This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Part 1: Da Jooz totally did it (Negro communism edition)
Prologue: David Cole Stein has a wonderful post on how conservatives do best when they 'notice': "Hey look at all the deranged homeless people screaming at you on the subway", but are limited by their own stupid tendency to also promote grand theories for why things happen: "The dems are brainwashed by Chinese communist propaganda". When you combine an observable and undeniable fact, with even a plausible but unprovable theory (and for the record I think CCP propaganda theories are psychotic), you provide people with a social license to dump it all in the trash. Some (Kevin McDonald cough) might find that a small price to pay to be considered Sherlock Holmes. Well, Motters, I'm not gonna let you get off that easy.
Thesis: Jewish elite overrepresentation in destructive cultural movements is not explained by their higher intelligence. It is also a critical factor, perhaps the critical factor in setting these off and shaping the direction these take. When Jewish elites act, they are representing the values of Jews in particular, not merely elites generally. Jews are always willing to go further than general elite opinion.
The Jewish Public vs. The Comparable Gentile Public
The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd), and that the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority. Here are the voting patterns of Whites with college degrees - at the time corresponding roughly in IQ to the average Jew, and Jews:
WHITE COLLEGE GRADUATES - NIXON - 80 - 82% ___ VS ___ JEWS - HUMPHREY - 81%
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-voting-record-in-u-s-presidential-elections
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-may-become-the-first-republican-in-60-years-to-lose-white-college-graduates/
The harmful role of Jewish Elites
In 1948, The US government joined a black plaintiff and their black lawyers in suing to abolish restrictive covenants, which limited the sale of homes to Blacks. Note critically, that restrictive covenants were private agreements between private homeowners; and thereby entirely outside the scope of any plausible interpretation of the constitution. Of course, by US government I mean; Jewish solicitor general Philip Elman, four Jewish lawyers and not a single gentile lawyer. This great dose of Jewish overrepresentation was obscured on the advice of Arnold Raum (take a guess) who said:
The Supreme Court sided with the US Government, and the only mechanism protecting tens of millions of Americans, including 80% of homes in Los Angeles and Chicago; from the carnage that was to follow, was rendered unenforceable. This was single most important battleground of the civil rights movement, and it was won by the enemy before people knew the war was going on.
RETRACTION NOTICE
Boy have I screwed the pooch here. As @Gdanning notes, Cohen was actually arguing for the company's ability to conduct IQ tests, not against it. He also alleges Jewish support for opposing racial quotas in Bakke v. California. I'll verify and update accordingly.
Here Jewish representation tends to be more balanced, corresponding well to their representation in the American elite generally. Critically however, Jewish lawyers never appear on the anti-civil rights side of a case.
Here again, the US government joined the black plaintiff in requesting that the Court establish the precedent that promoting based on intelligence tests would be like providing equality of opportunity "merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox." In other words, presumptively discriminatory unless you could prove otherwise.
Perceptive readers will note that by US government, I mean Lawrence M. Cohen speaking in the name of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Response to Objections:
Readers may note that all of these decisions required the cooperation of a majority gentile supreme court. This is a fair objection but I would note that SCOTUS judges are immunized from repercusions by their lifelong tenure and high status. No one was gonna turn down offering a job to any SCOTUS judge afterwards, regardless of what he did. A lawyer who forcibly integrated your neighbourhood, was a different matter. I don't doubt that there were a few non-jews in the office of the solicitor general who supported Shelley, but only the Jews had the sheer guts to pursue it.
Once again, some apparent white nationalist has noticed that lots of elite are left-wing and assumed that's because they're Jewish rather than because the elite are like that.
I don't like the idea of the elite consensus being an emergent property of being elite without it being taken into account what shapes these emergent properties.
As an example, I think it makes sense from an elite perspective to be, to make a long story short, 'pro-Heritage Foundation'. If you own a lot of the economy it makes sense you want 'line' to go up. Simple.
But there are also cases where this doesn't make as much sense. For example, there is nothing self evident about wanting to tear down the old structures or make drastic changes to the order of society. Why would an elite, that is already on top, want to do such a thing? It makes no sense. Unless, of course, the 'elite' sees themselves as an outsider to those structures. Which was the case for the new elite of jews and Catholics that started making up significant portions of the elite in America from 1930's onwards.
The balance of the elite shifted from what it was due to this influx of outsider elites who had different incentives from the old elite of, what was mostly, Liberal Protestants. This led to the many debates and intellectual clashes that made up the culture war of old. Where the 'old guard' stood behind the old structures whilst the new elite was tearing them down and building new ones out of the rubble. The one I'm familiar with, on race, is highly illustrative of this. From Boas and his fraudulent anthropology, that is the bedrock of modern American anthropology. Which helped facilitate the landscape that pushed men like Carleton Coon away. To Gould and his alternative timeline of evolutionary biology and what would later be recognized as completely fraudulent biology. Contrasted with Wilson and his fights against Gould and Lewontin and I think you have, at least in a specific area, a good illustrative example of what was going on at every single level of academia where anyone was putting up a fight against the new elite. And whilst the ratio of old vs new, WASP vs jew, was still balanced enough that you could have an explicit culture war at the elite level, the ratio kept skewing further and further 'new'. Giving us what we have today.
Another illustrative example would be the drastic change at the ACLU. Which I assume most are familiar with.
This wasn't an emergent change that happened naturally because elites are how they are because they are elites. There was a stark change in the demographics of Americas elite. New faces. New races. And the drastic change is not just correlated with this new ethnic makeup and overrepresentation of jews but also corroborated by specific historical examples where these jews ousted the old to make way for a new ideology that better suited their being.
It's hard to write in support of the WASP elite since it, along with the white American middle class, is finally getting what they've had coming for a long time now. And though it may be the fault of the WASP to have ever let the new elite in, ultimately the real driving force behind the change was the new elite.
I think there's a great segment from the linked interview with E.O. Wilson that illustrates the failure of the old mindset:
Yeah you're right. the ACLU has always been aggressively jewish. I felt the difference was that back then it had to play by old structure rules to get what it wanted with the Civil Rights stuff. Compared to now when it doesn't need to bother with such games. But I think that historical narrative is born more out of mythology than reality.
The early ACLU was a support organization for communist revolution in America. They may have dropped this once the Soviets shook hands with the Nazis, but they seem to have had few qualms about the whole mass murder part. Then again, I'm not sure how Jewish it was back then, so Jews might have actually improved it. This article mentions mainly gentiles.
https://reason.com/2017/12/14/communist-dissonance/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link