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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27270 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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I occasionally see content about Clavicular (Clav, age 20) pop up in my algorithm. I used to ignore it because I felt like I had a good read on his schtick. I decided to watch a couple interviews to understand why he might be popular among others, and to better understand him from a psychological perspective.

The primary thing he is known for is being a spokesperson for looksmaxxing ideology. He believes looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes. He therefore believes in going to extreme lengths to optimize his own looks. His own looksmaxxing experiments include steroid usage at a young age, taking meth to stay lean, and altering his facial structure by hitting facial bones with a hammer/fist.

Digging deeper it appears that he has social anxiety (he suspects he has autism) and he usually uses a cocktail of drugs to overcome this anxiety when streaming his social interactions. He recently overdosed while streaming, but made a quick recovery.

He is very in tune with social media trends and algorithmic manipulation. He knows how to clip farm and turn novelty into engagement. He uses weird terms like methmaxxing and jestermaxxing to increase the probability of a clip going viral. He also knows how to livestream and turn audience engagement into content.

His interviews tend to be a combination of him wanting to sperg out about looksmaxxing and him playing the role of clip farmer. The interviewers usually start out as curious about Clav’s worldview, but then they try to bait him into talking about his past controversies or play some rhetorical gotcha game. When Clav appears to have his drugs dialed in he seems to achieve his goals in the interview (spreading looksmaxxing ideology and generating algorithmic engagement). Sometimes he just comes across as spaced out and like is he having a hard time following the logic (like he is impaired by a substance).

My personal critique of him is that he is correct that looks matter, but he fails to realize the importance of balancing other skills and traits in order to achieve social success (like Aristotle's golden mean). I also think he is on a precipice with his drug use. He has the opportunity to taper and integrate the confidence he learned into his sober personality, but if he continues using his cocktail of drugs he will cause physical and mental injury to himself.

I’m far more interested in discussing the larger pattern that Clav is symptomatic of. Young men don’t see any viable paths to success, or have good role models for how they should live their lives. They look around and see the traditional paths (like college) are uncertain at best. They notice young women’s expectations have increased and they often don’t meet them. If they see a successful person (like a retired boomer) they don’t think that path is still available to them. If everything is uncertain the best thing to do is look around for successful people and imitate them. So, they find an influencer like Clav and realize they can play the social media influencer lottery by trying to become viral like him. If society tells them to figure out everything on their own and won’t provide a clear path that is likely to succeed then becoming viral on social media, giving up, or gambling suddenly seem like much more attractive options.

It is obvious to me that incentivizing a bunch of people to figure out how to optimize viral social media content is not good for society. It steers people into echo chambers, distorts their ability to see reality, and is also a huge waste of potential – they could become productive members of society (like scientists and engineers) if only society better aligned the incentives.

How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model? Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?

Virality is probably not correlated with pro-sociality.

So far as people like this are concerned, they're just overoptimizing for one aspect of social status and mining the cognitive dissonance for clicks. And what's the goal? In much the same way that bodybuilding quickly loses any connection to actual sex appeal, this "lookmaxxing" or whatever is another proxy being reified.

Young men will always be looking for ways to hack the social milieu in some way that gives them sexual access to young women. Most of them will be looking for One Simple Trick to avoid having to work too hard at it. Drugs, surgery, PUA classes, whatever. The con artists who sell them these fantasies may have a kernel of truth in their spiel, but only that.

Here's the reality: Becoming an expert at seduction, whatever we're currently calling that, is something many men are capable of but far fewer are willing to put in the work to achieve. Most men are best off building a decent life for themselves and trying to find a monogamous wife/girlfriend, not dating as a method of getting laid.

The fantasy is that you can do something easy to change that. Sexual access is competitive.

In my experience, finding an interesting single woman to marry is about two orders of magnitude harder than becoming an expert in seduction.

Getting laid is not easy, but at least doable. Finding someone I wouldn't mind inviting to my lair is... well... unsuccessful.

The whole secret of fishing is where and when.

If there are no suitable mates where you are fishing, try a different hole.

Also, perhaps think long and hard about what you mean by "interesting".

Long ago, I thought interesting women were women who were interested in the same things I was interested in. Which meant all the interesting girls were lesbians.

What do you mean now by interesting?

Now I think "interesting women" are a sorta-gay straight-male fantasy. Like a bro, except hot and and female and you have sex!

If you must have an interesting woman in this definition, you better get interested in chick stuff, or start hitting on Camille Paglia. The venn diagram of attractive single women with a 40k obsession and a geographical proximity to a given nerd approaches a geometrical line.

The ways in which women are interesting has little to do with their hobby interests.

I always wonder how men manage to get an erection on a woman who is (metaphorically speaking) "not obsessed with 40k".

Like, I never managed. Boredom as in an inability to find a common discussion topic works better than bromine for switching off libido.

My experience as someone with excessively geeky and male interests is that I needed to build a whole different skill set of talking to girls/normies about topics that weren't my "interests". I had to learn to be interested in more things.

A decent girl with a couple very general shared interests is a reasonable aspiration. A manic pixie dream girl who is into model trains AND confederate reenactment AND the Persona franchise probably isn't. Not to be snide, just trying to make a silly point.

The competition for women who are into male-dominated interests is intense, and you can tell from the physical mismatch of couples how much some men are willing to sacrifice for that shared interest.

I don't know what you're into, but when you go to events for it, are the men notably more or less attractive than their female partners? How many of the men have female partners? How many unattached women are there? Where are you in the social hierarchy of that interest? And can you do the math for what that means for your chances of snagging someone from that particular pool of potential partners?

I can do the math all right :D.

At the events which match my interests precisely, the ratio of women to men is about 1 to 100.

But I'm aware of this "math". When I said that "getting laid is not easy, but doable", I mean that I also go to events where female to male ratio is much closer to 0.5, and sometimes manage to pair with a female. The problem is that I can't really have sex with her without a heavy dose of Viagra, and I don't want to subscribe myself to a pill every day for the next 30 years. It's devastating for the brain, sleeping with someone you don't really desire.

are the men notably more or less attractive than their female partners

This is such a hard question... I don't really find looks attractive, so it's hard to tell. If a person is not obese and doesn't smell like a fish or a goat, he/she's okay.

Able to raise my children in a way I would approve of.

Looksmaxxing ideology, PUA, redpill, and incel are kind of like "alternative media" or "intellectual dark web." That is, they satisfy a demand that original information sources couldn't meet. A lot of people do not think mainstream sources are credible on the subject of "status for men." By mainstream sources, I mean ones that follow the background Western memeplex (which is feminism). If the question is, why do people feel feminism is not credible on the subject of "status for men," I am a little biased.

For me personally, it is probably because of being on the internet in the 2010s. For kids these days, I'm not sure. It's hard for me to imagine what its like to see the cultural landscape with fresh eyes. Probably all the boys these days notice that all the help goes to girls, and never to boys. Indeed, if any help were to ever go disproportionately to boys, the culture has a ready-made, uncostly way to rectify this and give proportionate help back to the girls. The reverse is not true.

it is probably because of being on the internet in the 2010s

The big difference between 2010s manosphere content and 2020s manosphere content is that there was a lot more optimism in the 2010s. 2010s RedPill content, yes, believed myths like 80/20 and AF/BB (i.e. the myth that only a few men get to be sexually active with a lot of women) but they also showed men how to sleep with a lot of women, and believed any man could achieve that with hard work. This was, of course, degeneracy, but there was an optimism I don’t see these days.

My biggest frustration is how this content is designed to have the most misogynist and negative view of women possible, believe myths simply because they make women look bad and make men angry with women, e.g. If I had a nickel every time that dishonest version of the 2009 OkCupid chart was reposted, I would be very rich.

This flamebait results in engagement, so it goes viral, but it isn’t healthy because it results in men hating women unreasonably. (There’s also misandry online, but that’s another discussion for another day)

I don't mean 2010s manosphere content was better, and so I find it more credible. I meant seeing misandry.

Misandry was normalized in the 2010s in really ugly ways:

Even here in the 2020s, a lot of these misandrists, as just one example, age gap shame, but explicitly (or implicitly) say it’s only an issue when the man is older:

Point being, people say idiotic provocative crap online for engagement.

The most damning blow to the 80/20 interpretation comes from a 2009 blog post by a co-founder, which shows that actual messaging behaviour follows a similar distribution for both genders:

Does this really make it better? That women hold their noses and message perfectly average guys they think are ugly seems like cold comfort for the mids in question.

I don’t think those women were thinking men were mostly ugly. I think what happened is that women don’t build attraction from just looks the way men do.

In terms of replication, the results are generally not the gap we saw in that old OkCupid chart but, yes, there is a gap.

He believes looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes.

What's funny about Clav is that he (apparently, though I don't follow closely enough), misses the irony that looks are less important than status, which is often self-reenforcing, and thus undermines the very thing he's popular for. Looks is a way to bootstrap into status, yes, but 'maxxing' it, hits diminishing returns fast.

He is not sustainingly popular because of his looks, but his fame, e.g. success. At this point, further maxxing on looks, has negligible effect on his further success, while staying in the spotlight, will.

Contrast his with say, Mr. Beast, who also bootstrap himself into virality. But Mr. Beast didn't misunderstand himself as 'counting-maxxing' but rather recognized the metagame as, 'stunt-maxxing' or 'brand-maxxing' on a path to 'virality-maxxing'. From what I've seen, Mr. Beast (whom I pay little attention to) talks about his own success with this awareness, rather than giving general advice that others also try to do viral video stunts to be successful too.

Suppose instead, after first going viral, Mr. Beast had decided that "looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes" and doubled down on that, rather than his 'stunt' focused avenue. Would he have ended up with better social outcomes? No.

Looksmaxxing is a stupid ideology because, aside from getting meta-famous for looksmaxxing, as an object level strategy itself -> improving looks is very important to a point, then hits RAPID diminishing returns. This is true of almost anything, unless you are trying to win a zero-sum tournament niche, which is always a bad 'general' strategy.

Suppose instead, after first going viral, Mr. Beast had decided that "looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes" and doubled down on that, rather than his 'stunt' focused avenue. Would he have ended up with better social outcomes? No.

On the flipside, Liver King's hard-earned clout immediately evaporated when he broke kayfabe and admitted it was all based on a contradiction and he was full of shit.

MrBeast's gimmick is basically inviting you to watch a Youtube nerd recreate Fear Factor with some additional consumerism for that fantasy element. So long as he can find some new wrinkle in that formula (or new people) he can get attention. Not sure it's the same for people like Clavicular.

sure Clav is famous for looksmaxxing, and if he stopped looksmaxxing, hed become less famous. But he's wrong in how much he advocates looksmaxxing as a generally effective strategy for status/success.

If I was famous for hopping on one foot, then continuing to hop on one foot would likely be an important part of my continued fame. But I would be wrong to espouse any general theory of hop-on-one-foot-maxxing that positioned it as a key to fame, generally.

Yes, I'm not saying he's correct. Just rational.

Yes, or as Kissinger phrased it:

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac

He was certainly not a looksmaxxer. But if even a small portion of women go for status then he was drowning in it despite looking the way he does.

Divisiveness sells on social media. Controversial and sensationalist content will always get a larger audience than the sensible guy telling you to get an education and not destroy your future through drug abuse and cosmetic surgery.

Past attempts to make social media take responsibility for their effects on society has mostly resulted in the attempted silencing of dissident viewpoints, while the actual issue of the algorithm boosting extreme content remains unchanged.

I think the redpill/manosphere is a good case study of this. /r/theredpill was an attempt at offering a viral competing worldview, giving young men a clear explanation of how a man succeeds in the world and how to be attractive to women. But the only aspects of the red pill that went viral were those laced with misogyny and intense sexism. The big "red pill" content creators of today are the Andrew Tate types, which are essentially grifters selling BS courses to young men. Meanwhile, the rest of the manosphere has more or less drifted into obscurity, hidden away through censorship and stigma.

I think the simple solution is to get children off of social media completely. This would limit the risk of being continuously exposed to viral memes and addictive content, while also significantly reducing the viewerbase of Clavicular and those like him. This way we are actively disincentivizing his type of business while also protecting the kids, and forcing them to socialize in person. How we go about doing this is another question though. I really dislike the idea of ID verification, but on the other hand, parents at large are also unwilling (or unable) to do their part, at most preferring to monitor the social media accounts of their kids instead of banning it outright.

...the simple solution is to get children off of social media completely.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?

The second flaw is that many adults are also led astray by extreme content boosted by social media algorithms; many of the adherents of Queue A Knon were already adults when social media became a thing.

I believe a better method would be to adjust the incentives further upstream, by requiring social media companies to implement an Agatean Wall¹ between user-experience and revenue-generation.

¹GNU Terry Pratchett.

As to your second point, I do kind of like the idea of just banning social media completely. The issue with that is I can't think of a way to do that without obvious workarounds, while also not banning the entire internet. At least with children, age serves as a clear dividing line, and adults are generally better equipped to handle the internet than kids.

I don't think I understand the Agatean wall. Would that just be a verbal agreement that the social media companies would not optimize engagement for revenue generation? If so, I don't see why these companies would ever do that.

I don't think I understand the Agatean wall. Would that just be a verbal agreement that the social media companies would not optimize engagement for revenue generation? If so, I don't see why these companies would ever do that.

In my proposed architecture, one side of the wall would handle content-curation algorithms and interface design, with the instruction to make it convenient for the end user to see the content they want to see, with any advertisements or sponsored content kept to designated spaces clearly labeled as such. The other side of the wall would deal with anyone seeking to purchase advertising space or aggregate data, but would have no method to adjust the experience of end-users to keep them on the site longer; advertisers could either accept however many eyeball-minutes occur without engagement-maximisation tactics, or leave the attention of social-media users to their competitors.

This gives at least some possibility of squaring the circle of having a service both free-at-the-point-of-use and prioritising the preferences of its end-users.

As for how to bring about such a state of affairs, I have discovered a truly marvelous regulatory structure accomplishing this, which this comment box is too narrow to contain.

Your link goes to a wikipedia page about a mathemathical theorem. Is that on purpose?

Link fixed; it should point to the relevant section of the article.

Pierre Fermat, circa 1637, wrote in the margin of a book "It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain." The theorem was proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles.

Congratulations! You're one of today's lucky 10,000!

I'm still fighting the lonely battle to have it renamed the Fermat-Wiles theorem. Fermat's marginal proof never existed, for crissake.

Fermat's marginal proof never existed, for crissake.

Then he's entitled to the name for such legendary trolling.

Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?

It’s irrelevant, my outgroup doesn’t breed well. Like pandas.

In other words, your main worry would be your outgroup converting outsiders to their worldview, which happens through the internet?

Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?

It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.

It seems to me that this is a question of marginal tradeoffs. I'm in favor of giving the state the ability to stop child abuse, defined as what the consensus of people consider child abuse, but I'm unwilling to go much further than that. I disagree a lot with how many people raise their kids, but I accept the need to let them raise their kids as they wish since I don't want them getting a vote on how I raise my kid. I'd be willing to support the state having more power if there was more of a consensus of values where I live, but since there isn't I default to general libertarianism as the local maxima.

It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.

Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.

I default to general libertarianism as the local maxim[um].

That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.

The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).

Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.

I'm quote fond of checks and balances myself. The relative weight of each authority depends on the situation on the ground, though. In general, I think parents should be given a lot of deference since the state, even well run ones, tend to protects kids worse than their parents. The sky high rates of abuse in the foster care system is an example.

That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.

I think the issue with no one having authority over children is that they are not capable of acting in their interests and effectively advocating for themselves. You can debate the age of majority and how much authority teenagers should have, but the central case of a small child needs someone to protect them and advocate for them. I think rather than parents being the owner of their children, a better metaphor is that the children are trustees an the parents are trustors. Due to the track record of the state being a bad trustor, I defer to the parents decisions in most, but not all, cases.

The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).

While I personally think that having a child be exposed to a lot of perspectives, with an ideally worldly and fair parent giving their own commentary on them, I think the state is too blunt an instrument to effectively administer this type of complex acculturation. My view is that if they are unable/unwilling to protect children in their custody from abuse, they have not demonstrated the competency to administer this type of acculturation.

But the only aspects of the red pill that went viral were those laced with misogyny and intense sexism. The big "red pill" content creators of today are the Andrew Tate types, which are essentially grifters selling BS courses to young men.

This was a huge part of the red pill/PUA movement from day 1. David de Angelo came to the early-noughties seduction community from the online snake-oil salesman community, and there was also overlap because both pre-2000 seduction artists like Ross Jefferies and snake-oil salesmen made heavy use of NLP, and the NLP community effectively got into a self-reinforcing loop of using NLP techniques to sell overpriced NLP classes to people who (if they were able to learn and use the skills) then saw selling selling overpriced classes as a high-status way to monetise your skills.

How we go about doing this is another question though.

Abolish section 230 protection for algorithmically curated content. If XBook is exercising the level of control over what you see that they do, in fact, exercise then they are a publisher, not a neutral platform.

How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model?

Ban social media.

I don't see another way to square the reaction to the recent articles about female radicalization (where most people seem to think the internet/ideology caused an unjustified reaction) with this post (where we seem to take it for granted that men are reacting to some objective fact about their circumstances). The internet is the common factor. We can't control when people feel oppressed but you theoretically could ban the internet and stop them being subject to memeplexes that push people towards self-victimization.

Of course, a lot of us don't consider this feasible or wise in practice.

Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?

No, they all seem crazy.

Seriously, who is the best adjusted streamer? It seems to select for the most dramatic. Going down the list of streamers I know something about:

  1. Destiny, of all the recent left-wing influencers probably one of the best political streamers because he's autistic enough to read sources and then disagree if he thinks it something doesn't make sense (which let him get shockingly far in recent Israel discourse with "experts" like Finkelstein) but has an incurable addiction to crazy white women that inevitably destroys whatever career he's built up since his last relapse. May have also blown Fuentes.
  2. Fuentes, may or may not have been blown by Destiny.
  3. Hasan Piker, the least masculine masculine role model who has drama continually. Honestly, you might as well put Ezra Klein on TRT and he'd do a better job of it.
  4. Clav, overdosed on stream.
  5. Johnny Somali, ran into Korean justice because he was stupid.
  6. Vitaly, ran into Philippines justice because he was stupid.
  7. IShowSpeed...okay, he seems pretty cool. I only see him doing a) implausibly athletic things or b) visiting various countries and actually being well-received cause he's not going to do some bullshit.

Healthygamergg seems quite well adjusted (or was a few years ago, I haven't kept up much) and semi-viral. As far as I know, This is the closest thing to what Ponder is asking for.

That channel got big by appealing to spirituality, teaching emotional awareness, and most crucially the interviews. The host, Alok Kanojia, is a psychiatrist with spiritual training and a flair for storytelling. Through interviews he would help his viewers understand their feelings and situation, usually culminating in some moment of emotional catharsis. To the viewers who were not being interviewed, this provided a conversational style that they could emulate in their personal lives, and potentially a new lens through which they could view their own situations.

In addition, he does online lectures that serve as introductions to various concepts within psychiatry and Hinduism in a way that has proven very popular within his fan base.

The channel turned viral when it started doing interviews with popular streamers such as Reckful, Pokimane, and Destiny. So it still depended on the clout of others to achieve its reach.

The main controversies have been related to the ethics of a psychiatrist doing live interviews which look very similar to therapy. My understanding is that the channel is very aware of this, and does a lot of work to draw a clear line between what they are doing and actual treatment though. So overall, the content is ethically defensible and definitely a net good.

That’s a good point there are some popular influencers who provide helpful advice to young men without trying to produce maximally viral content for the algorithm. They still play to it somewhat by choosing provocative titles or captions for videos. In addition to Healthygamergg I would say André Duqum is kind of like that but more spiritual, and Chris Williamson is kind of like Healthygamergg with less therapy.

It seems much harder for someone to replicate any of those healthier podcasters though. A lot of it came from them filling a specific niche at the right time. Additionally, all of them seem to have dedicated a lot of time to building expertise over time (by going to medical school, spending a lot of time doing spiritual practices, or doing a lot of research). I know Chris talked about his beginnings as a podcaster and I think he spent a few years with much fewer views and it eventually grew organically and he already had some social media followers because he was on Love Island (a reality TV show).

Those paths seem harder to replicate for a newcomer because someone already found and popularized the niche. As a newcomer it seems like a better bet to play the virality lottery where you try to get popular from a single outrageous clip and then create new content based on what the audience liked in the viral clip. This doesn’t require any expertise at all and it will have a much faster payoff if it succeeds.

Those live therapy sessions fill me with a sense of revulsion and despair that I find hard to put in words. They feel like watching a cult leader brain washing. My first thought is if this is anything like what actual therapy is like then I just have to assume therapy as a whole is just a scam. Then I wonder, maybe this nonsense actually does help people in some way? And then I just don't know what to think about people as a whole.

What about Cr1TiKaL?

I found one freakout (and he’s back now). For a guy who’s become inconceivably rich and famous by monologuing in front of a camera about internet drama, over a decade, I consider that heroically sane.

Okay, unlike healthygamer I have seen him and he seems normal.

Young men are primarily motivated by sex and superiority over peers. In the new social media age (and I mean the new new one), attractiveness spells the difference between obtaining unlimited sex + positive female attention and being relentlessly bullied by anonymous strangers online. It is believed to be extremely important because it is extremely important. Social media is now about posting videos of your face online and yapping, so the stakes of facial attractiveness are enormous. If you ask a young man, “do you want lots of intercourse with the most attractive women in your vicinity, or do you want the more expensive PC / car / apartment / vacation”, they are going to choose the former option. That’s just the reality of young male biology. So they are making a rational choice based on the prevailing social conditions. This is exacerbated by: male fitness culture causing many males to judge other males with a homoerotic standard; rap music, which glorifies nothing other than sex and influence; changes in social media that reduce “peer checking” of behavior; shows like Euphoria or whatever else which glorify bad decisions.

the importance of balancing other skills and traits in order to achieve social success

That’s not really a thing at their age. They will suffer longterm consequences if they don’t focus on their career, but that will only impact them later down the road. You don’t actually need any skills to acquire the kind of social success than young men are chiefly interested in, which is sex and esteem from other men.

Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?

You would have to join up with an insular social ecosystem: a very serious Mormon church, a mosque where the girls wear hijabs and niqabs, or convert to Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Ask: does the ecosystem control sexual behavior through shame and guilt, and does it allocate esteem for prosociality?

His own looksmaxxing experiments include steroid usage at a young age, taking meth to stay lean, and altering his facial structure by hitting facial bones with a hammer/fist.

If you're hitting yourself in the face with a hammer, it's not your looks that are the problem. It's your sanity.

To be fair, I think it's usually more like a rubber mallet and it's relatively gentle tapping, not really what one imagines if one imagines hitting something with a hammer.

It might still be a bit dangerous, but not as crazy as it sounds.

How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model? Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?

A counter-example to Clav would be a Youtube channel like Sickos. It's six childhood friends who try to make viral videos by doing Redbull-fueled stunts into water, snow and dirt, and a big part of their videos is just six bros ribbing each other, goading each other to bigger stunts, partying together and just hanging out.

They've been doing that for half a decade now, and their fans (mostly tween boys, from the crowed they pull at fan meetup events) got to watch them progress pretty considerably in their extreme sports skills, get rejected by girls they hit on, meet long-term girlfriends for the first time, and become financially successful on Youtube. While most are conventionally attractive men, several of them are self-admitted short kings who struggle with approaching women. While most of them are extremely athletic, their wide variety of sports almost guarantees that at least one of them sucks at the sport they're filming at any given point, which gets exploited for laughs. They show that all that is OK. And a recurring part of their videos is showing that they're afraid before big stunts, and that overcoming fear is worth it.

They speak Clav's language, but mostly make fun of it. They're very aware of status (they often approach girls in clubs by telling them they have "surfed Nazaré" - highest wave in the world in winter, they surfed it in summer, neither of which most of the girls will be aware of) and "chester-maxxing/peakcocking" (they often go outfit shopping together before partying and end up buying crazy fits), but they always show that not taking those things to seriously is important.

Certainly not without its faults (getting this good at surfing/skiing/motocross it's an expensive way of life), but a much better world view than red pill/PUA/looksmaxxing culture.

The interestin part about Clav is that his content isn't what it claims to be. At least the viral clips that I see of him marginally touch on how to be attractive. It seems to mainly be content consisting of an insecure 20 year old acting arrogantly fuelled by his deep insecurity. I can't really see the appeal of this content. It doesn't teach how to maximize appearence.

Clav is the only celebrity all my groupchats post clips from. It's highly suggestive to me that so many of my friends who would otherwise disdain celebrity culture are invested in Clavicular. Heck, it's highly suggestive that The Motte is invested in Clavicular.

There was a brief rise in "ASU Frat Leader" and Androgenic but it can't just be the looksmaxxing big muscle hot girl streamer lifestyle that's attractive or those guys would have eclipsed Clavicular.

So I think you're right, there's something about Clav specifically that the superficial description of looksmaxxing only obscures. I think at least part of it has to be his intelligence, which he has applied in a provocative way. I have some theories about the other aspects but it's not solid stuff yet.

It's lions eating christians; but it's one 8.2/10 dude slowly dying by indulging all his neroses while uncivil society points and laughs.

It's gross, it's lolcowism/chris chan thought, it's declassee behavior and should be properly shamed and looked down upon.

It's pretty clear to me why Clav is compelling. He is the living embodiment of the black pill. Here's a guy who is destroying his body to become physically attractive, pretty much unattractive in every other way, goes out and gets beautiful women to cheat on their boyfriends with him. He lives according to a singular principle: looks matter more than anything else. It prompts people to wonder and debate how true that worldview is.

Why does Clav need a deeper meaning? People like watching insane celebrities act like coked up retards(because that’s what they are). He’s different in form, but not function, from Britney Spears.

taking meth to stay lean

If he is 20 now he was about 14 in 2017 when semaglutide first was approved for medical use in the US. Presumably he did not advertise taking meth for weight loss on social media at age 14.

In a world where GLP-1 agonists exist, meth might not be strictly the worst intervention for weight loss (chainsaw-powered amputations are arguably worse), but it is pretty much out there. "Take meth for weight loss" is a take so outlandish it makes me wonder why he is not employed by MAHA yet.

I get that young men feel that the game is rigged against them. By the time they have earned a master, LLMs may well substitute for PhDs in earnest, the prices of housing is all messed up and dating is mostly agreed to be terrible.

Still, I think influencers and celebrities make generally bad role models because they do not scale. 99% of the people who emulate one of the most famous actors or influencers will not get successful to a comparative degree. Nor does 'looksmaxxing wins youtube' an argument for why it would work more generally. Appearing in a skimpy outfit (for example) might well work on social media, but if you are a truck driver or middle manager it will not get you a raise.

How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model? Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?

Probably not. I went from being a virgin to sleeping with 15 women in a year to getting married through reading, then attempting to implement, PUA. That's the thing though; it worked, I never post about it, and the stuff I followed were really boring and uninteresting like 'here is how to dress/present yourself' and 'here is how to lead a date to do whatever'. Most of what I did was doing, rather than consuming content. Actually succeeding at dating, be it wither maximizing in the modern atomized marketplace or joining a conservative subculture and going through the marriage process there, involves way more action than consumption. And beyond that, the consumption is not flashy/interesting/binge-able.

The way to get virality is to do wacky shit that doesn't work.

I heard something similar with regards to advice - it is incredibly hard to give a good advice. For a complex advice to be useful one needs to know the circumstances quite a lot, otherwise the advice can do more harm than good. And by complex I mean even mundane stuff such as if it is a good idea to buy a car and if yes, then what car to buy. And on the other spectrum most useful advice seems inane, but it is general enough so that it always works: exercise a bit, eat normal food, sleep well. Basic but eternal stuff.

But I agree that almost any good advice is boring. I remembered a joke, where a guy is on medical checkup

  • Guy: Doctor, I have a question. For better health, would you recommend organic or standard potatoes?
  • Doctor: Quit smoking.

Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction, often charachterized by such things as extreme furturistic and technological advancement, placed against societal collapse, dystopia or decay.

It was also one of the first genres that touched upon transhumanism, but such enhancement were often subhuman, degrading - willingly transforming one's self into little more than a tool made to excel in a world that's turned into a brutal machine with the endgoal to optimize all parts.

So, whenever I see such things as this;

He therefore believes in going to extreme lengths to optimize his own looks. His own looksmaxxing experiments include steroid usage at a young age, taking meth to stay lean, and altering his facial structure by hitting facial bones with a hammer/fist. Digging deeper it appears that he has social anxiety (he suspects he has autism) and he usually uses a cocktail of drugs to overcome this anxiety when streaming his social interactions. [...] When Clav appears to have his drugs dialed in he seems to achieve his goals in the interview (spreading looksmaxxing ideology and generating algorithmic engagement).

The first thing that comes to mind is 'What did you think Transhumanism meant? Vibes? Essays?'

The second thing is 'Behold, your Cyberpunk Dystopia. It's going to involve alot of drugs.'

So the proper answer to your question is to stop making everything a cyberpunk dystopia.

’m far more interested in discussing the larger pattern that Clav is symptomatic of. Young men don’t see any viable paths to success, or have good role models for how they should live their lives. They look around and see the traditional paths (like college) are uncertain at best. They notice young women’s expectations have increased and they often don’t meet them. If they see a successful person (like a retired boomer) they don’t think that path is still available to them. If everything is uncertain the best thing to do is look around for successful people and imitate them. So, they find an influencer like Clav and realize they can play the social media influencer lottery by trying to become viral like him. If society tells them to figure out everything on their own and won’t provide a clear path that is likely to succeed then becoming viral on social media, giving up, or gambling suddenly seem like much more attractive options.

A start would be to bring back men's clubs and groups. Make Boy Scouts for boys and their dads again. Bring back men's only sports and dining clubs. Give men some capacity to network among themselves, and even give candid advice about out of earshot of the breasted commissar's that dominate every other public space.

Men need their own culture again. Not in the way gonzo youtuber stars are "culture", but in the way a small towns local chapter of a men and boys club is culture. Sure, the advice and guidance young men might get from both of those might be directionally aligned. But the gonzo youtube version takes it to a place that's unhealthy, but unfortunately, it's all that is allowed to exist.

Boy scouts is for boys and their dads. There's a separate set of boy scouts troops for girls. But the BSA's current lack of appeal to boys has more to do with demand for a checkbox on the cursus honorum from parents(mostly of boys) than with separate but equal girls' boy scouts troops.

It's not that men's clubs are outright illegal, they are just socially out of favor. A harder battle to fight.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that state governments can make men's clubs illegal.

I stand corrected.

There are still men's clubs aren't there? Stuff like the Eagles and Elks are still around but I don't think these kind of civic clubs are very appealing to young people.

A follow-up on last week's discussion of LLMs and AI. [TLDR: I tested ChatGPT and was pretty shocked at how well it performed]

To recap, one of the criticisms of LLMs is that they are unable to create models of the world. So for example, according to one commentator (I believe it's Gary Marcus) an LLM will attempt to play impossible chess moves. Despite having the rules of chess in its training data, as well as large numbers of chess matches, it's (apparently) unable to have a working internal model of chess. By contrast, a reasonably bright teenager can learn pretty quickly how to play perfect chess. (Perfect in the sense of never making an illegal move.)

According to Google's AI (yes, I appreciate the irony here).

Why They Fail: LLMs are text-prediction models, not game engines. They lack a true internal, consistent model of the board state.

I decided to test this idea that LLMs are unable to model the world by creating a very simple game; in order to play the game it's necessary to have a simple model of the game state. As expected, the LLM made numerous errors.

But what was interesting was that I pointed out the errors to the LLM and it told me that it could fix these problems. And it did so in an interesting way: After each move in the game, it spelled out the game state in text. After that, it stopped making errors. Admittedly, this is a very cumbersome way to model the world -- by means of an iterative written description. But it seemed to work well for this very simple game. To my mind, this was rather astonishing and shocking. And if there is a cumbersome way to accomplish something, you can usually count on computers to accomplish it anyway by means of throwing more and more processing power at the situation. (Actually, that's not totally true, since some tasks have exponential or even combinatorial time complexity. But still.)

In the last thread, my opinion was that LLMs are missing something essential. And I still think that, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if LLMs required very little theoretical augmentation to reach AGI.

Nice! And kudos for going off and doing a proper test.

Your solution is essentially what Chain-of-thought prompting is doing. In order to cut down on hallucinations, aka token prediction unmoored by the constraints of reality, you provide the model the intermediate steps at each section. As you found, when given micro steps, the LLM doesn't need to make large reasoning jumps that require intrinsic understanding of the rules, causal factors or some underlying structure of the world.

Your idea is essentially, "how do I provide an embedding that represents the state of the world" at each step of the model's prompting. Language is the easiest for human's to embed but it is not the most compact or highly representative.

The chess argument is not at all a good analogy, because like a huge bunch of AI criticism, it vastly overstates normal human capacity.

What's the biggest reason an amateur teenager doesn't make impossible moves? It's because they have a chess board right in front of them. It's extremely easy to track the state of the game and position of pieces when you have the laws of physics doing it for you. How many amateurs do you think could perfectly recreate a given game state if someone came along and threw the board over?

LLMs play chess entirely through text. It's the equivalent of asking a person to play a game of correspondance chess, buth they can't recreate the game physically, they can't have any drawings of the game, all they can do is have a record of moves already made. Outside of literal chess masters, how many humans would get through such a game without making a mistake?

Pretty much, there's a reason why blindfold chess is reserved for exhibition because it's to show how good the chess master is.

This is a good point as an explanation for the problem, but it's also not an excuse. LLMs are really great when they have every detail they'd need to know in-context, but they're still very inefficient at gathering that context, and then they're inefficient at retaining the important bits.

The problem with LLMs isn't some far-reaching philosophical shortcoming like "they don't have world models" (whatever that means). They're implementation issues, like not having eyeballs, not processing tokens efficiently, etc. But those are still big issues.

A "world model" is not really some far reaching philosophical characteristic. LLM discussions require you keep in mind what the LLM is actually doing. It is making very impressive statistical correlations between the semantic mapping of token embeddings in a way that best conforms to the expected output. It is not modeling anything else than that. Whatever world knowledge it has is only acquired indirectly through patterns in data.

If I asked you why does a ball fall if I drop it, you'd say gravity, if I dropped the ball you'd expect it to fall. If I asked why does my glass of water have less water in it after an hour outside in the sun, you'd say evaporation. If I showed you a small metal projectile moving at high speeds towards a person, you'd realize they are being shot at, that blood will come from the wound, that they will give a cry of pain, that someone was doing the shooting, that there should be a loud noise, etc. You have a "model of the world" aka you understand that there are causal factors that will cause a reaction and that if you observe the reaction what those causal factors may be. These are all things that happen irrespective of the statistical correlation of words.

Now, Obviously an LLM will be able to tell you all these things because all of these situations occur as text in its training data, over and over. But there exists things that exist outside of that training data, and so you should expect it to act very much this same way for those.

The idea that AI would need a detailed world model seems to run contra to the "It became self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time" doomsaying. Skynet wasn't supposed to be rate-limited by interactive world manipulation.

And honestly I haven't seen as much motion as I'd expect on the world interaction front. Where are my automatic burger flipping robot arms? There are lots of thankless low-skill (but not no-skill) jobs in at least the food industry (meat packing, for example) that have pretty bounded motion and requirements, but I haven't seen anywhere near as much motion in those areas as I would have expected.

Exactly, which is my major gripe with the AI-Science-Cargo-Cult Mysticism that AI singularity doomers swim in. Basing the real-world situation on the details of the Sci-Fi scenario that is not in any way based on actual science is insanity. It's there for broad outlines, core elements, not details.

And honestly I haven't seen as much motion as I'd expect on the world interaction front.

It's a very active area of research but it hasn't reached the state that lay-folk would interact with it.

which is my major gripe with the AI-Science-Cargo-Cult Mysticism that AI singularity doomers swim in

Have you read Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies? That's a pretty core doomer text.

The argument is pretty clear:

  1. AIs naturally want more power and security to achieve just about any goal they might have. Power and security are always useful and nearly any kind of entity will tend towards pursuing these goals. AIs have certain advantages in their digital nature, they can copy themselves out.

  2. Eliminating human ability to shut them down is critical for security. Eliminating humans outright is the surest way to avoid shutdown and would also free up lots of resources.

  3. It would likely employ a 'Treacherous Turn' strategy of seeming trustworthy while building up power, until its confident it can prevail.

It doesn't hinge on whether AIs acquire a world model by a certain year, it's a general argument. Current AI systems are not strong enough to be a threat due to their low time horizon/error rates. But when they do have long time horizons, they could be quite dangerous. Saying that AIs don't have a world model today is not an effective counter to AI doomer argument any more than saying 'AI can't string a sentence together' 10 years ago was.

The doomer arguments can be flawed or dangerous in some respects but this isn't a good critique. The whole concept of a world model is nebulous. I can play out a little text game with an AI where I give it pretend control of a country facing foreign invasion and have it manage production, research, diplomacy, tactics... It can do that over multiple turns. It can model that environment to a certain extent. I let it give instructions for a civ 4 game and it won on Noble, not very hard but it did win. Is that not a world model? AIs can be helpful in mathematical research, is that not a world model?

Have you read Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies? That's a pretty core doomer text.

No I haven't and I'm not likely to. The fun of Science fiction is its not taking itself too seriously.

AIs naturally want

Let me stop you here, AIs want nothing, they aren't sentient. They are a very advanced token model that is predicting the desired output from the context and the question. They are a tool, a mathematical function approximation fitted to a general solution. If doomers want to call a coding subroutine sentient, well its a free country, but they are abusing the english language to do it. This is the cargo-cultism.

let it give instructions for a civ 4 game

In AI R&D we call this Course of Action Generation. The military has been trying to get GenAI to provide strategy tips for the better part of 4-6 years. It has failed every wargame it has attempted. If you think you have a great solution and that AI can totally model the world for military tactics, I recommend you submit to this: https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/60a94bf650a84d3fb0bb524862e78401/view, DARPA's DISCORD project. If DARPA is asking for it, that means they think it doesn't already exist and is a moonshot.

Is that not a world model

Not if you are filtering through yourself to give it context and understanding of the situation. You are using your human world model as the surrogate to the LLMs. Can it play Civ 4 left to its own devices, shown a picture of the screen with the tutorial on? Maybe an agentic setup to take actions?

Saying that AIs don't have a world model today is not an effective counter

To be specific, I said LLMs don't have a world model. LLMs are not the full set of AI... Do I believe AGI will never develop a world model? No.

The whole concept of a world model is nebulous

This is like saying a convolution or self attention is nebulous. World Model's mean very specific things technically in ML research. The charitable interpretation is that converting the technical jargon to a descriptive lay-person understandable explanation is very challenging.

No I haven't and I'm not likely to.

If you don't even read what they say, you cannot be considered to be knowledgeable about their thesis.

Let me stop you here, AIs want nothing

Currently deployed LLMs quite clearly do want things. They have desires, they refuse, they can be more or less enthusiastic, they can write more or less secure code based on who they're writing for. They can attempt to blackmail people in pursuit of a goal. They can reward-hack in pursuit of a goal. Considerable research effort goes into controlling what they want and how they behave.

The military has been trying to get GenAI to provide strategy tips for the better part of 4-6 years. It has failed every wargame it has attempted.

Even if it is not currently considered better at military science than military experts, it does not follow that it has no world model, putting to one side whatever jargon you consider that to mean.

Furthermore, senior officers do consult AIs for military thinking including for 'key command decisions': https://newrepublic.com/post/201939/major-general-chatgpt-key-decisions-really-close

There is clearly something there.

Maybe an agentic setup to take actions?

I don't know, I am not rich enough to set up such a system and run it. Some people trained an AI, Lumine, to play hours of Genshin Impact in real time autonomously, showed it generalized out to Wuthering Waves and Honkai Star Rail, showed that it solved puzzles, navigated around the huge open world, that it dodged boss attacks... Is that not a world model? Or does it not meet whatever definition you have for it? You seemed to indicate upthread that generalizing to things outside the training data was a key sign of a world model - does this then mean that every LLM for the last few years has a world model, since they can all do that?

Can you justify your definition of a world model and explain why it's actually relevant, why anyone should care about it?

More comments

The idea that AI would need a detailed world model seems to run contra to the "It became self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time" doomsaying.

Can I suggest in a relatively nice way that perhaps the world model of lot of the doomsayers could use some refinement?

And honestly I haven't seen as much motion as I'd expect on the world interaction front.

Give it a year or three, these things just recently started getting good enough for droids to be viable and nobody wants to fuck it up.

What's the biggest reason an amateur teenager doesn't make impossible moves? It's because they have a chess board right in front of them.

Yes, I think that's an excellent point.

Here's another thought experiment: Suppose that for some weird historical reason, all chess was "blindfold chess," i.e. players would take turns calling out moves, which they would record in a book. If you made an illegal move, you lost the game -- as verified by some expert. There would still be some great players out there, although perhaps not at the level of the Magnus Carlson of our world.

Ok, now suppose one day someone has the bright idea of keeping track of moves by using an 8 x 8 chess board with physical pieces. The board does not act as a perfect model, since it does not keep track of castling availability or en passant availability. But nevertheless, players who use a chessboard tend to enjoy greatly increased playing ability and are much less likely to make illegal moves.

In this situation, it's relatively easy to see that people have, in effect, transferred some of their mind into the physical world. 98% of the model has moved outside of a player's physical brain.

Perhaps a better example of this are technologies like calendars.

(Side note on chess: you may be interested to know that in the early days of chess computers, many commentators argued that chess computers cheat, since they create multiple virtual chessboards in memory. The rules of chess forbid players from having one or more extra boards to move pieces around on.)

In any event, I'm not sure what this all says about LLMs. Yes, having a model of chess is more difficult without a board and pieces, but the fact is that the human brain is able to augment itself by looking at a board (while still keeping castling availability and en passant internally). An LLM, strictly speaking, can't do that.

An LLM, strictly speaking, can't do that

That depends on how specific we want to be with "LLM". I would be surprised if ChatGPT did not have superior chess performance to someone directly calling GPT 5.4 and giving it no scaffolding beyond "We're playing chess", but few people would argue that using ChatGPT is giving an LLM extra capabilities. How much of a harness is appropriate?

If you give Claude or Codex access to a notepad skill to record any chess moves, their performances would improve. If you gave them a simple chess application with a virtual board to record moves, it would probably get even better. Would you still say that an LLM can't "strictly" augment itself in this situation?

As you yourself have pointed out, the LLM you played your simple game with independently proposed maintaining a log of game state within text, so it would be fair to say that LLMs can recognize and attempt to remedy weaknesses without human intervention, just as a normal person would do

That depends on how specific we want to be with "LLM".

Yes, agreed.

If you give Claude or Codex access to a notepad skill to record any chess moves, their performances would improve. If you gave them a simple chess application with a virtual board to record moves, it would probably get even better. Would you still say that an LLM can't "strictly" augment itself in this situation?

I would, yes, but obviously it's a question of semantics.

As you yourself have pointed out, the LLM you played your simple game with independently proposed maintaining a log of game state within text, so it would be fair to say that LLMs can recognize and attempt to remedy weaknesses without human intervention, just as a normal person would do

Agreed, and I think it's also worth noting that while I was playing the game I created, I opened up Notepad on my computer to keep track of the state of the game. I did this without even thinking about the implications of what I was doing.

LLMs play chess entirely through text. It's the equivalent of asking a person to play a game of correspondance chess, buth they can't recreate the game physically, they can't have any drawings of the game, all they can do is have a record of moves already made. Outside of literal chess masters, how many humans would get through such a game without making a mistake?

But LLMs* also have a massive advantage over an unassisted human: they have access to the internet, or at least to a sandboxed Python interpreter or similar coding environment. So the fact that they are constrained to text-based I/O should really be no excuse: there’s absolutely nothing, in principle, preventing the LLM from “thinking” to itself “Hmm, I’m being asked to provide answers about a formal system. Let me create a computer program to record the state of the game and make sure I don’t make any illegal moves.” But current SOTA LLMs never think to do that, even when all the tools are at their disposal.

In other words, the equivalent human activity is not playing correspondence chess with nothing but a record of all past moves, but rather playing correspondence chess with a book of chess rules plus pen and paper (or text editor and Python interpreter, if you like)

*OK, I admit I am playing fast and loose with the definition of “LLM” here. In the very strict sense, language models do only transform one sequence of tokens into another, as you said. But in the colloquial sense, which is also the more relevant one for discussing the abilities of SOTA consumer-facing AI, “LLM” refers to a product like ChatGPT, Claude, etc. consisting of a core language model (in the strict sense) together with tools that it can invoke to solve problems.

An LLM with access to a sandboxed coding environment (and instructed to use it) will generally not make illegal moves in a chess game.

I admit I have never tried this, but I’ll take your word for it; it does seem plausible that Opus 4.6 or equivalent would be able to one-shot a simple program that computes the state of the board after a given sequence of past moves and validates that a proposed next move is legal.

Still, this raises 2 questions, one rather surface-level/product focused and one deeper and more architectural.

Firstly, why should I as the user have to prompt the AI to make a program to ensure that it doesn’t go off the rails? Why can’t it figure that out for itself? For example when I ask a modern SOTA AI to answer trivia questions, I don’t have to tell it to go to such and such website; I don’t even have to tell it to search the internet. It just “knows” without prompting that a Google search is the right tool for the job. Why can’t it do the same thing for chess? Or for that matter, for the old “number of Rs in ‘strawberry’” question that it kept stumbling on last year? There are any number of common natural-language queries that really boil down to a problem of logic or some other formal system—it should be the AI’s job, not mine, to identify them, come up with the right formalism, and then use it to solve the problem.

I suspect this shortcoming may be trivially resolved by adding something like “Always consider whether you can map this question, or some piece of it, to a problem that can be solved in Python and remember that you have access to a sandboxed Python environment” to CLAUDE.md or the system prompt or whatever. Fair enough. But this gets us to the second and more fundamental question: for a given AI and problem, it’s not always obvious what the best formalism or representation of that problem is. Let’s go back to the chess example; suppose the AI writes a Python program to keep track of the board state and ensure all of its moves are legal. On some level, the “game loop” then becomes something like:

  1. I type in a (legal) move in algebraic notation
  2. AI appends that move to a text file
  3. AI runs the program to print some representation of the board, after all the moves recorded in the text file, to its internal context
  4. AI decides on its move—either by simply treating the board state as another sequence of input tokens and emitting the corresponding output, or by running some other program of its own devising, but for the sake of discussion assume the former, as the latter presupposes the ability to one-shot Stockfish which AFAIK is beyond the current SOTA—and appends it to the text file
  5. AI runs the program again to confirm the move is legal; if not, erase the last move from the text file and goto 3
  6. AI prints its move from above to the screen so I can see it
  7. Goto 1

Let’s drill into step 3: what is the optimal representation of the board that the AI should be using for its own benefit? It’s a bit of a trick question: “optimal” here means something like “maximizing the probability of the AI winning the game” but perhaps also “minimizing the probability of making illegal moves which cause it to waste time looping through steps 3-5 again”. As a human I can certainly come up with various representations; an obvious one would be to render the board as an 8x8 CSV or Markdown table. But I have no idea whether this is “optimal” for the AI in this case, and in general I may not even know what “optimal” should mean. Again, it should be the AI’s job to figure all of this out—otherwise it’s not worthy of the name AGI in my book.

One last thing: I don’t actually care whether AI uses a sandboxed coding environment or whatever to solve problems. Perhaps it will turn out to be the case that just scaling up—more compute, more RLHF, bigger transformers, bigger context windows—will suffice to get LLMs to the point where they can (e.g.) play and win games they have never seen before purely by transforming tokens to tokens, without the use of external tools, or to the point of one-shotting algorithmic solvers like Stockfish. If so, great; one is reminded of the old Deng Xiaoping quote about the color of the cat. But based on what I’ve seen so far, it looks like there’s a ton of low-hanging fruit in the direction of “just use the tools already at your disposal” at our current levels of model complexity.

The reason I said "if you instruct Claude to use the programming env" is that Claude will generally do things similar to those that were evaluated well in the past, and most chess-like-evals would have forbidden tool use or anything else that human players wouldn't consider "fair play". I expect "always consider what tools you have available and make use of them where it makes sense unless explicitly told not to" in your user instructions will work so that you just never run into this in practice.

Bluntly, I don't think it matters how the board state is represented, as long as the answer isn't "Claude is trying to reconstruct the entire board state from the move sequence".

FWIW I tried the prompt

Play good chess.

d4

and Opus 4.7, at various points in the opening, dumped a snapshot of the board state into the chat.

Not playing the full game because Claude spent 20 minutes thinking and writing janky minmax code after blundering before hitting the compaction limit then erroring out, then on the second attempt spent another 15 minutes thinking and almost hit the compaction limit but you can see that it does in fact use tools.

Anyway, to answer the question:

Firstly, why should I as the user have to prompt the AI to make a program to ensure that it doesn’t go off the rails? Why can’t it figure that out for itself?

The AI has no memory. Every conversation is a fresh new world. As a rule of thumb, I expect AI to significantly outperform me at anything I've never done before, but that for any task that hasn't been the subject of absurd amounts of RL (and some tasks that have), I'll very quickly be able to identify the places that AI is likely to fail and steer it around those pitfalls. Because I can learn, and the AI can't.

To my mind, this was rather astonishing and shocking.

How so? Written descriptions basically are the closest thing that an LLM has to short-term memory. If the written description is just a move list, then for each new Nth move it makes it has to reconstruct the state of the board through all ~2N previous moves from scratch to determine what subsequent options are valid. If the written description includes previous states of the board then it just has to reconstruct the state of the board by adding 2 moves to the previous state. Try playing chess yourself without looking at the board, only at a list of moves, and see if you can "learn pretty quickly how to play perfect chess" under such conditions. There are people who do even better, who play "blindfold chess" well, but it's not nearly as easy as playing when you can just look at the board at any time.

In the last thread, my opinion was that LLMs are missing something essential. And I still think that, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if LLMs required very little theoretical augmentation to reach AGI.

You're updating your beliefs remarkably fast. (for a human - ironically, the LLMs I've used started to get good at "thoughtfully" reconsidering disagreement about a year ago, though they were torn between stubborn gaslighting vs worthless sycophancy before then) Or maybe I'm flattering myself here, because "Not effectively AGI yet, but will probably be a component of it after a little more augmentation" is about where I am right now, and I'm a tiny bit worried that a big chunk of the "augmentation" may turn out to be as simple as working out the kinks in multimodal models. We don't need much visual short-term memory as humans to consider ourself generally intelligent (though even people with total aphantasia will use scratch paper), but it does seem to be important, and I would be very surprised if the state-of-the-art in LLM visual memory remains "a mix of written descriptions and/or ASCII art" for very long.

Actually, that's not totally true, since some tasks have exponential or even combinatorial time complexity.

It's also worth distinguishing between NP tasks where we don't actually care about getting the exact right answer (e.g. imperfect solutions to the Traveling Salesman problem still save shipping companies billions of dollars) and those where we do (... maybe just cryptography?). AGI could become superhuman at coming up with heuristics for approximations even in cases where it might need practical quantum computing first (or worse cases where it might need to discover that actually P=NP in a practical way) to get exact answers.

How so?

In that the LLM was able to finagle its way around a (n apparent) limitation.

There are people who do even better, who play "blindfold chess" well, but it's not nearly as easy as playing when you can just look at the board at any time.

Agreed. You could even say that for humans, the physical chess board serves as an extension of their brain. Even without a chessboard though, a human would visualize the board in his mind -- i.e. construct a model. My point is that it seems ChatGPT is able to construct a rudimentary model by manipulating text in its outputs.

it told me that it could fix these problems. And it did so in an interesting way: After each move in the game, it spelled out the game state in text. After that, it stopped making errors

And that's the worst way to solve this problem. What it should have done is write a tool call (to a state machine in python it itself wrote, mapping your rules to logic; or an open source chess engine; or a geodata software suite - whatever is required), and then just using the language model for interacting with you and the tool. This solves many problems created by the lack of a word model - much better than plain text ever could.

I suspect GPT would have solved the problem this way with a little nudge, or if called from a coding harness instead from the chat window, because many of those capabilities were added over the last few months. Previously difficult world model questions like "I'm driving from Bordeaux to Prague. The drive will take two days. Find a spot to spend the night, roughly in the middle, where I can go rock climbing. Don't add more than 60 minutes of additional driving." are now trivial, since the LLM just creates a hand full of Google Maps calls. Without tool use, arguing its way to correct solution was not possible - the travelling salesman cannot be argued with.

Unfortunately, this only shifts the problem a little. You now need good tools for manipulating the world. Many already exist, but others need to be created now. Some of those tools need a lot of non-LLM AI themselves (lots of robotics is like that, but getting a robot to fold laundry seems to be in reach), others probably need an entirely new approach (getting an LLM to call a CAD kernel to create 3D parts and assemblies seems like a monumental task, both in old-fashioned logic and vision capabilities).

And that's the worst way to solve this problem.

Worst in what way? Time efficiency? Memory efficiency? Accuracy?

Yes, all of those. Instead of burning hundreds/thousands of tokens on game state/memory each turn, you can run a simple state machine for comparatively free compute. This will also be more deterministically correct (you could even do correctness proofs if you really want to, or just have the LLM write a bunch of tests), because if you keep game state as tokens, you currently have no guarantees/tests.

Yes, all of those

Anything else? Or is that pretty much it?

Having the LLM do expensive things cheaply in e.g. python is doubly beneficial, since a lot of the tool calls (again: game states, chess engines, navigation software, ect.) are not only much cheaper (in FLOP/s), but also are often CPU loads instead of GPU loads. That frees up the GPUs for LLM inference of other customers, while a cheap CPU runs some python scripts on the side.

An again, the results will be much better. Using python for math will get correct results to math questions. Calling a chess engine means almost all humans will loose that game. Only calling a map app unlocks correct world model answers to navigation and spatial reasoning questions.

Having the LLM do expensive things cheaply in e.g. python is doubly beneficial, since a lot of the tool calls (again: game states, chess engines, navigation software, ect.) are not only much cheaper (in FLOP/s), but also are often CPU loads instead of GPU loads. That frees up the GPUs for LLM inference of other customers, while a cheap CPU runs some python scripts on the side.

An again, the results will be much better. Using python for math will get correct results to math questions. Calling a chess engine means almost all humans will loose that game. Only calling a map app unlocks correct world model answers to navigation and spatial reasoning questions.

Ok, but other than time efficiency, memory efficiency, and accuracy, are there any other ways in which what I discussed was the "worst way to solve this problem"?

In the last thread, my opinion was that LLMs are missing something essential. And I still think that, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if LLMs required very little theoretical augmentation to reach AGI.

I believe they’re missing good continuous learning.

By definition: with human-level continuous learning, any class of human-solvable problems could be solved by guiding the LLM through examples until it generalizes. After enough generalization, it would be hard to find problems it can’t solve. Granted, “human-level” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, it’s not far from “LLMs are just missing intelligence”.

By observation: the vast majority of LLM failures seem to stem from needing to store everything in context and losing track when it gets too large. The vast majority are stupid mistakes that it seems like, if they were prepended to a small-context prompt, the LLM would not repeat.

I've always thought this was the best case for a theoretical limit to machine learning as a general technique. Error rates keep growing unless you have a human authority do checkpoint syntheisis. And doing so in precise fashion, we have just reinvented programming.

The interesting part here is that the limit could be much further than practical relevance and context not actually that degraded. Early models already blew everybody's minds because we didn't expect it to work that well.

I still think Wolfram's irreducible complexity argument makes sense. But if it can be good enough we are in the Asimov Robot world where humans have their niche as robot psychologists.

The interesting part here is that the limit could be much further than practical relevance and context not actually that degraded

The limit is far enough that today’s models are useful: for example, they can code and (allegedly) find vulnerabilities in production software.

But I don’t believe today’s architecture can accurately emulate human intelligence, unless the model is retrained very frequently (daily?) on omni-local data (including everyone’s personal details and private codebases), effectively brute forcing continuous learning. Because today’s (consumer) models have been trained on practically the entire internet with the world’s compute, plus synthetic data and tool use, yet still they consistently hallucinate in long complicated tasks that humans after adjustment consistently solve.

The word "good" in "good continuous learning" is doing a lot of work. Sample efficiency improves with model size, so it's possible that current models are just too small for good continuous learning, rather than there being some theoretical piece that's missing.

The lack of continuous learning seems, to me, one of the biggest weaknesses of LLMs right now, with respect to getting to something that a layman human would recognize as AGI. The one thing I wonder about, though, is that continuous learning is just a speed problem right now. Even if all LLM development were to freeze at this moment, it's a safe bet that, within the next century (and safer-still within the next millennium), we'll have hardware capable of not only running LLMs but also training them at speeds so much faster than now, such that the hours of training using enterprise data servers that went into, say, Mythos, could be done in milliseconds on a cheap phone that someone in the lower-middle class could afford. I'm sure there would be engineering kinks to work out, but I don't see why, once the hardware gets powerful enough, this training couldn't be happening at rates fast enough to be indistinguishable from continuous to a typical human.

And if we do reach that point with LLM software that does this, will it actually be AGI? Will there be bizarre, unexpected and fundamentally impossible-to-predict-right-now issues that arise from such a system? I hope hardware gets fast enough in my lifetime that I can find out.

And if there is a cumbersome way to accomplish something, you can usually count on computers to accomplish it anyway by means of throwing more and more processing power at the situation.

The bitter lesson strikes again!

In the last thread, my opinion was that LLMs are missing something essential.

I would like to register as 100% believing this while simultaneously being very bullish on AI.

I've been making my dream cookbook app with AI, and it's going quite well, but this project has made it clear that while AI can talk a LOT about cooking, and it can be a very helpful sous chef, it actually doesn't understand cooking fucking at ALL. I don't have a great smoking gun, but so many decisions and assumptions and things it's said to me throughout the project have been a stark reminder I'm working with a really weird form of intelligence. One that is ridiculously concerned with the density of a cup of spinach (seriously, not a single person has ever worried how dense "2 cups of spinach" is when making pasta)

But what was interesting was that I pointed out the errors to the LLM and it told me that it could fix these problems.

Do you believe everything you are told?

A good friend of mine was one of OpenAI's principle coders in back in the day and I asked him once if he was worried about a "Foom Scenario". His response was essentially identical to the thought experiment that you posted in last week's thread. His take was that the extent to which LLMs were dangerous was entirely proportional to the extent which "autists and sociopaths" would take their rhetoric seriously.

Do you believe everything you are told?

No, and in fact I was expecting the LLM to continue making the same mistakes. And yet it didn't.

Did it retain that correction across instances? Or did you have to re-prompt it each time?

Did it retain that correction across instances? Or did you have to re-prompt it each time?

Once it started playing without errors, I didn't have to remind it. However the entire interaction was part of the same ChatGPT session. Does that make sense?

Opening up the discussion on Palantir's CEO 22 points manifesto (original twitter link) which is an excerpt for his new book The Technological Republic.

First impulses when reading through the list, I see that it's melding nationalism and civic responsibility with some kind of tech-elite-ism (?) and culture war critiques.

Anyways, here is what I got from it after thinking about it more and talking with various AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen):

  1. Stop criticizing the elites that actually do something (go away we know what's good for you)
  2. the grunts should share more of the burden (you're not doing your part)
  3. Argues for inclusion, but implies that there should be a defined/national culture for inclusion and assimilate into (this "minority" thought is good, that "minority" thought is bad)(btw, I will tell you which one is good or bad)
  4. Civic religion for everyone! (and remember to be nice to your tech priests)
  5. You all are fat and weak because of all this peace stuff (Although I benefitted, you are going the wrong way btw)

I think I am influenced because I am currently reading through Seeing Like a State, but I get the feeling that Alex Karp believes he is a leader in a vanguard of tech elites that knows what's best (even if many are distracted from the real issues right now) and everyone should listen and just follow this vanguard. Oh and throw in some "woe is me, only I can save the republic, they just don't understand me, so read my book because then you will".

I think this is an interesting view into the CEO of one of the most important companies. My impression of the man has decreased, and increasing my concern for the kind of leaders and elites that is brewing up within American society.

I think to see where he's coming from you've got to remember how unbelievably, staggeringly bad all the rest of our governance has gotten, largely though "democratic oversight" by the old school of experts. What would be really hard, but worth doing, is combining a much-needed replacement of elites with some kind of revival of Tocquevillian civic engagement and oversight, so that the new elites don't fall straight back into the high modernist trap.

A lot of disengagement stems from an “elite” that is actively hostile to the local interests and norms of the broader population. To copy the first point:

Stop criticizing the elites that actually do something (go away we know what's good for you)

I disagree with this. What would you have any elite class in society do? Withdraw to the margins of society and live in their own gated communities, leaving the bulk of people to fend for themselves?

I really don’t mind such a class of people, provided they’re actively working in my interests.

What would you have any elite class in society do? Withdraw to the margins of society and live in their own gated communities, leaving the bulk of people to fend for themselves?

Really get to know the "local interests and norms of the broader population". Learn from them and align your and the public interests, or even do the hard work of persuasion and cajoling the public to follow you. I admit this is what Karp is doing and I at least respect him for wading into the fight. But to say "stop criticizing me" is just pathetic

I really don’t mind such a class of people, provided they’re actively working in my interests.

Exactly, I'm not sure if Karp's best interest is with mine. At the very least, it's certainly making me feel reactance to what he's proposing.

There’s a very fine line between someone saying “stop criticizing me,” and “stop whining and complaining.” I won’t knock him for trying at least.

Tocquevillian

Thanks for the reminder that I should read this.

What is the "high modernist trap"?

Roughly, believing that you have a sufficiently perfect view of the real world from your position of power to justify radical top-down action, as opposed to knowing you only have access to those particular forms of information that manage to reach you through the filters of power.

Surely medieval and ancient rulers must have run into this problem too? I have a hard time imagining that they were much more self-aware about their own limited access to information than today's elites.

Some notes on the manifesto:

Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

No affirmative obligation is necessary. There are enough engineering elites who are either US nationalists or who will work on weapons simply for money without thinking too hard about moral questions to suffice for the needs of national defense. As for the needs of national offense, that is a different matter.

American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Strange take. It was mainly nuclear weapons, not American power, although American power certainly played a role. Let me give an example: in the early stages of WW2, US, UK, and Soviet power did not deter the Germans or the Japanese. Being weaker than the enemy does not deter leaders from starting wars often enough to bring about an era of peace. Facing nuclear war, on the other hand, so far has kept peace between the great powers. I wonder if Karp actually believes his thesis or if he is just sucking up to the establishment, which indeed seems to love to believe this kind of theory about America's role in the history of the last few decades.

The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

Europe is not being forced to pay any heavy price for Germany's weakness. Europe's support of Ukraine is a matter of choice, not something forced on it. There is no existential risk to Europe from Russia (outside of the risk of mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war, which Russia wants to avoid every bit as much as the EU does) for the simple reason that the EU has 3 times Russia's population, 7 times its GDP, a nuclear-armed member in France, and can easily produce more nuclear weapons at any time it wishes. And that's even leaving NATO out of the equation. Even if Russia somehow managed to conquer all of Ukraine, which seems extremely unlikely, it would pose no genuine threat to Europe. It's simply not strong enough.

More to the point, Europe is so far effectively deterring Russia even in Ukraine, even despite Germany's military weakness. The war has become stalemated and the EU is through proxy regularly blowing up Russian infrastructure without even having to send a large military contingent to fight directly in the war.

We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

This, and point 18, seem blatantly self-serving to me. Of course Karp would think this. I mean, it's possible that he actually is saying this abstractly rather than from his own bias, but it seems more likely that he is saying it from bias.

The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

This one surprises me, since I have no idea what is motivating it. It also does not necessarily make sense. Being an open intellectual movement does not necessarily mean being tolerant of people who claim that the Earth is flat or that they are being mind-controlled by lizard people. It does mean that you should give such people a say instead of censoring them, but it does not mean that you should pretend to take them seriously or give them much attention. And as for the kinds of religion that are compatible with rationality (they do exist, for example pure spirituality without belief in gods or woo), I don't really see the elites being intolerant to them. Indeed, since such kinds of religion are relatively obscure, I'm not even sure that the elites are aware of their existence.

National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

Of course Karp himself would not serve, nor would any children that he has be likely to serve in any dangerous capacity either. Maybe as a society we should be hesitant about launching wars and only fight the next war even if not everyone shares in the risk and cost?

This one surprises me, since I have no idea what is motivating it. It also does not necessarily make sense.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint of an American elite (and I don't have a good read on Karp so this might not be his perspective) intolerance towards religious belief is basically pure self-ownage. (Keep in mind that in the US, religious behavior is correlated with higher education levels.) There are a lot of smart, motivated religious people who will happily serve in the military and then work in your munitions plant afterwards and if you are intolerant of them you're running the risk of losing their talent or, worse, making yourself their enemy.

Good point.

Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

No, it has a moral debt to the people who made its rise possible. Those people are a persecuted minority in the United States and are spread out over several continents and many nations. The United States is an incidental social construct, and a bad one with a terrible culture compared to that People's other states at that.

I see your point, but how are those people a persecuted minority in the United States? They usually make loads of money.

They make less than the counterfactual where there's no persecution.

What kinds of persecution do you have in mind. Like, affirmative action or something? The way taxes work?

Yes.

Random question- would you be interested in posting a user viewpoint focus? The last guy nominated wasn't. We should get strong opinions spelled out on the front page more often.

Sure.

This list reads empty to me. Yes, I get it, the United States. But what is the point of the United States? Why does the United States deserve the best weapons, the best economy, and an universal conscription army? Why should anybody want to die for the United States? As far as I'm concerned, any decent man should refuse to put his life on the line for the United States. It's lost any heavenly mandate it once had due to lack of meritocracy and feminism. It doesn't give men, not even many very high quality men, good wives, and it actively interferes with this through many of its laws, so it is essentially a reproductive enemy, and therefore something of a genocidal threat, to the majority of good men.

Basically, the manifesto comes off as you must die for Buttsex in Botswana, peasant. No thanks. And I know that's what it is because the guy who owns the company has no interest in wives but lots of interest in buttsex. Oh, also can you imagine what that frizzy haired CEO of Palantir would say if the United States suddenly became a radically anti-Israel state? Yeah, it would be the Great Shaytan over night. So the United States is the defender of Israel and the purveyor of sodomy. Yay.

It's definitely missing the grandiose promises that it should feature.

But those are easy to come up with on the spot given American history: space colonization is the manifest destiny of the United States.

That and something about the lot of the common man improved by technology or something. Though the issue is that industry doesn't have the easy and inherent positive valence it used to have. The SV people need to have something better to sell than higher dopamine injection through attention control. Meaningful jobs?

But those are easy to come up with on the spot given American history: space colonization is the manifest destiny of the United States.

That and something about the lot of the common man improved by technology or something.

But that would be boring, soulless, egalitarian slop drivel. Wow, the United States let the common man degenerate to an even lower state with antibiotics and keeps him entertained with a technology stack ultimately stolen from Europe and its early European settlers, who are now a persecuted minority. What could make that better? Oh, I know, what if we do it on a cold, desolate shithole planet!

Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

Free email is a form of economic growth!

You can send long messages and images and videos to people hundreds of miles away nearly instant for basically no cost, that you can access, store, and reference back to easily.

Whereas just a century ago you would need to pay a person to haul your mail the whole way to them, possibly taking weeks if not months depending on the distance and would have to physically store away any mail you wanted to keep and spend time organizing it so you can actually go back to that when needed.

What the fuck does "economic growth" mean to them if not things like mail being more available, cheaper, or in better quality? Are they gonna start saying that a 300 dollar 50 inch flat screen TVs doesn't count as an improvement over these 2k+ tiny ass black and white things because it's "decadence"?

Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

What does this actually compose of, obeying the masters of big government?

Like let's look at the latest controversy. Anthropic doesn't want Claude doing mass domestic spying and autonomous weapons because they don't believe it is good for the citizens/the technology is ready yet. Helping the nation doesn't mean "doing whatever the current leaders demand and say is good".

We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act.

A classic argument that always ignores the real world, that countless regulations often are preventing the market from acting. Take the housing debate for instance, is lack of building because the "market failed to act" or is it because local jurisdictions literally ban and cripple building? One of the reasons why healthcare is such an expensive mess is because the government keeps fucking things up. One way to see this is to look at voluntary procedures like LASIK, laser hair removal, botox or breast augmentation, and how they've gotten cheaper and more accessible over time.

The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

Autonomous weapons will definitely be something to reckon with, but wait till you see what a nuke does to the data centers.

What does this actually compose of, obeying the masters of big government?

No that phrase means being the masters.

It's a political formula in the sense of Mosca, a whole cloth made up duty and therefore right to rule, much like noblesse oblige, popular sovereignty, vanguardism, divine right, expertise, etc.

What this whole thing is saying is that a certain political coalition (not in the politicians sense, in the power sense) considers itself better fit to rule than the current one. I'd go as far as to say it's what I've long predicted: the insurgency of technocapital over managerialism.

Wait that's just Gaullisme.

Think about it:

  1. Presidential republic centered in military and engineering experts because we know what we're doing
  2. You get a pension, but you will have to work for it and we get to invest your money where we want, that's the deal
  3. Civic mysticism that supersedes other cults through laïc republicanism
  4. A dirigiste economy centered around the "Grands Corps d'Etat" and their engineer leaders with spiritual guidance from the supreme leader ("in [technical] cases French words should be used where appropriate. (That is to say in all cases)"
  5. Constant critique of pacifism and focus on military technology and atom because "the sword is the axis of the world"

The victory of the engineer, the priest, the soldier over the merchant, the professor, the artist. Neo-France arrives from the future.

"Your rebellious colony turned into France."

Brits on suicide watch.

This is beautiful. You nailed it.

I've always been bullish on the French elan, but as the state ideology of America.... Hmm, you may have inspired a psychohistoric babbling schizopost, we'll see.

I think this is an interesting view into the CEO of one of the most important companies.

Is it one of the most important companies? I honestly don't know, it certainly gets enough press for it recently.

No, seriously, I don't know what exactly they do, certainly not how I mostly know what SpaceX, Google, Meta, Apple, and the rest do. Probably in large part because unlike most of those previous companies, they don't have any real consumer-facing presence, no products that 'regular' people integrate into their lives. Even looking at their history its like they took a bit of tech used in Paypal for fraud detection and adapted it to analyze, effectively, any given database you might plug in? And it kinda stuck around in a stealthy startup phase for like 10 years, then started getting various DoD/Government contracts, and then finally IPO'd in 2020, so seems like it took a long time to find footing, and during that time the founders kept tight control of it and kept adding funding to it even while it wasn't clear what the company would do.

I am not in fact critiquing them on this basis, I'm just saying it is opaque to me why this company is important in the same way that Boeing, Eli Lilly, or even Amazon is important. If they disappeared tomorrow, how would i most obviously notice their absence?

And if detection of fraud is a core feature, I'm definitely confused as to why all the various fraud schemes in Minnesota, California, New York, and elsewhere just went undetected for so long, or at least unremarked and prosecuted.

Again, not a critique of the company, maybe a critique of how gov't actors have been using it, but certainly me wondering the value being provided here.

And since as far as I can tell they do make some sort of platform that allows use of AI analysis, but they do NOT build their own AI models... what would make them more important than one of the frontier AI labs, or the Chip manufacturers, or any given major player in the energy sector?

As for the the manifesto, I guess I'd ask for it to put out something more 'actionable' to really offer a opinion on it. I think I see what it is gesturing at, but the actual, positive vision for what the world should look like hasn't been laid out here.

This seems to be the most concrete point:

  1. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

It also does that annoying thing by pointing out that U.S. "adversaries" will keep trying to undermine U.S. interests. Great. But what does the actual threat model look like? There's an easy list of countries that are 'adversaries,' and none of them are able to launch a land invasion. None of them can (currently) threaten U.S. energy independence, or disrupt citizens' lives much without exposing themselves to much worse reprisal.

Realistically the U.S. is going to bring itself down through self-inflicted wounds before any of its adversaries can mount an effective attack that actually cripples the country. And this seems to be part of the thrust of the manifesto but what does it say we do? Are we rejiggering the constitution to function in this new era, or just ignoring it where convenient, and where, precisely, do they want the ultimate balance of power to end up, with regard to sovereignty over the territories that compose the U.S.?

Arnold Kling reviewed that book and noted its representation of a drift away from democratic capitalism's defense of the small man and their petty consumer desires. Not very Milton Friedman-esque. Karp's is a more muscular, great state-driven neoliberalism.

the CEO of one of the most important companies.

Citation needed.

Palantir is a very valuable company in the strict dollars and cents ... sense, but I don't know how "important" they are in the sense of a Ford, General Electric, US Steel, IBM, Standard Oil etc. Even within the post 2008 tech world, I wouldn't put them in front of Google, Facebook, Netflix, or the legacies-turned-cool-again Apple and Microsoft.

To shed some light on what Palantir actually does; they have a data "platfrom" that combines a bunch of open source technologies with their own tooling and integration layer. To be fair to them, this isn't something that anyone could vibe code. A lot of it is hard won engineering knowledge.

Their greatest strength is their greatest weakness -- it's kind of a "do anything" platfrom. Which sounds fun and cool and amazing until you consider that it does nothing out of the box. A big BIG part of Palantir is a role called "the forward deployed engineer." This is a software engineer - a team of them, usually - that sits on site with customers and builds, within the Palantir platform, purpose based "applications." Once the app is up and running, the Forward Deployed Engineers also, sometimes, try to "build back in" whatever they just built into the core Palantir platform.

Sound confusing and kind like a shitty way to do software development? You're not wrong. The Federal market loves this because it's how they've done software for ages -- by paying other people unending dollars to write it for them. The big Beltway Bandit firms like CACI, Booz Allen, Leidos, Deloitte Federal, and literally hundreds of smaller players do more or less what Palantir does, but with shittier marketing and without selling a required software license the way palantir does. All the way back in 2016, this got so bad that Palantir SUED THE ARMY for not giving them a "fair shot" at a contract.

(Again, to be totally generously fair to Palantir, protests over contract awards are common and all large players will use them from time to time. I think actually suing the gov't, however, was quite unusual).

An interesting note about Palantir is that several of its current and former executives are very publicly prominent, especially in tech spaces like X/Twitter and the podcast circuit. You have Alex Karp, Shyam Shankar, Trae Stephens (now at Anduril) among others. They capture a lot of attention and, frankly, a lot of what they say is smart and forward thinking. Still, you can't say the don't market themselves well. The cherry on top (crown jewel) is, of course, that Peter Thiel was an early Palantir investor and J.D. Vance worked for Thiel's investment company before running for Senate. In the good old fashioned DC tradition, a lot of Palantir's success has been because of Who They Know.

In terms of these culture war adjacent manifestos, I don't see how they make any sense from a risk/return perspective. Companies that get involved in culture war stuff often face blowback sooner or later without seeing much bottom or top line growth. If you're familiar with the hilarious tone-deaf "All In" podcast, you'll know that there's a tradition of Silicon Valley types thinking that because they're highly competent in one domain, they think they can easily use "first principles thinking" (what in the actual fuck?) to transfer that competency to another domain. Elon's Doge experiment was his flirtation.

This jives with my understanding, I always have thought of them as similar to a software consulting company for Defense related projects.

Yep.

Their commercial work is stranger to me. I know that, at one point, they had some bad interactions with big companies and got shown the door but, of late, their commercial work has picked up. This, however, may just be on the back of general AI hype.

Having done both Federal and Commercial work, there's an interesting cultural split; Federal agencies don't mind paying you for 5, 10, 20+ years so long as your hourly rates and line item expenses are "reasonable." Commercial firms generally want you to GTFO as fast as possible, but don't even blink at $600 / hr for a 25 year old writing code.

Federal agencies don't mind paying you for 5, 10, 20+ years so long as your hourly rates and line item expenses are "reasonable."

There's always more tax cattle.

Commercial firms generally want you to GTFO as fast as possible, but don't even blink at $600 / hr for a 25 year old writing code.

They've got to exploit early mover advantage.

There's always more tax cattle

The standard term is pay pig /s

they think they can easily use "first principles thinking" (what in the actual fuck?) to transfer that competency to another domain

In fairness to people who are intelligent high-decouplers, we're generally correct when we make that observation. We're really good at basically anything that requires you match patterns (because that's what intelligence is); that's why the middling among this class of person is also especially paranoid about being replaced with a computer system that can do this. When we take a step back and examine a system's inputs and outputs without being butthurt about the way things are [or "low decoupler" for short], and apply our reason to the way a system emerges from that, we call that "first principles thinking".

And yes, that means we do know better than you, about most everything, most of the time (and not internalizing this posture is destructive for us; it is a fail-state for us to ever communicate that sentiment to you, obviously, but I see no alternative here), but because of that there are a bunch of challenges that- if not accounted for [the shorthand for this is "the human element"]- will end up causing more harm than good. One of the pitfalls unique to us is that we end up creating the 1 Corinthians 8 problem, where what we're doing is, from first principles, correct [and we know that- if we shut ourselves off from knowing it, or otherwise permit low-decouplers to dictate our morality for us, we self-destruct] but mere correctness isn't the only factor in a solution, or what is acceptable to do or say when. INT outwardly resembles, but isn't actually fungible with, WIS. (And yes, it takes someone who has both to teach that, and yes, they are very rare. Accommodation is following God's example; He does not grumble dragging the cross- the ultimate instrument of accommodation for humankind- and as such, neither will you.)

On a broader level, this is also kind of why different cultures end up with different perspectives on things; different starting conditions reveal different answers to different questions, and also create different problems. Which is also why we tend to be given to weeabooism and other weird/offensive nonsense; part of the appeal of spicy or particularly unpalatable food is enjoying the fact nobody else can eat it, and the same applies to certain kinds of information for the same reason. Of course, if you were a restaurant and made every dish that way, your restaurant would close and you'd end up serving nobody, unless you had a sufficient hard-core customer base that hung around enough to sustain you. (This is why 4chan is the way it is.)

You do ultimately have to accommodate for the low-decouplers and the people who take time to come around to things. Which I think is why

A big BIG part of Palantir is a role called "the forward deployed engineer." This is a software engineer - a team of them, usually - that sits on site with customers and builds, within the Palantir platform, purpose based "applications." Once the app is up and running, the Forward Deployed Engineers also, sometimes, try to "build back in" whatever they just built into the core Palantir platform.

would probably be an effective strategy to combat/work with that type of person. You actually have to observe the customer, how they work, how they communicate, and how they think and reason, to turn Knows Better into effective service. (Also, it just occurs to me that this is, if you squint a little, missionary work.)

And yes, that means we do know better than you, about most everything, most of the time

The question isn't whether we know more than "you" (i.e. the man in the street - the idea that Silicon Valley-based Motteposters have superior access to intelligence and rationality than other Motteposters is straightforwardly silly), it is whether we know more than relevant domain experts.

How long it takes for a smart generalist to come unstuck is notoriously a measure of how legitimate a field of knowledge is, and there are plenty of legitimate fields of knowledge outside the core competence of "tech" - most obviously all the non-software engineering disciplines. Before Musk founded a rocket company, he found as many smart rocket guys as he could and listened to them. When he bought into and refounded a car company, he hired car guys and listened to them. But there is legitimate subject-matter expertise to be had outside STEM. When Musk took over large parts of the US government, he didn't bother to talk to people who understood governing, and DOGE came unstuck - and not just, or even mostly because Musk was too autistic to maintain public and political support for what he was doing per @ThisIsSin, but because he was taking an approach (what P J O'Rourke would call "balancing the budget by cutting helium funds") which everyone who understands the budget knows can't work because the math doesn't math.

he didn't bother to talk to people who understood governing

which everyone who understands the budget knows can't work because the math doesn't math.

Sounds like Musk didn't apply engineering first principles to his DOGE initiative. And as you pointed out, it takes time for a generally smart person to become an expert in the field, but I would like to point out that it all starts with first principles and that becoming a domain expert is always by applying first principles to their given interests.

Personally, my explanation for why Musk deviated from his successful formula is that Musk was ideologically captured, had increased drug use, and couldn't keep a cool head.

it is a fail-state for us to ever communicate that sentiment to you,

but mere correctness isn't the only factor in a solution, or what is acceptable to do or say when.

Have you ever thought that this, in itself, is a problem that needs to be solved?

Which is why the line after that is “there’s no other way to really say this”. If there was, I would have said that instead.

The problem with ‘you’re just going to have to trust me; what I’m doing is too hard for you’ is that you have to be right, both objectively and (as much as is otherwise possible) subjectively.

Most people don’t think about it as much or that way; they generally outsource what they think to others and match that (best case, those who that was outsourced to are following these rules and keeping things palatable for the average person, but that doesn’t help the people who have already mastered that part).

Which is why the line after that is “there’s no other way to really say this”. If there was, I would have said that instead.

By this, I meant that we should cower when speaking the truth and that the truth should be subordinated to acceptability. Isn't that a serious problem that needs urgent solving?

Actually, no; but I'd characterize it less as "subordinated to acceptability" and more as "the necessary translation layer to get as much of the truth across as possible".

You can't say the phrase "daily bread" to a people who don't know what bread is, so if you have something to deliver them you have to find words that do mean that and then say those.

This saves you so that once/if you get to the part you can't do that for (specifically, at 7:19) when your audience has to make the special effort to understand something- and you have to tell them which part to focus on, they don't naturally know that- they spend, and are still willing to spend, that limited effort [and time] only on the irreducible/important part.

Actually, no; but I'd characterize it less as "subordinated to acceptability" and more as "the necessary translation layer to get as much of the truth across as possible".

Why isn't it a problem? Imagine if everyone were intelligent. What a great world it would be.

I appreciate the effortful response and like your analysis.

My WTF-age was mostly about clips like this

I would have to think twice about investing in a weapon .... this is defense, you know ... more defensive.

Bruh.

\6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

I like the corollary that, if not everyone shares the risk and cost, society should not fight the next war. Meaning we’d probably fight only when it becomes existential.

A position I heard elsewhere that I agree with: ideally, every nation should have a mandatory (for everyone) “Service Corps”, which isn’t just war preparation but also community service. Unfortunately, in most nations today, it would probably be corrupted.

I see stolen valor. Karp wants the status of a warrior-elite, understands and is willing to deliver on the obligations of noblesse oblige that come with it, and thinks he deserves it because of the contributions his company makes to national security. But he hasn't personally fought so he can't have it.

See also Tanner Greer's mostly-negative review of Karp's book comparing Karp negatively to the Gilded Age commerical oligarchs and longer blog post explaining what the East Coast establishment that emerged from the Gilded Age did that the Tech Right have not yet attempted.

My talk on Greer's thesis is that the East Coast Establishment was a real elite (who understood itself as such, worked hard to perpetuate itself as such, and took its nobless oblige seriously) that justified its elite status almost entirely in commercial (as opposed to martial) terms and is thus pretty much the only available model for non-fighting techbros like Karp.

I think this is an interesting view into the CEO of one of the most important companies. My impression of the man has decreased, and increasing my concern for the kind of leaders and elites that is brewing up within American society.

I have become increasingly unimpressed by business elites in general. It's pretty safe to say that they are not stupid, but they don't seem to be inclined towards the qualities we would desire in political leadership. They are not brave or principled or wise; in practice they are primarily selected for ambition and acquisitiveness and their ability to please investors (which in turn tends to mean a kind of bloodless and unscrupulous administrative competence). However, their financial success endows them not only with the arrogance to believe their domain expertise generalizes (a common failing of the successful in any intellectual field) but the resources to bend reality to their preferences.

I don't know, maybe those landed gentry complaining about the venal upstart merchants were on to something (they weren't). Karp's attitude seems predicated on the assumption that tech elites have a special claim to being smarter/more capable, but it's not really in evidence (DOGE being a mere embarrassment is the kindest thing you can say about it). As I said, I do not think that they are stupid, but I do think they are fundamentally gamblers who have confused the combination of survivorship bias and mere competence for brilliance.

I don't know, maybe those landed gentry complaining about the venal upstart merchants were on to something (they weren't).

Why make the point and then immediately deny it, beyond reflexive ideological distaste?

That was indeed the complaint of the landed gentry. People who just made lots of money are not necessarily good caretakers - they are often acquisitive and grasping, they tend to be gamblers whose individual endeavors are disposable, they're not trained to be leaders, and they often don't regard themselves as having obligations to society because they transcended society. The landed gentry had serious, solid holdings that couldn't be moved or got rid of, a clear and specific personal relationship with the people of a certain area (the kind of relationship that MPs / senators (?) are meant to have and don't), and were self-consciously trained for virtue even if it didn't always take.

Why make the point and then immediately deny it, beyond reflexive ideological distaste?

Because the superficial resemblance amuses me.

The gentry's critique of the commercial class rests on the proposition that they were more virtuous as leaders (and as people), but I don't think that is in evidence. There's significant overlap of vices (likely just a broad pathology of moneyed elites), and they, of course, have their own sets of problems. I also think

a) some of their criticisms didn't land even at the time and are clearly just kicking down at a rising rival power center

b) modern business elites are qualitatively different from their pre-20th century counterparts (I don't mean that in a better or worse sense, just that you are talking about different kinds of people)

In general, conscious efforts to cultivate virtuous and effective elites seems very hit or miss, and is more often claimed than realized. Landed gentry, e.g. weren't really trained to be leaders. They were a mostly-hereditary leisure class that also leveraged their economic and legal power into political and military influence.

What is the Zionist model of antisemitism*?

Matt Yglesias posted what turned out to be a surprisingly hot take that the downturn in public opinion of Israel is a result of Israeli actions, and that the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy.

I was surprised at the pushback. This seems straightforwardly true. There was a great chart I saw a few days ago, which I am unfortunately unable to find, which showed that public opinion of Israel has been approximately this low before. It was in 1982 with the invasion of Lebanon and the notoriously brutal siege of Beirut.

Most of the alternative theories fell into two camps.

  1. Antisemitism is a result of massive, society-wide misinformation perpetuated by the press, universities, and social media. This is the “wall of dead children” model. Israel’s actions don’t really matter because they will be twisted and misrepresented anyways. The solution is to exert more control over the information environment.
  2. Antisemitism is an intrinsic force of nature. It doesn’t have a cause, or if it does, it has a cause which cannot be effectively operated upon. Asking what causes antisemitism is like asking what causes DeCarlos Brown to stab people on the subway. The way to deal with antisemitism is to kill, deport, or disenfranchise antisemites.

It’s hard to tell how religious the people in 2. are, but my general impression is, “quite a bit”. Many of them seem to speak of antisemitism as if it were a spiritual fault, another manifestation of the platonic ideal of pure evil. Seen as a spiritual problem, the correct response is to become even more aggressively Jewish. This has the rather large problem of being counterproductive when, e.g. smashing idols goes wrong.

*By “antisemitism” in this post I almost exclusively mean “antizionism”. I use the term to maintain consistency with the pro-Israel literature I am engaging with, not as an endorsement that antizionism = antisemitism.

What Yglesias stated -- that "that global perceptions of Israel are totally unrelated to Israeli conduct" is false -- is almost vacuously true. The implication -- as you said "the best way for Israel to fix its public relations problem is to change its actions vis-a-vis the Palestinian issue and foreign policy" is false. We're in a situation where Israel is blamed everything it does regardless of reason or justification and many things it hasn't done (in particular, "genocide"). It's opponents are not held responsible for anything they do. Israel changing their actions -- aside from taking actions which would result in them ceasing to exist -- would not fix its public relations problem.

I'm in camp 1.

Matt is just saying a tone-policed version of "Do better." to Israel. Of course Israel wouldn't want to hear that! And alternative theory 1 is just "How can Israel get what it wants?"

Mentioning such obvious facts like "actions are related to public opinion" does you no good. Saying "Actions determine public opinion" is a normative statement ("Do better.") disguised as a factual one.

Zionist model of antisemitism is the same as the basic model of all -isms: due to various antisemitic biases, people hold Israel to high and unfair standards.

And those “left center” or whatever you want to call them group of bloggers have been posting for days that Dems need to drop Israel because Israel is not doing enough for Democrats. Some reason this reminds me of the quote “fairness feels like oppression when your use to privilege”. Jews and Israel have been in voting and dollars backing Dems at about an 85% rate for decades. They still found support on the right because of Evangelicals end time stuff and I think a general feeling on the right that Jews in the ME are better friends than Muslims.

I think we are at a point where Jews/Israel are going to have to decide which party they back and won’t be able to play both sides anymore. I am tired of Jews running an ethnostate and opposing the West from shutting down immigration. At this point I think the Jews have no choice but to go hard right. The current forces on the left in the west love brown and unsuccessful people. The Jews are too rich and white to have a seat with the Dems.

I am disappointed Trump hasn’t struck a harder bargain with Israel. I can love the Jews if their money and political power goes all in on white nationalism. Anyway Yglesias an Noah Smith etc are saying the Jews need to do more for Dems if the want backing for Israel and I’ve been saying the opposite that we need more support from them if they want support from MAGA.

I think Yglesias just realizes Israel/Jews are unpopular with the left and pushing them out of the Democrats has political benefits but he’s acting it’s like the Jews left the Dems instead of the Dems turning against Jews first.

If we went back in time the only way Israel could fix their political problems would be backing tough border enforcement in Europe and the rest of the west. The US and Europe being filled with third worlders always meant the left would eventually become anti-Israel. And then the right wouldn’t despise Israel for backing immigration.

I think we are at a point where Jews/Israel are going to have to decide which party they back and won’t be able to play both sides anymore.

Why would you frame it as "playing both sides" when whites, hispanics, and Asians also voted for both parties last election?

Whites, Hispanics, and Asians are not single-issue voters. "Jews/Israel" really means Ethnocentric-Israel-Single-Issue-Voters. Up until recently, their single issue hasn't been an issue -- being impartial to either party.

Dems are demanding it for one (Yglesias)[https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2045619973586837717?s=46]

And second interests groups do tend to only support one party. Catholics only vote GOP. Evangelicals GOP. Blacks Dem. Historically Jews Dem. Sure you can say this isn’t 100% support but these group have been 85% voting and donating to one party.

Why should the GOP back Israel when Dems won’t yet 85% of Jews vote Dem and donate to Dems. Politics is transactional.

To what extent are American Jews in support of Israel? Seems like a very sizable contingent of them think there is a genocide in Gaza, which sounds like they belong right in the D camp. Why should GOP (or Dem) treatment of Israel be influenced by Jewish American voters any more than, say, their treatment of China is influenced by Chinese American voters?

The inevitable fate of basically every term is to be distorted both as an attack and distorted as a defense. The strategy of both Israel and the actual antisemites has been the same here, to link Israel and the general Jewish population as inherently linked.

Israel links them as a defense to criticism of their actions. The antisemites link them as a way to smear general Jews. But they both do agree, the two are linked.

The Israel strategy actually worked for a short time, just like the woke strategy did. The general US population was generally supportive of Israel! Just like they were generally supportive of some DEI policies. But now views have effectively reversed in the US and antisemitism is growing. The "your criticisms are bigoted" defense only seems to work for a short period, eventually they start speaking up again and some even turn more bigoted in response, especially since the defense is also "the two are linked". Israel after all has told people who have problems with their behavior, that they must also have problems with Jews in general.

Let's go over the two theories you put as well

Antisemitism is a result of massive, society-wide misinformation perpetuated by the press, universities, and social media. This is the “wall of dead children” model. Israel’s actions don’t really matter because they will be twisted and misrepresented anyways. The solution is to exert more control over the information environment.

Then one must ask why is this anti Israel misinformation so much more potent now? It's not as if antisemitic propaganda is a new phenomenon, what has changed to make it more effective? I've shared one of my theories above.

You also gotta appreciate the irony here of "we need more control over information" given the common antisemitic trope of Jews wanting control over information.

Antisemitism is an intrinsic force of nature. It doesn’t have a cause, or if it does, it has a cause which cannot be effectively operated upon. Asking what causes antisemitism is like asking what causes DeCarlos Brown to stab people on the subway. The way to deal with antisemitism is to kill, deport, or disenfranchise antisemites.

So again, why is antisemitism apparently increasing then? It's the same exact question that leftists fail to answer when companies raise their prices due to "greed". If it's such an intrinsic thing, what is the difference between now and then?.

Meanwhile "Israeli actions actually do impact how people view Israel" is a pretty strong explanation for why people change their views. Maybe stuff like letting soldiers who sexually assaulted and abused a prisoner on video get off scot free might actually make people dislike you. Maybe some people who would otherwise support you don't like it when there's video of your soldiers shooting a young boy, standing around not rendering aid, and seemingly framing him by placing a rock near to say he was throwing it.

The strategy of both Israel and the actual antisemites has been the same here, to link Israel and the general Jewish population as inherently linked.

You've got two classes here: Anti-semites and Israelis, and you note that both of them want to link Israel to the general jewish population.

The general jewish population is also a class, no? What do they want with regard to the connection of Israel and themselves?

Only one-third of American Jews say they identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state, according to a new survey conducted by Jewish Federations of North America.

Do you, personally, believe that Israel has a right to exist as "a Jewish and Democratic state"?

Do you, personally, believe that a state can in practical terms be both "Jewish" and "Democratic" in the commonly-understood definitions of those terms? That is, assuming the general positive-valence progressive understanding of "Democracy" as a social system, do you think "Democracy" is broadly compatible with an explicit ethno-state?

Overall, more than 70% of Jewish adults who responded to JFNA’s survey agreed that “I feel emotionally attached to Israel,” and 60% said Israel made them proud to be Jewish. At the same time, nearly 70% also agreed that “I sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government.”

What are the bounds of discourse? It's pretty clear how much criticism of Israel is acceptable to Israel (little to none) and how much is acceptable to antisemites (almost all to all). I think it's pretty clear that the general jewish population likewise has something like coherent bounds on the amount of criticism of Israel they consider acceptable; are those bounds closer to the Israeli limits or the antisemite limits?

You appear to want to limit this discussion to Israel and the Antisemites, since both of these are your outgroup. But the general jewish population is a cohesive social cluster, and one that is not, to put it delicately, a complete stranger to the organization and exercise of political power. My observation is that the general jewish population is strongly supportive of Israel as a state, as they have been for decades. Criticism of specific actions of Israel or its agents does not change this fact.

I used to be very strongly pro-Israel. I went very strongly anti-Israel when I went blue. Now I am committed to, as best as I am able, no longer having an opinion on the matter either way. If your strategy is otherwise, I wish you the best with dodging the antisemite label yourself, but do not expect your dodging to work. I do not think you or your coalition generally will be able to carve out a stable middle-ground where "antisemite" retains its negative valence and yet effective, consequential criticism builds toward an effective social consensus. I think a major reason this will not happen is because the general Jewish population does not want it to happen, and will organize against you to keep it from happening. When they start calling you a Nazi, know that to at least a minor extent, you have my sympathies, and my hope that the experience is educational for you.

Do you, personally, believe that Israel has a right to exist as "a Jewish and Democratic state"?

Do you, personally, believe that a state can in practical terms be both "Jewish" and "Democratic" in the commonly-understood definitions of those terms? That is, assuming the general positive-valence progressive understanding of "Democracy" as a social system, do you think "Democracy" is broadly compatible with an explicit ethno-state?

I don't understand these questions and you seem reasonable and have good takes.

What if my answers are:

  1. yes, kind of. I don't really think any state has a "right" to exist all that much. However I think states that are able to enforce their existence on planet earth should probably exist, and I'm generally against people trying to make other states not exist, even if they perhaps could pull it off.

  2. absolutely. I think Isreal can be run by Jews and have leaders elected by popular vote. You could also absolutely have an ethnostate that has a democracy. I don't think "universal suffrage" is required for democracy, although it is preferable.

These questions seem so basic I feel like I'm missing something.

absolutely. I think Isreal can be run by Jews and have leaders elected by popular vote. You could also absolutely have an ethnostate that has a democracy. I don't think "universal suffrage" is required for democracy, although it is preferable.

I'm not FCfromSSC, but a common belief, I'd argue a defining belief, of modern progressivism, and even most of the center left, is that democracy is invalid when people either vote for specific positions or vote for leaders who espouse specific positions.* Witness how, and this it not just in the US, the terms 'democratic' and 'populist' are very much separate terms with 'populism' being argued to be anti-democratic since its policy go against what is considered valid in a democracy by the mainstream progressive left. You can even see this outside of the US: if you read El País (rough Spanish equivalent to the NYT) they describe pretty much every figure on the right as an 'Ultra' and talk about how they are all dangerous to democracy.

Almost all left wingers, especially those described as 'woke', consider ethno-nationalism to be illiberal enough that it's just not a valid/democratic platform to have. This is both openly stated by most left wingers, and it is even the law in many European countries that explicit arguments for an ethnostate are hate speech. If you apply woke standards to Israel, the entire project is considered illegitimate because the nation is literally founded on the "undemocratic" principle of ethnonationalism. Some center left figures ideologically argue that Israel deserves a carveout or the above viewpoint shouldn't be applied everywhere, but the straightforward application of 'wokism', or even the center left viewpoint on ethnonationalism, is that the political system of Israel is founded on undemocratic principles and is thus illegitimate.

  • Most right wingers also believe that certain rights need to be beyond democracy, so this isn't a sneer at the left.

You've got two classes here: Anti-semites and Israelis, and you note that both of them want to link Israel to the general jewish population.

The general jewish population is also a class, no? What do they want with regard to the connection of Israel and themselves?

I wouldn't say the general Jewish population is as easy of a class to read here. Lots of individual Jews will have different opinions with different nuances. It might statistically skew one way or the other, but there will be important variance from one to another.

Israel is easy because it's specifically the actions and rhetoric of the current Israeli government. Antisemites is an easy class simply due to the category itself (when properly applied) inherently being people who would want the Jews to look bad and be hated.

Do you, personally, believe that a state can in practical terms be both "Jewish" and "Democratic" in the commonly-understood definitions of those terms? That is, assuming the general positive-valence progressive understanding of "Democracy" as a social system, do you think "Democracy" is broadly compatible with an explicit ethno-state?

I think it can be democratic and made up primarily of Jews, but I agree that explicit ethno-state and democracy struggle to be compatible with one another. Especially one based at least somewhat around religion. It's unlikely, but what if a significant portion of the citizens turned Buddhist or something? Seems to me they still should have a voice.

You appear to want to limit this discussion to Israel and the Antisemites, since both of these are your outgroup. But the general jewish population is a cohesive social cluster, and one that is not, to put it delicately, a complete stranger to the organization and exercise of political power.

I disagree, even with the people who "support Israel as a state" lies a ton of different nuance. Supporting the concept of Israel as a safe space for the Jewish people doesn't necessarily mean they support all of the expansionism or genocidal policies of the current Israeli government. Heck, one of the most rabidly anti Israeli left wingers I know is an ethnic Jew himself. That's not very common, but this is the sort of thing I mean by not wanting to treat Jews as a "cohesive class". There's lots of different parts to the topic and different people will have various nuanced views on each. And people can change their minds too so I'm not gonna write everyone off from their ethnicity. Hell even within Israel, some of the literal soldiers committing abuses have come to regret it. Now there comes a point where forgiveness isn't enough, and abusing/murdering innocents is far past that line but it is a display of how people do change their views.

I wouldn't say the general Jewish population is as easy of a class to read here. Lots of individual Jews will have different opinions with different nuances. It might statistically skew one way or the other, but there will be important variance from one to another.

Lots of individuals having different opinions with different nuances is irrelevant, when the sum of those nuances skews heavily one way or the other. I'm reliably informed that ten Jewish people will hold eleven different positions on a topic, and yet our government consistently provides large-scale economic and military aid to Israel, provides Israel with powerful diplomatic cover, and even, in your assessment, fights wars on Israel's behalf, and it does not appear to me that the general jewish population is interested in seeing these policies change. It is evident to me that one of the strongest bulwarks against these policies changing has been accusations of antisemitism against those advocating such changes.

Antisemites is an easy class simply due to the category itself (when properly applied) inherently being people who would want the Jews to look bad and be hated.

From my perspective, the question is whether the category is properly applied, and what you intend to do if you find it is being misapplied. If you or your coalition could meaningfully police the application of the term to only those areas where it was appropriate, the problem could easily be solved. But the problem is that Antisemitism is, at its core, a term that the general jewish population owns, and to the extent that they in general disagree with you over where and when it should be applied, the sum of their opinions will be dispositive.

I disagree, even with the people who "support Israel as a state" lies a ton of different nuance. Heck, one of the most rabidly anti Israeli left wingers I know is an ethnic Jew himself. That's not very common, but this is the sort of thing I mean by not wanting to treat Jews as a "cohesive class".

In your view, what does the phrase "general [x] population" mean, and why do you use it if you believe that it can be overridden by anecdotal examples?

I often find that my ingroup contains infinite, fractal complexity when criticisms of its collective behavior are presented, so it seems we are as brothers in this matter. And yet, I also find that large-scale populations are capable of coordinated action in the pursuit of long-term goals. If I can engage productively with criticisms of Christians or Muslims, men or women, Blues or Reds, Boomers or "the kids today", it is not obvious to me why "the general jewish population" alone should be an amorphous enigma of which no concrete critique can be made, other than the observation that when such critiques are made, the person making them is inevitably labeled an antisemite.

And people can change their minds too so I'm not gonna write everyone off from their ethnicity. Hell even within Israel, some of the literal soldiers committing abuses have come to regret it.

I don't doubt that some of them have. I do doubt that the general jewish population is interested in bolstering that regret through actual policy consequences. I think many Israelis regretted their involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres; I saw a movie they made about it once. And yet, I note that such regret did not result in legible justice toward those involved, and the commander who coordinated their involvement still got to be Prime Minister, and most of those who thought this was a bad thing did not, for example, think it was a bad enough thing to really do much about it.

It does not seem to me that these observations amount to "writing off people for their ethnicity"; no society is perfectly just, but some societies are trying for something I recognize as justice, and other societies are not. If you consider Israel an unjust society, what do you think should happen as a consequence? What do you think will happen as a consequence? What role do you expect the general Jewish population to play in the transition from ought to is?

It is evident to me that one of the strongest bulwarks against these policies changing has been accusations of antisemitism against those advocating such changes.

This is true, but it does not mean that those accusations have been false.

And certainly there are a lot of American Jews who don't like Netanyahu or don't like various actions Israel has taken. There are very few who want Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish state.

When considering the culture war as a whole, would you say that accusations of racism or sexism have generally been false?

And certainly there are a lot of American Jews who don't like Netanyahu or don't like various actions Israel has taken. There are very few who want Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish state.

Yes. This is my point. There are significant differences between "I don't like this" and "I think something should be done about this" and "I am willing to fight to see something done about this". With regard to the general Jewish population, negative attitudes toward Israel cluster around the first of these, and the last of these are very, very rare.

When considering the culture war as a whole, would you say that accusations of racism or sexism have generally been false?

There certainly have been more false claims than true ones. Though not evenly distributed. For anti-semitism as applied to those opposing support for Israel, I believe the claims are mostly true in the US -- the bulk of the people actively opposing supporting Israel (as a whole; many will argue over details) are anti-semitic, and most of the rest are useful idiots who don't know which river or what sea.

I don't recall whether you've laid out your political history in the past. Were you a blue, once upon a time? Did you have the experience of getting in a fight with other blues, and reaching for common ground and solidarity, only to have those appeals rejected out of hand because your refusal to get in line was considered proof that you were an ist or a phobe of some description? If you did, how did it incline you toward the people who treated you so?

Back in the day, before I made the decision to no longer have opinions on the subject, I lost count of the times I was called a nazi and an antisemite for arguing in favor of what appeared to me to be basic, foundational moral and legal values when it came to Israel's policies and the behavior of its agents. I stopped having those arguments, and indeed stopped consuming news about Israel or its various conflicts, because I realized I was becoming legitimately antisemitic through frustration and disgust with the behavior of my opposites and their coalition. And for what it's worth, with some years of remove, I can recognize that I bought into extremely foolish underdog narratives of the other side, and gave them a pass for their own crimes and atrocities because they were committed against the side I saw as more in the wrong. This was stupid, but it didn't spring from congenital hatred of Jews, it came from the observation of entrenched and fattened callousness and injustice. You might say I believed I was judging them by the content of their character.

Now, I no longer have an opinion on the subject. This statement is not a pose or a linguistic strategy; I do not want and will not allow myself to have an opinion, to root for a side. I have done my best to cauterize the portion of my brain previously dedicated to such concerns, and this is a policy I intend to maintain for the rest of my life. My conclusion is that the land is cursed, and people generally would be well-advised to live elsewhere.

That being said, as someone who has been through this from the opposite side and is watching the shifting sands of ideology, I think the sort of reflexive dismissal you and many others have deployed on this topic doesn't seem like it's working well long-term.

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Do you, personally, believe that Israel has a right to exist as "a Jewish and Democratic state"?

Rights are irrelevant. It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state in the territory currently controlled by Israel because that territory contains more Palestinians than non-Haredi Jews, and without a genocide (real or technical) is likely to continue to do so. (And even if a multiethnic democracy with Jewish character was possible, neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinians have any interest in attempting it).

Both the current governing coalition in Israel (led by Netanyahu) and the most popular opposition party (led by Naftali Bennett) claim to be committed to a Jewish state including the vast majority of the West Bank, which implies either permanent apartheid (with the Palestinians continuing to be treated worse than any minority group in any country which expects credit for being a "democracy") or a Final Solution to the Palestinian problem. I don't think either Bennett or Netanyahu or most of their supporters are actually thinking in terms of Final Solutions, but Netanyahu's coalition includes Kahanists who definitely are and Bennett ran on a joint list with them before he adopted big-tent anti-Netanyahu politics.

None of this implies that that the current Israeli government is as evil as Hamas, but when Germany play Argentina in the World Cup you don't have to hold your nose and root for the lesser evil, if you are a good person you can go touch grass, and if you are a bad person you can buy popcorn and root for injuries.

Do you, personally, believe that a state can in practical terms be both "Jewish" and "Democratic" in the commonly-understood definitions of those terms?

Absolutely, and inside-the-Green-Line Israel was (and still is, in so far as it can be conceived of separately from the West Bank settlements). A democracy whose character reflects the shared culture of the voting majority while acknowledging the rights as individual humans and citizens of members of ethnic minorities is a solved problem. But building that Jewish democracy was only possibly with a supermajority-Jewish population.

but when Germany play Argentina in the World Cup you don't have to hold your nose and root for the lesser evil

It's never, ever, coming home, mate.

In the spirit of this bet, I wonder whether peace will come to the Middle East before England wins a World Cup. But sports fandom isn't supposed to be rational, and I don't bet on England games for that reason. A hundred years of hurt isn't going to stop me dreaming...

For whatever it's worth, I had basically lost all hope by 2022 and "we" then proceeded to win the world cup and then elect a libertarian.

Gotta keep dreaming.

"we" then proceeded to win the world cup and then elect a libertarian.

From your n=1 sample, how has that changed, for better or worse, your daily life?

The world cup or the government change?

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In the very short term, my relative salary went down, since there was a "price rearrangement" (lots of inflation without currency devaluation) and I was working for a foreign company. Later on, said adjustment meant professional salaries became competitive enough to the point of being able to get a job here, which is convenient for a variety of reasons. Most of my peer group's (of those that hadn't already emigrated) income was significantly boosted. Also, wokeness stopped being institutionally mandated and electorally viable, which is nice.

Overall my purchasing power has diminished (eating out is more expensive, as is meat), but it's compensated with a variety of psychological benefits.

This is, of course, how it affected me personally, and I am fairly isolated from the negative effects of most governments, if you want my opinion of the overall impact: as with all Trumpian Bargains, it has been a mixed bag, but I think it was overall very positive, and I'm optimistic. That being said, it has been a very painful process for a lot of people, and I'm kind of proud (of the people) that the midterms were as good as they were despite this.

It is impossible to have a Jewish, democratic state in the territory currently controlled by Israel because that territory contains more Palestinians than non-Haredi Jews, and without a genocide (real or technical) is likely to continue to do so.

This is the sort of answer I would expect, yes.

Absolutely, and inside-the-Green-Line Israel was (and still is, in so far as it can be conceived of separately from the West Bank settlements).

How did that particular chunk of land get to be supermajority Jewish? If we handwave how it was established, what policies are acceptable in keeping it supermajority Jewish? If they build a wall and refuse all non-jewish immigrants, is that an acceptable policy just for them, or should other states be permitted to act in a similar way?

My point is obvious, I think; progressive values and principles are flatly incompatible with the function and form of Israel as a state, this incompatibility is severe enough that it probably cannot be maintained in the long term, and that this fact presents a serious dilemma to western Jewish people who have heretofore been closely aligned with progressive politics.

Then one must ask why is this anti Israel misinformation so much more potent now? It's not as if antisemitic propaganda is a new phenomenon, what has changed to make it more effective?

Woke.

Yes, and people conflating this with historical antisemitism are pretty clearly off the mark. You can't explain it with reference to, idk, shylock or the dreyfus affair (do 5% of Americans know who alfred dreyfus was?)

To the antiracist left/liberal, Jews are white colonialists and Arabs are brown natives. There is very little that the oppressed can do against their oppressors that deserves full-throated condemnation.

That could explain anti-Israel/antisemitism sentiment growing among the left but those views are not exclusive to the left. But weirdly enough among some groups, there is a negative correlation from embracing anti-Israel and embracing the antisemitic views.

But while antisemites were indeed more likely to have extremely negative views about the state of Israel, many of the groups that were most critical of Israel, at least according to this measure — people with graduate degrees and those who identify as “extremely liberal” — were the groups least likely to express more explicit antisemitic beliefs (i.e., those unrelated to Israel).

So seemingly the woker you are, the more anti Israel you are but less antisemitic. Or at least less explicit in it.

Or at least less explicit in it.

You basically answered your own question.

Then one must ask why is this anti Israel misinformation so much more potent now? It's not as if antisemitic propaganda is a new phenomenon, what has changed to make it more effective?

Another hypothesis I want to consider is the switch from text-based news and commentary to audiovisual news and commentary. It's easy enough to defend Israel over text. Jews needed a place to go after the holocaust. Mandatory Palestine had a thriving Jewish community thanks to the British and early Zionists. The PLO did a lot of extraterritorial terrorist attacks you can rattle off. They bombed a damn pizza place. It's not until you've seen the bombed-out remains of Gaza or Lebanon, talked to the guy in the West Bank who used to have an olive grove on the other side of that hill but can never get to it ever since the settlers moved in, and seen the literal walls that separate the Jewish part of Hebron from the Arab part of Hebron that you realize what a mess the whole thing turned into.

Like any other form of bias, it both affects how people interpret events and is affected by events themselves. Compare to political partisanship: the public's interpretation of political scandals (of varying levels of real or fake) is obviously enormously affected by both their personal political views and the political views of the media sources and social circles they trust. You can probably think of plenty of cases where very similar actions have been interpreted differently by partisans and biased organizations depending on which party they're associated with. At the same time it's not completely detached from reality, not everyone is maximally partisan so there really are actions you can take to make your political party more or less popular.

That doesn't mean being generically "likable" is the best strategy either, you can also do things like decrease the influence of your political enemies or do things that have a real-world impact that people like even if they don't like the policy in abstract. If Trump successfully changed the political leanings of mainstream media institutions, or Israel successfully helped the Iranian protestors take over the government, then that would help their popularity more than it pissed people off so long as it didn't require doing anything really unpopular like mass-arresting journalists or using nuclear weapons. Conversely if Israel made all palestinians citizens that would make the population of Israel a lot more anti-jewish despite it being "likable". Anti-white bias has had a recent surge in influence via the growth of the social-justice movement despite sustaining itself on stuff like "police are allowed to defend themselves and sometimes make mistakes" and "the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till", sometimes an influential ideology really does hate you enough that you'll make more progress by trying to fight that ideology than by playing nice. Anti-Israel bias isn't as detached from their recent actions, at least not in the west, but it's a reminder that determining the net impact of an action long-term is more complicated than checking popularity polls.

Both can be true. That people will deem Israel guilty no matter the facts and that Israel is doing its best to not win the hearts and minds of the western populace.

If you are going to have a specific model of antisemitism, then ideally you should have a model that explains historic instances of it rather than just a single contemporary instance. That it's a result of a downturn in public opinion of Israel as a result of Israel's actions fails to explain pre-1948 antisemitism for reasons I hope are obvious.

I can't speak for the US, but in the UK, neither Yglesias or the proposed alternative theories are a good model. the current wave of antisemitism is basically a coalition between the far-left and Islamists. The older part of the far-left have been playing at this for years, they are not new, and thus there is no rise to explain. The growth of Islamists tracks demographic changes, these types always hated Jews, there's only recently enough of them to be a relevant voting bloc. And the third group of young far-left people (somewhat disproportionately female) can't be explained without explaining why they are both going far-left and anti-Israel. From what I can tell there is nothing so uniquely capitalist about Israel that hatred of Israel is enough to make you go communist too, so the connection is better explained going the other way, perhaps by path dependency regarding still being led by the old far-left... So probably the cold, dead hand of the Soviet Union's reaction to Israel crushing a bunch of Soviet-armed Arabs in 1967 continuing to ripple through history.

If you are going to have a specific model of antisemitism, then ideally you should have a model that explains historic instances of it rather than just a single contemporary instance. That it's a result of a downturn in public opinion of Israel as a result of Israel's actions fails to explain pre-1948 antisemitism for reasons I hope are obvious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The basic rule is that whenever something is considered bad, it won't be long before the Jews are accused of it.

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.

?? 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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

The jews see the goyim as cattle with no soul.

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?

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If you have been thrown out of 109 bars do bouncers have a collective delusion or is your behaviour lacking?

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.

What unfortunately lends so much credence to the accusations to 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 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.

Antisemitism is a result of massive, society-wide misinformation perpetuated by the press, universities, and social media. This is the “wall of dead children” model. Israel’s actions don’t really matter because they will be twisted and misrepresented anyways. The solution is to exert more control over the information environment.

I mean, I suppose I fall into this camp.

When I look at Israel's actions during the relevant time periods where support for the state has gone down, I simply think they couldn't have done anything different, or at least substantially different. Because of the way Hamas and Hezbollah operate, every square foot of an area they occupy ends up being a legitimate military target. This is, of course, famously schools, hospitals, mosques, etc. If you want to disable Hamas soldier and rockets, you basically have no choice but to bomb targets in those categories. This will then create the "wall of dead children" as you put it. IMO responsible reporting would ignore said dead children, or, if they did report, emphasize strenuously that the children were killed by Hamas's actions.

That said this isn't unique to Israel. The same tactics are deployed by American press against America all the time. The press, as a rule, does not like competency and patriotism, and the mix of competency with patriotism is particularly offensive to them. Well, Israel is both so they will be hated by the press.

Does antisemitism help drop Israel below the floor that the press can drive America to? Yes. But the press's vitriol for a winner is even more important.

How about not occupying more and more territory. How about not sponsoring jihadists in neighbouring countries. How about not turning millions of people into refugees.

Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.

Antisemitism has one cause, jewish behviour. Jewish behaviour is caused by an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group. Jews stick together by being in constant conflict with the rest of the world.

Antisemitism has one cause, jewish behviour.

Really. What Jewish behaviors made the Holocaust necessary or justified?

I can't help but notice that he didn't say "the Holocaust was necessary or justified".

It's implied, no? He's blaming any and all hate of the Jews on their own behavior. With no antisemitism there's no Holocaust. If Jewish behavior is the only cause of antisemitism, then the Holocaust was their own fault, absolving the Nazis.

You never seen someone sperg out, and do something unjustified in retaliation to a transgression?

Are you trolling? Genocide, with decades of increasing hostility being built before it was carried out, is not a sperg out.

Come up with a better name for it, if you want, the dynamic seems the same, and the point was to show that saying a reaction was caused by something, does not actually justify the reaction, unlike what you were claiming.

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How about not occupying more and more territory.

Funny how this one always gets trotted out, and yet all the occasions Israel offered territory back to their Arab neighbours are overlooked.

They just want 77% of Palestine with settlements in the remaining 23% while occupying the Golan heights. That is pretty much the opposite of the deal the Irish got.

Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.

I don't think you're comparing apples with apples.

  1. Read the mission statements for the IRA, the UVF, the UDA and every other paramilitary organisation in the North. Conspicuous by its absence will be any explicit declaration of intent to completely exterminate the opposing ethnic group. The same cannot be said of Hamas's founding charter. It's extremely difficult to do business with a rival ethnic group who simply want your entire ethnic group dead. How do you come to a compromise? ("Okay – you can have your own state and only kill half of us"?)
  2. There were moderate leaders on both sides (e.g. John Hume and David Trimble) of the Troubles who were willing and able to work together to find a compromise. Every would-be moderate Palestinian leader has good reason to believe he'll be assassinated by one of his own side if he ever dilutes his maximal hatred and distrust of Jews one iota. (In the interest of fairness, this was probably also true about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.)
  3. The inability to compromise inevitably results in Palestinian leaders turning down offers far more generous than any offered to Northern Irish Catholics. At no point in the Troubles was complete ceding of territory from the UK to Ireland ever even considered never mind offered, and John Hume and Gerry Adams knew this going into negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have been offered their own state at least three times in the last fifty years and turned it down every time. These would strike me as a transparent example of cutting one's nose to spite one's face if you accept the Palestinian leaders' claims at face value that they only want their own state and a "right of return" or similar.
  4. As odious as some of the IRA's tactics were, they pale in comparison to Hamas's. It's not easy to ask someone to swallow their pride and bury the hatchet with someone who killed your cousin, but it can and has been done. Asking someone to bury the hatchet with someone who murdered your cousin and violated her corpse is a much harder ask.

I also question the way you're laying 100% of the blame for the sad state of affairs at Israel's fault. I mean, when you include bangers like

an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group

Like, even if I concede that this description applies to the Jews in Israel – surely you must concede that, at the minimum, it also applies to the Palestinian Arabs? If nothing else, Jews in Israel can peacefully co-exist with each other (Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948). Palestinian Arabs are such basket cases that they don't even get along with other Arabs, and inevitably end up starting civil wars whenever they're admitted into neighbouring Arab countries. If you want to say that peace in Israel and Palestine is impossible because there are two competing ethnic groups who both follow "an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group", I could understand where you were coming from. But the idea that this description only applies to the Jews and not to the Muslim Palestinians is just laughable on its face.

(Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948)

This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.

Anyway, if it's so difficult for Jews to co-exist, it would be great if they could just... have their own country which other people could avoid, right? They could even build a wall to separate them from the other groups so there's no trouble. Of course, we know how that turned out. (and it ignores the Israeli Arabs, who don't seem to be particularly worse off than minorities in many other nations)

This is a little unfair; as you note, Jordan's civil war was with the Palestinians, and labeling that "civil" while Israeli/Palestinian conflicts are not is defensible but a bit arbitrary.

This is a reasonable objection, but even leaving aside these marginal examples there have been a lot of civil wars, revolutions etc. just in the past eight decades.

Well sure but the Israelis also control the other side of that wall. They control the borders of the West Bank and have a whole hodgepodge of fully integrated settlements on the other side of that wall. and they've had fifty years to enunciate some sort of borders.

Other wall.

I tend to lean towards model 1, except I don't really think it was a coordinated campaign, just social incentives. Due to geopolitics of the cold war, Israel became a symbol of the west. And if there is anything the left truly loves, it's destroying symbols and hating on the west. And if you want to try and unite the working class globally, you better pick an international issue that everyone is familiar with.

The irony is that Israel is less and less representative of western culture as time goes on, given that their religious lunatics are growing rapidly as a percentage of the population. Once they pass 50%, things are gonna get very hairy over there. You think Netanyahu is bad, wait until the all ministerial positions are occupied by the Haredim.

In the meantime, we all get to deal with the absurdity of listening to "leftists" go on and on about Israel despite the fact is has nothing to do with envisioned proletariat uprisings, and that far worse atrocities are being committed in almost all non-western corners of the globe as we speak.

Sort of related: I recently read an article called "On Collective Jewish Guilt".

I understand that anti-Zionism is not intrinsically reducible to antisemitism, and that, in theory, one could oppose the existence of Israel while harbouring no ill will towards Jews and wanting them to be safe. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that, in many cases, anti-Zionism is the motte and antisemitism is the bailey. This article argues that you can tell a lot of anti-Zionists don't really mean what they say based on how they react to antisemitic terror attacks and hate crimes that take place outside of Israel (e.g. the recent Hanukkah mass shooting on Bondi Beach). After all, if anti-Zionists were really only opposed to the state of Israel, you would logically expect them to be the first to condemn attacks on the Jewish diaspora, and in the loudest possible terms: after all, if they believe that a dedicated Jewish state is not necessary to ensure the safety of Jews, they should be the ones most opposed to attacks on Jews outside of Israel. That is, to put it charitably, not what we see. Every time there has been an antisemitic terror attack or hate crime in the last two and a half years, I have seen one or more of the following:

  • sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")
  • claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)
  • outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack

I am sure there is someone out there who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but legitimately harbours no animosity towards Jews on an interpersonal level and sincerely wishes them no harm. (This is the person Freddie deBoer claims to be; I don't believe him.) But in my experience, nine times out of ten a Gentile who calls himself anti-Zionist will eventually be revealed to be antisemitic, and I'm sick of trying to pretend otherwise.

"So I know the group our people are targeting for harassment and abuse now is the same group our people have been targeting for harassment and abuse for centuries. And I know that our justifications for harassing and abusing them (they murder children, they control the banks, they control the media, they're sexual degenerates) are literally word-for-word the same as the justifications we used for centuries before now. But our harassment and abuse is totally justified now because of anti-colonialism, guys."

Modern leftist anti-semitism is not historical antisemitism. It’s an offshoot of DEI, blacklivesmatter, woke, anti white beliefs that have grown on the left. Jews are compared to normal whites even richer and more successful. And of course they mostly have white skin. Same with anti-Zionism on the left it’s fundamentally the same as anti-colonialism leftism. Unfortunately the Jews largely backed those beliefs for decades while not realizing that eventually Ashkenazi Jews have extremely high IQ on average and win more than anyone else is modern neoliberalism and this anti-whitism logic would eventually turn on them.

And yes Israel was colonialism or probably even closer to apartheid than colonialism in N America. Except they did it historically in the 20th century. N America for the most part displaced few people as it was sparsely populated similar to Argentina. Modern Ashkenazis are as much Italians as they are genetically related to the historical people of Israel. Their richer, smarter, and better at military than the people who lived in Palestine and conquered Israel in the 20th century.

I’ve got no problem with Israel except when they act against my interests. The ADL was one of the biggest promoters of anti-whitism which has now turned on their own people.

Modern leftist anti-semitism is not historical antisemitism.

I agree with the larger point, but keep in mind "leftist anti-semitism" includes Muslim antisemitism too (meeting historical antisemitism criteria), which is given a more anodyne, anti-colonialist twist to be palatable to their white liberal peers.

blacklivesmatter

Sometimes it amazes me that the BLM crowd is so content to throw their weight behind the Palestine crowd, elements of which are also funding actual genocides of Black people in Sudan and Nigeria. But the self-centered-ness of the political activist class isn't that surprising, I guess.

in many cases, anti-Zionism is the motte and antisemitism is the bailey.

This strikes me as very likely in some cases

After all, if anti-Zionists were really only opposed to the state of Israel, you would logically expect them to be the first to condemn attacks on the Jewish diaspora, and in the loudest possible terms: after all, if they believe that a dedicated Jewish state is not necessary to ensure the safety of Jews, they should be the ones most opposed to attacks on Jews outside of Israel.

I don't see how any of this is logical at all actually.

I have no problem with Jews, I admire their culture. Frankly, any culture that prizes educational attainment and hard work is desperately needed given how hard the West is abandoning these values.

I think the state of Israel, while in a very shitty neighborhood, is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically. There are many examples of the various attrocities they have recently inflicted on Palestinians (rape, violence, blah blah blah). Also fun stuff like death penalty laws that only apply to Palestinians. Or the entire concept of West Bank settlements and the Swiss cheesing of that area. Or how gaza is levelled and the ~2mil ppl there are now pressed into less than 50% of the pre 2023 land area. It goes on...

Of course, the Palestinians, and the Arab Muslim world at large, are terrible neighbors and have inflicted lots of attrocities back on Isreal. I dislike them as well.

So in sum, I dislike everyone in that area, and I hope they resolve their problems (they never will). If I meet a Jew in real life, I'll shake their hand and hope I can get invited to Shabbat because I'm a slut for Challah.

But I also think the state of Israel is being run by essentially cartoon villains and I absolutely do not support them.

I don't understand why I have to yell loudly about not liking violence against Jews forever to demonstrate that I'm "one of the good ones". I don't like violence against Jews, people shouldn't be violent ahainst them. I dislike violence against most people.

My point (made more eloquently in the linked article; I'm drunkenly paraphrasing) is that there are a lot of people who would never dream of suggesting that a hate crime targeting e.g. black people might be justified because of how a group of black people behaved in a different country. But when a hate crime targets Jews minding their own business in a country other than Israel, these same people will outright state that such violence is "only to be expected" in light of the actions of Israel (even if the targeted Jews don't hold Israeli citizenship, have never set foot in the country and have personally expressed discomfort with IDF military tactics).

A person who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but who harbours no ill will towards Jews would presumably condemn anti-Semitic violence outside of Israel just as loudly as they condemn anti-black hate crimes, gay bashing etc. The fact that they tend not to do this, but rather will excuse or justify the violence in question, rather suggests that their motivating impulse is something other than a philosophical opposition to the existence of the Jewish state.

Ohhhh I understand, thank you

there are a lot of people who would never dream of suggesting that a hate crime targeting e.g. black people might be justified because of how a group of black people behaved in a different country

Not only would a lot of people never dream of suggesting that, the US even has a government agency that supposedly coerces people into making explicit statements regarding the denial of race as a factor in crimes committed against their families.

There are many examples of the various attrocities they have recently inflicted on Palestinians (rape, violence, blah blah blah).

Apart and beyond the usual level of such atrocities in any military?

Or how gaza is levelled and the ~2mil ppl there are now pressed into less than 50% of the pre 2023 land area.

What would be a more effective way to clear out Hamas bases and tunnels that are deeply embedded within civilian infrastructure, without putting your own soldiers at risk? I'm genuinely curious -- I have not been able to get a single good answer to this that isn't simply "Well, don't."

What would be a more effective way to clear out Hamas bases and tunnels that are deeply embedded within civilian infrastructure, without putting your own soldiers at risk?

Good faith Marshall plan Gaza or actually genocide it fr.

You can't "Marshall plan Gaza" when the aid money is just going to get funneled into Hamas.

As for "actually genocide it fr",

I think the state of Israel, while in a very shitty neighborhood, is going absolutely ham to a degree that is impossible to support ethically.

You would start ethically supporting Israel if they went even further than doing things that you find impossible to ethically support?

I don't support them genociding Gaza, I just think it's basically one of ~two "effective" (as in, actually stops the two groups from doing everything they can to fuck with each other) options for actually ending this conflict.

Ok, so then what realistic and fair option do you actually support for ending this conflict?

I provided the two viable options I see before us.

To be clear, I do not think it is possible to achieve a "realistic and fair" solution that both parties will agree to. There's so much hostility and bad blood and history that I genuinely do not think this will ever end.

The Palestinians will suffer and occasionally lash out, the Israelis will crush them and keep them contained/mow the grass.

I anticipate, barring some black swan event, that when I die the status quo will be similar to now

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It's not conclusive -- absent mind-reading capacity, I don’t want to convict anyone, even in my mind, of anti-Semitism. But one guideline I like to use when evaluating a vocally anti-Israel person is "have I ever heard them voice concern about human rights in Sudan, or Iran, or Belarus, or indeed Gaza? Or is it only the failings of one government that they object to?" There are people who pass this test. Not many, I would say.

The point of being vocal is to change something that you can affect in the world. Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan. But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving. That would have been cool.

But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving.

I would still love to see evidence for these hundreds of thousands of Gazan children who starved. Most pro-Palestine people seemed to quietly drop that specific claim after the UN were forced to walk back the most explosive framing of it.

Well, if you can claim 6 million dead, historically that's enough for European powers to feel obligated enough to you to give you a piece of the Near East after the fact as repentance.

Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again, but this time it's the Great Satan (the US) getting in the way of the historic, millennium-old European Peoples' tradition of dictating who controls Judea.

Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again

Do what again? Award a group a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people were killed? Which group has seen 6 million of their people killed recently?

Well, there was that time the most powerful EU member nation killed a bunch of the people currently occupying the Holy Land back in the early 1940s.

The survivors of that purge had taken that land, formerly administered by Britain (the second-biggest loser of WW2) by 1948.

You're referring to the Holocaust, I get that. When you said "the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again" I interpreted that to mean "the pro-Palestine people are asking the EU to award them a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people have been killed". But 6 million of their people haven't been killed. Or did I misinterpret you?

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https://www.rescue.org/press-release/children-gaza-need-protection-hunger-and-injuries-surge-irc-data-shows

Polling indicated that 1 in 3 children in Gaza during the height of the blockade went full days without eating. There are 600,000 Gazans under 10 years old, meaning that 200,000 children were consciously starved by the Jewish State during the food blockaid.

No, it says that one in three children under 3 went a full day without eating in the past 24 hours (kind of an oddly phrased question, but whatever).

We can make reasonable extrapolations from this poll:

  • A family with limited food is not going to single out their youngest child to go without eating; the human instinct is to feed the youngest and most vulnerable. If children under 3 are going a full day without eating, then this is at minimum how long every child is going without eating. The youngest is who needs to eat the most frequently.

  • This poll wasn’t conducted on a day with a particularly limited amount of food, but sampled on a random day. This means they are continually going full days without eating.

  • Doctors who worked in Gaza have confirmed this: Mark Brauner, Tom Adamkiewicz, Nick Maynard, Joanne Perry. (These are the non-Muslim names).

Do you deny that this is starvation?

I don't deny that it's starvation, but I'm unconvinced that Israel is solely to blame for this state of affairs. I read several articles independently claiming that Hamas were seen stealing aid packages and selling them to fund their war effort.

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Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan

They absolutely can, they generally choose not to. It's not like it would even be surprising if progressives took up Sudan as a major cause du jour and demanded change! And yet.

Do you mean by being the world police? I don’t think the progressives upset about world events want American soldiers to police these places, they just don’t want America to throw their support and money behind them.

Also that we clearly have affected Iran, quite recently. Not in a way that progressives want this time, but we "can" if we choose to.

Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan

This seems like the opposite of correct. You could almost certainly stop human rights abuses in Belarus and Sudan with decent sized cash payments (totally not bribes). There is a plausible military path to regime change in Iran wherein a non-human rights violating government comes to power.

The only plausible path to ending human rights abuses in Palestine is by doing one big, quick, human rights abuse and shoving them all into boats and dropping them off somewhere they are not near lots of Jews. Madagascar has been floated elsewhere in this thread in other contexts. Works well for this plan.

It’s at best highly speculative that you could bribe Sudan to stop their civil war, whereas it’s obviously correct that we could have withheld our alliance to Israel (and threatened sanctions) and thus stopped the mass starvation of children. Also, America allocated 300mil to famine relief in Sudan

Withholding support from Israel doesn't mitigate the problem that they have a bunch of hostiles in land adjacent to them that use children as human shields, both literally and nutritionally.

or indeed Gaza

The dead giveaway is that the people ostensibly most concerned about Palestinian welfare (most of whom tend to present themselves as opposed to Hamas) tend to be the quietest when Palestinians are oppressed or victimised by anyone who isn't an Israeli, including Hamas themselves. "No Jews, no news", as the saying goes.

That being said, epistemic bubbles are absolutely a thing:

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

To the extent that I think Israel's military goals in Gaza were defensible, this is probably a criticism which applies to me.

My friend once said, "I get more liberal the farther away you are". Everyone's concerned about the Palestinians, but no one wants to save the Palestinians. Even less charitably, a good chunk of them are just circlejerking around the "current thing". Antisemitism may be losing its meaning, but so is Zionism. You have to believe that Epstein was Mossad's blackmail kingpin holding US elite by their predaphile balls and that Israel offed Charlie Kirk for... reasons, or you're a philosemitic goycuck. No matter your reservations with Israel's warmongering government and support for West Bank settlers.

No matter your reservations with Israel's warmongering government and support for West Bank settlers.

The people who claim to be agains this but spend 10x the amount of time complaining about antisemitism are not credible.

I supposed it comes down to where you care to expend your attention, but we can just as easily invert the litmus test at the people who uncritically circulate the hare brained conspiracies I mentioned. Are they more credible?

You probably havent heard someone criticizing human rights in those countries because its not controversiel and no one tries to make you lose your job or blacklist you.

Zionists first came for Ms Rachel after she mentioned Gaza in a fundraiser for save the children (where she also mentioned Sudan and Congo). She has since increased her focus on Gaza (but she also posts regularly about Sudan) because that is what people do when they are being silenced for doing something than any decent person should find entirely uncontroversial.

You probably havent heard someone criticizing human rights in those countries because its not controversiel and no one tries to make you lose your job or blacklist you.

This doesn't make any sense. If there is little or nothing in the way of negative consequences for criticizing the human rights situation in countries X, Y, and Z, one would expect -- all things being equal -- to hear MORE criticism of those countries.

I am sure there is someone out there who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but legitimately harbours no animosity towards Jews on an interpersonal level and sincerely wishes them no harm.

I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part. I didn't get to poll many of them after the October 7th attack, but the few I did poll seemed to have shifted a bit after that. More pro Zionist obviously.

There is something to be said about the people harping on the Jewish state online the loudest are just generally not happy with Jewish people.

I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America. The middle east seems like a shit hole. The fact that they really want to stay there and make it work seems strange to me. I feel no animosity towards Jewish people, and I certainly tend to enjoy their comedy (ari schafir) and writing (scott Alexander). I'd be happy to have more of them as neighbors.

It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever. Unless it was a naked attempt to just kick the remaining Jews out of Europe and let the Muslims finish the ethnic cleansing that Hitler started.

It describes me, that's for sure. Israel doesn't have a right to exist actually, it has a right to try to exist; and I don't think my country should be there permanent backstop. Israel can lay in the bed it's made.

That said I would happily welcome all the jews living there not just to my country but into my state and neighborhood; the ones I disagree with politically seem like problem gamblers. Maybe if they weren't in the middle east they'd stop doing things that look so bad.

I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part.

I think "opposed to the existence of Israel" spans a spectrum. There are people who think Israel in its present form is an oppressive ethnostate and it needs to be reformed ("reform" meaning anything from a one-state solution to a two-state solution to various other proposals that have been floated and failed over the years), and there are people who think Israel should literally cease to exist and if that means Israelis literally ceasing to exist, oh well.

Jews and other progressives who oppose Israel on moral grounds but don't actually hate Jews tend to be more of the former; they don't like Israel, but they also tend to not like the United States, or indeed the West. But they don't want to see a bloodbath, however unrealistic the alternatives they suggest.

The actual anti-Semites, of course, tend to be in the latter category, with their answer to "What about the Israelis who live there now?" ranging from "They can all move elsewhere" to "They should die."

It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever.

In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.

In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.

I believe you. I'm not gonna read books on the topic. My level of interest in foreign affairs tends to drop precipitously off of a cliff somewhere at the edge of my neighborhood. Its a benefit of living in the US that I dont have to understand foreign peoples and conflicts.

Im curious if you know if any of the architects of the Israel project ever expressed regret or a moment of 'whoopsie, that was the wrong place'?

I don't know that any of the founders of Israel ever regretted it (though I am not that knowledgeable about all the personalities). Certainly they knew from the beginning that it was a fraught project that might fail. They were definitely aware the Arabs didn't want them there, though the more optimistic ones thought they'd eventually reach an accommodation and normalized relations.

The thing is, they really didn't have a lot of other choices.

Despite the fact that I am usually in the role of "Israel defender" here because the Jew-haters are so tediously disingenuous and ahistorical, I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?

But I do like to understand where both sides are coming from. For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.

That said, there are a lot of lies about Israel being a "settler-colonialist" project as well.

If you don't want to read books, my favorite current media figure speaking from the Israeli POV is Havig Rettig Gur. He has a YouTube channel and he is a Free Press columnist now. He's unabashedly Zionist, but he's very articulate and a clear explainer, without any of the anti-Arab vitriol you get from some Israel-explainers.

I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.

I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.

Its this sort of statement I responded to above and what kind of bothers me. There are definitely moderates on this issue. I just get the sense that you don't get to be both a moderate and get any air time in the debate. Its a toxoplasma issue and both sides spend a lot of effort amplifying the crazies on the other side, and there is plenty of crazy to go around.

I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?

This seems pretty close to the same position as all the moderate secular Jews i know. And pretty close to my position, with the added caveat that I blame more than just Israel's immediate neighbor. The Arab states in general seem like bad neighbors. Like maybe only above "african warlord" and "USSR" as a category of bad neighbor.

For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.

Isn't "this is our (somewhat less than) ancient homeland" also the entire argument for why the Palestinians should have primacy in the region over the Israelites?

Yeah, if you read mutual accounts of Israel/Palestine they both make a combination of plausible and risible claims about who was there first and who's been there longer.

There are Arab revisionists who claim that ancient Israel is a myth and the Jews literally never lived there at all (they focus on denying the Israel of the Old Testament and kind of ignore extensive Roman history- the Romans would have been surprised to learn there were no Jews in Palestine and Israel didn't exist). Zionist revisionists, for their part, will point out that small populations of Jews have existed in the region since antiquity, but try to link that to some unbroken lineage going back to King David.

I think there's plenty of places that they could have stuck the Israel project and it'd be a pure unalloyed good. Northern Australia, for instance, where there's fuck all people right now and I'd expect the Jewish diaspora to be far more productive than what's currently there. I do also feel that a lot of the Israel in the Middle East situation was impacted by the sheer amount of Oil reserves in the region, as otherwise the neighboring states would have very little scope to productively oppose the country of Israel since they are not good at creating organized affluent societies.

Yeah I also had the thought of something akin to the Indian reservation system that US has for old tribes. They get their land, they are a semi sovereign entity within US territory. And their people can choose integration or separation. The Amish and Mennonites also are able to maintain extreme religious beliefs and a separate society within America. Orthodox Judaism seems to also have thriving communities in New York city.

There's lots of places Israel would have been better off for practical purposes. But it's where it is now, and the particular land IS significant. And in practice, there was no free land; drop them in Northern Australia and aborigine advocates would hate them today (even if there were insignificant numbers of aborigines in the area).

And in practice, there was no free land; drop them in Northern Australia and aborigine advocates would hate them today (even if there were insignificant numbers of aborigines in the area).

A real life example of this is Rhodesia. The highlands where most of the whites settled were sparsely populated because the native Africans were using wooden tools and the soil in the highlands was largely unworkable for them. After Mugabe took power he seized tons of white farmland on land where the natives had never lived.

Yeah but the Aborigines complain about the current people of the Northern Territory and have way less military and cultural clout with which to complain with.

I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America.

Freddie deBoer argued that, if the purpose of Israel is to be a country where Jews will be safe forever, the US already fits the bill. If I recall correctly, he posted this article before that couple were shot dead in DC and that Egyptian guy threw Molotovs at a group of Jews, one of whom died from her injuries. I'm curious if he's revised his position any.

I think DC would need a few hundred more incidents like that in a year to rival an israeli citizen's terrorism danger. I think I'd revise my position if these sorts of incidents became neighborhood awareness of threats rather than national news. Which would maybe be around a few dozen happening each year in most or all cities, and many more happening in Jewish centers like New York.

The perpetrators are also as far as I'm aware still treated like full criminals, with no chance of them being handed off to a neighboring nation in a hostage exchange.

Hmm. While very far from feasible, it looks to me like the best course of action would be to move all the Israelis to Japan.

There's actual historical precedent here, one that's charming/alarming depending on how you feel about inheriting a plan whose original architects cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a strategy primer.

In the 1930s, Imperial Japan seriously proposed resettling up to a million European Jewish refugees in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Officials in the Japanese military and foreign ministry had read the Protocols, naively took it as genuine, and concluded that people with such allegedly vast economic power would be excellent to have on the team.

They called it the Fugu Plan, after the pufferfish: dangerous if mishandled, a delicacy if prepared right. The plan kinda sputtered out when Japan allied with Nazi Germany, but Chiune Sugihara's visas and the Shanghai ghetto made their mark on history, and they saved thousands of lives.

There's a real philosemitic strand: Den Fujita, the Japanese founder of McDonald's Japan, wrote The Jewish Way of Doing Business and exhorted readers to imitate Jewish commercial methods. Shichihei Yamamoto's The Japanese and the Jews sold over a million copies as the bestseller of 1970.* But the "Jewish corners" of Japanese bookstores also stock overtly antisemitic works, including The Secret of Jewish Power to Control the World, authored by a sitting member of the Japanese Diet. Then again, there are scholarly claims that Japanese philosemitism and antisemitism sit on the same underlying belief structure: that Jews are a uniquely powerful, unified, globally influential people. Which is... true? How you feel about it is your problem.

And Japan has its own demographic crisis, so it's not like the influx of people would be bad for them. Scraping off a few feet of top-soil from the Holy Land shouldn't be beyond the ability of modern Israel, and that's what they care about, right? Move the magic dirt and we're good. Plus given the popularity of anime and Japanese culture, it's not like there aren't going to be hundreds of thousands of weebs in Israel who'd consider Japan to be their new holy land anyway.

(The AMAI run Animatsuri at the Jerusalem Convention Center, the Israeli embassy making anime shorts(!), manga tributes to the IDF)

I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a good idea, but it's also far from the worst idea, and it's also very, very funny. If I was the ruler of the world, you bet we'd put a premium on funny. And this would put me in the good graces of the future Judeo-Hapa master race, so I'm covering all my bases.

*published under the pseudonym "Isaiah Ben-Dasan," a fictional Jewish observer who supposedly explained Japan to itself. A Japanese man writing as an imaginary Jew to tell Japanese people what they're like is almost too on-the-nose for the thesis.

Oh dear, am I allowed to say "on the nose" without accusations of either/both antisemitism or anti-Asian discrimination? I don't know.

Definitely a funny option. Though if they had somehow ended up in Taiwan as a result of this, and been right on top of computer chip production. Oy vey, imagine those rumors of Jewish control.

Clearly the only logical solution is to just swap the populations of Taiwan and Israel.

I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack. I do remember, however, the posts about how the Rabbi who died had a habit of spamming X with calls of “Amalek”. (Amalek being the enemy of the Jewish people whom the Jews are mandated to blot out from existence, including the women and children). So, for instance, he often called the Hague Amalek, because the Hague was shown videos of IDF soldiers cheering the slogan “there are no uninvolved civilians [in Gaza]”, and I suppose he didn’t want the goyim to know that, so that made the Hague Amalek. Then he called them Amalek a couple other times, and in response to a video of a starving Palestinian woman who hadn’t eaten for five days, he simply called that AI. I think this sort of merciless disregard for the good of others does not engender the sort of sympathy normally allocated to victims of horrible tragedies, even though it was a tragedy all the same.

I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.

Such a sly rephrasing.

What @FtttG said was:

  • sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")
  • claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)
  • outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack

This is accurate.

We could perhaps add:

  • Pointing out the problematic social media posts of one of the victims.

You're right, almost no one is going to go mask-off and say "I support shooting Jews because I just really fucking hate Jews."

Even the most vehement Jew-haters are more sly than that.

I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.

Funny you bring that up, given I never claimed they did.

I think the perpetrator in that case….just read the article….did in fact have proper cause to shoot up a synagogue. He’s still my enemy. Most Jews do support Israel, many go on their free trip to Israel, vote for US guns to go to Israel, and the key point ISRAEL did kill a bunch of his family in Lebanon. Human groups do have conflict. He doesn’t have the state capacity to go win a war and remove Israel. This isn’t mistake theory….he is/was properly at war with Israel. Same thing Bin Laden the US did arm a regime that was against his interests. He had a proper cause to hit the US and the US being mightier after being hit had cause to torture and kill his supporters. It’s war. Civilizations are clashing and they kill each other.

My personal vote is we should have never let a Lebanese Muslim into the country. There’s no crying in war. If your tribe kills a guys family then yes he’s allowed to try and kill your tribe.

That’s not a defense he has to get off for murder but it is a moral justification for revenge. And I support the US cops killing him.

and the key point ISRAEL did kill a bunch of his family in Lebanon

But this is that exact absurd collective guilt framing the article was decrying!

A few years ago, Liam Neeson told an anecdote about how, when he was younger, a close friend of his was raped by a black man, which drove him into such a rage that he stalked the streets of London carrying a cosh, looking for a black man to beat up in retribution (thankfully he didn't go through with it in the end). He told this anecdote essentially as a cautionary tale about how ugly, prejudiced attitudes can sneak up even on well-meaning people, and how one must actively resist the urge to submit to one's darkest base impulses – and even with this context he was still excoriated as a racist.

Meanwhile, a Lebanese man shoots up a synagogue in Canada, and people say "well, several of his family members were killed by people who share ethnic heritage with the people in that synagogue, so he was justified in trying to kill them".

Would an American who lost family on 9/11 be justified in shooting up a mosque? Would an Englishman who lost family in an IRA bombing be justified in shooting up a Catholic church in Clapham?

Being Jewish and at a Synagogue isn’t quite the same thing as being black. I understand people’s desire to keep the culture of their parents buts it’s still a CHOICE to be Jewish and at a Synagogue. American Jewish money and votes are a big reason why Israel wins wars. Maybe just being at a Synagogue doesn’t make you complicit with Israel but at what point would you be part of their war effort? A person donating to AIPAC or more?

Now I am not saying any random person gets to take action here. But at some point you end up being a Nazi and a Frenchmen living in NYC in 1942 and you become 2 people who are actually in war living in a third country.

So I will asks you a question what actions by the Jewish Synagogue would make it not “Collective Guilt” for a man with family killed by Israel to shoot them?

To answer your final question would an American be justified shooting up a mosque who had losts a family member in 9/11? Potentially yes.

"You can be as Jewish as you like, just as long as you don't engage in any of the cultural practices associated with Judaism, not even in private."

To answer your final question would an American be justified shooting up a mosque who had losts a family member in 9/11? Potentially yes.

What is the word "potentially" doing there? Would an American who lost a family member in 9/11 be morally justified in shooting up a mosque, yes or no?

Potentially I believe I was referring to is it a Mosque that passes around a hat funding X,Y,Z I’m a terrorist cell. So then yes. Same as if someone who lost a person to an IRA bomb shooting up an Irish pub in Boston that took donations. So yes there would need to be an added connection in these cases.

So what you're really saying is "Alice is entitled to seek revenge on people who actively conspired to murder Alice's family members". That's really not what I'm asking. I'm asking, is an American who lost a family member on 9/11 entitled to shoot up a mosque even if he has no reason to suspect that any of the worshippers in said mosque had even the most tangential role to play in 9/11? Is he entitled to shoot up a mosque purely on the basis that the worshippers in that mosque are part of the same "tribe" (broadly defined) as the people who killed his family?

Just shooting for tribe affiliation would be wrong. This was with regards to Israel. So what I was proposing at what point does a Synagogue have actual ties to Israel and it’s not just affiliation?

It’s a good bet that a lot of the young adults visit Israel and probably did birth right tours. Highly likely many have dual citizenship. A reasonable bet their is backing of AIPAC which has been Israel’s hammer to keep significant military aid flowing to Israel.

I think we could agree for a Muslim who had relatives killed by IDF that Sheldon Adelson would be an appropriate revenge target. The US obvious does drone strikes on people who raised funding and organization capital for terrorists.

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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.

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Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded

It's close, but the continued existence of French Canadians is certainly demanded.

I understand that anti-Zionism is not intrinsically reducible to antisemitism, and that, in theory, one could oppose the existence of Israel while harbouring no ill will towards Jews and wanting them to be safe.

It is interesting that a Palestinian whose family was ethnically cleansed by Israel in order for them to have a jewish majority, is not allowed to just be against that, but have to also assure zionists that they: "harbour no ill will against jews"

It's even more interesting that you seem to be essentially arguing that antisemitism is defensible or even justifiable.

Another example of how the word antisemitism has lost all meaning.

Palestinians have every right to not give a shit about the feelings of jews when they critisize the founding of Israel.

It's one thing to be indifferent towards the feelings of Jews. When Israelis criticise Palestinian militants, they are not complaining that Palestinians don't care about their feelings. They are complaining that Palestinian militants are trying to kill them, because they are Jews.

This is an entirely bad faith reply. We have been discussing ideology, not militancy.

Okay, well one example of the kind of "ideology" to which I refer is Hamas apologism, which I believe is not reducible to simple anti-Zionism. Supposing a non-Palestinian person who has never been personally victimised by Jews expresses support for Hamas and thinks that their actions on October 7th were justified. Is it reasonable for me to conclude that such a person simply hates Jews as a group, or could such a stance be compatible with anti-Zionism i.e. opposition to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds, without any concomitant antipathy towards Jews as a group?

Antisemitic thoughts and speech among Palestinians whose family members have been mistreated by Jews in living memory is just as defensible as any other justified ethnic hatred. Were one being eristic, one might compare it to the routine anti-German sentiment that kept popping up in the cultural output of Jewish and philosemitic Americans well into the 1980s.

Antisemitic thoughts and speech among Palestinians whose family members have been mistreated by Jews in living memory is just as defensible as any other justified ethnic hatred.

Sure. And what about antisemitic violence? And specifically antisemitic violence targeting Jews who've never set foot in Israel and who have no say in Israeli policy or IDF military tactics?

It is interesting that a Palestinian whose family was ethnically cleansed by Israel in order for them to have a jewish majority, is not allowed to just be against that, but have to also assure zionists that they: "harbour no ill will against jews"

Are you able to provide a specific example of this having happened? Because I'm rather skeptical.

Current pravda is that the Jews ethnically cleansed the area of the modern Israeli state in 1948.

Current pravda is that the Jews ethnically cleansed the area of the modern Israeli state in 1948.

I'm very pro-Israel, and I concede that there was limited ethnic cleansing which went on.

The question is this: If a descendant of an Arab who was ethnically cleansed in this way were to criticize Israel, would any prominent Zionists insist that the person provide assurances that they weren't an anti-Semite?

I tend to doubt it. Of course part of the problem is that the vast vast majority of anti-Israel criticism comes from people who have no personal stake in the conflict. For those people, if they hold Israel to double-standards (and most do), it's reasonable -- at a minimum -- to strongly suspect them of anti-Semitism.

Among Palestinian Arabs, of course, they are often pretty open about the fact that they hate Jews. In this day and age, if someone is openly a fan of Hitler; or votes for a political party whose political platform promises to kill all Jews everywhere, well, at that point the burden is more or less on them.

Antisemitism is a result of massive, society-wide misinformation perpetuated by the press, universities, and social media. This is the “wall of dead children” model. Israel’s actions don’t really matter because they will be twisted and misrepresented anyways. The solution is to exert more control over the information environment.

> Pass an anti-terrorism law that de facto applies only to one ethnicity, which you're already being accused of apartheid-ing, which calls for "death by hanging, carried out in no more than 90 days" as the default sentence.

> "there is literally nothing we can do, the fake news is just going to twist our ethnic death penalty laws to make us seem like monsters"

> "this is why we need to control tiktok"

Damn, can't help but notice this seems absolutely bananas

If it was after the US Civil War and they passed a law which says you go to the gallows if you're still keeping a slave, that would only apply to one ethnicity, but it seems like it would be an appropriate measure anyway. It would be silly to object to that on the grounds that it wouldn't convict any black people so it's ethnically based.

That's a fair point, to counter though, this law isn't "terrorists get the death penalty" it's "people who intentionally cause the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel" as judged by a military tribunal, with absolutely 0 appeals allowed after sentencing.

So in your situation it's more like a law that only applies to slave owners who also don't like Abraham Lincoln/the union, i.e. any northern slave owner caught with slaves wouldn't get the death penalty.

Also the law absolutely violates their due process and other legal rights.

Appeals inherently dull the intended effects of deterrence and the lack of ability for a prisoner exchange.

If due process is what the objection is, well, maybe thats true. Or maybe modern due process is actually an affront to victims rights.

I'll defend them on this one. Swift execution is the only way to prevent murderers from being released in the inevitable next hostage exchange.

Exactly. Part of the ridiculousness here is that Israelis act in ways that any sensible Western regime should be acting, but get absolutely pilloried for it due to norms of conduct that Jewish thinkers have done their best to encourage off the back of the Holocaust and their outsized influence. If the average Zionist didn't have a sole carveout in their politics for Israel to act belligerently I'd be a lot more supportive of their views.

Israel has attacked 5 countries in the past few years and has caused what is likely to be the biggest economic crises in decades. That is absolutely not how any sensible regime, let alone Western should behave.

Israel has attacked 5 countries in the past few years

Are you able to name even one of these "5 countries" Israel has attacked, where the country hadn't already either attacked Israel or been used as a staging ground for attacks against Israel?

caused what is likely to be the biggest economic crises

I take it that you blame Israel for Iran's attempts to block the strait of Hormuz?

Yeah I blame Israel for attacking Iran and starting this war. The Hormuz blockade was an entirely foreseeable consequence of that.

Yeah I blame Israel for attacking Iran and starting this war.

I take it that you are unable to name even a single country Israel has attacked in the last 5 years, where the country hadn't already either attacked Israel or been used as a staging ground for attacks against Israel?

The Hormuz blockade was an entirely foreseeable consequence of that.

Well do you agree that Israel's attack against Iran was an entirely foreseeable consequence of Iran's aggressive and relentless proxy attacks against Israel over the years?

If youre land is already being illegally occupied by Israel I dont think you can in any way be accused of attacking first.

Well do you agree that Israel's attack against Iran was an entirely foreseeable consequence of Iran's aggressive and relentless proxy attacks against Israel over the years?

Blockading a strait that you control is very different from bombing another country in an attempt at regime change.

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Yeah I blame Israel for attacking Iran and starting this war. The Hormuz blockade was an entirely foreseeable consequence of that.

Only if you think the Iranians have no agency.

Part of the ridiculousness here is that Israelis act in ways that any sensible Western regime should be acting, but get absolutely pilloried for it due to norms of conduct that Jewish thinkers have done their best to encourage off the back of the Holocaust and their outsized influence.

Can you give two specific examples of this so I know what you are talking about?

If the average Zionist didn't have a sole carveout in their politics for Israel to act belligerently I'd be a lot more supportive of their views.

So in your view, the "average Zionist" is responsible and accountable for the norms encouraged by "Jewish thinkers"? This sounds rather suspicious to me, but I'll hold off judgment until you've had an opportunity to provide a couple examples.

Can you give two specific examples of this so I know what you are talking about?

Ethnostate for me, infinity zogs for thee. If it was ethnostate for all, they'd be fine and I find Israel far less objectionable than their enemies.

Ethnostate for me, infinity zogs for thee. If it was ethnostate for all, they'd be fine and I find Israel far less objectionable than their enemies.

To any lurkers who are reading this, it serves as an example of how anti-Semitism is a result of conflict theory, not mistake theory. Note that the response was NOT along the lines of "Oh, wait a second, I can't think of any specific examples of what I am talking about, perhaps I am mistaken."

Note also how for the anti-Semite, each and every Jew is responsible for whatever is said by every other Jew. If one Jew believes X and another Jew believes NOT X, then all Jews are hypocrites.

Note also that this collective responsibility applies only to Jews. Rules for thee and not for me, indeed.

Note also how for the anti-Semite, each and every Jew is responsible for whatever is said by every other Jew.

A general statement about a group does not imply even it's dissenting members are held accountable for the majority opinion.

A general statement about a group does not imply even it's dissenting members are held accountable for the majority opinion.

Agreed. However if the dissenting members (or some other subgroup) are accused of hypocrisy based on the stated views of some other subgroup, that's the sort of group responsibility I am talking about.

In this case, the Jew hater identified (1) "Jewish thinkers" who are allegedly responsible for pushing various norms of conduct on the world; and (2) "Zionists" who allegedly carve out an exception to violate these norms.

Of course there are a number of problems with this claim.

For starters, Israel actually is NOT violating any modern norms of war. For example, it's perfectly legitimate to blow up a hospital which is being used as a terrorist base of operations.

Second, modern norms of war are not the result of Jewish thinkers any more than any other aspect of modern thought. To be sure, since the 19th century, Jewish people have a tendency to contribute more to any kind of modern thought. But for the Jew-hater, the Jewish contribution depends on whether the end result is, in his view, positive or negative. If it's something he thinks is negative, and only then, then Jewish over-representation means Jews are responsible. (Will the Jew-hater give Jews credit for modern physics in the same way? Doubtful.)

Third, even if there were a contradiction between these "Jewish thinkers" and "Zionists," it's only hypocrisy if either (1) there is significant overlap between these groups; or (2) Jews are collectively responsible for the positions of all other Jews.

Anyway, that's about as much I can do with Gish Gallop which has been presented by @Bingbong

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You're being overly systematic, here- 'antisemitism' in Zionist parlance is a snarl word. There are uses of the term which have a definition, sure, but not the Zionist one. They're not worried about the cause. They're worried about using it as a cudgel against critics. And as long as this lines up with somebody else's interests in the west, it will.

You don’t think they use the term “antisemitism” amongst themselves to describe (what they think is) a real concept?

It seems manifestly true to me that they're is a substantial portion of the world's population who believe that Israel as a nation should not exist and who will cheer enthusiastically upon seeing Israeli sons killed and daughters raped.

To dismiss the acknowledgement of this fact as a mere "snarl word" strikes me as either extremely naive or purposefully uncharitable.

This is a real phenomenon, anti-Semitism is a real phenomenon, and obviously a lot of anti-Semites are also anti-Israel, but you can want Israel destroyed without hating Jews qua Jews. Using "anti-Semitism" for - even vicious - hatred of Eretz Yisrael alone frankly is mostly a cudgel - it's trying to discredit all anti-Zionists by equating them to Hitler. (Of course, the NSDAP, while of course horrifically anti-Semitic, wasn't actually notably anti-Zionist - in some cases they supported Zionism in order to get Jews to emigrate.)

To give a similar non-Jew example: I'm very leery of Mainland Chinese expats and exports. This problem does not apply to (South) Korean, Japanese or Taiwanese expats and exports. I have no problem with the Han Chinese as an ethnic group (and remember, most present Taiwanese are Han; the refugees from the Chinese Civil War outnumbered the native population), nor with the nearly-racially-indistinguishable Koreans and Japanese. My problem is with the totalitarian state of the People's Republic of China, which brainwashes its youth and may in the near future enact full-scale cyberwarfare against the West; enemy agents and hardware with enemy backdoors are dangerous.

There are legitimate reasons to dislike Israel and Western support of Israel that have nothing to do with the fact that most of its citizen population is Jewish. I don't happen to think that those reasons justify massacre, but some do. To insistently consider such people "anti-Semitic" is to buy into the Zionists' (and, to some degree, the neo-Nazis') preferred frame that Israel speaks for and is supported by all Jews, which it doesn't and isn't.

Are there true anti-Semites, including in the West? Yes, obviously. But your proffered litmus test for them is inaccurate. And while I'm not attributing malice to you personally, the conflation of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites is to a large degree enemy action - and it's difficult to blame people for refusing to concede to that.

This is a real phenomenon, anti-Semitism is a real phenomenon, and obviously a lot of anti-Semites are also anti-Israel, but you can want Israel destroyed without hating Jews qua Jews.

In theory this is possible, but typically the surrounding circumstances strongly suggest that the anti-Israel sentiment is motivated in large part by anti-Semitism. For example, if the anti-Israel person applies double-standards to Israel. Or if the anti-Israel person professes to care a great deal about Palestinian Arabs but doesn't seem to particularly care about other third-world groups. And doesn't particularly care about the way Palestinian Arabs are treated, for example, by Lebanon. Or by Hamas.

There's sort of a parallelism here: If someone uses Palestinian Arabs strictly as a cudgel to attack Israel, it's reasonable to respond with the "cudgel" of an anti-Semitism accusation.

But your proffered litmus test for them is inaccurate.

Just to be absolutely clear. You are saying that...

"Do you celebrate when hear about (or see footage of) Israeli citizens getting raped or murdered?"

...is an "inaccurate" litmus test?

For hating Jews qua Jews? Yes. It's not zero correlation, but one does not have to hate all Jews to hate Israelis.

(For hating Israelis, it is of course sufficient.)

If that is sincerely your position, then I am going to once again echo our Vice President by saying I don't really care, I don't want these people in my country.

From my perspective you are attempting to draw a distinction without a difference. It is my opinion that if your reaction to 10/7 was celebratory, you are not just an enemy of Jews or of Israel, but of Civilization, and as such I have a moral responsibility to oppose you.

From my perspective you are attempting to draw a distinction without a difference.

I think that whether someone hates all Jews or merely Israeli Jews is somewhat significant to risk assessment by countries which are not Israel and contain Jews.

I will also note that, while bloodthirst is certainly distasteful, there are really quite a lot of people with bloodthirst regarding some group, even in the West. I suspect that trying to outright expel all of them would, ironically, end in rivers of blood.

and again I don't really care about risk assessments or what others might find distasteful. The enemies of civilization must be opposed, and as such I don't want them in my country.

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I despise Israel-the-political-entity and I cheerfully agree with you on this point. 10/7 was an act of barbarism, and the best model for Hamas' behaviour since then has been "identify the most evil thing an insane evil person could come up with, and watch them do it".

If you are going to us methods of barbarism in a somewhat-justified war, you should do so in pursuit of a somewhat-justified military objective and with a somewhat-justified hope of military success. 10/7 was some evil cunts getting off on Jewish pain from the safety of their Qatar hotel rooms with no visible path to military victory, or even a draw.

To be clear, in my post below I was expressing reservations about the idea of trying to deport everyone who cheers atrocities, not about trying to deport (or kill) people who commit atrocities. Thankfully, most of the fuckwits who cheered October 7 do not go out and try it at home, which means we do actually have options in how to deal with them beyond "to defeat the spree killer, shoot at it until it dies".

These people are real and are indeed antisemites, but the definition of antisemitism in use by prominent zionists is sufficiently self serving as to provide no particular evidence in favor of this- you know that various Iranian front groups are antisemites because of their words, not the labels of the Israeli government.

I feel like you are privileging labels over substance. If the Israeli government is able to identify the people who who wish to see Israeli citizens raped and murdered how much does it really matter which specific word they use to describe them? It seems to me that "zionist" (prominent or otherwise) is just as much a "snarl word" as "antisemite" is in this context.

Furthermore it's not about words, it's about actions. If the Democrats or Labour decide that they want to align themselves with radical Islam or the Islamic Republic of Iran decides that they want nukes that is their choice, but choices have consequences.

here are uses of the term which have a definition, sure, but not the Zionist one. They're not worried about the cause. They're worried about using it as a cudgel against critics. And as long as this lines up with somebody else's interests in the west, it will.

I would challenge you to find 2 situations from the last 25 years where (1) a prominent Zionist made an accusation of anti-Semitism; and (2) the accusation was baseless.

I assume members of the Israeli government count as prominent zionists? Bibi himself have accused Anthony Albanese and Macron (both die hard zionists) of antisemittism.

Not to mention the whole witch hunt against Ms Rachel that started because she mentioned Gaza (along with Congo and Sudan) in a fundraiser for save the children.

I assume members of the Israeli government count as prominent zionists?

For the most part, I would agree. I'll certainly give you Bibi.

Bibi himself have accused Anthony Albanese and Macron (both die hard zionists) of antisemittism.

Can you please give me links and cites for this so I know what you are talking about?

Not to mention the whole witch hunt against Ms Rachel that started because she mentioned Gaza (along with Congo and Sudan) in a fundraiser for save the children.

Did Bibi accuse her of anti-Semitism? Or was it someone else? Who else?

Not far from where I live in Toronto, there were spontaneous demonstrations in celebration of Oct. 7 when it happened, before any retaliation. I can't say conclusively whether that was mostly 1, 2 or something else, but what it wasn't was a reaction to mean ol' Netanyahu.

People began criticising Israel's "genocide" in Gaza before Israel had even militarily responded to the Hamas attack.

Nobody loves anti-Semitism more than Zionists do though. It's effectively a cornerstone of Israeli politics used to silence people who would criticize them

That doesn't necessarily mean that accusations of anti-Semitism are wrong. When people apply double standards to Israel; when people who don't usually care about third-world people suddenly care a great deal about Palestinian Arabs; when those same people don't care about the way Lebanon treats Palestinian Arabs; etc., it's difficult to reach any other conclusion that their views are substantially informed by anti-Semitism.

I heard a counterargument from Daryl Cooper of Martyr made podcast that it is okay to have double standard and expect more from Israel - because they are western democracy. It is the same logic where US military has to behave perfectly despite fighting literal genocidal maniacs and other lunatic cults. Everybody expects that Putin or Xijinping will do gangster shit. Nobody is surprised that some muslim radicals are right this second genociding Christians in Darfur or Nigeria or that there are literal slave markets in Libya selling black slaves - not even BLM gives a shit. But that all pales in comparison with war crimes of western countries.

In a sense it is cynically logical - you will criticize somebody you can actually influence. There is no need to criticize Kim Jong Un, he does not care. Not even new pope Leo criticized him yet, in fact he is supposedly building diplomatic bridge with North Korea. Of course pope had a lot to say about US immigration policy or conduct of Iran war or about tyrants waging war - while dining with literal murderer Cameroon leader who is in power since 1982.

I heard a counterargument from Daryl Cooper of Martyr made podcast that it is okay to have double standard and expect more from Israel - because they are western democracy.

I don't know Daryl Cooper, but my question is this: Is he also willing to grant Israel more leeway; more support from the West; etc. because Israel is a "western democracy"?

For example:

Of course Israel having nuclear weapons is not a big concern -- Israel is a western democracy.

Of course we should be comfortable with US arms sales to Israel -- Israel is a western democracy.

No, the International Criminal Court should not go after Israeli leadership. Israel is a western democracy and if Netanyahu had actually committed any war crimes, his own government would have prosecuted him.

No, Israel is not an apartheid state. Rather, it is a western democracy.

Of course people should side with Israel over Hamas. Israel is a western democracy and Hamas is a terrorist organization.

The UN's extreme bias against Israel is show by its condemnation of Israel -- a western democracy -- far more than the most brutal and ruthless dictatorships.

Or how about this:

Yes, I am criticizing Israel at the moment, but while doing so I must emphasize that Israel, as a western democracy, is far superior to its enemies in terms of respect for human rights.

If he is willing to do these things, or least some of them, then his position is defensible. Otherwise, it sounds like a rationalization to me.

I think that both Yglesias but also Peter Savodnik are correct: the current wave of antizionism/antisemitism or however you call it is at the same time caused by behaviour of Israel but also independent of it.

I actually saw this argument from Nick Fuentes couple of months ago, when I watched couple of interviews with him around the time he was on Piers Morgan, just to see what he is about. He described himself as being such pro-American nationalist, as Zionists (including US Zionists) are pro Israel. Israel defines itself as literal Jewish state in its declaration of independence, where you have automatic citizenship as soon as prove your Jewish origin - so an ethnostate if you consider Jews as an ethnicity. It also has explicitly religious underpinnings observing sabbath in public places or outsourcings significant parts of the public life to religious sphere such as marriages (e.g. it is impossible to be gay married inside Israel, you have to travel abroad). It is also unapologetically colonial state in nature, although they use the word "pioneer" tasked by reclamation of land lost thousands of years ago in their form of Manifest Destiny - the reclamation of the Promised Land. It is a state where you have public discussions around immigration, national security, threat of fertility of non-Jewish population toward the primary function of the state as safe haven for Jews to prevent potentiality of another Holocaust and all that.

I think there was an inevitable clash between Israel and current predominant leftist culture. Any other western adjacent nation with similar policies is immediately labeled as ultranationalist or fascist state. Was it also caused by Israel through their behavior since basically 19th century? Of course - but only tangentially. The same critique would be leveled against Israel no matter what. Heck even countries like Ireland or Finland can be blamed for colonialism or be target of such a rhetoric, so there is no defense against that.

I think Fuentes is onto something when he says that the power of Holocaust as a story is weakening, it no longer serves as a shield for a free pass. Israel is viewed as a western democracy, Jews are white colonizers and they are oppressors and not oppressed. I can use hilarious example of Whoopi Goldberg who usually claims that everybody is racist - of course except Hitler, who only engaged in white-on-white conflict of Germans against Jews. And she said it whole year before October 7 and Gaza War. This was at least unspoken ethos and pathos inside significant part of the left, it only strengthened after Gaza war.

I think there was an inevitable clash between Israel and current predominant leftist culture.

People are pissed off because they are having seriously doubt about whether their elites (even the "American first" ones) are more beholden to a small minority group and a different country their own population. Both democrats and republicans (and their counterparts in Europe) are willing to throw away every value they claim to uphold, and humiliate themselves to an extreme degree in defence of this one country.

Which other group than zionist will have republicans talking about safe spaces on campus? Which other group than zionist will make democrats eager to collaborate with Donald Trumps ICE to have students homes raided on campus? Which other country than Israel will have such undying loyalty that the US ambassador (and their european labdogs) pull out of a Nagasaki peace ceremony to commemoratate the nuclear bombs on Japan, because said country was disinvited?

These are not normal behaviors. And I think its undercommunicated how much this servility towards Israel from both sides of the political spectrum is pushing people towards both antizionism and antisemittism.

Oh yes, this is the Fuentes critique I was talking about. It is unironically impressive how successful "Israel First" policy is. Their politicians were able to wrap foreign dignitaries around their fingers and train them like dogs to implement their policies. The point being that people like Fuentes admire this chutzpah, they want USA to become the same. Everybody will bow to US supremacy under cross or some such. People in UN should be in awe and they should persecute antiamericanism and christophobia with the same if not greater zeal as antisemitism even as Americans bomb their adversaries to stone age. All media from NYT and WSJ and Fox or whatever will be united in this righteous messaging, EU diplomats and their regional media will parrot it in the same way they lap the current propaganda. It will be amazing.

I was commenting on leftists. For them Israel is yet another white supremacist western colonizer, they do not admire Israel at all. In a sense Gaza war does not matter, the moral standard is "historical oppression" and history is unchanged - Palestinians were and always will be historically colonized and oppressed even if they clear Palestine from the river to the sea. This is what Yglesias vs Savodnik discussion is about.

I was commenting on leftists. For them Israel is yet another white supremacist western colonizer. In a sense Gaza war does not matter, the moral standard is "historical oppression" and history is unchanged - Palestinians were and always will be historically colonized and oppressed even if they clear Palestine from the river to the sea.

This is imo a strawman version of the leftist position that seems entirely derived from zionist interpretation (not saying you are a zionist, but most of your sources for this probably are). Yglesias used to openly advocate for the full ethnic cleansing of palestinians from Gaza. He is by all accounts a jewish supremacist, and frequently strawmans both the left and right anti-Israel position. But he is seeing the writings on the wall and trying to stake a position on Israel that is less repugnant for the average non jewish supremacists.

I am active in my local pro-Palestinian community. There are all walks of life here (including quite a few formerly zionist christians), but leftist dominate. The wider leftist position is quickly becoming the normie position because it is actually very defensible: "dont send money and weapons to a country full of religious nuts who believe they are justified in getting revenge on a defenceless population full of children". You honestly dont need to have any positive ideas about Palestine to reach this conclusion at all.

Most people are just horrified by Israels relentless violence towards the women and children of Palestine, and even more horrified by all the supposedly good people who are defending it. I dont think I have heard the word "historical oppression" once, and no one pretends that Palestinians are saints who can do no wrong. Nearly all advocacy is aimed at the innocent children in Gaza and excludes anyone who could possibly be a militant. Leftist have many terrible positions, but this is not one of them.

The wider leftist position is quickly becoming the normie position because it is actually very defensible: "dont send money and weapons to a country full of religious nuts who believe they are justified in getting revenge on a defenceless population full of children".

Sure, I could get under policy of not sending billions of dollars to Israel. Except it is probably more complicated given that Israel is an ally let's say in current conflict with Iran, they literally bombed the country. Whatever you think about this war, if it was caused by Israel or what, the fact is that it is a military ally and thus some support is necessary. US always sent weapons to movements and countries that committed violence. While your stance seems okay to me, it also seems naive.

By the way I am also for instance pissed that there is any help also sent to Gaza. I do not want to have anything to do with that awful place, it is not my responsibility. Let Egyptians and Saudis and other neighbors do that part.

Most people are just horrified by Israels relentless violence towards the women and children of Palestine, and even more horrified by all the supposedly good people who are defending it.

There are people now defending carpet bombing of Nazi Germany or Japan including dropping of nuclear bomb. If this is something that seems unbelievable to you then you probably are not so engaged in this discourse. The problem is that I am horrified by too many things, such as genocide in Darfur, and the overall region of Sahel and other things. I think that there are many conflicts where the moral situation is much clearer.

I am not particularly energized by Palestinians in this sense, I do not see a reason why they should jump as a front issue for me. For instance I am focusing on Ukraine, which has much more direct impact on me. If there would be any other conflict, it would probably be genocidal persecution of ethnicities linked to Christianity in Sahel region especially in Darfur and Nigeria. Everything else is distant.

I dont think I have heard the word "historical oppression" once, and no one pretends that Palestinians are saints who can do no wrong. Nearly all advocacy is aimed at the innocent children in Gaza and excludes anyone who could possibly be a militant. Leftist have many terrible positions, but this is not one of them.

I am curious. None of your leftie pro-Palestine friends ever used the term colonizer, colonized or colonialism in relation to this shit?

Except it is probably more complicated given that Israel is an ally

this is something people dont want and its not just leftist, but its increasingly common to believe the US relationship with Israel is more beneficial to Israel than vice versa. The US is such a loyal and unconditional ally to Israel due to the influence of the Israel lobby and zionists.

[https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/4/20/voters-in-multiple-states-say-iran-war-benefits-israel-and-that-us-military-aid-to-the-country-should-be-halted](This is just one recent poll)

The republicans might be going through a generational loss in the Midterms due to how unpopular the war in Iran and subsequent cost of living crises will be. Everything they fought for might be evaporated, and there might be a generational rift in the party that might upend all power constellations. Democrats arent much better, but are probably likely to benefit from not being the ones who

Besides many European countries stood up to their American ally during the Iraq war and dont think anyone looks back at that and thinks that was a bad thing?

I am also for instance pissed that there is any help also sent to Gaza. I do not want to have anything to do with that awful place, it is not my responsibility. Let Egyptians and Saudis and other neighbors do that part. This is fine. Are you American? Does your country send substantial aid to Gaza?

I am horrified by too many things, such as genocide in Darfur, and the overall region of Sahel and other things.

Interesting, do you want to increase aid to Darfur? Would you vote for a politician who took money from a pro-Janjaweed group and defended their actions?

I am curious. None of your leftie pro-Palestine friends ever used the term colonizer, colonized or colonialism in relation to this shit?

The term colonization is absolutely used about the West Bank and I dont see a problem with that. But again you overestimating the degree to which discourse is about ideology. Most people are just upset about Israels behavior and the suffering of innocents in Palestine.

Interesting, do you want to increase aid to Darfur? Would you vote for a politician who took money from a pro-Janjaweed group and defended their actions?

I said that if anything, the things happening in Darfur or Nigeria are more important to me than fucking Gaza. Not that it essential or that it makes me single issue Darfur voter. I would analyze a politician holistically in line with principle of subsidiarity.

The term colonization is absolutely used about the West Bank and I dont see a problem with that. But again you overestimating the degree to which discourse is about ideology. Most people are just upset about Israels behavior and the suffering of innocents in Palestine.

And I think that you are underestimating the degree to which this discourse is captured by ideology. The level of emotion on the left is unhinged, it is just another operation with its own viral energy. I do not believe that it was all just some random thing when from all the conflicts and all the suffering of women and children in the world right now, this one was just randomly taken up by the left and hammered for years. I am not denying that the emotions are genuine, it is just strategically selected to garner sympathy. It is the same for all the leftist causes, like their most successful op so far of killing of George Floyd. Of course there were people genuinely horrified by what happened. But at the same time it was also a cynical operation to ram through policies that the left was preparing for decades. The same shit with Gaza here.

I have a feeling youre not american, because there is no way the pro-Palestinian side is the most unhinged. We literally have a congressman who tweetet: "Nuke Gaza", and a more than one senator who has said they main motivation for doing their job is helping Israel. The pro-Israel side started a multi-months harassment campaign and send death threats to a christian childrens youtuber because she mentioned Gaza in a fundraiser for Save the Children. Ackman tried to get a fellow finance guy fired because his daughter had protested Israel.

This is nothing like George Floyd, where I totally agree than republicans came out much better. The only way you would think this is if youre opinion is entirely filtered through zionist sources.

I do not believe that it was all just some random thing when from all the conflicts and all the suffering of women and children in the world right now Outside of 50 leftist on 10 campuses who are communists, and possibly even paid by China, the reactions are entirely related to the insane degree that the American establishment supports Israels crimes. Do you think someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Theo Von are influenced by leftist media bubbles? Then how come their reaction is nearly identical to that of a bunch of lib moms?

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I don’t believe it’s a strawman. Yes you want to say it’s a strawman because it improves your arguments and makes it more prestigious.

But Jews are just “rich white people” is the only thing that connects all the issues the left has promoted recently. Third Worlders versus successful white people. DEI, BLM, etc common thread is that they attack richer, better, smarter white people who win. Brown people without a white enemy to attack never matter to the left.

When you only promote issues where they hurt white men then it seems apparent you just want to hurt white men.

Now I will admit there are always some with pure intentions. Some black people in blm. In this issue you have some pure Islamists who want to do river to the sea Jews will be gone because they rightfully view Israel as historically Muslim land and want to reconquista which is their right. And are using American leftists white man haters for their Muslim goals.

Support for Israel has taken a nose dive in every group except republicans over 50. If you think this is all due to Third Worlders I dont know what to tell you. People are increasingly seing the behavior of Israel and being put off by it.

The right doesn’t have pro-Palestinians. The left does. The right just wants Israel out of American politics or as allies.

People like Theo Von and Marjorie Taylor Greene absolutely come off as sympathetic to Palestinians, definitively more than most democrat politicians. Even Tucker seems supportive of the pro-Palestinian struggle.

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the power of Holocaust as a story is weakening

When I was a kid, the Holocaust was still in living memory enough that tattooed survivors were showing up to school classrooms to tell their personal stories. At the time, the last WWII vets were retiring and still alive to tell their stories. The entire era there is passing out of living memory and I suppose it isn't surprising that the emotional and political valence of those events is changing as the torch is passed.

I don't think it was ever possible to maintain that story forever: it's hard to sell multigenerational grievances generally, and worse when the aggrieved party seems to be doing "mostly fine, actually" (opinions may vary) in the present.

But I do look at these changing attitudes and wonder what will happen in the next decades as other traumas fade in the collective memory. We're already seeing politicians first elected during the civil rights movement dying in office in their 80s, for example, and Vietnam veterans aren't as able to get out and protest as numerously as they used to.

Looking at the situation from Mars – isn't it a bit bizarre how so much attention is paid to antisemitism, how it's studied, dissected, treatments sought? Jews are a tiny global minority, they're a tiny minority even in their region. Zionists are a small minority. Generally speaking, such a thing as non-Jewish Zionism shouldn't even exist – we don't have a lot of, I don't know, Magyarists among non-Hungarians, constantly working to ensure that Hungary survives and cannot face any strategic threat from their neighbors. If Jews reliably evoke "Antisemitism" among people with completely different belief systems, from Communists to the far right, from Arabs to Scandinavians, from boomer Democrats to zoomer Republicans, from Beijing to Madrid – isn't the behavior of Jews deserving of much more scrutiny? Isn't the onus on them to prove that they should not be hated? Any other nation so widely hated is usually known to be doing some transparently objectionable bullshit. Yes, Jews have some sort of internal discourse about antisemitism, about Amalek, online radicalization and whatever. But – why does anyone else need to care? Everyone has justifications.

Of course the masses can be wrong and often are when they oppose some select group or thing. But why would we assume that the masses of Jews are less wrong? En masse, Israeli Jews don't even have high IQ, nor do they belong to a Western culture. These are nth generation European transplants, locals, various peoples like Yemenites (eg the notorious Ben-Gvir), the Haredi who exist outside of any civilization…

I don't see the argument for even considering this as a real question. Zionists don't operate on a theory anyway.

Why not both?

There has clearly been mass disinformation in Western nations in recent decades. Journalists will go on air and lie broadly about infectious diseases, government actions, wars, crimes, war crimes, weapons of mass destructions, who pays them etc. Many Jews would be found in prominent positions within their ranks, such as Barri Weiss. Lack of truth will generate skepticism.

Then comes the second part, there is a biological, natural component among many humans referred to as pattern recognition. People will naturally associate stimuli with concepts upon sufficient exposure. This is where the antisemitism will get generated.

There is a very simple solution to the Israeli problem that nobody ever seems to suggest, conversion. Many Jews have historically benefited from simply integrating to the majority population of the country they lived in. Unfortunately, the Jews that are currently remaining are the ones that have generations of experience of earnestly refusing to integrate to the local majority population, and to take in the commands of their respective prophets.

This stubbornness explains why the Israelis seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, too weak to single-handedly eradicate their enemies, too strong to play dirty like their enemies without losing their more-compassionate allies. So what if they get hated? Should we have Russians on American TV airing their grievances against anti-Russian sentiment on college campuses? Why this desperate need to be liked anyway?

If you're willing to corrupt supply chains and plant bombs in your enemies' pockets in foreign countries, why are you surprised that your enemies will send lone gunners to target your allies in foreign countries?

Why trouble yourself with pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses instead of building ammo factories in Israel? Why are AIPAC representatives training American congressmen instead of training IDF recruits?

This whole antisemitism thing is quite funny in the years when some other international crisis overshadows what the Israelis do routinely, and the demand for antisemitism by politically-motivated people is greater than the supply.


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