This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Apropo of the discussion below, I decided to look into these oft-repeated claims about Jewish overrepresentation in certain sectors of the economy. So I decided to look at the banking industry. I looked at the top executives of the 25 largest US banks by total assets; anyone listed on the bank's website under "leadership team" or some other such designation counts as a top executive, usually between 10 and 25 people for each bank. As far as determining who's Jewish, I mostly went by last names, although if someone was obviously black or Asian I skipped the name entirely. The results? Of 414 total executives, I found 19 Jews, or about 4.3%. Considering that only a little over 2% of the country is Jewish, this is significant overrepresentation. Or is it?
The first problem is that I had to rely on names to determine if someone was Jewish as that isn't the kind of information included in most corporate bios. And most of the names I came across weren't Cohen and Leibowitz but generic names like Weiss and Stein or something else that's German or Russian-sounding. For my purposes I assumed all these people were Jewish unless their bio specifically mentioned working for a Christian charity or something (like Jason Schugel), so I probably overestimated the total number of Jews by a few, though on the flip side there are Jews with gentile names I may have missed. And then there's the fact that a significant number of these Jews were women. In addition to the whole problem of married names, the stereotypical image of a Jewish banker is not a woman. Additionally, a lot of these executives were general counsel, or HR execs, or were involved in some other aspect of the business not directly related to banking, but I didn't bother to account for this because they're still obviously influential and are top executives at large banks, but one could make the argument that they shouldn't be counted.
Methodological issues aside, though, the more salient point is that while 4.3% may be a significant overrepresentation in a strict statistical sense (it's about double the expected number), this isn't the kind of overrepresentation most people have in mind when they talk about Jews and banking. It's hard to make the argument that at 4.5% Jews in any way control the industry, or even have any significant impact on it as a group. Relatively speaking, this is about half the number of Christians in Egypt. When you look at the individual banks, 11 of them, or nearly half, don't have any Jews in top leadership positions. An additional 10 have 1, and the remaining 4 have 2. The most Jewish bank on the list is Goldman Sachs at number 5, with 2 of 9 top executives, including the CEO, being Jewish. In other words, even the most obviously Jewish big bank in the country still has 80% gentiles in top leadership positions.
Is my methodology off? Probably. I limited myself to the top 25 banks because that's what I had time for, but I doubt that including the top 100 would have made much difference considering that below that you start getting into regional banks from areas where the Jewish population isn't particularly high and US divisions of foreign banks. But it's still something to look at. I could have included more people than the top executives, though any cutoff is arbitrary; I'm sure if you go all the way down to including branch employees the number of Jews would thin considerably. You could use boards of directors instead of executives. I don't know what kind of effect this would have but I avoided boards because they don't concern themselves with the day-to-day operations of the company and their members aren't necessarily in the banking industry at all, but you can make the argument. Whatever you think about my methodology, though, if you're going to challenge it, at least do the work. Don't just tell me my methodology is bad and you're just sure if I had used a different methodology I would have found that the whole industry is totally dominated by Jews. Because this is what people have been doing for years, and it's obviously bullshit. People have been talking about Jewish domination of various industries in the United States for years, but as soon as I take a cursory look at the most stereotypical Jewish business this "dominance" doesn't even crack 5%.
Unsurprising. According to the NYT feat Steve Sailer, Jews obviously dominate only as University Presidents, at 56%, less so as heads of news and media companies (36-40%), and across the sample of powerful positions the NYT has gathered make up merely 13%, which given what we know about IQ disparities probably indicates systemic anti-Semitism. Consider this also an endorsed alternative to your work (in the future, please attach CSV at least, when you're talking about 414 data points and aggressively demanding a quantitative analysis).
Seriously though, I do suspect that this methodology is wrong, much like counting ML papers and SOTA results on synthetic benchmarks can create the impression that the US is lagging behind China (indeed, «The China-US AI research gap has continued to widen, with Chinese institutions producing 4.5 times as many papers than American institutions since 2010, and significantly more than the US, India, UK, and Germany combined»), while in reality not a single Chinese paper is of any consequence and Google alone, with a few dozen major papers, is running circles around the entire rest of the planet, with OpenAI and Meta in tow.
Goldman Sachs is not bigger than JPMorgan Chase, but it aggressively defines standards and pushes ethical guidelines for others to follow; it may be that David Solomon, or whatever he represents, has higher agency than Jamie Dimon. And do you seriously say that the CEO has 1/10th of the power because there are 9 more executives listed? Does Xi have 1/7th of the Standing Committee's power?
To be fair, he could have even less. Structure matters. Maybe it's like the difference between the LA Times and the New York Times: «...the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. [...] It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.» I suspect it's not a coincidence that Sulzbergers guard their turf so jealously while the LA Times is ran more like a regular business. (In the same vein, what is interesting about Goldman Sachs is not its current CEO but the historical predominance of Jewish executives, and the often clannish nature of their succession. GS is not merely a property).
BlackRock, meanwhile, this «industry leader in environmental, social and corporate governance» that issues moralizing letters to its clients, is not even a bank, has pitiful assets by bank standards and can mainly brag of «assets under management» ($10 trillion of them, though) and thus doesn't make it to your list with its diverse leadership.
It may work the other way around too. Like Churchill has said once, «...the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews.» This is an unsubstantiated, qualitative judgement of a savvy well-connected operator, that no counting of raw beans could check – how do we know if Litvinoff truly was more powerful than Tchitcherin? His rank doesn't indicate that! Kushner, too, didn't outrank Trump, nor does Blinken outrank Biden, yet the former has bragged of defining Trump's policy in the Middle East (one of the few parts of Trump's presidency that have been allowed posterity) and basically running the whole show, and the latter is perhaps more influential still. And someone like Pompeo is a purebred Gentile, but his beliefs about the supernatural primacy of Israel, uhh... Ditto for Pelosi – does it matter if she isn't as Jewish as Schumer?
Now, how do we develop a proper methodology for apportioning relative power of groups in a principled way? I admit it's hard, but I think this involves what Moldbug is going on about with his reformalization. We evaluate individual actors as moved by others or actively moving them; their interpersonal relationships and their career obligations to organizations with unambiguous and hopefully self-admitted allegiances; we chart trajectories leading people from the crib to powerful positions; and thus reveal a network of influence.
Necessarily, this is going to give off crazy vibes – so nobody decent will bother. Certainly couldn't be me!
Well, we now know how it ended, we have the benefits of knowing that ZOG even at its strongest stands no chance against COG.
Lesson of history is: if you have a (((problem))) in your house, call the Caucasians
Should you, though?
I've read some Trotsky. He was an intellectual, at least; some of his views (which you have linked to) are close to mine. Yes, chutzpah, double-or-nothing, wasting the Russian people as kindling to start the global Revolution, all that's true – but would it have worked? With the benefit of hindsight we know also that Trotskyism is incapable of seizing power and easily falls to dynamics one can observe in an ordinary nerd community; it is quite likely that his brazen escapades would have culminated in a swift collapse, not unlike FTX, freeing the Northern Eurasia for some freer and nicer future. Likewise, hilariously Jewish and unbelievably extreme power grabs in Germany (e.g. the Bavarian Levien-Levine duo have not persisted, instead only priming the polity for eventual acceptance of local far-right forces, which... ended up having their own problems.
Now, Stalin was a political animal of the basest sort, a man who knew few things, but among them how to grab and not let go. Georgians provide the lion's share of ex-USSR's thieves-in-law, Stalin was the apex of the type, and the country reigned by Georgian-Mingrelian mafia was entirely deserving of the moniker «Empire of Evil» (arguably unlike the older, softer, Slavic-ran Sovok). If that is the natural antidote, is it truly better than the poison? Is «ZOG» the worst rule that can befall a people?
(Stalin was supported in his atrocities and outlived by one lesser-known Lazar Kaganovich who, according to some rumors, played part in his death, participated in an attempt to seize power in 1957, survived that, and has almost outlived the Union itself; but that's neither here nor there).
I don't understand this argument. («And they lost», as @Stefferi triumphantly puts it, but there it's expected – by Stefferi's motivated reasoning, the very fact that Kanye dared to mouth off with his death con, before getting canceled from everywhere and divested from, is evidence of the powerlessness of Jews in entertainment, so it's not surprising if eventual loss of a groups retroactively makes its period of dominance fictitious).
It is true that Russians have been historically underrepresented among the country's elite, where descendants of Northern Europeans competed with more clannish non-Slavic locals. This is nothing to be proud of, but also fairly typical in less developed countries. One can conclude that the Russian National State is sorely needed, or discuss which mix in particular was more tolerable. I believe that both «Jewish» and «Caucasian» periods of the USSR were extraordinarily ruinous, far more so than the stagnant «Slavic» period, that the «Jewish» period of post-USSR was also extremely bad, that the «Russian-Caucasian» period following it was fairly tolerable if not for its culmination in... well, this; and in general the period of dominance of elites with German heritage was not hopeless and brought Russia the closest to the bleeding edge of contemporary civilization.
If possible, I'd have swapped Germans for the French, as they themselves tried to do in spirit and education.
My argument wasn't that they are powerless, of course. The argument was that they do not hold absolute power; Kanye cannot in fact be stopped from spreading his message, even if there are inefficiencies. At least if the triumphalist narratives from various antisemites I've seen hold, this is having a real effect, too.
Likewise, when it comes to the specific claim of Bolshevism as Jewish agenda, the Jews in the Soviet Union never held anything like absolute power; for a while, many important Bolsheviks were Jewish, sure, but even during this period we cannot talk of "Jewish rule", and most of the powerful Jewish Bolsheviks fell from their heights pretty much right after the Revolution, which especially in hindsight serves as more proof about the tendentious nature of their power even during the period.
Frankly, all the talk about Soviet Union under "Jewish rule" or "Caucasian rule" or even Russian Empire under "German rule" just seems like deflection from the most obvious narrative: Russian Empire, Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation have all been fundamentally Russian projects, with the reigning group, in the end, being Russians or Russified/Russianizing minorities. The same eternal Russia, just changing garbs from one to another.
Well, have they ever held? Did the «sheeple» ever «wake up» from some media imbroglio? What's the exact scenario here? I can tell what the most probable and boring one is: Kanye burning through his remaining social and financial capital and simply becoming irrelevant; some kooks following him into the depths of Q-adjacent conspiracies; his image in the public eye gradually transforming from «that rap icon with a few wacky ideas» to «that schizo antisemite who was popular for a while somehow; man, Millenials sure were gross bigots». This isn't the first time this has happened to the biggest guy in his respective arena – Ford, Disney, Fischer to name a few; probably Musk soon.
Do you happen to disagree with me and agree with triumphalist antisemites?
I think you are the one dutifully deflecting from noticing the sovereign – as befits a politician.
I guess that's how it must look from a de facto ethnostate.
One might look at it that way. From my perspective, though, all the Russian nationalist talk about "it was the JEWS who did the Soviet Union! Not us! The Jews!" just looks like fundamentally a gigantic pile of cope, a complete deflection of national responsibility.
That's just a "one man's modus ponens..." type of disagreement. I am arguing that his defining characteristic that has allowed his views certain exposure is his near-unrivaled eminence as a brand name and public entertainer, not his Black Hebrew opinions one could as well get from a deadbeat with a crack pipe on a seedy back alley in Baltimore. For you it's «even this schizo cannot be stopped from mouthing off», for me it's «even this celebrity can be canceled, barely making a splash».
The reason I believe my frame is more correct is that if even this schizo could be «stopped» – that is, stopped sooner and more completely, erased from the public consciousness like Yezhov from that photo – we'd have been living in a totalitarian world, walking on tight leashes, much like Chinese businessmen for the last few years, humbled by Jack Ma's adventures. Like, I've asked you the last time – what then? If not even a batshit crazy billionaire celebrity can realistically do something like this, what's happening?
I guess the answer is something like «credible politics is happening».
But you're not talking of nations here; and Bolsheviks were explicitly opposing Russian nationalism (which, by the way, earned them enthusiastic support of such currently anti-Communist peoples as Latvians). Do you hold Chinese nationalists to the same standard of collective ethnic responsibility? Or is escaping to an island under American patronage, instead of dissolving in Paris on the account of having no such islands around, enough to earn your pardon?
How do you think Russian Nationalists fared post-1917? Specific career trajectories, please. For example, Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov – a typical Jew-counting nationalist of the type you're ridiculing here, who was screaming bloody murder about Jews distributing anti-Tsarist agitation since early 1900's. Did he hop on the Soviet bandwagon to glorify the slightly transformed Motherland? No, he predictably got executed by a bunch of Cheka Jews (according to his wife, shot by a certain unsettlingly bloodthirsty youth called Davidson). Ilyin escaped such a fate to Switzerland. On the less effete side, what about Vrangel, Ungern, Denikin and so on?
As a movement, Russian Nationalists, whether of Russian, German, Polish or any other ancestry, did take responsibility, as well as they could, which was perhaps not well at all. They had their intellectuals, their extremist factions, their attempts to steer the discourse. First, their preferred (albeit not particularly interested in their input) regime was toppled using terrorism and propaganda, disproportionately organized by people like Gershuni and Azef and financially supported by people like Jacob Schiff; then they were defeated in the course of a civil war, in which the principal agency on the opposing side belonged to people like Trotsky. That those cerebrally inclined victors soon lost to a more primitive mafia, which in turn was supplanted by Slavs in the long run, changes little.
It can be said that vae victis, and anyway Russians en masse chose Reds over Whites. It is certainly easy to understand how neighboring nations do not give much of a fuck whether Kremlin is White or Red and hold that the only good Russian is a dead one. Nevertheless, it's clear that at the time of those events Russians en masse were ignorant apolitical peasants and frustrated workers with just about enough agency to get a clue which side promises gibs or will punish them harder for non-cooperation, and that intellectually the broader Socialist and specifically Bolshevik movement was dominated by Jews, this trend starting long before Lenin.
After all, even he discovered Das Kapital through the lecture of Moisey Mandelshtam – as told by Radek.
"Russian nationalists" is quite obviously a different thing than "Russians", just like "Jewish nationalists" (arguably a more compact name here is "Zionists") is different from "Jews". Russian nationalists, as a specific ideology, obviously didn't fare very well in the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union, but Soviet Union was still fundamentally mainly a Russian project (though, as said, often supported and advanced by Russified and Russianizinf minorities), a continuation of the previous Russian state, just as the current Russian Federation is the (direct) continuation of RSFSR, and Soviet Union more generally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link