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I agree that a Jewish rejection of idolatry would be akin to a rejection of tyranny, but the Jewish voices you see in the media don't actually reject idolatry. You can tell that by the way they treat the holocaust. Dennis Prager said that questioning any part of the official narrative means you're denying it in its totality, which means you're evil, which means that if hell exists, you will go there. And this guy is a dissident Jewish voice!
And yeah, the fact that Jews are a monotheistic religion is important, I guess. But so is the role that Jewish people (were believed to have) played in the formation of the USSR. Why isn't that mentioned in this article? Or in most articles on this subject?
By the way, what're your views on the holocaust, if you don't mind me asking? The fact that people get so mad about holocaust revisionism leads me to believe there must be something to it, but I'm not educated enough to say what that something is. I do believe the Nazi party deliberately murdered several million Jews because they don't want Jews in their territory. I don't care about the specifics beyond that, and I think calling anyone who disagrees on the specifics beyond that a "denier" is insane. It's weird to me that David Cole gets so much flack for saying the gas chambers were fake, when he still claims that the Nazis committed genocide. (And in case anyone lobs an accusation at me, I don't think the gas chambers were fake. I just think that if they were, it would change nothing.)
I don't think this is a good tendency. Possibly related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence
It's a good post, but I wish it explicitly attacked the claim that "to find out who rules over you, find out who you're not allowed to criticize", because that's what's relevant here.
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't differentiate between group X and people who don't want group X attacked for some reason. In the case of Jews, the assertion is that Jews rule over you, but this is not necessarily the case - it can also be that the people who rule you do not want Jews attacked for a variety of reasons.
Right. I don't literally think the people who you can't criticize are your rulers, but they are people who your rulers hold sacred. But I'd classify the people who don't want me to "attack" Jews as people who hold Jews sacred. This also applies to concepts. The holocaust is sacred because I can't question it.
No, because the goal can still be to fight against the attacker, not protect the defender. That is, if they think anti-Semitism is immoral, but are indifferent to the Jews themselves, then they would still not allow you to speak. This isn't implausible under a good-faith dialogue framework, like what we have here where the most virulent attacks are banned.
This is too broad and vague. Where can you not question it? What parts of it, and in what manner, can you not question? Are you banned from poking holes in the narrative to at least shift the Overton Window your way?
You shouldn't conflate "able to say things outside the Overton Window" with "literally not possible to every meaningfully question it".
I do conflate them, because I think the Overton window is absurd and should not exist. I don't want to move it to the left or right, I want to smash it into pieces.
Destroying the Overton Window is synonymous with destroying a people, a culture, a civilization - all three of those are defined a great deal by their Overton Windows. "We hold these rights to be self-evident" is an anchor on the Overton Window that defines part of what it means to be an American, for example.
If you want to destroy this, you'd essentially be saying that Americans, Russians, Chinese, etc. and their civilizations don't exist. Is that what you're after?
You make a good point. How wide can we make the Overton window before anti-free speech norms take hold? (Crap, this is that Karl Popper thing, isn't it)
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