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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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How is this extremism? His politics essentially are that he wants to avoid massive demographic change that will not only greatly replace his own ethnic group but also causes a low trust and dysfunctional society. Not wanting wage dumping by cheap illegal migrants isn't extremism.

Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects is more extreme than not wanting mass migration. Wanting to burn thousands of Libyans alive in firestorms in order to turn Africa's most developed country into a mess run by jihadist groups is extremism. Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism. Labelling every 16+ year old man in Afghanistan a legitimate military target while backing drug cartel government is extremism. Bailing out the banks while people foreclose on their homes is extremism. Going 30 000 000 000 000 dollars in debt largely due to spending more on the military than the next 9 biggest militaries combined when your neighbors are Canada and Mexico is extremism. The patriot act and the incredible power of the NSA is extreme. Pretty much the entirety of mainstream Republican Party positions are extremist positions that ordinary people would have a difficult time supporting if it was explained to them.

Wanting the politics that Republicans would call far left anti Israel politics if it was applied to Israel isn't right wing extremism just because it is in the US. Why is a wall In Israel not an extremist policy, but a wall separating the Mexican drug war from the US is when tens of thousands of Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year?

Wanting the politics that Republicans would call far left anti Israel politics if it was applied to Israel isn't right wing extremism just because it is in the US. Why is a wall In Israel not an extremist policy, but a wall separating the Mexican drug war from the US is when tens of thousands of Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year?

The advocatus diabolus case would probably be something like: "Because what is extremism and what isn't is path-dependent, and the Jews have recent historical form to believe that people are trying to genocide them, whereas white people don't. They're karmically allowed a surfeit of caution, you're not."

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews, but this time they actually were. The fact that systematic extermination hadn't been seen before was insufficient defence against it happening in 1933, and so by analogy it's no defence against it happening to whites in 2023.

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews

Not fully, but Jews had been conditioned over the past 100 years to the idea that their neighbors could turn on them at any moment in smaller-scale violence (i.e., "only" 5-10 dead, and maybe a dozen women raped plus various property destruction, sub-lethal beatings, etc.) which occasionally escalated in turn into something much worse. Like, imagine if the 1992 LA anti-Korean riots kept occurring in LA every 5 years or so, with fatalities each time. Or if BLM went out and rampaged through white suburbs every couple years. Under those conditions, it seems pretty obvious why they would have been a mite twitchy.

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews, but this time they actually were. The fact that systematic extermination hadn't been seen before was insufficient defence against it happening in 1933, and so by analogy it's no defence against it happening to whites in 2023.

I'm not a big fan of the 'holocaust means Israel gets to do settler colonialism' argument but your argument is either trivial or really bad. If your point is "an unprecedented thing happened once, therefore the probability of it happening again is not 0", then sure, but that doesn't tell us anything about what the actualy probability is. If your point is the probability of Jews getting genocided in 1930's Germany is similar to the probability of whites being genocided in 2020's America that's ridiculous. Just the difference in population share should be enough to indicate the situation is wildly different before we even get into the waves of pogroms that swept Eastern Europe during the Russian Revolution and the relative recency of Jewish legal equality in Germany.

The better argument is that identity politics shouldn't stop at race. "People like me" were very much subject to murder and internment, more recently and in more places than the Jews, the rich the educated and Christians were killed or imprisoned in Cambodia, China, Russia. That those people were "like me" in our social class and means of subsistence rather than in some nebulous genetic sense doesn't alter the impact.