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Notes -
ANZAC Day and Welcome to Country
Anzac Day is an Australian national holiday on 25th April each year, devised to honour the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in WW1. Gallipoli is one of the great national myths of Australia, at the start of the the transition from colony to real country. There’s a myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’ in that the British were too slow to secure their beachhead, their officers were having tea on the beach and then we got stuck in trench warfare. This is confected but helped solidify Australia as a nation distinct from Britain.
There are Anzac values like bravery, mateship, camaraderie and ingenuity: William Scurry’s self-firing ‘drip rifle’ that was used to mask the retreat. If you went to school in Australia you’d have memories of a student mangling The Last Post on a bugle while in Assembly, everyone saying ‘lest we forget’ and speeches about sacrifice and duty and values.
More recently, there has been booing during a Welcome to Country ceremony conducted in the Melbourne Dawn Service for Anzac Day A transcript of the Welcome to Country, from Bunurong Elder and Senior Cultural Heritage Officer Mark Brown:
‘Welcome to Country’ is a new myth-building rite that’s conducted at just about all major and minor public occasions in Australia these days, where an Aboriginal comes and gives an address and affirms, in some more or less nebulous way, that his people are the real owners of the land. Maybe they're traditional custodians. Or perhaps 'sovereignty was never ceded'. Sometimes they're really small and quick, when it's just white people reading out a script in a monotone as a preamble to some trivial meeting, even zoom meetings sometimes.
One thing that I observe is this interchangeable use of the first person. He uses ‘my people’, ‘my indigenous brothers’ and also ‘our rivers’, ‘islands are ours’. Yet he also says how ‘we pay our respects to all of my elders’. He’s switching from being ‘I am here as part of all Australians present’ to ‘I am one of the true landowners, with a continuous and unbroken connection to my country’ as he sees fit. He’s paying respect as an Australian, on behalf of all others present, to himself as an indigenous elder and presenting it as an opportunity.
Maybe he adlibs too, trying to be more aggressive in the face of booing. It’s visible that he’s sad and upset about being booed.
War
Then there’s the reference to fighting Gunditijmara.
In essence, whites crushed Aboriginals wherever they came into conflict during colonization. Aboriginals largely lacked the martial culture and organization of Native Americans, who managed to inflict occasional defeats on white troops and massacre civilians with more success. The Comanche launched huge raids into Mexico and depopulated the north, did a lot of damage to Texas. None of that ever happened in Australia, it was one-sided in the extreme.
“It's believed that around 80 settlers died; while the Gunditjmara suffered the loss of 6,500 of their people, from a total of 7000.”
The SBS (state-run Australian ethnic media outlet) attribute the crushing defeat in this war of resistance partially to the Native Police, aboriginal troops with white officers. It seems that is one of the few kinds of multiculturalism that the SBS doesn’t favour:
The whole article is full of cope really, glorifying sheep-stealing raids as an epic struggle of resistance, which brings me back to my main point.
The aboriginal tribes of Australia lost incredibly badly in warfare, it was possibly the most crushing and one-sided defeat in history, largely inflicted by adhoc militias and settlers rather than troops.
Peace
Then the aboriginals won a series of incredible political victories, despite being generally hopeless.
Today they get about $6 billion AUD a year in indigenous specific services, targeted exclusively at them, in addition to regular spending. Their tax input is minimal. Expenditure per person for aboriginals is roughly twice that for non-indigenous people (in large part due to how they live out in remote locations where it’s hard to provide goods and services) and also because they’re incredibly dysfunctional, requiring welfare and adult supervision.
They get partial native title over 70% of Australia's landmass, albeit mostly the desolate parts and block development.
Petrol in remote areas needs additives put in it to stop them sniffing it and suffering brain damage.
Indigenous youth make up 55% of those in youth detention despite being only 7% of the youth. Adults, despite being only 3% of the national population, represent 33% of the prison population. They are the most incarcerated people in the world because they commit enormous amounts of crime, mostly against eachother.
There are aboriginal towns in Australia 30x more violent than the US, even more violent than the nastier American cities.
They commit 30-80x more domestic violence against women than the Australian average.
Alice Springs at one point had the world’s highest stabbing rate, mostly aboriginal women being stabbed. It hasn't significantly improved.
There are occasional ‘interventions’ when white politicians get appalled by how violent and brutal their remote towns are and decide to ban alcohol and pornography. Australian politicians love banning things. But the situation was bad, there was and remains an epidemic of abuse and child rape in Aboriginal areas, children getting STDs:
90% of school age children in some places suffering abuse.
There’s a cycle where the situation gets really bad, then the government cracks down, left-wingers and NGOs decry it as racist and authoritarian and eventually the crackdown ends. There’s no positive long term change, only expenditure of money. The only thing that’s long-term is white people being blamed, somehow white colonization is said to have caused all this pedophilia and domestic violence, general incompetence. In truth they were already doing that when whites got here, they had ancient traditions of infanticide, ritual cannibalism, scarification and intertribal warfare. I don’t see how British colonization made the aboriginals horrifically violent and rapey to eachother but Ireland remains fine despite centuries of colonization and harsh treatment. Who loses their land and decides to become a pedophile or beat their wife to a pulp?
More realistically they were just inherently stupid to begin with, which is why they never got around to agriculture or more advanced social organization. How much time and effort needs to be expended trying to make these people meet the standards of others? Why expend effort trying to make them act like white people, while also encouraging and valorizing them for their indigeneity, for sitting on Australia for 60,000 years with little to show for it? Where is the value in this? Why even try? A billion dollars represents hundreds of lifetimes of labour, taken away by the state.
Some of my friends worked with the failed referendum to give Aboriginals a Voice to Parliament (a great tool for hectoring whites and asking for more money, more privileges). The ‘real’ black aboriginal elders, the ones who aren’t cherrypicked speakers, the ones they brought in from the bush to provide a more authentic perspective, they had no conceptual understanding of legislation or abstract concepts generally, consulting them was impossible. It was like they were drunk, my politically correct friends said. Maybe they were drunk. The elite aboriginal activists weren’t that much better, constantly trying to do crazy self-defeating things. This brings me to Lydia Thorpe.
A left-leaning Melbourne seat elected a partially aboriginal woman, Lydia Thorpe, to the Senate who made a complete embarrassment of herself and the Greens Party. She was in a relationship with an outlawed bikie gang ex-president while serving on the parliamentary law enforcement committee. She applauded an arson attack of the Old Parliament House as the colonial system burning down.
In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land.
She heckled King Charles III at Parliament House and claimed she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘hairs’ rather than ‘heirs’. She then walked it back when it was pointed out that she’d signed a document for her oath and the document was spelled correctly.
She got into an altercation outside a Melbourne strip club, approaching white patrons and telling them they had small penises and had stolen her land. She’s since been permanently banned from that strip club.
In short, she’s a racist stereotype given flesh, a single mother at 17. An idiot who thinks she’s smarter than she is and still in the Senate.
Democracy is not a suicide pact, why would any normal people tolerate wreckers who are openly trying to undermine and destroy the country that they think is illegitimate, who clearly hold their oaths in total contempt? If this woman had any actual power, it is overwhelmingly clear that she'd use it solely for her co-ethnics and to extract from whites, which was my problem with the Voice to Parliament. Ironically, she opposed that, instead demanding a treaty where various aboriginal tribes would be considered like independent states.
As a group, Aboriginals make Sub-Saharan Africans look like paragons of civilization. Some did at least develop kingdoms, metalworking and agriculture. Aboriginals did not develop Australia in any way recognizable to civilized peoples. One can only take their word for it that they have a deep, invisible, spiritual connection to the land.
And yet despite all this dysfunction and incompetence, it’s fashionable and useful to have indigenous heritage. Sometimes universities boast on social media over their blue eyed, white-faced ‘indigenous’ medical graduates, who exploit the extra help given to nominally aboriginal students and their higher IQs, less dysfunctional family upbringings to get ahead. If they’re even aboriginal at all and not just lying.
Aboriginals get their customary law partially applied in some cases, they get more lenient treatment in the real courts, with judges and police incentivized informally to reduce their incarceration, find non-punitive ways of managing their dysfunction.
They get another $AUD billion a year in preferential govt contracting.
They can even be brought in to make Anzac Day speeches where about 85% of the content is them personally claiming the country that the fallen, overwhelmingly white, soldiers fought and died for. ANZACs were not mentioned at all in Brown’s speech, only affirmations to his people's claim to the country and these unsubtle implications that he's the authority who decides who other people pay respect to. Then they take a speaking fee for that. Meanwhile, war memorials are vandalized with graffiti such as ‘the colony will fall’…
It’s as if they won a war and are enjoying the spoils from the conquered people. Isn't this world-historically bizarre?
Yet there’s been booing from the audience, organized by younger and more radical rightwingers presumably. Naturally the booing was condemned by the state premiers and those who actually run the country as disrespectful to the war dead - though none of the soldiers who spoke about the war dead were booed. Some of the more rightwing senators are taking easier potshots like ‘it’s inappropriate to have a hat on while making a speech in a Dawn Service’ or denying that veterans need to be welcomed back to their country. They don't deny the central case generally, that whites need to pay respects and pay tribute to a conquered people. Just not on Anzac Day.
Here’s a twitter topic if you want to look at some other perspectives.
Why is there only booing about this? In 1870 Bismarck edited a single letter to make the tone a little curt, like Wilhelm had abruptly rebuffed the French ambassador and sent a low-ranked officer to convey the message. Bismarck had it leaked on Bastille day and that started a major war with France. Bismarck is considered the aggressor, people generally accepted at the time the French couldn’t accept an insult like that! Hundreds of thousands died over national honour.
The conquered are giving laws to the conquerors.
This is a microcosm of the key trend of the last 100 years, whites who forcibly conquered 90% of the world bending over backwards to be nice and get forgiveness from the peoples they conquered. The conquered peoples quickly organized to take maximum possible advantage of this bizarre blunder, organizing more or less adeptly to demand treaties, land rights, welfare payments, reparations and special ceremonies to further legitimize and expand this political superiority.
Despite the passivity, it is what war is all about: obtaining land and obtaining wealth or labour from others. Political and social status. Securing these things from challengers. That is what wars are fought for, only the means are non-kinetic.
There seems to be a concept that after enough of these political ceremonies, apologies, reparations (formal or just via progressive taxation), criminal justice reforms and affirmative action black people (or blak as they sometimes call themselves in Australia) are going to be happy and we’ll all dance together in harmony. Some day the Gap will be Closed, that's the ostensible plan that Australia pursues.
If you give people money and status because you conquered them, they’re going to use this and try to get more wealth from you. If you pay for something, you get more of it. It creates incentives for professional political workers like Elder Brown to show up and hone rabblerousing, rhetorical, guilt-tripping skills. It creates incentives to be more strident and demanding to prove ideological purity and righteousness. And there’s also a massive sunk cost fallacy amongst white people. Many officials, taxpayers and donors don’t want to believe that they’ve spent billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it. It would be incredibly embarrassing to change course now. In fact, after paying all this lip service to colonial sins and a couple trillion in foreign aid to Africa, the Global Majority of black and brown people are multiplying and migrating over to Europe, America, Australia as ‘climate refugees’, looking for more money, welfare and special privileges. Ireland never colonized anyone, yet isn't escaping diversity.
The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank. They make good use of language and ritual, as did the Australians of old. In the 19th century, Australian newspapers would report on how colonists would eagerly ‘disperse’ or ‘duly and efficiently pound’ aboriginals. The Native Police would ‘give them a dressing down’, a ‘thumping’ or ‘a shaking up’.
In Israel there’s all this talk about security zones, neutralizing, mowing the lawn, suspected militants, human shields, Dahiya doctrine. This is a kind of political warfare, on the other side there are words like Holocaust, Nazi and genocide, for Australia ‘Invasion Day’ rather than Australia Day.
We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?
Better not to fight at all, especially if hopelessly outgunned and outmatched. Better to just take wealth and land slowly through legal means, engineer new rites to legitimize authority and status and national self-concept. Even traditional warfare is a contest of willpower, the capacity to endure pain and fight on for a given reward, it’s a test of political strength.
AI
No post of mine would be complete without a digression on AI... Bunurong Elder Mark Brown has an AI-written website hawking his services:
He even made an AI-written statement decrying how he was booed on linkedin:
Along with some AI jeers at Charlie Kirk too:
My assumption is that a default ChatGPT wouldn’t quite outright say ‘Charlie Kirk deserved his fate’ even though it’s inclined in that direction. I think Brown just left the memory feature on by default and it acclimated itself to his views. I imagine it would refuse his rightwing equivalent. I haven’t tested this though and don’t use ChatGPT, I’m interested in any thoughts others have with that, or other things mentioned.
I observe also that the culture war is global and only getting more global with automated cheap translation and the primacy of US media, especially social media. And AI acts as a force multiplier. I doubt Brown would’ve bothered to make a statement on Kirk if he had to write it out himself.
One wonders whether Brown is a real person or just a mouth reading out AI speeches. After all, you can’t hear an em dash as easily as you can read it. Beneath all these high-minded words, there’s this perpetual search for cash: $770 AUD for a Welcome to Country, $4500 for a keynote speech, $90 for AI designed t-shirts and hoodies. Art created by AI (made by whites and Asians), printed on T-shirts (made in America from global parts, so whites and Asians), justified by a synthetic social status.
I'm tapping the sign again. This is, literally, unequivocally, without exaggeration, the work of Marxists and Marxist fellow travelers. It is the cumulative result of memetic weapons deployed by the Soviet Union and its precursor philosophers (Marx, Engels, Adler, Lenin et. al.) in an explicit attempt to undermine and destroy capitalist (read: Western) society and bring about the Glorious Revolution. I realize that typing that out makes me sound like a schizophrenic, and it sometimes makes me want to tear my hair out that as it turns out the people who were most right about Communism and Communists were McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But McCarthy was, broadly speaking if not always in specific individual cases, completely and utterly correct.
Modern progressives are the heirs of Antonio Gramsci. Read this list of Soviet talking points and tell me that I'm crazy:
These ideas were drummed up in a Soviet think-tank or by communist fellow-travelers in a philosophy department in Vienna circa 1880 and eventually deliberately transmitted to Western intellectuals as tools of societal subversion designed to hollow out capitalism and replace it with a globalist regime which cannot defend itself because the very act of defense is seen as morally wrong. Once this was accomplished, there would be no need for T-62s to roll across the Fulda Gap and risk all-out nuclear war.
This is from a speech by Reagan, in 1964. Nineteen sixty-four. The most xenophobic right-wing frothing-at-the-mouth commentators from the 60s 70s and 80s were if anything underselling Soviet subversion because it sounds ridiculous. Ideas as weapons? Come on we're Americans, we engage in free debate as a pastime! Any idea the Soviets could create can't hurt us because their propaganda is clumsy and inelegant, it is designed for their fear-bound uneducated populace, not the Leaders of the Free World!
Heirs of Gramsci and also Orwell.
There is no truth, only competing agendas... but also there is truth, truth-telling ceremonies, true histories that have been distorted and covered up by the West. 'History is a whitewash', to quote Capaldi's Doctor Who in a reimagined, more diverse Victorian setting.
There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another... but favoured cultures to be glorified as feminist, rape-free (at least before whites arrived), diverse, inclusive and their darker aspects are left tastefully obscured or just blamed on white people for corrupting them...
The poor and criminals are victims of society but hate criminals are just evil and hateful.
There are these subversions and inversions as needed, different paths in the same direction.
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Were they? I mean, maybe, but I don't know if I can take ESR's word for it.
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I don't have any Australian context, but today I learned there is apparently an "Aboriginal tent embassy" across the street from the Australian Parliament house. Now, it seems to me that a country cannot have an embassy of itself within itself, so this is a little awkward when combined with the idea of the land never having been ceded; however, that appears to be the point.
Exactly, 'sovereignty never ceded' is something that they love to repeat despite sovereignty being taken without a treaty. William the Conqueror didn't need a treaty to achieve sovereignty over England. Treaties are secondary to conditions on the ground.
There was a fellow in Australia who LARPed as having his own country to get around paying taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Casley
He made visas and passports and his own currency, it was a bit of a tourist attraction... but that doesn't actually mean he had a real country, only that the government was tolerating him.
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huh, I would reverse that. Seems to me, 200 years from now, Israeli Jews are going to have to "[spend] billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it."
PS: I was going to go a tangent about "all men are created equal" but then Australia is the only common law country with neither a constitutional nor federal legislative bill of rights to protect its citizens
Israeli Jews are already struggling with low-performing Haredis in Israel, even Israel hasn't mastered this social technology.
And what good is a bill of rights? Britain has one. Zimbabwe has one. The Soviet Union had one. Individual Australian states have them.
Laws are secondary to opinion and facts on the ground.
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The Bill of Rights 1689 and Magna Carta are surely both also grandfathered into Australian law.
As to the Israelis, if the situation had been settled in the 80s they’d be doing so right now.
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Aboriginals being the most savage primitives in the world may well be true(although they have some competition). But as our resident ‘some cultures just suck’ enthusiast, this may not be entirely generic- do aborigines adopted by white families have similar incarceration rates?
There was a controversial activity a generation or two back called the stolen generation in which Aboriginal children were taken from remote locations and forcefully taken to the cities to be educated. This largely impacted children with European admixture.
Ironically this has produced a large group of Indigenous with far greater education, economic success and cultural salience (Nature v Nurture debate can be had) who have largely further diminished their blood quantum over the years. This group does the vast majority of lobbying on Aboriginal issues, whilst the remote community largely sits in whoop whoop and rots.
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Why are the Torres Strait Islanders always mentioned and stapled together with the Aborigines in these events? They have a completely different culture and way of life, and live so far from any Australian towns of any size that I'd be willing to bet 90+ % of Australians have never seen one in person.
I did a year in Darwin and met a few. Way more organized people, prettymuch Polynesian level in development
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If it were any animal but humans, Aboriginal Australians would easily be categorized as a separate and long divergent species. Their exceptionally low intelligence, limited technological development, and prominent brow put them closer to our ancient fossilized cousins than any other “indigenous” (in the contemporary meaning of the term) people group.
That progressives use them as a status signal is not at all surprising - leftist women have driven social consciousness causes for all sorts of degenerates over time, from the clinically insane to the illegal immigrant child rapist to the Arab terrorist.
Modern taxonomy is generally based on recent common ancestry. Despite their profound behavioral and morphological peculiarities, Australian Aborigines split more recently from other Eurasians than Eurasians as a whole split from Sub-Saharan Africans. So if Australian Aborigines are to be classified as a separate species, then so would groups like Khoisan, Pygmies, and black Africans. Which means... your_terms_are_acceptable.jpg, I suppose. If race is a social construct, then so is species.
Among modern humans, Oceanians (including Australia Aborigines) have the highest degree of archaic admixture from Denisovans and Neanderthals, perhaps around 4-6% Denisovan admixture, on top of the 1-4% of Neanderthal admixture shared by Eurasians. West Africans appear to have about 2-19% of archaic admixture from ghost populations (populations of which fossils have yet to be discovered, as the climate of Sub-Saharan Africa tends to be unkind toward fossils).
It reminds me of that viral tweet that I can't find at the moment, which reads something like "Leftist thought: Actually, productive, law-abiding citizens are the oppressors and the unproductive and the criminal are the oppressed."
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FWIW I think there is some degree of truth in this. I remember a few years back a photo circulated which purported to compare the skull of an Aboriginal Australian with that of a European. The difference is so shocking that the normal reaction is to think that the photo can't be real; that it must be the work of a racist troll who mislabeled the skull of some non-human hominid. But I looked into it and concluded it was probably accurate.
I think what happened was that when Homo Sapiens spread around the world, they encountered other species, such as Neanderthals, who were close enough genetically that some degree of interbreeding was possible. Thus Europeans and Asians have some percentage of Neanderthal genes. I would guess that Aboriginal Australians have a high percentage of genes from whatever hominid species was in Australia when Homo Sapiens showed up.
Denisovans. IIRC the Denisovans were never actually in Australia, but Aboriginal Australians (along with Melanesians) picked up their genes in transit.
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That’s the thing, I am pretty sure (the ancestors of) the Aboriginals were the first hominids of any kind to populate Australia, around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. I suppose it is a testament to the tenacity and creativity of their forebears that they were apparently able to navigate the seas millennia before agriculture, the earliest cave art, or the domestication of the dog. Sadly they seem to be the civilizational equivalent of the kid who peaked in high school.
As I understand it, they wouldn’t have had to navigate very far, as at the time both the Sunda Shelf and Sahul were above water; these seafarers would have been able to travel between a series of close-together islands in between the two supercontinents.
True, but island-hopping 90-100km is still no mean feat for literal Paleolithic man! I suppose it may have taken place over multiple generations, though I don’t know if the interstitial archipelago was large and fertile enough to support such long pit stops.
We still don't have a tremendously convincing theory for how primitive primates managed to cross the Atlantic: their appearance in the fossil record is long after Africa and South America separated.
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Is that really true? Dogs are all the same species and yet differ far more in intellect, brain size, color, appearance, size, lifespan etc than humans do.
The actual science of separating species is (as most biologists will say) almost completely arbitrary.
The genus Canis is such a taxonomic mess that almost everything about its classification is almost certainly wrong, though.
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The reason is obvious: they have Jewish land acknowledgements instead, tracing every significant place to the Tanakh. The region itself is called Judea and Samaria in Israel. They are the decolonizers in their own story.
I think this may be a factor, but I doubt it's that big of a factor. For example, look at Sweden. Clearly ethnic Swedes are one of the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia. But that doesn't stop them from bringing in and valorizing destructive third-world people. Maybe they don't have land acknowledgments, but they have plenty of other Leftist nonsense.
It seems to me that Leftists can always find a way to twist things. The fact that Europeans are not indigenous to Australia is useful tool for them, but it doesn't stop them from playing their games in Europe or Judea.
As an ethnic Scandinavian by race, I really bemoan what leftism is doing over there. A lot of far-right publishers like Arktos come from there and produce a lot of literature that’s popular in the west and is continuing to gain traction year after year. It’s concerning to imagine where all this is headed because these people don’t integrate. They live in parallel societies.
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Actually that's not totally true. Arab citizens of Israel enjoy some degree of affirmative action and Leftists in Israel are constantly pushing for the same sort of suicidal policies Leftists push for in every advanced nation.
The main differences are
(1) there are lots of Arabs in and around Israel that want to slaughter every last Jew and are aggressive, organized, and relentless about it; and
(2) the world is full of Jew-haters who inevitably blame all of this on the Israelis themselves; who twist everything in order to falsely accuse Israel of villainy; and who dismiss or ignore or defend the evil deeds of those who terrorize the Israeli people.
The ironic upshot of this persecution is that your typical Israeli is very conscious of the consequences of Leftist policies. So it's hard for the Left to get much purchase. Even so, Israel made the mistake of leaving Gaza -- with disasterous results.
Another factor is that Israel is the first advanced nation where a growing subpopulation of conservative religious types is starting to have real, general influence over internal politics. I would expect that the US is next in line to encounter such a phenomenon.
As a side note, it's worth pointing out that you yourself are one of the Jew-haters who, in effect, undermines the Left in Israel. For example, when a girl's school was blown up in Iran, I am pretty sure you were the person who was "confident" it was Israel that was responsible for the bombing. It's difficult to square this kind of arrogant and foolhardy rush to judgment with anything other than raw anti-Semitism. So probably conservatives in Israel owe you some degree of thanks.
How large is the left in Israel, nowadays? My understanding is since the 2010s the Overton Window has shifted such that Netanyahu is pretty close to the center, and the right is mostly religious conservatives who are inoculated against pathological xenophilia.
I don't know. But I do know that so far, they have not succeeded in getting the door open to immigration of outsiders. Which is kind of the holy grail for Leftists, for obvious reasons.
There is lots of immigration into Israël, and ‘who counts as Jewish’ is a thorny question that the left has taken W’s on in the past.
Right, and it's reasonably obvious that their goal is to open the floodgates via "quickie conversions."
??? No, the left's wins on Israeli immigration policy have tended to be recognizing as valid Jewish ethnic groups those with sketchier claims, conversions have pretty consistently been very difficult.
I'm talking about what they would like to do -- not what they have accomplished.
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The right-wing in Israel is also quite split. If you think it’s “the left” that are Israel’s biggest source of internal instability, you should see just how strongly the right there opposes the state.
I'm kind of skeptical about this. Can you give me 3 examples of right-wing members of the Knesset who strongly oppose the state?
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Do the ultra Orthodox trend left wing or right wing in Israeli politics? I feel like their beliefs are kind of spread out across the political axis
If you're ultra orthodox you're right-wing by definition but they get pretty rabid and extreme when it comes to their protests against the state.
I thought some were largely pacifist and driven by the allocation of gibs, though?
This is the Israeli equivalent of a rural interest party, is my understanding- they’ll coalition with anyone as long as they get their way, but that don’t make em left wing- even when that coalition is with labour. They’re also not pacifist, they just don’t want to personally fight.
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Do you really believe that opposition to Israel is (always? in the case of OP specifically? most of the time?) motivated by opposition to Jews, or is it a rhetorical device because you like Israel and want to tar opposition to it? I'm particularly interested in the answer because I am situated in the category whose existence you appear to deny (no issue with Jews as an ethnicity or religion, large issue with the state of Israel in its current form - not even as a theoretical concept, as I've previously argued they should have just taken some land from the Germans and founded it on the Baltic coast back in 1945 instead).
"I'm particularly interested in the answer because I am situated in the category whose existence you appear to deny (no issue with Jews as an ethnicity or religion, large issue with the state of Israel in its current form - not even as a theoretical concept, as I've previously argued they should have just taken some land from the Germans and founded it on the Baltic coast back in 1945 instead)."
That pro-Israel classical liberals can't see this as the same nonsense that conflates the NAACP with all black people is beyond me. My theory: Jewish identity politics for some on the right is the one identity politics to rule them all. Meaning, its correctness is positively correlated with the incorrectness of all the other, admittedly more odious and societally detrimental kinds of identity politics.
"There can be no absence of identity politics, so choose the relatively best one, which also happens to nullify the other, worse ones! Yes, it means being hyperbolic and engaging in disingenuous rhetoric, but that's the price to pay, and it's worth it."
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I'll go with "almost always."
Well, here are a few questions:
When you criticize or condemn Israel for something, do you criticize or condemn other countries that behave similarly or worse?
Do you care about the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs? If so, how do you feel about the treatment of Palestinian Arabs by Arab countries such as Lebanon?
Are you aware that the UN condemns Israel far more than any other country by far? Do you think that this is because the UN is biased against Israel or do you believe that Israel genuinely is the worst country in the world in terms of activities which merit condemnation?
Are you upset about US military support of Israel? If so, how do you feel about US military support of South Korea; Japan; Norway; Turkey; or the UK?
When Israel does things such as attacking hospitals, do you understand and accept that this is because terrorist organizations such as Hamas operate out of hospitals?
In my experience, the vast majority of people who criticize or condemn Israel single the Israel out for special treatment. The vast majority of people who claim to care about Palestinian Arabs are not even aware, let alone care about, the way Palestinian Arabs are treated in places like Lebanon. The vast majority of people who criticize or condemn Israel are not able to bring themselves to admit that the UN is horrifically biased against Israel. The vast majority of people who complain about US military support of Israel are hardly aware and do not care about US military support for other countries. The vast majority of Israel's critics minimize or ignore things like Hamas' use of hospitals, which gives Israel no practical choice other than to attack hospitals. It's difficult to square these attitudes with anything other than anti-Semitism. The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that a lot of these people are simply NPC's repeating Leftist talking points -- they are a vehicle for other peoples' hatred of Jews, the equivalent of low level concentration camp guards.
I would, but unlike you I don't get the sense that there are currently other countries who are similar or worse. The country was founded less than 100 years ago on land violently stolen from the previous residents; more land continues to be stolen (settlers) on its periphery; the descendants of the same previous residents are stuck on its territory as an underclass with minimal sociopolitical rights and recently being slaughtered by the tens of thousands in a form of collective punishment for the violent resistance that formed among them. The most recent historical comparisons I can think of are South Africa and perhaps Korea/China under Japanese rule during/before WWII, and even in those cases I get the sense that the lot of the native population was actually better (both in terms of the sheer volume of violence they suffered relative to their total number, and in terms of how much of what was their ancestors' they were they denied the use of). Of course there is the objection that they are different in that the invaders had something like a homeland they could straightforwardly retreat to (this is more clear in the case of Japan than in the case of the white peoples of South Africa), but as someone who is not particularly convinced of a general right to an ethnostate I don't find this so compelling.
I somewhat do, but to my best knowledge little of my taxes is spent on supporting whatever other Arab countries do to them, so it's easier to see it as an instance of misery that I have no moral responsibility to stop. Also, per the above angle on Israel, I'm not sure I agree that other Arab countries mistreat them as badly.
See above, I get the sense that it is among the worst. If pressed, I think North Korea might cause (in the counterfactual sense of causation: literally deleting the state of North Korea, including every member of leadership, official document and government building, would make things better) more total undeserved misery per capita, but for better or worse one may argue that the UN's magisterium is to regulate the relations between nations/peoples, so that North Koreans torturing their own is none of its business.
It's a harder question whether various colourful events in Africa (like the recent genocides in Sudan) were worse, and in general I would wish for more UN intervention in those; but to do so properly from my point of view requires a memetic rehabilitation of uplift colonialism, where we may accept that if some peoples keep murdering each other at some point we ought to go in, confiscate their children and put them through a few generations of forced schooling in a different cultural background. At the same time, the current memetic landscape unfortunately does not require this; and either way, in practice the UN has a lot more influence on rich first-world countries than places like Sudan, so it makes sense for it to direct its condemnation energy in a direction where it can actually affect outcomes.
Neither of those is doing things as bad as what I said in my first paragraph! I should say that my citizenship is German, so my tax money is being spent on Israel to a significant extent but not so much on the others. But either way, the problem is not military support being intrinsically bad, but rather military support conveying upon the supporter some responsibility for what the military is then used for. Out of this list, if I were a US citizen, I would also prefer to defund Turkey.
I understand that this is a motivation, though I'm not convinced that it isn't simultaneously true that they are happy to have a pretext to flatten a hospital because it serves the longer-term goal of having fewer and less healthy Palestinians in the area.
Let's see if I understand your argument correctly:
In the 1940s, what is now Israel was collectively the property of the Arabs living in the area but NOT the property of the Jews living in the area.
Thus, by declaring a Jewish state and winning the Israeli war of independence, Israel has a sort of original sin which taints everything it does.
Therefore, if Israel blows up a hospital which is being used as a base by Hamas, it is illegitimate because Israel has no legitimate right of self defense.
Thus, if some other country blows up a hospital or a school or whatever, and even if that hospital was not being used for military purposes, it's still not as bad as Israel because that other country does not have Israel's "original sin."
Do I understand your position correctly?
Of course I have heard the "tax dollars" argument before. But if this were the reason for the ferocious and relentless criticism of Israel out there, one would expect Europeans to be far less anti-Israel than Americans. That's not the case at all. "Tax dollars" is an excuse, not the actual reason.
Are you similarly skeptical of the motives of other countries which are engaged in military conflicts?
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These kinds of whataboutisms chalk up to antisemitism what is really about a lack of cognitive omnipotence. (Or the fact that Americans aren't allegedly joined morally at the hip with the Arab World, but they are with Israel, making criticisms more tempting.)
Well what happens when your typical Israel critic is informed about these things? Does it change the person's mind? Generally no.
Can you explain what this means?
Yes, just assume that the critics already know these other things and that focusing on Israeli, er, malfeasance has sinister motives. That their not talking about violence and horribleness that afflicts Sub-Saharan Africans etc. must be due to a suspiciously strange obsession with Israel, which is just a random country like Bulgaria or Turkmenistan that is being unfairly singled out.
"Can you explain what this means?"
That they are a longstanding and obvious ally, an outpost of our Western way of life in the Middle East that is fundamentally on a higher moral plane (likewise, that even if you agree, you don't think Israel's problems should be our problems; nope, not good enough, it just MUST be Jew hatred.)
There's no need to make that assumption. You just need to see whether they change their mind when presented with the facts. And the results are not flattering to such people.
Agreed. And if critics of Israel would regularly acknowledge this, I would be much less likely to conclude that they have "sinister motives" as you put it.
"Agreed. And if critics of Israel would regularly acknowledge this, I would be much less likely to conclude that they have "sinister motives" as you put it."
But when people call out Israel for not sharing our values (in being an ethno-religious state), that's also called Antisemitic. As it stands, I feel like I'm being asked to pick a side in the Shia vs. Sunni dispute. I say the line is being drawn arbitrarily. The whole intra-Middle East dispute spectrum, which includes the Israeli pov, is ALL awful.
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That doesn't have to be specifically anti-semitism; I think most of it is just garden variety anti-westernism. In general, the same leftists who condemn Israel for its military actions are the ones who condemn the US Military for similar actions. This attitude often extends to other domains, such as criminal justice.
I agree that's probably a factor, but (1) given that Jews are one of world's most advanced peoples, in practice that sort of attitude is functionally indistinguishable from anti-Semitism; and (2) it doesn't look like it's the only factor, or even necessarily the main factor. Even before the current war, there were plenty of people in the US who were upset over US military aid to Israel. Those same people were apparently unaware that the US has full on military installations in South Korea and Germany. That the US is pledged to treat an attack on Norway as an attack on the United States.
What treaties do we have with Israel that are in any way comparable to NATO? We pledge to defend Norway in case of an attack because they pledge the same thing back to us. Is it a lopsided relationship? Absolutely. But we don't even get those same guarantees back from Israel, lopsided as they would be. I'm not inherently opposed to entering a mutual defense treaty ala NATO with Israel, but there would have to be more to it than we just subsidize their military, forever.
So if Israel makes a pledge to defend the United States if it's ever attacked (and they honor that pledge to the same extent Norway has) do you think people who complain about US military aid to Israel will be mollified? Serious question.
Also, do you think those people care about US military aid to Egypt? My guess is that for the most part they don't even know about it.
Some of them (such as myself) would be (if we were also getting bases, unrestricted access to Israeli defense tech, etc. out of it). But I agree with you that there would be plenty who would not be because they hate Israel for other reasons. But I don't think it's necessarily because of anti-Semitism in all cases, some of the opposition to Israel seems to be because of deranged strains of Third-Worldism as well (and sometimes the two overlap as well).
I do, but I agree that the median American is retarded and ignorant about it. I will point out that the quantity of aid given to Israel is greater than that given to most other countries, so someone could be opposed to it on those grounds (though I admit they usually are not).
I'm personally opposed to almost all foreign aid, unless there is a clear benefit to the American people and taxpayers from that aid.
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The indigenous are just the most recent intellectual cat's paw to be used by the actual native elites to keep the restive natives at bay by humiliating and shaming them for imagined crimes against more historical natives.
Whether it's the poor, the disabled, the gay, the communist, the catholics or the blacks or the jews or the palestinians or the ukrainians, it's just the cudgel of the day. It's how rich mostly-white people who went to the best colleges convince themselves they are chosen by god to lead their countries. The "revolutionary" stance of Ivy league grads and rich kids. It's just a hatred of their own working class, and fear of their electoral power. Only with constant state-funded propaganda, educational brainwashing and public religious ceremonies can the nation be cleansed of its (historical and minor by comparison) sins. And of course, a lot of public money flushed down the toilet of middle-class bureaucrats siphoning off all the cash being spent on the problems they claim to want to alleviate.
I’ve long suspected this, most especially because it explains the very large disconnection between what the liberal elite think about as important issues for minorities and other countries and cultures and what those people who are minorities think and want. It’s very obvious that in very few cases that anyone in the elite actually knows any minorities. Like, no working class minority has ever cared or ever will care about appropriation, or past oppression. They want access to education, they want to live in low crime neighborhoods, they want good jobs. Liberals don’t care about most of that. They have zero interest in fixing local majority minority schools. They don’t care about whether or not those majority minority neighborhoods are safe. They could give a shit less whether the median black man can get a decent job. Moving middle class and upper middle class blacks into slightly better jobs doesn’t fix anything that working class minorities care about.
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I don't have too much to add to what you said, but I think it's interesting to note that Prince Philip's comments in 2002 about Australian aboriginals, specifically him asking if they still threw spears at each other, were vindicated entirely. Even though the Australian media generally still considers him racist over the question, "reality has a rightwing bias" it would seem. I present to you a gang fight in a rural Australian town between two aboriginal gangs, where they literally throw spears at each other (and at a cop car): https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/1gpmasx/brawl_breaks_out_in_remote_aboriginal_community/
Like, I really don't want to be uncharitable to aboriginals, but they have a dysfunction that seems to be on a whole different level than the dysfunction we see in other comparable subcultures. I've been to several Native American reservations throughout the US and gone to school and worked with several natives, I've been in ghetto black parts of cities like Oakland and LA and Baltimore, and I taught several Gypsy families as a missionary in Eastern Europe. All of these groups are doing immeasurably better than Australian aboriginals. Even if you believe that the issues these groups face are due to colonization/slavery/racism/whatever, I don't see how you can argue that Australian aboriginals got treated worse than black chattel slaves in the US. But even blacks the first generation after being freed from slavery seemed to have more civilized behavior than aboriginals centuries after being colonized.
The point I'm trying to make is that blaming colonization for the ills of aboriginals doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Similar to how people point to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the San Francisco Councils of Vigilance Act as proof that historical discrimination isn't keeping present day Asians from succeeding in America, with Australian aboriginals you can point to almost any other aboriginal or otherwise mistreated population across the world and they'll have better results despite often having been treated much worse. Whether that's the Ainu in Japan or the Kurds in the Middle East or the Navajo in America. I just don't see how continuing to lay all the blame on Europeans can continue to hold up to intellectual rigor (though I don't believe my opponents are actually trying to apply intellectual rigor here in the first place).
As a final bonus story about aboriginal dysfunction, because it's simply so absurd that it's hard to believe it's real. Truth really is stranger than fiction:
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-10784597/Wadeye-Northern-Territory-burns-22-clans-war-brutal-tribal-rivalry-violence.html
Ironically, the use of archery is itself assimilating- the aborigines didn’t have it until introduced by Europeans.
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My mom did a few years teaching in rural Western Australia. Twice a year the indigenous half of the school would empty out for essentially a grand tribal council out in the bush that took a week or so. One of the main functions of this would be that members judged to have broken native law would be speared in the thighs as a punishment
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Sometimes I wonder if there's anyone left anywhere who actually believes this. Someone believed it fifty or sixty years ago, and every western country has been marching straight into the garbage can after it ever since.
Essentially nobody "actually" believes it in the sense that they would bet their life savings on it. But at the same time, many people believe it in the sense that they have sincerely fooled themselves into believing it; they will sincerely and eagerly support public policies based on these beliefs; etc.
The fact is that most people are pretty good at fooling themselves into believing ridiculous things; things that deep down they know aren't true.
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Yes, I meet fairly intelligent people all the time who actually believe this. Trying to suggest to them that the truth is less hopeful has never gone well.
I think this is straightforwardly because everyone in Western society has been raised from birth to believe that some ideas are right, some ideas are wrong, and some ideas are evil. That last category can never even be seriously considered without becoming the absolute worst sort of person. No one wants to be the bad guy, so open-mindedness here is strongly contraindicated.
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I understand the logic that sits behind their way of thinking. The day you stop believing people can live together in harmony, peace and security is the day you lose it. If the attempts to keep that vision alive were always going to be doomed to fail and if America is the next USSR or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then I’m not really optimistic about the future.
It's worth noting that neither of those Empires looked like a powder keg ten years before they detonated.
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