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.
I think this hints a core intuitive objection I have to the narrative you are seeking to weave here. What do we know about the non-Jewish lawyers on the pro-civil rights side of the "standard civil rights cases" you are talking about here? I would wager that some very clear pattern would emerge, which would correspond to a picture that is more along the lines of there being two broad coalitions fighting (urban vs. rural? Moldbug's Brahmins vs Optimates?), of which the Jews overwhelmingly side with one. That picture, though, no longer provides the categorical support for the "civil rights is a Jewish plan against the Gentiles" picture you are seeking to paint (though of course it is not inconsistent with it; a scheme can of course include dupes and Quislings). I would, for example, guess that to the extent non-white lawyers were involved in civil rights cases, they were also all on the pro-civil rights side; yet, most WNs tend to not ascribe enough agency to them to call civil rights a black/brown/yellow/red plot.
All being said, though, even if your thesis is true, so what? If the civil rights movement is indeed a destructive plot by triple-parens them, I can't get myself to think this is particularly immoral, given that they have a pretty solid case for retaliation/self-defense in destroying whatever it destroys. I also don't think I can't oppose it based on self-interest, because I think so far I've been a net beneficiary even taking into account all of its failings and wrong turns and local negatives.
I am not on board lepidus's claims in any real way, but I have seen several conservative rabbis make points that are...similar to his. Their points have generally boiled down to something like, "Jews are so overwhelmingly irrationally afraid of white gentiles oppressing them, that they will enable any outside force to be against that force, no matter how self destructive." I first saw this point right after 9/11 when a lot of progressive Jews were on the "stop Muslim hate" train, and they would be pointing out quietly that Jews would be pretty screwed if Islam became a political force in the US. I saw some similar takes after Trump took office. But conservative rabbis represent a very small % of Jews.
Probably has to do with context. Islam in America doesn't seem very attuned to the more fundamentalist preaching exported from Saudi Arabia. Cases of Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so.
There are relatively few Muslims in the US. But quite a few Muslim terrorist incidents. And plenty of smaller incidents where Muslims and Jews are in proximity, such as NYC, though these don't seem to be tracked on a national level.
I'm seeing 15 on Wikipedia for the US, that seems rare to me. Also, what's the source on the Muslim-Jew incidents?
What do you mean, rare? The boogeyman of the left, white nationalism is at 11, if wiki is the scale we're using.
Some of the other categories contain even more islamic perps, like antisemitic, and palestininan terrorism. Not to mention islamic terrorism did by far the most victims, outweighing all other forms of terrorism combined.
Even the 2017 study, ignoring the twin elephants in the room, comes to that conclusion:
The article wiki uses as source here is confused. Its central, vehement point is that far more resources should be devoted to far-right terrorism, yet its own (and in my opinion, already cherry-picked) statistics show that despite the government's focus on islamic terrorism, it remains the greater threat. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly equalized all forms of terrorism to foil 55% (the mean of the two threats) : far-right deaths would be reduced by 24, islamic deaths would jump by 79.
Suspiciously absent from that wikipedia article are black supremacist attacks, like waukesha. And the dallas and NY police killings (quote from a perp: "I want to kill white people, especially white officers"), although mentioned in the introduction, are not in the categorized list. But I guess it's just "isolated incidents", they needed the space for a couple of anti-abortion attempted murders.
I mean that Wiki is listing 15 attacks in 20 years, with the clear outlier being 9/11. I didn't say anything about how rare or common white nationalist attacks were.
You said "Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so." That 'exceptionnally rare' is 100% false.
But okay. You mean then, that terrorism is rare in general. That may be true, but so are wars. And one can cause the other, as 9/11 or sarajevo '14 have shown.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link