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My feelings on this story are complicated and contradictory, which is how I know I'm having a good time.
So, here's my background. I'm Jewish, but I'm also autistic. I come from a semi-religious household, but I haven't been personally religious since childhood. I thought of myself as just another white guy until 2015, when I was forced to be aware of my ethnic identity. During that election cycle, some leftists told me that Trump was an anti-Semite and that supporting him made me a traitor. The alt-right was also hostile towards Jews in the MAGA movement, but for more conventionally anti-Semitic reasons. I found both of these attitudes offensive, and my recognition of this manifested into an ethnic consciousness. I'm often told by people in rationalist communities that I don't see racism or anti-Semitism in places where they're present because I'm unwilling (because of bias) or unable (because of autism) to the kind of inferences that normal people do. I don't know if this is true. I never know if this is true. But I'm not going to abstain from discussing issues for fear that I may be wrong.
I will say, there was one time Trump said something I found genuinely anti-Semitic, and that was when he said that any Jew who didn't support him was a traitor to Israel (maybe?) and therefore a bad Jew (hell naw). Yeah, I think Israel has a right to exist, but I don't think I have to believe that as a consequence of being Jewish. To me, racism is when you use race as the sole factor in making a decision, or when you say that someone is required to be something because of their race. I do not not racist to acknowledge statistics about IQ, wealth, or crime. It is not even racist to speculate about the genetic link between these things. I wish every American would read Bryan Caplan's explanation of why racism is morally wrong..
So, do I think Kanye is anti-Semitic? My answer is "not yet, but he's dangerously close."
I think it was insensitive for Kanye to use the phrase "defcon" as a prelude to his JQ posting, given that the term references military action and there have been several high-profile mass shootings at synagogues in recent years. I mean, this is the exact kind of hyperbole that I would use when I want to be cheeky (which is all the time), but I'm not a public figure. Kanye's statement on Piers Morgan didn't make explicit that he was being hyperbolic, but it did make clear that he wasn't talking about Jews in general, so that was good enough for me.
As for everything about Jews being overrepresented in media, and the banks, and everything that requires high verbal IQ.. yes, that's absolutely, obviously true, and denying it is not only wrong for the deontological reason that lying is wrong, but also the consequentalist reason that denying an obvious truth makes it look like "they" (the people denying the claim, whether or not they're Jewish) have something to hide. This will obviously increase anti-Semitism. Watch this Steve Hofstetter video, and then look at the comments. If you live in middle America and haven't met any Jews, and your primary exposure to Jewish people is seeing them deny obvious truths and punish people for pointing them out, you're going to be steered towards anti-Semitism. So I'm not nearly as angry at the commenters as I am at Steve Hofstetter for empowering them.
So I was sympathetic to Kanye.. until he invited Nick Fuentes to see Trump. Forget the cookies remark, which is several years old at this point. Earlier this year, he went on stage at AFPAC and implied that if Putin was the next Hitler, it wouldn't be a bad thing. I'm not going to jump the gun and say Nick is absolutely for sure a Neo-Nazi, but he is a white nationalist who, at the absolute least, does not treat the holocaust with reverence mocks those who do. Why the heck did Kanye hire this person? My understanding is that Kanye's specific beef is that he's not allowed to acknowledge the disproportionate representation of Jews in certain fields or speculate as to how that impacts the culture of those fields. That is understandable. It'd be like if women couldn't acknowledge how men are overrepresented in positions of power or how this leads to the specific needs of women being overlooked. (This is a point upon which I absolutely agree with feminists.) Nick, however, is upset that Jewish people have any role in American governance at all. He believes that America is a white Christian nation, and that white Christians should make its decisions. (I don't have a direct quote where he says this, but that's the vibe I got from him by listening to him speak for several hours over the course of a few years.) I don't like guilt by association, or telling people that they can't be friends with people who they disagree with. But this goes beyond that. Kanye hired Nick to be a part of his campaign, and he invited the man to meet the former president of the United States! I can't explain how, specifically, but I intuit that this goes beyond "agreeing to disagree" territory and goes into outright an endorsement of Nick's beliefs. Either Kanye isn't aware of who Nick really is, or Kanye is much farther down the rabbit hole than I realize. Either way, for Kanye's sake, I hope he gets rid of Nick.. but for my sake, I hope whatever happens next is funny, and Nick being involved with a presidential campaign is funny. Like I said, I'm conflicted.
I watched the Tim Pool interview live as it aired. While I share Pool's preference for individualism, I think Kanye absolutely nailed him about how he groups black people together when talking about "the black vote," and Pool's rebuttal came across as word salad to me. If black peoples' awareness of their blackness can lead them to prefer certain policies, couldn't Jewish peoples' awareness of their Jewishness lead them to prefer certain policies? You can advocate individualism while still acknowledging that humans have tribal impulses that have to be fought and conquered. Pool doesn't seem to understand this nuance. I found that disappointing. Instead, he contradicted himself in a way that made him look foolish. And West walking out was both bad strategically and bad for my entertainment. I don't know who messed up more last night.
So, to those of you who have read my message this long, I pose you a question: suppose you are Tim Pool. You tell Kanye that there's no reason to group together Jewish individuals as a collective, when they're all individuals who happen to be Jewish. Kanye points out that you have previously discussed "the black vote," a concept that involves black people making electoral decisions because they're black. You now have to explain how this is different from talking about "the Jews" who control record labels and movie studios.
What do you tell Kanye?
How that's "antisemitic"? It's some weird world where a person saying Jews should support Israel is called "antisemitic".
Now, on the substance, I think Trump is correct on Israel part - if you don't support Israel, you are not a good Jew (sorry, there's about 3000 years of history behind that, not going to put it here). But he is too full of himself, one can support Israel without supporting Trump. Even though he was one of the most Israel-friendly presidents at least on my memory, he's just one politician. But being too full of himself and being antisemitic is way different.
You don't have to. Free will is one of the pillars of Judaism. You don't "have" to do anything. But whatever you decide to do, you'll could be evaluated on it, and other people could view you with regard to your choices.
Jews aren't a race, but that's not the most important part. Here is where it breaks. If you don't believe in Jesus Christ being The Savior, you aren't a good Christian. You don't have to be a good Christian - in fact, you don't have to be one at all! - but these two things are not compatible. You don't have to be a good Jew either. You can abandon everything that is connected to being Jewish, and curse all Jewish history, and hate it all, or just be indifferent to it and be Jew in name only. I'm not saying you should, but that's an option that is always open to you. But it's not racist to say if you do that, you can't also honestly call yourself a good Jew, connected to Jewish culture, tradition and community. Maybe you don't want to - many people don't care about it, again - free will - but there's still the logic behind it, which makes it one or the other. It's not racist to mention this fact. It is racist (with a bit of a stretch, but let's ignore that for now) to deny you free will and free choice on account of your birth circumstances, but it's not racist to point our certain choices would put you in certain relationships towards certain things.
Here I am on the opposite side - I think he very likely is. He probably got poisoned by one of those "Jews stole our whatever" conspiracy theories that are very very popular among some people. This is classic antisemitism. It's not because of how many Jews are in Hollywood (a lot, yes) - it's because of the conclusions he makes (or, rather, he regurgitates conclusions made by the theory designers) and converts one of the traits to the defining trait and extends it further.
"Black vote" is a racist concept that black people should vote for specific people and specific policies (usually leftist) because otherwise they are "traitors". It is despicable, but it is a fact of our political life, and as such may be discussed. We wish instead that we could discuss specific policies and how they influence people, not concentrating on traits like skin color. The idea that all black people share political views (or should) because of skin color is racist.
Talking about "the Jews" who control record labels and movie studios depends on what specifically you are talking about. Do you have a beef with specific policies and actions of record labels or studios? Like, they take wrong side in the culture war, or they produce shitty movies, or they don't promote good music? Does it have anything to do with being Jewish - are they ordered to do this by the government of Israel, is there something is the Torah and Talmud that prohibits making good movies, are Jewishness somehow incompatible with good music? I didn't think so. Thus, the idea that they are acting as a single block based on their Jewishness, and couldn't act any other way because of their Jewishness, is the same racist idea as above - and should be similarly condemned. Everybody who endorses this idea is, again, a racist.
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Someone else in these circles mentioned that black people see overrepresentation and feel excluded, but when they really look into it and see Jews make up some huge percentage, significantly higher than blacks - but also whites... They fill in the rest of the owl. So we have Kanye who sees black and even white people these days complain about the whites, but what about the elephant in the room? Even the whites are underrepresented!
To respond to your prompt: You can tell kanye that the black people don't have a single monolithic belief structure. There are religious and conservative blacks (more so than white democrats), there are intellectual, n#$@$, old money elite, farmer, atheist, politically mobilized, muslim, new world conspiracy muslim etc. etc. blacks. In the last election 14% voted Republican. That's not 0. In other countries, there's quite a plurality of opinion.
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Isn't that the opposite of what your link says? You mean any Jew who did not support him.
Zionism (like anti-racism) is a feature of the common civil religion and a non-negotiable, if informal, axiom in American politics, so both sides beat each other over the head with accusations of lacking it; same logic with sympathies for Russia and China, that are mutually suspected and awkwardly competitively disavowed at debates. Trump was going with the spin of him being the most stalwart Zionist, which is probably a somewhat honest branding by Trumpian standards, and Jews who vote against him (i.e. most American Jews) being insufficiently pro-Jewish and unsupportive of Israel (like all Democrats, within this rhetoric). But since Zionism, as per the tenets of his hardline branch of the American faith, is not just perfectly compatible but basically a component of American patriotism, they are also traitors to the US. It's a bit of an extreme rhetoric but it amounts to the anodyne «my side are true patriots», as expected of MAGA chief. Obviously Greenblatt and other such people, who are Democrats, have aikido-ed the charge of being anti-Jewish back at Trump using the absurd meme about «dual loyalty».
This isn't to criticize you, since we seem to agree on most counts, but I'll be blunt. The effects of Jewish political dominance are unappealing, scary and ultimately dangerous‡. What is described in the paragraph above, the background radiation of American politics, is de facto the condition of debasement for American Gentiles. You correctly observe how the conspicuous denial of the obvious, like overrepresentation in the media or having in-group preferences, is causing extra anti-Semitism. But that's small potatoes. The problem I observe is that this is the stage upon American minds are forged, and only autistic, schizophrenic or otherwise non-compliant ones tend to misbehave. Same as with canonical Culture War topics like race or sex, but equally for both political tribes (or actually worse so on the Red side with their Evangelical beliefs), Americans are continually, starting in the crib, undergoing the «calling a deer a horse» training, with those who break the kayfabe being made examples of. Most of them aren't autistic. They will bend, reform their entire epistemologies under the pressure, «understand» how it is at once laughably wrong and morally evil to believe that Jews with dual nationality have dual national loyalty, and also morally right to uphold the right of Jewish Americans to lobby for their «strong peoplehood, with a homeland and with an army committed to defending the Jewish people worldwide». At the same time they learn to punish the non-punishers. It is worse than it was in the Soviet Union. Soviets never reached that deep. This racial mental debasement is an insult to the premise of equality, and its cost is too great.
This is, I believe, where someone like Fuentes is coming from – assuming for a moment that he is not just a shallow grifter who waded into too spicy a topic and was prohibited from leaving. «But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism...» This is what pushes people to endorse Kanye, too.
‡ With the willful ignorance of Israeli WMD capacity, proactive Israeli militarism and self-defense doctrines, Israeli delusions of being a desperate underdog that are invulnerable to experience, changing Israeli demographics and beliefs of those new Israelis, effective Israeli self-sufficiency in the semiconductor industry, accelerating adsorption of American ML know-how by Israelis (just off the top of akhaliq's feed, 1, 2, 3, 4) and giddy Israeli willingness to weaponize obscure computer science and to manufacture semi-autonomous tools of war – in the AI age the uncritical adulation for Israel demanded of Americans and, less directly, their allies amounts to an existential risk number 1. Because, unlike with China or even American Big Tech or government agencies (!), we literally cannot touch the subject, and are reduced to muttering, like broken slaves, about muh paperclips and misalignment and such Lesswrong bullshit.
This can get very ugly, very quickly.
I mean, to consider, how ravingly, howlingly insane this is. Is there a popular movement in the US for destruction of Germany? I mean, that's literally people that invented the Nazis. Or Poland - we did pretty well for centuries without any Poland, why we need it at all? Or France - these bastards speak a weird language and are rude, why do they need a state, just to be more full of themselves than they already are? Let them have Quebec, and enough. Or, say, Japan - they attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and we had to nuke them, twice - why not just finish the job and get rid of it forever? You don't need to invent any "civil religion" to explain why there's not a lot of people advocating for such nonsense, do you? In fact, there's not even a word describing the idea that Germans, French, Japanese or Polish people deserve their own state - it's so obvious you don't need to call it anything. But talk about Jews having their own state - and talk about people saying maybe denying them that right is not a decent idea - and there's a conspiracy. Only a conspiracy can explain why such an idea is popular, only the absolute Despotism can ingrain the idea that Jews are people like Japanese, French, German and Polish are and their statehood does not have more reasons to be denied than any of these people, only an overwhelming pressure from a global plot and deep mental oppression can make this idea attractive, only an utterly brainwashed people can find any logic in it. It can not come into any mind by itself, it has to be forged into it by external forces. To think about it - those are Jews, how could they be like the other people? In fact, promoting such idea is a debasement of all that is proper and just.
And of course, if a person of Japanese descent lobbies for continued alliance between Japan and US - it's a natural thing. Why wouldn't they? They don't want their aunt to be nuked again. Friendship is much better, and also more profitable. But when a person of Jewish descent wants Israel and US to be allies - oh, here's dual loyalty! How dare you to think US can have common interests with the only democracy in the Middle East? How dare you to suggest it may be just good to not let millions of Jews to be murdered? It's all plot to steal our precious bodily fluids... sorry, wrong conspiracy, but it must be an evil plot, because nobody can have such an idea naturally. I mean, lobbying for the foreign aid to any other country? Sure. Working as a lobbyist for China, Iran, Russia, Egypt, whatever - nobody would dare to question the citizenly loyalties of those people, it's just not what decent people do - as long as it is not concerning Jews.
Yes, the term is called German/French/Polish nationalism. Prussians and their other German allies had to fight two wars, first with Austria in 1866 and later with France in 1871 in order to secure the the new state as homeland for Germans in form of Keiserreich. The formation of French identity as a state was also fraught: France was in the past basically something like Holy Roman Empire. For instance even in 1806 only around 58% of people living in France spoke French with large minority in the south speaking Occitan, a language in similar family as Catalan. With one exception being that Occitan nationalism was nowhere near as successful even compared to Catalan nationalism that fuels separatist movements up until today. Also there is huge complication with French Guayana being territory of France
When it comes to Jews and Israel, the major difference is that Israel as home of the Jews was carved by invasion and conquest. In 1800 Jews was small minority of around 2.5% in Palestine, it increased to around 10% by 1890 as Zionism picked up steam - also "thanks" to pogroms on Jews inside many new states that were fueled by nationalist identities and who considered Jews as foreign elements. In 1947 before the Israeli war of Independence, Jews consisted of around 32% of population of Palestine. Zionism is the Jewish form of nationalism with all the usual steps: creation of new language of Hebrew out of basically dead religious language, a solution that was necessary in order to integrate Jews comming to Palestine from all over the world and a solution that prevailed over some suggestions such as using Yiddish in that way. However the extra step of invasion and conquest is something that in eyes of many people make the state of Israel having less legitimacy over let's say Germany or France. Heck, there are many people now questioning the legitimacy of USA due to the fact of conquest of native population. The very fact that questioning the legitimacy of state of Israel is not taken as a joke but as something that has to be squashed by force points to this inherent weakness. This is a similar phenomenon in Spain where Catalans and Basque peoples are questioning the legitimacy of Spain as a state and they are met with similarly strong response.
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Right, The Joos scared Americans with their absolute Depotism into complete inability of even thinking about criticizing them and Israel (of course outside every university campus, the Congress and every leftist newspaper and thousands of leftists blogs and the BDS movement - the only tolerated political movement in the US literally openly dedicated to destruction of UN member state and inevitable genocide that will ensue - but let's not count all that), and yet on any right gathering there's a bunch of people that attribute literally anything bad that happens to "the Joos" and pop constantly into any topic reminding us that "the Joos" invented everything bad, from cancel culture to vaccine mandates, and from gender transition to income taxes, and they control everything too. Somehow the absolute Despotism doesn't work on those people. Must be those tin foil hats, I knew they do something.
Now hold on there. As much as I think progressives are full of it when they equivocate between getting comic book about rats taken out of a lesson plan, and Cancel Culture, they do actually have a claim to being more cancelled than anyone else, and that claim is BDS. I have never seen knives come out so hard after someone engaging in what is obviously protected speech.
Last I checked sanctions were a legitimate tool of foreign policy, and after 8 years of "it's a private company, it can do what it wants", I'm not entertaining, even for a millisecond, the idea that boycotting or divesting are somehow beyond the pale.
As for "openly dedicated to destruction of UN member state", we literally had a conference where they were planning how they're going to partition Russia, and that's just the latest I heard from Council on Foreign Relationesque ghouls acting like the actual planet Earth is the map in their Total War franchise game.
Talk about equality feeling like oppression, sheesh...
The issue here is not sanctions per se. Imprisonment is a legitimate law enforcement tool too, but if you advocate for Jews to be put in camps, you made several wrong turns on the way. BDS advocates for destruction of Israel (which inevitably would lead to genocide) and that's their goal. B, D and S are tools to achieve this goal. I still can't name any popular movement that calls for destruction of any country. And come into any university campus, and stand one day with "Free Palestine" sign and other day with "Support Israel" sign and count how many times you are spit on and how long does it take before somebody sucker-punches you and steals your sign - and you'll see for yourself its popularity. I mean, surely, US invaded Iraq, and kicked Lybia's ass and there's the Iran thing and so on - but I don't see anybody proclaiming Iran should be destroyed, and Kurds or Iraqis or whoever should take over. Sure, there are sanctions - which probably are very unpopular on the same campuses - but nobody says "Iranism" is a conspiracy to reforge our minds, and without it there would be no reason for Iran to exist. But for BDS, it is the goal. It's not because Israel did something or didn't do something. It's because there is Israel.
Who, when? I mean, Russia being fully formed fascist state, I wouldn't mind somebody finding the cojones to think what to do about it, instead of mumbling "we can't let things escalate" while they are escalating - but who are "they" and how exactly they are planning to achieve that? I'd like to read that plan, where could I find it? Does it include Ironman, Superman, Hulk and Flash stealing all Russian nukes, or do they just magically turn them off? I am very curious, please help.
I don't hang out all that much with these folks, but my impression is that this is completely false. They either want to establish an independent Palestinian state, or demand that Palestinians be given full citizenship and equal rights within the existing state of Israel. If you want to argue this just the first step on the slippery slope that inevitably leads to genocide... I'm actually quite sympathetic, but it's hard to work up the outrage when the truth is you're just being treated exactly like everyone else.
I could probably replicate the "Support Israel" effect with a Russian flag, this is because no one would interpret it as a statement like "I think the Russian people should have a country they can call their own", but as a statement of support for their war. Same applies to Israel.
https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/press-and-media/press-releases/decolonization-russia-be-discussed-upcoming
Ok, if we asked the BDS people to put "fully formed fascist states" in one column, and "not completely fascist states" in the other, where do you think Israel would end up? I'm not saying they're right, but they're basically using the same logic.
And by Palestinians they mean anybody who wants to claim part of Israel, which would lead to immediate destruction of Israel because 9 million country can not exist after granting citizenship and full rights to the same amount of hostile foreigners. Imagine US importing, say, 300 million Chinese at once and granting them full citizen rights. Only no, it's not the same - Chinese people don't really hate Americans that much and didn't spend the last 80 years trying to kill as many of them as possible. Maybe, say, US in 1943 asked to import 130 million Germans. Surely not all of them are Nazis, so it'd be OK, right?
I not only want to argue that - I want to argue that they know it, and that's exactly what they want.
Name any other country that is considered illegitimate until it accepts a hostile population equal to its own. In fact, name any other country that is not considered having sole discretion at whom to grant and withhold citizenship. Does Japan control who gets Japanese citizenship? Does Switzerland decide who gets to be Swiss citizen? Does Israel have the right to decide who gets to be citizen of Israel - without external interference? Oh no, no they don't. At least as far as BDS is concerned.
So wait, this is a couple of random professors, an ex-Russian journalist, a writer and one Ukrainian politician, so popular she didn't even bother to participate in the last elections, chatted about how "colonialist" Russia is - and you describe it as "planning how they're going to partition Russia"? You can't be serious.
I mean, if one can harness woke terminology to put some heat on Russia, that would be the first and only time where wokeness might come to some use, but there's absolutely zero chance anybody outside the room it happened in and any time after June 23, cared about what happened there or it had any effect on the surrounding world. You can not seriously believe this is how "planning to partition Russia" looks like. This is how "waste of taxpayer money" looks like. I hope they all had good time, at least.
So you are saying people can lie using the same words and same patterns as people telling the truth? Like, I could say "X is true" and be correct, and something could say "Y is true" - and be completely false? How could that be! You blown my mind!
Really, I think "people can lie by saying something is true while it's not" is not an argument against something else being true. Yes, they can. They are liars. So what?
Look, you don't actually have to explain to me why you think they're wrong. Like I said, I sympathize with your side more than theirs. I just object to the idea that BDS represents something no other nationality has to put up with, it's the logical conclusion of the discourse on "whiteness"/imperialism/colonialism. I get very strong "Radfem forced to wax balls" vibes from this. I understand the outrage, but can you please not lecture me on how it's all the fault of the patriarchy as you're trying to get me to express sympathy?
Have you followed the discourse around the Syrian refugee crisis? Anything on immigration or demographics?
Japan seems to be doing fine, but for western countries the answer seems to be: "yes, in theory, but if you advocate for actually exercising any of that control, you're an alt-right nazi".
OTOH the CSCE is an official US agency, while the BDS people seem like, dare I say, just a couple of kids on collage campuses. Currently they seem to have about an equal chance destroying the countries they've targeted (well, actually I'd bet on CSCE being more successful).
I'm not saying they're lying, I think they actually believe that stuff, but they're wrong.
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Indeed, life is going to immitate art once more.
(for the uninitiated: cult Czechoslovak movie, famous for creating modern image of golem as monstrous walking statue common in fantasy and RPG, original golem from Jewish tales looked like normal human)
Useless nerd trivia aside, I happen to disagree - lots of people are talking about Israel, there is about 1/100 interest what is NoSuchAgency doing, what exactly is happening here, and there is not even NSA BDS movement.
Huh?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=82JqvIozLk4
What are they doing to discourage companies from supplying and cooperating with NSA, what are they doing to shame people working for NSA and encourage them to leave? What are they doing at all, except getting shot or imprisoned for life?
Nothing comparable with BDS
(and BDS efforts are, as you said, very feeble compared to power of Israel and ZOG).
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Why did you say you don't know how to insert links? You have inserted several.
LOL, I thought I removed that once I managed to insert the link. I guess what I don't know how to do is proofread!
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[[I have no clue who Tim Pool is or what his deal is, so this might not match what "Tim Pool" would say at all]]
Every political goal is and must be downstream of winning. Anything that isn't winning isn't, in the short term, politics; it is speculation, philosophy, academics. Now, short term loss can turn into long term triumph, political philosophy isn't valueless, but it is at core a separate domain from politics. Letting the one infect the other poisons both.
So when we talk about "The Black Vote" we are talking about the behaviors of voters with identifiable characteristics. That those characteristics correlate at a rate of over 80% with voting behavior does not reify the idea that all Black folk act or think alike. But it is a fact you need to grapple with if you want to win elections. If you want to win elections without thinking about voters in demographic groups, you won't win, and if you don't win you don't achieve anything at all. Deontology is fine, if you have a principled religious objection to labeling groups that's great, go be a Shaker or a Jain and leave the real world alone. We're out here trying to win elections, not ask how many angels dance on the head of a pin or tell the axe murderer where our friend is hiding.
Talking about the Black vote doesn't elevate or deny Black agency, any more than looking for tall players on a Basketball team or fast soccer players is denying short slow people their humanity.
So, to turn it around, what does Kanye hope to achieve by going Death Con 3 on the Jews in the media industry? What does his ideal media universe look like? Would it be strictly representational by race, by religion, by social class? Would it be meritocratic, and in what ways is our current system less meritocratic than it should be? What needs to change, say it out loud, don't hide it behind vague ideas of representation.
{I'll note personally that I have basically skipped any "literary" work with a 20th century Jewish protagonist, particularly one who lives in the Northeast USA, for a few years now. I just got sick of so many of the tropes. And I find it funny that so many critics of Big Mouth decry its lack of Black voices, while failing to notice that it has only a single white Christian (inevitably, a comic-relief flaming homosexual) in a sea of NYC-metro Jews. I've also reduced consumption of anything related to WWII, movies books histories etc; I find that our culture overemphasizes WWII to the detriment of learning about literally anything else in history. So I do see some room for expanding our set of literary and cultural tropes by expanding the representation of creators. But that has to be accompanied by genuine quality and audience enjoyment, not by politically correct dictates}
The war part of WWII is absolutely unbeatable, no other war can compete. I dare you as an autistic man to not enjoy this 29-hour, 41-part series on the Battle of Stalingrad told via map.
What about Alexander? Cannae? Austerlitz? De Bello Gallico? Tamerlane? Valley Forge? Sherman's march to the sea? Plassey? Lepanto? Sobieski at Vienna?
WWII is fascinating, but when the only analogy you have is WWII everyone gets cast as Hitler, Chamberlain, Stalin or Churchill.
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Well, it is our origin story, at least for the current incarnation of the United States as a globe-spanning empire with interests and soldiers everywhere. Without WWII as the central part of that story, without Hitler as the stand-in for Satan and the ensuing rise of the Soviet Union as a permanent threat, the rest of the story looks pretty weird. We have 55,000 soldiers in Japan, 36,000 in Germany, a few thousand in Spain and Italy, hundreds in places that most people don't even know exist (what the hell is Diego Garcia?). Everything that comes after WWII is justified by WWII and the new role of the Greater American Empire in which nearly every country on Earth is an American protectorate or an American adversary.
I don't think maintaining buy-in for the modern American civic religion would be possible without centering the 20th century's triumphant struggle for the primacy and legitimacy of Democracy^tm above all other systems.
That is exactly why I object to centering it so strongly in our popular understanding of history. I find the American imperial project abhorrent both to much of the world {Remember Allende and the day before, before the army came} and to the interests of the American people.
Historical analogy, consider the quip*: Athens recovered quickly from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta never recovered from its victory. Sparta would never be the Sparta of Lycurgus, in a pure decline until their defeat against Antipater snuffed them out forever as a real power, they became a mocking footnote in Alexanders memorials "These victories were won by all the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians." Athens would become a center of learning, prominent into the days of Julian the Apostate, our modern framing of Athens descends as much from the later period under Roman rule as from the Athenian Golden Age. Most of what we remember about Sparta was mythmaking by Athenians playing up their great rivals as models or as villains.
I fear that it might be the same for the USA; we may never recover from winning WWII and the Cold War.
*I can never remember where I first heard it or who to attribute it to.
Oh, I'm in a distressing amount of agreement. The initial American project was unstable for all of the reasons that culminated in the Civil War, but the post-Reconstruction nation really seems to me like it could have stayed as a hemispheric superpower indefinitely. The post-WWII arrangement strikes me as being on its last legs, with some major realignment approaching quickly.
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I've never encountered Fuentes in long form and I'm really only familiar with the sort of joking-not-joking clips like what you've linked there, but it strikes me as pretty weird for a "white nationalist" to be actively promoting Kanye West. Antisemitism can make for strange bedfellows, I suppose, but it seems a lot more like Fuentes just actually doesn't mind siding with a black guy that he's on the same page with politically, which is pretty antithetical to being an actual white nationalist.
I guess it's hard for me to be Tim Pool in this conversation. I know that acknowledging the point is going to get me more trouble than it's worth, but I also know that the point is so obviously correct that there isn't any plausible argument against it. Every now and then people push back against the "the black vote" or "the Hispanic vote" or "the LGBTQIA2S+ community" monikers on the basis that these aren't monoliths and they often differ on issues, but it's usually pretty weak pushback because we all know that there actually are shared characteristics and interest in these groups. We can come up with historical reasons why noticing the interests of "the Jews" is more impolite than other groups, but none of them really make a whole lot of sense in the 2022 United States. So, if I was to put aside my interests in avoiding an unpleasant encounter with the ADL, I suppose I'd agree with Kanye that it's actually kind of fishy that it's OK to refer to "the Mormons" as controlling Utah, but not "the Jews" controlling record labels.
I don't think it's antithetical. "White nationalist" means "advocating a white national identity." That could mean wanting to maintain a white majority in historically white countries, or it could mean creating a new nation-state to function as a white homeland. Fuentes claims to be the former, though he prefers the phrase "white majoritarian" as a descriptor. And honestly, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor are respectable people. Neither of them have ever given me the impression that they don't think the holocaust was both real and bad. Nick has, and that's why I find it troublesome that Kanye is associating with him. But as I said before, the way Kanye is being treated is the kind of thing that leads to radicalization, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
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First off thank you for your sensible assessment
to the typical overreaction of jewish media people, or what you could call members of the 'jewish mafia'.
Every criticism of an individual jew is antisemitism, every criticism of jewish power is antisemitism, using words like 'jewish mafia' to describe existing groups is antisemitism, while it is factual and not describing 'all jews'.
As Chapelle put it, a group of Italian criminals is a Mafia while a group of jews is a coincidence.
As a jewish ethnostate?
Or should Israel be decolonized like South Africa or every other colony? With reparations, reconciliation commissions etc.
Why should anybody treat the holocaust with reverence?
The Dailystormer made the point a while back that American jews mostly identify as atheist but they made the holocaust their religion. They had some poll to back it up. Your parents/family obsessed so much about the holocaust that you see nazis under your bed.
The holocaust was allegedly a century ago, all the alleged perpetrators are dead... The only people that remotely affiliate themselves with the perps are Ukrainian Banderas fangirls that the overwhelmingly jewish Biden admin is sending billions to.
Nobody cares about that, not even Zelensky, who actually lives in the very area it supposedly took place.
Everybody's ancestors went through their own share of suffering.
That should not put anyone above blame.
Jews are massively overrepresented in all facets of American power. They are less than 1% of the population but you can't turn on tv or open a newspaper website to see their opinion plastered everywhere.
Should jews have a say in American governance? Sure, at a proportional rate. <1%, whatever their population rate is, of all positions of power.
Not 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/10 or whatever we see now. There should be 0 jewish supreme court justices ruling on whether or not white and black American women should be allowed to kill their kids.
Check your jewish privilege.
Sit down and listen to the black man.
I can't tell if this part is a joke, but even if it is don't do it. It breaks common courtesy, borders on consensus building, and is antagonistic.
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I would respond that this is not necessarily a tribal acknowledgement. We can talk about let's say "first time voters" vote without necessary implication that they all band together in some tribal way although they may naturally put more importance to certain topics such as college debt, housing being too expensive and so forth compared to let's say retired veteran voters. Even for black voters there are shifts and splits among them, for instance black men turned to republicans significantly so in that sense talking about "black vote" is at least not as significant as it was in the past. But using race or ethnicity or educational status or rural/urban split or income and any number of other categories as well as finding intersections among them can definitely be used for analysis of voter sentiment and their policy preferences to engage in dialog and crafting political program. It does not have to be used to fuel tribal wars dividing people as allies/enemies based on those characteristics.
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