies." Clearly a different concept than middleman minorities, and neither has anything to do with US whites; not everything on the planet is about the current culture war.

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IIRC Chua discusses the issue in the book and notes that, quite simply, the Jews in the US are not a market-dominant minority because they do not in fact dominate the market (ie. control a majority, or even a great plurality, of private economy within the country) the same way as the MDMs she discusses do.

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