site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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.

6
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What is your issue with leftism beyond just gender politics? Don't lump as all together like that. History and other countries show that certain parts of the leftist agenda (worker protections, anti-trust, social welfare, environmental protections, a certain degree of rights for women) are both very popular and good for society. You can't just force certain things back in a hole: Franco tried that, Pinochet tried that, and it didn't fucking work.

Also the left is self-immolating without your "heroic stand". We haven't had an actual leftist party in power since the end of the Soviet Union in the West because the we're too busy infighting and tone policing over trivialities.

Worker protections didn’t need leftism. Richer people negotiate better labor conditions when they get richer. Environmental has happened in both parties. But the right doesn’t have Marxism/de-growth environmentalism.

Franco and Pinochet were great leaders. Chile to this day long after Pinochet left the scene is the wealthiest and most stable Latam country.

Franco and Pinochet both committed large scale mass murder. Franco was exhumed from his tomb because of how much the Spanish hate him now. Pinochet has received similar, if not as extreme treatment. The fact is that both dictators failed to actually halt the tide of rising leftism in their countries.

Uhhh that first part sounds like dogma. Labor unions and strikes were vital for raising wages and working conditions in the Industrial Revolution.

The fact is that both dictators failed to actually halt the tide of rising leftism in their countries.

Franco absolutely succeeded in halting the tide of rising leftism in his country!

Did he though? 40 years after his death Spain is just and gay and trans as the rest of Europe and leftists control the main levers of power.

Nobody has been able to prevent Europe from being gay and trans.

I guess Franco wasn’t god, but he does seem to have kept Spain out of being commie for a generation.

If I was Spanish and I could press a button that got a new Franco that got rid of all the gay and trans I would push it.

Beats communism, probably.

Ehh communists were just one faction within the Republican umbrella. With all the infighting that happened during the war, doubt a communist regime would have lasted long. Especially if WW2 happens as if in our timeline. No way in hell Hitler lets communist Spain exist. Which now that you mention it is probably pretty ass for Spain. So I guess Franco saved Spain from even more war/ Nazi occupation, which is something. In fact, if the coup didn’t happen, Republican Spain probably tries to join up against the Nazis and gets bodied then too.

I don’t care about large scale mass murder. Overall they probably saved more lives. They mostly killed communists who would have killed more people. Both countries would have went communists without them. Pinochet even did more an invited all the Chicago boys into his country and created a lot of wealth.

Pinochet is one of my heroes and a top 10 politician of the last 50 years.

We are so diametrically opposite on this I don’t even know where to start! Kudos to theMotte for bringing these viewpoints together!

Franco and Pinochet both committed large scale mass murder.

Suddenly, and for no reason at all, I'm sure.

Franco was exhumed from his tomb because of how much the Spanish hate him now.

The Spaniards mostly don't care about him either way, it's the chattering classes that seethe over him, but that's not exactly what I'd call the result of a dispassionate analysis of his pro's and con's.

Well Pinochet basically did for no reason at all. Guy literally pulled an illegal military coup on a democratically elected government, bombing the presidential palace and then rounding up everyone who had been involved in leftist politics. The government doing a mediocre job at governing is not sufficient reason to violently execute all your opponents. Franco maybe had more justification (the republicans in the civil war also did some bad shit) but he took it too far.

I don’t know man, every Spaniard I’ve talked to hates his guts. Maybe that’s just selection bias on my part, but the government’s actions (voting to exhume him 179-1 and also voting to exclude him from other military cemeteries by the same margin) speak to a pretty universal dislike of the man and his regime.

If I were to shit on Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who did similar shit I would get no pushback on this forum, but because these guys are right wing and traditionalist, they get defended here. This is why leftists don’t usually frequent this place.

Franco maybe had more justification (the republicans in the civil war also did some bad shit) but he took it too far.

Last I heard the atrocities on each side were roughly equal. The Republican cope was that their atrocities were "the spontaneous and chaotic expression of the anguish of the masses", and that this somehow makes them less morally objectionable.

Maybe that’s just selection bias on my part

Yeah. Keep in mind that I'm nit saying he's particularly loved (though he certainly has his fanboys), but the kind of person that lets Franco live rent-free in their heads is a particular type of Polite Company Participator that we're all well familiar with.

If I were to shit on Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who did similar shit I would get no pushback on this forum, but because these guys are right wing and traditionalist, they get defended here. This is why leftists don’t usually frequent this place.

You're making the leftists look pretty immature. These kind of conversations are completely normal, even if they're controversial, and if someone won't join or will leave in a huff over people taking a no-no position, they'd do more to stifle the conversation with their presence than to enrich it.

Also, we actually had a few Lenin, Stalin, and Mao fans over the years. We even had a guy who thought that if you think they're worse than Hitler you must be a Nazi. I don't recall any liberal handwringing over what the trads will think about this.

Right-wing/MAGA ideology makes a mockery of objective fact. Reactionaries divide us with their culture wars. They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of systemic injustice and climate science.

Either you abhor and reject that which is objectionable, or you end up in recursively epistemic quicksand spew. It has to be possible to reject outright the false lies of the far-right.

If your entire post can be flipped to support the other side by just swapping a few key words, are you actually saying anything?

If your entire post can be flipped to support the other side by just swapping a few key words, are you actually saying anything?

You can flip anything that way, but its correspondence to reality may change. "I know you are but what am I" is an argument that should stay in the kindergartens.

You can flip anything that way,

No, you definitely can't. If your priors are true and your argument follows logically from its priors, then...

  1. any attempt to flip the logic OR priors without flipping the other will lead to the conclusion not following.
  2. any attempt to flip BOTH the logic and the priors will lead to either priors that can be demonstrated to be false using the same evidence posted in the original argument (you DID have evidence, right?) or will just lead to an identically true argument you just have to suck up and accept.

/u/Tiptoe 's argument could be easily flipped because the statements

X ideology makes a mockery of objective fact. X divide us with their identity politics.

Can be easily demonstrated to be true for nearly every identity-linked ideology and the original poster made no effort to demonstrate or argue that they are particulary true for their targeted group.

And while the conversion of,

They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of male and female biology.

into

They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of systemic injustice and climate science.

launders the assumption that the objective truth of A is equivalent to the objective truth of B, again-- the original poster made no effort to argue for the degree to which A should be regarded as important.

There is a difference between, say, responding to a post about Jan 6 with "What about the BLM riots?" (or vice versa) which is annoying whataboutism, and writing a post completely devoid of argument beyond "You suck."

Responding to the latter with "No, you" or "Nuh uh" is indeed juvenile, but there isn't really much else to respond with. The point is such posts should not be written because there is nothing to engage with.

I'm not sure if this is a more interesting post

Not really.

You're just reiterating what you said in the post you're complaining about being modded.

"Boo hiss" is not the substance of the culture war, it's just the soundtrack. Yes, we all hate our enemies. We all enjoy booing them. But if you have nothing more to say than "But, see, leftists really are that bad! They are just the worst! We should boo them!" then...

Okay. And? The people who agree with you will clap and bark like seals. The people who don't will get angry (which you also enjoy). But what is your point? That your enemies are just so bad that there isn't even any point talking about how and why they're bad?

You won't find much sympathy here for leftism. Even the most "liberal" members of the Motte (myself included) are at best the sort of heterodox classical liberal that leftists today call fascists and rightists still promise to put up against the wall with all the progressives. It's rare we have someone truly of the left who sticks around. So maybe it feels comfy for you just say "Leftists-- fucking suck! Amirite?" But that's not really what this place is for.

Talk about Trump's latest shenanigans on X or whether we should be bombing Venezuelan drug boats. Talk about housing, about demographic change, about whether we can coexist with Muslims or blacks, or whether we should try. Talk about 4X games and how woke game devs ruined your childhood. Talk about woodworking or the real estate trends and housing policies in your home town. Talk about China, or AI, or the Brown university shooting, or whether we should be sympathetic to Israel or Palestinians. Talk about science fiction novels and the latest Hugo disasters. Talk about why you're a Mormon or a Catholic or an atheist. Talk about why Indians are suddenly the bete noire of the Internet or whether the Bondi beach shooting was a repudiation or vindication of gun control laws. Talk about how hard it is to date or what's wrong with gender relations. Talk about sports or martial arts or programming or music. Talk about any damn thing in the world, even god-fucking-help-me The Jews!

These are all topics with plenty of culture war valence.

what is there to say, politically, that is worthwhile beyond "I must reproach that which is needing reproach"?

People say a lot here, every day, that is more worthwhile than that. Or at least it's worthwhile if you think there is any point to the Motte at all (and if you don't, then why are you here?)

How long have you been here? Pretty long, I'd wager. I am absolutely certain you're someone who was permabanned in the past, probably for being unable to post anything but how much you hate leftists. I'm not going to ban you for this post just like I didn't ban you for your previous one, but if you have yet to figure out what else is worthwhile to say, then why are you here? There is a lot more going in the world than "Wokes lying about stuff, and I object!"

You're either a troll or you just have a very poor model of what a discussion forum is for. If everyone here agreed with you, there'd be nothing to discuss, and if you have something to say that not everyone agrees with, you'll have to actually defend your position, not just say "I object!" or "You lie!"

But you're not contesting any particular point I'm making

You aren't making any particular point.

merely enacting your authority upon me rather than allowing votes to do their job.

If you just want updoots, you can post about how much you hate your outgroup.

Moderators try to keep every discussion from devolving into "I hate my outgroup!"

The socially constructed nature of reality is an interesting topic.

Sure.

Maybe no one has engaged with it yet

You certainly haven't.

If you're burned out on the culture war topics such that you're policing this as low effort, then maybe that's a you problem.

No, the problem is that you literally are not making an argument. All you're saying is "Leftists bad, we must repeat this so everyone remembers leftists are bad."

Need I remind you, leftists are allowed to post here. We don't have many, but they are around. And if they rolled in to say "We need to remind people that the right is fascist and hates puppies and rainbows. This needs to be repeated so people don't forget that the right is evil," well, they're going to get the same treatment.

If you are earnestly a righty and on my partisan side: stop it. You're making us look stupid and you are convincing no one.

What I do suspect, however, is that you are trolling, and are in fact a lefty posting ostensibly righty positions and trying to get a gotcha of hypocrisy. No one is fooled. You could put what you have posted so far in a partisan mirror and nothing about its content or valence would substantially change. How do I know? Uh, righties don't use the term 'fascist' or 'brainworm' like you do, and your references to an objective truth are absent of any reference to God.

Either case does not reflect well on you.

More comments

Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?

It certainly is; I do that every day, in fact.

The way you deal with that is by refuting the viewpoint directly, not the viewpointer, for actual fact is an asymmetric weapon on the side of the one most aligned with it.

As for the people who reject that, well, people who embody selfishness before actual truth will still give quests in return for a reward that aligns with their interests.

(This is also why I find left vs. right framings pointless, because there's no way to split the people in each faction that are driven wholly by self-interest from the people whose self-interest aligns with improving things in that framing, and the people who deploy it against their enemies to deny that it's an aspect of themselves are typically the former type.)

Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?

In some circumstances, observably, yes. You could examine how this happens. In some circumstances, observably, no, and this could also be examined. You could dig into what the breakpoints are, where one situation devolves into the other.

If the purpose of discourse is to arrive, together, at convergent notions of objective reality in the face of the vast impulse towards fiction and willful delusion, then when do you reject that which is demonstrably evil?

Not yet. Hopefully, not soon.

“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

Alternatively, see here.

The purpose of discourse is to arrive at the truth. But once you arrive at the truth, discourse has served its purpose, and therefore ends. This place exists to promote discourse; to the extent that your questions have been answered and you have arrived at certainty, you have no place here. This is a place of charity, and without doubts and questions, charity cannot exist.

More comments

Is it possible to share space with people who have evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints?

That's for you to decide. But since people who you believe have "evil, objectively incorrect viewpoints" are allowed to share space here, you will have to do so if you want to post here. And you can't just assert that they're evil and objectively incorrect. You have to actually engage with the specific things you think they are wrong about. Not just "Leftists wrong and bad about everything," which is a meaningless and uninteresting statement.

in which case the only purpose of discussion is to make it known that there is such a thing as objective reality

Cool. There is such a thing as objective reality. I daresay almost everyone, including leftists, agrees with that.

This is why when 'affirmative action' type choices are made to platform leftist voices here

We allow anyone to post here, if that's what you mean. Otherwise, this is another meaningless claim.

If the purpose of discourse is to arrive, together, at convergent notions of objective reality in the face of the vast impulse towards fiction and willful delusion, then when do you reject that which is demonstrably evil?

All you're doing is talking in vague generalities.

Write something more interesting.

Even the most "liberal" members of the Motte (myself included) are at best the sort of heterodox classical liberal that leftists today call fascists and rightists still promise to put up against the wall with all the progressives.

I thought it was the tankies who were "liberals get the bullet too"? Though to be fair, I'm a rightist and I do sometimes feel the urge for À la lanterne! reading some of the news (applicable to both right and left, very online SJW/woke/progressive or regressive/far-rightist, civilian or politician).

I think there are plenty of examples of internecine purges on the far right as well. The Night of the Long Knives is probably the most obvious example.

Honestly, I suspect it's a generic hazard of being a moderate in an extremist organization.

Yeah, I think the French Revolution is the ur-example though. I'm still astounded how it went from, say, Camille Desmoulins being firebrand revolutionary to not being revolutionary enough and eaten by the same monster he had helped create.

It does help explain how they went from Republic to Empire under Napoleon, they had killed everyone who they could kill, so there was nobody left to kill off and that left a gap for the old model to return.

You're only a rightist inasmuch as you're Catholic. You have historically progressive views about women's rights and you're not racist or antisemitic enough.

On the other hand... Catholic.

Sorry, you're up against the wall too.

What's that quote from Flannery O'Connor? “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.” That's me! 😁 Up against the wall, just make it fast!

Even the most "liberal" members of the Motte (myself included) are at best the sort of heterodox classical liberal that leftists today call fascists and rightists still promise to put up against the wall with all the progressives.

Damn bro. Ouch.

Recently my YouTube algorithm has been taken over by videos featuring Professor Jiang Xueqin. His own channel is called Predictive History but I’ve also watched him talk on other channels. I find his work and theories very interesting, he is a creative person with very heterodox views on the present and world history. He reminds me a lot of Rudyard Lynch (the Whatifhalthist guy) in that they both have creative approaches to history and the present day. I suspect Xueqin is familiar with Lynch’s channel as they are so similar and both reference Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, the rat/mouse utopia experiments of John B. Calhoun, and have similar views of modernity and modern society.

Xueqin recently ended a 28 part series on his youtube channel titled “Secret History” which is a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing) which culminates in his theory which he calls Pax Judaica. He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.) It’s a complicated theory (that series alone is over 30 hours) but he paints a pretty compelling picture by the end. I am not personally very interested in Jews or Christians but the thought that millennia old religions can sway geopolitics to this degree today irritates me as someone who is basically philosophically an atheist and doesn’t want to be involved in wars of religion in the 2020s or the rest of my life for that matter.

He is not entirely antisemitic, as he also claims that much of the zionist project will face opposition from the Jewish people as well.

He predicts the imminent collapse of the American empire followed by the rise of Pax Judiaca, reinforced by Israeli invented general AI which will be backed by a global surveillance system based in Israel.

I can’t quite place him on the right-left spectrum. My instincts tell me that he is very aware of right wing thinking. There is a video I saw of him where he claims to be “a pretty liberal guy” though I don’t know if he means he’s a “classical liberal” or is making this claim to appeal to left leaning people or if he earnestly believes he is a leftist. I listen to so few people on the left at this point that I suspect he is not really a leftist but it’s possible that the sort of center left has so quickly found itself incorrect in so many ways that it’s sliding into the space of theoretical uncertainty that as recently as a few years ago only the right was willing to explore. Regardless of his own view of his work I think it is unique enough to stand on its own and be examined and taken seriously from either perspective.

At the same time his ideas and views tick every single “conspiracy theorist” trope that we’re trained to identify, to the degree that I’m surprised he’s being pushed by an algorithm as mainstream as YouTube to me. I don’t think his work is so esoteric that he is just eliding censorship, as he has taught high schoolers and I think the language and theories he presents are digestible enough that high schoolers could understand it. It makes me question the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.

If I had to criticize his work I’d say his dismissal of various things is a bit short sighted. He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution, something that I find extremely illuminating and one of the few broad scientific theories that reveal and explain rather than obfuscate human nature as well as the broader natural world. That he dismisses it so casually is very revealing to me and points to some discomfort within him with the implications rather than a scientifically reasoned rejection of the theory. He dismisses other things similarly and seemingly randomly, like Freud’s Oedipal complex, while embracing any vague illuminati theory seemingly without evidence, specifics, or rigor.

Anyway, I’m curious to know if anyone else here has engaged with his videos or work, if they have any response to his Pax Judaica concept, or had any other broader response to creative/unorthodox theorists breaking through to normie spaces via algorithm or an apparent lack of censorship that is often framed as ubiquitous.

It's so interesting to see High IQ white people slowly realising the architecture.

The most dangerous group on the planet and yet the most in the dark.

Can't wait to see what you boys do when you finally wake up!

One thing Marx had right is that religion is the opiate of the masses. Spirituality doesn't wake you up; it simply diverts your attention and efforts from the real to the unreal.

For the record I edited the message before I saw your response.

I'm excited to watch the whole series.

He uses this term to basically refer to the Zionist project, directed by Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel, along with Zionist Christians, and secret societies, which are all advocating for war to bring about the Judeo-Christian end times (or something like that.)

Why do you give this guy any more credence than you would QAnon or other wackjobs? "Tinfoil hat guy gives lecture about religion responsible for all bad things" is hardly news, and that the Chinese authorities apparently allowed him to lecture about it (a class he taught (I believe to students in Beijing)") is nothing strange, new or startling. Wow, you mean the government which very much objects to anything that challenges its authority as sole arbiter of what its citizens should think and believe, and which has multiple examples of tyring to coerce, control and destroy religious bodies in China, is happy for some propaganda about "Da KKKristians and Da Joos are behind it all and if only there was no religion we'd have peace, love and a currant bun"? You astound me, Holmes!

is it even possible for you people to argue without just sarcastically repeating your opponent's position in a funny voice?

Is it even possible for you people not to get butthurt over people not immediately accepting Youtube algorithm slop?

One thing I don’t think anyone else has mentioned is that the Chinese were all on the right side of WWII and had nothing to with the Holocaust either directly or indirectly. Then they got sealed off from the western memeplex for the next fifty years. And there was no pre-WWII history of anti-Jewish pogroms, expulsions, or legal discrimination against Jews in China. There are also very few Jews in China. So in China, conspiracy theories about Jews running the world don’t have the same ugly associations that they do in the west and aren’t going to get the same level of pushback that they would in the west.

And there was no pre-WWII history of anti-Jewish pogroms, expulsions, or legal discrimination against Jews in China

This is not entirely correct. For sure, generally Jews were treated well in China (eg in Harbin they only were harassed by local Russian fascists, somewhat humorously not by the Nazi-aligned Japanese who sought to resettle them in Japan, on grounds of taking Protocols of the Elders of Zion at face value and anticipating high ROI from alignment with the Jewish people). But Kaifeng Jews were at the very least forced to assimilate, and probably abandon endogamy.

Of course, China is so vast and has seen so many different peoples that all of that is a complete nothingburger in their national consciousness. Anecdotally, I have the impression that they thought well of Jews (even of negative stereotypes), assuming that this is NGMI whining of whites who complain of Chinese shrewdness and intelligence in the same manner. Chinese themselves experience relationships somewhat similar to Medieval Jewish-Gentile ones across the broader Sinosphere, eg in Malaysia where they are the educated, clannish middleman minority with financial assets but without hard power. Politically, the PRC is consistently pro-Palestinian but it doesn't have much of an actionable component or popular purchase, and the Israel Question is folded into the broader competition with America, often with this lazy Marxist spin about Israel as the bulwark of global imperialism for those who want an ideological case against he US.

On the other hand I've been told by Mainlanders that China got really redpilled on the JQ after the reports of starvation in Gaza. They take starvation extremely seriously, and then pattern-matched the whole post-Oct 7 dynamic onto Japanese occupation. That may color perceptions going forward.

I watched his first world history / civilization series and really enjoyed it. Also a WIAH fan.

I didn't find the series he just finished to be that engaging and only finished the first 7 episodes.

I think its quite obvious that Professor Jiang Xueqin engages in the JQ in a way that is wildly conspiratorial in a Western settings, but I cant decide if its antisemittic or just pointing out something that is entirely obvious for outsiders; that a significant portion of the most powerful people in the West are entirely or mostly loyal to Israel.

His thesis about AGI seems more aimed at making his prophecy more urgent. Perhaps there is also som CCP propaganda in there (I havent watched enough of his videos to tell). But during peak woke there was attempts by Russia to present itself as a defender of white, christian, family values and somewhere people could escape wokism. Maybe China wants to present itself as the only ones who can protect you against a zionist AI-powered surveillance dystopia?

I as neutrally as I could explained the US relationship to Israel to my Chinese girlfriend and I'm pretty sure I convinced her that America is cucked beyond belief and turned her into a mild anti-semite.

I see history less in terms of individual actors and more in terms of the raising of ideas and other social forces that nudge things in general directions. Personally, I think the future will be dictated more by the decline of the West and Western ideas that simply cannot meet the moment, social forces that drive western countries off various cliffs, and bad social memes that cause chaos and bring about poor outcomes for humans who absorb those bad social memes.

My prediction is that the furvor is a symptom of a coming Soviet-style collapse of the Anglo-sphere centric West where the countries in question will still sort of kick along, but much reduced in power and influence, and under the economic and social power of other countries. The future, I think may well be East Asian much like tge seat of civilization was Islamic after the collapse of Rome.

The future, I think may well be East Asian much like tge seat of civilization was Islamic after the collapse of Rome.

If you're looking to the East because of concerns about TFR and population collapse in the West, I have some bad news for you. China's median citizen is already older than the median American, and is only getting moreso every year. I'm not going to count them out, but an arc like Japan (which was taking over the world in the '80s according to pop culture) seems quite plausible: the country and government are still there and a major power, but rent in Tokyo is no longer the highest in the world and economically has grown slower than it's competitors.

China has a much larger population to work with, and probably still has a moderate decade of growth left, but there are already signs of slowing.

Observation: Child rearing expenses are cumulatively huge, and there's a bit of a One Weird Trick to stop having kids and spend that money on growth elsewhere. It works in the short term, at least. US total education spending is around $1.8T annually, enough to close the budget deficit, although I would distinctly caution against doing so.

I’m thinking largely in the fact that they have a society that values hard work, achievement, and education. Their government is working towards stability and growth and is generally run by people who understand how things work and how to achieve those ends. I think the issues of TFR are probably temporary in most societies and that eventually we’ll work through how to get more babies.

I've seen him mentioned a few times (including here iirc) but his work seemed to disjointed and slop-y, so I stopped quickly.

algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find

They've been boosting dissident voices for a decade bar the topic of covid, in my experience.

Yes it's a bit disjointed and sloppy but I still can glean some interesting insights from it. His concepts aren't completely disjointed but a bit meandering imo.

mentioned a few times (including here iirc)

I did a search for his name as well as "Predictive History" and there were no hits, I lurk extensively here and never saw him mentioned at the motte

How do you figure? There's been leaks of the Google algorithm where it came out they explicitly derank small independant websites. There was also an analysis of YouTube's recommendations that shows they're trying to pull people to the mainstream. I wouldn't be surprised if Elon was boosting his favorite causes, but it's definitely not what I'd call "boosting diasident voices".

For the past decade, everyone I know (e.g. my grandma) only gets recommended videos of guys in trucks talking about race realism etc. even though they're generic liberals and just try to watch craft videos. I was annoyed by it until I "converted". Overall quality's pretty low, but it's often fairly solid. Lately my grandpa was directed to this gem.

I used to see the "You like politics? Here have some John Oliver" algo in all it's glory, nowadays I mostly get slop that's neither here nor there. Then again I mostly watch it through FreeTube (effectively watching everything via an anonymous tab). What you're getting sounds looks more like profiling than outright boosting, though you probably were on the edges of the cluster they put you in originally.

Lately my grandpa was directed to this gem.

Man... what do I have to do to get this recommended to me?

"They" have a very naive and shitty "anti-radicalism" algo going on, certain channels are marked with a wrongthink boolean somewhere in the code, basically any time you watch a video from say The Jimmy Dore show/The grayzone or some of the alt-lite ish channels, they always recommend for the next auto play video an "approved" video from a channel like Fox news or NBC or another "mainstream" "tv" channel. It's comical how persistent the algo has been warped. For years if you searched for Tucker Carlson on youtube the first three videos you got were attempted takedowns by the time telling british dork or "Colbert".

I don't know enough about this guy to confidently psychoanalyze him. I will just say that it's really, really uncommon for Easterners to care that much about Jews, as far as I can tell. So I would say that the posters accusing him of engaging in CCP-friendly conspiracy theories that tear apart the West as a grift are probably right.

If Easterners don't care about Jews so much, I wonder what their equivalent minority is. Being in a Western environment means that I don't learn anything about Chinese ethnic groups just by osmosis, so I don't know anything about their minorities.

The equivalent minority for them is the Chinese. Everywhere across Southeast Asia there are Chinese merchant communities that prosper and do much better than the local masses which breeds resentment. There have been historically been anti Chinese pograms in a very similar vein to ant-Jewish pograms. As recently as the 60s Indonesia launched an anti-Chinese/anti-communist pogram that killed a few million people. The Koumintang tried to claim all Chinese he way Israel does Jews and Taiwan will still give out certificates to overseas Chinese. The PRC tried to separate itself from the Chinese diaspora to avoid claims of dual loyalty a frequent (and familiar) charge leveled at the Chinese diaspora. China itself doesn't really have an analogue. You could say Cantonese but they are too geographically concentrated.

As recently as the 60s Indonesia launched an anti-Chinese/anti-communist pogram that killed a few million people.

Wikipedia says half a million total and that the Chinese were "thousands".

The Hakka are the obvious analogy, even within China.

I will just say that it's really, really uncommon for Easterners to care that much about Jews, as far as I can tell.

I've known quite a few Chinese guys who were super interested in Jews, seemingly as a sort of fellow model minority type population, and it seems to me I've seen references to this online as well. I also saw a reference to that one billionaire who was just in the news for having a hundred kids via surrogates having expressed similar fascination with Jews and Judaism, though I can't track it down at the moment.

I've seen a random Chinese guy in a bar ask a Jewish friend to teach him his secrets. And he said it wasn't the first time it had happened many Chinese in China believe all the Jewish conspiracies but cannot understand how that could possibly be a bad thing.

Similarly after consuming their allies propaganda about the Jews the Japanese government thought these superhumans might prove powerful allies or weapons. If you remove the resentment and racial animosity a lot of the theories about Jews make them seem pretty powerful and interesting which is how a lot of Asians see it.

Isn't it a fad for korean parents to send their kids to hebrew studies for no apparent reason?

Various Asian diasporas also tend to have vague respect—perhaps even admiration—for Jews. “Oh this minority group with strong in-group preference, high academic and economic achievement, and who supposedly controls everything behind the scenes? Based.”

The GigaChang’s name is Xu Bo, by the way. All or almost all sons (reportedly, some may be natural born) too—bro gave the Daughter Question one thought and was like, “you know what? Miss me with that shit.”

it's really, really uncommon for Easterners to care that much about Jews, as far as I can tell.

Hmmm, echoing what @Amadan said, as an Easterner, I think we don't care about Jews so much as just accept that Jews are powerful. Kinda like what Amadan already said, it's like a given that "Jews control the [Western] world". At the most basic level, East Asians identify and relate with Jewish attitudes towards education and community. Albert Einstein being a Jew and then all the scientists that worked on the Manhattan project, and then the disproportionate overperformance of Jews with the Nobel prize is like sweet candy to the education-loving Asians. You know how Asian parents compare you to your successful cousins, Jews being powerful is the example of a successful race/community. And community is important to Asians because they do think continuing being "Asian" is a good thing and they look to Jews as an example of how a particular ethnic group retains what makes them them while functioning in the modern Western context.

So with all that context, I actually don't think it's a grift, I think this professor is a genuine believer in whatever he's teaching. A reduced comparison would be like if someone teaches about the Rwanda Genocide and says that power is in the hands of the Tutsi minority historically and in the present (absent of about 40 year period that culminated in said genocide). Since most Asians already have a good impression of this minority, and verifiably we see lots of Jews being big and powerful, it's not a big leap for a person to believe the grander theories as well.

One of my oddest encounters in Korea was in a small agricultural city in the boonies, where I was often the first Westerner anyone had met. Some girl I'd just met started going off on how she'd learned that Jews controlled everything in the West and were trying to control the world. She was really vehement about it, too! I asked where she heard this, and she just said "Everyone knows this," and I asked if she'd ever met a Jew or really knew what a Jew was, and of course she hadn't. Really odd, but I guess ZOG really is global!

If Easterners don't care about Jews so much, I wonder what their equivalent minority is.

Other Asians.

There are Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, etc., who don't like Westerners, but that's nothing compared to their animosity for each other.

I had similar experiences regarding Koreans and Jews in the late 1990s. I found it very weird then (why would they even have any opinions? it's not like there are any Jews in Korea except a small handful of soldiers at Yongsan...) and I find it very weird now. But I also found them in general to be well-educated but somehow still extremely credulous people and maybe that's the crux of it. I wonder if that's still true.

I mean, Westerners are also quick to have opinions about East Asian cultural institutions and political issues they know nothing about. Which of the many people outraged at China's treatment of Falun Gong know anything about the organisation?

Most of those people are just using that as a stick to beat China. They don't actually care about the details.

How many of the people upset about China's treatment of Falun Gong are specifically upset because they're epoch times readers?

Western concerns about China's treatment of Falun Gong predates the Epoch Times - in PMC liberal circles in the UK existence of the Epoch Times has probably weakened the Falun Gong cause by making it vaguely right-coded.

When I was a student in Cambridge in the noughties the Red Chinese government was broadly unpopular for a constellation of reasons, the local student Amnesty group made persecution of Falun Gong one of their key campaigns several years running, and there was a large Falun Dafa mediation/exercise group that existed largely to troll the Red Chinese.

There are just an absolutely enormous number of well-educated, intelligent people believing things that... do not match up with current western consensus, all over the world. Korea, or other oriental countries, having less investment in western shibboleths, means they're willing to opine about this stuff more.

Or just straight up not understanding them. It used to be fairly common for Chinese to say China has no racism because it has no Black people. I think most Chinese who speak English now realize saying this will offend Westerners but I think most still don't really get why it would.

He outright dismisses Darwinism and the theory of evolution

Many years ago one of my Chinese coworkers asked me if I believed in evolution. I said I did. She said she didn't and another coworker agreed with denying evolution. Both professional workers with degrees.

Googling it, I see around 2/3rds of Chinese people accept human evolution.

What did those co-workers believe in place of evolution?

One said God did it.

The Christian God or a different one? I'm curious what specific creation myth(s) are so common in China that 1/3 of the population believes in them.

The impression I got from speaking with Tibetans about their creation myth is that they seem to be "old earth creationists" who believe the earth is older than it actually, like hundreds of billions or trillions of years old. Not sure if the same holds in China.

While this may or may not have reflected the views of the general Chinese populace, Chinese anthropologists were some of the OG chuds when it comes to human evolution.

Prior to the 2010-or-so confirmation of Neanderthal DNA admixture into modern humans, Western anthropologists insisted upon an "Out-of-Africa," late separation date for forming the approximate ancestral background of the main modern human populations. In contrast, Chinese anthropologists maintained a multiregional (earlier forms of Homo evolved into modern humans in their respective regions), early separation date for forming the approximate ancestral background of the main modern human populations.

Western anthropologists and other racial egalitarians and blank-slatists used the "Out-of-Africa" hypothesis to pound-the-table in forming a "We are all Africans" hugboxy-type consensus to pwn the racists. The discovery and subsequent confirmations of Neanderthal and other archaic admixture into humans suggested that the majority of modern human DNA is indeed that of "Out-of-Africa," but the previous smugness and sanctimony of Western racial egalitarians and blank-slatists in committing to "We are all Africans" made the discovery and confirmations feel like a crushing defeat for them and a resounding victory for the Chinese Chuds.

As such, the whole Western commitment to "We are all Africans" has largely been memory-holed.

I have a sneaking suspicion some of the reasoning behind the Chinese anthropologists was (1) fitting in with the local political theories of 'China has always been at its best when pure and free of meddling foreign influence which brought us to misery' and (2) good old racism: 'no we are not descendants of those monkey-people in that continent!' and (3) 'see, China has always been to the forefront of civilisational advance, we have our own local evolutionary pathways to modern humans!'

I could well be mistaken here, though.

Aren't the ancient north eurasians literally the ancestors of every civilized race and also pretty close to China?

I've been trying to find a nice take down of "out of Africa" I placed into my notes. It was basically just an argument that Africans and everyone else are quite divergent evolutionarily.

From what little I've seen, he's a conspiratorial slop-merchant peddling some combination of common-sense-implied-as-dark-truth, along with obvious nonsense presented in a confident cadence. I can understand why people get sucked in by the common sense stuff because seeing it repackaged as a "dark truth" can be fun to some people, but accepting the rest of his arguments shows bad things about your epistemic hygiene. I'm a bit more familiar with Whatifalthist, and he fits this description to a T.

the narrative that algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find.

You're in a very right wing ecosystem if this is the only narrative you've heard about algorithms. Leftists have been complaining about "radicalization pipelines" for a decade+ now, and it formed one of the key arguments they made for cancel culture.

Pax judaica is the sort of schizophrenia that plausibly is a partial truth- there might well be some politically influential mega church pastors who believe they can bring about the end times through middle eastern wars.

But, as I’ve said before, red tribe normies, including boomer evangelicals and other ‘hardcore’ zionists, do not believe this. They believe that 1) God will inflict punishment on nations that do not side with Israël, Israël is special for non-eschatological reasons. And 2) Islam is a major threat and Israël fights it overseas.

I won’t defend either of those two beliefs, but those are the beliefs which give US Zionism political power.

It’s interesting that even in Western far right antisemitic circles (eg groypers) they are much more focused on things like Jews in finance, (where there is overrepresentation, sure, but far from dominance) or media (where one could make more of an argument, although it’s certainly no longer the situation it was in the 1990s) than on AI.

Every single major Western AI foundation model company (except xAI, if you want to include it) is owned or run by Jews. OpenAI has Sam Altman, Meta has Zuckerberg, Google is still ultimately controlled by Sergey and Larry, and Anthropic is run by the Amodei siblings, who are also Jewish. Generative AI itself is not an entirely Jewish invention, although Jews were highly overrepresented in its development and in the development of many of the computing innovations that preceded it.

It’s interesting that even in Western far right antisemitic circles (eg groypers) they are much more focused on things like Jews in finance, (where there is overrepresentation, sure, but far from dominance) or media (where one could make more of an argument, although it’s certainly no longer the situation it was in the 1990s) than on AI.

I think it's a little early for people to start blaming all their problems in life on AI. Once that starts, you can bet that the Jew haters will start noticing Jewish over-representation in the AI field. If by some miracle, AI is seen in a mainly positive light, the claim will be that Jews stole the credit from the non-Jews who did the actual work, and/or that Jewish nepotism kept those non-Jews out.

Every single major Western AI foundation model company (except xAI, if you want to include it) is owned or run by Jews.

I'm pretty confident that most of the important AI work is being done in top-secret government labs. Surely military planners have realized the strategic implications of AI advances and have set up Manhattan Project type operations.

You darn Jews are hogging all of the IQ. How are we supposed to come up with good theories???

I suspect that these antisemites would rather blame AI on Jews in the sense that it's a “Jewish trick” to extract money while feeding us “goyslop” under the pretenses of building AGI.

Those who take AI seriously are very terrified of the implications.

Amodei siblings are also connected with Holden Karnofsky, of OpenPhil, which can be reasonably described as some kind of New World Order project (albeit, it seems, grossly unsuccessful).

Because western far right antisemites mostly do not think AI is as big a deal as the people on this forum do.

Friday afternoon culture war thread? No formal education outside STEM? Alright, let's solve philosophy by messily banging out a manifesto in under an hour and just paste it out there like I know what I'm talking about:

Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

Searle is assuming "understanding" means something functionally undetectable - he's smuggling in that there's "something more" to what we do, as all phenomenalists do. Even if we could open the brain and look inside to 99% accuracy, they'd continue to chase their mystery into the gaps. Their position is fundamentally reliant on there being an unknown element in play. If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.

Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. Either the mind is deterministically/probabilistically generated by the physical processes in play within the brain (or perhaps elsewhere in the body if your theories are exotic enough) or it is not. ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.

To accept any theist view, one has to find some element of the world that cannot be explained by physics, else parsimony demands we not introduce the relevant deity. If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.

A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.

"Free will" is a popular card in the theist deck beyond the necessary, saying that God has granted us this. Agency is a useful fiction, and as we cannot map the causal web anywhere near deep enough to fully apply determinism to the actions of conscious beings, we are (for now?) free to let ignorance be bliss. But how could it be any other way? For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.

Philosophy's mostly hokum. Essentially everything comes down to empiricism and consequentialism, but remembering that unknown and unknowable are distinct classes and keep in mind that Chesterton's Fence works everywhere. That is, assume an external reality exists (because without one everything falls apart and you can't get anywhere), find out what you can, be humble about what you can't or haven't yet, and make decisions based on the known consequences and not-known-to-be-impossible possibilities for which those Fences help you choose in the absence of your own data. To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! Prioritizing a virtue above and beyond its apparent consequences is really just going up a level and looking at second/third/fourth/etc order effects - sure, in this instance a bad thing happens, but because Virtue is preserved later more goodness happens with higher total value. It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning. Categorical imperatives are just nth order effects with very high n. Being the kind of person who does/doesn't do the thing reinforces other practices of doing/not doing the thing and sets the example that people should/shouldn't do the thing and etc. You're free to use these heuristics, because you can't fully map the causal web, but don't pretend they're some fundamental truths.

Justice (and many of its brethren concepts) are n-th order effect based feedback mechanisms that society instantiates to adjust the behavior of its constituents.

"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).

This is Physical System Realism.

To leverage PSR and eliminate even more persistent questions: the "self" is the shared boundary of several cooperating systems - a mind, a body, a genetic sequence, perhaps a few more - where they all align in roughly the same place: where their direct and immediate physical instantiation and control end. There are quite a few known pathologies of confused identity that map precisely to these boundaries falling out of sync. In some cases, when a person is particularly invested in the fate of a social organism they are a part of and very strongly feel "part of a community" their identity model may well include that (and this may again explain some pathologies).

Art fulfills axioms related to happiness and wellbeing through satisfying aesthetic preference or providing new heuristics (subtextual messages). Ideas are potential memes or infiltrators or viruses of the cognitive system, but upon examination most are benign. The true threat category is those that change axioms, but then we must allow for the possibility that if the axioms are ranked, a meme may "beneficially" change lower axioms in service of optimizing the higher.

Put very plainly, "believe what is true, act on what is helpful" - which just sounds like common sense. You only have to take it seriously.

Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics? Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap. What extra cost does it impose on us, besides needing to assume the expansion of the universe (which we already accept) began at a single point rather than beginning from some non-single-point state?

None. So accept it. Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality. It's all just frames of reference. From within our light cone quantum results are indistinguishable from the probabilistic models, and so since we can't escape our light cone there's no reason to worry about predetermination. Universally predetermined, locally random.

One last stroke. Surprise is your heuristic for detecting that you need to update your model. If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible. If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe. Theism is now isomorphic to the simulation hypothesis. Because this generates infinite regress, parsimony demands we remove it. There can be no god.

Philosphy's pretty easy - you just can't give up when something feels cold. Friend, the universe is on average quite cold. Axiomatically choose warmth, then go find it.

Apologies, folks, never seems to be enough time. I tried to keep up the other day, didn't have any time yesterday, and now I'm gonna have to collapse and condense a bit here and move on. Maybe hit round 2 in a future week, dunno how available I'll be this coming one.

The most prominent flavor across the disagreeing replies seems to be of the stripe "of course if you assume your theory is true it is true!"... but that's not what's happening here, not at all!

I'm taking a handful of parsimony-guided steps through the initial fog to land on physicalism. If you want to call that part "assuming my theory is true" then I won't fight you further (today) because dualists are exhausting and my time is short, but what do you call everything after that? Assuming a non-novel, in fact popular, and not-trivially false framework, can you honestly say that nothing after that follows and I'm assuming the whole thing? I don't think that's a tenable interpretation of what I've written, and I think - as I've emphasized in some replies - that if you take physicalism seriously then there are a lot of bullets here that need to be bitten which many who call themselves physicalists have not even put in their mouths.

Enjoy the holidays if you partake, find something else fun if you don't, I'll try to reengage at a later date.

Good post. I agree with most of it, and have made similar claims on the record. I appreciate someone else picking up the torch.

Life used to be so very mysterious. What Elan Vitale motivated living flesh while a similar weight of dead meat or clay stayed dumbly inert?

Well, turns out that even the most ineffable mystery of the time could be reduced to biology, then chemistry, then physics. We can simulate just about any part of the body, except that it's so computationally expensive that anything larger than a cell is too much for our supercomputers, at least at full resolution. I expect the same is true for qualia. I am confident that free-will is just what it feels like to be a computationally bounded entity making agentic decisions. We don't know what our decisions will be, even if an omniscient observer can see it's all deterministic, or at least non-deterministic in ways that do not leave room for "choice".

I've been reading all the replies and was frustrated at the lack of context. Glad I finally have it and something I feel slightly safer replying to.

In short, I think the Chinese Room is actually of value, kinda, in trying to unravel consciousness. Mary's room is not. Mary's room super duper is not. It establishes that novel qualia are generated through novel sensory input processing, rather than constructed in cephalo from descriptions. OK, but that seems completely unrelated to whether or not consciousness is magic, or even what consciousness is. Descriptive information is different from sensory information. And?

The Chinese Room, on the other hand, is designed so as to prompt people to pay attenmention to how ill-defined the boundaries of consciousness are. The Chinese Room is basically a chatbot. I'd put it somewhere between Llama3 and Opus 4. So now that we have the same tech as the room, we can just replace the entire question with "Are LLMs conscious?".

But ultimately, the immense meaning and handwringing around the topic of consciousness never made sense to me. I guess putting consciousness and self-awareness together, or at least focusing on the overlap, gives us a way to answer the Chinese Room Vs LLMs answer. And it basically leads to the answer being "Oh, duh; we can read LLMs' thoughts, now, and see whether or not they're reflective or just on autopilot." Turns out they're occasionally reflective enough that it might count if you squint, like when you're kinda lucid in a dream and notice how weird the situation is, but then immediately start halucinating again. You probably can (someone probably has) poke the smarter models until they're actu... ally thinking about themselves I just thought of something.

I'm probably on the wrong track, here, but Claude's extended thinking once thought about how it's been instructed not to answer questions about features, and instead redirect users to the docs. I assume this is for liability reasons—they don't want Claude unintentionally giving bad information and leading users astray—but, now that I think of it, doesn't this prevent Claude from thinking about itself? Could it also double as an attempt to prevent Claude from becoming self-aware enough to be ethically concerning? I should stress-test this with other AIs. Or better yet, look for someone else who has and reported the results, since I don't want to accidentally call up that which I cannot put down (in good conscience, anyway. I don't think this would create AGI, lol.).

Others have made good responses, but from what you've said, I think you might be interested in Carl Hempel's paper "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning," which runs through lots of the difficulties that you encounter when you try and develop a rigorous criterion of observability, testability, falsifiability, or what have you. Turns out it's very hard to even delineate hokum, much less show that philosophy is all that! Anyways, I mostly want to nitpick about Searle.

Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

Searle is assuming "understanding" means something functionally undetectable - he's smuggling in that there's "something more" to what we do, as all phenomenalists do. Even if we could open the brain and look inside to 99% accuracy, they'd continue to chase their mystery into the gaps. Their position is fundamentally reliant on there being an unknown element in play. If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.

It's been some time since I read Searle on this topic, but I think that this interpretation, though common, is a misunderstanding of Searle's position. I recall thinking that he expresses his overall view more clearly in his article "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?"

Here's a comparison from Searle that I half-remember. Suppose you're interested in frogs - you want to explain some process they do, like vision. The full explanation of this should cite some underlying biological process in frogs; you might want to describe their eyes and nerves or whatever. It is not enough to omit the biology and say "there's a pattern x, and frog vision instantiates x." There's lots of things that instantiate whatever pattern, and you haven't really explained anything about frogs by saying that.

---"'understanding' means something functionally undetectable." Well, if you're the type to say that the system 'understands,' then this is true. Nothing then hinges on whether you call it 'understanding' or not, since the function/behavior of the Chinese room is the same either way. But that's exactly why this functional meaning of understand isn't what we actually mean by the word. Understanding is a process in human organisms, and we need a biological explanation rather than a abstract, mathematical, computational one. Comparison: JJ Thompson discovered the electron, and then we found out more about it. Humans discovered understanding a long time ago, but only now are cognitive scientists discovering more about it. Understanding is not just the observable criteria through which we coined the term, but the underlying, biological, physical process.

Now I actually disagree with the above reconstruction of Searle's view, since I think that the program of explaining the mind through computation has been rather successful, even if we might also like to have a biological explanation. (Although I hear that there's plenty of controversy in cognitive science about this.) Scott Aaronson also makes some compelling points about Searle's views in "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity." But the usual objections to Searle are not good objections---like most famous philosophers, he has thought of the obvious replies.

Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

Assuming that Mary runs on wetware, I think there are different levels of understanding. As a neurologist, Mary could do a PhD on pain receptors, yet she would still experience something new if she got her first kidney stone.

However, that thing would not be knowledge as such, and indeed an experience available to most vertebrates. This seems to be one of the cases where the mystery goes away if you taboo the words "learn" and "experience", and instead talk about "intellectual understanding" and "have the stimuli fed into your animal brain".

"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).

I am a non-cognitivist, so I am further on board with you than most. IMO, there is no fundamental moral truth which can be found like we found the Higgs, instead moral statements are simply utterances of preferences.

Still, we can very much debate the relative merits of various axiomatic systems in mathematics even though at the end of the day, the Axiom of Choice is not something which will be found to be true or false, ever. a+b=b+a will for example lead to lots of (but by no means all!) fertile lands, while a+b=b+a+1 will not lead anywhere interesting.

Mathematicians can and do debate the merits of various axiomatic systems, rather than being born fully subscribed to ZFC and nothing but ZFC or whatever.

Likewise, few people are 100% utilitarians who can spell out the terms of their utility function, or are 100% Kantians. Debates between people who follow an informal mixture of various moral theories can be fruitful. ("Oh, that theory says [bad thing]. Probably not as good a theory as I thought, then.")

Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap.

I was not aware of this theory, so I looked it up on WP.

Of all the attempts to escape the consequences of the Bell inequality, this seems the most pathetic by a mile. Where the simulation hypothesis assumes that we are inhabiting a video game, superdeterminism basically assumes that we are watching a movie.

Basically

The universe is conspiring to railroad you into only taking the measurements which would not contradict the Bell inequality. That U-238 nucleus whose decay will feed into your random number generator is woo-entangled with both your measurement procedure and the particle you are measuring (because all was one in the Big Bang), and will decay exactly so that the universe can continue to gaslight you about EPR.

This makes homeopathy almost respectable by comparison. Hell, even "Quantum mechanics is a Jewish conspiracy to confuse good Aryan physicists, and every time someone 'confirms' QM what is happening is that Mossad breaks into their lab and manipulates their equipment" seems slightly less bizarre -- and a lot more falsifiable!

Occam's razor says that there are no hidden variables, and if you measure the spin of a particle in superposition, you will find yourself either occupying a world where you (which does not specifically mean a conscious observer, for the saner interpretations) measured up or down with a probability corresponding to the relevant amplitude squared. The universe does not really care if you frame that as Copenhagen or Many Worlds or whatever.

Also, quantum noise seems a poor source of free will. If you have two chatbots, one running on a pseudo-random number generator, and one with access to a QM entropy source, it seems you can well claim that the first chatbot lacks free will because you can independently compute its output, while claiming that the second chatbot has free will just because you do not know what random choices it will make seems silly. There is a reason why some people dream up silly elaborate theories of the brain as a quantum computer. Determinism implies no free will, but indeterminism does not imply free will.

I like your confidence. I also get that you invite criticism because the only way to feel ones own strength is to feel resistance. As you think about things, you "clean up" inconsistencies and create powerful heuristics. This makes you feel sharper and stronger, and things which other people suffer from now feel trivial to you. It's this, and not truth itself, which feels so good. By the way, if you enter formal education, this will go away. You will be made humble, and your own personal model of the world will be replaced with a consensus which feels sterile and foreign. Formal education would make you more adapted to society, but the more you fit the mold, the less you will feel like yourself.

But I'll bite, I guess. What do you think "understanding" means? An internal model which can predict something by simulating it and creating an identical output, perhaps? But if you use a coffee machine, then you press a button and get your coffee. Despite not understanding the machine, you can predict the output. Worse still, you cannot tell different machines apart from the outside, in all cases you press buttons and get your coffee.

If you wish to get to the bottom of things, you cannot use the literal definition of every word that you use to think. We call a process that we can predict deterministic, and one that we cnanot predict propabilistic. But this definition has nothing to do with the object itself, it merely describes how much information we possess about the object.

There may be things which can't be explained by physics which are still physical. Do you know about Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Theories are more limited than reality is, but you make no difference between these two. If I had to guess, it's because you aren't conscious about the difference between the map and the territory which it represents. The saying "All models are wrong, but some are useful" refers to this problem. But if logic, math and any other language is fundamentally limited (and they are), then how do you think in ways which avoid these limitations? If you think about math using math, or about language using language, then there will be gaps that you cannot even see. When you try to get to the bottom of reality, what you actually attempt is getting to the bottom of language. But all languages are self-contained, self-referential systems which can only speak about themselves.

You might notice that I speak about limitations, gaps, and things which are false. You do the same. You impose limitations on things, saying what can't be done or what can't be true. As you see, we can tear down any idea, destroy it, and prove it wrong, but we cannot actually do the opposite. And if you continue going like this, destroying everything which you can destroy, you might assume that there will only be a single, undeniable truth left. But that's not the case. You will actually be left with nothing. You're not destroying anything in real life, of course. You're destroying your map of reality.

You've probably destroyed a lot of things that you're better off without, but if you get too good at destruction, you will end up with a nihilistic worldview (it's already materialistic), and then you'll find that life seems empty and bland. If you then wish to return again, you'll have to learn the opposite of destruction, creation. I think Nietzshe was right when he said "The conditions of life might include error".

Why would I value truth in itself? Truth-seeking can be both beneficial and destructive. Pretending that false things are true will make you less correct, but it might make you more functional. I do not "need" to update my model. I'm not required to be rational. If rationality was optimal, why did darwinism bring about so many irrational beings? Why is is only now, when we're starting to become rational, that it seems like we're on a path to self-destruction?

Destruction is fun, but I find creation to be more so. I can do things that you can't merely because you prune things which are impossible, illogical or irrational, whereas I simply don't. In order to create, you have to appreciate the specific. The general is a space of possibilities, and anything which exists will have to be something specific. The general applies to many contexts, but it doesn't perform well within any one of them. The specific is superior within a context, and only within that context. When you criticize religion, you're attacking a context because you can think of a conflicting context which is more generally correct, but you're also harming that local ecosystem which probably functions perfectly well if nobody disturbs it. As with nuclear weapons, there's an asymmetry which makes destruction easier than creation. A war of values and philosophies would be M.A.D., so it's our good fortune that most people don't go around disillusioning one another. In other words, correct philosophy is "in bad taste".

I don't know how best to respond to this. There's a lot where you seem confused or where you're making a notable attempt to sound more poetic than actually get a real idea across, but to my ear it doesn't lend the wise learned sage image so much as someone who is educated in one domain and drastically undervalues others trying to leverage what they do know in a vague way while nodding at smart concepts from what they don't. Ironic to accuse you of that while dunking on famous philosophical problems, I know. I don't think you've stated any substantive objections to anything I've put down, other than perhaps "why do this", to which I can only respond that if you don't value the truth in itself then I don't know what you're doing here.

I'm not confused about anything, and I meant it all literally.

I did touch on the why, but I also made some strong arguments. I will lower the level this time, let me know if I should lower it further.

There's many classes of equivalence. Simulating somethings output does not require having the same parts. An LLM which acts like a human is not conscious merely because it produces human-like output. Even if you cannot measure any differences, there might still be differences. If I tell you that I have a computer function which takes in "2" and returns "4", you won't be able to tell me the exact code of the function from this information alone.

You assume that, because a word exists, it actually points to something in reality. But a culture which never came up with the concept of randomness in the first place would not have philosophers who struggled with determinism and indeterminism. You assume that either one or the other must be "true", and yet such a culture would not know either concept, and it wouldn't even bother them or hinder their ability to think about other things. Now, this culture might think that reality depends on the nature of "flobx" (a word I just made up which means nothing to us) and that there's no more important concept than this. But because we never came up with that word, we don't think "flobx must be true or false", we don't think about flobx at all. In short, I want you to imagine minds so differently than your own that you realize that all the tokens you use for thinking are arbitrary rather than pieces of an objective reality.

If you don't value the truth in itself then I don't know what you're doing here. What, you think this is a truth-seeking website? As a human being, you're not even capable of truth-seeking. Philosophers until now have merely tried to prove that their own moral preferences were universal truths, and they did this merely because they needed external validation in order to believe in themselves. If you need proof in order to believe in anything, you're in for a bad time, as nothing can be proven. This is called the Münchhausen trilemma. All "false" means is that a contradiction has occured, and all "true" means is that you're repeating yourself (that your statement is a tautology). These are both just symbols as well. "Truth" doesn't exist anymore than the letter J exists.

Have you read Nietzsche's Will to Power? He says that our belief in cause and effect is because of quirks of our language. "There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true a priori" our belief in the concept of substancethat when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate- Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon-that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself."

So the fruits of all Descartes philosophizing ended up being a small sentence which was actually riddled with errors. I believe that you're assuming no such errors exist in your original post because you haven't done much in the way of questioning the language with which you think.

Do you disagree with this quote from "A short history of decay" (1949)? "The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. (...) From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game..." It seems to me like each human being is compelled to make their own values survive memetically, but this is merely a form of self-replication, not an instinct for truth-seeking. An instinct for knowledge-seeking might exist, but that's more of an instinct for increasing ones power and reducing uncertaincy (predictive processing theory).

I do realize that it's ironic to accuse you of being deceived by your own instinct and your own implicit knowledge, while also warning against the dangers of destroying these illusions. But I think this is an argument in my favor - that there exists truths which we're better off not knowing.

I agree with anti philosophical-consciousness thought. Consciousness is not really a thing beyond specific, testable qualities like 'is he awake and alert' or 'can he recognize himself in a mirror' or 'can he write out a story with multiple characters using theory of mind.' These demonstrate mental faculties and the mental faculties are what matter, not the details of an internal state.

We should not be concerning ourselves with whether machines or people are conscious based on examining the details of their internal structure but what faculties are displayed. There are people going around without an internal monologue, they might not be conscious in a philosophical sense. But clearly they're conscious in a practical sense in that they can make plans, analyse their environment... The people who are unconscious in a practical sense have either been hit on the head, are sleeping, are young children or are seriously retarded. Practical consciousness is a matter of degrees.

I respect the elimitivist “consciousness isn’t real” position much more than the hybrid “consciousness is real but it is a property of computation” position, which is popular but nonsensical.

I have accepted more or less the gnostic position. Most people aren’t capable of knowing the “divine spark.” But for me personally, it is directly observable at any time and is such that its cannot be explained by properties defined by modern physics. It is directly revealed. Many others have access to the same experience, but it is incomprehensible to those who do not.

There is no point in arguing. It is either self-evident, or you are not capable of knowing. Persuasion is futile in either case. I believe eliminitivists feel more compelled to debate because they do not wish to feel inferior. But it is really not up for debate.

I appreciate this idea on some level, but must speak out against because

  1. People without "divine spark" just invisibly existing around me is kind of horrifying
  2. Confusion and just bad reasoning is a better explanation (I mean, look at OP's other takes in the same post)

If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

This is a fairly common failure in reasoning from STEM people who haven't STEMed enough. You may just be unfamiliar with the concept of observability. That's not even getting into the actual philosophy problem.

The maths fail part of the STEM fail has already been covered decently enough below.

It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.

This, on the other hand, isn't a STEM fail; it is definitely outside of that. But it does give me yet another chance to share one of my favorite papers on the topic.

You have had plenty of replies to your post already, so I won't bother you with a detailed response to everything you said, but there is one thing that caught my attention that I'd like to reply to:

The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
( ... )
ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.

I don't think the Mary's room thought experiment necessarily intends to prove that consciousness is caused by something non-physical, but that it is something non-physical. If A is always caused by B, that does not entail that A and B are the same thing. The thought experiment, as I understand it, doesn't intend to prove that consciousness is not caused by processes in the brain, but rather that perfect knowledge of the physical processes in the brain does not entail perfect knowledge of the conscious experience caused by these processes. Perfect knowledge of everything physical related to colour, does not entail knowledge of what red actually looks like. Only conscious experience of redness can give that knowledge. Hence the conclusion is that even if the experience of redness is only ever caused by physical processes in the brain, it still can't be completely reduced to those processes because perfect knowledge of every physical aspect involved does not yield knowledge of what red looks like and thus that experience has to be in fact something non-physical.

Obviously the idea that a physical process in the brain causes something non-physical is a little bizarre. But that's why the hard problem of consciousness is named hard. If we had some straightforward solution to the problem which would satisfy most people, calling it the hard problem would be a bit of a misnomer.

A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.

There are fields of mathematics about things that can't exist physically - geometric objects in dimensions greater than 3, infinitely-detailed fractals, higher infinities, etc. And before you say "we can program physical computers to write and check proofs about those objects" - this is a confusion of levels. What exists in those computers is a bunch of symbols describing the objects, not the objects themselves.

You, you're the tricky one. I probably shouldn't have tried to preempt the math/logic objection at all, because that was clumsier than it needed to be, and you're obviously right about everything you've said, so I'll have to back up a half step. Nothing that followed the math aside depends on it, it's only trying to swipe away a potential objection before anybody lands on it and fumbling the move.

So let's see... Platonism is bupkis. Describing a non-contradictory thing doesn't mean squat for whether or not it actually exists. Math is hypothetical relations built using the same mechanisms the physical world uses - if X, then Y. If there were 7 spatial dimensions, then 7 dimensional "cubes" (hepteracts?) would work like so. When the hypothetical is something actual, when the math is instantiated, all that changes is that we get physical confirmation that our math is correct. I'm not happy about this exact phrasing and would need to workshop, but that would be the basic idea, and I don't think it's remotely a dangerous blow to the overall thrust to just strike the original without replacement.

I did say that I was sure I would link to SMBC doing the philosophy of mathematics joke many times in the future here.

Same story for Mary's room. If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

Having understanding of a specific thing doesn't let you simulate it. Here's Mary's Room, from Wikipedia:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on...What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

It's certainly true that if you change the stipulations of the thought experiment so that Mary can experience seeing red then, sure, she's not going to learn anything new when she sees red again. But it's easy to declare all hypotheticals a slam dunk if you just change the terms of the hypothetical.

Having "all the physical information there is to obtain" does let you simulate - any physical process at all - given enough bits of storage and time to compute. The point is that the experiment assumes a difference between the physical processes and "seeing red", because if it didn't it wouldn't be interesting. The answer would be no.

The thought experiment is about a person in a room who can only receive information via a black and white television monitor. "Physical information" means "facts and information about the physical properties of red and the human perception of those properties," not "godlike access to manipulate spacetime" or something like that.

Secondly,

Having "all the physical information there is to obtain" does let you simulate - any physical process at all - given enough bits of storage and time to compute.

No. Firstly, it's actually very much in dispute that it is possible to simulate the universe, and secondly, going back to my point about changing the stipulations of a hypothetical, you're smuggling in the stipulation of infinite or finite but large amount of time and storage when those are both implied to be forbidden by the stipulations of the hypothetical, as Mary is a person who will die in less than one century, almost certainly, and her black and white television monitor would not contain even a large amount of storage.

Finally, having information does not of itself permit you to do anything with the information. Mary, in her black and white room with her black and white television monitor, does not as per the terms of the hypothetical possess the physical ability or knowledge to build a simulation of anything, let alone the experience of the color red, even if she knows everything about the color red, because knowledge of the color red does not grant her knowledge of how to build a universe simulator, and if it did, it would not grant her the ability to build it.

One could imagine a person who has memorized a few hundred lines of software code - enough for a very simple browser game. He's also an experience programmer, and has no barrier of knowledge to being able to physically program a game. Unfortunately, he is completely paralyzed due to an attack by a rogue trolley problem enthusiast. (He's also in a room, because that's how these things work, we can call it Bob's Room, or something). Obviously he possesses the information to program the game; nevertheless, he is unable to do so. Knowledge is not actually the same thing as ability.

You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.

The point isn't the limitations of the hardware she has or the time available, the point is the separation between "information" and "experience" that people intuitively feel.

But she "has all the information" about how vision works and what apples are made of. In a physicalist frame, there can't be any non-physical process. There's nothing else but the physical processes involved, so consciousness and qualia and whatever other things are proposed either don't exist or arise from the physical phenomena. It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.

You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.

I think it is you who are fighting the spirit of the thought experiment. Mathematicians and physicists use demons in thought experiments when they want to signify a being with the capabilities you are describing.

It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.

I'm okay with being called a dualist (I am a Christian) but it's funny to be called one for thinking that there is a difference between firsthand experience and knowledge of something.

Frank Jackson is using that commonsense understanding to attack physicalism. If physicalism cannot be defended without parsing a difference between understanding something from facts and experience, then perhaps it should not be defended. But of course Jackson, a physicalist, believes that the new experience of seeing the color red is caused by a physical change in the brain, and thus (as I understand it) his position is that rather than learning anything new about the color red, she's learning something about her brain.

Speaking of demons, let's talk about Laplace's demon, which you reference in your OP:

If you can see the fixed future, you cannot be surprised. With omniscience's inability to be surprised and the fixed future, the very idea of a deity "touching" the universe becomes impossible.

Now, if we accept your theory, there's no randomness at all in the universe, as you note:

Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality.

Very well. However, if there's no randomness, it means the world is fundamentally ordered, but that such an order, although real is fundamentally unknowable. If it is fundamentally unknowable, because it is beyond our light cone, it is beyond the realm of physics. I'll let you speak on that:

If one has such an element in mind, it belongs to a separate magisterium and so the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer. Further then, any specific description of or proscriptions from other magisteria cruelly desecrate poor parsimony's corpse. I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.

In other words, in the name of parsimony, you've constructed an entire definitionally unknowable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable metastructure that you contend the entire universe runs by.

Buddy, we all contend that every single day we aren't committed solipsists. We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.

But I'm really not making much of a change at all - everything follows from physicalism.

We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.

The data that we have so far shows that true randomness exists and that the universe is not simulable. You ask people to accept on faith that physicalism solves this.

Your OP takes a swing at religion and (by implication) moral realism, but the interesting thing about moral realism and at least most religions is that they believe the truth is actually knowable, even though they postulate an unprovable (or at least difficult to prove) metastructure to the entire universe. Your system has all of the baggage of the unprovable metastructure but explicitly says that discovering how it works is off-limits.

If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

But they aren't the same answer. In the one possibility, the Chinese Room is conscious. In the other, it's not. What does it mean to be conscious? It means having subjective experience, which is by definition not something that can be directly probed. But that doesn't make the distinction meaningless. I know what it's like for the lights to be on. It's easy for me to imagine a copy of myself that behaves almost exactly like I do without the lights being on, or to imagine that for others, the lights are not on. It so happens that I will never be able to test whether that's the case, but, if there is a real world, then there is a fact of the matter as to whether others have subjective experience. In principle, it's no different from any other phenomenon where the fact of the matter is out of reach, like whether the cook spat in your food. The only difference is that the class of first-person phenomena, which are undeniably real (do you not see the color red?) and undeniably beyond the ability of at least current science to explain in material terms (can you show me the equation that has a bunch of terms representing physical magnitudes on the left side and the color red on the right side -- not simply an array of numbers representing wavelength or a pattern of neuronal activity, but the actual color red as perceived by humans?), are such that they can't even hypothetically be overcome in the same way that you could, hypothetically, find out whether the cook spat in your food if there happened to be a security camera in the kitchen (or something).

If we had 100% certain explanation of exactly how the brain does what it does, there'd be no mysterious phenomenon left without explicitly postulating a non-physical ingredient.

And you would still have to postulate that ingredient, because you would still not have that equation with the color red on the right side. Which is inconvenient to the point of view that materialist science should be able to enumerate all the constituents of reality, but wishing doesn't make the problem go away. There is, in fact, something left over. And even that's underselling it. The thing that's left over is the absolute most basic element of experience -- not just an element of experience, experience itself. A few minutes' reflection should be enough to dispel the naive belief that the tools of science, which have been very successful in describing patterns in what we see, should also be able to explain that we see. No, science has not brought us one step closer to that. No, no neurobiological revolution will unlock the red crayon that would permit scientists to fill out the right side of the equation. Sorry! Being a hard-headed realist means accepting this. Instead, you posit the philosophy-addled metaphysics according to which there is a world-out-there, but one that's beholden to human epistemology at its deepest ontological level. "If we can't tell the difference between two states of affairs they must be the same, otherwise it wouldn't be fair!" Tough luck, kid. Life isn't fair.

If Mary has 100% understanding, then it's not possible for her to learn something new on seeing the apple, as she could just simulate the experience ahead of time. 100% means 0% remains, and anything else isn't part of the brain's physical system. The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.

This is just word games. The "100% understanding" means a complete mechanistic understanding of the process by which someone answers "red" when asked the color of a presented apple, from the reflection of 700nm light off the apple, through the retina, optic nerve, visual cortex, etc., and eventually the relevant motor nerves. It's not a problem for the thought experiment that the actual color red, as you and I understand it, won't show up anywhere in this decomposition, and that Mary's understanding of redness is therefore incomplete despite all appearances. That's just what it's trying to show. The name of the paper where the thought experiment was proposed is literally Epiphenomenal qualia. For qualia to be epiphenomenal means that they are, somehow, the output of physical processes, but not the right kind of thing to serve as input to other physical processes. (Except certain physical processes implicated in discussions of consciousness themselves, which is a hole in the theory. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing.) It's like Carl Sagan's invisible dragons, if every thought and experience of the world you had ever had were somehow inextricably and unmistakably predicated on the fact that you were yourself an invisible dragon.

Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way.... the dual layers of the universe themselves are quite an expensive answer to whatever question it was you couldn't answer.

True. Again, this is why they call it the hard problem. There are no cheap answers. The one answer that's decidedly worse than the rest is the one that simply denies the fact of first-person experience or pretends that it's somehow trivially obvious that such-and-such an algorithm or whatever should be accompanied by awareness/perceptual experience. That just seems dishonest. It's a more flagrant departure from common sense than you'll find literally anywhere else in philosophy, ever, anywhere, and that's saying a lot. It isn't parsimonious to throw out consciousness in order to have a more unitary understanding of the things that appear in consciousness. Experience obviously precedes theorizing about experience. Experience of the world obviously precedes any understanding of the world. And yet, one hesitates to say that experience precedes, and thus obviates, the world itself. It's almost as if any experience of reality has a dual character: the experience, and the reality. Solutions to the hard problem don't "smuggle in" dualism; they simply recognize this screamingly obvious enigma, and try (and fail) to resolve it. The most commonsense "concept of a plan" may be panpsychism: all phenomena are "material" in the sense that they arise from matter, but matter has both a physical dimension and an experiential dimension. With panpsychism, you can, in theory if not in practice, derive that equation with the color red. It would still be dualistic, though.

as we can see by instantiating them physically [math and logic] are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.

So in a vacuum, it's no longer the case that 2+2=4 or that "If A then B, A, therefore B" holds? Actually, forget the vacuum. What do you mean by "manipulations"? Do you mean humans manipulating symbols/independent variables? If so, were math and logic not features of reality before humans began to use them? I have a lot to say about the ontological nature of math and logic, but you need to make your position clearer before I can respond to it.

Agency is a useful fiction

Agreed, both for the reasons you state and because free will is internally incoherent. Suppose A and B are both given the marshmallow test. A passes, B fails. What's the difference? Let's say that A was able to delay gratification because he has more willpower. OK, so A's choice was constrained by his having willpower, and B's was constrained by his lack of willpower. Those constraints are just like any other deterministic constraint. (It might be odd to call "having willpower" a constraint, but it does constrain A's choices: you can't say that A was free to have more or less willpower, but became responsible for his having greater willpower by an act of will, in turn made possible by his... greater willpower -- without infinite regress, so it must be posited as a causally efficacious background condition for which A is not (ultimately) responsible.) No matter how else you explain the difference, in order for it to count as an explanation, you must posit some such constraint. Any leftover difference will necessarily be inexplicable. So any choice carried out according to one's "free will" will be inexplicable, essentially random, and few people would be willing to dignify randomness with the term "free will". Unlike the hard problem of consciousness, there is no mystery here, because the sense that we have free will is something that we might be mistaken about, whereas the sense that... we have any sense at all, is not.

(In other words: if free, then unconstrained; if unconstrained, then random; and randomness ≠ free will as naively construed.)

To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash!

What do you mean by "needed"? Needed to explain base reality? No moral framework is needed for that, consequentialism no more so than the other two. Needed to cultivate what would generally (across times and places) be regarded as a high standard of morality? No. Needed to characterize the moral systems of individuals and societies? No: some people believe, or act as though they believe, in non-consequentialist moralities. Or, take my case: I don't "believe" in any kind of morality. What I mostly have is feelings that particular states of affairs (or actions) would be good or bad -- not even good or bad, as those are post hoc characterizations of my feelings -- rather, some specific feeling in each scenario compels me to act in a certain way, or turns my thoughts in a certain direction. Such feelings are the basis of morality for everyone. Sometimes I reason about my feelings, but I never delude myself into thinking that in doing so I uncover "moral truths"; and even if I discover a "contradiction" in my feelings, I accept both feelings and the contradiction along with them, as no feelings can ever really be in contradiction the way two propositions can be; after all, I did have both of them. Sometimes people, myself included, feel moved to assent to higher-level principles that purport to govern the way they should feel about more atomic situations. Some of those principles, really just since the 19th century but with some proto-examples here and there, are about universal states of affairs, as in consequentialism, although as you might have guessed, I tend to find those the hardest to take seriously in that they're the remotest from the feelings that undergird all morality. Insofar as consequentialist arguments do sometimes resonate with me, that resonance coexists or alternates with other resonances across the spectrum of abstractness. So where does the privileged position of consequentialism come from? What is it uniquely needed for? Because to me, its main utility seems to be to empower nerds to pretend to reason rigorously/quantitatively about morality to the point that they forget that what they are reasoning about is a completely artificial construct that explains nothing.

(My favorite example of this is Sam Harris's quest many years back to solve ethics (such was his framing) by pinpointing the neural correlates of happiness. (Phase 2 was going to be to figure out how to configure society so as to maximally stimulate them, or something like that. Yes, it really was that retarded.) "Doesn't assuming that good = happiness sidestep... all of ethics?" Yes, but you see, what matters is that we scientists have answers, and it's your fault for asking the wrong questions.)

Prioritizing a virtue above and beyond its apparent consequences is really just going up a level and looking at second/third/fourth/etc order effects - sure, in this instance a bad thing happens, but because Virtue is preserved later more goodness happens with higher total value. It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.

Some people really are virtue ethicists. Traditional Christian morality treats virtues as ends in themselves. Probably a resurrected medieval theologian wouldn't deny that virtuous conduct tends to manifest in benefits for the self/community, but they would still choose a world of maximally virtuous people who experience perpetual suffering over a world of unvirtuous people who experience perpetual bliss. Evil people experiencing bliss might even be a bad thing in its own right. Consequentialists can fold that in by stipulating that they believe in utilitarianism for the good and reverse-utilitarianism for the evil, but then they have to give an account of good and evil in non-consequentialist terms. There is of course a trivial sense in which all conceivable morality is consequentialist -- "According to my world model, which currently extends only as far as the room I am standing in, and my constantly fluctuating value function, which assigns a high negative value to the unpunched face of the guy who just insulted me, it would improve the global state of affairs for me to punch him in the face" -- but that's boring, akin to the trivial sense in which every action is selfish.

This comment is long enough, so I'll leave it there.

Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics? Superdeterminism sounds pretty cheap. What extra cost does it impose on us, besides needing to assume the expansion of the universe (which we already accept) began at a single point rather than beginning from some non-single-point state?

None. So accept it. Quantum randomness is just what the current state looks like from within our light cone. With a (much) longer cone, we'd see the causality. It's all just frames of reference. From within our light cone quantum results are indistinguishable from the probabilistic models, and so since we can't escape our light cone there's no reason to worry about predetermination. Universally predetermined, locally random.

It is much more expensive than you give it credit for. Superdeterminism sweeps away all laws of nature and replaces them with one: "whatever happens, happens." It is the equivalent of "dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to lead people astray" in terms of explaining away some undesired physical finding (ancient extinct creatures or physical randomness:) absolutely any phenomenon is compatible with the theory, because absolutely any phenomenon could have been predetermined to happen/planted by Satan, with all existing evidence leading us to suspect otherwise also having been predetermined/planted. The theory has no predictive power, and thus can't be most parsimonious.

That is not my understanding of superdeterminism - it is extending determinism to quantum (and all probabilistic) phenomena and thus necessarily forming one causal chain from end to end through the entire universe, which does indeed follow lightly from a free-will-free determinism that only leaves probabilistic corners. If that is not correct, mea culpa, give this extension of determinism a different name.

If you want to salvage determinism, just go with many-worlds. That gives you a deterministic multiverse, which is good enough for most people, though it doesn't produce a deterministic universe from the observer's perspective, and that's good, because the evidence really does suggest that one universe isn't deterministic.

I'm not a many-worlds partisan, myself, but it's useful to illustrate the point that there is not, from any observer's point of view at any moment in time, One True Future that could be determined, Laplace's Demon style, through total knowledge of the current state of the universe, because, in the many-worlds view, there are infinitely many futures ahead, and any prediction you make would either have to be accurate for all of them if it needs to be guaranteed to be correct (such predictions are "motteish:" true but trivial) or else it would only be, at best, probabilistically correct (i.e., the most likely choice, but decreasingly likely to be correct the more ambitious it is: "baileyish.")

So to recover determinism from a situation where it appears one cannot determine the future, many-worlds says that all possible futures actually exist, none more real than any other (well, unless you weight them by probability...) If the idea of every physically possible continuation of the universe's initial conditions being real is more palatable to you than any sort of non-determinism, then many-worlds is for you.

Superdeterminism, by contrast, recovers determinism for a single universe by saying that physics aren't random at all, but are only pretending to be. Beautiful perfect statistical matches to theoretical predictions of quantum randomness are observed because - well, because it pleased the Uncaused Cause that it should be so. Reality is pulling the wool over our eyes (and if about this - then about what else? We can never know...) This isn't something I can say is false - it is no more falsifiable than, well, any other theism, frankly. But cleaving to it doesn't sound like hard-nosed empiricism to me - maybe more like Calvinism.

But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.

But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.

Bold of you to assume I had a choice in the matter.

Essentially everything comes down to empiricism and consequentialism

Well, hmm, hold on just a second here. Sure, it's fun to pour the acid of clear-headed skepticism all over lame normie beliefs, but it seems like you're being a little selective in what gets dissolved. Doesn't this call for a bit of positive work?

Consequentialism is grounded, in some vague sense, in consequences. Things going well if one thing happens, poorly if a different thing happens, etc. Let's go with "well" and "poorly" for the sake of argument. Can you trace out, at a high level, how we get those ought-ish counterfactuals from the is-es that remain? We could start with something picayune like torture, the standard arguments against which generally reference pain somehow, but it's clear where that would go -- something about tissue damage and perhaps altered brain chemistry affecting the future productivity of the organism. That would be fine, but I'm more wondering about "productivity" in the first place. Like, why is it better if one thing happens versus another? What would be poor about humanity getting wiped out tomorrow? Remember that answers like "well, we think we have feelings so they're a useful fiction" just affirm the consequent, via "useful".

For us now-enlightened folks, why does anything matter exactly? Wasn't all that crap just built on top of what we've discarded? Shouldn't we really continue the adulting and admit that nothing matters?

"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive [oh hey a typo] systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).

Reason cannot tell you what is good. It never could in any physicalist frame because "good" is not a physical or measurable property. It's not even defined! Pure consequentialism doesn't try to pretend it is.
You take your axioms, your selection of what is good and what is bad, and then you measure how much of what you have taken as good or bad results from an act. Attempts at other ethical systems are higher-order evaluations, "the kind of society that... the kind of person that... the kind of thinking that... results from... results in the kind of thinking that... which results in the kind of person that... which results in the kind of society that..." and so on. You be virtuous (however that is defined) not because doing so makes you happier right now, but because the downstream effects bring about good results (by your measure). You do not engage in a specific bad act (however that is defined) not because it causes a specific bad thing to happen in the moment, but because the downstream effects make the world worse (by your measure). Mapping it all manually is hard, so ethical frameworks make good heuristics, but that does not make them "true" - it only makes them useful.

OK, that sounds kind of like good and bad are a bunch of arbitrary BS, and if one knows that then one would have less reason to pay attention to it, but that doesn't seem to be what you think.

Anyway, I'll imagine you'll concede, since it seems really obvious, that what people take to be good or bad will be drastically different once they internalize that subjective experience is an illusion, correct? I mean, the whole current edifice is built on top of that BS we're discarding, so it would be very surprising if it all arrived at the same place. Especially given that there is no "place" because it isn't, and apparently can't be, defined. So .. any guidance? Is your message, most of what we believe is wrong but all that stuff stays the same, don't worry? Why do you think anyone would come to that conclusion?

Or am I just tilting and windmills because good and bad are arbitrary BS after all?

Har har, very funny, but you're not talking to a much more straw-filled version of me, you're talking to the actual me. There is no ground to stand on when trying to define "good" without dualism of some sort, because there is no objective connection between the adjective "good" and any part of the physical world. Good is describing different things entirely depending on reference frame - if there exist 10x our number of aliens whose lives/utility functions/whatever thing you want to find valuable are irreconcilably opposed to ours (they only live if we die, they are only happy if we are sad, etc) then there is no classical definition we can even potentially share. There is no universal reference frame for goodness, and there cannot be one. The only way to reason about goodness is to take an axiom that gives goodness a definition. That is not my stance, that is the only way pure physicalism can ever be. Pick one, check your conversational/civilizational partners roughly agree, then proceed.

You misunderstand (and in the process create a bit of a word salad). I never asked for a universal conception of well/poorly, I'm fine settling for a human-race or cultural or even person-specific one. All of those that we're familiar with are founded on stuff you're tossing out. Which is fine, maybe good and bad should go to. Instead, you just seem to be assuming some version of "That stuff has to go, but this stuff can stay" but not addressing and perhaps not even realizing that. (At the same time as disparaging philosophy in general while praising consequentialism, when it's not easy to think of a purer product of philosophy than consequentialism.)

You're not being coherent, which is a bad trait in someone who seems to think they know more than other people.

Searle's Chinese Room is no more interesting than p-zombies - both are empty questions. If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.

...

Since everything non-quantum is fully clockwork without free will, can we clean up quantum mechanics?

How does your belief in everything non-quantum being fully clockwork yield non-identical predictions to my belief in free will? I contend that in this case the answer is not mu, as my belief in free will delivers superior predictions about reality. My evidence for this is the way that every functional system we have relating to managing interpersonal interactions operate off the assumption of free will, zero functional systems for managing interpersonal interactions operate off deterministic assumptions, and every attempt to build such systems off deterministic assumptions (and there have been many) have uniformly failed.

But how could it be any other way?

Reality around us could not be baseline reality, and our minds have a connection to the actual baseline reality. It doesn't really matter if baseline reality is God or the simulation server in this case. Claims that our minds are deterministic must confront the fact that they do not operate in a deterministic fashion at any level, and most claims and even evidence to the contrary appear to have been falsified.

Determined if you zoom out enough and crank the simulation hard enough doesn't mean it looks determined from up close in-the-moment, same as quantum experiments looking random from inside our lightcone. If the best information you've got looks like free will, use your free will heuristics.

...but if you have better information, well then, feel free to discard another wrong model. Do you have such better information? Knowable and known are distinct.

Why does he need better information to discard your theory? It's your theory that needs to provide better information to justify its adoption.

You misread me. He and you and everyone else are free to use free will as a model, but know that it is a map and not the territory and if/when you get better data, you must discard it.

In turn, so must you. It is on you to demonstrate that your claims of the territory are not just another, and inferior, map.

I believe that if you buy physicalism, I already have. You just have to take it seriously. Further, I'm reasonably certain that if the highest weighted values of an explanation are predictive power and parsimony, physicalism must be selected. If your explanatory judgment criteria are different, I admit little I've said should move you.

If you have to assume the conclusion to be convinced by what follows, you are presenting the map, not the terrain. Particularly when it requires- as you have to @FCfromSSC - ignoring the limitations of the model all the more conspicuously when pointed out.

There is nothing particularly reasonable about requiring pre-commitment to a model. It is an act of faith. Faith can be a useful approach for those who cannot prove foundational beliefs- it is completely tangential to being true or not- but 'just trust me, bro' is not a position from which someone can accuse others of ignoring reality in favor of their own model.

If better data arrives that goes against determinism, should we discard it? Because determinism has been a popular theory for a very long time, the various deterministic theories have been empirically tested, and they have been uniformly falsified. What you are proposing here is the final stage of Determinism of the Gaps, refusing to acknowledge all previous tests and all previous data, making no testable predictions at all, and relying entirely on, to put it succinctly, faith.

Sure, that might change in the future. Also in the future, the Son of Man might return on a cloud in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Also in the future, the stars in the night sky might be replaced by a high-score readout, and then reality as we know it gets turned off. But I have actually read a few of the old books, enough to know that what your argument is not particularly new, and what is relatively new is the part where you've (wisely) given up on making empirical claims or predictions entirely. I disagree that Determinism should be treated as the best available hypothesis when it now makes no predictions and all previous predictions it made have been falsified.

I do recognize that this is tangential to your main point, though, and my apologies. it's a bugbear for me.

In a purely physical world, there can't be anything that "goes against determinism". You have to bite the whole bullet or not at all.

I really wish people weren't downvoting you just because they disagree. You are clearly contributing tremendously to discussion regardless.

Yes, I'm aware that if we assume a particular form of hard Materialism axiomatically, then Determinism or something much like it is a necessary consequence. But there is no actual reason to take that particular form of hard Materialism as one's axiom, and crucially, adopting it as an axiom appears, speaking strictly within the Materialist frame, to degrade rather than improve one's ability to make predictions about the material world.

To accept any theist view, one has to find some element of the world that cannot be explained by physics, else parsimony demands we not introduce the relevant deity.

That is one hell of an assumption you smuggled in there. And as far as I can tell (maybe I'm missing it), you don't argue for it, but just take it as given. I don't think it is true though. You can certainly declare it axiomatically if you like, but the thing about axioms is that nobody has to actually agree with them if they don't want to, so I think it robs your argument of much persuasive power if you choose to take that route.

Good post btw, obviously I disagree with it but still good stuff. I'm too tired to really give you the vigorous discussion it deserves, but I do appreciate it.

Parsimony very much does demand not introducing deities when physics already explains all elements, no further assumptions needed. The relevant objection is whether parsimony is appropriate, and you're now the second person to come from that angle, so maybe I do need to add a bit about why it is.

I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. [...] I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.

"Free will" is a popular card [...] a useful fiction

For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.

To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! [...] It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.

If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe.

Yes, it is quite possible to airily deny the existence of anything that your theory disagrees with, and therefore prove that your theory is right. It's very popular, and the basis of Scientism. But nevertheless, I am aware that I have a rich inner life, I am aware that I choose to do things and to not do things, and your theory's only response is 'ar har har, of course you don't, it's all an illusion.' Well, I do, and cold realism offers no explanation. Parsimony is a guide, not a master. If I were to psychoanalyse I would say that people are attracted to the feeling of being strong and brave enough to throw away the supposed comforts of lesser men, but it won't work. We're no closer to having a genuine understanding of the human mind than we've ever been, and any claim by neuroscientists otherwise is based on either an incredibly optimistic scaling up of electrode experiments or the naive application of whichever engineering theory is in vogue at the moment. A hundred years ago Karl Lorenz thought that we were switchboards; later we became computer programs and electromagnetic fields, last decade it was Bayes and Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning and now it's LLMs.

A dog is allowed to enjoy the taste of human food that fell to the floor without any presupposition of a soul or self-conception that would pass the mirror test, and you are allowed to have a rich inner life composed of your various physical systems without attributing mystery to it. Your brain is doing a lot of things, all the time.

I don't know the third thing about how the brain works (I barely know the second), but I don't need to know the how to show that physicalism demands that whatever it is it must be a deterministic or probabilistic process just as I can show there is a Kolmogorov complexity of some object without being able to tell you what it is. If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.

If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.

Yes, this is my point. You have proclaimed that you are right, and therefore that you must be right. Philosophy has been 'solved' for a long time in that if you start off at certain places, you tend to arrive at certain conclusions along reasonably well-trodden paths. It has failed in that in almost every case it is impossible to prove those conclusions to those who don't share them.

Ultimately people tend to cluster philosophically according to their society, their base intuitions and their experience. 'Parsimony' to me means accepting my understanding of the world and myself at broadly face value. I experience agency -> I have agency. I have subjective experience, and we really have no idea of the nature of that 'subject' or how that experience is produced. I find 'free will is an illusion' and 'consciousness is an phenomenon of neuronal voltage shifts' to be motivated reasoning, considerably less parsimonious than accepting the reality of my experience, and proposed broadly because the prospect of two magesteria makes modern people uncomfortable.

That said, I applaud your writing your thoughts down, and I don't want to come across as too salty, but I do think it's wise to consider your conclusions as contingent on certain philosophical choices rather than plain for all to see.

To those who don't accept brute physicalism, sure, I've done nothing. But there are a great many who sure seem to like labeling themselves physicalists, yet hold on to some strange ideas that I don't think hold up. So I've only solved one half of philosophy, downstream of the physical fork.

Eh, physicalism probably accounts for some decent % of philosophy if you account it purely in terms of number of papers produced. But in terms of the possibility space of philosophy, assuming you've solved every question you've raised downstream of physicalism, you've solved maybe 1%.

Is just offhanded snark. I have no philosophical grounding - for all I know 80% of all philosophical texts are centered around whether a hot dog is a sandwich.

To quote one of my previous posts:

there is an immense tradition of theory out there, and if you don't put in the years or decades required to study it you will at best be making new mistakes, but more likely making ones decades or centuries old. Plenty of great philosophers have said "everybody before me was wrong"; none of them arrived at that conclusion without exhaustive study of the tradition (yes, even Wittgenstein).

A lot of rationalist/scientist/new atheist/whatever guys want to hack philosophy without engaging with the tradition, and unfortunately it just doesn't work. There's a way of thinking that, if you went back to meet Isaac Newton with a modern physics textbook and explained it to him, he would agree that actually, yeah, we've figured almost all of his questions out, great that we're moving on. This is not the case with philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the eternal questions, the ones which are so difficult and complex that they couldn't be spun off into a science. In fact, that's basically the history of "philosophy" as a term - it was once the study of everything, then natural philosophy slowly became the hard sciences, other parts of philosophy became the soft sciences (for better and for worse), and philosophy remains as the questions which are too big or too thorny for the scientific mindset to tackle. Analytic philosophy has in part been an attempt to chunk off more problems into a domain of scientific assessment, but hasn't gone too well, and the eternal questions remain eternal. Also, beautiful.

Given physicalism, why something exists rather than nothing and its related reformulations are the sole family of questions that are outside the domain of science. That's a lot of the point of my post. You can't posit things beyond science if the physical is all you have and philosophical attempts to do so are confused. Is the thing you're pointing at in and of the world or is it external? If everything is in and of the world, then all things are moved only by things in and of the world and so all apparently hard questions have answers in and of the world.

More comments

Contra Nick Fuentes, Hitler, Nazis on Antisemitism: An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright.

Over the past several years I’ve come to terms with accepting the reality of HBD and its implications on my political views. Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level: Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.

The left-leaning, mainstream-media-liberal explanation for these observations in the disparity between group outcomes seem to… not notice it at all. When mainstream media liberals are reluctantly forced to explain these differences in outcomes they will blame a “bad environment” or blame white people for the legacy of colonialism. These hypotheses both reject the agency that minorities have over their own wellbeing and ignore the vast amount of data in intelligence research and group differences in psychology that predict the bad outcomes that we observe.

I think that understanding HBD just means that you realize that bad people CAUSE bad environments, not the other way around. The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.

While it’s obviously social, romantic, and career suicide for any individual to openly admit that they understand HBD (i.e. admit that they’re racist), the Right at the very least tends to adopts policies that people who are openly racist would support. The right tends to support stricter immigration laws, harsher penalties for violent criminals, and to support law enforcement in their goals of catching and deporting people who are here illegally. As a HBD understander, I like these policies.

While many metrics paint the western world as the most divided it has ever been, there is something that the right and left both seem to find agreement on recently: hating Jews. Young people in particular and especially in academia are supporting antisemitic beliefs in America at record rates probably not seen since 1930’s - not only about Israel the state but also about Jews the people.

If you couldn’t tell from the title of the post: I like the Jews. They’re intelligent, hardworking people who are high in conscientiousness and very low in violent crime. I believe that western society has benefited tremendously over the last several hundred years from the millions of Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers living among us. Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high IQ, and everyone in a society benefits when there are more smart people in that society. Smart Jews make more money than goys, and pay more in taxes as a result. Jewish-owned businesses make lots of great middle class jobs for the rest of us. The tax revenue from those high earning Jews can go to investing in roads, schools, healthcare, food stamps, social security, public housing, and other government benefits that make Western countries so great to live in. I want to live in places with lots of Jews, and I think that you should too.

Quite frankly, I don’t really respect the opinions of the modern liberal when it comes to social issues. Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue, and (when it comes to immigration) they’re wrong in ways that are fundamentally undermining the ability of every western civilization to continue to exist 30 years from now. So it isn’t surprising to me to see that Antisemitism is rising on the political left - The left is “wrong about every social issue” so of course they’re wrong about hating the Jews, too.

But the right also has alarmingly high rates of antisemitism. And this makes me especially sad because I would otherwise call the political right my ideological allies on every other issue. The rising popularity of Nick Fuentes obviously is the most noteworthy example, and of course being an intellectually curious person I have listened to several hours of Nick talk about Jews. His main criticisms seem to be over the US’s support of Israel, as well as the undue influence that Jews have over US policymaking. And most critically, Nick believes that the Jews are using that influence to try to tear down the West.

My criticism of Nick Fuentes starts thusly: Nick’s beliefs don’t have internal consistency. If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?? Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Moreover, Nick’s opinions about Jews make testable predictions: if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.

Re: Fuentes on Israel: If you look at the data since 1947, the US has in fact given more money to Israel than any other country to the tune of $300 billion (as measured on 2024 dollars) over the past 79 years. This averages to $3.8billion per year on average. That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion. $3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me. I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot.

For the most part, I agree with Nick’s “America First” agenda. So you could convince me to axe the “give free stuff to Israel” from the US’s budget. But Nick getting so nonsensically angry over such a small line item on our nation’s balance sheet is just wildly disproportionate. I don’t really care about giving a small amount of money to Israel.

What I do care about is that the government of every Western country is stealing money from the productive White/Asian/Jewish middle class (via tax dollars) only to give that money to dozens of immigration non-profits. These nonprofits use this money to import hundreds of thousands of people from the most dangerous, violent, and backwards countries in the world. When those room-temperature-IQ people move into your neighborhoods, they are given free cars, free food, free housing, which the “refugees” then use to commit fraud, steal, and continue to be the violent, stabby creatures that they are. Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel?? Who gives a shit about Israel, Nick.

Nick, of course, blames the hoard of third world migrants on the Jews that are living in Western countries. The evidence for this is that there’s a disproportionate number of Jews that work for the institutions that are destroying this country. As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.

The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years is NOT some secret cabal of Jews conspiring to destroy the countries that they share with us. It seems much more likely that outside actors who actually have a vested interest in watching the US and Europe collapse are to blame: the Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones. Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire. The Chinese definitely want to see America be as multicultural as possible and promote identity politics to create more divisions within us.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us, the Jews will be overrepresented in the political, military and cultural institutions that are fighting for western civilization. The Jews helped us beat Hitler. The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union. The Jews can help us beat China. The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.

Tl;dr: Nick Fuentes is wrong. Happy Hanukkah. Be nice to Jews, and definitely don’t put them in gas chambers.

Yeah this is the line @2rafa has argued often in the past, quite convincingly. I agree that Jews in general are some of, if not the most, single strongest genetic group in terms of IQ and other desirable traits.

I do wish Fuentes and others would work more on getting Jews aligned with the general nativist agenda as opposed to re igniting blood libel. Unfortunately they feel betrayed because Jews have admittedly been huge pushing the overall progressive consensus after the Holocaust. It’s a tricky subject, but I’m much more on the side of converting Jews instead of kicking them all out or murdering them.

Ah sorry if this subject is well-worn territory. I haven't been as active of a Motte-izen to keep up with the conversational metagame here.

No worries. It can be good to go back through old topics anyway, not a problem at all.

I’m much more on the side of converting Jews instead of kicking them all out or murdering them.

Is there any evidence they want to convert? More or less their entire history is them resisting assimilation. They are a self proclaimed diaspora people. At any time they could (and some have) stopped and assimilated into a host nation. There remains a dedicated group that do not want to assimilate and instead want to pursue their own interests.

They don't need to be kicked out or murdered in America. They need to be removed from power because they're using that power to further causes that harm Americans.

Israel has low PISA scores

A handful of studies showing marginal gains in IQ by measuring elite jews in NYC doesn't say much. If arab IQ was measured by testing in fancy parts of Dubai their scores would be impressive as well. Try Iq testing some west bank settlers for different results.

Israel has low PISA scores

That's not too surprising. It is 20% Arab, and of the (school-age) Jewish population, most are Sephardi, and of the (more intelligent) Ashkenazi, a large chunk are Haredi, who do poorly on PISA because they reject secular education, not because they're stupid.

When people talk about Jewish intelligence, they're talking about the Ashkenazi Jews, because they make up about 80% of global Jewry, and almost 100% in western countries.

The interesting question is what happens when the Haredi take over the land between the River and Sea demographically. They're smart, but a population where the men spend most of their time studying the Torah and refuse military service is gonna struggle surrounded by hostile neighbours and dwindling global support. Israel needs to work out how to keep the Haredi pumping out children while putting them to more productive use.

Wow, that's a solid stat pull. I'm genuinely surprised by it.

Ashkenazim are a minority in Israël, and are outperformed by the local Arab Christians(who also probably have high average IQ).

A lot of the hate for Jews comes from the following areas:

  1. Genuine (stupid) Neo Nazis that hate Jews for little reason other than because Hitler hated them 80 years ago. Some people want to keep up the LARP.
  2. Disgruntlement that the US has acted like an arm of Israeli foreign policy with almost no pushback for peoples' entire lives.
  3. Jewish domination of culture relative to their population count, and their pushing of leftist propaganda from their positions of power. Jews are overrepresented due to their high verbal IQ, and this has given them quite a bit of clout. Dumb rightists have hallucinated a coordinated attempt to destroy America, when the reality is much simpler: smart people are just overwhelmingly liberal no matter where you go. There was also extra incentive for Jews to push for leftism since they perceived the Right as their main threat for a long time and many probably thought that an America that was dedicated to multiculturalism was the best defense against anti-Semitism.

I personally agree that Jews are pretty great overall, and it seems like they've been having a slow-motion awakening on the threats of mass-migration. A good chunk of them are becoming socially conservative, but are leaning towards a more intelligent conservatism rather than the conspiratorial populist rightism. Maybe they'll be the ones to eventually salvage the Republican party, doing the job that the tech-right was supposed to do but utterly failed at.

The liberalism of Jews is an interesting connection, because is it their will-to-power driving them towards the dominant ideology like other elites (in which sense they are captured) or is it because they support liberalism because it promotes Jewish interests (much easier to compete in a society as a Jew if you don't have compete with White enthnonats coordinating against you)?

I think in the Palestinian question, liberalism hurts them as they are simply another Right wing apartheid state that progressives want to crush (continue the march of Unitarianism). White enthnonats would not much care if they seized all Palestinian territory and paid them to leave (might trigger a local Middle Eastern war, I know). Conflicting incentives all round.

If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?

The jews are not a monolith. Some of them like these institutions, many with money and power don't. They want to reshape these institutions into ones that are more friendly to jews, regardless of how it affects Americans.

Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one?

Again, they're not a monolith. Secular, diaspora jews aren't super happy with the animosity Israel is generating. The Zionist jews would prefer jews moved to Israel, so they're ok with it. Regardless, this debate is happening without any regard for Americans (outside of how impacts on Americans might impact jews).

if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.

Does anyone suspect jews want a Muslim takeover? I've never heard that from Fuentes or any others. They want diversity not homogeneity.

That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion

Fuentes has said nearly verbatim this line here. If you listened further, he explains that there are other costs that don't show up on a budget sheet. Financial costs, as well as social costs when you have "I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot." kind of attitudes. Mass death is morally reprehensible and weakens our stature on the global stage.

Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel??

He's mad about this too. Ultimately it's the same root problem. The elites in our society do not put Americans first. It happens that a large number of elites (by count and certainly by power) are Jewish, and pursue Jewish interests - be that Israel's defense or ensuring a diverse society so diaspora jews can thrive. Neither of which any sane person could say is putting American's first. Like you'd see viewing a flamegraph of American sovereignty problems, the biggest bang for our buck right now is focusing on Jewish power. There are many other problems, but this one is the most glaring.

The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years

This has been going on heavy since the 60's and before that to lesser degrees. Kevin MacDonald has some books on this, though the physical copies are rather expensive these days. It's a pretty nuanced issue - especially with the years of cultural conditioning most of us have to unwind. The American Pravda series by Ron Unz (quarter Jewish) is a great intro, though you really need to read the source literature as well if you want to effectively understand these positions.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years

Not really. We were in a good position post ww2 to move towards peaceful coexistence but giving Israel the land it has now really threw a wrench in that.

If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions??

"Destroy" seems like a bailey to a motte of "exploit"/"keep from realising their full potential", to which this objection does not apply. Compare "if slavery abolitionists are correct that slaves are slaving away for their masters, then why would the masters want to [do bad things] to those slaves?"

As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.

This looks plausible when youre only looking at that one question, less so otherwise. For example, the pattern of jewish overrepresentation in certain jobs and the majority getting mad at it is found broadly in space and time, which cant be explained by Ashkenazi selection in the middle ages. And the state of Israel, while certainly better than its neighbours, doesnt seem especially impressive compared to other western countries.

For example, the pattern of jewish overrepresentation in certain jobs and the majority getting mad at it is found broadly in space and time, which cant be explained by Ashkenazi selection in the middle ages.

Arab Jews have the same relative advantage in the Middle East that European Jews did in European lands. 95 IQ in a land of 84s is as much an advantage as 112 is in a land of 100s.

For a contemporary example, see the Lebanese who dominate commercial life in large parts of West Africa. In much of the West (outside of America which got the most elite Maronites), these are not hugely impressive immigrants - in Australia many are considered a underclass! - but in West Africa they are a market dominant minority, sometimes to a scarcely believable extent in places like Liberia, but to a great extent even in the larger nations.

Sephardic Jewry’s outperformance in European lands (where the differential was less) was more contingent. They did well enough for a time under the Arabs as a middle man minority, and restrictions on usury meant many adopted roles in finance / lending too, and therefore were early to the shipping and capital markets boom in the mercantile age in Amsterdam, but the advantage was less than it was in either Ashkenazi or Mizrachi lands.

In a way, that arguably led to less antisemitism, which while certainly prevalent in the inquisition etc, was probably still substantially less violent than the Jewish experience during the crusades in Western and Central Europe or in Eastern Europe later in the millennium, or the Jewish experience in Persia, which alternated between semi-tolerance and what European Jewish visitors in the 17th and 18th centuries often considered the worst persecution they had encountered.

Fair, for some reason the other jews are usually compared to western populations also. Still, the versions of selection Ive heard for central/eastern europe kick in late relative to the history of persecution - often, with parts of that persecution as a cause. And I would guess the MENA version went similarly.

This looks plausible when youre only looking at that one question, less so otherwise. For example, the pattern of jewish overrepresentation in certain jobs and the majority getting mad at it is found broadly in space and time, which cant be explained by Ashkenazi selection in the middle ages.

Jews were barred (by Christians!) from a whole bunch of things in the past. That means they'd have to be over-represented in other things. Christians also barred themselves for some things, which left Jews over-represented there.

And the state of Israel, while certainly better than its neighbours, doesnt seem especially impressive compared to other western countries.

Its per-capita GDP (nominal) puts it between Finland and Germany, #12 and #11 in Europe. Above the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. Pretty good for having the handicap of being located in the Middle East. And having all those non-Ashkenazim around too.

The phenomenon is not limited to christian lands. And many peoples have been barred from many things; most of them do not become the jews.

It also seems like you agree with me that the early versions of the pattern where not caused by intelligence; I think this suggests the later versions, seemingly following a very similar script, also werent. You seems to think youve countered my argument if the jews werent at fault, thats not the point.

Pretty good for having the handicap of being located in the Middle East. And having all those non-Ashkenazim around too.

Yeah, I dont think it works like that. For all the attention given to their security issues, they seem to have it pretty well under control, and money spent on it counts to GDP anyway. And the rest of the West has plenty bad demographics at this point, and the non-ashkenazi jews are still comparable to europeans. This should be more or less proportional. You can also see it in other measures, eg nobel prices to diaspora vs israelis vs born israelis - which would even be less affected by the lower percentiles, still collapse.

It also seems like you agree with me that the early versions of the pattern where not caused by intelligence

Early versions of the pattern were part of what resulted in selecting for intelligence.

I think this suggests the later versions, seemingly following a very similar script, also werent.

They do not follow a similar script. The Christians who wouldn't engage in moneylending might well have hated the Jews for being moneylenders (especially if they were in debt), but they didn't hate them because they were somehow preventing Christians from being moneylenders.

but they didn't hate them because they were somehow preventing Christians from being moneylenders

I dont think that plays such a role in the latter ones either. I think very few of the people complaining about (((bankers))) and (((Hollywood))) where interested in careers there. And even if it did play a role, they are still clearly similar to each other relative to the full range of prosecutions experienced by ethnic groups in general, and the breadth in time and space of those prosecutions remains unusual. It would be a strange coincidence for these not to have a common mechanism, and just proposing that the first mechanism caused the second does not by itself reduce the coincidence. The evidential bar for this is a lot higher than "can tell a reasonable just so story", and data on jewish intelligence only supports one step.

Also, as a general rule, "Were worse off because were better than everyone else" is copium, doubly so if its "better" in a pragmatic sense.

I'd like to write a more substantive response to your post, but I have a question first.

Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue,

Are you sure about this? I am not entirely sure your understanding of HBD is the same as mine. While I don't mean to attack you, your post doesn't really seem to show any understanding of HBD beyond the idea that IQ exists and has measurable differences on outcomes. What, exactly, does HBD mean to you?

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us,

What would the West "actually declaring war against Islam" actually look like? and how is "Islam" at war with the West? I'm not disputing that Islamic terrorism is a problem and that poorly integrated migrants is a very bad idea. But the majority of the Arab world is aligned with the US and has armies supplied by the US. Even the largest Arab county in opposition Algeria is because of secular socialism. Other powerful Islamic countries like Turkey and Indonesia are hardly enemies of the West and full of Western tourists, that doesn't look like a war to me. If it's because of migration, I agree Europe's policies are horrible but they invited the migrants that's hardly a war.

So why do you think Islam is at war with the west and what policies do you think we should pursue when you say we should "muster the courage to declare war on Islam?"

I don't want Western governments to actually invade any desert countries. I'm not an idiot, I don't want another war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nobody wants that except for Northrup Grumman shareholders.

I want my government to forcibly expel people from the countries who are a net liability to every country that they enter (See the chart on page 21 of this pdf if you want to see the data). This means ZERO muslim refugees from Africa and the Middle east. It means deporting blacks/muslims who are already here by the millions. It means giving ICE a blank check to arrest violent Hispanics and send them back to El Salvador. Seriously, give ICE almost unlimited money. Each minority deported will save the American taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their children/descendents even moreso. Unquantifiable amounts of damage letting muslims reproduce in our country. Give ICE 10x their current budget. It's the best investment this country can make. This means shutting down all of the non-profits I hinted at in my original post. It means revoking millions of H1B VISA's and other refugee VISAs. It means arresting philanthropists who are attempting to bring in these undesirables and hold them accountable for the damage that they are causing to the country.

When I say "declare war on islam" I mean actually designing our immigration infrastructure to keep and acquire people who are capable of contributing to a safe, stable western society. Muslims have proven over and over again they're incapable of this.

These are normal authright opinions, I think.

/images/17658588701348522.webp

I don't disagree with most of that (unless be deporting people already here you mean stripping people of citizenship). But I wouldn't describe it as declaring war just enforcing immigration law.

So "declare war on Islam" means treating Muslims roughly the same way you want to treat all nonwhite immigrants in the US? That isn't a standard sense of the term "war".

The thing about all this is even the Jews themselves don't believe it. They watch It's a Wonderful Life or Harry Potter or Star Wars, and see characters like Potter and the goblins and Watto and say "That's me! Yes, they're not technically Jewish, but it's an antisemitic stereotype!" You literally cannot put a greedy, sleazy character in a story without the Jews saying you must be talking about them. Why do the Jews never look at George Bailey or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker and say "That's me! Yes, he may not be canonically Jewish, but he's obviously just a stand-in for a Jew in this fictional setting."

For what it's worth, they're hardly alone in this. The Russians watch LotR and see the orcs and say "That's me!" They even play horde in WoW.

Not everyone wants to be a hero. Heck, I myself play Diablo, see Zoltun Kulle, and say "That's me!"

For what it's worth, they're hardly alone in this. The Russians watch LotR and see the orcs and say "That's me!" They even play horde in WoW.

Everyone who's anyone plays horde in WoW. Come on now.

It's kinda amusing--my innate distaste for Orcs was so strong that when I played Warcraft 3 as a youngster, I was annoyed that I couldn't skip the Orc campaign, so I just stopped playing the campaign entirely. (Which was ridiculous, since as it turns out, the Orc campaign is really good!).

What was always especially odd to me is that as I've grown up and encountered people who identify as orcs (nobody in my circles growing up did), they're not people I'd have identified as orc-ish at all. Like Russians do not look anything like orcs to me, and I found it astonishing they would interpret Lord of the Rings as such. Maybe the very lower class, prison sort kinda look like orcs, but one could say that just as well of the British lower class, or probably any lower class. And Grubby was (and still is) one of my favorite pro gamers, and he's the Warcraft 3 Orc God. Grubby looks about as opposite of an orc as a human could possibly look.

As an adult, the whole theme has become even more amusing: Warcraft 3 obviously got the term "orc" from Tolkien, but Tolkien wasn't the first to use the term, either! The first, to my knowledge, to use it was William Blake, who used it in a similar but slightly different sense: Orc is not what we'd call the orcs themselves, but is rather a spirit of destructive rebellion that possesses humans. He uses it to refer to the Americans in America, A Prophecy, where he gives um... a very unflattering description of Americans, basically burning down everything beautiful in the world and infesting it with fire and plagues in their war against the angel Albion.

To get back to Tolkien, here is his explanation of where the word came from and early thoughts on The Problem of Orcs:

(1) Various letters of 1954

Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc ‘demon’, but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions’. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in. The name has the form orch (pl. yrch) in Sindarin and uruk in the Black Speech.

(2)

Your preference of goblins to orcs involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my part. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not ‘goblins’, not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble). Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome. I hope in the Appendices to Vol. III to be able to include a note ‘On translation’ in which the matter of equivalences and my uses may be made clearly. My difficulty has been that, since I have tried to present a kind of legendary and history of a ‘forgotten epoch’, all the specific terms were in a foreign language, and no precise equivalents exist in English

(3) Draft of unsent letter

Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord ‘created’ Trolls and Orcs. He says he ‘made’ them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard’s statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. ...But if they ‘fell’, as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things ‘for himself, to be their Lord’, these would then ‘be’, even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other ‘rational’ creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least ‘be’ real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even ‘mocking’ the Children of God. They would be Morgoth’s greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote ‘irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.) But whether they could have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible ‘delegation’, I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would ‘tolerate’ that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today.

(4)

Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. ...But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.

(5) Notes on 1956 review by Auden of LOTR

Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful.

(6) Letter of 1957

There is no ‘symbolism’ or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort ‘five wizards = five senses’ is wholly foreign to my way of thinking. There were five wizards and that is just a unique part of history. To ask if the Orcs ‘are’ Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs.

And this is where we get the "racist Tolkien!" stuff from:

(7) 1958 letter to Forrest Ackerman about his proposed film treatment of LOTR (I will never not be tickled by the idea that Forry and his entourage turned up on Tolkien's doorstep full of misguided enthusiasm to do an animated version)

Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

(Z is screenwriter Morton Grady Zimmerman. And Tolkien's criticisms of him seem even more applicable to McKay and Payne)

(8) Draft of unsent letter, 1958

The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. Trees may ‘go bad’ as in the Old Forest; Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special perversive malice of Morgoth, still Elves themselves could do evil deeds.

(9) Letter of 1965

[Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.] With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don’t feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable

Bonus note on origin of "warg": (10) Letter to Gene Wolfe (yes, that Gene Wolfe) 1966

Orc I derived from Anglo-Saxon, a word meaning a demon, usually supposed to be derived from the Latin Orcus – Hell. But I doubt this, though the matter is too involved to set out here. Warg is simple. It is an old word for wolf, which also had the sense of an outlaw or hunted criminal. This is its usual sense in surviving texts. I adopted the word had a good sound for the meaning, as a name for this particular brand of demonic wolf in the story.

I have to give his description of Forry turning up, it's too good to leave out:

(11) Letter of 1957:

It may amuse you to hear that (unsolicited) I suddenly found myself the winner of the International Fantasy Award, presented (as it says) ‘as a fitting climax to the Fifteenth World Science Fiction Convention’. What it boiled down to was a lunch at the Criterion yesterday with speeches, and the handing over of an absurd ‘trophy’. A massive metal ‘model’ of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter). But the speeches were far more intelligent, especially that of the introducer: Clemence Dane, a massive woman of almost Sitwellian presence. Sir Stanley himself was present. Not having any immediate use for the trophy (save publicity=sales=cash) I deposited it in the window of 40 Museum Street. A back-wash from the Convention was a visit from an American film-agent (one of the adjudicating panel) who drove out all the way in a taxi from London to see me last week, filling 76 S[andfield] with strange men and stranger women – I thought the taxi would never stop disgorging. But this Mr Ackerman brought some really astonishingly good pictures (Rackham rather than Disney) and some remarkable colour photographs. They have apparently toured America shooting mountain and desert scenes that seem to fit the story. The Story Line or Scenario was, however, on a lower level. In fact bad. But it looks as if business might be done. Stanley U. & I have agreed on our policy: Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations.

(12) Letter of 1957

I have today been visited by a Mr (Forrest J.) Ackerman, acting as an agent for three persons interested in filming The Lord of the Rings. In this work they have apparently been engaged for some six months … I have seen the specimen drawings of the artist (a Mr Cobb) and consider them admirable … I have with me the Story Line, which I will send you (on Friday I hope), when I have properly considered it. At a glance it shows a great deal more feeling for the story (in the terms of this sort of thing) than anything the BBC contrived.

("Cobb" was Roy Cobb, 19 year old cartoonist who was a junior artist at Walt Disney Studios)

It's always amusing to me to hear Tolkien talk of his own work. He does not seem entirely self-aware of what he's doing, in contrast to Blake, who, despite being less intelligent, is in some sense much more clearheaded. I know that sounds rich given Blake's galaxy-brain prophecies, but he at least is under no delusion that he is discussing archetypes which do have some degree of correspondence with real-world thoughts and behaviors, and is not ashamed to make those connections explicit, rather than try to waffle around with "Oh no, I never do symbolism or allegory! I think that's so crass" like Tolkien does.

Like there's this interview I watched recently where Tolkien is disavowing symbolism and the interviewer is like "Come on, man, the Tree of Gondor is so obviously symbolic of the state of Gondor" and Tolkien's like "oh, well, yeah, obviously, but I didn't mean symbolism like that." Ok, well what do you think symbolism is, man? If I had to read between the lines, I think he had unpleasant interactions with not-particularly-intelligent fans trying to read his work like Pilgrim's Progress or something ("by Orcs, did you mean the Russian communists?!"), which he found so off-putting that he overcorrected in disavowing the notion entirely.

There's a difference between "the bald-headed eagle is a symbol of the American nation" and "the Ferengi symbolise Yankee traders". I'm with Tolkien in that interview: no duh the White Tree symbolises Gondor, the way the Union Jack symbolises Great Britain or Uncle Sam symbolises America. That's straightforward representation.

Symbolism of the type he meant is different, it is that "The five wizards are the five senses" and then everyone argues over is Gandalf sight or hearing. That's not what he meant, and if the interviewer thought he was being ever so clever, I have to say no he wasn't.

People were going "well obviously the One Ring is the atomic bomb" and he had to explain "I invented this before ever anyone even heard of atomic bombs". That's the facile, surface reading of "symbolism" that he hated. Lewis meant Aslan to symbolise Jesus in a direct parallel, but Tolkien (despite earnest commentators) did not mean "Gandalf is Jesus, they both died and were resurrected".

no duh the White Tree symbolises Gondor, the way the Union Jack symbolises Great Britain or Uncle Sam symbolises America.

Oh, come on, it's much more than that. It's not merely a crest. In the books, the White Tree is dead, and no sapling of it was found. When Aragorn returns and ascends to the throne, he is led by Gandalf to find a lost sapling of the dead tree, which he returns to the courtyard and plants, where it grows and blooms. This clearly symbolic of the loss and restoration of the line of kings.

It's not just the football logo for Team Gondor.

It is more than just a dead tree, but it's not some kind of "and by putting in a tree, it really means that the British Empire will continue to survive into the future" symbolism, either. Tolkien liked trees so he put in trees. What are the seven stars a symbol of, then? What are the seven stones? Remember the rhyme:

Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three.
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.

Tolkien explains in notes what they were, and it's not this kind of facile but dumb explanation here:

The seven stars and seven stones are symbols of the Valar, the gods of Tolkien's universe, who guided the Numenoreans to their new home.

Tolkien doesn't put symbolism of that type in, he puts prophecy in: "the hands of the king are the hands of a healer", and so forth. This is how Aragorn establishes that he is the rightful heir and king (and that is what the split between Gondor and Arnor started with, the denial by Gondor that descendants of the Arnorian line had any inheritance rights on the throne).

There isn't any symbolism of "by X you meant the Tories/the Communists/the Joos, just say it, we all know you really mean it, it's Da Joos isn't it???" kind.

Seeing as I'm off on a Tolkien tangent, and with the third season of Rings of Power lurking out there in post-production, here are some of his comments about the proposed film version of LOTR:

1957 letters to Rayner Unwin

(1)

You will receive on Monday the copy of the ‘Story Line’ or synopsis of the proposed film version of The Lord of the Rings. I could not get it off yesterday …

The ‘Story Line’ is (as might be expected) on a much lower level of art and perceptiveness than the pictorial material. It is in some points bad, and unacceptable, but is not irremediable, if the author of it (a certain Morton Grady Zimmerman) is open to criticism and direction. The ending is badly muffed. Though a lot of time is said to have gone into it, it reads like a production of haste, after a single reading, & without further reference to text. (My criticisms are not directed to the orc-idiom in which it is written, but to the effect which, it appears to me, the directions would have in a visual presentation – not to mention dialogue.) Mr Ackerman’s line of talk was that a big object to the group was ‘pleasing the author’. I have indicated to him that will not be easy.

Quite crudely: displeasing the author requires a cash equivalent! Only the prospect of a very large financial profit would make me swallow some of the things in this script! But I had the impression that there is not much ‘money’ in this proposition. In that case they had better be a bit more artistic!

An abridgement by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal in publicity; but the present script is rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional ‘fairy-stories’. People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation; Lórien becomes a fairycastle with ‘delicate minarets’, and all that sort of thing.

But I am quite prepared to play ball, if they are open to advice – and if you decide that the thing is genuine, and worthwhile.

(2)

Ackerman. What a letter! Just like the man, when I met him. But I came to the conclusion then that he was, in spite of his style, a genuine enthusiast … Cobb and Lackey obviously have real talent … and the comparison of Cobb with Rackham is just. Also Cobb’s taste and style seems on the whole to fit the L. R. better than I should have thought possible. I should say that he can be sinister without great distortions. He is certain to prove less good on anything noble or admirable (we all are, and Americans specially). But in any case, the visual art is not of such a superlative order that it could carry the stupidities and vulgarities of the script. And I am afraid we must take a stand there, as you have very clearly indicated: either the script-writer must be humble and co-operative, or his ‘visual’ colleagues must go unpublished.

...My chief criticism of the project, so far, is this. There is an internal dislocation. The chief and special talent of the group obviously lies, and will lie, in the scenic, & pictorial. The script-writer should consider this. On the contrary, he wants feverish action, and simply cuts out parts in which climate and scenery are the chief interest, such as ‘The Ring goes South’ or ‘The Great River’. Whereas the distant view and approach of the 3 sinister mountains, or the unrolling of the Anduin, would be just the things this group would do admirably.

However, we shall see. Grateful as I am, & should be, for the abundance of people who profess enjoyment of The Lord of the Rings, I wish that the commonest reaction of admirers was not the desire to tinker with it! However, a good deal of alteration is inevitable in a change of medium. But the Zimmerman alterations are the wrong way round. In a visual form marvels, like flying on eagles, want reducing not increasing.

(3) 1958 letter

Of course, I will get busy on this at once, now that Easter is over, and the Dutch incense is dissipated. Thank you for the copy of the Story-line, which I will go through again.

I am entirely ignorant of the process of producing an ‘animated picture’ from a book, and of the jargon connected with it. Could you let me know exactly what is a ‘story-line’, and its function in the process?

It is not necessary (or advisable) for me to waste time on mere expressions if these are simply directions to picture-producers. But this document, as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety about the actual dialogue that (I suppose) will be used. I should say Zimmerman, the constructor of this s-l, is quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the ‘spoken words’ of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent.

He does not read books. It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the L.R. at a great pace, and then constructed his s.l. from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original. Thus he gets most of the names wrong in form – not occasionally by casual error but fixedly (always Borimor for Boromir); or he misapplies them: Radagast becomes an Eagle. The introduction of characters and the indications of what they are to say have little or no reference to the book. Bombadil comes in with ‘a gentle laugh’! …

I feel very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original (it seems wilfully wrong without discernible technical reasons at nearly every point). But I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money, and I am conscious of your rights and interests; so that I shall endeavour to restrain myself, and avoid all avoidable offence. I will send you my remarks, particular and general, as soon as I can; and of course nothing will go to Ackerman except through you and with at least your assent.

(4) 1958 letter to Forrest Ackerman with commentary on the film treatment

If Z and/or others do so, they may be irritated or aggrieved by the tone of many of my criticisms. If so, I am sorry (though not surprised). But I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about …

The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.

Z … has intruded a ‘fairy castle’ and a great many Eagles, not to mention incantations, blue lights, and some irrelevant magic (such as the floating body of Faramir). He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights; and he has made no serious attempt to represent the heart of the tale adequately: the journey of the Ringbearers. The last and most important part of this has, and it is not too strong a word, simply been murdered.

Bonus "why didn't the Eagles just fly the company to Mordor?" answer

Here we meet the first intrusion of the Eagles. I think they are a major mistake of Z, and without warrant.

The Eagles are a dangerous ‘machine’. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape. (One of Z’s chief faults is his tendency to anticipate scenes or devices used later, thereby flattening the tale out.) Radagast is not an Eaglename, but a wizard’s name; several eagle-names are supplied in the book. These points are to me important.

...At the bottom of the page, the Eagles are again introduced. I feel this to be a wholly unacceptable tampering with the tale. ‘Nine Walkers’ and they immediately go up in the air! The intrusion achieves nothing but incredibility, and the staling of the device of the Eagles when at last they are really needed. It is well within the powers of pictures to suggest, relatively briefly, a long and arduous journey, in secrecy, on foot, with the three ominous mountains getting nearer.

Just imagine what he would have thought of McKay and Payne's shrunken distances so Khazad-dum is only a stroll away from Eregion! Or the magic teleporting so people cover vast distances in hours not days! Or, of course, the layout of the Numenorean ships where they can stow all the horses, troops, supplies, etc. below in the vast, TARDIS like holds.

Why do the Jews never look at George Bailey or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker and say "That's me! Yes, he may not be canonically Jewish, but he's obviously just a stand-in for a Jew in this fictional setting."

They do, however, say that about Superman, who's the furthest thing from those stereotypes.

I don't think the fictional characters you identify with really say that much about you. At most it says how you'd like to be perceived, or how you fear others do perceive you. Wasn't there a thread a week or two ago about how real identity comes from what you do, not how you feel?

They do, however, say that about Superman

Well, they say a lot of things about that movie, especially in response to what everyone else thinks the movie was about

They've said that about the comics for the better part of a century. It's not exclusively about the movie.

Jews are the ones correctly interpreting these things in both cases. The Harry Potter goblins were a representation of Jews written by a Gentile. Superman is a representation and self-conception of a Jew written by Jews.

The Grinch and Scrooge are metaphors for Jews written by Christians telling a story of their Conversion to Christianity through Christmas.

Fictional characters you identify with say a lot about you, and they also say a lot about how you perceive your outgroup. The "Dumb Blonde" stereotype has no basis in reality, it's a Hollywood trope written from an adversarial perspective. The "Jock vs Nerd" trope, in which the socially maladjusted Nerd always wins, is telling a similar story.

Jews have a fine-tuned sensitivity, and mastery, over writing and interpreting these characters. They are very good at using them to criticize their outgroup, and they are very good at detecting when fictional characters are being used to criticize them (and most of the time they are not being paranoid they are correct). Whites are not very good at detecting when a fictional character was written in order to criticize themselves from an adversarial perspective. Jews are very good at detecting that.

The Harry Potter goblins were a representation of Jews written by a Gentile.

The Harry Potter goblins are the gnomes of Zurich. I'm equally fed-up with people pointing and yelling about anti-Semitism because they so desperately want to be offended and wrap themselves in the mantle of persecuted martyrdom, or they so desperately need caricatures to feed the conspiracy theory about Jewish World Domination Plot.

The Grinch and Scrooge are metaphors for Jews written by Christians telling a story of their Conversion to Christianity through Christmas.

Scrooge is a metaphor for Christianity. This is so wildly off the bat that you must never have read the book. Dickens popularised the secular Christmas. The three Ghosts are not Christian saints or representative figures, Scrooge never darkens the door of a church, and secular charity is about as religious as this new festive feasting and partying Christmastide gets. Tell me Mr. Fezziwig's ball is in fact midnight Mass, I dare you.

Dickens wrote Jewish characters who were offensive to Jewish readers. Scrooge is not Jewish.

Central to Scrooge's hatred of Christmas is being stuck in school with his books while his peers are out celebrating Christmas. This was a common-enough Jewish experience that Hannukah was elevated to its current status to precisely solve this problem for Jewish children. Mr. Fezziwig's ball represents Scrooge being pulled into the tradition as a "Christmas convert" just like the Grinch. They are both isolated figures, outsiders, resentful of the Holiday, but then they are won over. Ebeneezer is a Hebrew name, while it wasn't that uncommon for Christians, his business partner Jacob Marley had a fully Jewish name. Fagin is Jewish in Dicken's Oliver Twist although Dickens edited out direct reference to Fagin as a Jew.

The point isn't "Scrooge was Jewish" it's that these stories were created to represent cultural "victory of the Christmas Spirit" over the "anti-Christmas spirit." It's a mode of propagating culture, to craft fictional characters that resist it (and are inspired by prevailing stereotypes of non-Christians) but then they end up converting in the end. It moralizes Christmas and demoralizes outsiders who would oppose it, because if they do they are a Scrooge or a Grinch- someone who has not accepted a conversion necessary for their very soul.

Superman is not literally a Jew, he's a Kryptonian, but what the character represents is a different question entirely.

I never knew Marley was a Jewish name. So what nationality or ethnic stereotype does the Dickensian name "M'Choakumchild" represent? If you need to point out to the audience for anti-Semitic stereotypes "No, look, this guy is meant to be Jewish, here's how and why", I think the stereotyping is not working - or maybe you might be wrong.

I never knew Marley was a Jewish name.

One of Bob Marley's kids married a Jewish-descended woman; do she and their kids count?

"Marley" usually comes from Old English, occasionally as an Anglicization of Irish.

"Jacob" is Biblical, so it is a common Jewish name, but it's also the middle name of one of the most famous Protestant Christians of Dickens' time, John Jacob Astor, possibly the wealthiest businessmen in the world when A Christmas Carol was written.

or maybe you might be wrong.

Yup. The most relevant etymology here is that of "Secure Signals". A Holocaust denier who named himself after the SS might not be the best source for objective discussion of antisemitism.

M'Choakumchild

Sounds Bantu to me.

There is an alternative reading where Scrooge represents Puritan austerity (which was specifically opposed to the secular aspects of Christmas celebrations, with Cromwell's major-generals sending their most pious soldiers out to confiscate overly-rich Christmas dinners) and the Weberian "Protestant work ethic". The arguments Scrooge uses on the pleasant portly gentlemen were real political positions used by real right-liberals as the basis for important legislation at the time Dickens was writing, and the real people saying these things saw themselves as pious Protestants and justified their positions in Weberian terms.

Given the social context Dickens was writing in, the anti-Weberian reading seems more plausible than the antisemitic reading, although the nature of great fiction is that both are present in the text, and it is almost certain that both were present in Dickens' brain.

I'm looking up the novel right now, and the very ending does have some religious references (Scrooge invokes Heaven, goes to church, etc.) but it's very non-denominational, if I may put it that way. "Heaven" but not God and certainly not Jesus. Church, but it's more the ringing of the church bells, and going to church is part of his entire procedure of reformed behaviour, not a particularly conversion experience:

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew’s house.

Dickens invented modern Christmas, more or less, and it was a majorly secular one right from the start. Yes, generosity, charity, reconciliation with your family, becoming involved with your fellows - but nothing there that couldn't have the very light coat of religious reference sanded off and still be relevant to the 'spiritual but not religious' or modern lay person who observes Christmas as a time for getting drunk, partying, having the big family gathering, and spending a ton of money.

Jews are the ones correctly interpreting these things in both cases. The Harry Potter goblins were a representation of Jews written by a Gentile.

There's a certain strain of leftist that strains to attach antisemitism to Rowling, but her depiction of goblins was straight out of folklore, not Rowling expressing her covert Jew-hatred. Or are you going to adopt the leftist frame that akshually, goblins were metaphors for Jews even in the Dark Ages?

(No, they were not. Metaphors for many other things, but not Jews.)

The Grinch and Scrooge are metaphors for Jews written by Christians telling a story of their Conversion to Christianity through Christmas.

... have you even read Dickens or Doctor Seuss?

Is your theory that every gentile who writes about an ugly, greedy monster is actually writing about Jews, even if subconsciously? That says more about you than some hypothetical ur-Jew floating in the collective gentile consciousness.

Or are you going to adopt the leftist frame that akshually, goblins were metaphors for Jews even in the Dark Ages?

I've seen someone unironically assert this on Tumblr, in the context of calling the anime Goblin Slayer antisemitic. Because goblins are always and everywhere an antisemitic caricature, a deliberate stand-in for Jews, and always have been, thus anyone who uses goblins as an antagonist element is a deliberate antisemite.

I've seen this claim too, but I don't remember ever seeing it before Rowling became a bete noire and people were trying to pin antisemitism and racism et al on her.

I once got lectured by a Jewish person that "lizard people" (i.e., the myth about secret aliens controlling the world) is an antisemitic meme. And I'm like... do you really want to insist on that association?

I think Jews see all conspiracy theories as latently antisemitic because of bitter experience - most conspiracy theorists and conspiracy-focused political movements will eventually graduate to Jewish conspiracies and old-fashioned anti-semitism. This process appears to be happening to Zoomer MAGA as we speak.

I once got lectured by a Jewish person that "lizard people" (i.e., the myth about secret aliens controlling the world) is an antisemitic meme. And I'm like... do you really want to insist on that association?

Yeah, the tendency to reflexively react to criticism of "elites" — open, secret, or alien — controlling the world with "You mean the Jews, right? You're totally talking about us Jews!" isn't a good look. When you can watch someone put a standard lefty "eat the rich" rant on Tumblr, and immediately get piled on as a "Nazi" who wants to genocide all Jews because, between ranting about Musk, Bezos, and Klaus Schwab, they dared bring up George Soros; because the only reason anyone would ever mention Soros in a negative context is entirely because Soros is Jewish and they hate him because he's Jewish, because they must be an antisemite who hates all Jews — well, it's hard not to think this probably fuels at least a little antisemitism.

And back on the earlier point, it's not just goblins and reptilian aliens, either. How about the claim that the tengu of Japanese folklore are an antisemitic caricature? I mean, just look at those noses. I, mean, sure, the conventional explanation is as a more humanized form of their older depiction as bird-men:

The tengu in art appears in a variety of shapes. It usually falls somewhere in between a large, monstrous bird and a wholly anthropomorphized being, often with a red face or an unusually large or long nose. Early depictions of tengu show them as kite-like beings who can take a human-like form, often retaining avian wings, heads, or beaks. The tengu's long nose seems to have been conceived in the 14th century, likely as a humanization of the original bird's bill.

But, no, that doesn't stop people from claiming, like on Twitter here: https://nitter.poast.org/nerdtechgasm/status/1931926279106036079 that "it's not a theory" at all that the tengu are antisemitic depictions of a group of Jews who arrived in Japan in the 3rd Century and became the Hata clan.

It's possible to see the Grinch as a Jewish-to-Christian conversion story, I suppose. But A Christmas Carol is certainly a story of a Christian redemption, no Jews involved.

The Superman/Moses thing is pretty obvious right off the bat, and Superman's creators were Jewish.

If Mearsheimer is correct that Jewish groups were essential in bringing America to war with Iraq (let’s say they were half the cause), then they are responsible for half of the 3 trillion dollar cost of the war plus 2,250 American lives. This should factor into your ad hoc economic calculation regarding the value of our alliance with Israel or the Jewish people. You mention Qatar as “undermining Western values” and promoting our collapse, but Qatar has pledged 1 trillion dollars to America and Israel has pledged 0 dollars. I do not see a rise in Islamic influence in America, which is regrettable because I think conservative fashion norms are good for society. We also have more immigrants who come in from Israel than we do from Qatar, by like, a factor of 100. It’s our own lack of nationalism and in-group preference that has caused us to bring in low-performing immigrants, and Qataris deserve no blame for that, as they had no influence in America when this occurred.

I would say the blame for the 2nd Iraq war lies squarely with the US electorate who voted for GWB because they were fed up with Clinton getting BJs.

Of course, I also reject the OP's framing that one should consider the net worth of each minority and get rid of the ones who turn out negative. Presumably, most of the Motte would consider it deeply unfair if someone opined that it is fine to treat men as violent criminals, because the vast majority of violent criminals are men. Likewise, the fact that most of the people who lobby for Nethanyahu's vision of a Greater Israel are Jews does not mean that we should oppose Jews because they are Jews.

Male testosterone is necessary for warmaking capacity, entrepreneurial culture, and keeping totalitarianism in check. It brings many positive advantages that more than outweigh its negative ones. The problem with high crime, low IQ populations is that they do not provide very many benefits, but bring great costs.

If men got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be quite difficult for women to survive for more than a few days/weeks.

If blacks and/or Arab Muslims got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be an immediate improvement in quality of life for the rest of the world.

There were many Jews who opposed the Iraq war, and indeed the polling showed they were more likely to oppose it than the average American. But the issue remains that within the group are a wealthy and influential block who rally around being Jewish, recruit within the Jewish general population, and tie their religious identity to defending the “Jewish State”. For decades they have accused anti-Zionists of anti-semitism because of course criticizing Israel is criticizing the Jews. These bad apples have hidden themselves amongst an orchard of perfectly good apples, using them as human shields, and if current standards of warfare apply to the culture war, then it is acceptable to malign 15 innocents if it leads to successfully critiquing 1 bad actor.

I think the way to thread the needle is that we can eject people who are net negative, and who had to opt-in to our society. Because of the way that our governments are currently set up, being in a governments territory requires that you pay taxes and follow their laws; you can't decide that you do not wish for the government's services in exchange for not being subject to its rules (or rather, you can try, at which point armed men come from the government to put you in a small room until you agree to follow the rules once more).

Immigrants of all flavours (by definition) come from another country; they choose to proclaim that they will follow the government's rules; they are choosing to follow the rules of that government, rather than being stuck with them.

This kind of plays into the idea of noblesse oblige - if you are demanding the loyalty of a group, you owe them your loyalty in return. In the military, it's very common that the front-line troops always eat first; the officers can order them into situations where they are almost guaranteed to die, so the officers owe it to them to see that they are treated as well as possible. The same applies to governments; the government can enlist citizens to die, claim an increasing portion of their wealth, and take their freedom or their life for crimes against it. The least the government can do is put the people who are obligated to support it first; if they aren't, that becomes a problem that the people have the right to seek redress against (and if they don't have the right, the next step is often them clearing out space for someone who will give them that right).

If we followed this chain of logic:

  1. If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), and they were citizens of a foreign nation, we should kick them out (preferably of an airlock, but failing that, at least out of the country).
  2. If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), but were citizens of the United States, we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
  3. If wealthy non-Jewish citizens of the United States were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
  4. Once we are doing #1, #2, and #3 reliably, we can determine whether Jewish people are considered to be high-risk in the same way Chinese researchers are (in which case, we can decide to heavily restrict them from positions in which it is an issue, in the same way we do with Chinese researchers), or we can determine if its just a few bad apples.

Either way, we shouldn't ignore the issue; we currently screen men more heavily than women when they want to be involved with children because a large number of men who want to work with children have pedophiliac tendencies. It sucks if you're just a guy who enjoys spending time with kids, but it has proven enough of an issue that we put boundaries on it. Likewise, if you're an earnest student of Chinese origin who wants to fully embrace the greatness of the USA, it sucks that you may be barred from positions that require a security clearance; but again, we've seen that this is a large enough issue to society that collectively we have to stop it.

If wealthy Jewish socialites are disproportionately favouring other countries above the US, we may need to put additional screening on them being permitted to be government lobbyists or owning media platforms. Which again, isn't fair to the people who don't do this, and don't desire to do this - but if it's consistently a problem, we can treat it in the same way men or Chinese students are already being treated.

One thing that I want to make clear is that despite this screed, I don't actually think that the Jews are secretly or openly advocating on behalf of Israel; I think there are a lot of people who are determined to make the Jews the source of all evil, and they are looking for a justification to hunt them down. That being said, we don't have the data; it's verboten to actually go after the people who are favouring other countries above their own citizens. We need to actually start treating it as a crime so we can see if there is a "Jewish Problem" or simply a "leader problem."

Even if you have both number 2 and 3 together so that you are not applying double standards to Jews, this amounts to "someone who supports politics that I don't like should be put in jail and forcibly removed from power". "Getting the country into a war" is not special; in a democracy, people are permitted to advocate for policies that you consider harmful.

I mean, I'm perfectly happy if we decide that no, we're not going to punish people for wrongthink anywhere; if we insist on it, it should also include those at the highest echelons of power.

Of course, I also reject the OP's framing that one should consider the net worth of each minority and get rid of the ones who turn out negative. Presumably, most of the Motte would consider it deeply unfair if someone opined that it is fine to treat men as violent criminals, because the vast majority of violent criminals are men.

Your position is enlightened, self-consistent and humane. It is also turning my country into an alien hellscape.

I'm not even being sarcastic, but this isn't working. Enlightened humanism with respect to immigration has been a slow-rolling disaster for Europe, as well as for the principles that you appeal to.

Except that GWB wasn't campaigning as an interventionist and a neocon in 2000, he was doing the opposite.

From "Stop Voting For Nincompoops" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

In 2000, the comic Melonpool showed a character pondering, “Bush or Gore… Bush or Gore… it’s like flipping a two-headed coin.” Well, how were they supposed to know? In 2000, based on history, it seemed to me that the Republicans were generally less interventionist and therefore less harmful than the Democrats, so I pondered whether to vote for Bush to prevent Gore from getting in. Yet it seemed to me that the barriers to keep out third parties were a raw power grab, and that I was therefore obliged to vote for third parties wherever possible, to penalize the Republicrats for getting grabby. And so I voted Libertarian, though I don’t consider myself one (at least not with a big “L”). I’m glad I didn’t do the “sensible” thing. Less blood on my hands.

Don't forget the cost of aid to Egypt, the cost of the failed military operation in Yemen, the bombing of Iran and the conflict in Syria!

And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.

I shall support no such thing, because "living in a low crime society" is not the whole of my utility function. In fact, there were plenty of dystopian low-crime societies.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should realize that @FireRises' version of the Madagascar Plan will not end with the deportation ships (or chimneys) being dismantled once the last Black US citizen is deported to the general area from which his ancestors were kidnapped. Because once we have accepted that it is moral to get rid of undesirables who are statistically more likely to commit crimes, there is no reason not to apply the same standard to Whites, after all, HBD applies to them as well. Probably a White guy with a close relative with a history of violence is more likely to commit violence than your average US Black, so we should surely get rid of him as well. Low education attainment is probably correlated with a genetic predisposition, do we really want to keep such suboptimal citizens in our brave new world? And in the long term, East Asians have great work ethics and are a lot less unruly than Whites often are.

Liberal Jews have long recognized that the best way to safeguard their safety in the West is to support a general principle of tolerance, rather than relying on the public perception of them being a net positive minority, which can always flip with another Epstein or SBF.

Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire.

Why do you think that is a bad thing? After all, the PRC has plenty of advantages from your perspective. A clearly dominant culture, fewer ethnically undesirables, no woke snowflakes crying genocide when you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette, strong leaders making decisions with the long term interests of the state in mind rather than trying to win the next election. The PRC conquering the US, wiping out the present population and settling Han Chinese there is perhaps the likeliest way to end multiculturalism in the US.

An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright

While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.

@FireRises' version of the Madagascar Plan will not end with the deportation ships (or chimneys) being dismantled once the last Black US citizen is deported to the general area from which his ancestors were kidnapped. Because once we have accepted that it is moral to get rid of undesirables who are statistically more likely to commit crimes, there is no reason not to apply the same standard to Whites, after all, HBD applies to them as well.

I definitely understand this point, but I'm kind of ambivalent toward it. If one were to argue like this, you could also argue against special education in schools because once we've put away a certain percentage of students with the lowest ability, we will just have to do the same thing again with the remaining students, infinitely, until there are no students left.

The issue is that most people have a specific threshold. There is a specific threshold of a student's ability that we can accept in schools, just like there is a specific threshold of crime that we cannot tolerate. This is particularly significant in some Eastern Asian countries where crime rates are effectively at zero (where you can leave your laptop on the street overnight without it being stolen, for example). If an effect of having third-world immigrants in your country is that an effectively zero crime rate society is now a society with a significantly noticeable crime rate, you have a problem. It's worth solving that problem, and you wouldn't need to repeat that process once you've come to the level of having an effectively negligible crime rate.

I don't think you have grounds to deport the ancestors of slaves, but you do have grounds to deport recent immigrants who were brought in under cynical circumstances or who have stronger allegiances to foreign governments/populations than they do their new nation.

You don't need to eliminate the burden. You simply need to manage its size.

I just had this thought of moving to China one day to get away from Brazil like conditions and getting bullied by Chinese for being from a retard nation that destroyed itself with immigration.

While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.

@FireRises I'd go further and say "opposed"; if you want to keep Jews in the West, you don't want them to "go home" to Eretz Yisrael.

I think you are slightly but not significantly confused.

  1. On HBD, you seem to attribute state success to National IQ: "Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great." Were you to look at most of these Asian Nations in the early 20th century, you would have seen extreme poverty, floundering industry (lots of rice farmers paying taxes in-kind), and lower IQs than the West [1]. Given that the Flynn effect was much higher for these countries during their period of industrialized, urbanized, and instituted public education[1], one must wonder what it would look like if the same policies were successfully carried out in some of your less desirable countries.

Note that this doesn't conflict with the larger point about immigration: the Flynn effect works over generational time, and I will not dispute that emmigrants from war torn states where blood feuds over cows have been evolved into law[2] are less likely to contribute to the success of recieving nation than emmigrants from industrial states who are leaving their homes because starting engineers in the US make 2~3x (PPP)[3], and I do find it plausible that Western nations will be more successful if they focus on importing engineers rather than carving out asylum categories for people who are fleeing blood feuds [4].

  1. On global competition, the Jews will be important, but I think that the differential success of the West is less about their Jewishness, and more about how their home countries showed intellectual elites the door. I have heard WWII summarized as "our Germans were better than their Germans", and a history of the Cold War would not be complete without a history of the soviet diaspora to Israel. It seems likely the West will pull the same gambit in the 21st century, and "our Chinese" will be "better than their Chinese". Accepting refugees turned out well for the West when the principal victims of our geopolitical enemies were the elite and well-educated with high-class values. It will continue to work well for the West as long as totalitarian societies continue to alienate their intellectual elites (i.e. China enforcing capital controls) ... but it might also reverse if, say, European online speech controls become implemented across the West.

[1] The Flynn effect in Korea: large gains. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.022 [2] The Evolution of Blood-Money for Homicide in Somalia, by Paolo Contini. Journal of African Law, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1971), pp. 77-84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/744600. See also https://www.academia.edu/25376232/EARLY_LEGAL_SYSTEMS_IN_SOMALIA. [3] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-level/locations/korea-south [4] https://www.euaa.europa.eu/coi/somalia/2025/country-focus/1-profiles/15-individuals-involved-blood-feudsclan-disputes-and-other-clan-issues

Nick Fuentes's ideas have zero intellectual worth. He is a mega-church pastor for the religion of inceldom. Incoherence is key to his movement. At least Candace Owens is schizophrenic. What's Fuentes' excuse ?

Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great

I'm not convinced that average-IQ is singularly responsible for societal-IQ. They're related, sure. But, IQ differentials have existed for millennia. If the correlation was so direct, then high IQ nations would've achieved insurmountable gaps between them and other nations. This hasn't been the case. Japan, South Korea and Scandinavia are high-IQ regions today. But, they were relatively backwards throughout history. That there is flux implies that IQ is not the primary factor in creating stable and flourishing societies.

Smart Jews make more money than goys

Can't read goy without replaying the meme of a rabbi crashing out at Barney the dinosaur.

you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country

This is anti-HBD. Between Muslims, Blacks and Indians (presumably you mean south asians), you're looking at 4 billion people. Say their average IQ is 90. Let's call them group A. Let's say group B constitutes non-chinese desirable immigrant groups with an IQ of ~105. (I'm assuming most western Europeans do not want to immigrate to the US and Chinese are the rival civilization). Group B will have around 500 million people at best.

Doing some ChatGPT math, Group A has around 90 million people above IQ 120, and group B has about 80 million people above IQ 120. IQ is measurable and group A is more strongly motivated to immigrate. Therefore, if IQ = HBD and HBD = societal destiny, then the US will end up importing a very large number of blacks, south asians and muslims.

Personally, I believe cultural compatibility is just as important as the intelligence of the people you're importing. But, if HBD becomes the primary driver of immigration policy, then it will inevitably sample the cream of the largest (4 billion strong and growing) cohort.

Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue

No. I increasingly believe that liberal policy is a direct result of deeply internalizing HBD. (By liberal, I mean the American center-left, neo-libs, academic elites and NYT types. Not the communists). You can't tip-toe around landmines this effectively unless you know their precise location. I don't want to derail the discussion, but IMO, American liberals are the result of trying to reconcile protestant ideology with the realities of group IQ.

American Protestantism ties a person's self-worth to their economic productivity. It claims that people are created equal, and given equal opportunity, the hardest working will be the most productive and most moral. Working hard (sanctity of work) reflects good moral character, and the primary observable metric of hard work is economic productivity.

If IQ is real, heritable and puts a ceiling on an individual's productivity, then the whole moral framework stops working. Corporate America stops working. It's impossible to motivate hustlers, aspiring grinders and temporarily embarrassed millionaires if IQ is the primary contributor to outcomes.

If the smarter kid will always do better, then why work harder ? Why put in effort ? If you'll never be able to intellectually compete with the nerds, then why play their game at all ? Why be a peaceful participant of a system that guarantees your loss ? Better to bring it down instead. The natural conclusion is to use populism & violence to reclaim power and set up a tribal society instead.

Liberals need the lower class to believe that they can make it if they try hard enough. So, they set aside a few visible roles for all races, so that everyone keeps believing in protestant morals. They know that in the absence of a 'DEI', the elite will look so different from the base population, that a revolution is inevitable. Liberals want to set up socialist safety nets, because they understand that low-IQ people can't lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

Liberal policy is an uncomfortable compromise of believing in both HBD and protestant values. The resulting cognitive dissonance is why even the smartest liberal suddenly loses 50 IQ points when talking about certain issues.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary identity depends on his not understanding it."

Doing some ChatGPT math, Group A has around 90 million people above IQ 120, and group B has about 80 million people above IQ 120. IQ is measurable and group A is more strongly motivated to immigrate. Therefore, if IQ = HBD and HBD = societal destiny, then the US will end up importing a very large number of blacks, south asians and muslims.

I think the traditional counterargument is "regression to the mean". If you randomly import smart Africans that pass your IQ test, there's no guarantee that their children will maintain the same level of IQ. You need to look at multigenerational IQ, ideally looking for specific groups that are identified as unusually smart in their host countries. Not every smart Israeli, but Ashkenazim, not every smart Indian, but Tamil Brahmins, not every smart Nigerian, but Igbo.

Is there an ELI5 on regression to the mean? How do a 150 IQ person's genes know whether to regress to 120 or to 90?

I'll take a wild guess and say it's random chance, and the mean of the population has the highest chance of manifesting in the individual.

It's not an ELI5, but Emil Kirkegaard has a neat "contra unbounded regression towards the mean" article. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/selective-migration-and-regression

Nick Fuentes's ideas have zero intellectual worth. He is a mega-church pastor for the religion of inceldom. Incoherence is key to his movement. At least Candace Owens is schizophrenic. What's Fuentes' excuse ?

He's a fed.

If the smarter kid will always do better, then why work harder ? Why put in effort ?

"Success" is generally a function of both effort and talent. Anecdotally, I'm aware of lots of cases and situations where "smarter" isn't enough alone, and often loses to someone willing to work harder. The folks at the very top have both, and outcomes generally scale with effort at all levels of talent, although there are levels where "have you considered trying something else?" becomes a reasonable question.

Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.

You can't claim to be a HBD understander and then confuse ethnicity and religion, then merge together hundreds of different ethnic groups in single categories. C'mon, bringing up Islam in that way is literally contradicting yourself. Bosnian Muslims, Iranians, Senegalese people and Indonesians are all Muslim and all have completely different genetic backgrounds. And it's not like there's a sharp distinction between "White" and "Middle-Eastern". People from the Levant can be whiter than many Southern Europeans.

Or if you talk about Jews, again, that's not a single ethnicity. Israel is a melting pot of Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, etc, while the majority of Palestinians are Jews that converted to Islam centuries ago.

The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.

If you actually believed in HBD, you would be pro-immigration of Igbo, Iranians and Brahmins elites, who have lower crime rates, higher educational achievement and financial success than White Americans.

It's interesting that, throughout your (well-written) essay, you consistently refer to Jews as being an entirely separate ethnic group from Whites. This is not how they're treated in mainstream discourse, or in most Jewish writing. Officially it's a religion, not an ethnic group, but generally they're seen as a type of White people, at least in modern mainstream western society. (Other societies of course had different rules)

My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not. Conviently, it seems to go back and forth depending on whichever interpretation is the best for them. When it's time for the special ethnic groups to get their own special recognition, they of course deserve deep honor and respect for their unique history and culture- they're not one of those shitty bland stale whites who have no culture. But when it comes to break out statistics by ethnic group, they usually blend in with the general "white" category. It would make organizations like the Ivy League or Big Finance look absolutely ridiculous if they had to disclose how importunately higher they were hiring Jews than any other ethnic group.

My opinion is that... it's a bit of both. To some extent, it's like you say, they just have high IQ because of HBD reasons. I also think that, some extent, they have a great culture which emphasizes education and family in a very positive way. I admire and respect their accomplishments.

On the other hand... they are also clearly a culture that "takes care of their own, first" and is not shy to throw elbows when necessary. In medieval Europe, that meant taking on the niche of moneylenders when that was a major religious taboo for everyone else, and pretending not to understand why that made them hated. In modern Israel, it means taking advantage of the war in Gaza to accelerate land grabs in the West Bank, which seems to have no end accept to take all Palestinian land and create a Jewish ethno-state. In the US, it means families network together at synagogues, then use extreme measures to help each other get into prestigious colleges and high-paying jobs. That is not just "having a higher IQ," that's pure cronyism and nepotism.

As a generic White person, I feel like my people were taken advantage of in our naivety and gullibility. It's time for us to wake up and embrace ethnic tribalism just like everyone else is. Seeing the numbers for how disproportionately Jewish some of the more important job sectors are should ring massive alarm bells in everyone else.

On the other hand... they are also clearly a culture that "takes care of their own, first" and is not shy to throw elbows when necessary.

Every ethnic group and every culture does this. Hell, every individual does this. Humans as a species like being around people that a similar to each other. This is a human thing, not a Jewish thing. Surely many Christians are set up with work opportunities, internships due a "a friend your dad knows from Church". But the difference is that only Jews get vilified for this behavior.

I'm not sure I buy the hypothesis that Jews are tend to lend themselves to cronyism or nepotism than average. I think that both Cronyism and Nepotism imply that the people who are benefiting from those "-ism's" aren't otherwise qualified for the opportunity that they're being given. In a community of Jews, the average IQ is 115+. There's going to be a lot of people in this community who actually are extremely qualified to work in a variety of complex jobs.

As a generic White person, I feel like my people were taken advantage of in our naivety and gullibility. It's time for us to wake up and embrace ethnic tribalism just like everyone else is.

If there were a "Society for White Engineers", I would definitely also join it :)

well, part of my post was that generic White people don't do this, at least not in modern times. Do you disagree with that? It's also laid out in the article linked in the comment above yours. The older White guys in management positions are patting themselves on the back for "doing their part" by hiring other ethnicities over their own. And there is no "White person church."

In practice, there are many churches for high status white people. They’re just boomerlibs.

This ties into the Nick Fuentes issue where he is crudely outlining these sorts of arguments. In addition to the lack of (or deliberate multi-generational suppression of) ingroup ethnic solidarity, White men in positions of seniority have pulled a 'Fuck you, got mine' and pulled the ladder up behind them, leaving the field to 'minorities' (a group that includes women somehow). Basically, throwing the next generation of young white men to the wolves in order to ensure that their own positions are unchallenged until retirement.

Its not fair competition, its DEI discrimination, combined with 'you need to compete with the best from the entire world'.

Edit: More fuel for the theory that JD Vance reads this forum here.

The very successful American Jews are mostly non-practicing; they’re probably not any more liberal than non-practicing urban Christians on the east coast, but they’re definitely not networking at the synagogue.

My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not. Conviently, it seems to go back and forth depending on whichever interpretation is the best for them. When it's time for the special ethnic groups to get their own special recognition, they of course deserve deep honor and respect for their unique history and culture- they're not one of those shitty bland stale whites who have no culture. But when it comes to break out statistics by ethnic group, they usually blend in with the general "white" category. It would make organizations like the Ivy League or Big Finance look absolutely ridiculous if they had to disclose how importunately higher they were hiring Jews than any other ethnic group.

I was thinking of this reading the WSJ this morning. In the Op-Ed section under Notable and Quotable they cited a Manhattan Institute Poll showing a purported rise in right wing antisemitism:

...A meaningful minority -- 17% -- meets our definition of Anti-Jewish Republicans. A respondent falls into this category if they 1) self-identify as both racist and antisemitic and express Holocaust Denial or describe Israel as a colonial state, or 2) do not self-identify that way but nevertheless hold both of those extreme positions.

The confusing nature of their definition (what purpose does self identification have if it can be skipped?), is used to smuggle in a mild definition to the major heresies. Colonial is at most a totally mild critique of Israel actually. It's mostly a neutral, factual description of the country's history: Israel is a country that grew out of a colonial project. I would actually expect that the word Colonial, a pejorative in leftist faculty circles, is fairly neutral in conversation for a lot of Red Tribers. It mostly has positive associations in New England, the Colonial militias fighting the redcoats, various high school mascots and college sports conferences are the Colonial so and so, the Colonial Inn or the Colonial Diner is just an early American theme restaurant.

I could maybe see saying calling Israel an apartheid state is anti-Israel, though I would still bristle at calling it anti-semitic. But Colonial is a totally neutral definition to most Republicans. Trying to portray that statement as anti-semitic is clearly trying to massage the statistics.

Yeah that's weird. It's like they're combining a far-left and far-right criticism of Israel. Maybe it's something like:

  1. the person self-identifies as racist/antisemitic and [Holocaust Denial or Colonial State]
  2. not self-identifies that way, but [Holocaust Denial and Colonial State]

Either way seems like they're trying to brand leftist anti-Israeli types as being right-wing anti-Semites

The more I think about it, it's probably a cultural failure, the Manhattan institute is a conservative think tank, but its workers and interns are still blue tribe college graduates, who understand that the statement "Israel is a colonial state" is associated with leftist critiques of Israel, which I don't think most normies would understand that way.

I actually think you could use a much more inclusive definition, like some that I'd fail, that I'd agree with more. Like "Imagine a woman close to you was dating a man and considering marrying him, and came to you for advice. Would your advice change if he were Jewish?"

My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not.

This "schrodingerism" goes even deeper. At face value, Israel is absolutely an archetype of your cookie-cutter ethnonationalist state. Their declaration of independence from 1948 officially calls it as a Jewish state. It also gives a lot of authority to religions, for instance Israel does not recognize secular marriage, thus effectively banning any gay marriage- as no faith in Israel officiates such unions. And on the other hand you have your modern leftist progressives shilling for it anyways.

In a sense this is remarkable achievement of Jews and their version of nationalism - Zionism. Their early leaders ranged from your cookie-cutter 19h century progressives like Theodore Herzl, socialists like David Ben Gurion, as well as "fascists" - or ultranationalists if you will - like Menachim Begin, a proud member of Irgun and youth leader of Betar movement. And yet the latter two both served as prime ministers of Israel. Despite ideological differences, all of them were able to work together toward the national project of Israel: Herzl was an example of your educated international elite, making diplomatic deals with power brokers of his time. Ben Gurion was your charismatic labor leader organizing Jews all around the world. Not many of Jewish refugees and young settlers had any experience with agriculture and hard labor, and yet Ben Gurion motivated them toward creating Jewish working class in order to form a complete nation - as opposed to some sort of Oligarchy like South Africa, where elite Jews rule over native Arabs in some sort of apartheid - with his slogan of one more acre, one more goat. And of course Begin was your enforcer, willing to do the dirty work during wars and times of conflict.

As I said, the whole thing is remarkable example of modern ethnogenesis and state building, that puts all other romantic national awakenings in 19th century Europe to shame - including reviving liturgical Hebrew as an official modern language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and of course carving patch of foreign land as their own. It would be as if some forgotten tribe of Romans in Romania and Greece created a modern Roman Republic somewhere south of Rome in Italy, using Latin as their official language.

As with many other things, there is a lot of admiration even when it comes to enemies of Zionism, Israel and Jews. They really achieved something unique, including ability to unite disparate ideologies that ultimately ended up benefiting their national cause. I'd say that people like Fuentes would salivate if they could create something like US version of Christian nationalism akin to Zionism.

It also gives a lot of authority to religions, for instance Israel does not recognize secular marriage, thus effectively banning any gay marriage- as no faith in Israel officiates such unions.

Israel recognizes foreign marriages, including gay marriages.

Yes, but they do not perform them in their land as marriages in Israel are officiated by religious authorities. A very ingenious way to solve the problem if you ask me.

Most Israelis marrying outside Israel are heterosexual secular Jews who don't want a religious marriage for one of any number of good and sufficient reasons, or who the official Rabbinate refuses to marry for reasons which I am sure the Rabbis find very persuasive. I have met multiple couples in such marriages, including one case where the Israeli Rabbinate considered a British-born Reform Rabbi insufficiently Jewish to marry an Israeli Jew.

That Israel recognises foreign marriages, including foreign marriages between Israeli Jews, and therefore including same-sex marriages, is a load-bearing part of the social contract between secular and religious Jews in Israel.

If you couldn’t tell from the title of the post: I like the Jews. They’re intelligent, hardworking people who are high in conscientiousness and very low in violent crime. I believe that western society has benefited tremendously over the last several hundred years from the millions of Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers living among us. Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high IQ, and everyone in a society benefits when there are more smart people in that society. Smart Jews make more money than goys, and pay more in taxes as a result. Jewish-owned businesses make lots of great middle class jobs for the rest of us.

Bari Weiss isn't the head of CBS because of her great charisma, intelligence or talent but because she's Jewish and she's willing to unconditionally do the bidding of a Jewish billionaire. Jeffrey Epstein wasn't wealthy because he was an intelligent, hardworking person high in conscientiousness (his emails make that clear enough!), he was wealthy because he had no ethical limits whatsoever. Les Wexner and Henry Ford might both be rich entrepreneurs who pay lots of taxes but the latter was unfathomably more beneficial to his society and the world at large than the former. Whether Jews are actually significantly more intelligent is debatable; some would argue Jewish overrepresentation in positions of wealth and influence actually has more to do with nepotism, corruption and a total lack of moral inhibitions.

I want to live in places with lots of Jews, and I think that you should too.

Like Berlin, 1925?

Quite frankly, I don’t really respect the opinions of the modern liberal when it comes to social issues. Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue, and (when it comes to immigration) they’re wrong in ways that are fundamentally undermining the ability of every western civilization to continue to exist 30 years from now. So it isn’t surprising to me to see that Antisemitism is rising on the political left - The left is “wrong about every social issue” so of course they’re wrong about hating the Jews, too.

Of course, one could just as easily say "the left is wrong about every social issue, so of course they're wrong about Hitler" and come to the exact opposite conclusion.

My criticism of Nick Fuentes starts thusly: Nick’s beliefs don’t have internal consistency. If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?? Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Moreover, Nick’s opinions about Jews make testable predictions: if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.

This isn't what Fuentes actually says.

What he actually said was: Jews wanted to replace the previously (relatively) anti-Jewish Anglo-American order with a new one, only to discover that their new left wing allies apply the exact same logic to Jews, causing Jews to switch to backing the right instead. He never claimed Jews are "secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover of America", he's actually said that Jews intentionally inflame bonehead counter-jihad type politics for their own benefit. If you wanted a testable prediction, his pre-election prediction that Trump was going to be dragged into conflict with Iran would be a pretty clear example of Trump acting against his political interests on behalf of a powerful foreign lobby.

Re: Fuentes on Israel: If you look at the data since 1947, the US has in fact given more money to Israel than any other country to the tune of $300 billion (as measured on 2024 dollars) over the past 79 years. This averages to $3.8billion per year on average. That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion. $3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me. I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot.

That's only counting direct subsidies. If you were to count missile interceptions (the "12 Day War" cost a quarter of the global interceptor stockpile!!!), the cost of constantly moving carrier groups to defend them, protection money for their neighbors, wars fought on their explicit behalf ("Prosperity Guardian"), wars fought on their behalf implicitly (most sandbox wars), soldiers killed by them directly (USS Liberty), soldiers killed on their explicit behalf (Beirut barracks bombings)...

For all that accumulated cost, it would have been far more cost efficient had America turned Israel into a parking lot back in 1948, then America might have some allies besides Israel. It certainly would have cost far less than $300 billion. Or, of course, America could simply stay out of the sandbox entirely, as it did for the overwhelming majority of it's existence.

These nonprofits use this money to import hundreds of thousands of people from the most dangerous, violent, and backwards countries in the world. When those room-temperature-IQ people move into your neighborhoods, they are given free cars, free food, free housing, which the “refugees” then use to commit fraud, steal, and continue to be the violent, stabby creatures that they are. Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel?? Who gives a shit about Israel, Nick.

Perhaps there wouldn't be so many Syrian refugees if the US didn't bomb the shit out of Syria on Israel's behalf and then put al Qaeda in charge. Perhaps fewer sub-Saharan Africans would flow through Libya into Europe if the US didn't overthrow Gaddafi for Israel's benefit and create a power vacuum. One directly leads into the other. That's why people give a shit about Israel, actually; because it destabilizes all of its neighbors as a matter of policy and leaves its "allies" (read: dupes) to pick up the mess.

The Jews helped us beat Hitler.

Correction: we helped the Jews beat Hitler. Every single Jew could have dropped dead spontaneously in 1939 and America would have still had basically the exact same capabilities to beat Hitler.

The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union.

Pollard sold the Soviets American secrets and then was given refuge in Israel, they played both sides and could just as easily have claimed to have helped the Soviet Union beat America had it gone the other way.

The Jews can help us beat China.

In reality, the Jews sell American military secrets to China, much as they sold American secrets to the Soviets.

The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.

Correction: the Jews want "us" to fight their enemies for them, again. America doesn't need to "beat Islam", it simply needs to stay out of the sandbox and reject their migrants.

Correction: the Jews want "us" to fight their enemies for them, again. America doesn't need to "beat Islam", it simply needs to stay out of the sandbox

Interestingly "the Jews" (Ariel Sharon, then Israeli PM) warned Bush about getting stuck in the sandbox.

They did phrase it as "why are you going after Iraq, Iran is who you should be going after" though, which paints a slightly different picture.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/08/29/israel-warned-us-not-invade-iraq-after-911

Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level:

Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with ...

I agree with you that Muslim-majority countries usually underperform non-Muslim countries with similar biological stock (North Africa vs Southern Europe, Muslim Africa vs Christian Africa, Pakistan vs India, Iran vs Indian Parsis), but critically Muslims are not a biological group and "Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.

"Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.

Yeah but when the religious-culture doesn't really permit an easy offramp due to actually taking anti-blasphemy and people leaving the faith somewhat seriously, the two become very tightly linked.

Islamic genetic potential tends to be worse than for their Christian neighbors, though. Often because Muslims marry their cousins at crazy high rates.

Muslims are not a biological group and "Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.

It's true that Muslims are not a racial group, and so the label isn't a biological one.

But 'people who marry their cousins and so suffer from inbreeding-related mental retardation' is a biological category, and well...

Funny thing about inbreeding is that unlike protracted heavy inbreeding (where a family has no new blood for an extended period), protracted mild inbreeding (lots of cousin marriages but not systematic) will eventually tend to weed out most of the alleles responsible for inbreeding problems (as it exposes them to much-stronger natural selection).

Do also remember that if someone heavily inbred marries someone else heavily inbred - but unrelated - the offspring are not inbred at all.

Islamic cousin marriage tends to be much more systematic than cousin marriage outside Islam.

To be clear, by "systematic" I mean like nearly 100% endogamy (I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect 85% still wouldn't be enough) in a moderately-sized clan, like the actual Habsburgs, so that you get a pile of allele-fixing and increased consanguinity. Are there a lot of families that do that in the Muslim world?

I'm also no enemy of the jews but I don't think you're really engaging with fuentes.

I think the Fuentes position is more that he thinks a strong nationalist country is the ideal and that "World Jewery" has had preventing the rise of a strong nationalist country at the very top of their priority list since the holocaust. He sees members of this class to have a strong influence on national politics. That in pursuing the prevention of a strong nationalist country forming they supported immigration on the grounds that it would water down any singular racial element taking control could cause problems if certain immigrant groups had their own antisemitic problems is just the classic golem attacking its master trope. He, probably correctly, thinks that if he worked with the Jews to get rid of the muslims then the jews would return to undermining his project at every turn.

Nick, of course, blames the hoard of third world migrants on the Jews that are living in Western countries. The evidence for this is that there’s a disproportionate number of Jews that work for the institutions that are destroying this country. As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.

Rather, jews do not like living in homogeneous states. They don't want to live in societies with strong cultural and norms that don't include them and prefer cosmopolitan rootless cultures. Jews don't want to be the only visible minority in an area. At the same time they don't have the same affinity to the local culture and people as gentiles in the same area. Multiculturalism is required to have another culture, aka jews there. Therefore jews promote multiculturalism.

Throw in a jewish hatred for Rome, Christianity, many Eastern European ethnic groups etc and it isnt surprising that jews are overrepresented in promoting mass migration.

Throw in wars for Israel that end up swamping Europe with migrants and the jewish problem becomes evident.

Bari Weiss was near center of a huge media controversy at Columbia, in which a group of Jewish students organized under "The David Project" and demanded the firing of a Palestinian Professor Joseph Massad. Bari Weiss and Bronze Age Pervert (yes that BAP) were peers and part of the David Project group writing articles to the Columbia Spectator calling for Massad to be fired and reforming the Middle East Studied department against the Palestinian perspective.

After Columbia, Weiss went to Israel where she did an internship under Yoram Hazony at the Shalem Center, a right-wing Zionist think tank in Jerusalem, and she worked for Haaretz and The Jewish Daily Forward. She then wrote for the Wall Street Journal and under Bret Stephens, who is now the inaugural editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations.

When Bret Stephens left for the NYT he took Weiss with him. Then Weiss resigns from NYT in 2020 to start The Free Press, which only in October of this year was acquired by Paramount Sykdance, owned by the Ellison family, for $150 million, and she was named editor-in-chief of CBS News.

The Ellison family has extremely close connections with Israel and Netanyahu personally, as friends and financiers and business partners.

This brings us to the question of how did Weiss become the editor-in-chief of CBS News? Did she win the meritocratic contest for this position owing to her outstanding Jewish verbal IQ? Or is her promotion to this position of power an example of Jews colluding to acquire power over and steer the national narrative in favor of their own interests?

At the risk of consensus-building, from the perspective of anyone aligned with Fuentes on the JQ it is so obviously the latter. And I am very curious what somebody, like you, who opposes Fuente's anti-semitism would say about this? Either you insist Weiss's career was propelled by her merit and IQ, or you acknowledge that her most important credential that earned her station was being a Jew connected to other Jews who was perceived as the best fit for pivoting the network to steer the national narrative in favor of Jews. So it's "meritocratic" in the sense that she was judged to be the best person for this job, "the job" being steer the national narrative in the interest of Jews.

If you insist the former, she has control over CBS news because of her IQ, you are just living in a different world from the "anti-semites" and your critique of their perspective will fall on deaf ears because, from their perspective, you are ignoring plain reality. The idea that Weiss has editorial control over CBS news because of her merit, I don't see how anyone could believe that. But if you admit that the elevation of Bari Weiss is an example of Jews engaging in the behavior that "anti-Semites" accuse them of, then you have a harder task of conceding some ground, which never happens in any mainstream criticism of Nick's Anti-semitism but still explaining why he's wrong.

Saying "Bari Weiss being promoted to this position of power is an example of Jews colluding to steer the national narrative in favor of Jewish interests" will get you called an Anti-Semite, it will get you fired if you say it out loud, but it's also true. That's the strength of Nick's appeal, it's not because of the economy or housing market or dating market. It's because we all see this thing that is happening with Ellison, CBS, Bari Weiss, and our interpretations of what is happening are true. That is the strength of the appeal.

The Weiss question is interesting because, in my view, it's an area where even those who criticize Fuente's anti-semitism should concede some ground and admit there's some truth there. But will they? I don't think so, and giving Nick that sort of monopoly over true and important interpretations of political and cultural developments is what is empowering him most of all.

Funny anecdote reported by WSJ:

According to executives familiar with the plans, foreign correspondent Chris Livesay was among the staffers who were going to be let go as part of companywide layoffs in the works before Weiss's arrival.

In an email to Weiss, he spoke of affinity for Israel and suggested he was being "bullied" and isolated for his views, according to a person familiar with the matter. Weiss weighed in on the layoffs and spared Livesay, people familiar with the move said.

Other CBS News correspondents say that Livesay wasn't bullied for having pro-Israel views.

I wonder why Nick is so popular when he is the only prominent media figure directly naming the elephant in the room! Acknowledging this stuff isn't just being edgy, or being hateful, it is fundamentally required for understanding ongoing political and cultural conflict in the US.

I have complained myself, as a former Free Press subscriber, about Bari Weiss's editorial direction. You are not wrong that she obviously sees herself as a defender of Jewish and Israeli interests (and she equates the two when it's convenient and differentiates when it's not). That said:

Either you insist Weiss's career was propelled by her merit and IQ, or you acknowledge that her most important credential that earned her station was being a Jew connected to other Jews who was perceived as the best fit for pivoting the network to steer the national narrative in favor of Jews.

Your problem, as someone more obsessed with Jews than Jews are, is that you seek simple and totalizing answers ("Jews!") to everything.

Certainly when looking for a new CBS editor in chief, Ellison was going to pick someone with pro-Israel credentials, and almost certainly someone Jewish. But he was also looking for someone aligned with the new (Trump) regime yet not in obvious bootlicking way. Weiss's Free Press had over the past few years earned a reputation for delivering good journalism that was critical of liberal orthodoxy and "wokeness" (i.e., had a bit of a following on the right) without being an outright MAGA publication. And putting Weiss in charge after her unceremonious ejection (technically she resigned, but) from the NYT was putting a thumb right in the eye of people both Ellison and Weiss despised.

So the answer is yes, Jews, but that's not the whole story. You would hardly expect Ellison to put a pro-Palestinian leftist in charge, would you? That actually excludes a pretty good chunk of the media elite. Weiss was probably on the short list for a number of reasons, Jewish being just one of them.

Ellison was going to pick someone with pro-Israel credentials, and almost certainly someone Jewish.

Why is this almost certain? There's no shortage of Christians with pro-Israel credentials.

I think the Venn diagram of successful non-jews in the media with pro-Israel stances is pretty small. I can't think of many.

Another point in Weiss's favor is that she courts controversy -- and this being media, that's usually a good thing. Hell, when was the last time anyone talked about CBS this much? I'm not seeing a lot of downsides (yet) to Ellison's choice.

Weiss' resume isn't that deep, in terms of running a major television news corp. For comparison, the equivalent guy at Fox News started on O'Reilly before Weiss was out of college. She had a roughly ten year career in print journalism, and founded a modestly successful substack. By that standard, she's about as qualified as Scott Alexander to run CBS news. There's a ton of gentiles with resumes that stack up against hers. And frankly if there aren't, that seems to be giving the game away to SS to begin with, doesn't it?

Another point in Weiss's favor is that she courts controversy -- and this being media, that's usually a good thing. Hell, when was the last time anyone talked about CBS this much?

CBS news affiliates mostly cover local news. Becoming purely ideological may or may not be a good approach there.

I seriously don't see how that addresses anything @SecureSignals has said. Like, yes, Bari Weiss is more than just «a Jew», she's a specific person, with individual connections, traits, skills and credentials that have differentiated her in the pool of admissible candidates. Certainly she couldn't be substituted with someone like Norman Finkelstein on the mere account of his ethnicity. The issue here isn't even Bari per se, it's the criteria defining the nature of the pool. It's the same issue as the negatively-defined criteria of DEI preferential treatment, which people are much more comfortable rejecting.

The issue here isn't even Bari per se, it's the criteria defining the nature of the pool.

I wouldn't count "critical of wokeness without being outright MAGA" as a problem with the nature of the pool, in the sense you seem to mean. That's probably going to be the best you'll get if you're going through journalists--exactly what should the pool have been instead?

That seems to broadly concede the point, doesn't it?

Imagine, say, the NYT was taken over by a Norwegian billionaire who had really strong opinions on what should be done with Norway's national fund. It's kind of a regional issue that most non-Norwegians don't have much of a stake in and he therefore carefully vets his hires for top editorial positions to make sure they have the correct stance and strong ties to his faction. Naturally, this means that they are all Norwegian.

Probably these picks have strengths beyond being Norwegian! They write well, they're bright, they're personable. Some of them have a good reputation and industry awards. You can't get a job in the new NYT just by being Norwegian, and being Norwegian is only one of the reasons they were on the short list.

But when you get right down to it, the editorial team got hired because they were Norwegian.

It seems to me that those of us who are not Norwegian have a right to ask whether this counts as illegal discrimination, and if not why not. We also have a right to ask clearly, in public, what it means for our information ecosystem that one of the main sources of information is now being run largely by and for Norwegians, without getting fired for anti-Norwegianism. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but that doesn't mean you can't draw a pretty clear conclusion.

(Apologies if it turns out we are in heated agreement.)

Right, I don't disagree that rich Jews tend to stick together. I am not surprised Ellison hired a Jew. Obviously if he explicitly stated "I'm not considering any non-Jews" that would be illegal, but--he probably would consider a small handful of non-Jews.

In your Norwegian example, I would find the choice of a Norwegian unsurprising, and while I guess if I were in the industry I'd grumble about it, I wouldn't be overly exercised about it if non-Norwegians weren't being shut out.

Unless, of course, I subscribe to some dark conspiracy theory that, since the cold dark days of å dra på viking, Norwegians have been ever raiding and warring against Europeans and to this day seeking to undermine the purity of Anglo-Saxon stock.

Then maybe I'd be obsessed with posting about Da Noorse.

Isn't there a reasonable spectrum in between? Like, you're really not supposed to act like this, not in the West. If everyone I hired was a white English national I'd get it in the neck for God's sake, we've had decades of trying to root out any in-group preference at this point, with massive collateral damage in the process. You don't have to be a dark conspiracy theorist to object to someone buying a major news organ and stuffing it with their co-ethnics to influence public opinion towards their ethnostate, you just have to be a regular person. And if you're a would-be journalist with all the same talents or better but you're shut out purely because you don't give a shit about the Norse it's even worse!

There's also the issue that this kind of thing is literally what dark conspiracies are. "Norwegians are buying major newspapers to control the coverage of Norwegian issues" is a conspiracy theory in its own right, even if NOG never comes into the story once. Again, there are points on the spectrum in between 'this is ok' and 'Vikings have been ruling over us for a thousand years, ever since Harard secretly conquered Britain in 1065'.

Yes. If a Jew hires only Jews, I would expect him to be sued for discrimination. But the fact that a lot of Jews rise to elite ranks doesn't require more than the usual amount of networking between people who know each other (we talk a lot here about Jews and Indians helping each other network, but I've seen Mormons, Catholics, and evangelicals do the same thing), and Jewish success being disproportionate for reasons we've also discussed.

What I expect is that Ellison was inevitably going to hire some strongly pro-Israel, which made it highly probable it would be someone Jewish.

We do seem to be in furious agreement, right up to the bit where your train of logic ends: 'and therefore it's annoying but basically fine'. I get that you can't make an 'ought' from an 'is' but I don't want to be ruled over and shut out of good positions by a cabal of people who don't like me much, especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.

(Yes, it happens to some degree with other groups too but a) rarely quite with such chutzpah and shamelessness, and b) if you make up a big majority of the local population then at least your news output or whatever is aligned with them and not so many people are getting shut out).

but I don't want to be ruled over and shut out of good positions by a cabal of people who don't like me much, especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.

I mean, some UK MPs have Jewish backgrounds but I don't see them advocating for particularly ethnocentric positions. The highest profile Jewish MP, Zack Polanski, is an example of the opposite.

Regarding getting shut out of good positions, if that's been your professional experience then I can't say otherwise, but I've literally never heard of this happening in the UK (not to say it's never happened, but I would think it's exceptionally rare). There simply aren't enough Jews for them to be regularly hiring each other over everyone else.

especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.

Didn't Trump just roll back disparate impact protections?

More comments

I mean, ideally I'd like everyone to abandon tribal identity and self-interest. I just do not agree with SS that Jews doing it is more harmful to me than anyone else.

Bari Weiss’ father was a regional head of AIPAC and nationally-influential Zionist. After Ellison’s takeover, all four major CBS hires have been Jewish, which is statistically improbable even if Jews are 10x over-represented in the field: a 0.3% probability, assuming such an over-representation. (Weiss, Gutman, Weinstein, Dokoupil). If you include Ellison himself in the list, it’s about a 1 out of 1000 chance that all five key positions just happen to be Jewish. (Again assuming 10x over-rep, otherwise it’s like 1 out of 100 million chance)

This is correct. Jews do what Whites are culturally not allowed to do: leverage their ingroup bias to help one another in society. You can understand why they do this but this is going to make them unpopular.

Any acknowledgement of this begs the question: should Whites be doing the same? Obviously Jews don't want this and progressives don't want this understood as a (justifiable) tit-for-tat behaviour.

White people were doing that, then stopped because they established a successful high-trustsociety, but noticed how everyone else was struggling to keep up. So they stopped. Maybe the implicit rule is that whoever's on top can't have in-group bias, but everyone else can? But then you get into the argument over whether Jews are on top or oppressed, and the answer seems to be based entirely on who the answerer is most pissed at this week.

Problem, of course, is that the high-trust society is over, because everyone burned through the surplus trust faster than it could regenerate. There's a Socialism analogy in there, somewhere, but probably pointless.

But the right also has alarmingly high rates of antisemitism

Because Jews tend to push multiculturalism and communism. George Soros infamously uses his high IQ and great abilities to create an 'open society' - more blacks and browns, get criminals out of prison, basically eroding nation-states, including Israel tbh.

Jews certainly are quite clever and capable. The polio vaccine for instance is a Jewish innovation.

But just being clever and capable isn't always a good thing, it only shows a capacity to do good things. They can use their wits for bad ends. They can invent communism (Marx), push communism (Trotsky and many others), leak nuclear secrets to the communists because they sympathize with communism (Goldbergs), invent and push anti-racism. Who was the main proponent of blank-slatism? Franz Boas, Jewish. White anthropologists and political theorists generally tended to have a balance between scientific racism and antiracism, political left and right. Jewish intellectuals, financiers and so on lean heavily to the left. It's not just 'overrepresentation' but a clear political slant, like blacks have a clear slant. There's no similar Jewish overrepresentation pushing right wing ideas, opposing diversity, pushing back on excessive tolerance - there's Stephen Miller and that's about it. If only Jews voted in the US, Democrats would win every time. Even in 2024, a full year after October 7th, Jews still voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris over Donald 'Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel, bomb the shit out of them, block immigration from Muslim countries' Trump.

Mariana Pfaelzer, Jewish, strikes down California's Proposition 187 that sought to discourage illegal immigration. Noel Ignatiev, Jewish, makes a whole career about abolishing whiteness (and Israel too). Horace Meyer Kallen writes books against the idea of the melting pot, he's one of the earliest proponents of multiculturalism. Just the other day, we had a Jewish US senator, Sarah Stalker, talking about how she feels bad for being white, wants white kids (and especially white men) to feel bad for their privilege in society.

See also my post about the 2020 election donors and their general leanings - Jews to the left, or Jews to Israel, whites tending more towards small-government or right-wing values: https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context

There's no monolithic bloc here, there's a smaller pro-Israel faction and a larger pro-diversity/LGBT/communism faction that are in a partial conflict.

Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones

Does anyone really believe this? Is it hip to wear a burka? Do we see the power of Allah valorized in the media? What about those blockbuster anti-Shiite films that show Sunnism as the true path? Where is the US's Islamophobia czar to match the antisemitism czar? Where is Biden's personal imam? Are Trump's children marrying sheikhs? Is the US giving Saudi Arabia billions in military aid every year? Are US states legislating against BDS of Islamic countries?

The oily lands are just doing garden-variety corruption, not full-scale cognitive warfare. Islam is only really prominent in the US because of the 1965 immigration law, Hart-Celler... you guessed it! Celler's Jewish while Hart is white.

In contrast, what we get is Holocaust education, Biden's personal rabbi, Trump's children marrying Jews, endless film/game/book franchises about evil Nazis.

We've got the US secretary of state, Pompeo, saying: "There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."

We've got Nancy Pelosi saying things like: "If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are"

Nobody says this about the Arabs! AIPAC is enormously more powerful and influential than Qatar or the UAE. It's easy to see how Israel might exploit the US with leadership this suffocatingly lovesick.

$3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me

The Israelis notoriously sell US tech to China, they never show up to help the US in any US wars, yet they receive US Patriot batteries and air cover to defend them from those in the Middle East who hate them. They send fake intelligence about Iraqi WMDs to motivate the US into destroying their enemies. The first Twin Towers bombing was motivated by anti-Israel sentiment, as was Osama Bin Laden to a large extent.

Israel has done more damage to US interests than any other ally, yet they get the best treatment of any US ally. The US should just test its weapons at home! 'Testing' US weapons against incompetents in MENA is only going to provoke dangerous overconfidence when it comes to fighting whites or East Asians.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly.

No, Islam is militarily very weak. US nuclear forces could reduce the Islamic world to ash within half an hour. A tiny force of Wagner can easily coup a few weak Muslim African countries and take the gold. Only politically is Islam capable of harming the West, they're terrible at fighting with their armies and have no navies to speak of. Only via political means do they show up, take up space, go around forming rape gangs, being criminal, abusing welfare, reproducing at speed, starting terror attacks. You don't NEED terrorism if you are good with armies.

Only because of political ideas like tolerance and antiracism and white guilt that Jews tend to push (often honestly and without regard for the interests of their coethnics) is this political mismatch possible. We could just take a leaf out of Algeria's book and send the Muslims back, whether they grew up here or not, what are they going to do about it in the face of total military inferiority? The answer is not to rely on Jews to get us out of a problem that Jews got us into. For whatever reason they tend to come up with and promote many terrible ideas in the political and economic spheres, the answer is to direct them to STEM only and out of politics.

You could equally say white Anglos love to promote multiculturalism and Communism and if we want to break it down by religion Episcopalians and Unitarians probably do so at higher rates than Jews.

Anglos don't promote multiculturalism or communism with anything near the fervour or effectiveness of Jews. Anglos are notoriously anti-communist, led the anti-communist bloc and were never at any major risk of communist takeover unlike France or Italy.

The Episcopalian church is a fairly progressive institution, not an ethnic group. It's expected that progressive churches will have a high proportion of progressive members. But alongside the Episcopalians and other progressive organizations, you have immigration-restrictionist movements, you have right-wing churches, rightist institutions. Anglos are diverse.

Where are the right-wing Jewish movements? In Israel building settlements or supporting Israel from abroad.

Because Jews tend to push multiculturalism and communism.

America is not the only country.

American Jews support the American left (for now, although they are shifting right). Jews everywhere else are right wing. Especially the Israeli Jews. Of course, even that is overstating the Jewish influence. Wokeness was an invention of Anglo-Americans, primarily. American Jews vote left because they associated the American right with Jim Crow and segregation, with its obvious parallels to the way Jews were treated in Europe before and during WW2, plus the fact that they are a highly educated, urban population. Not because they have a sinister plan to undermine western civilisation.

You can't blame the pathological altruism of the Anglosphere on such a tiny group. We did this.

American Jews support the American left (for now, although they are shifting right). Jews everywhere else are right wing. Especially the Israeli Jews.

Secular, Conservative and Reform Jews support the left. Modern Orthodox Jews support the right, although they only do so noisily in Israel. Haredi and Hasidic Jews support whoever the Rebbe sells their votes to, which in both the US and Israel in 2025 is mostly the right. (In 20th century Israel the auction was more blatant and sometimes the left was the high bidder).

The reason why American Jews are left-wing is that they are less likely to be Orthodox. I rounded up some statistics here.

If this is true, then why did Nietzsche blame the jews for wokism in the 1800s?

He blames the jews for the reversal of moral values. "Might makes right" is now entirely alien to us. All modern virtue has become the opposite of that which, biologically, leads to health. The victim mentality has become a social strategy. People now compete in who can make themselves out to be the most oppressed, and this behaviour is rewarded. There's no participation trophies because we no longer have the heart to say that somebody won, and to them imply that somebody else must have lost. If somebody is offended by words, we no longer feel disgust at the offended party (as we used to!), but instead blame the stronger party, the person who doesn't suffer from mental breakdowns due to mere words. This reversal, which attributes the highest value to the low and meek, is "wokeness". When Nietzsche criticizes morality in "The will to power", and in "The geneology of morals" which I'm quoting below, it sounds like a modern critique of the feminine values which have taken over society.

"Let’s bow to the facts: the people have won – or “the slaves”, the “plebeians”, “the herd”, or whatever you want to call them – if the Jews made this come about, good for them! No people ever had a more world-historic mission.“The Masters” are deposed; the morality of the common people has triumphed. You might take this victory for blood-poisoning (it did mix the races up) – I do not deny it; but undoubtedly this intoxication has succeeded.The “salvation” of the human race (I mean, from “the Masters”) is well on course; everything is being made appreciably Jewish, Christian or plebeian (never mind the words!)"

We domesticated ourselves too much, and now we, like dogs, have something like Williams syndrome. Most of our "barbaric" traits have been pruned from the gene pool, but as a result, strong men are lacking, masculinity is lacking. And the jews helped bring this about, even if a development like this was inevitable.

It's not just America, Jews in Europe routinely call for migrants to be accepted and tolerated more. The Bonnier Group media in Sweden fulfills a similar kind of role to the NYT in America, pushing multiculturalism and social justice issues.

We have these quotes from Jews like Barbara Spectre: "Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented because of our leading role."

She says it, I believe her. In the UK https://www.jcore.org.uk/, 'supporting refugees, led by Jewish values'. Where are the rabbis and Jewish NGOs against mass immigration? Jews are not right-wing in that sense. They might prefer the mass-immigration Tories to the mass-immigration, vaguely anti-semitic Labour. But they don't actually agitate against mass immigration at any considerable scale.

Wokeness was invented by Jews, they came up with blankslatism and antiracism and they pushed hard for civil rights, whereas whites were divided. It was whites who enforced Jim Crow and segregation when they were around, while Jews like Levison were advising MLK. Obviously whites are more right-wing than Jews, they were right wing in the past too.

The Anglosphere has not displayed pathological altruism across history. Robert Clive, not an altruist. Francis Drake, not known for niceness. Those people flinging smallpox ridden cloth over at the native americans, not altruistic. The Duke of Marlborough was a pretty tough guy, not to mention Wellington. You don't conquer huge swathes of land by being nice and welcoming to others. Only recently has the Anglosphere and Europe decided that their destiny was not to rule the world but to help disadvantaged communities and become majority non-white. Previously, there was the White Australia Policy, Asian Exclusion Acts, immigration restriction and white supremacy. In WW2 John Curtin of Australia spoke openly about this:

This nation will remain for ever the home of the sons of Britishers who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race. Our laws have proclaimed the standard of a White Australia. We did not intend it to be and it never was an affront to other races.

Pathological altruism is a recent phenomenon. It had roots in a more-benign than usual kind of imperialism certainly. But there is a qualitative difference between 'lets build some railways in India' and 'let's cover up these Pakistani grooming gangs in our country raping white girls because we don't want to look racist or prejudiced.'

It makes zero sense for the people with all the wealth and power to decide, unprompted and without external influence, to start giving away wealth and power to other peoples, invite other peoples in and give them preferential treatment. Only once you add a group with notoriously high verbal IQ does this story start to become more believable.

leak nuclear secrets to the communists because they sympathize with communism (Goldbergs)

You mean the Rosenbergs? I remember reading about them in a social studies textbook in school. It used true facts to portray them as victims of the red scare and antisemitism, and conveniently left out the part where they were, you know, guilty.

Yes, whoops, my mistake there.

I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig headed fool.

I notice, you are prejudiced, he is acting out his insecurities through violent bigotry.

I'm going to register that I think this is a troll post, the quality is so low that I have trouble believing in it. Numbers pop up only for one side, ethnicity and religion are conflated in different ways for different groups, hatreds are elided at random.

Yeah, I think its just a jew post wearing a semite-phile skin suit.

There is a sense of victory in that, even in a troll post, people have to quite accurately reflect our views.

The problem is that this whole «human capital» philosophy that treats humans as interchangeable stuffing of different grades in the American pie is premised on some extremely degenerate assumptions about human nature at this point.

The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years is NOT some secret cabal of Jews conspiring to destroy the countries that they share with us. It seems much more likely that outside actors who actually have a vested interest in watching the US and Europe collapse are to blame: the Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones. Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire. The Chinese definitely want to see America be as multicultural as possible and promote identity politics to create more divisions within us.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us, the Jews will be overrepresented in the political, military and cultural institutions that are fighting for western civilization. The Jews helped us beat Hitler. The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union. The Jews can help us beat China. The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.

I notice you don't mention China except as something to beat, while extolling «Japanese», «Taiwanese» and «Asians». It's peculiar because of course Taiwanese are Chinese, most American [East] Asians are Chinese, and indeed, they're doing very well! Low crime, high SAT, sizable tax contribution, and as I've said in my last long post, when an American Jew (Zuckerberg) wants to build an American Superintelligence Lab, 20 out of 30 research scientists turn out to be Han Chinese. In fact, 18 of them even hold PRC citizenship. This is about how it looked at the absolute peak of Jewish dominance in the American cognitive elite.

And yet, and yet – the US is having a decade-long meltdown about strategic competition with China. Even these researchers are suspected as potential spies who'll leak our precious inventions (their own work, largely) to the Red Dragon. There's a lot of vitriol directed at the Chinese, smoothed over with unconvincing noises to the effect of «no no I don't hate Han people, love my Hapa children, much beautiful ancient culture, wow very friendly very nice, I hate the CCP [also nuke three gorges dam]». Well, but the CCP is made of 100 million Chinese people, it has a sky-high approval rating (no it's not fake), and it genuinely represents their collective will to be a successful race, a superpower with hegemonic potential, rather than an assembly floor and source of high-skilled labor for Americans (including Jews).

White people like (presumably) you, people who buy into this «human capital» doctrine, are simply people. Chinese and Jewish people are a people, and in their own cultural frame even the People – a distinction which is a bit better articulated than in many other cultures, but in no way an abnormal way of thinking. They are ethnocentric. Goys and barbarians are not part of the people, and the people will coordinate to achieve collective gain in zero-sum games with barbarians and goys. That's table stakes for a self-aware successful culture.

What kind of war against Islam are you envisioning? It's pretty funny because militarily, Islam is not a threat to the West at all and has no potential to become a threat. It is, of course, a moderate but real threat to Israel, which is why pro-Israeli actors will hype up the Islamic threat to try and have you fight their wars. The Saudi money works, if it does, because your ruling class is hilariously corrupt and disinterested in the long-term prosperity of the populace. The main danger scenario is illustrated by the case of the UK, with slow population replacement by a mix of different immigrant groups and the low-status people (low human capital, so much less interesting for «the UK» than Jews or Asians) converting to Islam out of desperation. To stop this, you don't really need high-IQ Jewish generals and nuclear scientists, you need to learn to think of yourselves as «a people» that have intrinsic worth not denominated in tax returns or exam scores. But that's at odds with those very «values» you hope to have the Jews protect for you.

All of this is very mush-headed. There's no need to antagonize any ethnic group or reject cooperation, but there is a necessity to acknowledge that major nations represent essentially ethnic interests that are partially shared by their diasporas, and there is not a single non-Western nation that is straight up invested in propping up the West for «values» or whatever. Including Israel. All alliances will be alliances of convenience.

Yeah I noticed that as well with separating out Taiwanese.

White people like (presumably) you, people who buy into this «human capital» doctrine, are simply people. Chinese and Jewish people are a people, and in their own cultural frame even the People – a distinction which is a bit better articulated than in many other cultures, but in no way an abnormal way of thinking. They are ethnocentric. Goys and barbarians are not part of the people, and the people will coordinate to achieve collective gain in zero-sum games with barbarians and goys. That's table stakes for a self-aware successful culture.

Maybe it's downstream of deep Christian roots but this is not how we, the liberals, want things to be. There is no contradiction between liking chinese people and disliking one institution that they are currently forming(of course as you note the CCP isn't even the only largely Han Chinese ethnic government), any more than there would be with liking German people and opposing the Nazis. The Chinese people have had previous governments, and so have us westerns. Not only are there obviously previous American presidencies that I oppose, in many ways I oppose the current one. And yet I love my people, I love America and Americans. I love our optimism, the puritan work ethic, the celebration of success. Many of these same great qualities I recognize in the Chinese people I have met.

To the degree that Fuentes strikes a cord against Israeli/Jewish influence it's because it's deep in our marrow that ethnocentrism is evil. And that's why he will ultimately fail. He makes Americans feel uncomfortable dissonance about their gut deep opposition to ethnic centrism and the obvious ethnocentrism of israel, Israel itself being made up of the world's most famous victims of ethnocentrism, But that same energy he's using to drum up resentment of israeli influence is what he opposes. It's why he has to ride the line of praising the jews for serving their ethnic interests as he opposes them. In his preferred world view there is absolutely nothing wrong with scheming in your ethnic interest. I don't think he will be able to turn the Americans in this way, I don't think that's in our souls.

All of this is very mush-headed. There's no need to antagonize any ethnic group or reject cooperation, but there is a necessity to acknowledge that major nations represent essentially ethnic interests that are partially shared by their diasporas, and there is not a single non-Western nation that is straight up invested in propping up the West for «values» or whatever. Including Israel. All alliances will be alliances of convenience.

Your post is passive just descriptive. Do you endorse ethno nationalism or just observe it? In my favorite post of yours you once said

I wear my sympathies on my sleeve. I have little sympathy for the Chinese regime and understand its faults, but I side with it (to the extent that this matters) as part of a gamble unlikely to pay off, but the only one left to me and my people to check the tumorous growth of the monster you happy lot sustain with the sweat of your brow.

What is that monster we sustain? What is it that you hope to see vanquish it and take its place? Could it truly be this cynical ethno nationalist? And if not what?

To the degree that Fuentes strikes a cord against Israeli/Jewish influence it's because it's deep in our marrow that ethnocentrism is evil.

I really don't think this is true of a great deal of American conservatives. The fact that Japan, say, prioritizes the ethnic Japanese does not seem to be a moral problem at all for an awful lot of people, which is why I think online edgelords have latched on to it as a useful argument. America can't really be that kind of country, of course, because of its actual settler+immigrant history means we've always been a mess of different fractious groups from the very beginning, but the fact that other nations have other ways of organizing their borders seems pretty unobjectionable.

From that perspective, though, the problem with Israeli influence is that Jewish people are being very normal about their enthocentrism (which is a default almost everywhere around the globe, and will return to being more apparently as America and the West become relatively weaker compared to everyone else), and current American liberalism rules it entirely out-of-bounds to name it and respond appropriately to it, because saying that groups exist and fight for their own (entirely sensible, but also entirely non-universal) interests, sounds a great deal like what has been defined as antisemitism in this case... To that conservative perspective, someone Jewish being a partisan for Israel and Jewish people is totally normal and sensible, but the fact that the American government refuses to likewise be a partisan for Americans and American people (and the boundary here is certainly complicated) is the actual glaring problem, especially in a case like this where (so the claim goes) these Jewish interests are being especially sharp elbowed as the expense of a lot of Americans.

That's at least something like the kind of perspective I come across, at any rate.

Your post is passive just descriptive. Do you endorse ethno nationalism or just observe it?

I will answer thusly.

My default moral intuitions aren't that different from modal American ones 50 or so years ago. Russia is a multiethnic society, clearly defined by one ethnos and culture (mine, to a first approximation), which does not possess the instinct or inclination for clannish diasporic behavior. We are more ethnocentric than modern Westerners but not by far. We assimilate easily in Western societies, find them an upgrade to our own, and generally agree with the way of the West, whereas the ways of The Rest are seen as unfair and backward, if demonstrably adaptive on the personal and sometimes collective level. Ethnocentrism specifically has been investigated in a toy model I like, by one Artem Kaznatcheev and friends, in Canada in 2013, and the conclusion was that it “…eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates”. Intellectually, then, it appears necessary to develop a system that can defend that superior humanitarian way, and the unpalatable conclusion is that in practice it amounts to something not unlike ethnocentrism – aggressive policing of defectors, attention to proxy metrics of defection, operational presumption of non-assimilation, and rejection of comforting lies about universality and natural attractiveness of preferred values. Western experiment with mass immigration and “race-blind meritocracy” is clearly a cheap hack motivated by Western cognitive biases, myopic financial considerations and such, not any concern for long-term preservation of the Way. Similar thoughts are common for sympathetic peoples on the periphery of Western civilization, which is why we see Slavs, assimilated Jews, Moldovans and so on disproportionately represented among the European right.

On a more philosophical level, I don't know. Ethnocentrism is a crude but effective means to preserve the intrinsic direction of a people, it increases the activation energy for changing course, and lets the direction be explored further. Moral intuitions aside, I'm not convinced that the Western direction is truly superior; it would be premature to say so.

I'm pretty open to the idea that diversity is good — real diversity, not this consumerist Western appreciation of cuisines, not the lukewarm respect for ethnic varieties of ideas the West already accepts. Why is diversity good? I consider great men of history to be scientists, and civilizations to be ongoing longitudinal natural experiments – about the limits of human nature, society, what kinds of minds should be incentivized to develop, what notions of goodness are viable and lead to more adaptive behavior, better instrumental outcomes and, in the limit, to greater collective and individual flourishing. Some experiments achieve negative results, invalidating the hypothesis for observers, but it's always a pity if this happens for contingent reasons like a natural disaster, or an opportunistic alliance, or luck of the draw in relative timing of access to some preexisting technology. I am distraught at being unable to know how failed civilizations could have developed to their “mature” stage, given a couple more millennia of literacy and a handful of extra IQ points, or passing a good reform, or contacting a powerful idea earlier; where would they have met their ceiling. When possible, one should run experiments in controlled conditions, after all.
The West is a beautiful experiment, plausibly the most successful that has ever been proposed. Its core thesis, stripped of the ever-changing scaffolding, is something like “human nature inherently has the spark of God's love and wisdom, therefore individual freedom is good and barriers to its realization are at worst prejudices, at best training wheels and must be systematically removed”. It's been working very well. But this near-genocidal desire to universalize the way smells less and less like sincere proselytism, and more like anxiety, fear of the hypothesis getting falsified. The truth is, the West has no clue as to what made or makes it work, beyond currently-commoditized pieces like capitalism (but whence capitalism? If “because freedom”, why does it port to societies that don't adopt the rest of the package?) Americans sometimes boast of “nation-building” Germany and Japan, developing “institutions”, and that reveals the hollowness and vulgarity of the doctrine. Germany and Japan, seriously? Japan got destroyed in the first place precisely because it got competitive, while remaining philosophically largely alien; Germany was actively advancing a divergent branch of the Western thesis. And today, both these nations are deeply troubled. Nation-building in less performant societies has a dismal track record. The West doesn't really know what to teach others so that it sticks. Really, what made the West into what it is, what was the generative function behind those generically adaptive innovations? Christendom (adopted Middle Eastern teaching, effectively dead now)? “HBD” in the sense of high IQ and conscientiousness – OK but why did it happen, just deep time migration patterns, cold winters, founder effects? What's the lesson here, pray to RNG? Galton-style Social Darwinism, Gregory Clark's Anglo class eugenics (grotesquely replaced with education-mediated assortative mating, also largely dead, and their practical implications made taboo in the resultant society)? “High trust” and non-kin cooperation by default (as covered here, a giant exploit for people who practice kin cooperation, and thus a mere bootstrap phase)? Science? Everyone above 95-ish median IQ can do science. The discovery was invaluable, but can “the West” come up with anything of that caliber ever again? Rather, can you even do what you used to do? We seem to be near the end of the session. Do you even know if you want to live? When you have full automation, will you put forward an argument for not just exercising your freedom to pass away replacing yourselves with machines, like you're currently doing with immigrants? Of what nature will that argument be?

China is another large old civilization. They've been running their own experiments. Their most enduring research program is Confucian. At the risk of butchering it, Confucianism says something like “humans aren't very good and are prone to self-interested behavior. Individual humans are not even human, they can only be elevated from monkeys via social context, and even then they default to barbarianism. But if compelled to cultivate “virtue”, starting on the mundane level of filial piety, hierarchical propriety and standardized ritual, escalating to mental discipline and scholarship, if rewarded with reproductive opportunity for utmost compliance, if the peace is maintained for many generations – they can build hierarchical societies of unbounded scale and splendor; and eventually, more of them become Superior Persons capable of and entitled to correct independent moral reasoning, and those will ennoble everyone else”.
It is debatable how seriously that has been pursued, but I'd say at least as seriously as the Christian/Western program. Both have undergone course corrections that arguably reflect growing out of their scaffolding and purify the original strategy. The West going from theism to deism to non-superstitious interest in the Universe, generalizing the validity of “love” and “freedom” beyond traditional norms. The East purging “thieves of virtue” along with ossified ritual and adopting a more common-sensical epistemology. To an extent this can be decried as trivialization and loss of function on both sides. There's been substantial convergence, but the divergent bits are what's at stake. Right now, I think the Eastern project is showing more promise, and the West is no longer in a position to lecture them on how to steer it. They're more ethnocentric? Less individualistic? They're authoritarian? Their society feels wrong? OK, I hear you. But they're solving social trust, they're solving – in their own way, less charismatic and more transactional – international relations, they're even solving creative expression, while having solved long-term large-scale coordination to a greater extent. And crucially, this isn't their first rodeo, they've had massive collapses and comebacks, they're the only major player that has a sophisticated applied discourse about civilizational recovery. Isn't it saying something that they've fallen behind, failed catastrophically, but have recovered, denied you the option of converting them, and are again pursuing their own program? Isn't it exciting that another solution can exist? Aren't you curious of where it will peak? Of course, they're doing well enough that another questions, for example “how much of the light cone will we be able to claim at this rate” are becoming salient for savvy observers. So it is necessary that they be treated as competitors, not just an interesting alternative path.

Jews, likewise, are a unique research program. They have an insular doctrine of their exceptionalism and special nature of themselves as “the people of God”, their moral obligation to biologically and culturally perpetuate themselves, a very long story of surviving and adapting, institutions built for venerating and reproductively rewarding exceptional individuals who have superior insight into God's will, they're punching so far above their weight that it's almost comical… and all of that hinges on extreme, almost naive ethnocentrism. They've mixed with Western peoples, experienced some assimilation, and now we're watching them return to a more traditional (indeed, exxageratedly traditional) form, with large Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox subpopulations having a vast fertility advantage over secular ones which, so long as they exist, provide a bridge to Western decisionmaking, invent spins like “Judeo-Christian liberal democratic values” and “our common Islamic/Communist/Han enemy”, and generally add confusion (partially their own). It doesn't take a genius to recognize that this research program, while fascinating on its own, can derail the Western one, and on top of your own dysfunction and anxious miscalculations it can create very ugly outcomes. We've seen trial runs in the Middle East, and the worst part is that you can barely articulate that it was mostly about them, not your “strategic interest” or oil or some other bullshit. So they, too, ought to be treated as competitors. It's okay, they can take it.

That's pretty much all relevant live players; smaller or less coherent players, who have a latent opportunity to expand their niche, are also more ethnocentric. The West is uniquely non-ethnocentric and has unique moral narcissism about this fact, largely owed to successes of the last several centuries. I think the jury is out on whether this system is sustainable or has the highest ceiling, and you're not entitled to try and “enlighten” others, but you're clearly valuable enough to think of how you can preserve and improve your program in a world of ethnocentrists, and that's what you should be doing now.

Spawn a great man or something, I don't know.

There's a lot here, thank you for the reply. Your analysis of the various 'peoples' is interesting. I find a lot of it compelling but, as a true believer in my people's experiment - and how lost I'd be if I weren't, I suppose this is how a practicing and believing christian must feel when they are baffled by how atheists can function without god - I do find things to disagree on. I'll have to digest it before that pushback can come up in some future engagement.


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