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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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no doubt when there is talk about black people you don't feign ignorance.

No, "black people" is exactly the same sort of weird concept. It makes some sense to denote a cultural group inside of the US ("African-Americans" and "Caucasian-Americans", if you want), but the people who feel loyalty to it always unilaterally want to increase its legitimacy by extending it to other groups that are nothing like them and not even like each other. "White identity, history and culture", as held by most of those who would actually use those terms, starts in or around 17th century America, as does "black identity, history and culture"; and Jews in my European countr(y/ies) seem clearly more aligned to me (in terms of culture, history, interests, probably even genetics) than the typical American White Nationalist.

No, "black people" is exactly the same sort of weird concept.

No it isn't, at least according to Chat GPT. There's the answer to your question. You live in your own little world where you declare racial categories that people identify with to be not real- that's fine, but Chat GPT will identify one as real and emphasize that it should be treated with respect and cultural sensitivity, while the other racial category is questionable at best- its entire existence is doubtful it should be regarded with suspicion because of all its negative associations.

Jews in my European countr(y/ies) seem clearly more aligned to me (in terms of culture, history, interests, probably even genetics) than the typical American White Nationalist.

I suppose that would depend on your interests and concerns- that is true for a large portion of white people in the United States as well who take your position that there is no such thing as white people who would have any ethnic interests. There are plenty of Europeans who would be happy to see themselves become minorities in their own countries, and they would obviously not be aligned with American white nationalists. Your position isn't novel, it sounds like you've learned your lessons.

I would feel like more of a minority in my own country if the American white nationalists got their way, because they are nothing like me and tend to engage in ruthless cultural imperialism.

From the outside, all this pleading for kinship and alliance from American political groups always feels like part of a good cop/bad cop routine: "The red-hat Americans want to destroy/assimilate your culture! Quick, you must let us blue-hat Americans assimilate/destroy your culture to prevent that!". I do think that I might well have some "ethnic interests", if you define it as interests that are along the lines of perpetuating the culture and memescape of a group that is strongly correlated with ancestry; but among the first and foremost ones of those would be the interest in keeping out American culture, which, as I'm noting, includes the notion that "white [and not Jewish]" is an ethnic group. As a transplant I'm in an awkward position to take strong stances here, but I hope that both my Russian (original) and my $western_european_country (adopted) coethnics, whether they are Jewish or Gentile, will rally to defend that particular ethnic interest.

I would feel like more of a minority in my own country if the American white nationalists got their way, because they are nothing like me and tend to engage in ruthless cultural imperialism.

There are a lot of things you could charge white nationalists with, but that's probably the most baseless criticism I've seen. White nationalists are quite far from the levers of cultural power, and it's ironic that you chiefly complain about the contemporary cultural export of American Empire in the context of this discussion, where one group has a huge amount of power in generating and perpetuating that cultural output and the other has none. Yet you feel compelled to regard Jews as allies against notions of whiteness, I think you've already internalized more of American Culture than you realize.