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 -
Jews have assimilated pretty well in the US. Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?
This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence. (Not modhatted, because I'm in the conversation, but you should know better.)
If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.
(2) being most obviously exemplified by the memetic double claim 'fellow white people now is time to end racism/whiteness etc' + 'I'm not white I'm Jewish' when time comes to explain why affirmative action somehow does not apply to Jewish-heavy institutions.
Then yes.
But guess what, that is implicitly and sometimes explicitly what is demanded of white people. 'stop supporting whiteness'.
'stop surrounding yourself with other white people' / 'stop excluding non-whites' / 'stop taking non-whites' space [in formerly white-built institutions]
Why wouldn't it be more inclusive to have every synagogue open to worship Mohammed or even Hitler?
Well then not all Jews (NAJ).
Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.
[ADL & co / Kanye West / Adidas]
But uh oh isn't that an antisemitic trope to claim that a handful of Jews have disproportionate power?!
This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.
This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."
Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.
Even if we go with "Jews control Hollywood," yeah, that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."
Not a very common thing to see. At least we can admit that they are pretty insular people.
In the one country where there is a large amount of them, Israel, they can't really be said to be very nice to the non-Jews.
Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.
All the Jews that exist now descend from people that had a chance to convert at some point, and decided not to.
And they've taught their descendants not to.
Similarly to the Amish. The Amish exist because they descend from a line of people that decided not to adopt technology and to teach their children not to. There are very few converts.
At any point in time an Amish person can decide to stop living the Amish life. Sure, they could still be considered Amish, but their children or grand-children would not.
The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.
Imagine if the owner of TheMotte was talking trash about the Amish and the Amish somehow coordinated with payment processing systems, internet infrastructure companies, other corporations to force the owner to close the website.
And when they would try go tell somebody about these events, their media invites would get cancelled or the media that did decide to host them would get banned from internet infrastructure companies, payment processing companies, etc.
This is what happens very often if not always when somebody talks trash about the Jews.
This would be fair if that was the first time this ever happened.
Rick Sanchez had the same issues in the 2010s.
Norm was joking about it in the 90s
My point of view is that a conspiracy does not need to exist for the results that we see.
I think that Jews in general, going through the historical selection that they went through, led them to inherit characteristics of people that not only cannot assimilate to a wider body of humanity, but also constantly feel under attack from the majority of humanity, and tend to overreact to that perceived attack, therefore triggering resentment.
Kind of like the common psychological phenomenon of somebody feeling insecure, thinking that everybody is constantly judging or scrutinizing them, therefore projecting an aura of awkwardness wherever they go, and causing people to perceive them as they self-evaluate.
These people find each over and bond over their uniqueness and their vulnerability against the rest of the mean world, and when inevitably their behavior causes the rest of the tribe to suffer, they are the first out the door, and the most likely to survive!
Who is most likely to survive a banking riot, the honest guy that doesn't really have any opinion about banking, or the insider Sam Bankman-Fried, who knows that there's a lot of bad things happening in banking, and if they're not coming for him, the pitchforks outside the windows are not good news anyway?
The easiest for rich, powerful Jews to get others to like them, is to personify noblesse oblige.
Be generous with your money, share your wealth, be a role model for others.
What do so many of them do?
George Soros goes and hires people to make US cities more dangerous (soft on crime DAs).
Others found organizations to help people illegally immigrate to the US (break the laws that protect the American people).
Sam Bankman Fried goes and scams a bunch of do-gooders who wanted to improve charity.
And of course the endless stream of progressive media 'stop whiteness now', 'you are racist for having standards of how your country should be that rich Jews disagree with' etc.
This is historical too. So many Jews could not stand that Americans had a right to self-association so they funded the Civil Rights movement.
The Amish like their life a certain way, they like to live among themselves and not mingle with others, like the Jews, but they're not forcing or even coercing anyone else to live their beliefs, drop their borders, accommodate foreigners, accommodate sexual minorities, drug addicts, etc.
"The Jews" don't control banking and media corporations - specific Jews do - and they're not uniformly Jewish. As I keep banging on about, Jews come in all sorts of different groups, and increasingly they're not even all that Jewish at all.
Then it would behoove those jews who are apparently not being represented by the 'elite' jews to stop supporting them through ethno centric advocacy groups that go as far as to say that any talk of 'international' or 'cosmopolitan' elites is inherently anti-semitic.
You can't have AIPAC, the ADL, and the thousands of jewish advocacy groups in the US and act like the concept of a 'jew' doesn't hold any value and that it can just be brushed away by mention of the fact that poor jews exist.
Unlike the anti-white racial theories of unconscious bias and systemic racism, anti-semitism doesn't need to go that far to make its point. It just needs to point to any one of the widely supported explicitly racially exclusive jewish advocacy groups.
Every group in history has learned the lesson that you bury your differences with your in-group(s) when the out-group(s) attack. This would hold even for Jews. Why wouldn't they defend people that don't represent them if they happen to be in the same nominal group? This can happen even as they claim there's no meaningful concept as a Jew, yes?
Again, Scott had the post (which I can't remember the name of) about how there is a value in defending someone "related" to you from even the slightest attack even as you may have substantial disagreements with them.
OK, but I want to recognize, in the context my original reply to Supah, that we are going very swiftly from 'not all jews' to 'of course all jews'.
I would also like to recognize the inherent problems with the fact that jews naturally outgroup non-jews. And that some jews have displayed extreme neuroticism when it comes to interpreting whether the ingroup is being persecuted or not.
I think we can also recognize that there are inherent issues with this dynamic that are very conducive to causing problems. As is argued in the OP, the very nature of something like the narrative of the holocaust transcends just matters of historical fact. It has to be defended tooth and nail at every point, like you mention, regardless of whether it be true or not. Because it's perceived by jews as a matter of survival. Same goes for the variety of other social memes like the authoritarian personality, critical theory and their derivatives. Say what you want about those memes, but they are not there to help gentiles. They are there to help jews.
I feel that there is an alleged proposition inherent to all of the jew apologetics surrounding these issues. That is that, ultimately, whether it harms gentiles or not is irrelevant. It doesn't ultimately matter if the jew running around defending every bunk social theory or historical narratives is doing good or bad or telling truth or lie. We are just implicitly supposed to recognize and appreciate the inherent logic to the actions of the unapologetic jew. Regardless of its consequences.
No, it's not the same. Supah's point is about who owns the banks. My point is that groups like the ADL can and probably do defend those Jews against anti-Semitism (or its perception, anyway) even without any power/sway at those banks.
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