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I honestly can't tell whether you're being ironic or just aggressively misunderstanding my point. I feel like the most generous thing I can say might be "keep in mind your aims in writing this response to me; now go back and read my post with the idea that I was trying to make the same point to magicalkittycat, for analogous reasons, as you had when writing this response to me."
Less charitably, I did find this line to be unmitigated bullshit:
I am not running cover for antisemitism on the right, and nothing I wrote can be reasonably construed that way. Hell, I am occasionally accused, here, as a moderator, of running cover for the Jews! But neither do I think that the antisemitic left should be simply allowed to do what it does because everyone is so distracted by the tiki torch cosplayers they fail to notice (or outright excuse) blatant antisemitism from the left and its political allies. (And while the 9/11 hijackers weren't formally "leftists," their presence in the United States was arguably traceable to changes in American immigration law plausibly attributed to the left.)
My beef is with identitarians. To my mind, the main difference between leftist identitarians and right-wing identitarians is that right-wing identitarians are a bunch of reactionaries doing reactionary things. Leftists set the stage, defined the terms, and picked the fight. Reactionaries are doing exactly what (as @Fruck correctly observes) the radicals were told they would do. I don't like it. I don't agree with it. I think that nothing good will ever come of identitarianism, no matter how righteous-minded its practitioners. I don't think any of it is good. But neither do I think it reasonable to apportion blame equally to both sides; this is a mess of progressivism's making.
Discussing the culture wars is not the same as waging them. Yes, I acknowledge that people do wage them, to various degrees. But we do try to discourage that.
I am increasingly convinced that this distinction is, in practice, typically illusory.
In the specific case of The Motte, where the vast majority of ‘discussing the culture war’ posts in the main thread are about the latest outrage by the degenerate liberals, and most discussion is about how things are swimming leftwards towards Cthulhu, the distinction is without a difference.
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This is incorrect. None of the 9/11 hijackers were on an immigrant track (such as the H1B visa). Most of them had multi-entry B1/B2 visas and their most recent entries before carrying out the attach were either as tourists or as students in flying schools (if the course is less than 6 months, you can study on a B1 visa). The decision to be lax in granting visitor visas to Saudis (and other Arab nationals) was part of the non-partisan deep state policy of making nice to the Arabs (driven by some combination of oil, US domestic political corruption, and a shared enemy in Iran). Visitor visas for rich, officially-friendly countries weren't materially affected by the Hart-Celler Act, and I don't think they were affected by the broader trends in attitudes to immigration either.
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I am neither being ironic, nor am I aggressively misunderstanding you. Thankfully options exist outside your false dichotomy!
Thank you for your honesty. Now, moderator, ban thyself.
Your post was a mix of whataboutism, if it's true that there are nazis on the right it's not their (red tribe) fault, and oh, while I hate nazis they'll treat me better than the woke police. Insofar as 'running cover' implies you have some secret agenda to promote Nazi material, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as you're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing (lol Tiki Torch cosplayers) and whatabouting - yes, you're running cover for them.
In reality, you are a flawlessly objective crystal passing judgment from on high. You have principles that you live your life by, and you chide the left and the right equally, god damnit! Anything less would be to descend into partisan hackery.
And Nara, I am (whatever people may think) fundamentally of this place. I believe that we should strive towards objectivity, that it exists, I deeply believe in mistake theory and progress and that things are getting better and discussion is good. I reject the people on the left who claim that everything is political, nobody is objective and it's all just white supremacist/patriarchal/isms all the way down and doubly so if you're a white man.
But dude, I have to actually invoke that progressive argument here, much as it pains me. You fit the trope of the partisan pretending to be objective and principled to a T to avoid confronting the fact that you are, in fact, also waging the culture war most of the time.
Tiki torch cosplayers vs. blatant antisemitism. I am impressed by your objective framing of the political situation!
Your beef is with the vast majority of the modern left. Seriously, replace identitarian with vast majority of the modern left - is your statement significantly different?
Nara, go to West Philly. Go to Baltimore. Go to Chicago. Much as I love your race-blind ideals, much as they resonate with me, the modern incarnation of progressivism and identitarianism didn't build the slums and the poverty and the suffering. Cancel culture wasn't a thing during the Rodney King riots. You can't be naive enough to ask an entire nation not to Notice that people of one skin color are overwhelmingly worse off, and it doesn't even matter what the cause is. People take that information in the direction they prefer.
The problem is that people like waging the culture war. I commend you and the moderation team, because the failing lies with the users. You can't mod yourself a better forum population.
The vast majority of the modern left are identitarian, so not incorrect but also not a clarifying statement.
Some people are really good at Noticing what they want and ignoring what they don't, aren't they? One really shouldn't believe their lying eyes, that's what Official Experts are for.
Why not?
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Unironically: The left has gotten extraordinarily racist over the last ten years, and if we're doing a post-detente racial spoils shithole then I guess I know what team my white ass is on.
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It looks from this post as if "aggressively misunderstanding" is still in fact what you're doing, though--including, here, by skipping the most generous recommendation I could think of. Look--
My point was that magicalkittycat was engaged with a mixture of whataboutism and the Chinese Robber fallacy that is presently circulating in furtherance of running cover for Leftist antisemitism. Insofar as 'running cover' implies the news media has some secret agenda to promote antisemitism, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as they're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing and whatabouting, yes, they're running cover for antisemitism.
Every once in a while it will happen that I am in a conversation with someone here, using the terms and tropes of this place, and it will turn into a kind of "no, you" debate. This seems to be most common with motte-and-bailey arguments--"no, I'm not playing in the bailey, you're playing the bailey!" Sometimes people find ways out by finding a good word to taboo, or through careful charity, or whatever. I'm honestly not great at this (Zorba is genuinely great at it) but I do try. Anyway we seem to be in one of those circles now, where I get accused of whataboutism (maybe simply because I'm not the OP, and so there's a "first mover" advantage or something) for pointing out how OP's sources are engaged in a kind of whataboutism.
Right, and the circlular firing squad for this argument is the one where I point out that you're playing the role of the leftist who simultaneously speaks as the arbiter and adherent of objectivity and truth while downplaying the possibility (or at least likelihood) of objectivity and truth. Why is it that forums with actual free speech so often begin leaning to the right--almost as though leftism can't stand on its own two feet? Clearly I am not without my priors! And yet exactly one of us in this discussion has frankly admitted the existence of, and offered criticism against, both right-wing and left-wing antisemitism and racism, and it isn't you. I wasn't kidding, here:
Yes! White supremacy is not a new kind of identitarianism, though the term "white supremacy" has gotten woefully overextended and maliciously distorted in furtherance of Leftist aims. And I think a lot of Leftists are not identitarians, though sometimes they have to be reminded of that. The anti-Woke Left is not a group of insignificant size--and relevantly, my sense of this forum is that most users are anti-Woke leftists who have been surprised to find themselves in the center-Right of the Overton window, as radicals have stretched it to reach the territory of identitarian spoils systems.
The main difference between left-wing identitarians and right-wing identitarians so far is that left-wing identitarians mostly control their political coalition (the Democratic Party) while right-wing identitarians remain at the fringes--albeit, less at the fringes than they were before the Great Awokening. With specific reference to antisemitism, the antisemites on the Right are reactionaries who fetishize a failed effort to implement national socialism in a country they often know nothing about. The antisemites on the Left, by contrast, are the vanguard of Islamofacism, a movement with at least tens of millions of supporters around the globe, who are prosecuting a centuries-long grudge against the ideological descendants of Judaism and Christianity. I don't think it's "whataboutism" or "running cover" to suggest that if we're going to talk about political antisemitism, we should talk about all of it, not just those bits of it that are most convenient to our preferred narratives.
I echo @Chrisprattalpharaptr’s half-bemused, half-despairing incredulity at the fact that you apparently genuinely think that MAGA isn’t an identitarian movement.
‘Remove the log from your own eye’, indeed.
I suppose you can make the case that they are "identitarian" in some vague abstract sense, but you're just not going to find the kind of racist screeds published by MAGA that routinely get published by progressive institutions. Or if I'm wrong feel free to enlighten me, but you seem like the one with the log in the eye.
Give me the worst such screed you can find, and I guarantee you that I can give you a MAGA screed that’s just as bad, if not worse.
Okay, let's start with something basic. Here's 3 day training that Lockheed Martin executives were sent to, where they were asked to connect the term "white men" with terms like "old, racist, privileged, anti-women, angry, Aryan Nation, KKK, Founding fathers, guns, guilty, can’t jump.". Or here's a chart by the Smithsonian that's so anti-white that it somehow managed to flip over into being racist against non-whites.
Sure, that’s a great example of bizarre double-standards racism, but…
Entities like Lockheed are not publishing racist screeds, progressive or otherwise. They are subscribing to them. The publishers are usually small, interchangeable consultants. In aggregate, they might count as an institution; individually, they’re effectively free to dance on the bleeding edge.
Lockheed and friends want that +1 to saves against cancellation, but they can’t commit as hard as the consultants, since they have lots of competing interests. So they pay whoever is currently atop the pile. It doesn’t matter if that consultant gets exposed and torn to shreds because they’re fungible.
That’s part of the reason the Smithsonian infographic was so insane. They’re not supposed to be fungible! They’re not supposed to be testing new and exciting frontiers for racism!
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Eh, fuck it.
After spending the better part of a day dumpster-diving through the worst MAGA shit I could find, I finally started wondering why I was doing any of this.
I mean, shit, it’s not like whatever I can throw at you is likely to convince you that actually, you’re wrong and I’m right; any more than than your (IMO unimpressive) examples actually convinced me that I’m wrong and you’re right. All I’ll succeed at is wasting both our time, probably irritating you with my unwillingness to cede any ground in the face of what you consider to be indisputable evidence, and further disgruntling me with continued exposure to anti-woke talking points.
So whatever; you win, I guess. Congratulations on your argumentative stamina. Feel free to get in the last words at your leisure.
If you haven't yet completely flounced, would you mind posting what you found anyways? I'm working on something of a steelman of your and magicalkittycat's positions and I'd like to see what you managed to dig up.
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Well that hardly seems fair, would you say the Smithsonian is a dumpster?
So just to clarify, if you saw the exact same workshops / infographics published under Trump by the exact same institutions, but with races reversed, someone got outraged over it, you'd say something like "I don't see where the problem is"?
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@Amadan, I’d appreciate it if you did the both of us a favor and permabanned me while this moment of clarity lasts.
Ought to make your lives easier having one less triggered leftist around accumulating reports, and maybe it’ll be the kick in the pants I need to finally get me off this site.
It’s clear to me now that the time for talking is over, and that there can be no further productive use for sticking around and trying to bridge the ever-widening divide in realities between “woke” America and “antiwoke” America.
Not here, anyways.
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I get "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for this link.
Fixed, thanks!
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...By a MAGA institution/figure of similar prominence to the progressive institution in question?
That’s a good question; after all, I suspect that litigating over how equivalent the prominence/importance/impact/etc. the two ‘institutions’ are will probably be an inevitable feature of this little race to the bottom.
I’ll leave that up to @ArjinFerman’s discretion.
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It is and it isn't. Anyone who tries to suggest to a MAGA blue-collar worker that he should get affirmative action for being white will likely get a punch in the face. Rightly or wrongly, most MAGA supporters see themselves as rolling back unfair discrimination against them, rather than advocating for their own racial interests. Though tbf even as I type this I'm reminded that a lot of the progressive left launders its demands the same way, but the spirit still seems kind of different... they are often explicitly racial in a way that MAGA just doesn't seem to be. There's no Ibram Kendi in power saying, 'any disparity between white people and others is racist', there's no public statements 'blackness is an original sin', no 'grit and resiliance is a hallmark of black supremacy'.
I think it boils down to the fact that America is, still, a largely white country and a largely white-run country, where almost everyone was raised with the 'I have a dream' speech. White progressives are comfortable flagellating (other) whites, and raising up other races; despite many accusation, white MAGA aren't comfortable denigrating other races or exerting white supremacy, and those few who are don't feel able to say so publicly.
Using those specific words, probably.
Phrasing it instead as “putting them in the positions they deserve, and clearing out all those unqualified affirmative action hires who got inappropriately appointed to those positions instead of a deserving, meritorious applicant like themselves”, and that will get an enthusiastic approval.
Yes, but it really matters if they’re correct in that analysis! The Jews and Asians were correct: once historic discrimination was removed, they did considerably better. I think by now we can safely say that African-Americans were not correct about this: they were unable to compete after discrimination against them was removed, or even once a heavy finger was put on the scale in their favour.
Personally I grew up being told again and again that there are ‘too many white guys in X’, with special interest groups, mentorship, considerable government/media pressure and often quiet biasing of entry criteria all working hard to reduce the percentage of white men. In a friend’s line of work, jobs are specifically advertised as ‘for a person of BAME background’. It would be kind of weird if white people didn’t do better when these barriers are removed.
Put another way, isn’t there a pretty big difference between a movement that is campaigning to level the playing field for everyone, and once for reparations and affirmative action for their preferred group? MAGA doesn’t campaign for white men; Trump never said, “if you don’t vote for me, you ain’t white”.
You can call any political movement that broadly captures a specific group and advances their interest ‘identitarian’ but then I think you’re catching a lot of stuff in that net.
And I’m quite comfortable calling the MAGA movement that only supports so-called “Real Americans”, and wants the overwhelming majority of the people who actually live in America (whether the dirty, filthy immigrants, the city “vermin” and “filth”, the leftist “Unhumans” that need to be put up against the wall and machine-gunned, or just generally any of the “Satanic” folk who voted against Trump) to go fuck themselves and leave “““their””” country an identitarian movement.
And a particularly noxious one, at that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, MAGA won the popular vote (that is, the absolute majority of Americans) and some of its most fervent supporters are people who fled the third world and are appalled to see America sliding back into it.
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How can he engage in whataboutism when he is the one initiating the conversation...?
So your argument is that antisemitism is vanishingly rare on the right, and common on the left?
Again, you're deflecting and refusing to engage with the object level by reverting to criticizing the way the 'news media' (a, how did you put it? Unmitigated bullshit line? if I've ever heard one. As if the news sources consumed by your average MAGA footsoldier has any overlap in coverage whatsoever with the NYT) covers what you see as leftist antisemitism. You're minimizing the existence of antisemitism on the right (Chinese robber fallacy), and in the rare cases where those Chinese robbers get caught, they were pushed into it by the lefists!
I'm not downplaying it - reaching some Platonic ideal of objectivity is impossible. Thinking otherwise is foolish. Discarding the pursuit of objectivity is equally foolish.
I'm not the arbiter of objectivity and truth, and neither are you. But the data don't lie. I'm fairly confident I could go through your post history, tally up the posts that are right-wing coded, tally up those that are left-wing coded, and I imagine a statistically significant pattern would emerge. But, 1) I assume I'd run afoul of some kind of harassment wildcard rule and get banned and 2) there would be a hundred reasons you could give to preserve your self-image.
This is just blatantly false, but I suppose if Trump taught us anything, there's a lot of value in making truthless accusations without any supporting evidence. If nothing else, it puts the other person on the defensive and makes them respond. So, this is the closest you come to criticizing right-wing antisemitism:
Which is hilarious that in your mind you consider this some even-handed criticism of right-wing antisemitism. Throw in some tiki-torch cosplaying and you've got some quality partisan hackery going on here!
Insofar as you're accusing me of not admitting to left-wing antisemitism, I did break it down into multiple components, but if you'd like me to be pithy and explicit: Yes, I agree that it exists. I think it's fundamentally different and less dangerous than right-wing antisemitism in the ways I described and with which you completely failed to engage with.
Well, thankfully this space offers a valuable refutation of your point. We've been here for nearly a decade now and there is still an equal balance of left and right-leaning views, right?
You'd be surprised, although again your desire to label someone as an (anti-)identitarian will elide a lot of heterogeneity in political views.
Indeed, that is why AOC and her crew ran the table with the old guard and toppled Nancy as speaker of the house. But sure, while I think 'mostly control' is another unmitigated bullshit line, before we get another 'exactly one of us has frankly admitted the existence of both right and left wing identitarianism and it isn't ChrisPratt!' moment, I acknowledge the existence of what you're alluding to and won't debate it in order to avoid an entirely new conversation.
But, the fact that you think Trump and MAGA are not identitarian just lays bare the gaping blind spot in your entire self-conception. And may be one of the funnier things I've read today. I know, I know! Circular firing squad. I guess I'd better let that one slide so we can break this cycle of violence.
No; there are plenty who dislike black people, who argue that some Jewish elite controls [X] institution, that immigration is a Jewish plot to dumb down the gentiles, and whom never bother invoking the Painter or tattooing swastikas on their foreheads. But you'd rather focus on the latter to fit your Chinese Robber narrative.
Muslims make up 1.1% of America, and antisemites make up some much smaller fraction of that. Are you genuinely misguided enough to think that these people are the 'vanguard' of islamofascism in America? What do you think follows the vanguard, an invasion force of Taliban led by the spirit of Mehmed the conqueror to purge America of the Jews? What western nation has ever been so influenced by 'Islamofascism' that it started pogromming Jews?
White nationalists and Christians, on the other hand...
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Why can't the left make its case in a race neutral way?
I live in one of these 3 cities. The slums were built by progressives. They more recently have abandoned the slum (more well known as public housing I think) project in favor of placing impoverished citizens in housing that they cannot afford alongside productive humans.
That has also failed. Section 8 is highly associated with crime.
The only thing that will work long term is aggressive law enforcement. Particularly death sentences quickly carried out.
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Oh, but they did. Riot by riot, they built them. They got their clients to move in, drive the old white people out, take over the political machines of the cities, break the cities... and then they got to keep both parts. Still do, in most cases.
No actually it was racist white southerners lynching them and denying them economic opportunity that drove millions of them north
After WWII, lynching was not much of an issue. There were 21 black people (and 5 whites) lynched after 1945. That's what, a bad month in Chicago?
It started 30 years before that
The slums were built by the Second Great Migration, not the First.
https://brewminate.com/chicago-and-the-great-migration-1915-1950/
Your own source describes (using simperingly defensive language toward the black Chicagoans, of course) how there was a massive race riot begun by Bronzeville (black Chicago) residents in 1919 caused by allegations of white police apathy toward a homicide, before the advent of redlining or covenant segregation in Chicago, which the article itself says only began in the 1920s mainly in response to this riot!
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Without entering into the discussion proper, I will just note (because it came up in another thread) that there is a thin but meaningful difference between calling an argument bullshit/stupid/retarded and calling a poster that. So no, even if Nara wasn't a mod, I wouldn't mod someone for saying "This line is bullshit." I would mod someone for saying "You're full of a shit."
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