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 -
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?
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.
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.
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