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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27763 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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This is a troll post where you pretend to make an argument that 38% property ownership is not high enough to justify discrimination against Jews, while intending for the reader to ignore your argument and just react to the 38% figure as being too high.

Troll post or not(it is), the meta argument still stands. At a certain point you realize that people who ingroup jews never accept in any sense that there is any rhyme, reason or responsibility to be found when the subject of anti-semitism comes up. Which is why you get these inane arguments to begin with.

The framework for the discussion is of a victim and oppressor, not cause and effect. Which is at odds with the 'rationalist' disposition on most other topics.

Are Jews overrepresented? Of course. Is that a problem? I don’t think so. Could that cause jealously? Naturally.

This is a great example. Jews just exist in a form that is impossible to assign negative cause to. So the natural conclusion is that anyone who assigns them any negative cause is suffering from some ailment or pathology.

This is just such a transparent expression of ingroup bias. Like, it can't be that jews actually caused something negative to happen or are in any way instrumental in the proliferation of anything bad and that some people had a very natural and human reaction to it. I.e. not wanting to live with jews anymore. No, the Nazis were instead jealous of jews.

Claiming that certain Jews did things that you dislike is of course not necessarily pathological. However, blaming Jews as a group for things is certainly and in all cases a form of irrational, shoddy thinking. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it is inaccurate. "Jews" did not cause things that you dislike to happen in Weimar Germany. Some specific Jews did.

Frankly this is just a form of special pleading that only ever functions to try and thwart discussions of large-scale problems by shrinking them down to a series of individual decisions. It's de rigeur to talk of pathological behavior among white people, white communities, "whiteness", etc., and most people who sniff about "canards" of Jewish influence and malign behavior will not think twice before agreeing that white people bear collective moral, cultural and (especially) financial responsibility for a litany of supposed historical grievances. In many cases this is actually the law! The nuance that you insist upon is something that's only ever applied to shield members of an ingroup from criticism of that ingroup as a collective, so that no one ever gets to ask questions about whether your ingroup really is a malign influence on society - now, regardless of how large the problem is, you get to insist that it's just hundreds or thousands or millions of individual bad apples, nothing more. Where, precisely, is the boundary between "it's all just individual Jews making individual decisions" and "white people need to spend their lives denouncing previous generations of white people"? At what point does it become fair to make systemic criticisms of your ingroup?

In order to blame someone they’d have to have the power to do it. White Americans did, for example, push Native American tribes onto reservations. White Southern Americans passed Jim Crow laws. If you want to blame Jews for the fall of Weimar, they not only have to be there when the gun goes off, but have to be holding the gun. But, quite often it was other people. Hyperinflation was caused by the Allies demanding draconian reparations.

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