This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I agree. Before the existence of Israel, Jews were collectively accused of spreading communism; spreading capitalism; spreading the bubonic plague; killing Christian babies to make matzo; oppressing people on behalf of the Czar; undermining support for the Czar; and probably a whole bunch of other things.
The basic rule is that whenever something is considered bad, it won't be long before the Jews are accused of it.
What unfortunately lends so much credence to the accusations of the anti-Semites is what when the claims start getting thrown around, almost 'nobody' takes to combatting them to show them why they're factually false. The implied default assumption seems to be that anti-Semites don't actually believe there's a causal arrow between the activities Jews participate in and the negative downstream consequences it stirs up in the societies they inhabit.
I 100% disagree completely with the prescription people like Sam Harris have to anti-Semitism, saying it's just a ridiculous notion to be an anti-Semite (it is) and "we need to tell these people to go fuck themselves." It completely ignores the fact that people actually believe there's a factual foundation to this and the fact that it's never counter-argued or address is often what adds continued fuel to the conspiratorial notions people have.
I think there's value in debunking false accusations, but I doubt it's going to help much. People start with their Jew hatred and then look for reasons to justify it. There are countries out there actually doing the bad stuff of which Israel is falsely accused. Are those countries hated the way Israel is?
No other country on Earth has the pedigree that they do and that's why they've attracted so much attention throughout history, beginning all the way back with the accusation of deicide in the 2nd century A.D. Most people who treat them suspiciously are not rabid anti-Semites but get roped into thinking there's "something to it," because it going unanswered as left conspiracies to fester in their minds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They were just thrown out of 109 countries over a span of 3000 years with similar complaints each time for no reason. If you have been thrown out of 109 bars do bouncers have a collective delusion or is your behaviour lacking?
Jews need external enemies to unite their own group. Jews are extremely ethnocentric and are loyal to their group instead of their host societies. Jews have a religion which morality is shockingly antagonistic to goyim.
I hate to pull the "akchually" card but yes I know someone who gets kicked out of bars with uncanny regularity, with no real provocation every single time. It's odd, but sometimes your luck is just consistently fucking rotten.
More options
Context Copy link
Jews have disproportionate influence. They are nepotistic and work as a team for their special interest. A small dedicated lobby working for a specific issue can push the mainstream. That is what lobbying is about. It doesn't mean they are superior. There are plenty of cases in European history of one ethnic group having the upper hand in an empire over another. That doesn't require others to be inferior.
The issues with jews is that their interests are not our interests. Open borders migration and diversity makes sense for an ethnic minority protecting its interest. It doesn't benefit wider society. Promoting their ethnic subinterest over the majority's causes conflict. This is why throughout history they have been kicked out by the host population.
Christians and Muslims want to convert the non believers. The jews see the goyim as cattle with no soul.
Between this post and this one, the mods are now discussing whether you have earned the permaban you were promised last time you crashed out about Jews.
For now I am inclined to just tell you to chill out, despite the fact that I warned you no leniency would be granted last time. The reason for this is not because I think there is any chance you will moderate your behavior and stop being absolutely unhinged every time you post about Jews, but because threads about Israel and Jews always wind up here, and it's hard to say you are significantly worse than several other posters, who are more verbose and circumlocutious when they argue that Jews are monstrous and evil, but are expressing essentially the same sentiments.
The next post I see from you in the mod queue is probably going to be the trigger, though.
So just to review one more time for all our Joo-posters: you are allowed to hate Jews. You are allowed to say you hate Jews. You are allowed to advance theories about Jewish "behavior" and why they deserve hatred. But you cannot just "boo" your outgroup (e.g., Jews do this, Jews do that, Jews are blah blah blah) without pinning these accusations to specific groups. "Jews" are not a "specific group." You cannot realistically argue that there is something inherent to every single person of Jewish heritage that causes them to act a particular way. (I mean, if you want to, go ahead and present your biological/genetic evidence for this claim.) You cannot realistically argue that every single person in the "Jewish community" thinks a certain way or that everyone practicing the Jewish religion believes a certain thing. Because that is very obviously not true. So if you want go off on "Jews," you are almost certainly on thin ice, not because "Jews" are a protected class but because we mod people for doing exactly the same thing wrt every other group.
As always, you must proactively provide evidence in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your claims, and since claiming that an entire ethnic group is inherently treacherous, malevolent, and hostile to "our" interests is clearly inflammatory, you need to very diligently dot your i's and cross your t's every single time. And you don't.
Just as an example:
Really? "The Jews"? All Jews? All religious Jews? All Jews who are culturally Jewish regardless of their religious inclinations? You can argue (as some people do) from selected Talmudic excerpts that there is a strain of Judaism that considers "goyim as cattle with no soul." I think this is pretty clearly bad-faith cherry picking and you still need to, you know, point at the actual scriptures that say this (even @coffee_enjoyer only manages to produce some distorted and disputable texts to argue that that's what the nefarious Jews actually mean), but there are at least words you can point to as evidence that some Jews think things like this. There are rabbis who shitpost on Twitter and you can say "See, some Jews talk shit about goys."
But that's not sufficient evidence to claim "An ancient text says this, therefore all Jews believe this." Or "A prominent rabbi said this, so this is representative of what Jews think and we can indict them all on the basis of his words." It should go without saying that such standards would indict essentially every religious or ethnic group. But we've been over this before. Jew-haters gonna hate, but we're still going to apply the rules. Evenly.
You continue to post on very thin sufferance.
Funny how we have other people openly post about genociding Palestinians and that doesn't seem to get anyone banned.
Searching for the exact term "muslims believe" leads to 314 search results on the motte. Many of these comments are negative. There are over a thousand comments with the phrase "Russians are". Do they need specification as well?
This is a meaningless whine unless you have a specific post to talk about.
"Posting about..." is not a bannable offense.
Expressing negative opinions about Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, or Russians is not a bannable offense. Yes, this needs specification as well. I just told you above that you are allowed to have "negative opinions." I gave some very clear guidelines for what sort of "negative opinions" cross the line.
You show me where someone talks about Palestinians, Muslims, or Russians the way you talk about Jews. You show me someone with a history of raging about Palestinians, Muslims or Russians and not being told to cool it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes. And so “Jews” are like any other group in such regard. Whether you or I think it’s legitimate for them to do so is beside the point. You’re describing basic behavior.
Do I dislike particular Jews because they advocate politics antithetical to my own? Yep. Do I dislike them because they follow the religion of Judaism? No. Unless you’re telling me what you’re really against are Zionists, in which case I’m with you there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And even worse: things which were once considered bad when Jews did them may later come to be considered good, but new infractions will be discovered or invented to pin on Jews so that their perceived moral status among gentiles never improves.
For many centuries, Christians were forbidden to lend money, so if a Christian wanted to borrow money, he had to borrow from a Jewish moneylender (cue centuries of stereotypes about greedy Jews). Over time, Christian countries liberalised and secularised, and now there are just as many gentile moneylenders as Jewish ones, if not more so. But has this resulted in a rehabilitation of Jews in the gentile imagination, or an acknowledgement that it was wrong to stereotype Jews as greedy when in many cases they were completely shut out of many lines of work other than finance? Has it fuck. Gentiles are allowed to engage in the behaviours that resulted in the "greedy Jew" stereotype without incurring any of the associated negative status.
It's such transparently rigged, unfair bullshit.
What you're leaving out of the story is that Jews were also forbidden from lending money at interest (all Abrahamic faiths were, though the only ones trying to stick to it nowadays are the Muslims) they just weren't forbidden from lending money at interest to the goyim. This dynamic is at the root of a lot of the antipathy between the groups.
Right. But we're now at the point where Gentiles feel no qualms about lending money at interest either to each other or to people of differing faiths. Probably there are thousands if not millions of people who've chanted "from the river to the sea" who support themselves by lending money at interest.
Group A despises Group B. When asked to explain the reason behind their antipathy, Group A explains they hate Group B because Group B does Activity X to Group A. Subsequently, Group A decides that Activity X isn't such a bad activity after all, and starts doing it to Group B (among other groups) e.g. a Jewish family who takes out a mortgage with a Gentile-owned bank. However, Group A's antipathy towards Group B doesn't budge an inch.
Doesn't this strongly suggest that Group A's antipathy towards Group B really has nothing to do with Activity X, and it's just a convenient pretext to ostracise a group they wanted to harass for unrelated reasons?
You could say that activity X has nothing to do with it, but not in the way you wish to imply. The actual issue was the dynamic where an activity is seen as corrosive to society by both groups, so one of them bans it universally, and the other bans it only within the ingroup. I don't know how you can claim it's a "convenient pretext", one group is clearly defecting, and has no right to whine about their defection being recognized as such.
The activity being no longer recognized as harmful due to changing socio-economic circumstances does not change the fact that one of the groups was defecting. And even though that particular activity is no longer controversial, the defection dynamic causing the conflict is still observable today.
How are the Jews defecting now?
By majority-supporting progressive policies for other nations, while opposing them for their own communities.
For example? "Progressive policies" is a large set.
Keeping Israel as a necessarily majority-Jewish state, while promoting diversity in any state they're a minority in, for one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
?? The greedy jew stereotype is the butt of jokes, not something people seriously hold. Serious antisemites are much more likely to rant about dual loyalty or jews r pedos conspiracy theories.
In the last three years I have seen plenty of people discussing in complete seriousness how all of the banks and financial institutions are controlled by Jews and that this is bad.
American Jews are more than 10x over-represented in wholesale financial services, and there are substantial parts of the industry (though not close to a majority) where access to senior positions is gated by Jewish social networks.
This is a long way from Jews controlling finance, but when you can't safely tell the truth except on a pseudonymous online forum or in left-wing spaces dominated by machine politicians elected by unassimilated immigrants from Goatfuckistan, it isn't surprising that people postulate a more powerful conspiracy than the one that actually exists.
The same applies to Hollywood and probably the US MSM more broadly.
Hollywood has been kicking out Jews because of diversity initiatives. Just about all Jews are white in this context.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Forgetting that Marx was jewish and that the Russian revolution was at least as jewish as it was Russian. Jews are an ethnocentric outsider group that is loyal to itself. It isn't odd that they are accused of not being loyal to the society as a whole.
Yes, it is.
Apply that standard to literally any other group. Marx was dead for decades before the Russians got to him. Might as well say the U.S. is a white supremacist state.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm going to ask that you kindly capitalize the word "Jewish," consistent with normal English usage for the last 100 years. I am well aware that you are one of the Jew haters we are talking about, but to me this is just insulting "boo-outgroup" nonsense.
In any event, although I am skeptical that the Communist movement in Russia was majority Jewish, I would certainly not dispute that it was disproportionately Jewish. Although you claim to want to forget it (which I don't believe), I think it is worth thinking about. "Spreading communism" is one of those excuses to hate Jews but not the real reason. If it were the real reason, then why did the Soviet Union persecute its Jewish population? They should have been ecstatic that it had a subgroup that was so gung-ho.
This is another justification which is not the real reason for anti-Semitism. For starters, it does not explain the ferocious hatred towards Israel. Nor does it explain anti-Semitism in societies where Jews make great efforts to assimilate. Nor does it explain the various blood libels against Jews over the years.
Of course, I am also well aware that you no doubt have other rationalizations for your hatred of Israel. For example, they bomb hospitals (which just so happen to be bases of operations for anti-Israel terrorists). They "steal land" (which mainly consists of Jews going back to live in areas from which they had been ethnically cleansed within living memory). All of these ridiculous false accusations against Israel, combined with silence over behavior from other countries which actually do horrible things but are completely ignored shows that these are but rationalizations.
The inescapable conclusion is that anti-Semites such as yourself start with your hatred of Jews and then look for ways to justify it. That there is literally nothing the Jews can do (short of disappearing) which would change your mind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link