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 -
Let’s try this in different language, then.
I recently called you an anti-semite. Judging from this post, while you object to being called a neo-Nazi (fair enough, Nazism is a specific ideology), you would broadly accept the labels ‘anti-semite’ and ‘white identitarian’ or ‘white nationalist’.
When I say that you’re an anti-semite, what I mean is that your posts seem to me to have, as an animating principle, a very strong and irrational prejudice against both Jewish people as an ethnicity and Judaism as a religion. I think this is visible in both the subjects you choose to address and the normative valences you put on them. That is, I think that you consistently want to talk about Jews and steer every subject back to Jews, no matter how tangential they are to the topic, and I think that your judgement of anything involving Jews is prejudicially negative.
You constantly want to talk about Jews, and no matter what a Jew does, you interpret it in a maximally uncharitable light. The conclusion I draw from this is that you are anti-semitic. You just hate Jews.
Do I know what specific policy you recommend towards Jews, particularly in the 21st century United States? No, I don't. As Amadan and magic9mushroom have noted, you are strategically very cagey about that, and when you are directly asked, you respond evasively. You constantly suggest that something ought to be done about the Jews, but do not indicate what you think that something ought to be. It's a simple question, one which you surely must have considered, and you squirm to avoid answering it.
In this context I don't think it hugely matters. Maybe you want them all to be killed. It's a possibility. I will say that, at the least, I think that if they were all killed, you would not shed any tears. But maybe you just want them all deported or expelled, or want their property expropriated, or even just a social norm where non-Jews refuse to associate with Jews and treat them with scorn. Those are possibilities too. I don't care that much because even supposing that your 'secret' position is the mildest of these, it's still bad, and it's still motivated by a prejudice that is both irrational and worthy of moral condemnation.
And for the record, this would be the case regardless of the group in question. If you were obsessed with, I don't know, Tibetans, that would be equally as bad. If you had a similar level of both obsession with and hostility to Azeris, that would be just as bad. Jews have no special status. The same goes for Europeans, and if it's necessary, I condemn Ignatiev as well.
Let me then ask you straightforwardly: do you object to being characterised as anti-semitic? Do you disagree with the statement "SecureSignals hates Jews"? Or is that simply an accurate description?
I don't accept your definition of "anti-semitism". "Anti-semitic" is an emotionally-loaded slur intended to denounce and pathologize any criticism of Jewish identity, religion, or culture whether it's rational or irrational, true or false.
So when Gentiles, like me, engage in radical criticism of Jewish behavior and identity that's "anti-Semitic," which makes the criticism intrinsically irrational according to the popular understanding. But there's no similar term for when Jews in Academia or Hollywood engage in radical criticism of Gentile racial identity, culture, and religion.
For example, my criticism of the very broad pattern of behavior of Jews in academia and popular culture engaging in criticism of White identity while also strongly denouncing any criticism of Jewish identity is a rational and true argument. This pattern of behavior is seen across the political spectrum, from secular Communists like Ignatiev, to Conservative religious Jews like Ben Shaprio, to politically heterodox/rationalist-adjacent like @2rafa. They all oppose White identitarianism and support Jewish identitarianism, meaning this pattern of behavior cannot be reduced to communist vs capitalist, liberal vs postmodern, secular vs religious, because this pattern of behavior dominates the entire spectrum of those other categories.
Conservative talk show host Mark Levin, who has been cartoonishly pro-war on the Iran question and extremely vitriolic towards everyone opposed to war with Iran, accused a White man on twitter of having antisemitism in his family's DNA. What's the word for that? If I accused Levin of having subversion in his family's DNA (someone in the Twitter replies did that), that would be "anti-semitic."
Anti-Semitism can be rational or irrational, true or false. All it requires is engaging in criticism of Jewish behavior, culture, and identity, and there's no word for when Jews do the same to Gentile race, religion, or culture. And I do those things, so I accept the label, although I don't accept that label denotes irrationality- that's just a vain attempt to pathologize rational criticism as being crazy-talk. What people call "anti-Semitism" is a rational response to this behavior of Jews in American politics and culture spending decades undermining white racial identity and political interests while strongly promoting Jewish identity and political interests, and especially the geopolitical interests of the state of Israel. Look at this clip of Greenblatt from the ADL:
You really don't think there's a "there" there?
I also don't accept "you hate the Jews" that's just a proto-woke slur also intended to intrinsically attach irrationality to a critical perspective of Jewish behavior and identity. I don't hate Jews, I don't remember who said something along the lines of "when Jews are great they're amazing and when they're bad they're really terrible." That's been my own experience with Jews personally, and I do have an adversarial-level respect for what I see myself as opposing. I see them as political and cultural opposition in how they behave politically and culturally, it's not an irrational hatred although this statement is not going to stop you or anyone else from accusing me of that. Which is why I don't respond to it, those accusations very conveniently derail from the arguments I'm making (by design), so if you just get bogged down in trying to convince everyone you aren't a neo-Nazi or you don't want to kill all the Jews you are just operating within the same consensus that I reject.
Is there a definition of 'anti-semite' that you do accept as applying to yourself?
Would you agree with a statement like, "SecureSignals opposes and dislikes Jews?", absent any comment about whether or not you are rational in doing so?
All right, let's accept this. You would presumably say that you are a rational anti-semite, in that you are rationally opposed to Jews?
This is progress, because this means that our disagreement has now been precisified. We no longer need to argue about whether you are opposed to ('dislike', 'hate', etc.) Jews. We only need to argue about whether it is rational for you to do so.
(I do think there are clear ways to express the idea of a Jew who hates Gentiles - Jewish supremacism definitely exists. You can find Jews who hate non-Jews. But I don't want to get sidetracked. We're talking about you.)
I think it's fair to say that your posting on the Motte displays, at the very least, a pathological interest in Jews. You keep bringing them up all the time, and always do so in the context of opposing or criticising them.
Rounding that off to 'you hate Jews' seems like a reasonable use of language to me. You certainly regard Jews with a great deal of hostility.
Will you respond to the question, "What do you want to do about Jews?"
There's no hidden agenda there. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that everything you've argued in the past about Jews is correct. What follows from that? What policies would you recommend? You've clearly indicated that you regard Jews as opponents - what, then, would you do?
I don't think that's an unfair gotcha. There are certainly groups that I regard as 'political and cultural opposition' to myself, so it would be fair game to ask me, "Olive, what do you want to do about the communists?" If I tried to avoid answering that, or if I treated that question as being inherently in bad faith, it would reflect badly on me. So too with you.
(I want to discredit communism as an ideological position in public debate and defeat communists in elections. There, see, it's easy.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Depends on your definition of "group". There's at least one category of people that's basically just staggeringly negative-sum and appears to exist pretty much solely due to group selection not being strong enough to fully root it out. I'm speaking, of course, of psychopaths. I think "kill all the psychopaths" is a very defensible position; the big problem with doing it is not that we need psychopaths or that they don't deserve it, but that of setting a precedent of gas chambers (because once that taboo's broken people will start arguing for gassing the borderlines and the autistics and the morons, and that's a far-worse idea).
That's fair. I should have clarified that I meant ethnic or racial groups.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link