site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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.

14
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Anti-Semitism: It's not rocket science

The familial relationship takes certain actions of the table and requires others, even when it's bad. You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps. You probably wouldn't want him imprisoned, hanged or shot, even under pretty hostile circumstances. On a more general note, there may be countless family members who are not awful people but are simply less capable than you. If they weren't family members, you might have little to do with them and might rarely even consider them in your plans. But because they are, you do. Ethnies are partly socially constructed, but largely racially constrained families, and they contained a weakened form of the same instinct of moral obligation towards the members of the ethny. Elites from the same ethny may see their peasants as retrograde, but they don't normally arrive at the belief that these should be mercilessly crushed, or that public policy should show no concern whatsoever for their wellbeing.

Now take an ethny with a dramatically higher average IQ (10 -15 points) than the members of the society they live in. You have at once, a guaranteed factory of new revolutionary ideas; and no instinctive limiting concern for the vast majority of people who will be affected by those ideas. Now sometimes ethnies merge and form new identities. Most British, Germans, Irish and even Italian Americans eventually came to see themselves as Americans first. But the gaps between your average German and Italian are not remotely similar to the gap between your average Jew and non-Jew. This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room, or the thousands of years of hostility it involved. No one wants to merge with a family that has a comparatively large percentage of loosers to the one they came from. So the Jewish ethny remains separate, and as such it's members pursue their ideological goals without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society. Naturally, eventually people get tired of this and respond with anti-Jewish measures.

Note that this theory of Jewish gentile relations requires no belief in a unique Jewish malevolence in order to arrive at the conclusion that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews will always naturally develop into hostility.

  • -17

It really boils down to ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

African-Americans and their allies commit large-scale arson for several months and the result is the non-African-American majority's response is : 'Well maybe they have a point, maybe we can be nicer to these people, let's give them some reparations or whatever'.

Meanwhile African-American entertainers complain about unfair business practices, nepotism, dishonest contracts and other unfortunate experiences from Jewish millionaires and billionaires and the response is 'oy vey, how dare you claim I hold disproportionate power in this society, I'm shutting down your contracts and your bank accounts.'

As a group, the Jews encourage and profit from multiculturalism in other countries, where they have access to the highest positions and where they deploy extensive lobbying groups, but they can always retreat to Israel that they have shaped as an ethnostate where they have primacy over other groups.

The worse thing? It's not the scheming, the money-laundering, the international human trafficking / blackmailing networks... It's the hypocrisy!

Broadly speaking, African Americans in entertainment and in general have benefited from Jewish involvement in Civil Rights groups, media organisations and business much more than they’ve suffered from it. My heart bleeds for the leading sports player who thinks they should be worth $400m instead of $300m while ignoring their Jewish lawyer who negotiated a much better deal with Adidas or Nike, the Jewish PR guys at their agency or the team’s agency who promoted them and built up their public reputation, the Jews who run the league that provides the other half of their income, the Jewish activists who were instrumental in them even being allowed to play in said league, and so on and so on.

Now extend that argument on behalf of the rest of Western civilization.

I meant that your argument seemed like it could generalize out much further, into the land of spicy takes like "Getting to live in the West is such a benefit that you should consider slavery a net gain." Or "Having a large, functional economy to be a financial professional in is so beneficial that Jews should just eat some predatory clawbacks and random hate crimes." "English speaking empires ended slavery and crushed the Nazis, so quit your bitching."

That's one way of looking at it.

The 'lack of gratitude' is not the issue in this case.

One could argue that Jews are not necessary to elevate the talented African-Americans. Even Hitler recognized the talent of Jesse Owens for example.

American entertainment Jewish millionaires and billionaires are not exactly acting out of pure disinterested concern for their brothers.

The issue is that African-Americans who are not grateful for billions (trillions?) of dollars of welfare and other perks associated with living in a Western country, can freely criticize white Americans, even colonize or burn down their city centers, and not much happens to them.

Yet for some mild criticism of Jewish billionaires, they get fired, unbanked, etc.

And everybody has to say 'Jews don't have power' or a similar fate awaits them.

Why would you have to be grateful for the perks of living in your own country?

Most of the perks come from living in proximity with the people they complain about.

Meanwhile African-American entertainers complain about unfair business practices, nepotism, dishonest contracts and other unfortunate experiences from Jewish millionaires and billionaires

This is a...strained reading of what Ye et. al. have been saying. I think if they came out and said "the studios are not treating us fairly; agents take disproportionate cuts of money; contracts are written to take advantage of poorly-educated but suddenly-wealthy celebrities; we are targeted disproportionately by fraudsters and other nefarious individuals" they would get some sympathy, because their claims would be true. But instead they've sublimated these object-level complaints into meta-level theories about group-wide tendencies that somehow both claim too much (religio-ethnic conspiracies) and not enough (not detailing specific abuses or problems).

Also, American jews and Israeli jews are very different; there really isn't some grand unified plan here.

In mild fairness:

-Kanye put his weight behind Tidal, which promised a more competitive cut for artists (or at least a whole-ass stake), and exclusively released The Life of Pablo through it.

-There was that time he went a rant on Twitter about the record industry, and posted an entire PDF (of his record conract, I think) as a long thread of images (yes, seriously, but I don't think I can find it now...).

-Kanye also backed the Stem Player (a device and streaming service(?) whose whole shtick was being able to isolate instrument and vocal stems/tracks from songs, allowing you to customize your listening experience, though it works best with albums that are already broken-up into stems), releasing Donda 2 exclusively for it (which was such an album, alongside the original Donda which released around the same time as the Stem Player).

It's possible that Kanye started out being frustrated at the music industry, but Kanye being Kanye, his...unique mind probably led to him escalating his frustrations into conspiracy territory.

Not being an assiduous Kanye-follower, I did not know this! Those seem like good things for him to have done (without knowing more about the particular projects involved), and it seems a shame they didn't work. I agree that Kanye is much more a tragic, rather than wicked, figure.

But instead they've sublimated these object-level complaints into meta-level theories about group-wide tendencies that somehow both claim too much (religio-ethnic conspiracies) and not enough (not detailing specific abuses or problems).

It's a matter of habit for social justice movements. Gender Critical Radfems, bless their hearts, still frame their activism in terms of fighting the patriarchy, women's rights, etc. Why is it a surprise that after years and years of "white privilege" and "white fragility", religo-ethnic conspiracies are suddenly beyond the pale? If anything, the experience of only receiving praise for one and scorn for the other, might actually strengthen the conspiracy theory.

I'm not saying the framing's a surprise. But it's still bad. The fights against "patriarchy" are also bad when they're not pointing to specific, object-level claims of disparity which can be assessed on their merits. White privilege and white fragility are also extremely bad. The whole edifice is bad! I feel like my posting history, both here and at the old place, should buy me some credibility here.

All you're observing is that Jews tend to be liberal, and the things you describe are done by liberals. Being Jewish has nothing to do with it.

Not really, Israeli ethnonationalists are a target for liberals.

Here's an article detailing the root of the issue with Israel-affiliated lobbying groups like the ADL.

On Wednesday, the left-wing Jewish columnist Peter Beinart tweeted that the contradiction identified by Carlson makes the ADL vulnerable to criticism.

“This is the problem with being an anti-bigotry organization in the US but opposing equality for Palestinians,” Beinart tweeted. “You have a glass jaw. As I wrote a while back, white nationalists like Carlson see Israel’s system of ethnic privilege as a model for the US.”

'being liberal' didn't fall from the sky. The direction of American liberalism has been influenced and directed by jews for close to a century.

Yes, but often jews self-consciously running from a judaism that they found embarrassingly backward and medieval. One could (and the Orthodox often do) equally say that American liberalism has infected judaism and perverted it from its historical and religious roots.

Isn't the birth of Reform Judaism literally basically case of (non-American) liberal/enlightenment thought and trends originally formulated in progressive Protestant churches being adopted by various Jewish congregations and figures? At least Wikipedia says:

With the advent of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Central Europe during the late 18th century, and the breakdown of traditional patterns and norms, the response Judaism should offer to the changed circumstances became a heated concern. Radical, second-generation Berlin maskilim (Enlightened), like Lazarus Bendavid and David Friedländer, proposed to reduce it to little above Deism or allow it to dissipate. A more palatable course was the reform of worship in synagogues, making it more attractive to a Jewish public whose aesthetic and moral taste became attuned to that of Christian surroundings.[39] The first considered to have implemented such a course was the Amsterdam Ashkenazi congregation, Adath Jessurun. In 1796, emulating the local Sephardic custom, it omitted the "Father of Mercy" prayer, beseeching God to take revenge upon the gentiles. The short-lived Adath Jessurun employed fully traditional argumentation to legitimize its actions, but is often regarded a harbinger by historians.[40]

A relatively thoroughgoing program was adopted by Israel Jacobson, a philanthropist from the Kingdom of Westphalia. Faith and dogma were eroded for decades both by Enlightenment criticism and apathy, but Jacobson himself did not bother with those. He was interested in decorum, believing its lack in services was driving the young away. Many of the aesthetic reforms he pioneered, like a regular vernacular sermon on moralistic themes, would be later adopted by the modernist Orthodox.[41] On 17 July 1810, he dedicated a synagogue in Seesen that employed an organ and a choir during prayer and introduced some German liturgy. While Jacobson was far from full-fledged Reform Judaism, this day was adopted by the movement worldwide as its foundation date. The Seesen temple – a designation quite common for prayerhouses at the time; "temple" would later become, somewhat misleadingly (and not exclusively), identified with Reform institutions via association with the elimination of prayers for the Jerusalem Temple[42] – closed in 1813. Jacobson moved to Berlin and established a similar one, which became a hub for like-minded individuals. Though the prayerbook used in Berlin did introduce several deviations from the received text, it did so without an organizing principle. In 1818, Jacobson's acquaintance Edward Kley founded the Hamburg Temple. Here, changes in the rite were eclectic no more and had severe dogmatic implications: prayers for the restoration of sacrifices by the Messiah and Return to Zion were quite systematically omitted. The Hamburg edition is considered the first comprehensive Reform liturgy.

and

In the 1820s and 1830s, philosophers like Solomon Steinheim imported German idealism into the Jewish religious discourse, attempting to draw from the means it employed to reconcile Christian faith and modern sensibilities. But it was the new scholarly, critical Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) that became the focus of controversy. Its proponents vacillated whether and to what degree it should be applied against the contemporary plight. Opinions ranged from the strictly Orthodox Azriel Hildesheimer, who subjugated research to the predetermined sanctity of the texts and refused to allow it practical implication over received methods; via the Positive-Historical Zecharias Frankel, who did not deny Wissenschaft a role, but only in deference to tradition, and opposed analysis of the Pentateuch; and up to Abraham Geiger, who rejected any limitations on objective research or its application. He is considered the founding father of Reform Judaism.[46]

At the very least it would seem to be a process of reconciling Judaism with the modern society being borne all around them by the (post-)Christian reforming and progressive Europeans.

Also worth noting that probably the most famous (ethnically) Jewish radical of them all, Karl Marx, had grown up in a liberal Protestant convert family. One might at the very least take this background in account when considering that his co-partner, who had independently already formulated many of the most important "Marxist" points before meeting Marx - Friedrich Engels - came from a similarly liberal Protestant background, expect without being ethnically Jewish.

Yes, and what to make of "judaeo-bolsheviks" like Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) who, yes, abolished the Pale of Settlement, but also were equally devoted to destroying the particularity of Judaism (alongside all other nationalisms and religions) as just another backwards false consciousness preventing people from becoming enlightened socialist deracinated "new men"?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats