site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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.

5
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Something to note when considering Ashkenazi in Europe is history is that they really were their own nation, a kind of mobile and extra-territorial nation who 100% believed they were their own peoplehood. The Rabbis had jurisdiction over their subjects and could excommunicate anyone at will. They had their own laws and traditions and tax codes. This means that when you read about “oppression”, you are actually reading about a conflict between two nations. This needs to be dwelled upon, because if you compare European-Jewish conflict to European-European conflict, you quickly see that Jews were the least attacked and the safest group in Europe by a large margin. (Consider this an historical White on White argument if you must). Of course there would be conflicts against Jews, their own nation was in a geographical area made up of many states and ruled by hereditary rulers. And of course they would lose these conflicts, because they chose to be their own traveling nation. But compare the bloodshed between, say, Catholics and Protestants, or even British versus British in the War of the Roses with 100,000 dead. Jews have little to complain about regarding their treatment in European history before the holocaust, as they were the safest group by a large margin.

If the Jews were behaving like sovereign citizens and (e.g.) refusing to pay taxes or follow laws, then "persecuting the Jews is no worse than a conflict with a foreign state" might be somewhat defensible.

But it sounds like you're saying "Yeah you pay French taxes and follow French laws and have lived in France all your life, but you don't follow French culture, so you shouldn't get the game-theoretic protections of being part of France". If you agree that (e.g.) Mormons deserve to live without persecution, I feel like that should also extend to Jews.

Jews in the middle ages often did live under their own laws and pay taxes separately while being citizens of the same state as gentiles.

I suspect "often" is doing some weaseling here. After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_the_Jews_in_Europe I see exactly one example, which was in the town of Altona

From 1584 to 1639, as in the Middle Ages, the Jews of Altona paid taxes specific to the Jews, but no further taxes. Each Jewish family was required to pay 6 Reichstaler per year. Under Danish rule this changed: the Jews continued to pay the specifically Jewish taxes plus the same taxes as all other residents.

Do you think it was common for Jews to pay less in taxes than ordinary citizens? Can you provide an example of a kingdom where this happened? Do you think in kingdoms where this didn't happen (I'm guessing the vast majority) Jews shouldn't have received the same rights as other citizens?

The Middle Ages were radically different. Even disputing a Christian doctrine in a Catholic country could you have killed. Apostasy in a Muslim country would have you killed, and apostasy in a Jewish city as a Jew would have you made anathema with the threat of being killed. Today is much different than the Middle Ages. I’m merely asserting that the Jews as a whole did not face more threat than everyone else, because everyone else was dying in wars and starving to death (outside the “urban” center).

Yeah you pay French taxes and follow French laws and have lived in France all your life, but you don't follow French culture, so you shouldn't get the game-theoretic protections of being part of France"

This is of course perfectly coherent and sensible to essentially anybody before 1789.

The idea of nationhood as citizenship is a liberal innovation. And frankly, jury is still out on whether that was a good idea or not. Let alone if it's compatible with any national culture at all.

Not sure this is right. What about Hobbes? Surely the relevant point here is whether Jews were under the French state in a similar manner to Frenchmen, not whether they were considered part of the nation of Frenchmen, which doesn't seem especially relevant. They submitted to the leviathan, paid its taxes, followed its laws etc. so why should they not also benefit from its protection?

What about Hobbes? He's one of the earliest of Liberals and Leviathan, though it justifies this position very well in a way I personally believe, was an extremely controversial book that earned him the contempt of his royalist friends, anglicans and Catholics. He is by no means "essentially anybody".

Protection in exchange for taxes doesn't require hobbes, it's just feudalism. Earlier, even. The world's oldest profession... for men.

As long as the jews or goths or cumans pay taxes and obey the king, they should not be treated as a foreign army or persecuted by the rest of the king's subjects. One doesn't need liberalism to justify this arrangement.

As long as the jews or goths or cumans pay taxes and obey the king, they should not be treated as a foreign army or persecuted by the rest of the king's subjects.

Why?

I mean it, explain as you would to a catholic ruler why you shouldn't persecute those who have no kinship, cultural ties to your realm and whom you don't even share a religion with.

Why not just kill them and take their stuff or convert them except that it might be impractical at the moment?

The catholic church explicitly extended protection and tolerance to the Jews, something not extended to other religious minorities who were persecuted. The only reason Jews could exist in catholic and orthodox Europe was that they were Jews and not something else.

Mutual benefit. Loyalty without competition (as in, a jew cannot replace you as the new king like a catholic could). Honoring your word. You're asking why anyone would act morally. I doubt they do it because of 'cultural ties'.

Just because a policy is ruthless does not make it beneficial to the realm. The dutch and americans soaked up all the religious freaks nobody wanted and it made them rich. Has that king ever heard of the goose with the golden eggs?

Khmelnitsky’s uprising is a pretty clear counterexample.

Did Jews ever declare war on the standard European nations? If you had two countries like England and France who had numerous wars over their history, but every war was initiated by the French, I would say the English were "oppressed" of a sort.

This needs to be dwelled upon, because if you compare European-Jewish conflict to European-European conflict, you quickly see that Jews were the least attacked and the safest group in Europe by a large margin.

The logic in this claim seems completely wrong. You're comparing the number of times, say, England and France declared war on each other, to the times they declared war on Jews. Only, the jews are living in England and France; when an invading English army sweeps through the French countryside, they don't carefully avoid the Jewish settlements. So the jews get hit with the same attacks as everyone else in their country, and they get hit with specifically targeted attacks against jews also. That's a lot more threat, not a lot less.

Jews did not primarily live in the countryside during European history outside of Russia, iirc. They would live in close proximity to the King with whom they had a unique economic partnership. There were no agricultural Jews in Northern, Southern, or Central Europe, unless I am mistaken.

Jews did not primarily live in the countryside during European history outside of Russia

Could they even own or rent land? Or be serfs?

They had their own quarters of a city with nearly full self-rule and a religious freedom that no one else in Europe had. This was clearly desirable to them which is why they traveled great lengths to live in Europe. Humans don’t really value whether they “own land” (after all, in America it’s not yours if you don’t pay taxes), they care whether they have a place of their own with self-rule. They were given their own unique quarters of European cities where they were free of all the pains of the typical serf or peasant and were protected by the personal interest of the King. In practice, is that ownership? In the cases where they loaned money, they held the value of many properties, but as non-agricultural people, they had no interest in owning and living in farm lands in Western Europe. In fact, the Talmud has passages about how farming is a disreputable profession, which is one of the reasons Ashkenazi didn’t farm much.

Humans don’t really value whether they “own land”

Do you have any evidence for this?

More generally, any sources that whether people historically want to live in the countryside is independent of whether they could earn a living, either on their own land or someone else's, in the jobs that exist in the countryside?

It seems that legal restrictions on what Jews could do is a sufficient explanation of why they lived in cities, sometimes with segregation to Jewish quarters. When they could work in the countryside, as in parts of Eastern Europe, it seems they did, like everyone else in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In Central Europe during 30 years war:

https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545974

The rewards for their cooperation began to accrue to the Jews directly following the crushing of the Bohemian rebels at the Battle of the White Mountain, in November 1620. With the Protestant forces dis-persed, the city of Prague was ruthlessly sacked, all that is except for the Judenstadt. The emperor's soldiery were under strict instructions, which they obeyed, not to enter the Jewish quarter.

The privileged treatment continued under the new governor of Bohemia, Karl von Liechtenstein, a nobleman with close links with Jacob Bassevi, the Jewish financier who was at the center of the efforts to raise Jewish cash for the emperor and who had been ennobled--the first Jew to receive such an honor from a Holy Roman Emperor--by Rudolph II, in 1614.

In conclusion, it does seem that previous views of the fate of Central European Jewry during the Thirty Years' War stand in need of revision. The influence of certain preconceived notions appears to be widely dis-cernible in the historiography, ideas which have tended to distort our view of the question. On the one hand, there is an entrenched expecta-tion that as a defenseless and supposedly constantly victimized group, the jews of Germany and Austria must have been "easy prey for the marauding soldiery."

On the other, there is the marked tendency in pre-1939 German Jewish historical writing to flatly deny that the Jews were affected by or experienced major historical events differently from other Germans. The truth is that the terrible upheavals of the Thirty Years' War mostly worked in favor of German and all Central Euro-pean Jewry, appreciably enhanced the Jewish role in German life, and prepared the ground for the "Age of the Court Jew"-the late seven-teenth and early eighteenth century-the high-water mark of Jewish influence on Central European commerce and finance.

Note that 30% of HRE population died (though, unsure how many from violence and starvation rather than disease; perhaps 3-6% of that number) during the Thirty Years’ War. I also can’t find a number on the the number of Jews in the HRE at that time, but we can be certain they died less due to starvation, pillaging, and combat.

As for all of European history? I don’t think any Academic has crunched those numbers.

I guess a comparison could be made to other peoples in territories ruled by another power (eg the Welsh).

The best example of this right now are arguably the Kurdish.

And the Celts. The celts were obliterated by the Romans and then the Saxons, and Wales was the last Celtic holdout.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats