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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Lebron James is upset that he was asked questions about Kyrie James’ potential anti-semitism but was not asked about Jerry Jones potential anti black racism. For those not familiar, Kyrie is a basketball player that posted a video link to a movie that I understand is making the claim the blacks are the real Jews. Kyrie refused to apologize until he eventually did. A photo of Jerry Jones emerged that showed Jones was in the crowd that was attempting to prevent Arkansas from de-segregating schools. It isn’t clear from the picture whether Jones was participating or merely watching a spectacle. Also of note Jones was only 14 and it was about sixty five years ago. Jones is an owner of the Dallas Cowboys, a football team (the real football; not the silly sport being played in Qatar right now).

Below is a link to ESPN.

This seems like Lebron’s attempt to revenged racism as “whites against blacks” instead of the conversation that blacks (eg Kanye, Kyrie, other athletes) have an anti semitism problem. The reason I think so is because the situations couldn’t be very different.

  1. Kyrie did these actions today; Jones was photographed 65 years ago. People change.

  2. Kyrie is a grown ass man. Jones was 14.

  3. It isn’t clear Jones was even being racist.

  4. It is more natural that Lebron was asked about something happening in the NBA as opposed to something happening in the NFL.

I am curious if this will be successful. The dirty secret is that the black community does have some pretty big racism issues (eg anti antisemitism). It’s also interesting that instead of leading the charge, Lebron wants to redirect. It makes it seem that he doesn’t give a damn about justice but just special pleading for his own race. Now of course I’d believe that because I dislike Lebron. But curious to hear other thoughts.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35153937/lebron-james-faults-media-not-asking-1957-jerry-jones-photo

People are obsessed with this issue for different reasons. On the right it’s a “muh based” form of copery in which Kanye’s schizophrenic views reminiscent of the average alleyway Hotep will somehow mainstream antisemitism back to the 1920s. On the left it’s that another Trumpist has been outed as a “real nazi” and must therefore be purged from public life with maximum prejudice. Some famous black people are upset because Jews in the entertainment business largely tolerate low-key black antisemitism as long as it doesn’t escalate and so they are annoyed that, in the heightened Kanye climate, they’re getting called out more than usual.

For those of us who hate the whole cultural marxism / "progressive stack" ideological edifice and want to see it torn to the ground, and who believe that the Jewish community punches above its weight both in terms of political power and in terms of specifically promoting the "progressive stack" ideology, and who are neither black nor Jewish and therefore have no dog directly in this fight, it's delightful.

As a wise man once taught, if you want to tear down an edifice, you heighten its contradictions. One towering contradiction in the progressive stack ideology is that, on the one hand, its foundation is an argument from disproportion ("Blacks Less Likely"), but on the other hand, the Jewish community (IMO its principal architect and custodian) is More Likely than anyone. Kanye and the ADL are doing hero's work right now to heighten that contradiction. It would be lovely for the Jewish community to be as explicit and vocal as possible about why they are excepted from the rules that govern this system, and I appreciate Kanye's efforts to solicit that explanation, even if there's little that I otherwise agree with him about.

I'm genuinely curious if you see a flaw ("muh ___") in my reasoning.

The stuff that black people are supposedly institutionally annoyed by whites at, like police shootings, don’t have anything to do with Jews (who rarely become police officers, certainly outside NYC), and Jews are also very rare in the Deep South, where the great majority of American black people live. Hotep complaints are quite different to the complaints of the average black progressive racial activist, in general many fringe black nationalist or conspiracist groups are socially conservative, patriarchal /misogynistic, and at odds with black progressive activists.

If you look at the “progressive stack” in your average Deep South town where the average African American lives, there may be whites, but there are no Jews to place.

None of my comment relates to the Deep South nor to the classes of whites and blacks who live there, all of whom are all but irrelevant to The Discourse. Kanye and the ADL influence elite discourse; Billy Bob and Jamaal don't influence it and probably aren't even aware of it; at best, they are objects of it, when the coastal Eye of Sauron fixates upon some squalid incident to elevate above the hundreds of thousands of quotidian but equally depraved behavior to advance an argument or storyline in the Great Culture Game (e.g. that black jogger guy who got shot by those white rednecks -- Arbory Aubery or whatever). This is a struggle that plays out in the commanding heights of culture, wherein I hope it isn't controversial that the Jewish community participates well in excess of its share of the population, such as when the Sulzberger dynasty manipulates the gimbals of Sauron's Eye to find his sordid teachable moment du jour.

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