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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32501 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Oh look, another week on the motte, another topic about DAE DAE da joos???. Actually strike that, that's the ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶r̶d̶ seventh in seven days (thanks, fuckduck9000!).

I'd like to formally apologize to the mods for raising a stink about the HBD moratorium back in the old place. This is getting really annoying.

Jews are intelligent. As such, HBD provides no reason to be against them.

The Joo-posters are constantly arguing that Jews are essentially a malignant invasive species working for the benefit of their in-group (Jews) to the detriment of non-Jews, and that undermining Western civilization and trying to destroy white society is something they are naturally driven to do. In olden times, they would have just said this is because Jews are inherently wicked because God hates them. Nowadays, that doesn't sound very persuasive, especially to rationalists, so instead they make up HBD theories for why Jews are a uniquely pernicious tribe following biological imperatives.

I know this because it's not exactly a new argument, and you know this because you've been around long enough to have seen it yourself. Why are you pretending that HBD has only ever been about IQ? Even the people whose HBD arguments are primarily focused on blacks are quite open about their belief that HBD says blacks aren't just low IQ, but also impulsive, violent, criminally inclined, etc.

Why are you pretending that HBD has only ever been about IQ?

HBD as used by rationalists should be about IQ, because IQ can be measured. Claiming that Jews are bad people for some HBD-related reason that you can't measure is incorrectly using HBD.

I will concede that HBD may give you a reason to hate Jews if you use it incorrectly, but I don't think that tells you much about HBD. Anything can give you a reason for anything if you use it incorrectly.

So your belief is that HBD explains IQ differences and only IQ differences (as far as cognitive function goes)?

Exactly what else do you think it can explain that wouldn't be tied to IQ?

(I would think that something like low time preference is tied to IQ.)

Exactly what else do you think it can explain that wouldn't be tied to IQ?

I'm not making any claims. I'm an HBD skeptic who thinks it has some explanatory power but not the power its more enthusiastic advocates claim. Such as all the other qualities I mentioned.

What I am noticing in your case is that it appears you believe that HBD is "correctly" used when it makes negative generalizations about your outgroup, and "incorrectly" used when it makes negative generalizations about your ingroup.

What I am noticing in your case is that it appears you believe that HBD is "correctly" used when it makes negative generalizations about your outgroup, and "incorrectly" used when it makes negative generalizations about your ingroup.

By this reasoning, most people here are well-educated, so generalizing that education is good is self-serving, and should be looked upon very suspiciously. I suspect that most people here are not murderers, either, so it would be self-serving to claim that being a murderer indicates something negative about oneself.

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Why wouldn't it explain anything else? Why is our ability to measure it according to science which has been hostile to these conclusions for decades conclusive evidence of existence or non existence of phenomena? Why would behavior be uniquely free of genetic influence, when in fact we can point to numerous examples of behavior being influenced by genetics on an individual level?

HBDers argue over and over the it's absurd to assume that genetics influences an abundance of physical characteristics but not the brain; why is it intellectually fine that the first ranked NBA player who isn't Black or Balkan is in the 30s, but racism that there aren't enough Blacks at Harvard law? Further HBDer arguments require that American folk racialization categories are accurate, that the world can be divided into White/Black/Asian and produce useful insights, why wouldn't other even more prevalent folk racial theories be correct?

It seems like if you open up to HBD, the burden is heavy to claim that it implicates only part of the brain.

instead they make up HBD theories for why Jews are a uniquely pernicious tribe following biological imperatives.

Isn't that overcomplicating it a bit? When did generic in-group bias become anything to do with HBD? There's simply no need to reach as far as HBD when a perfectly fully formed explanation of nepotism already exists a lot closer to the centre of the Overton Window?

Generic in-group bias would be a fully-formed explanation if the complaints about Jews were limited to their overrepresentation in banking and Hollywood, but the Jew-baiting posts very regularly make much broader assertions, that Jews are responsible for desegregation, affirmative action, increased immigration, laxer criminal justice, pornography, sexual liberation, feminism, and essentially, the entire liberal project, up to and including wokeism. Which is assumed to be a deliberate multigenerational campaign to undermine their neighbors and destroy their host society.

This only makes sense if you believe (a) Jews are just naturally evil for some reason; (b) it's some sort of biological imperative to conduct tribal warfare at a level that goes well beyond any "in-group bias" one sees in other ethnic groups. And some of the Joo-posters have made explicit HBD arguments to the effect that Jews just "evolved that way."

Jews are responsible for desegregation, affirmative action, increased immigration, laxer criminal justice, pornography, sexual liberation, feminism, and essentially, the entire liberal project, up to and including wokeism.

To be fair, you can hear that right from the horse's mouth. She herself relates this behavior directly to Tikkun Olam:

to speedily see Your mighty splendor, to cause detestable (idolatry) to be removed from the land, and the (false) gods will be utterly 'cut off', to takein olam – fix/repair/establish a world – under the Almighty's kingdom

In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, the world will have been perfected.

To be fair, you can hear that right from the horse's mouth. She herself relates this behavior directly to Tikkun Olam:

Whether or not you agree with individual Jews who believe that things that like gay rights and affirmative action are good, there is still a disconnect between "They're doing these things because they believe they're good" and "They're doing these things because they are driven by a Jewish impulse to corrupt and destroy." But I take it that you are, in fact, endorsing the HBD theory of Jewish nefariousness?

In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, the world will have been perfected.

This is essentially what most religious adherents believe.

The Roman Pantheon was highly representative of subjugation and hierarchy, no doubt, but it integrated the idols and symbols of others into its order. The mandate to remove idolatry from the land and "cut off" the false gods points to Yahweh as a singularly jealous god. So a Jewish mandate to drive out the false gods of the Gentiles, or Ōr laGōyyīm, relates the systematic behavior of Jewish influence in Gentile culture. Yes, I do think, as in all religion, there is an HBD-understood influence between the mythos that has formulated the people, the genes of those people, and the behavior of said people. Same is true for Christians, Arabs, Hindus.

If we properly understand Yahweh as a metaphor and synonym for the Jewish people, then the mandate in Tikkun Olam to "utterly cut off" the false gods points towards an inscrutable cultural hostility. A hostility towards the national idols and traditions and even the very ethnic identity of Gentiles is openly professed under the banner of Tikkun Olam today.

Edit: Here's an interesting article from a Jewish group corroborating the importance of Tikkun Olam to the behavior of the Jewish people:

One can say a lot about our infatuation with Tikkun Olam, and I will. But let’s start with what the critics get wrong, which is most of it.

First, the phrase “Tikkun Olam” is at least as old as Rabbinic Judaism itself. It appears already in the Mishnah, where it refers to social policy legislation providing extra protection to those potentially at a disadvantage. The “Aleinu”, one of the oldest Jewish prayers, contains the phrase “repair the world” (letaken olam). Critics love to grouse that liberal Jews “forget” the context—Aleinu envisions that God (not us) will “repair the world in the Kingship of God”—but the more important point is that “Tikkun Olam” wasn’t some phrase invented in the 1970s by Rabbi Michael Lerner and other hippie Jews.

Nor are the concepts of Jewish social justice and universal morality, to which Tikkun Olam has come to refer. Virtually all the prophets talk tirelessly about the need to create a just and ethical society, many of their words sound pretty much like a 21st century Tikkun Olam manifesto. Needless to say, they draw from the Torah, which speaks endlessly about loving the stranger and the poor. The idea that Jews have a universal mission also appears insistently from the Torah onwards. When God blesses our patriarch Abraham, God states that “through you, all the Nations of the Earth will be blessed”. The prophets often focus on Israel, their purview also extends to all Peoples. This includes the prophet Jonah, whose story we read on Yom Kippur and whose mission was exclusively directed at the gentile city (an enemy city, in fact) of Nineveh.

It would take gallons of ink to list all the traditional sources that encourage us to embark on what we call today Tikkun Olam. Considering how many of these sources are traditionally understood to be directly and authoritatively quoting God, whoever has an issue with Tikkun Olam needs to take it up with the Boss Himself. So no, it’s not a marginal idea that evil liberals brought to the forefront of the Jewish agenda; it’s been central to Judaism for millennia. And it’s not a perversion of a Kabbalistic term; if anything, the way in which we understand Tikkun Olam today is more faithful to the original mishnaic meaning of the term (pragmatic legislation to protect the vulnerable and preserve the integrity of society) than to the mystical interpretation of Lurianic Kabbalah, in which the world has lost its original harmony after the “breaking of the vessels”, and fulfilling mitzvot (whether ethical or purely ritual) can “repair the world” from its spiritual wounds.

If we understand Tikkun Olam to relate to a psychometric quality like g then of course HBD would suggest that this idea which has been central to these people for millennia is both a reflection of and influence on their psychology, even atheistic Jews. Even Jews, proudly, relate a long history of radical agitation to the concept.

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In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, the world will have been perfected.

Okay, this is not sinister.

Christians and Muslims believe that as well. If we add up the Abrahamic faiths, over fifty percent of all human beings belong to religious traditions that explicitly believe that everyone should abandon false gods and turn to the only true God - the Lord of Hosts; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God of Israel.

If Jews believe that the world will be perfected when everyone recognises Adonai, then as a Christian I feel entirely unthreatened. I greet that belief with a hearty "Amen!"

If Jews believe that the world will be perfected when everyone recognises Adonai, then as a Christian I feel entirely unthreatened. I greet that belief with a hearty "Amen!"

Amen!

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In-group bias differs by populations. As does, say, intraversion

It’s the combo of high intelligence and apparent anti-my-group alignment that anti-semites tend to be against. (Tongue in cheek, of course. The Yudkowsky irony amuses me greatly.)

The off-the-cuff words of someone in the DR recently, giving some in-group criticism:

Some things are cliches because they are true. For example: politics lie downstream from culture. Almost no one in the dissident right denies this.

The problem is they don’t understand culture and have no real interest in understanding it (or aptitude for understanding it). When they do bother to approach it, they approach it with the attitude of “these Jews are not smarter than me! I see everything they are doing, it’s soooo obvious!” Wrong moron. They are actually quite sophisticated and there is a lot we can learn from them. They wouldn't have reached the position they have if they weren't.

And any assessment that gives Js their fair due (while nevertheless accepting they are a hostile elite), sends these grugs into a tizzy. They’d rather sit on streams and complain that Js succeed simply by virtue of their “evil” (and not their talent or their particular inscrutable approach). It becomes an ego thing for them.

Of course the most controversial premise here is that they are a hostile elite, which is not a hypothesis that is refuted by their IQ.

This does not follow. And, in fact, this kind of non sequitur coming from an apparently intelligent person is in itself a major reason. I think Lior Pachter's inane and poisonous hit piece on James Watson, a piece completely misrepresenting Pachter's own field for the sake of essentially propagating anti-white hatred while character-assassinating one of the field's heroes, was a big one. Really showed me how this happens.

It absolutely follows.

It doesn't mean you might not hate Jews for other reasons than HBD, but not because of HBD itself.

HBD – in and of itself – does not provide reason to hate any group or individual, it's not a normative position but a prism for making predictions.

Smarter people, so far as they are unaligned with one's values, are a bigger cause for concern than dumber ones in all important cases.

Their main argument is ‘look at all these jews in politics and media’ –and intelligence is sufficient to explain overrepresentation. Their intellectual output covers the entire spectrum of political opinions. Treating a race as a single unified force is the same mistake the woke make when they explain black underachievement with institutional white supremacy. So I don’t see what one guy criticizing watson is supposed to prove.

If evolution doesn't stop at the neck, why does it stop at intelligence and not touch morality?

DAE DAE da joos???

'Da joos' is the most open and blatant kind of sarcastic sneering you can imagine. None of the below is acceptable or provides any kind of serious content:

"Yeah, of course, it's the liberals causing all the problems in your life, pal. Sure."

"Oh, it's da rich??? Funny how you seem to have such an obsession with them."

"Trans people live in your head rent free, stop whining about them."

"Oh, you're blaming incentives for the tenth time in a row. Did an incentive machete your family to death?"

Jews act and have political effects, as do liberals or rich people. I don't particularly like the long and interminable discussions on the abstract gender/trans theory here but that's fine, other people do. I minimize that thread and move along because I recognize that this is a politics discussion website and this is an appropriate place to talk about it. It's as easy as clicking a button. I don't provide a backhanded comment smearing people who talk about it as low-class or obsessives.

Actually strike that, that's the ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ third in seven days.

At least seven . This one, 2 , 3 and the deleted 4, 5, 6, 7.

If it’s a day that ends with -y, foreverlurker’s got a question about jews for you.

Are those all related to Jews? Most are, but I don't remember it coming up in the South Africa post. In any case, yeah, that's really not great. (and deleting isn't great either)

The problem is that if we allow unknown provocateurs to “make topics annoying” by posting about them in the shittiest way, it gives anyone the power to veto the topic altogether. So, absent knowing the motivations of the shitty poster, it’s a better idea to just delete the posts and write them off completely. You would be amazed the lengths evil people go to ruin discourse. Back on Reddit there were people who would literally pretend to be a sockpuppet account of a different user in order to get that user banned, and other such shenanigans

This is the Kevin MacDonald line: that there is something inherent about the Jews that leads them to "undermine" Western society.

Is it? I was under the impression that Kevin's arguments were far more specific and detailed than that, and I haven't seen a single thing in this article that would actually even reach the level of engaging with his arguments let alone opposing them. I can't blame you for not reading them given their reputation, but this only serves to rebut a strawman of his position. I am no fan of reading lengthy neonazi screeds written by unhinged morons myself, but Kevin MacDonald's work is not that and requires more effort if you want to actually rebut it.

Kevin’s politics are complex (to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand…). He considers (or did consider for many years) himself to write in the long tradition of enlightenment classical liberalism. Some of his earlier published works were on the Scottish enlightenment, in which he appeared to take considerable (perhaps ethnic) pride. MacDonald isn’t a reactionary in the way Moldbug or the TradCaths are, he considers America’s liberal constitution and traditions largely good, he just thinks they were corrupted (etc) by juice.

Rudd was a rebel, a revolutionary, but now in his own words, is a "good Jewish boy". @fuckduck9000 nailed it, didn't he? And this is just one last gambit before the hammer drops.

When a moderator says to you:

All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).

And not even a day later you again repost identitarian bait, with minimal commentary, as a top-level post, I have to assume you have opted to ignore the warning.

I want to emphasize: in absolute terms, this post is "not bad." It's not great, it does challenge both "speak plainly" and "avoid low-effort participation," as well as "make your point reasonably clear and plain" (though this post is in that regard maybe a slight improvement on the last one). That it does those things as a top level post is an aggravating factor. The CW thread is not a dumping ground for posts other people have written on topics that are maximally inflammatory. It's a place to test your thinking, which to a great extent demands that you do some thinking in an open and public way. Gradually accruing the annoyance of the sub by being a one-note piano while evading effortful engagement with others is, if nothing else, egregiously obnoxious.

So let's start the banning at 48 hours.

Maybe my reading comprehension is trash, but how is “I'd like to push back against the contention that Jewish overrepresentation among leftist movements is related to activists being Jewish per se” not speaking plainly?

The idea that some people (eg @Fruck) have suggested is that this poster is claiming to be against antisemitism while also thinly-veiled hmmposting links to internet antisemitism in a way that encourages users to click on them and to conclude from them that the post was ‘wrong’ and the far-right position on the issue ‘right’.

This is a relatively complex form of baiting and a violation of the ‘speak plainly’ rule, although it’s not uncommon online. Still, I’m ambivalent on a ban unless the mods have better proof the poster is trolling or being sneaky.

In a DM conversation they asked me what my political leaning was, and when I responded something like "far-right but not fascist" they responded with a "I don't talk to fascists", so yeah it's some sort of bait considering OP is explicitly talking to fascists.

It is an instance of the thing Zorba(?) said a while ago (paraphrased) "if the trolls are forced to contribute interesting pieces and/or make composed, reasonable arguments in service of trolling, then we've already won"

It is an instance of the thing Zorba(?) said a while ago (paraphrased) "if the trolls are forced to contribute interesting pieces and/or make composed, reasonable arguments in service of trolling, then we've already won"

This slogan falls to Goodhart's Law. The things that trolls produce to satisfy a requirement for interesting posts will never be the kind of things that an interesting post requirement is actually meant for. (Especially not cumulatively. We wouldn't, without trolls, get eight conversations about Jews in a row, even if each post could have been individually posted sincerely and led to a single interesting conversation about Jews.)

There's also the problem that people's ability to detect disruptive posts isn't perfect. And you're not going to get reasonable arguments, you're going to get arguments that are just close enough to reasonable that they won't be immediately thrown out.

This slogan falls to Goodhart's Law.

I agree with your points, but this doesn't seem to have much to do with Goodhart's Law. The target already is interesting, well-composed, reasonable posts. There's nothing about this situation where a measure becomes a target, since the measure already is the target. What's the difference between an interesting post and a post which appears interesting but actually isn't? Seems like an impossibility; either a post is interesting or it is not.

It's Goodhart's law because you don't actually want "interesting posts", you want interesting posts that don't encourage above normal noise. But you can't measure that, you can only measure interesting posts.

Twitter optimizes for engagement. It's terrible.

We can measure how inflammatory a post is as easily as measuring how interesting it is. Really these vague measures--interesting, well-composed, reasonable, more light than heat, etc.--seem to hold up well against Goodhart's law. We all can tell which posts meet those standards and which don't, and there's not much of a way to fake that.

The bigger issue is when posts don't meet the standard, but do pass some lower "minimal effort to not be seen as an obvious troll" standard. The latter takes a lot less work than producing good posts and you still get to stand on your soapbox and shout incessantly about whatever your pet topic is. You did mention something similar with "arguments.... just close enough to reasonable that they won't immediately [get] thrown out."

But you can't measure that, you can only measure interesting posts

You can just ban people for making bad posts, the mods just don't think that's fair.

I'd be ambivalent if it was just a few instances, but it really feels like he's exploiting the system. I wouldn't come to themotte if every other top-level post was one person soapboxing about da joos. HBD was similar: Yes, this is (intended to be) one of the few places on the Internet you can freely debate it, but it shouldn't be the only topic of discussion...

Still, I’m ambivalent on a ban unless the mods have better proof the poster is trolling or being sneaky.

The ban is short, and very much intended to communicate that Amadan's warning should not have been ignored in this way.

We don't like anyone doing top-level posting that is overwhelmingly copy-pasted, even when it's not on a maximally-inflammatory topic, but we also don't want to over-moderate, so when it happens occasionally, or comes from otherwise-well-reputed users, it's kinda whatever. But when one user does it repeatedly, in combination with other kinda-shady behaviors, and immediately after being warned against it, like--what else am I supposed to do?

We don't like anyone doing top-level posting that is overwhelmingly copy-pasted

I'm not necessarily criticizing this ban, but what's the justification behind this? Why does it matter if something insightful came from a user here or from an outside thinker (assuming the poster agrees with what they're sharing)?

Is the idea that this is a way to prevent spamming, by raising the required time commitment to make a top-level post?

I'm not necessarily criticizing this ban, but what's the justification behind this? Why does it matter if something insightful came from a user here or from an outside thinker (assuming the poster agrees with what they're sharing)?

Is the idea that this is a way to prevent spamming, by raising the required time commitment to make a top-level post?

It's bound up in a long history of wrangling with "bare links" and otherwise low-effort content. At the extreme, a user could sock-puppet as a way of skirting the rules of engagement. Like, suppose you write a really scathing takedown of your outgroup. Post it here, maybe you get moderated. Post it on Substack and then share it here, though, maybe you don't, depending on how transparent your effort to circumvent the rules of engagement is.

This is not a common problem, by the by, but it is definitely something that has happened in the past. And the foundation of the whole enterprise is that we're here to discuss things, to test our own shady thinking in a community of people who don't all agree with our views. "Here's a thing for you all to discuss" is not quite the same thing as actually participating in a discussion, and can very easily be trolling/bait/etc. So copy-pasting large chunks of text while providing minimal insight of your own doesn't really reach the necessary level. If someone outside the sub says something insightful, sharing it here is fine--even as a top post, if it's not CW. But if it's a picture, or video, or Culture War material, then we are looking for submission statements and effortful engagement.

Contra Cori Bush, the War on Woke is not a proxy for race issues. In fact, it appears to be diverting the Right from those problems. That’s a grave mistake. Mass immigration and anti-white racism are far more important than who Bud Light puts on a beer can.

anti-wokeism is rebranded '80s, '90s and early 2000s era culture wars. Race, ethnicity are supposed to be irrelevant or secondary.

When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

More generally, I think reactionaries are too obsessed with black people. Black people are unlikely to make up more than 15% of the American population any time soon. AA birth rates have converged with the white rate. In South Africa, black people are the great majority of the population. In America, they likely never will be. Black people have been in the US longer than many Europeans, and have nothing much to do with the large scale demographic change that has occurred since the 1970s. Ultimately, any pro-black affirmative action, state support etc will always have to be passed with the assistance of the majority of the rest of the population, whether that is white or latino or a mix of both. Issues with race relations that exist between black and white Americans are largely separate to mass immigration, and would exist in the same way even if America had remained 85% white.

When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

Because it’s not the same rhetorical game. In my experience the ‘anti-woke’ people are vocally and actively anti-affirmative action, blackwashing, pride stuff, etc and ‘diversity’ people in my general experience tend to express that it’s never meant to be anti-white, even when it is (except that’s a good thing).

I think the code thing is true in both cases more or less. If you’re anti-woke you oppose the DEI and “anti-racism” agenda and so on (anti-racism in quotes because this isn’t the same as beliefs in equality, but a suite of social and political views that are called anti-racism).

And in most instances, anti-racism is, in practical terms anti-white. When companies brag about their diversity, it’s generally that they e made a special effort to find, recruit and promote non-whites. When schools talk about reading more diverse sources, generally it means setting aside classic European texts to add in texts from Africa, Asia, and Latin America where the population isn’t white.

I agree to an extent. Conflating demographic replacement with blacks was always an implicit lefty meme born out of their inability to distinguish ingroup/outgroup bias from narratives surrounding immigration and birthrates. The concern over blacks in the US is not demographic but 'cultural' for a lack of a better term.

When 6% of the population is committing 50-60% of all violent crime you should be allowed to ask why they are all black men and what can be done about them as black men before you start restructuring your potentially high trust white society to account for such a disruptive minority. In that sense blacks act as a disruption generator that fuels the aspects reactionaries hate the most about modern lib/left/progressive expression. Primarily the aspect that they are traitors who refuse to face the hard truths and instead let others carry the cost of the fantasies their unexamined privilege affords them.

To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes. The old generation with their old propaganda gets cycled out and the new generation with new propaganda gets cycled in to continue where the old left off.

On the other hand, modern US society is in part based on worshipping black people. I mean, can anyone deny to ridiculous effort both sides of the mainstream enact in just to get a black person to mouth off their talking points? And the fact people genuinely feel that their side is more valid if they have a black person on their side.

I wish I could find the study that, in broad terms, showed how depicting blacks as fighting for a just cause made people more likely to assume blacks in general were more virtuous. It, at the very least, confirmed all of my biases regarding the effects I felt after being exposed to a nigh endless propaganda stream of blacks protesting during the civil rights era against the evil white supremacist empire. I mean, why were the evil white police hitting the innocent blacks who just wanted to be treated the same? My 12 year old brain could make no sense of it, and came to the obvious logical conclusion that one side was good and the other evil.

To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes

Is this really in reference to slavery? If so, black emancipation won a fairly resounding seal of approval in 1864 and 1868.

That's not the entire truth though. The backdrop to the peaceful protests was violent riots and full scale political terrorism, as is examined in detail in Days of Rage In full context, the civil rights movement is not just a bunch of innocent blacks getting beaten up by sadist white men. But that would only exist as a sideshow to the baseline that black people, in general, are not more virtuous than others, despite many people intrinsically believing so.

As for black men and crime, as long as the societal norm is to apply blame and dish out punishment based on historical crimes made by your ancestors, like is done to white people, on top of blaming them as a group for any activity a white person undertakes as an individual, which is done on top of actively marginalizing against white men based on the comparatively poor performance of blacks, as well as actively fostering an environment that excuses black crime and vilifies white crime, and all of those activities existing under an umbrella of anti-racism, I see no reason why we can't have an active anti-racist marginalization campaign enacted against black men.

Nothing should be done about "black men", but something can be done about criminals. Those are two separate categories.

I very much agree with this but would like to make sure we're on the same page on drilling down to the individual in our pursuits of equal treatment. We should address only the criminals no matter their skincolor. But we should also be distributing aid and help also only based on need correct? No blanket affirmative action pushes so that the poor white trailer kid gets the same help as the poor black resident in a blighted neighborhood?

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

One is true and the other is false.

One is hinged, one is unhinged.

@The_Nybbler was certainly playing a bit loose with the boundary of "low effort", there, and I definitely directed a frown in that direction, but all you did was add heat to it. Please don't do that.

"Diversity is code for anti-white" is based on the logic that since efforts to diversify organizations/companies/government/etc. typically involve reducing the relative proportion of whites and increasing the proportion of non-whites, diversity is anti-white.

"Anti-woke is code for anti-black" is based on the logic that since 'anti-woke' efforts include as a central pillar the elimination of affirmative action (in education, employment, federal contracting and so on), thereby certainly reducing the relative proportion of black people in those organizations, anti-woke is anti-black.

You can take a principled libertarian stance that 'diversity' is manipulating the ratios and 'anti-woke' merely restoring the natural order of things, but from a consequentialist perspective one linearly reduces the proportion of whites in major organizations and one linearly reduces the proportion of blacks. A white person advocating the latter and a black person the former are both displaying ethnic self-interest.

"Anti-woke" includes many things that are beneficial to black people, most obviously in that it opposes wokeness in areas that have nothing to do with race, but also even within the realm of race. For instance, consider the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine prioritization policy. They deprioritized older people relative to essential workers because older people are more white, even though they estimated this would result in many additional deaths (especially if the vaccine was less effective at preventing infection than serious disease, which turned out to be the case). This policy killed more black people it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. How did it benefit black people that more of them died so that more white people would die so that the percentages looked better to woke ACIP/CDC officials? Take the argument from the expert on ethics and health-policy the NYT quoted:

“Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

I don't think the average black person would really be sympathetic to this argument, even before you pointed out it was also going to kill more black people. These sorts of arguments are mostly only appealing to the woke. And of course the same is true for plenty of less life-or-death issues, like Gamergate's NotYourShield consisting of women and minorities who didn't think they benefited from journalists defending themselves by accusing critics of being sexist/racist/etc.

Furthermore, even within the limited realm of affirmative-action I don't think wokeness genuinely serves the racial self-interest of black people. There are many more black people who benefit from infrastructure than from racial quotas in infrastructure contracts, more who need medical care than who go to medical school, more who use Google than who work for Google. It isn't just the principles that want the black percentage to be high vs. the ones that want it to be low, there is an inherent asymmetry because meritocracy isn't just an arbitrary "principled libertarian stance", it serves an important functional purpose.

Of course diversity advocates also sometimes say that affirmative-action/etc. benefits everyone, it's just that they're wrong. Other times racial resentment and malice clearly play a role, but even then that doesn't mean it actually serves racial self-interest. In general I think ideological conflicts have a lot more true believers and a lot less people cynically pursuing their interests than people tend to think they have.

"Diversity" is aimed (often explicitly) at reducing the relative proportion of whites (and sometimes Asians). Elimination of affirmative action is aimed at NOT doing that. These are not the same.

You can’t tell me that anti-affirmative action advocates aren’t firmly aware that they’re in practice advocating for a huge reduction in black representation in top colleges, businesses, civil service employment, state contracts and so on.

Aware - maybe, want - not at all. Reducing the representation is not the policy goal. Stopping artificial racist distortion of the market (and society) is. If the statistics would be different - then it will be, but it's not the goal of the advocacy. Just as the result of reducing child mortality could be raise in crime (because poor children would die more often, and if they stop dying, they have higher chance to grow up into criminals), it does not mean every pediatrician has increasing crime as their goal. Making such inferences is both unproductive and unfair.

2rafa is arguing consequentialism here, that anti-AA advocates are firmly aware of the consequences of their actions. This is indeed the bar because the context is that Diversity is anti-white in consequences.

If pro-AA advocates can play the intent and goal card, then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.

Are both of these inferences unfair, or only one?

then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.

That assumes such a distortion exists, which is very much unproven. While the AA distortion is obvious and easily seen - and, in fact, nobody even attempts to hide it, and if they did, it'd be extremely easy to disprove just quoting their own policies - the other side requires introducing phlogiston-like "systemic racism", which is immeasurable, imperceptible, unfalsifiable and can only be proven by employing the circular argument from the outcome. Admittedly, some racist policies existed, and it is theoretically possible somehow, somewhere the remnants of them survived (e.g., gun control policies or union protections have well known racist roots) - and if they did, getting rid of them would be appropriate. However, that is not what AA proponents are arguing for, and that's not what they are basing their argument on. There's no symmetry - it's like comparing General Relativity and flat-earth hypothesis - on the surface, both look structurally similar, as they both make some claims about certain phenomena, but once you bother looking deeper, the similarity disappears entirely.

"Diversity" is anti-white in intent, in action, and in consequences. As we routinely have confirmed with advocates of such using phrases like "stale, pale, and male" or "useless white male pilots".

I am saying that removal of discrimination is not the same as implementing it, even if some of the effects are.

Can a disabled person argue that eliminating disability welfare is anti-disabled people?

That's not comparable at all. The point of disability welfare is to provide them with the baseline of a life worth living, which we want to provide to everyone. Few proponents of meritocracy propose letting the useless languish.

AA, however, goes way beyond that. It gives blacks an advantage beyond that. It's fair to say everyone should live a dignified life. It's not fair some people to say some people should get unmerited success beyond what others get, based on their skin color.

I wouldn't say being a against a blindness quota for pilots is anti blind people.

Are you prepared to argue that being black is a disability akin to being blind? Should you argue we should allocate some NIH funds to look for the cure?

They can argue anything they want, but I see no reason to accept their framing. "You're arguing against an advantage for me, therefore you are anti-me" isn't valid.

The left has a clear idea of what it means to be "woke." They believe that since American life is built on a white supremacist foundation, equality demands race-based redistribution policies. These include mandatory racial quotas in hiring, DEI indoctrination in schools and businesses, and criminal justice reforms designed to benefit POC. Race is central to how the left understands "wokeness." Everything else follows.

I actually don't think that's the case. Sure, that's the message...but in reality, note that anything that actually negatively affects them and their circles are omitted from this. I would actually argue that this "Woke"...this modern Pop Progressivism is more defined by what it isn't rather than what it is, what it excludes rather than what it includes. That is, protecting and enhancing the role of class and status privilege in our society. The focus on certain identity characteristics...first it was sex, then it was race, and now we're on gender in terms of a strict oppressor-oppressed dichotomy serves that purpose.

Because not freezing out those facets, frankly, things look awfully different. It looks a lot more like the dismantling of the managerial class, both private and public in favor of lower-class workers, giving the latter more status, power, and most importantly, money and wealth. We don't see quotas in hiring, we see pressure to increase the churn among established workers along with a post-bias process for new hiring. We see largely a dropping of those DEI departments, to be frank, to increase funding for front-line positions in terms of additional wages and manpower (so their jobs are less difficult). The criminal justice thing? You know, that would probably look like both a more responsive and a more responsible police policy. Basically what liberals (I.E. the south of center range of people flowing from materialist Marxists to Classical Liberals.) have been calling for.

I think it's a mistake to actually take these ideas at face value.

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Also giving executives who fail miserably huge severance packages instead of doing what they should, telling them to get on the dole like a normal person.

They get severance that you don't for the same reason that they get paid more than you. So I'd say that yes, they should get huge severance packages.

On the same day as Cori Bush’s unhinged rant, conservatives cheered on Muslims protesting LGBT curricula in Montgomery County, Maryland schools. They championed Armenians beating up Antifa at a protest against school Pride Month activities in Glendale, California. These immigrant communities were heralded as the new bastion against progressivism, a POC revolt against white liberal extremism.

The enemy of my enemy is my enemies enemy, no more --- but also no less.

Contra Greer, I like Asian-Americans, find that they are on average excellent American citizens and net contributors, and the extent to which their politics leans Democrat seems heavily driven by continued wignat sentiments. I don't actually think I need to "remember that identity will always remain paramount" to find common cause with Asian-Americans in battles against affirmative action or other racial spoils systems.

My guess is that at least a part of Asian-American Dem identification is also simply driven by the fact that GOP continues to be the party of (mostly Evangelical Protestant) Christianity and, out of the major US demographics, Asian-Americans are least likely to be Christian.

Only when you lump them under the same umbrella. Koreans and Filipinos are Christian to the point of stereotype.

'Asian American' is far too broad a category. Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans are about as different to each other as either is to European-Americans. In general on the 'new right' we see (and have long seen, see Dinesh D'Souza in the 1990s) quite a substantial number of South Asians (including even a few Pakistanis and Bengalis here and there), but very, very few East Asian Americans, who are more uniformly progressive.

This doesn't track with personal experience or with any polling I've ever seen. Indian Americans are the Asian American group that is usually most consistently supportive of Democrats (e.g. 2020 and 2012). It's possible that East Asian Americans are just less likely to engage deeply in politics overall, so your observations may just be a variance effect.

Too broad for what, exactly? We surely can drill down even further and note that Hmong-Americans aren't socioeconomically advantaged, or that Korean-Americans do tend towards more conservative affiliations (see Michelle Steel and Young Kim, see also the relationship of Korean immigrants to the LA riots), and I think that makes sense at times. I agree with the obvious statement that South Asians and East Asians aren't very similar. Nonetheless, my statement above seems true for the aggregated group that includes both South Asians and East Asians. Most importantly in the context of the Greer article, I reject the idea of my racial identity being highly salient when it comes to whether I should regard people of both South Asian and East Asian as both good Americans and potential allies across many political dimensions.

the extent to which their politics leans Democrat seems heavily driven by continued wignat sentiments.

Don't overestimate the impact of a tiny fringe of online shitpoasters. Most Asian-Americans live in heavily-progressive areas; the dominant culture of these areas is progressive, and this has permeated nearly all the institutions around them. Their kids are brought up in classrooms where the basic progressive narratives on ethics and history are taught as gospel and entirely unquestioned. They live under progressive governance. Thus, they learn to play the progressive game - advocating for ethnic spoils as an "oppressed minority" - because that's how to get along as a numerically-small minority in large blue polities.

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You seem to be playing some sort of game here, and I strongly suspect you are trolling.

You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"

Normally, while I might consider this a little sketchy, you aren't the only regular poster who makes a habit of being somewhat oblique about your agenda, and we don't exactly have a rule requiring you to be explicit about your POV and agenda. (The requirement to speak plainly comes close, but people often misinterpret this as "You must always be direct and explicit and literal about what you're saying," and that's not really what it means.)

You've been warned a couple of times by @naraburns, and your now-deleted responses are consistent with this pattern of being coy about your intentions. @naraburns has also observed your tendency to write trollish posts that seems calculated to provoke responses without really saying anything.

Following your last posting spree, you deleted all your previous posts. While we allow people to delete their posts (though we'd prefer they didn't), this also looks quite suspect.

All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).

Would it be possible to make the policy against deletion harsher? I get if people want to be done with the site, and want to delete things to do what they can to remove their traces from the internet, but just run of the mill removing comments in the midst of a conversation, especially top-level ones, while continuing to post new ones, is something that I think is fairly harmful. (also not a huge fan of private mode, but whatever—in any case, being in private mode makes deleting top-level comments even less defensible)

You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"

But he made a similar post of an article by a far-left person (the article by ganz). All told I'd rather have his posts than not.

Also ... while for each individual post I'd prefer some commentary than no commentary, the requirement to add commentary instead of just excerpts significantly decreases the number of posts, and if the rule would lead to e.g. the ganz post not being posted because the author has no commentary I'm not sure it's a good rule.

It's a shame, because they'd be welcome as a progressive poster interested in what conservatives think. And I genuinely do think a lot of the articles this user has posted have prompted interesting discussion. But deleting posts after a few hours on such a regular basis is poor form (at least wait until the end of the week).

There is no way this guy’s a progressive. What is he, writing a PhD on the identification of different flavours of stochastic terrorism? We get few progressives as it is, and it just so happens this one is more interested in far right content than we are.

Greer is interesting in that he presents himself as a race conscious conservative, putting him well outside the mainstream, but he never "calls out "Jewish power", which has alienated him among other far right online commentators.

Just add quotes around ‘jewish power’, and no one will notice the odd insider narration. Actually I'm pretty sure I read the above sentence, possibly about another guy, from another disposable account. To JQ or not to JQ, that is their question.

Inb4 OP deletes.

He has argued against resident reactionaries before (example today). Could it be a next-level psy op? I guess it could. My guess is he's a rationalist-verse poster though, not a Sneerclub regular. I could be wrong.

FWIW he doesn't strike me as a DR person trying to under-cover drop redpills or anything. i.e. he said:

People familiar with the online right know that there's a rift between those who prioritize hating black people and those who prioritize hating Jews.

It's either a talented troll, or he's sincere and should just lurk more until he has a better understanding for posting standards. I think it's the latter.

It’s weak bait, a few breadcrumbs. From a private, month-old account who never stays for any real discussion. Last time, you said you liked his posts, then he deleted everything, hours after posting. You may find it comfy to have him lobbing the easiest balls in your direction, but he obviously has a record of dishonesty. He’s far right, not sneerclub.

foreverlurker just posted this OP:

In the Culture War thread, SecureSignals cited an article in which Ron Unz quotes a "secret report" from the Polish Ambassador to the U.S. In the report, the Ambassador supposedly wrote that, basically, powerful Jews in the U.S. are responsible for turning public opinion against Germany.

SecureSignals claimed that the authenticity of this document was "confirmed many times over", but provided no evidence of this. My brief search found that the Ambassador, Jerzy Potocki, denied that he wrote the document. Reading the alleged report, it's so nakedly and unoriginally anti-Jewish that it seems like the kind of thing that the Nazis would fabricate, but I'm wondering if anyone has more information on the report or about Potocki more generally.

Of course, even if the document is authentic, Potocki's claim that "propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the] radio, film, daily and periodical press" is nonsensical in light of how much editorial power William Randolph Hearst had in the 30's and 40's.

I don’t know anything about this affair, but the denial by potocki in 1940 seems suspect to me, like I’m sure to most reasonable people. Now do you see the bait? It's encouraging people to find out that potocki really said those things, and then.... profit .... people's minds will be blown by the JQ. And he's like 'Oh my , how can such vile antisemitic claims be uttered by a pole, let alone be true. Wait, let me find more antisemitic claims for you to "debunk". "

He talks exactly like the last alt , from the same faux-mainstream perspective, about the same topics, 99% JQ.

While I'm at it, @SecureSignals , @hanikrummihundursvin , do you honestly think this guy's not on your side?

To be fair, it seems pretty hard to find information about it on the internet. I did a search before making my post and could only find that 1940 Jewish Telegraph Agency article which is probably what he found. That indicates he also did a search, could not find anything to corroborate the authenticity with google searching but found a denial, and then asked if anyone had more information. The only other brief reference to this was this Wikiquote link which contains a quote from the report which is flagged as disputed, with the very same 1940 JTA article as a source.

The only sources I can find confirming the authenticity are the very same cited in the article I linked, so he probably did not find anything to corroborate the authenticity from a google search.

In conclusion, a Google search yields essentially nothing about these documents except the 1940 JTA article. So him concluding "this is probably fake but if it's real it doesn't matter" seems genuine to me. It is pretty mind-blowing how closely that memo mirrors German propaganda all the way through alt-right propaganda about "spreading freedom and democracy" in the Middle East as a front for fighting wars on behalf of Israel. It's understandable why someone who denies the JQ would regard this as highly suspect for what is essentially contemporary, independent corroboration from a Polish ambassador to the anti-Semitic rhetoric.

But I'll admit I'm not 100% certain, maybe he's a DR person throwing soft-balls, but he is saying enough things that indicate to me he's not. It's easy to accidentally throw softballs at the DR if you are not experienced actually talking to them.

The only sources I can find confirming the authenticity are the very same cited in the article I linked

Why then did you say earlier its authenticity "has been confirmed many times over"? Are you and the DR in the habit of taking nazi propaganda at face value?

Because the article contains multiple sources with citations? If it didn't contain citations I wouldn't take it at face value:

There is no question that the secret documents taken from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw are authentic. Charles C. Tansill considered the documents genuine and stated, “Some months ago I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents in the German White Paper are authentic.”[6]

William H. Chamberlain wrote , “I have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy of the documents, so far as he was concerned.”[7] Historian Harry Elmer Barnes also stated, “Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents.”[8]

Edward Raczyński, the Polish ambassador to London from 1934 to 1945, confirmed in his diary the authenticity of the Polish documents. He wrote in his entry on June 20, 1940: “The Germans published in April a White Book containing documents from the archives of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisting of reports from Potocki from Washington, Łukasiewicz in Paris and myself. I do not know where they found them, since we were told that the archives had been destroyed. The documents are certainly genuine, and the facsimiles show that for the most part the Germans got hold of the originals and not merely copies.”[9]

The official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Łukasiewicz published in 1970 in the book Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939 reconfirmed the authenticity of the Polish documents. Łukasiewicz was the Polish ambassador to Paris, who authored several of the secret Polish documents. The collection was edited by Wacław Jędrzejewicz, a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member. Jędrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine, and quoted from several of them.

Tyler G. Kent, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, has also confirmed the authenticity of the secret Polish documents. Kent says that he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded to the Polish documents.[10]

The German Foreign Office published the Polish documents on March 29, 1940. The Reich Ministry of Propaganda released the documents to strengthen the case of the American isolationists and to prove the degree of America’s responsibility for the outbreak of war. In Berlin, journalists from around the world were permitted to examine the original documents themselves, along with a large number of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry. The release of the documents caused an international media sensation. American newspapers published lengthy excerpts from the documents and gave the story large front-page headline coverage.[11]

More comments

The Potocki report is suspect not because it's unbelievable that a Polish aristocrat from the 1930s would be anti-semitic (would be surprising if he wasn't), but because it's suspect that a Polish diplomat would author a report that boils down to, "the only reason the Americans and English would want to go to war for Poland is because the Jews are tricking them into it." If Potocki really did deny writing it, and it boils down to "he said she said" then I think it's probably a Nazi fabrication.

Sounds polish enough. What about the evidence unz gives (here's the book), does it seem credible to you?

Well like @Esperanza says, only two or three of those are 'hostile witnesses' whose bias would not be to confirm such documents. Even if some of the documents in the 'White Book' are real, doesn't mean all of them are. In any case, I don't see what the 'bombshell' is supposed to be. It's one man's subjective opinion. In general I think Unz's "American Pravda" articles are bad.

Let's suppose I believe in freedom of speech, including freedom speech for literal Nazis. Suppose also that I know that, whenever a Nazi or someone Nazi-adjacent commits a crime whoch appears to be motivated by his beliefs, many people say, "See! That is why hate speech must be banned!" Suppose also that I believe that Nazis are not evil but misguided or the like, in a "there but for the grace of God go I" manner.

Now suppose that one of my loved ones is murdered by a Nazi, because of the Nazi's hatred for the victim's race. Surely it would not be a mystery why I might preemptively say, "please don't use this tragedy as an excuse to limit free speech rights." Or, alternatively, why I might preemptively say "please hold no hate that relates to any political beliefs".

You should stop expecting people to grieve in predictable ways that you find coherent and legible.

I've never faced anything like the public tragedy of having a family member notably murdered, but my reactions to even relatively minor tragedies are often regarded as inappropriate. People process strong emotions in different ways.

It's easy to imagine, in my mind, a grieving individual focusing intensely on the racism question specifically because their brain cannot process the grief and they wish to find a productive outlet that they have a voice and a choice in.

But for an average person?

But, the parishioners at Mother Emanuel were average persons, where they not? The only think unusual about them is their faith. And, of course, many members who lost loved ones refused to forgive Roof. So, if you can understand why some Christians might make an expressed effort to act in a manner consistent with the principles that they value, why is it so hard to believe that those who hold other sets of values might make an expressed effort to act in manner consistent therewith? And, note that what the Mother Emanuel parishioners did was far, far more emotionally difficult than merely saying, "please don't use my loved one's death as an excuse to do bad things." So, I just don't get why you can understand the former, but not the latter.

And note that the families of murdered loved ones have to do all sorts of things in the light of their immense grief, such as make funeral arrangements. That would include responding to questions like, "what clothes would your dead loved one want to be buried in." I am sure that some people are so overwhelmed with grief that they are unable to deal with that, but are you surprised when people are able to coherently address those issues even in the light of immense grief? I doubt it. So why is it so surprising when someone says to themselves, "how would my dead loved one feel about people using her death to advance political goals with which she disagreed?" and acts accordingly?

Finally, surely it is a question of degree. If my loved one is killed in a terrorist attack by a Muslim, and as a result people begin burning down mosques and exterminating Muslims in the streets, wouldn't I have an obligation to speak out (assuming I disagreed therewith), regardless of my grief? Presumably so, so perhaps those parents simply draw the line in a place different than where you draw it.

People of faith generally make more sense to me than the whims and fancies of the secular.

Exactly. You respond as you do because you personally empathize more with the former than with the latter. Doesn’t that imply that your condemnation of the parents is based less in principle than on your personal whims, particularly difficulty in empathizing with those whose values differ slightly from yours?

Where is your evidence that anyone is taking advantage of them?

Maybe it's that they don't like one set of ghouls appropriating their grief?

That's my read on it. Specifically I expect that, if you believe that discrimination is bad, and also your child has just been murdered, it's extremely traumatic to have a set of ghouls come in and tell you that the murder of your child was because of people like you who believe discrimination is bad. It's not that the other set of ghouls pushing a narrative are good, it's that at least the other set of ghouls isn't trying to appropriate a tragedy that happened to you to oppose everything that you believe in and push a narrative that it's your fault that your child was murdered.

I'm not going to be paying attention to what anyone else is saying; my world would have been shattered and I'd be doing my damnedest to keep every attention-sucking ghoul out of my mourning.

I think you do not understand how Bongland policing works.

The families in such cases are harangued into giving such a statements by the urging of the "friendly" "support" officers assigned to family liaison. I mean, the police's remit is the maintenance of public order, not the coddling of the bereaved, so I can't say they're not technically doing their jobs by hassling the families to come out with this kumbaya drek.

So in a sense you're right, the families probably would, in a vacuum, react emotionally as you would expect them to. But the police don't let 'em.

Is it actionable if the parents reply to the bereavement officer with a curt, "go fuck yourself, the only thing I want is to see that sonofabitch hanged"?

One set of parents are Indian and Irish in an interracial marriage, and the other set are (also) good upper-middle class progressives. I doubt it’s the bereavement support officer pressuring this statement.

Had a response, realized who's posting, and realized that it's all a bit too tidy. Oh, yeah, are you deeply affronted by users like sentinellgrave? You're not posting that looking to elicit a response of any sort? Definitely not attempting to move the needle in any particular direction?

there are users here who sympathize with the sentiment he expressed

such thinking only leads to further misery for all

Thank you for adding one more post to the exhibit of reasons why the mods have been too charitable with the likes of you.

No they definitely don't, the rules don't really allow me to express my sentiments in their fullest viscerallity about what should be done about such people who do these acts of racial terrorism and what should happen to their appeasers. My fucking god how cucked and brainwashed must you be in the moment of such tragedy to be advocating for your attacker and their group.

PM me your sentiments instead. I’ll tip you.

I’m very surprised, in the past 5-10 years there have been a number (handful?) of these high visibility cases where the family, typically parents of these victims make sure to prioritize giving a public statement of some racial slave morality bent. In a proper country these family members would be held accountable as accomplice to these homicides. I’ll throw “stochastic” in front of homicide to give it the imprimatur of reason.

As the wheel turns in reaction against the culture these displays issue from, we might one day delight in seeing them crushed underneath that wheel.

some racial slave morality bent

My God, Americans really are ignorant. Remind me why the fuck I ever came back here.

Please note: the entire rest of the world is not the same as your crabbed little polarised wars. "Whitey so great!!" chest-beating like this isn't yet part of our discourse, even given the best efforts of the type of actual white supremacist losers to export it to my country from both the USA and the UK.

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I don't think that's common discourse in America either?

They probably fear that if they don't, they'll be hounded. They don't want to be associated with Bad People so they go out of their way to make the distinction even in the midst of mourning.

It's Havel's Greengrocer: Family Tragedy Edition.

Is it really so difficult to believe that she might just be a good person who genuinely cares enough about doing what she believes is the right thing despite her grief? You may typical mind her to the point that her speech and feelings can't possibly be genuine, but not everybody processes their emotions in the same way as you.

Tell me, when Fox News regularly interviews families with children murdered by illegal immigrants are you similarly disgusted? Do you cringe and berate them for giving speeches on national television rather than grieving alone at home? How about Trump giving a panel with Bill Clinton's victims?

Most people are fundamentally good and want to do the right thing. I think she's deserving of at least as much charity as you're willing to extend to your tribe.

As an aside, is this comment:

Honesty is alien to the Arab, Chinaman, Indian, etc. They have a difficult time imagining a world in which you can look to a man as your equal and take what he says as a sincere expression of his beliefs. I think Americans have been somewhat orientalized in this regard.

So unremarkable that nobody here even bothers to point it out? I know, don't feed the trolls and all, but that tweet is just funny and self-sabotaging to the point of satire. Not to mention the followup tweet 'Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!'

Sentinel is pretty open about his nazism so it's not really remarkable from him. He's also a teenager, which makes it doubly unsurprising.

What this brought to mind was the father of a kidnapped and murdered daughter saying that the cohort from which his daughter's murderer came were, "Iowans with better food," as if street tacos and breakfast burritos can make up for your murdered daughter.

You seem to be implying that he said that having his daughter murdered is an acceptable trade-off for good food. He didn't. He just said that the vast majority of Mexicans are not violent murderers and they shouldn't be collectively punished for the actions of a single madman.

Assuming you are a White American, I don't think you are in any way responsible for the actions of John Wayne Gacy. If you are from a different ethnic group, I'm sure it has produced similarly evil people, and you are not responsible for their actions unless you directly assisted them.

Assuming you are a White American, I don't think you are in any way responsible for the actions of John Wayne Gacy. If you are from a different ethnic group, I'm sure it has produced similarly evil people, and you are not responsible for their actions unless you directly assisted them.

I don't think anyone makes the Gacy association, though I wonder to what extent this is because Gacy was a gay Democratic organizer, and thus has too many counter-signals in his identity. But we are told, every single day, by the dominant institutions of power and culture, that we are responsible for the actions of Derek Chauvin. We're told every single day that everything from microaggressions at work to the bullets from a policeman's gun are products of the swirling cauldron of whiteness, and that we all contribute to it from the day we are born, and that we must drain our lives and resources in silent deference and atonement. Comments like these only highlight that some groups get the privilege of nuance, while others must simply endure being treated as an amorphous mass of social toxins.

And that's setting aside that no one had the ability to stop Gacy from being in the country, since he was born an American. Mexican migrants, particularly illegal ones, are here as the result of deliberate policy decisions to do nothing about them. If a father who has just lost his daughter cannot even question the wisdom of those policy decisions, he deserves contempt. But my sympathy is limited, as I'm sure his daughter would have never questioned those policies either, even as the knife went in. Some people just bare their necks to the world.

I actually considered using Chauvin as an example instead of Gacy. I opted for Gacy because his actions are much more unambiguously evil and indefensible. Given this site's bent, there was a possibility that some might believe Chauvin's actions were justified, in which case the example wouldn't work.

Anyway, White Americans are not responsible for Chauvin's actions either.

And that's setting aside that no one had the ability to stop Gacy from being in the country, since he was born an American. Mexican migrants, particularly illegal ones, are here as the result of deliberate policy decisions to do nothing about them. If a father who has just lost his daughter cannot even question the wisdom of those policy decisions, he deserves contempt. But my sympathy is limited, as I'm sure his daughter would have never questioned those policies either, even as the knife went in.

No one decided to deliberately let in murderers. Yes, if you let in millions of people, some of them are probably going to commit murder. But unless they commit murder at a higher rate, you are not actually increasing the natives' probability of being murdered. In that case, highlighting individual murders committed by immigrants is dishonest fearmongering.

The question then is whether immigrants do commit violent crimes at a higher rate. Apparently this is not the case and illegal immigrants actually commit less violent crime than natives.

More comments

people who do these acts of racial terrorism

When we know that it was an act of racial terrorism, then you can go full keyboard warrior.

Right now it's looking like "guy who was probably in the throes of a mental episode". I only am aware of the races of three of the victims: the white English young student and the older man, and the half-Irish/half-Indian girl student. I don't know what race(s) the two people who were run over are. Perpetrator is West African.

It's the parents of the Irish-Indian girl who are asking not for responses like yours, and that's because as Irish in Britain and Indian in Britain both of them are likely to have encountered some form of "your nationality is shit" (not as often as in the past, thank goodness, but there are still pockets of ignorance).

It's the parents of the Irish-Indian girl who are asking not for responses like yours, and that's because as Irish in Britain and Indian in Britain both of them are likely to have encountered some form of "your nationality is shit" (not as often as in the past, thank goodness, but there are still pockets of ignorance).

The person in the link in the OP appears to be the mother of Barnaby Webber, who was white English, so unless you've seen some other parent talking about this in some other source, perhaps you should read before harrumphing about your racial enlightenment.

Oh god damn it. How do I keep falling for this guy?

It's good bait, real red meat for the local crowd. I honestly don't know the angle for sure, there are at least a few options:

  • Right-wing - wants to incite similar feelings among others that are on the fence

  • Sneer-club - wants to incite right-wing responses that look bad to an outside audience

  • Shit-stirrer - some people just want to generate heat

  • Good-faith - interested in hot button topics, not great at generating more light than heat

My pet theory falls in line with option 2. I'm expecting some writeup on Substack or Reddit wherein he "exposes" a den of rightwingers.

Top level mod comment directed at multiple people.

First, @foreverlurker. I think you're a troll and after conferring with @ZorbaTHut, you are banned for repeatedly posting things that pattern match to "Bad faith sockpuppet who ignores warnings and repeatedly does the same thing as soon as the last ban ends."

Besides being trollish, it had the desired effects of a trollpost, which is to induce multiple people (including @FistfullOfCrows, @grognard, and @FarNearEverywhere) to post shitty responses and subresponses. I'd mod you all, but if anything my mod note would be something like "Stop taking the bait and letting a troll get you to play Let's You And Him Fight." So consider yourselves to have gotten a pass on this one, but consider not letting a troll jerk your strings next time.

And to everyone who's going to say "But it started an interesting discussion!" Yeah, and someone could (and has) start an interesting discussion with an unhinged unambiguously culture warring rant, but "Anything that gets people to talk" is not the criterion for a good post.

This is not a ban worthy post whatever patterns you're seeing. I personally think moderation should be uber-light. It is the overall community we need to trust in maintaining standards, not moderation. There should be a ban line at explicitly inciting hate, but not at allusions, dog whistles etc. I may be naive but I just don't see how a broad base community like this will get swept up in a descent to all out racism or whatever. People will counter till they will get bored and then disengage. A small minority will feed off each other's posts potentially but I think it's worth being radically open here given what is happening internet wide with censorship.

This post alone may not be, but the user is well-known for making "edgy" top-level posts which are mostly copy-pastes of articles elsewhere without any original commentary, performing minimal to no engagement in the discussion generated, and usually deleting the post within a few hours. You can argue for any position you want here, but you have to actually argue for it, not just stir the pot. He seems like he's either pot-stirring for the lols, or is some sort of "researcher" trying to generate comments that can be taken out of context to paint the whole forum as some kind of racist cesspool.

I hadn't appreciated the broader context, as I said was judging off the post itself, not 'pot-stirring'.

The problem is not with dog whistling or allusions. The OP was not banned for dog whistling, he was banned for being a troll who's not engaging in good faith. That is precisely what will undermine faith in community standards.

I guess I don't have the visibility of the pattern to judge. The post itself looks quite normal to the untrained eye...

He's posted eight top comments, of which 4 are deleted, since the beginning of the previous week, all of which were racially related, many of which were reposts of large swaths of external articles with minimal commentary, and has been warned or temp-banned at least three times in that duration.

Oh well, I defer to the better attuned mod. I think I probably tend to skip those posts and so don't notice.

To be clear, I'm not a mod, if that was referring to me.

And you're right that this post was better than the last two, I think.

No, was referring to original mod post. I guess I'm curious as to what happens if you have a very low ban bar, it could all go to shit quickly of course, particularly if the community population changes, but if the community is broad-based and stable it's just on the margins might it just get ignored or rebutted.

"Anything that gets people to talk" is not the criterion for a good post.

Aren't we missing out on a lot of interesting conversations as a result though? Banning forever is fine (OP is an undeniable bait post), but in general I think a lower effort-level for toplevel posts would be good. I think we'd have interesting discussion, at the time, over this or this or a dozen other things I've seen over the past month, but obviously I haven't made such posts.

I personally quite like the standard of "if you're going to bring up a controversial topic it should be because you personally care about and have a well-thought-out stance on the topic, and you are willing to either defend your stance or change your mind".

I don't think it even needs to rise to that level - I would settle for, "I have not considered this thoroughly, but I think this article makes an interesting, provocative point, and I'd like to engage the community on it" if it's actually in good faith. The well-thought-out stance part is optional, but honesty is required.

If you think the point is interesting or provocative, there's probably a reason you think that, and I think comments where the poster explains their interest and take are better.

They don’t seem to have been targeted because of their race, there just aren’t many people walking around Nottingham at 4am on a weekday other than students (which two victims were) and janitors/cleaners (which the other victim was). More information could come out, I suppose.

Interestingly, though the apparent perpetrator is a West African migrant from Guinea-Bissau, he wasn’t a refugee or asylum seeker. He had completed a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Nottingham, which is fifth (after Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and Manchester) in the UK for that subject, apparently, and was looking for a software engineer / data scientist job. So he doesn’t really fit the typical profile of male migrants who go on a rampage, although he does arguably fit the older trope of the engineering student turned terrorist.

Guinea-Bissau is ~45-60% Muslim depending on source, likely due to significant syncretic practice of aspects of Islam and native West African folk religion in rural areas. There are “concerns” about extremism but compared to much of the rest of West Africa it’s a relatively tolerant country. It’s possible he was radicalized in Britain, of course.

This reminds me of Jihadi John, honestly.

He was merely a lowly sysadmin, though.

He could also just have been a schizo especially since he falls several higher risk groups for schizophrenia.

The BBC says “It is also understood that the man has a history of mental health issues.”


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