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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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This feels like we are just erecting an impossible standard for being described as a neurotypical person that also dislikes Israel. I.e, we want to label everyone who does not like Israel with a verbal guillotine called 'antisemitism'. Which is conveniently defined by us as an ever evolving collection of psychosocial irrational delusions. Sucks to be one of those, I guess.

The article’s most grating implicit premise is that dissent is only permitted if one first secures a survival plan for Israeli ethnocentrism. This is irksome not just because Israel is not holding itself to such a standard with its own actions against the Palestinians, but also because it relies on the lack of such a standard existing in the western world. Where Israel holds seemingly no reservations about sending any and all refugees their continued ethnocentric existence might cause. It's a catch 22 for the argument.

If the author thinks they are hoisting leftists by their own petard by employing this rhetoric, let me introduce you to the rich history of jewish intellectuals that spent their lives dismantling even the notion that ingroup bias, nations, or biology itself should exist in any relevant way in the western mind when we think of ourselves or our identities!

To the articles assertions more directly: Diaspora jews are probably the most self aware and protected group in the world. They are funded by tax payers like no other. Their representation in media is rivaled by none and the attention they receive from world leaders borders on absurdity. The notion that the multiculti death worlds that diaspora intellectual jews have helped create in the west are not safe for jews because of the imported muslims that Zionist policies necessitated and many diaspora jews aided in the import of is, on top of the audacious hypocrisy, not rational.

Jews are not going more extinct in the west than any other western group. On that simple fact the debate is over. Jews are not put upon, jews are not oppressed. They are just... suffering from a collection of irrational psychosocial delusions. Call it 'authoritarian-ingroup-hysteria'. They are afflicted with the odd and outdated notion of ingroup bias towards their own kind. That ones ingroups continued existence as a coherent sovereign entity is somehow valuable or relevant. Or that attacks against the ingroup are personally relevant. The western world has long dissolved any notion pertaining to such ideation. Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded. Least of all by leftists or jews! We deserved 9/11! Diversity is our strength! Our genes will survive no matter our phenotypic expression! Beige Power!

...I could go on and on. Thank you for linking the article, it was traumatizing.

Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded.

To push back on this point: depending on how you define it, there are two orders of magnitude more white Europeans in the world then there are Jews, and the global population of white Europeans has not declined at any point in the last century. Jews are not mistaken to perceive themselves as a vulnerable population in a way that white Europeans are not.

It doesn't matter how much more there is of one group than the other, when their core mechanism of cohesion has been, and is still being eroded.

In practical terms it kind of does matter.

I think you'll need to elaborate on that.

Just within the last generation you could see a massive cultural and demographic shift in Europe, even in it's most populated countries, and any pushback against the trend will only get harder with each passing day. Is the fact that technically it will take more for us to die off, than it would for a smaller population, supposed to console me somehow?

It's not meant to console you in particular. I'm just trying to illustrate that, for reasons of demography, the outright extermination of Jews in a couple of generations is a live possibility in a way it simply isn't for white Europeans.

Not really. We should still care about Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians, Danes, the Irish, Icelanders... etc., etc., etc., far before we care about the Jews. If we shouldn't care about these nations because they are all "white" and "whiteness" will live on without them, we also shouldn't care about the Jews. Unless you want to tell me that Jews aren't white.

Icelanders are a small subpopulation of Nordics, but they and their homeland don't seem to be under any particular threat. Except by their own acceptance of Islamic migrants, I suppose, but I suspect their climate (and the availability of better places) will limit that phenomenon. The Baltics main threat is Russia, which fortunately is occupied elsewhere. The others, like the Icelanders, are doing it to themselves. The Israelis, however, have been under near-continuous attack since the founding of their state. If they have a siege mentality (and they do seem to), it is because they have been under siege. It is true that eliminating Israel as a Jewish state wouldn't wipe out the Jews -- if it happens soon the Israeli Jews will mostly end up in the US. If it happens later, I suspect they'd mostly find places, not because the world's so much more accepting than in Hitler's time but because they're resourceful and will prepare. Unless they start a nuclear war instead; Masada wasn't THAT long ago, by geological standards.

This makes the Israeli situation rather different than any of those others. If the Israelis were inviting Hamas-loving Palestinians to join their polity and risking being wiped out that way, well... it would be sad, but totally on them.

The Baltics hopped on the mass immigration bandwagon as well, and I'm a bit skeptical on how much it's "doing it to themselves", a lot of it is pressured from the EU level. I'm also not sure I buy that Israel's issue with open borders is about the immigrants' love for Hamas, and that they'd be perfectly happy to import a couple million Indians, and give them full rights as citizens.

But that's all beside the point. I grant that the nature of the threat these nations face is different than that faced by the Jews, the question was whether Europeans should be allowed to advocate for their nation's continued existence the same way that Jewish people are. The precise nature of the threat seems completely orthogonal to that question. From what I recall about the opinions you expressed here, you wouldn't have anything against that, so as far as I can tell, we're good. Ftttg, on the other hand, seems to be saying that only Jews should be allowed to do that, because their situation is so special, and that's where I'm going to have an issue. Even if I misunderstood him, there's no shortage of people, even otherwise extremely anti-woke ones like James Lindsay or the Babylon Bee brigade, who will make that argument explicitly.