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Every discussion with you reaches this point, where I observe that for post after post, you have ignored all my direct and specific challenges to each point you made, and simply try to grab the ball and run in a different direction with it.
Until next time, I am done playing "Look, squirrel!"
You never even bothered answering my question re: Caplan, and I guess you don't want to answer the question I just posed either. "But Caplan said he didn't want Jews to get too much power" is a non-answer. The point was that Caplan looks at society and says "damn, it would be better for it to be diverse so that the majority cannot organize against me." I asked you if this could be considered an example of disempowering a legacy majority and reading your post I see no answer.
This is a falsehood. I wrote an entire paragraph in response, which you have chosen to ignore. "Caplan directly contradicted your entire premise, and also you snuck in a lot of assumptions that weren't actually there" is not a non-answer.
Caplan wants more diversity because he considers it to be less threatening than a homogenous population, it doesn't matter how many paragraphs you write, that is what Caplan is talking about and I'm simply asking if we can interpret "more diversity == less threatening" to be an advocacy for disempowering a legacy majority?
Tell you what - when you answer some of my direct questions, I'll take up the task of dissecting yours again.
I will answer your questions by attempting to clarify my position:
Let's say that 100% of the Jewish academics, Hollywood producers, media execs, financiers, etc. who acquired station in the United States since the 1900s were Chinese instead of Jewish. For example, take every single Jewish intellectual in the Frankfurt school and suppose they were Chinese instead of Jewish, and repeat that across all of society for the past century. Freud was Chinese, Franz Boas was Chinese, every media exec in this image were Chinese instead of Jewish... Let's say that all the exact ideological, academic, and cultural movements have otherwise been identical, except instead the prevailing consternation over anti-Semitism, anti-Chinese sentiments were regarded with equal severity in the United States today.
If I were to say, "these Chinese are a hostile elite: they promote ideology and radical movements that criticize white identity and call for a whole-of-society effort to dismantle 'White Supremacy' while simultaneously calling for a whole-of-society effort to prevent anti-Chinese sentiments. They present this dynamic as a universal moral good, a healing of the world, but it seems pretty self-serving. They themselves are Chinese ethnic nationalists, many of them have Chinese citizenship and identify strongly with that country, even as they criticize and suppress any advocacy for white identity in our own country. Anybody who criticizes Chinese influence or behavior is regarded as a deranged genocidal lunatic who should be de-personed from social media, the labor force, payment processors, and polite society. This is hostile."
Do you think it would be reasonable to say: "So you're saying that the Chinese are lizard people who have it in their DNA to destroy their outgroup?" I am saying the Chinese are a hostile elite, that is not a statement on the behavior or motivation of every single Chinese person.
Now this scenario with the Chinese playing this role is unlikely for two reasons: First, despite their intelligence they completely lack the Jewish talent for creating myth, propaganda, and social narratives... amazingly, people here are citing the worldwide adherence to Abrahamic religion as evidence for the innocuity of Jewish mythmaking, rather than acknowledging that as evidence for the potent psychological influence of their talents. This is without a shadow of a doubt derived from their cognitive profile that goes way beyond IQ alone. This talent is the most HBD-relevant point and what sets Jews apart, as indeed trying to influence culture to the benefit of your ingroup isn't unique to Jews, they just have the most success in convcing society that Moral Progress means dismantling whiteness and protecting Jews from anti-Semtism.
Secondly, if every time an American turned on a TV and saw a Chinese person or academic talking about how evil white people are and how they need to be removed from positions of influence, that would probably have incited an anti-Chinese backlash decades ago. But Jews present as white when they say "fellow white people, we need to dismantle white supremacy and engage in a whole-of-society effort to combat anti-Semitism." So their outgroup criticisms are interpreted by the population as an ingroup moral enlightenment, who in their naivety have no suspicion whatsoever of an ethnocentric motivation for the intellectual and cultural ideas being presented as moral progress or healing of the world. They actually think it is moral progress to hate white identity and be obsessed with protecting Jewish identity from any measure of criticism.
We can also consider a proof by contradiction: "The Jewish elite has been hostile to Jewish identity and a fierce advocate of white identity." Which hypothesis seems more likely to you, that one or mine?
So, firstly, you've omitted the context of that disagreement entirely and in doing so changed its meaning. You quoted part of the Aleinu with the implication that it's a call for outright ethnosupremacism - for the supremacy of the Jewish tribal deity over other deities. Per your own comments, you think that Adonai is just 'a metaphor and synonym for the Jewish people'. I thus understand you to be claiming that the Aleinu is an outright call for Jewish supremacy - for the superiority of the Jewish race over other people.
In that context I think it is extremely relevant that the part of the Aleinu you quoted is not only common knowledge but also uncontroversially accepted by billions of non-Jews. I can only assume that the non-Jews who agree with that statement do not see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. Certainly I don't. If so, then it also seems at least imaginable that Jews themselves don't see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. This seems supported by the fact that if I ask Jews directly, they tell me that it isn't a call for Jewish supremacy.
As such I think your claim about the Aleinu is a tissue of nonsense. I invite you to consider that it actually means what it says it means - that it is a statement about God, rather than one about race.
Moving on...
Why is the global success of Abrahamic religion 'without a shadow of a doubt derived from [the Jews'] cognitive profile'?
For a start, 'the Jews' in a macrohistorical sense aren't a single clear genetic profile. Even if for some reason there was proof that Ashkenazim or something have a unique genetic tendency towards subterfuge and malevolence, it is not clear how this would equip you to productively speculate about the genetic profiles of the 'myth-makers' of Abrahamic religion. Bluntly, we don't know anything about the genetics of Abraham or Moses, if they even existed, or David or Solomon, or Jesus or St. Paul. So you're attributing whatever storytelling genius they might have had to an entirely mysterious genetic factor, which there is no evidence they even possessed.
It is worth bearing in mind that, as far as we can tell, the early narrative tropes of the ancient Hebrews weren't particularly unique. If you read something like the Mesha Stele, it is remarkable how similar it is to biblical narratives. Ancient Hebrew stories are often visibly influenced by contemporary stories - Genesis 1 is informed by Babylonian creation narratives, for instances, and indeed in places the Hebrew Bible seems to get mixed up with Babylonian stories. (e.g. Gen 1 itself reads like a response to or parody of the Babylonian motif of Marduk slaying the sea monster and fashioning creation from her remains, but with the sea monster removed, indicating God's absolute supremacy. However, in other places - Job 26, Psalm 74, Psalm 89, Isaiah 51 - the monster-slaying narrative element has crept back in and God is depicted as having killed a sea monster to create the world. Ancient Hebrew narratives don't look like the uniquely genius products of a malevolent culture of subverters - they look like what was going around at the time.
Maybe some Hebrew thinkers brilliantly remixed it all into the perfect combination to survive and spread. If so, I don't see how that's evidence for the unique storytelling genius of Hebrews - after all, they were probably pretty darn similar, genetically, to all their neighbouring peoples. It seems more likely to me that whichever strand of ancient Near Eastern religious thought came out on top, you could accuse it of being the product of a genetic community with a unique gift for myth-making. But that doesn't make it so. Any number of contingent historical factors apply as well.
Moreover, I think the argument about the Jews as supremely good myth-weavers, creating narratives that powerfully spread on their own, has to reckon with the fact that it is not Judaism as we know it that actually spread to half the world. It seems to me that non-Jews deserve some credit for the spread of Christianity and Islam. If judged purely by personal success (and ruling out the possibility of divine intervention), the decidedly non-Jewish Muhammad seems to have been a far superior maker of myth than any Jewish figure. If we consider Christianity, sure, maybe you can declare that Jesus and Paul have whatever mysterious genetic trait you're ascribing to Jews, but the successful spread of Christianity across Eurasia seems to have had less to do with super-capable Jewish Christians and more to do with a vast array of apostles of many different genetic backgrounds. To take a specific local example, the Christianisation of Britain seems to have had more to do with non-Jewish missionaries like Augustine of Canterbury than it did any Jews.
You might reply that even if the standard-bearers and the myth-tellers weren't Jewish, the fundamentals of the narrative had been worked out by Jews, with whatever this unique gift they apparently have is. But by the same logic I might as well say that the Jews themselves deserve no credit at all for Judaism, because the fundamentals were worked out by the Egyptians or by the Babylonians. Judaism modifies many ideas from other ancient Semitic religions, but then, Christianity and Islam modify many ideas from Judaism. (Although to be fully pedantic I should say that rabbinic Judaism in the modern sense is itself a modification of more ancient ideas - Second Temple Judaism was destroyed in the first century, and both Christianity and the rabbinic tradition from which modern Judaism descends are innovative reactions to that disaster. Both had to significantly reformulate what it meant to worship God.)
I'm not sure how you can get past this - if Jews are uniquely gifted at myth-making and the formation of religious narrative, it seems at least a bit odd that Judaism is the least successful of the major Abrahamic religions. When it comes to formulating a narrative memetically optimised for spreading, the Christians and the Muslims seem to have significantly outdone the Jews.
Why were the Abrahamic religions so successful at spreading?
Well, leaving aside the possibility that God wanted them to, there is indeed the possibility that many of the basic elements of the Abrahamic religions are memetically optimised for spreading. But that possibility does not require the hypothesis of a unique Jewish talent for myth! It does not follow.
Who is Thor? If you ask the average person, they will not relate a Germanic tribal deity who was, at one time, a religious symbol of resistance to Christianization. They will say "Oh I love Thor, the last movie where he joined the Guardians of the Galaxy to save humanity from aliens was epic." Stan Lee, who was also Jewish, was a particularly effective mythmaker and storyteller precisely because he appropriated a base of existing myth and archetypes in the creation of a new Pantheon that memetically captured the imagination of Gentiles. The interpretatio romana likewise incorporated non-Roman deities into the Roman pantheon, which served a cultural and civic function. A talent for mythmaking specifically entails appropriating existing symbols and integrating them into a particular cultural and religious consciousness.
Christianity and Islam both belong to the Judaic pantheon, which is deeply meaningful in spite of localized "DLC" to the pantheon, so-to-speak. There is an incomprehensible mishmash of deities in the Hindu religion inspired by local interpretations and "new characters", and likewise Stan Lee hired gentile writers to create new characters and stories for his pantheon, but ultimately it's his universe.
If all prevailing followers of Abrahamic religion (including Jews themselves) worshipped the god Apollo from Greek myth instead of the Jewish god from the Hebrew bible, but also formulated their own innovations- heroes and myths, under the auspices of His Image, we would properly regard the cult of Apollo as the most successful religion. Even if globally influential cults emerged which worshipped some derived heroes like the martyred son of Apollo or warrior-prophet of Apollo... They would still, at the end of the day, be worshipping a European god who is the embodiment of a race of people as the master of the universe. Christians and Muslims worship a Jewish god, so their religions must be considered mythological "success" of the Judaic pantheon in the same way.
Of course, the earliest Christians were Jewish and St. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles - the Stan Lee of his day - was a Jewish pharisee.
Abraham and Moses are heroes in the Judaic pantheon, this is like saying "we don't know the genetic profile of Iron Man so we can't say anything about his behavior in that regard", the storytellers are the Jews themselves who keep these myths alive and propagate them among themselves and others with their rituals and behavior. This often takes esoteric form in modern culture, where a film like Spartacus functions as a mythological homage to Exodus and inspires audiences to root for the slave revolt against Roman civilization. This is sophisticated storytelling, and the Jews are better at it than anyone. They are also able to pick up on it whereas gentiles remain oblivious to deeper esoteric meaning to myths like these (FWIW I agree with the author here that Zach Snyder's Superman is less Jewish and more Apollonian than in the written canon, while the Nietzschean-Übermensch Lex Luthor is more Jewish in Snyder's work).
In order to calibrate our baseline perspectives, would you accept the proposition that HBD provides explanatory power for why Jews tend to be more successful lawyers than non-Jews? I am suggesting that this holds for culture-and-myth-creation, and the cognitive traits that explain this go beyond simply IQ.
You don't see how the global-memetic spread of a myth body, and its survival as a diaspora for thousands of years, is evidence for the power of its storytelling?
Secondly, we should dispense with the absurd claim that the Aleinu is not supremacist, if a group of white people all cited some refrain proclaiming that the master of the universe chose them as his favorite people and made them differently from everyone else, and all else will bow under the yoke of the Creator who made Europeans his chosen people, you would unambiguously call that supremacist. I think the Aleinu is in fact similar to cultural rhetoric like Manifest Destiny or the British Empire which saw itself as the light unto the world, bringing civilization to the savages. Of course it's supremacist.
Judaism is an ethnically supremacist religion, and I don't mean that as a criticism, it is the entire reason it has survived under hostile conditions for thousands of years. Their god is their race, and their race is their god. I have heard Jews, in the wild, say "us being God's chosen people doesn't mean we are superior, it in fact means we are mandated greater responsibility for the world", which is not much different that you would hear from some European colonizer in Africa, we have a responsibility to civilize these savages because of our unique gifts bestowed by God. It is supremacist.
Christianity is a personal salvation cult. There are many theories for why it spread. The decline of Rome undoubtedly played a part, but I think there were also some micro-phenomena, like women being dazzled with the Gospel and then insisting that their pagan husbands convert as a condition for marriage. Bio-Leninism and Nietzsche provide a different explanation. I don't claim to know the how, but there is no question that they were successful at spreading because of their memetic potency. Concluding that the memetic potency is related to the people that created the pantheon, and relates to dynamics in modern-day culture, would be well-supported by taking HBD seriously as more than just "IQ-realism."
I think you're muddling quite a few things here.
For a start, I want to clarify exactly which standards you're using. The global spread and popularity of biblical narratives does indeed seem like evidence that those narratives have some merit. But what I would challenge you on is that there's any particularly unique about those narratives, which implies anything sinister about Jews as people.
After all, you mention other highly successful ancient narratives. I suspect most people on the street who recognise the name 'Thor' do know that he's an ancient Norse god, and Thor is actually a pretty weak example because the surviving corpus of religious Scandinavian literature is so small. But I invite you to consider, say, the enduring recognisability and popularity of Hercules. Consider the enduring narrative power of the Iliad and the Odyssey - even when the entire religious culture those stories were embedded in faded away. People may not specifically worship Zeus any more, but even in the Superman comics you reference, Perry White continues to swear by Zeus! ("By Jove!") This seems like an enduring hold on the imagination by these ancient writers. The power of Greek mythological narratives is such that they've even successfully hopped across cultures - you can find the Greek gods popping up even in Japanese media, for instance.
What I want to suggest is that the existence of an extremely successful narrative or set of images doesn't necessary imply anything nefarious about race. Certainly the success of Greek mythological narrative suggests that at some point in history something creatively fecund was going on in Greece, but leaping from this to the assertion of a unique, genetic Greek talent for myth-making that continues to the modern day and makes Greeks a powerful conspiracy manipulating non-Greeks to their advantage is simply ludicrous. As with Greeks, so too with Jews.
I think you're also tending to single out the involvement of any Jew in any creative endeavour as evidence that the whole thing is somehow Jewish, or part of this cross-historical Jewish myth-making scheme. In practice, however, Jewish influences are often only one of many involved in creating the narratives that you're describing. I was just talking about Greeks, after all, and we have to grant that Judaism in the classical world was extremely Hellenised, and Christianity's early growth involved a lot of fusion of Jewish and Greek ideas. You might say that this shows the power of Jewish narrative to co-opt and absorb Greek thought, but why not the opposite? Why doesn't it show the power of Greek narrative to co-opt and absorb Jewish thought? Why are the Jews, in your telling, always the manipulators and never the manipulated?
Thus with the Superman example. The Christian and for that matter Greek influences on Superman seem pretty clear - Superman has been read as an allegory for Jesus but also as coming from the Greek heroic tradition. There is certainly something very Apollonian about him. Greek or Christian memes flowing through the minds of Jewish people are still Greek or Christian memes. A figure like Superman is pretty clearly an aggregate of diverse influences, some of which are related to the Jewish experience in America, and some of which are not.
If Jewish ideas can flow through non-Jews in a way that, to you, is just Jewish influence (as with Christianity and Islam), it seems like non-Jewish ideas can also flow through Jews in a way that retains their power. If so, perhaps we'd be better off thinking of ideas in less of a race-essentialist way.
In this case, there are some foundational ideas that originate in ancient Israel, yes - monotheism is the big one. Those ideas spread between many different peoples, mixed with different other ideas and contexts, and eventually formed several different religious traditions, including rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At no point in this process do you need a posit a special genetic propensity for myth-making or cultural manipulation on the part of the ancient Israelites.
I'd also suggest that you use the term 'the Jews' in a very vague and general way, such that it's not clear what you refer to or why. For instance:
Who are 'the Jews' in this context?
Read 'Abraham and Moses' as shorthand for 'the people who historically came up with the core ideas and narratives of the Torah'. The point is that we cannot know anything meaningful about the genetics of the community in which the fundamental elements of Abrahamic faith were born.
I note that it is clearly the case that people like Abraham or Moses are revered by people of many different ethnicities. A specifically racialised interpretation seems weak. Muslims say explicitly that Abraham was a Muslim, and reject any significance for race. Christians also say directly that what matters is being a spiritual heir of Abraham, not one by blood (cf. Matthew 3:9, John 8:39, Romans 4:16, Galatians 3:7). Clearly Abraham is a hero and is understood as an ancestor by members of all the Abrahamic faiths - you have to go significantly against how these traditions have understood Abraham to see him as deeply racialised figure.
This even seems consistent with Jewish understandings of Abraham. Converts to Judaism are given the name ben/bat Avraham v'Sarah - son or daughter of Abraham and Sarah. The Jews themselves understand descent from Abraham to be spiritual rather than genetic!
It seems to me that the genetics of Abraham and the other originators of Abrahamic religion are firstly unknown and secondly held to be unimportant by his own heirs, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. So I think you're wrong to racialise this as much as you do.
I'm wary of and try to avoid the term 'HBD'. I think there are probably multivariate reasons why Jews are overrepresented in professions like the law.
I do dispute, however, the claim that there is a genetic propensity for myth-making unique to Jews. I don't think it's even correct to say that Jews (as in a historically distinguishable genetic community like the Ashkenazim) do have a special talent for myth-making above other peoples.
You're taking a very misleading reading of it. What the Aleinu says is that God has called and made a covenant with the Jewish people, differently to all the other nations of the world.
How would we feel if a bunch of other people said something like that? We don't have to speculate. We know, because they do. Americans say something similar to that all the time - that's American civil religion, the unique and special identity of the United States, chosen by Providence to be a beacon of freedom to the world. Americans make this claim all the time.
Judaism is an ethnoreligion, certainly - it is a religion associated with a particular people (though as I have indicated Jews understand Jewish peoplehood to not be reducible to race or genetics). That's not the same thing as being a supremacist religion - as you just admit in the next line, Jews speak very clearly about Jews not being superior to other people.
Moreover, you're taking an interpretation of Judaism here that almost no Jew would agree with. The God of the Jews, as Jews understand him, is the most high and the creator of the universe. They understand God to be a real being, and a different being to they themselves. They have this in common with every other Abrahamic religion.
I would encourage you to consider how the people you're talking about understand themselves. If nothing else, I'd like to suggest that Jews themselves might understand what Judaism is better than you do. Listen to them.
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