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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27774 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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38% does not constitute majority ownership, which would mean that whatever perceived exploitation there was would have been mostly the product of native Slovaks. The Nazi's attempt at drawing a connection between "Weimar degeneracy" and Jews is similarly ridiculous because there were at least as many ethnic Germans involved.

I would favour "Is the demographic overrepresented?", over "Does the demographic represent over 50%?". The former doesn't breakdown at sufficiently small minorities who might exert power/commit crime at rates staggeringly higher than the largest demographic but less than 50%. The former isn't dependent on what fraction other demographics of the entire population represent thus allowing one to discover demographic partilucular peculiarities, even if they are only a small fraction of the whole.

In a population consisting solely of Greens and Purples, if Greens are ten times as likely to commit murder as Purples, but if Greens are less than 1/11th of the population, the latter metric would fail to detect a murderous characteristic, whatever the cause, of the Greens.

I think you have fallen for the bait; this is the objection which OP intended to be raised. I would have too had @omfalos not mentioned it.

Can we stipulate Wikipedia is not a Nazi-aligned source? And then put aside everything else, to look at this list of leaders from Wikipedia of the German Revolution that introduced the "Weimar degeneracy" -

Rosa Luxemburg

Karl Liebknecht

Kurt Eisner

Clara Zetkin

Paul Levi

Franz Mehring

Leo Jogiches

Wilhelm Pieck

Ernst Toller

Erich Mühsam

Richard Müller

Emil Barth

Gustav Landauer

Eugen Leviné

Max Levien

Rudolf Egelhofer

Karl Radek

Johann Knief

Emil Eichhorn

It did not have "at least as many" ethnic Germans involved. In reality only 1/3rd were gentiles.

Since I am not that good with european jewish names - how did you figure that out? Aside from the Levi and Levines that are somewhat high profile.

Max Levien doesn't seem to have been Jewish. "Research has established that Levien was descended from Huguenot immigrants into Russia by the name of Lavigne."

Of course, several debates with online antisemites have demonstrated, to me, that he criteria for Jewishness among their objects of hatred are stretchy indeed - you can be Jewish by religion, Jewish by ethnicity, half Jewish, quarter Jewish, have any demonstrable Jewish heritage, just know how to speak Yiddish, have advocated against anti-Semitism, have a Jewish spouse, "look Jewish", have a "Jewish" last name (ie. often just a normal German or East European last name - that's why people frequently seem to assume Karl Liebknecht was Jewish, for example) etc. etc. to get in the Jew count.

It’s funny. I’m not Jewish by Jewish standards (father was Jewish but not mother). I’m married to a Jew. My kids are Jewish. So presumably the antisemites view me as Jewish while the Jews do not!

In a way that makes you Jewish. The true essence of being a jew is that whichever way the world turn you are always the one in the least favorable position. Sources - let's start with the old testament and then move to history books.

Orthodox Judaism wouldn’t, Reform Judaism would.

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht died a few months after the German revolution when they led the weak and quickly crushed Spartacist uprising, so I'm not sure why anyone would think they contributed much to so-called Weimar "degeneracy".

I also find the notion of "Weimar degeneracy" to be pretty silly because people who use that term generally ignore the much worse degeneracy of the Kaiser's government, which allowed Germany to get pulled into the worst war in human history up to that point and then failed to win it, and many of the supporters of which then blamed others besides Germany's political-military ruling class for the catastrophe. Note that I am not blaming Germany for starting the war or claiming that the communists would have been better had they taken power in Germany, but I am claiming that the Kaiser's government were a bunch of incompetents who caused much worse things to happen to Germany than anything that Jews or leftists did to it during the Weimar periiod.

The specific notion of "Weimar degeneracy" already implies that the person who uses the term only cares about what certain groups of people did to Germany, but does not care about others. So, for example, to them all the leftist attempts to take power are automatically branded as bad things, but they will go and excuse the Kapp Putsch and Hitler's later takeover as being good things even though there is no good reason to believe so given that Kapp probably would have returned some version of an incompetent monarchist autocracy into power and we know that Hitler in fact made even stupider geopolitical decisions than the Kaiser's government had, and got Germany even more destroyed than the Kaiser's government had.

This list has 9 Jews and 10 non-Jews. Going by Wikipedia descriptions, Luxemburg, Eisner, Levi, Jogiches, Toller, Mühsam, Landauer, Leviné and Radek are Jewish.

The German revolution didn’t “introduce Weimar degeneracy”; the ‘German revolution’ (actually several) that you’re referring to were a series of failed communist revolutionary attempts, all of which were quashed. The Weimar Republic stood in opposition to them, and was considered by the radical left to be the enemy since it largely preserved the economic system and structure of government (at lower levels) that had existed in Germany before the war, was more continuity than change. It certainly didn’t have very much to do with any cultural change, since its main problem was its utter sclerosis.

The cultural changes that happened in Weimar Germany happened across the West at the same time, and outside of a tiny subculture in Berlin (which even the Nazis didn’t really bother eradicating, since in many ways their attitude to gender wasn’t trad at all) the vast majority of Germany in the Weimar era largely retained its traditional cultural character.

People who constantly milk past history of antisemitism or past anti black racism are promoting racism today and authoritarianism. I think it would be much better if people instead of doing this were silent instead and that such milking of past grievances in one sided manner was dealt with more intolerance and there was a taboo against it.

Like people realizing this fact and either outright censoring some of this when is overdone or be condemning and unpleasant to those doing it.

So no, it isn't legitimate and good to be talking about the so called antisemitism of Tito's Yugoslavia. I don't care about it but I do care about you and others like you bringing it up.

Although in different contexts among historical departments doing an even handed history that doesn't just soapbox about antisemitism but is willing to mention negaively say Jewish mistreatment of non Jews too, but also talk about Jews being mistreated, I don't see something wrong with that.

There is certainly a norm being promoted about being against bringing up Jewish participation in communism or any Jewish wrongdoing. Well if we shouldn't talk about Jews wronging others we should also talk less about others wronging Jews in the past. These milking of past grievances and promotion of victimhood ensures racism being kept alive. Especially in combo with the concept that some groups have always been victims and others always be victimizers.

The people who are extremely intolerant to any negativity towards Jews and call it conspiracy theory, while legitimize much greater negativity towards non Jews, are just racist extremists acting based on prejudice and trying to give it a fig leaf of legitimacy. The end point of what they promote is that indeed Jews are superior and should be treated better and others worse.

So my view is what we need is to not care that much about such events but to care about the faction that wants to talk about it and punish them for being malicious racists who are acting in bad faith and trying to use their one sided approach of history as a weapon.

Unironically one way to avoid conflict is to actually bring up the past less. Unless that is you bring it up to correct the onesided approach of those who are milking the past maliciously today which isn't antisemites today who milk the past against their outgroup in positions of influence.

To respect the sensitivity of people who want less focus on any supposed wrongdoing done by say Jews, we should also talk less about supposed past antisemitism.

Unless the goal is indeed to promote a narrative of oppressed groups that should be protected and we need to be racist in their favor and against groups like european christian men. Which it is. Hence making such malicious exploration of history taboo is what I recommend. Like fighting about the details, it is better to just not tolerate people who try to use history in such manner to begin with.

I certainly don't think we need the opposite milking of history either as the pervasive force but a detente where everyone understands that at least most groups, and certainly Jews included have a more complex history than pure victimizers nor victims and while we aknowledge complexities of history we don't abuse it in such manner would be a much a superior norm. A detente rather than one group of hateful grievance carriers dishing out as much as they want while demanding they don't get any of the same currency back. And throwing terms like nazi and antisemitism to cover up their own racism and to slander any dissent to their racist extremism.

I would recommend for the right and others who ought to oppose this to fire activists in positions of influence promoting this milking of the past to shit on the present outgroup and that it would be a good thing and a move towards a less racist and fanatical society if we were intolerant to those malicious actors of this mentality. Rules like boo outgroup or regulations against racism should not make exceptions for those promoting a jewish grievance against european societies either.

BTW, it does no good for the relationship between Jews and non Jews to constantly talk about ethnic conflict between Jews and non Jews. Moving past it and promoting that different groups must respect each other does far better than promoting to one the idea that they will always be victimized by the other, and to the other either the acceptance of this ideal and they deserve to be mistreated as "revenge" and because of their own bad nature, or to see Jews as a group that will always see them as oppressors and therefore might mistreat them.

Rules like boo outgroup or regulations against racism should not make exceptions for those promoting a jewish grievance against european societies either.

Should TheMotte add a rule against advancing any form of slave morality in general?

Calling it slave morality misdiagnoses the problem.

It is more racism for Jews by either Jewish supremacists who are Jewish racists, or non Jews who are racist supremacists for a foreign ethnic group. And same in general for the progressive stack.

These people with this mentality are not pushovers. Oikophobia relies on pushovers as well to take root, but the faction on the offense are more direct racists, rather than those who are impotent to oppose them. It is an alliance of different extreme tribalists than just a pathology of everyone being a pushover.

And such behavior of enforcing consensus that the Jewish outgroup is always at fault and Jews always have it worse and admitting no fault, and how any dissent is antisemitism which should be shut down is behavior that is utterly ridiculous and rule violating and inconsistent with any serious and respectable way of exploring history, or ethnic issues. Just onesided racist propaganda. So is more sneaky ways of doing this like just always talking about jewish victimhood.

This authoritarian racist propaganda should not be tolerated anywhere, including in universities, media, etc. by just enforcing what current rules ought to be or were, but not the hidden rules that are about the progressive stack and respecting the tribalism of Jewish supremacists. Is it possible to shut it down, but have some sensitivity to not censor the rare case that Jewish victimhood is brought up if there isn't an agenda to overly promote it? Yes it is possible indeed to do that and distinguish the weaponization of history, with the even handed exploration of it.

I have a problem with the slave morality concept since those who bring it up seem to use it to pathologize both being a pushover and moderation. I favor groups having self respect, and standing up for themselves against malicious racists. I don't want them to have a mentality that everything is ok and permitted and that they should abuse others.

There is a sweet spot between pushover, ultranationalist oppressor and it does involve a healthy level of intolerance towards foreign racist supremacists and the locals who align with them. That sweet spot is what I favor, of not tolerating this bullshit, but also not doing it to others neither.

The reality is that if western civilization and countries, when the Frankfurt school, ADL, weathermen underground and third world marxist nationalists were pushing their extremism decades ago, shut these groups down and didn't let them march in institutions, the world would be in a saner and more moderate place today. Same for other groups which shared this extremism and authoritarianism but were somewhat more sneaky about it like the neocons.

And make no mistake, these groups did shut down opposition.

Now things are in a worse spot, but you still got to not tolerate such viewpoint if you have any rules of conduct and standards. Its not that we don't have rules in institutions but its that evenhanded application of rules has been eroded over being at this point even overt supremacist in the progressive stack manner. And there are also those who are aligning with its agenda but aren't going to admit this even though it can be surmised by their behavior.

So do we have a general problem of quokas? Not exactly. Racist supremacists for progressive stack identities are racists who promote tolerance for their own racism and in bad faith promote that their outgroup should be pushovers and have no tribalism. These people are not really quokas but are authoritarians.

This isn't done in good faith against tribalism since they promote it for their ingroup and oppose any right wing criticism of excessive tribalism. Moreover, there is a direct connection between becoming a pushover and eventually becoming a racist supremacist for a foreign tribe and not just an enabler. Since the vacuum of your own lack of tribalism can be filled by identifying with the tribalism of another group where tribalism without limit is tolerated and where you can virtue signal.

A society that was dominated by "slave morality" promoted towards everyone would look quite different. I think a mutuality of restraint is part of international justice but again restraint does not mean tolerating everything. Restraint is different than concern trolling the victimized party to be pushovers or else they are dishonestly slandered by the actual racist supremacists as nazi antisemites, who just coincidentally never show the same intolerance both in terms of unpleasantness, hostility and also in terms of outright banning and restricting the most pervasive type of progressive supremacists who actually do pass hate speech laws and manage to get governments promote their narratives.

Of which Jewish supremacists are obviously part of promoting the same ideal of their group doing nothing wrong and western civilization oppressing them among others. If anything, they seem to be the most authoritarian racists and the issue where their supremacist ideology is enforced most viciously and ruthlessly.

Governments abandoning ridiculously one sided definitions of antisemitism and outright condemning the weaponization of history to portray Christians as permanent oppressors of Jews or anyone, would be a move forward. Same with the narrative of europeans as oppressors, or even of western civilization as oppressive. As well as condemning one sided depictions of the past and promoting in influence figures like Helen Andrews and more who have promoted truth and nuance and this as the official approach.

The lobbies which made these racist blood libel laws reality should not be allowed to continue to have influence and organizations can easily be banned. Indeed, like a police department raided ADL offices for a criminal investigation in the 1990s, banning political commissar state within a state powerful totalitarian racist supremacist organizations while investigating them for crimes like extortion, spying and more, is definitely feasible.

In Poland they criminalized blaming the Poles for the holocaust, which is part of the reason the Polish succeed in defending themselves from this to some extend. Prohibition which does not necessarily require outright criminalization on goverment level of this one sided promotion of guilt on continuous nations, religions, based on one sided propaganda ought to be the end point. People who are being racist pricks against groups today by weaponizing history promoting them as permanent past, present and future oppressors should be more afraid of engaging in that behavior, than their victims of resisting it.

As we can see you can incentivize and keep out ideologies without outright banning them. But it would be less extreme for countries to restrict the more dominant type of hate speech that shits on their people that laws in line of this ideology. Like this ideology rose in influence it can decline. And then I would have less supremacists to be complaining about since there will be less people holding that ideology once it is repressed instead of promoted. Which is fine my me.

It really is especially insulting to see people in other occasions be intolerant to this type of behavior but either engage in it themselves when it comes to the Jews, or tolerate it as uniquely defensible. It isn't and the way forward is to not tolerate it anywhere.

At the heart of the impotence and extremism lies the same fallacy about how we should defend this kind of extremism because the radical right oppose it, which could be used to justify, and has been used to justify all type of far left extremism. What is wrong about racist supremacists is in fact imposing on other groups a violation of their rights. Its not in fact extreme to oppose this being done to you.

So it is both disappointing and illuminating that we are dealing with people who we shouldn't take as credible just because they might have more correct takes on other issues, when they show this extremist prejudice in favor of the Jews and against Christians, Europeans and other non Jewish groups. It isn't really that complicated, don't tolerate this movement, which is good while behaving with standards of behavior that do in fact differ from the supremacists which you don't tolerate and criticize. Remember that being too much of a pushover towards them is not being sufficiently different and is letting them impose their evil on the world.

If I were to quantify it, I would say that enforcing an ultranationalist ideology with worldwide ambitions is evil. It makes sense for nations to have some bias in favor of themselves in their own borders. Focusing more on your own history is part of this. While focusing on your history is one thing, even there some restraint on how one sided you present history and the world is good. Some evenhandedness. But this should count 100 times over if you are trying to promote a vision of history to a different ethnic group. That we reached the point where ridiculous Jewish supremacist racist propaganda is being adopted by different non Jewish countries is both a tragedy and a farce.

38% does not constitute majority ownership, which would mean that whatever perceived exploitation there was would have been mostly the product of native Slovaks

38% of property doesn't equal 38% of businesses. If indeed the non-Jews owned basically all the land, then the Jews would have owned more than 38% of businesses (assuming, again, that one can trust the 38% number).

It makes sense that an insular religious group which refused to do agriculture since ~400AD would own an outsize amount of property in 20th century Slovakia (acquired through moneylending and banking I imagine). It also makes sense the ethnic Slovak farmers would find this annoying and try to take action against that. How much more is there to discuss? There’s no moral quandary or political interest here, just two groups doing what is in their best interests.

They didn't refuse agriculture, they were banned from it in most places.

Of course, it was noted Jews were predominantly craftsmen and other non farm occupations cca year zero.

Pretty sure Jews in the pale of settlement farmed, no?

The Talmud has passages condemning agricultural work and encouraging learned / literate work. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Tsar tried to get Russian Jews to farm but failed. As far as I know there is no example of a Rabbi (the leaders of the Jewish micro-nation) ever asking for farming privileges in any of their negotiations with foreign powers.

I am also reminded of King Anaxandridas II of Sparta, who was alleged to have told someone who asked why Spartans didn't till their fields but instead had their helots do it, that "It was not by taking care of the fields, but of ourselves, that we acquired those fields."

As you said, this is alleged apocryphal quote.

If you want to hear authentic Spartan voice from antiquity justifying their treatment of helots (that was seen as outrageous even by ancient standards), start here, this is the closest you can get.

This speech was written by Isocrates, one of most famous orators of the time in voice of Spartan king of the day. It summarizes arguments used by Spartans themselves and presents the best possible case for Spartan peculiar institutions.

So what he says:

1/God gave us this land and these people.

For we inhabit Lacedaemon because the sons of Heracles gave it to us, because Apollo directed us to do so, and because we fought and conquered those who held it; and Messene we received from the same people, in the same way, and by taking the advice of the same oracle.

2/It was ours for a long time. Its a tradition.

Then again you are doubtless well aware that possessions, whether private or public, when they have remained for a long time in the hands of their owner, are by all men acknowledged to be hereditary and incontestable. Now we took Messene before the Persians acquired their kingdom23 and became masters of the continent, in fact before a number of the Hellenic cities were even founded.

3/You are doing far worse, you have no right to judge us.

and although it was only the other day that they razed both Thespiae and Plataea to the ground

4/Both the greatest kingdom and the greatest democracy of the world were fine with it for a long time, why are you making into a big issue now?

But, although our treaties were concluded under circumstances in which it was impossible for us to seek any advantage, yet, while there were other matters about which differences arose, neither the Great King nor the city of Athens ever charged us with having acquired Messene unjustly.

See that despite the delusions of modern wannabe bronze age keyboard warriors, raw psychopathic "might makes right" attitude was not something believed in ancient times, even by Spartans.

3/You are doing far worse, you have no right to judge us.

and although it was only the other day that they razed both Thespiae and Plataea to the ground

The earliest example of "[And you are lynching Negroes](And you are lynching Negroes)" in history?

Outstandingly informative post! I hope you aren't lumping me in with bronze age keyboard warriors though, because my basic philosophy can be summarised as being human means striving to exceed the limits of might makes right.

I also don't see what's wrong with preferring to avoid farming if possible and wanted to provide another ancient example of that mindset, which might not have been said by Anaxandridas II, but was clearly understood by Plutarch. This thread reads like mango worship to me.

See that despite the delusions of modern wannabe bronze age keyboard warriors, raw psychopathic "might makes right" attitude was not something believed in ancient times, even by Spartans.

That literally is a raw psychopathic "might makes right" ideology. Invoking the will of the gods doesn't change anything. They thought the will of the gods was whatever happened. It's just "might makes right" with extra steps. They even add as an extra, "and because we fought and conquered those who held it."

I don't see how the invocation of jealous, petty, and partial gods changes anything. It just reinforces how insanely might makes right their ideology was back then.

The Talmud has passages condemning agricultural work

Can you give us a cite where? I think what quotes (passed through several hundred years chinese whispers game) you mean, but they do not say what you think they say.

and encouraging learned / literate work.

No surprise, who you think wrote the Talmud?

According to Solzhenitsyn, the Tsar tried to get Russian Jews to farm but failed.

People were not eager to become Russian peasants? What a surprise.

BTW, if true, it confirms that the tsars were idiots, lack of people in agriculture was the last of Russia problem.

It is not 14th century but 19th one, you are not playing Crusader Kings, but Victoria and your first task is to move peasants out of villages into cities and factories (if you want to win and not only goof around).

If Jews don't farm, why do they have a major holiday for harvest season? Farming may not be the most popular career for Jews, but it appears there's still plenty of Jewish farmers, even before the Kibbutz movement.

I am also highly skeptical of people pulling quotes from the Talmud to try and make a point about the Jews. The Talmud is a large volume containing many contradictory opinions about many subjects from many historical scholars. It's meant to be studied and debated, not read as a literal book of laws. Can you cite the exact passage that you believe condemns agricultural work and why you believe the intent of that section is to order Jews not to perform it?

I have no idea what the relationship of Eastern European Jewish communities was to farming. Certainly they were strongly discriminated against and banned from it in many places. If they refused to try or ask, perhaps they knew they wouldn't get it, or were concerned that they wouldn't be allowed to keep them for long enough for a planting and harvest cycle, or wouldn't be allowed to learn how to do it well. Or maybe it's not very well documented exactly what they did or didn't try to do over the years.

In looking around the net about the subject, I did find this interesting and pretty neutral article about the subject making the case that the root cause of Jews tending away from farming in the pre-historical era was not hostile discrimination or refusal to do farm labor, but instead the religious requirement to be literate (in order to read the Torah) in an era when that was extremely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. It seems likely that many people thought, if you've got to acquire a relatively rare and difficult skill, better to make some use of it rather than continue to farm.

Because Sukkot has its origins in Ancient Israel, and actually before that in ancient Canaan, which was agricultural. Talmudic Judaism came about around the first century, around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. This is where what we call “Judaism” originates.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/20824/1/dp670.pdf

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/jewish-occupational-selection-education-restrictions-or-minorities/5B02E978ED1E2F71A331D87CA6DE71D9

These articles go over how the Talmud made those who were illiterate very low status, and those Jews eventually converted to other religions. But farmers were pretty much necessarily illiterate before the printing press. Additionally, scholars had a huge advantage in terms of marriage because of the general praise of scholars. “200 years together” talks about how rabbis took advantage of this. Specifically in the Talmud we read we read that agriculture is the lowest profession and that selling merchandise is better than working the land.

Specifically in the Talmud we read we read that agriculture is the lowest profession and that selling merchandise is better than working the land.

Which just sounds like the Hindu caste system, very broadly, where it's the literate priestly class putting their caste at the top of the pecking order and then those who till the land or engage in work around animals, waste, dead bodies, etc. are put at the very bottom of the social pyramid. This isn't a purely and solely Jewish notion.

In the ideal (as opposed to actual) social system in the Vedic era, the ranks are:

Brahmins: Vedic scholars, priests or teachers. Kshatriyas: Rulers, administrators or warriors. Vaishyas: Agriculturalists, farmers or merchants. Shudras: Artisans, laborers or servants.

Manusmriti assigns cattle rearing as Vaishya occupation but historical evidence shows that Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Shudras also owned and reared cattle and that cattle-wealth was mainstay of their households. Ramnarayan Rawat, a professor of History and specialising in social exclusion in the Indian subcontinent, states that 19th century British records show that Chamars, listed as untouchables, also owned land and cattle and were active agriculturalists. The emperors of Kosala and the prince of Kasi are other examples.

Cows being sacred, farming/dairy herdsmen as occupation would be higher-ranked in India. For the Jewish position, since there weren't sacred animals but were impure ones - and the question of who was raising pigs or keeping pigs at the time - then people who were probably herding non-kosher animals as well as kosher ones would naturally be an occupation giving rise to the attitude "it's better to be a trader than a farmer".

i agree, but we don’t see this kind of anti-agricultural ethic in Christianity. All Christians are of equal value who act Christlike, and the learned class was celibate. So it makes sense for eg Slovaks to rebel against a foreign upper class. And, of course, it also makes sense for Jews to want to make more money in lending and trade rather than farming. All of it makes sense, it’s just competing value schemes.

There might be another push. Since Jews were generally exiles for most of the existence of Talmudic Judaism, they might have been subject to expulsions and attacks. Farming is obviously bound to the land, and if you have to worry about neighbors with pitchforks and torches coming after you or governments getting grabby, Farming is probably a terrible profession. You cannot pack your field in a suitcase or put it in a cart, your fields and barns will be lost if you have to flee or are ordered to leave. Christians were generally dominant in their countries and rulers of those countries so any wealth tied to the land wouldn’t be at risk. If you bought a field, chances are that your kids would be passing it to their kids.

The other thing with literacy is that without literacy, there’s not really a way to preserve the religion. The temple is gone, the priests are gone, you’re surrounded by other peoples. If nobody can read, the religion gets lost or becomes so diluted that it’s lost entirely.

I interpret the posts you started this thread with as making the claim that Jews as a group categorically refuse to do agricultural work because the Talmud says they aren't allowed to. But the articles that you posted seem to basically agree with the one I posted - that Jews mostly moved away from agriculture because the religion did mandate that they become literate in an age where that was rare and difficult, and there were more lucrative jobs available for those who were (though usually not lucrative enough versus farming at the time to persuade people of other religions who did not have a religious mandate for literacy to take them up). So agreed on that I guess?

This is also evidence that the mandate for literacy is actually real and recognized as so and obeyed by the great majority of Jews throughout history. You seem to be attempting to claim there is a mandate to not do agricultural work, which I can't see any evidence of historical or near-modern Jews actually perceiving, recognizing, or obeying. It may not be super-popular, but there definitely are substantial movements around Jewish Farming, and I've never heard of any Rabbis or Talmudic scholars making a claim that those movements are wrong. And you'd think they'd get rid of Sukkot too if they really did hate farming.

(this probably deserves an effortpost of its own, but indeed literacy is rare and expensive in the pre-industrial age, which includes not only the printing press, but a power source for it, plus decent-quality long-lasting paper and ink in industrial quantities, plus a way to transport large quantities of all of those supplies and the resulting books around a country)

The Talmud is a pretty complex and obscure subject. You pretty much never hear any Jews who are not Talmudic scholars talking about it or basing their lives around it. Indeed, there are college degrees for reading and interpreting it. I am not at all a Talmudic scholar myself, but all of the commentary in the site you posted on the section you linked says it's mainly about marriage and relations between men and women. It seems nobody else thinks the bit that you say forbids agriculture work (or rather, quotes a "Rabbi Elazar" as claiming it's "low") actually does so. It's a book that's existed for thousands of years and had many tens of thousands of people spend years of their life reading and interpreting, if it's actually meant as a prohibition, surely there must be more people talking about that, but I can't seem to find any.

I interpret the posts you started this thread with as making the claim that Jews as a group categorically refuse to do agricultural work because the Talmud says they aren't allowed to.

Yes, this is the most surreal part of anti-Jewish discourse, remnant of premodern villager mind floating around in post-post-post modern cyberspace.

Medieval Jews indeed avoided peasant farm labor, just like medieval Christian nobility, clergy, merchants, craftsmen, town dwellers in general and everyone else who could.

If you ever did even a day of manual field work, you would understand why.

The Talmud is a pretty complex and obscure subject. You pretty much never hear any Jews who are not Talmudic scholars talking about it or basing their lives around it.

"The Talmud" is not a book, it is a library. The full edition in printed form weighs impressive 330 pounds.

Imagine, for example, treating 217 volumes of the Church Fathers as "one book."

Just like all traditional religious works, Talmud is full of stuff extremely unsavory for modern audiences.

If you listen to people who are not fond of Jews, they have idea that Talmud is some sort of encyclopedia of crime, grand manual how to cheat, rob, deceive and manipulate the goyim, they make Talmud much cooler that it is in reality (extremely dreary discussions about minutiae of religious laws).

As you said, only religious Jews are studying Talmud for real, even people who are really not fond of Jews are not interested in learning the "Jewish secrets" and are satisfied with copying and pasting of short list of mostly fabricated "Talmud quotes".

"Tifo"?

We maintain the ability to delete and edit top level posts for people to correct honest mistakes. I don't know why you deleted your previous top level post, but do not abuse that feature. If it is already under discussion, consider it out of your control.

Also this is a discussion forum for the culture war. Although jewish issues are often culture war related, it doesn't mean all jewish issues belong being discussed here. The main thread is mostly for current culture war issues. Historical analysis can be brought up in their own separate topic. These aren't hard and fast rules. But they are unspoken community expectations, which you managed to heavily violate (which is the reason for the large number of downvotes). I'd suggest more lurking in the future.

What point were you trying to make with this post? It seems to be a historical curio with no real relevance to modern culture war.

i dont claim to find this relevant to modern culture war but bear in mind not every country has a culture war about the same topics.

maybe he is slovakian, i dont know if it is relevant there but i dont just assume it isnt

I'm pretty sure this is just secure signals getting around his ban. OP hasn't responded to a single comment on his post, and the post bears the hallmarks of trying to smuggle in pro-holocaust messaging without explicit calls to action.

Seriously, who here cares that pre war Slovakian Jews were an economically dominant minority?

I disagree. The poster very likely went by Anything-something in the previous forum. There was a case of a far right figure killing minorities and this poster milked it very fanatically in line with their far left jewish supremacist ideology. They also posted like they posted now. He could be pushing a long con, but it seems more likely they are just a Jewish supremacist which isn't uncommon here. And in regards to that poster in particular I have seen different names with the same way of thinking posting for a long time.

Why can't you oppose what the OP promotes without coming with a theory that they must be the opposite of what they represent? Its like racists for Jews can do no wrong.

I genuinely think that if we censored but also treated with contempt as they deserve people promoting propaganda about how Jews/blacks/women/lgbt can do no wrong, milking their suffering in a cherry picked and promoting one sided history and shitting on their outgroup and we also don't promote milking history against Jews, we would have a far less pointless debate about these issues. So I am in favor of OP not be allowed to continue their behavior and they are in fact the same poster that was banned previously, but I don't buy that they are pulling a 5th dimensional chess move. I also think that the behavior of OP and Jewish supremacists does create a hostile racist environment and violates consistently rules on consensus, hating outgroup. Generally there are good reasons to limit their behavior to protect those they abuse, and such people always abuse their power.

We should also ideally be promoting people like Helen Andrews promoting nuance. There is also a nuance to be found in WW2 but one that still ends up with a very negative view of the nazi regime. Things like the mistreatment of Germans for example and Morgenthau plan are worth mentioning to move beyond the most fanatical black and white visions. Or the soviet mass deportations and genocides.

Jewish participation in communism is also important to note, not to promote a narrative that onesidedly shits on Jews, but to promote a narrative that spreads negativity and positivity around over a narrative that potrays one group in the most favorable light and other groups in the most negative one.

A good comparison is the Jewish overepresentation among slave owners in 19th century America. The point isn't that this justifies today mistreating Jews but to counter what John Steward called "blacks and Jews together getting whitey". Or the Jewish supremacist narrative of history. We should to the extend history allows be promoting narratives that are more evenhanded than onesided. At least in comparison to the typical approach we see today on such issues. Spreading the negativity around is part of that but also outright promoting the importance of not weaponizing history.

Its why Andrews articles arguing against the grave hoax in Canada, or against the thesis of American slavery as uniquely bad form of slavery are good. I also recommend her articles arguing against the dishonest propaganda of the Belgian Congo attrocity propaganda that also promoted exaggerations.

Where the facts don't allow it, we can still pathologize and be intolerant towards people cherry picking real events in the exclusion of any other to weaponize history against their ethnic outgroup.

It is completely true that there is an attempt to promote maximal grievances mixing truth and lies against western civilization. We should expose the lies and be intolerant to those cherry picking the truth to hate on western civilization in the broad sense and anyone affected by this movement. However we should tolerate people who don't weaponize history and just in proportion to what should be expected do care about past attrocities in a proportionate manner that doesn't result in shitting on the outgroup. It is also fine to care more about your own people's past suffering but again to a point. There is a point where trying to impose it as the most important thingever encroaches on the rights of others and is disrespectful and abusive.

Also, important to note that the brutal nazi occupation ended up in decent % of populations dying from various countries in eastern europe. They deserve a negative reputation, because the dislike and hatred against them didn't start in post ww2 propaganda, or existed only in the American shores, but among the people they abused historically. It isn't just about the Jews. The point here is we shouldn't allow people to use the nazis or confederates to shit on modern rightists, non far leftists, or european nations. This is compatible with holding a negative opinion of the nazis.

Not allowing bad actors to do that won't result in the nazis being liked. They are not going to be liked.

In fact the proud eastern european or certain south europeans should have an especially negative opinion both their previous oppressors and their modern haters who don themselves in antifascist colors. Indeed, as USSR was the most antifascist regime to ever exist, they have a good experience getting it good and hard from both the nazis and the antifascists.

Although, obviously people should focus much more on present problems and less on past defeated regimes.

For the avoidance of doubt, the "Slovak Republic" in question was a puppet state set up following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Tifo was a Nazi collaborator and was quite properly hanged for treason by the short-lived democratic government that ruled post-war Czechoslovakia before the Soviets consolidated thei control.

Everything the "Slovak Aryanization agency" and suchlike did was more or less enthusiastic implementation of decisions taken in Berlin.

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.

It proves that rationalists are disingenuous about caring for rationality which is what one would expect.

There has been a history of movements calling themselves rationalist in the last 200+ years and usually they are atheistic leftwing cults of reason where a very ideological, fanatical and close minded group proclaims their views to be rationality itself and also scientific. If you look even in the French revolution they were rationalists although of a more murderous sort.

It really hollows out any criticism of far right identity politics or woke non jewish identity politics from their substance, since those making such criticisms share the same pathologies and just find their own prejudice in favor of Jews to be uniquely fine. To be fair what is called far right identity politics often includes not just extremists but even moderates, so some of those people who are treated as far right extremists should not be criticized to begin with.

I do think someone who is a genuine moderate can make criticisms of extreme identity politics, albeit I don't oppose any form of identity politics for any group a priori. It is about the amount and whether it is motivated by a view of history that is "what is mine is mine and what is yours, is yours". I also oppose this even to the level of smaller groups and the individual.

Ideally in my view people should respect their own and try to better their lot (as individual, family or nation) while following the golden rule and respecting the same rights in others and not seeking to do better by trampling over others. And it is fine to be angry when others are unwilling to do so and are out to get you and mistreat you. And to indeed defend yourself from their bad behavior. It is also good to oppose and be disgusted at this behavior even when it doesn't directly lead to your specific tribe being mistreated which is how I feel.

If this norm is common enough in a society you got justice, and internationally you do end up having something closer to international justice.

But any form of justice requires a punishment mechanism and also disapproval of those who violate it. It is a trap in my view that a good thing (disapproval of leftist or Jewish racist bad behavior) should be memetically aligned with bad things like sharing the same levels of ethnic extremism which isn't necessary to share to oppose this. Moderate tribalism to support your group when mistreated is sufficient, if one doesn't misunderstand what moderation means to mean too little. Or even without direct tribalism which is fine in moderation (and bad if too little or too much), it is also moral and good to oppose this behavior on a more general universalist grounds for being utterly immoral and criminal.

Extreme forms of tribalism, like the form promoted by many who have captured institutions in favor of Jewish identity politics today (n addition to others of progressive stack), obviously is in the mentality that they own history both the past, present and future. Fully the mentality of what is yours is mine and what is mine is mine. Where their vilification of others is kosher, but where their wrongdoing is antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Not everything related to the enlightenment degenerated in extreme cults, so there is something to what I argue here related to the enlightenment even if this fanaticism and hypocritical tribalism is part of its historical trajectory as well. Hell the enlightenment even had key figures who were highly critical of the Jews from an internationalist perspective, condemning them as misanthropes. And these figures have also been branded dishonestly with the typical one sided racist manner of most of those who use that word who care zero for nuance as antisemites.

My thesis is that seeing all the evil and all of racism as historically existing just in the Jews is obviously false, others had and can have this extremism as well, but there has been and there is a genuine problem of racism against non Jews that both the Jewish community it self had and has (and the result are racist hate groups like the ADL), and even there are non Jews have become that by identifying with the Jewish ultranationalist vision of the world. And it is part of a general pattern of extreme tribalists. The general alliance of tribalism of progressive associated identities aka progressive stack today is of an extremist and ultranationalist sort.

Coming to terms with the fact that their shit also stinks and striving to genuinely promote a more evenhanded perspective on the moral evaluation of different identity groups would be a valid demonstration of not sharing this pathology.

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.

My point is that being successful is not a bad thing and therefore it’s weird to imply there is some moral failing by Jews being successful and thereby causing resentment.

Who implied that? I don't understand.

I just see your point being predicated on the idea that people can't take issue with what some jews were being successful at and/or how.

What issue is there to take with Jews being successful? Provided they weren’t stealing from people or doing something illicit it seems to me that anyone taking issue with Jews being successful is engaging in resentment.

No one is saying that jews being 'successful' is a reason to not like them except you.

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.

Claiming that certain Jews did things that you dislike is of course not necessarily pathological.

Then why do I consistently get the response that it is? Regardless of anything else, my point stands. There is a very distinct and clear form of ingroup bias whenever the 'jews' are criticized. There's never a concession made or a 'rational' framework of cause and effect. In this very thread the act of killing a Nazi collaborator is framed as justified, not causal.

However, blaming Jews as a group for things is certainly and in all cases a form of irrational, shoddy thinking.

Is there anyone in the world who believes that every single jew in the world was doing the things the "specific" jews in Weimar Germany were doing?

What you are saying would have salience and some form of coherency if it wasn't for the fact that the entire modern world is based on the idea that there are nations of people. Like Germans. Who were paying, and are in some form still paying, for the actions of specific Germans during the war. Do we need to be able to trace the causal chain of how a specific German housewife helped the Nazi regime during the war, which justifies her and her offspring pay money to jews until the day they die and beyond? No. This nihilistic autism is only presented when someone makes even a vague generalization about jews having done something.

I mean, can we come up with some term that describes the specific jews that do anti-European, anti-civilizational, anti-society, anti-Christian stuff? You know, not the good ones but the "specific" ones and those that support them. Because I'm tired of people acting like they are explaining something to me when all they are doing is playing PR for their ingroup. As if I just can not fathom that the jew I played video games with isn't Magnus Hirschfeld.

Because I'm tired of people acting like they are explaining something to me when all they are doing is playing PR for their ingroup.

Then stop saying "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. " and say i.e. not wanting to live with the specific people who did X. We can only judge you by what you say, so if you cast a wide net (jews) with your words, that's all we can respond to. If you mean to only criticise a subset of people who did X or Y, then say that.

That's why one of the part of the rules is: Be as precise and charitable as you can.

Be precise about who you want to criticise. If you don't mean jews as a group then define who exactly you are talking about. If there is some anti-European position you want to criticise, define it and who said it. If you know it "isn't all jews" then make that clear. Otherwise it looks like you are simply indulging in Boo-outgroup rhetoric.

It will also skip the whole back and forth you are right in the middle of now, where someone rebuts with, "well actually,not all jews", and you have to sigh, "yes I know it's not all jews, I don't think the guy I play CoD with is involved. I'm not an idiot!"

Define exactly who you are talking about at step 1 and you can skip steps 1A through D going back and forth until you define who you mean. It removes a derailment opportunity. It hones your argument and removes extraneous pain points.

The fact Germans are paying for anything is because citizens do in fact inherit the financial responsibilities their government has agreed to. It doesn't mean morally Brunhilde is responsible for the Holocaust, any more than the fact her taxes go to pay interest on the national debt means she is responsible directly for the government building an autobahn 10 years before she was born and thus the deaths of anyone who crashes their well engineered automobile at 200kph should weigh on her soul. But yet still her taxes go to help pay it off. The German government can decide that a moral crime committed by the German government demands recompense. And all German citizens therefore inherit the financial responsibility, but they do not inherit the moral responsibility. That is the disconnect in your example. They are different things.

Brunhilde is not morally responsible for Hitler's actions just as Bob the jew is not morally responsible for Fred the jew's actions. So if it is Fred's anti-European actions you have a problem with then criticise Fred, not jews. If you mean Fred but say jews then people will understand you to mean jews not Fred. And if Bob and Fred are BOTH members of "Ja, we hate Europe" then specify it is the organization JwhE that you are criticizing.

In other words if you are not being specific in who you are calling out, why should people responding be specific in return?

That's why one of the part of the rules is: Be as precise and charitable as you can.

Maybe you could be charitable and understand that when someone says the Germans did something, they don't mean every single individual German. Maybe you can understand that when someone says jews have won a lot of Nobel prizes, they don't mean every single individual jew. I mean, of course you understand that. Everyone does. 'Jews have won a lot of nobel prizes' is not a statement anyone has ever taken issue with. It's just that when the implication is negative the ingroup bias of some gets activated and they start demanding special status for their ingroup.

I don't accept that jews are more special than others and I don't accept that I should use extreme and autistic verbal rigor when talking about the ingroup bias of some whilst freely ignoring it for others. I think people should be able to be charitable, see past their bias, and recognize what is being said without dragging everything through the mud of tactical individualism. Like I said in my prior comment, you don't need to prove how every single individual German helped the Third Reich when justifying they pay war reparations to jews. You don't need their tax returns to see just how much they were paying. You just draw a blanket group based judgement. They were German, they now have to pay. I'm making a similar judgement call. If one is jewish and one sees all of the negative stuff specific jews have done, why doesn't one have to own that? The Germans had to own all of their actions. They couldn't say that it wasn't them, but rather individual soldiers, politicians and the 30% or so that voted for the NSDAP in the 30's. Why should jews be allowed to not just disown all responsibility, but ultimately claim that these things aren't even jewish. It's like saying the NSDAP wasn't actually German.

The fact Germans are paying for anything is because citizens do in fact inherit the financial responsibilities their government has agreed to.

Why do they 'inherit' that whilst jews don't inherit that specific jews in powerful positions who identified themselves as jews and representatives of jews, who identified their organization as jewish and who declared economic war on Germans in the name of their explicitly jewish organizations due to actions taken by specific Germans against jews in Germany?

Seems like we've erected a very one sided standard. Individual Germans take responsibility for Germans as a group. Individual jews don't take responsibility for jews as a group. Even when jews are explicitly grouping up and expressing themselves as a group. It seems like, in a negative context, there are only individual jews and they can never reflect poorly on jews as a group. No matter how much ingroup bias jews display. Yet here I am pretending that this just doesn't exist. That jews don't have an ingroup bias that they routinely express every single time someone is critical of jews.

Here's a thought, if people don't see themselves as jewish, stop being jewish. Say you're Italian or Romanian. But no. Even on the internet, where no one knows you are a dog, jews and people who ingroup jews take time out of their day to reply to group generalizations in the context of negatives about jews but let actively rely on them in other contexts.

I'm not saying anything about all jews being X. I'm pointing out a double standard. Other individual people have to own their group and how other individual people of that group have made that group look, especially if those individuals did something bad to jews. I could understand how a fervent individualist would not want to participate in such a thing, but people who act on their group biases are obviously not that.

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What you are saying would have salience and some form of coherency if it wasn't for the fact that the entire modern world is based on the idea that there are nations of people. Like Germans.

There was a country of people, called Germany. It was this country that did various actions in WW2 that still partially (though, in truth, not as much as some people would like to claim) burden the successor country of that country. They do not, however, burden ethnic Germans who had, say, moved to the United States to form German communities there, many of which specifically fought against the country of Germany. People might claim Donald Trump to be a Nazi for various reasons, but it would be at the very least exceedingly rare to claim he is one because he's a German-American, or that his German heritage would make him directly liable for the actions of the Nazi government in the country of Germany.

During WW2, there was not a Jewish country. There is a Jewish country now, and the actions of that country burden the citizens of that country, making all Israelis in some ways liable for the actions of Israeli government vis-a-vis the Palestinian occupation and the human rights violations therein (at least the ones not explicitly resisting those actions). However, that still doesn't make all Jews everywhere liable for the actions of Israeli goverment.

German people were interned in the US following the US entry into the war. Plans were drawn up for more extensive internment of all German Americans but were scrapped since there were too many of them. Redefining things to be a 'country' is irrelevant. Getting down to brass tax it's about people. Everyone understands this when they are forced to act in reality.

However, that still doesn't make all Jews everywhere liable for the actions of Israeli goverment.

Yet, to this very day, many jews harbor resentment towards Germans. Some going as far as they can in upholding the old anti-German boycott.

Maybe I am being too hot tempered and uncharitable here but I really can't fathom what your point of bringing 'countries' into this would be other than to obfuscate things. Jews did not need to be a country to act as a people. They knew of themselves as the jewish people, they grouped up as the jewish people and they made declarations and took actions as a people prior to Israel ever being a thing. In fact, the only way Israel as a country could come to be in the first place was because of jewish people acting as a group.

So to turn your thing on its head a little bit, and to attempt to highlight my issue with it; are jews liable for the creation of the state of Israel?

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This is a nonsense argument. You may as well say that Nazis as a group don't share responsibility and that all evil done in the 3rd Reich was done by individual Nazis.

This outright denial of any collective responsibility is common among individualists, like myself, but it falls short on one condition: if people organize as a group, they are responsible as a group. Which is why we punish criminal conspiracies.

And if one concedes at least this, and they must, then the question becomes rather if Weimar had Jews organized and organized specifically as Jews. A question that is much less easy to answer in the negative than a clean reading of history would enjoy. Successful minorities are almost always so because they are organized.

Now of course this is where collective condemnation of an entire ethnic group falls short as guilt can only be shared in the confines of a specific organization (supposing of course it can first be established), but you can't defend this by claiming atoms acting independently, not seriously.

And if one concedes at least this, and they must, then the question becomes rather if Weimar had Jews organized and organized specifically as Jews.

The “Jewish communists” derided as revolutionaries in Weimar Germany (they failed at revolution, so can’t be responsible for those issues, but still) certainly didn’t organize specifically as Jews - they were part of areligious communist and anarchist organizations that all had a substantial number of gentile members.

I must say I was not here thinking of communists but of the very much capitalist german-jewish economic elite, a group much studied by sociology, and in particular as to how Jewish its success and internal ties were.

I believe the answer to that question remains debated, but they are a clearly identifiable group with class interests and a significant say and influence in the direction of German society at the time.

The national socialist ideological tie between these people and the communist Jews to form some international conspiracy I believe is clearly faulty and fictitious, but both groups existed and had aims and power. Often at odds with one another, but not necessarily with a character that can be removed from Jewish ethno-cultural interest.

Incidentally, I do not believe such dismissals about atheism matter when we are talking about an ethnos. To give a clear example, atheists Jews have long had tremendous influence over the American film industry and nobody can seriously deny that this influence has a Jewish cultural character even as they are atheists.

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.

I think it's very fair to say it's a problem, much like it is for any successful minority. Because it breeds resentment and cliquishness.

The way around is to have successful minorities adhere first to a common set of principles and fuse them into a larger group where tribal loyalties are discouraged.

But if you don't do that, you will get sectarian conflict. It's not optional.

They post and delete so many threads now, often you reply only for them to be deleted. They’re also a lot like a similar account that used to do this.

As a Slovak I have a suspicion it was more than 38%.

I know that in Hungary it was over 50% before WW2..

Not sure what's objectionable about this post. (His behavior aside).

Slovak state was antisemitic, they aryanised Jewish property, they didn't just hand over Jews of Slovakia but paid the Germans to take them.

2/3rds of the pre war Jewish population died, a lot of the remainder moved to Israel.

Still seems to be a lot of Jews around, but that's just my family - half of it are M.D.s and Jews are quite common in medicine.

I think interwar Hungary is widely acknowledged as the European society in which Jews were most disproportionately dominant in commerce (Scott even wrote about it on various occasions). I suspect it had something to do with political dynamics in the late Austro-Hungarian empire; even in Poland (which had a numerically and proportionally much larger Jewish population) you didn’t see the same level of involvement in leading businesses etc.

Weren't Poles more antisemitic / discriminatory?

The reason why OP's post is objectionable is because OP is doing a thing. He wants to post a quote about how Jews owned a large percentage of property in Slovakia. He considers the high percentage to be noteworthy and wants to share it with The Motte, and yet, he disguises his reason for sharing the quote by pretending to refute it. He pretends to make an argument that the large percentage is not noteworthy, while expecting the reader to reject his pretend argument and conclude that it is indeed noteworthy.

OP wants to make posts that speak truth to Jewish power but feigns to believe that the moderation team of The Motte will silence him if he does so in an open and forthright manner. He adopts the guise of an antisemitism skeptic who tries to refute hate facts and fails. I think as well that OP expects his disguise to be recognized. Which means his true intention is not even to deceive but simply to express resentment that his posts speaking truth to Jewish power are unwelcome on The Motte.

Let's consider forbidding this bad behavior. Whatever they're doing with this post and delete game, it isn't in good faith.

Yeah. It really puzzles me why NNs are allowed to post on this site. I understand that rationalists want to "discuss absolutely anything", but bad faith posting doesn't help anyone.

The point of this place is to practice the belief that we can discuss any subject rationally and honestly. So we strongly prefer to ban not any specific viewpoint, but poor argument tactics instead. If you want to say that Jews are bad, you can, but you have to actually say it and make a rational case for why, not make suspiciously weird and irrelevant posts whose real purpose seem to be to put a eyebrow-raising number into people's heads.

I think this is a good thing - the NN's most compelling argument is usually that they're so censored everywhere, they must have an actual point that the system doesn't want you to hear. We can refute that here - here's a wide open forum for you to post what you actually think, and if it's really dumb it will get shredded just like it deserves.

Why can people even delete threads? What purpose does it serve?

I've used it to delete dupes in the past, or comments I later saw were already made by somebody else in totality. You also should be able to delete posts you simply didn't intend to make.

Removing them after people have engaged I don't see the use of however, it just removes useful context.

Incidentally that's how it works in Slack: you can only remove posts nobody interacted with.

I think that would be a decent compromise. And you can message an admin to delete otherwise.

Well, really why bother? Maybe the CIA could or couldn't get rid of Maduro, but it seems to be of very little advantage to the United States. They don't need their oil, they're not in a relevant location, there are much bigger and more serious threats, and whatever comes after Maduro could be worse. Either way, the CIA gets the blame, so why not go home early on Fridays?

It decreases illegal immigration from increases legal immigration

Similarly, one can decrease rape by declaring it consensual.

[not a reply to you] Not sure why OP deleted their post, I thought it was good.

Could you summarize?

Idk about good but it certainly was eye-opening. Did you catch the username? I was confused about how cocaine comes from scorpions and wanted to follow up via PM.

Good one! The username was jfnyqinr292m

You'd need a mod, it was a random string of characters like jfnyrgi or something. Not memorable.

Well now I wish I had gotten to read it!

Right, the segue into late-stage capitalism vs. hallucinogens was confusing though.

Deleted by author

Hmm. Should posters be allowed to delete top level posts like this? It isn't great behavior.

Edit: meant to post as reply, not top level.

All I can think of is TechDirt's Content Moderation Learning Curve. The convergence of large social media platforms on similar content moderation rules is less due to shared ideological capture than a combination of legal, financial, and social pressures all pointing in a similar direction.

The convergence of large social media platforms on similar content moderation rules is less due to shared ideological capture than a combination of legal, financial, and social pressures all pointing in a similar direction.

But these "social pressures", aren't they also a form of ideological capture among the institutions that exert said pressure on social media platforms? I don't have the data on me, but I've seen plenty of evidence that democratic voters form an absolute majority among key institutions (top university faculty, judiciary, media, big tech, federal govt employees etc).

But these "social pressures", aren't they also a form of ideological capture among the institutions that exert said pressure on social media platforms?

Undoubtedly some of the social pressure on social media platforms come from institutions ideologically captured by Democrats, but hardly all of it.

top university faculty

Seems like it.

judiciary

As of Jan 2021 the federal judiciary was actually majority appointed by Republicans although only slightly and this has probably reversed since. On the other hand, SCOTUS has been majority Republican appointed since, like, the 1960's

Overall, in the 54 years since Nixon first took office, there have been 20 confirmed appointments to the court, counting chiefs and associate justices. Republican presidents have had 15 of them, Democratic presidents just five.

media

This obviously depends on the media entity. NYT or CNN? Sure. Fox News or OANN? Definitely not.

big tech

Probably

federal govt employees

Are probably more split than you suppose, especially with respect to the Senate.

Masnick's a two-faced prick on this particular topic among no shortage of others, and that post there could not be more of a strawman were the characters named Simplicio and Sagredo, but to engage with this far more seriously than it deserves:

  • The criticism of pre-Musk Twitter was never that it banned CSAM or followed copyright law, Masnick knows that, you know that, I know that, the dog knows that.
  • The actual criticisms are either glossed over ("level three" is hilariously short) or not engaged with at all (the godsdamned FBI called them and told them repeatedly not to run stories about Hunter Biden's laptop, while knowing that Hunter Biden's laptop had been out there, and I notice Masnick seems to have missed any mention about it).
  • Quite a lot of those "legal, financial, and social pressures" are just shared ideological capture, or only taken seriously because of shared ideological capture. There could be a plausible argument otherwise if pre-Musk Twitter's censorship focused on commonly-agreed slurs or clear falsity or other bad behaviors, but in practice for all that Twitter moderation had also always been arbitrary and inconsistent, it overwhelmingly ended up in a left-wing mode, encouraged and legitimized by a fairly small number of (overwhelmingly left-wing) partners that promoted these standards to both Twitter and its advertisers (and sometimes regulators!).

The ADL is Musk's current focus, simply because (he alleges) that they've directly contacted his advertising partners before he even took ownership and a lot of what he's described (if true!) is very close to playing bingo with tortuous interference with contract. But it's not like the SPLC is any less "shared ideological capture", and was heavily involved in moderation decisions at length, including far away from SPLC's supposed domain expertise.

When Masnick is discussing Twitter protecting people's first amendment rights he doesn't mean they didn't ban people (because banning people doesn't implicate their first amendment rights) he means they resisted subpoenas from the government demanding they de-anonymize it's critics, which does implicate their first amendment rights.

The criticism of pre-Musk Twitter was never that it banned CSAM or followed copyright law, Masnick knows that, you know that, I know that, the dog knows that.

Yes, the point of the article is that very few of the people who talk about being a "free speech platform" have any idea that there's tons of stuff they are going to be legally obliged to moderate. The piece is not about responding to criticisms of Twitter, it's about the specific convergent evolution of social media moderation policies as the first paragraph makes clear:

It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.

The actual criticisms are either glossed over ("level three" is hilariously short) or not engaged with at all (the godsdamned FBI called them and told them repeatedly not to run stories about Hunter Biden's laptop, while knowing that Hunter Biden's laptop had been out there, and I notice Masnick seems to have missed any mention about it).

What further elaboration is required? It turns out people don't like to spend time on a site where they are regularly called slurs! Advertisers think it damages their brand when their advertisements appear next to hate speech. Is this concept complicated? Masnick, in fact, has a whole article about Twitter and Hunter Biden's laptop.

Quite a lot of those "legal, financial, and social pressures" are just shared ideological capture, or only taken seriously because of shared ideological capture. There could be a plausible argument otherwise if pre-Musk Twitter's censorship focused on commonly-agreed slurs or clear falsity or other bad behaviors, but in practice for all that Twitter moderation had also always been arbitrary and inconsistent, it overwhelmingly ended up in a left-wing mode, encouraged and legitimized by a fairly small number of (overwhelmingly left-wing) partners that promoted these standards to both Twitter and its advertisers (and sometimes regulators!).

I don't even know how to respond to the implication that legal or financial pressures are due to shared ideological capture. If your primary revenue stream is from people advertising on your platform then it's important for the survival of your business in a non-ideological way that they continue to do that. You are somewhat at the whim of what advertisers like and want. Similar advertisers only want to advertise on your platform because they believe they can reach users who will buy things. If users abandon your platform en masse that is also bad for your business, so you are somewhat beholden to the desires of users, whatever your ideology. Legal pressure even more so! I guess X could stop reporting CSAM or responding to DMCA takedowns, but the end result would definitely be the end of their business! How is ideological capture related at all? Sure some social pressure and its response may be due to shared ideological capture, I acknowledge as much in another comment.

The ADL is Musk's current focus, simply because (he alleges) that they've directly contacted his advertising partners before he even took ownership and a lot of what he's described (if true!) is very close to playing bingo with tortuous interference with contract.

What is the tort the ADL committed to constitute the "tortious" part of tortious interference? I am pretty sure they're his foe now because he goes around promoting open anti-semites like Keith Woods.

When Masnick is discussing Twitter protecting people's first amendment rights he doesn't mean they didn't ban people (because banning people doesn't implicate their first amendment rights) he means they resisted subpoenas from the government demanding they de-anonymize it's critics, which does implicate their first amendment rights.

And this dichotomy is exactly what I'm criticizing. Masnick's entire shtick is to prevaricate between officially state-driven things that could be anywhere near the First Amendment whenever the censorship is something he opposes (see this) no matter how regulated speech is in that sphere otherwise, and then raising incredibly exacting standards for what counts as government action when it's something he doesn't care about (see for example this post conflating double-digit legal demands with the literally thousands of 'unofficial requests' from the government.).

The piece is not about responding to criticisms of Twitter...

The piece is literally titled 'Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve' and is tagged Elon Musk. And you're right, but it just makes him an asshole, and your post a non-sequitur to drop in.

What further elaboration is required? It turns out people don't like to spend time on a site where they are regularly called slurs! Advertisers think it damages their brand when their advertisements appear next to hate speech.

Which is funny, because you'd think that people would be at least somewhat opposed to slurs that touched on them, and instead Twitter and Advertisers supposedly found tweeting "Learn To Code" at a handful of bargain-basement 'journalists' worse than having ads sandwiched between "KillAllMen" and photoshopped decapitations of a certain politician. And it was always like that.

Is this concept complicated? Masnick, in fact, has a whole article about Twitter and Hunter Biden's laptop.

Indeed, and he quickly papered over any potential problem by giving his friends at Twitter the most charitable possible explanations and possible facts, and then when those assumptions came false retreated time and time again, often in hilariously misleading ways. That link rests heavily on people not finding yet that any evidence of government pressure, and then despite all of the later releases his information since his comments never quite get around to revisiting the matter except to provide increasingly circumscribed reasons This Does Count.

What is the tort the ADL committed to constitute the "tortious" part of tortious interference?

The tort is tortious interference, sometimes called intentional interference with contractual relations. It's not an add-on to some other tort: it's trying to induce people to breach binding contracts with a specific person. The exact rule varies by state, but it can cover behavior that would not be tortious in itself (in some rare cases, not applicable here, even by negligence), typically requiring either malice or that the act be done without legal justification.

See the Third Restatement of Torts, which (while trying to scale down the tort from past version's array of privileges!) listed :

(a) the defendant acted for the purpose of appropriating the benefits of the plaintiff's contract; or (b) the defendant's conduct constituted an independent and intentional legal wrong; or (c) the defendant engaged in the conduct for the sole purpose of injuring the plaintiff.

(emphasis added, note that many states still use far more expansive caselaw)

Now, that legal justification includes a wide First Amendment exception for interference that is truthful or at least opinion (possibly with some modulos for private information). And courts have been somewhat wishy-washy about "sole purpose of injuring the plaintiff". But this is not an open season for any statement to be immune: see SpamHaus v. DatabaseUSA. Musk alleges that they have separately made private claims to advertisers that are contradicted by widely available evidence. He could well be wrong or lying -- there's a reason I use "alleges" and "if true!"

((I don't think Musk will actually bring this case, or be successful if he does, and it's certainly not a multi-billion and maybe not even multi-million dollar tort. But that's more because it'd be worth pennies on the legal fee dollar even in the off chance he wins, and the standards for when a claim is an opinion of undisclosed facts or where it's just an opinion mumblemumble are an absolute mess. In addition to the obvious reputational risks.))

I am pretty sure they're his foe now because he goes around promoting open anti-semites like Keith Woods.

A bad like or reply this month can be strong evidence that Musk needs to lay off the cocaine, but it can't be the cause for a campaign to Twitter advertisers that's over a year old.

((In addition to the other inconsistency.))

And this dichotomy is exactly what I'm criticizing. Masnick's entire shtick is to prevaricate between officially state-driven things that could be anywhere near the First Amendment whenever the censorship is something he opposes (see this) no matter how regulated speech is in that sphere otherwise, and then raising incredibly exacting standards for what counts as government action when it's something he doesn't care about (see for example this post conflating double-digit legal demands with the literally thousands of 'unofficial requests' from the government.).

I don't know how to tell you this but there's a difference between a government passing a law imposing criminal or civil penalties on someone and them clicking the equivalent of a Super Report button. The article specifically notes that Twitter did not comply with a majority of the government's unofficial requests. Twitter was (and is) free to ignore unofficial requests from the government. The doctors in the first article would not be free to disregard the government's prohibition on discussing certain topics with patients. The two things are different in very important ways.

Which is funny, because you'd think that people would be at least somewhat opposed to slurs that touched on them, and instead Twitter and Advertisers supposedly found tweeting "Learn To Code" at a handful of bargain-basement 'journalists' worse than having ads sandwiched between "KillAllMen" and photoshopped decapitations of a certain politician. And it was always like that.

Have you been on Twitter? Why would I think that? I'm sorry that advertisers and Twitter users don't share your ratings of what things are bad but their opinions are the ones that matter for Twitter's continued viability as a business.

Indeed, and he quickly papered over any potential problem by giving his friends at Twitter the most charitable possible explanations and possible facts, and then when those assumptions came false retreated time and time again, often in hilariously misleading ways. That link rests heavily on people not finding yet that any evidence of government pressure, and then despite all of the later releases his information since his comments never quite get around to revisiting the matter except to provide increasingly circumscribed reasons This Does Count.

I mean, yea. It's important that if you're going to allege the government pressured Twitter about the laptop story and that was the cause of their suppression people are going to want, like, evidence. So far none has been forthcoming. The best I've seen is some general warnings to Twitter about possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia.

((I don't think Musk will actually bring this case, or be successful if he does, and it's certainly not a multi-billion and maybe not even multi-million dollar tort. But that's more because it'd be worth pennies on the legal fee dollar even in the off chance he wins, and the standards for when a claim is an opinion of undisclosed facts or where it's just an opinion mumblemumble are an absolute mess. In addition to the obvious reputational risks.))

I think the ADL's problem with Musk becomes much more obvious phrased as "He made frivolous threats they had committed torts against him."

I don't know how to tell you this but there's a difference between a government passing a law imposing criminal or civil penalties on someone and them clicking the equivalent of a Super Report button.

That's not really my point; I can instead point to environments where Mere Polite Requests were obviously immediate jawboning, and were Masnick's twitter still open I could show more clear examples. But look at the articles and compare the dramatic differences in charity or even mere honesty in describing them -- most evidently the Super Report button instead ended up being weekly meetings or dedicated fast-response systems, but also the NRA-backed bill being described in far more maximalist terms than even the already-aggressive read by the newspaper he linked.

The article specifically notes that Twitter did not comply with a majority of the government's unofficial requests.

And Masnick is a two-faced prick, so while it claims that, instead it points to this comparison of official requests -- primarily legal demands like subpeonas and court orders, for mere double-digit (and often low double-digit) number removal requests. Aka, it tells us nothing about unofficial requests to take down accounts, which (again in contrast to Masnick's claims) ended up being thousands of accounts passed by spreadsheet and face-to-face meetings, not just a slightly more polished version of the Report Button you or I could use.

Masnick does not know the relative proportion of those unofficial requests that resulted in a removal. We don't have statistics, and given the heavy influence Baker had at the building they may not exist anymore. The selections Taibbi brought give 60%-85%, but Taibbi doesn't claim to have done a meaningful statistical analysis; he just provides a single e-mail that would break Twitter's transparency report for that time block. If Masnick had planted his flag on the possibility of consistent pushback, I'd not have highlighted that as severely or been as critical of him generally (although I wouldn't be surprised were his 'consistent' pushback to include one-offs that still resulted in account bans).

But he instead makes ludicrously strong claims with clearly wrong backing, and only ever one way.

Have you been on Twitter? Why would I think that? I'm sorry that advertisers and Twitter users don't share your ratings of what things are bad but their opinions are the ones that matter for Twitter's continued viability as a business.

I think you're vastly overestimating the popularity of guillotine twitter or of journalists, or of the relative proportion of the site's users or advertising targets those two groups or their sympathizers make up.

It's important that if you're going to allege the government pressured Twitter about the laptop story and that was the cause of their suppression people are going to want, like, evidence. So far none has been forthcoming. The best I've seen is some general warnings to Twitter about possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia.

Well, no. Even before the Twitter Files, Yoel Fucking Roth declared that :

Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.

During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.

That is law enforcement specifically mentioning a hack-and-leak operation involving Hunter Biden in October of 2020, which is a good deal less general than "possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia".

((We've since learned that a 'totally private institution' funded in part by the State Department ran an exercise I'd call impressively prescient -- were it not for the FBI having already taken possession of Hunter Biden's laptop and corresponding documents months before the exercise was run.))

There's no clear "you must censor this or go to jail" e-mail, fair. There is 'just' all of this very precise concern about this particular topic, sent while the FBI and DHS were making claims about intransigent social media groups being allied with foreign governments, and while many politicians were talking up CDA230 modifications for those who didn't cooperate.

But Klobuchar wasn't sending the letter, so it's not really jawboning, it's just still a small coordinated groupthink with shared ideological capture.

I think the ADL's problem with Musk becomes much more obvious phrased as "He made frivolous threats they had committed torts against him."

Again, the ADL started calling Twitter's advertisers about Musk publicly (as in through newspapers) in November of last year, Musk claims that they did so privately the week he closed on the company and had called him saying they would do so if he did not continue certain parts of the Trust and Safety paradigm before that. Unless he or they have a time machine, the ADL's problem can not have started this week.

in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin

The point is that they end up in the same vicinity not for generally accepted things as CSAM or copyright violation, but because infrastructure providers, advertisers, and governments impose ideological conformity. Not, in the case of advertisers, because their ads will be less effective or harmful without it, but because employees at the advertising companies are in favor of the censorship.

Citation that their ads will be equally effective? That there would be no difference in user base under various moderation schemes?

“Criticism of Soros – who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but antisemitism, quite the opposite!” Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs, Amichai Chikli, said in May, the Washington Post reported.

Lol, but ultimately it seems to have gone fine. I doubt he’s going to ban Keith Woods but, at the same time, I think Ellison and co have probably convinced him to stop retweeting him.

For top-level posts we would like users to avoid just posting a link to a longer story. This is a place for discussion, and a top level post should start the discussion.

We have this rule for multiple reasons:

  1. Link dropping can be a form of waging the culture war. People would just constantly drop links to the latest rage bait story about their outgroup.
  2. There are not an infinite number of interesting discussion topics. We don't want people racing to post the latest news, because it might crowd out a more thoughtful post. Once something has already been discussed once in a week people's interest tends to drop off a little.
  3. If you can't find anything interesting to say about a topic, it is more likely that no one else will either.

The funny thing about anti-semitism is any serious cultural study of Jewish Culture/history would fall under anti-semitism atleast as espoused by the ADL.

In what way?

Of all the major religions they are the only one that doesn’t recruit members. It’s a chosen people. For a lot of history it does appear they’ve maintained a state within a state (less so for modern secular Jews today) and the ADL does declare things like “Jews having sympathies to Israel over America” as antisemitic.

They lists “Jews have too much power” - that makes discussing Jewish at one point being >20% of Ivy graduates, insane amount of Hollywood representation, Goldman Sachs, and overall Jewish grossly disproportionate representation at the top of a lot of fields difficult.

Feel like ADL publishes a list of antisemitism and a lot of the lists would have difficult bits to cover.

It’s because antisemitism atleast by the ADL doesn’t just mean don’t do genocide or hate us.

Of all the major religions they are the only one that doesn’t recruit members

Hinduism? It doesn't strike me as a religion that actively seeks new members, though it is open to converts (just like Judaism). Of course, these converts may or may not always be treated as equal in practice. But that's another topic.

I think you get to my point later. Jews are to an a great extent an ethnic religion closed to outsiders with some of their own ethnostate institutions.

It does appear many orthodox still do keep boundaries between themselves and broader society and don’t fully integrate into the American melting part.

I don’t think it’s anti-Catholic to question whether a Catholic Potus first loyalty is to America or the Pope. (I believe a Catholic would have loyalty to the Popr first). But if you accuse a Jew of having sympathies to Israel First etc it’s declared antisemitic.

So if the Pope goes to war on America, you expect the Catholic POTUS to side with the Pope over USA, or at least give them remotely equal consideration?

Because here's the thing: if he doesn't, then I would not say he is loyal to the Pope first. If he does, then it's a big problem to have such a person as the POTUS, and it would be a problem if a person loyal to Israel to that extent was POTUS, and it's easy for me to see how Jews see it as an accusation and an unfair one at that. It's effectively calling them a potential traitor.

Well yes. That’s the vowels you take. Not sure it’s unfair. That’s the nature of religion.

I mean it can be a good thing. Catholic regions in Germany were the least supportive of Hitler. That’s the vows they take.

I don’t consider it anti-Catholic to recognize I answer to something above nation and we long took tbose accusations. It’s a big reason Catholics are preferred Supreme Court Justices because we aren’t malleable.

Here is the problem with advocating censorship of "bad" ideas: If it is permissible make rules about what ideas can be expressed, then someone has to make those rules. And who will that be, people with power, or people without power. Obviously the former.

Btw, I am referring to censorship of ideas, not obscenity, not child porn, and not any of the 1000 other things that those who favor censoring ideas they don't like want to conflate therewith.

I disagree with this argument (and all similar "how would you like it if it were the right wing censoring left wing ideas?" ones)

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that (idea) censorship, as a technique, is inherently bad - even if its being done on behalf of your in-group in order to suppress the out-group.

There are techniques that I would consider inherently evil, even if done against people I disagree with (torture, vigilante violence, etc)

But as suppression techniques go, censorship is rather underrated:

  • No one (even the people leading and organising the dissent) actually gets physically harmed.
  • The leaders/organisers can end up in legal trouble if they operate in a jurisdiction with hate speech laws, and will suffer social/professional repercussions. But they knew the consequences of their actions going into this, and a regime can't just sit back and do not nothing as people overtly and openly attempt to undermine it.
  • All the non-dissidents (like me, you, and almost everyone on this forum), are free to openly and honestly discuss our thoughts/beliefs on any topic we want, so long as we stick to discussing, and make a good faith effort to avoid influencing the views of the masses (this is why the Motte remains up and running, and there is no one trying to cancel it, as it only influences a user base numbering in the thousands)

And who will that be, people with power, or people without power. Obviously the former.

Yes, the people in power want to stay in power, and everyone wants to impose what they believe to be moral on reality.

If you genuinely believe that all criticism of Jews is unfounded in reality and that allowing such ideas to exist in the mainstream could lead to a 21st century Holocaust, then why shouldn't you stop these anti-Semites from trying to prosecute such a wantonly cruel agenda?

Sure, it would be bad for your cause if the tables were turned, and it were the enemy in power, censoring all of your own propaganda. And censoring them now will have the second order effect of making it more likely they censor you later on. But that's outweighed by the first order effect of actually censoring them.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that (idea) censorship, as a technique, is inherently bad

No, the idea behind it is usually good. It's that is always ends up getting abused...

Just look at history (looking at you blasphemy laws), the pattern is the same each time.

Now, I'm not saying that we can't have any regulations on speech (ie fire in a crowded theater that is not in danger) but any rules need to be transparent and very carefully constructed.

Just look at history (looking at you blasphemy laws), the pattern is the same each time.

I think you misunderstand me. I see blasphemy laws as the same in character to hate speech laws, and I'm saying both of them are a good thing.

I assume the terrible "pattern" you refer to is stuff like this. Obviously in contemporary Western society, even the most extreme anti-Semite isn't burned at the stake, or even executed.

But the principle - that you can be legally prosecuted by the state for being a dissident - remains the same (It's just that we don't even perform such gruesome acts on actual violent criminals), and I argue that unless you find the management of our current society intolerable (in which case you wouldn't be happy even with the freedom to proselytise your beliefs) this is a good thing.

I have no sympathy for the victims of such government persecutions given that, despite fully understanding the rules, they deliberately chose to disobey them for the purposes of a principled stand. I can't really empathise with such a person because I would never be in such a situation - if I were bound to the post, as an angry Protestant gave me one last chance to renounce my Catholicism, I would just say "I renounce my Catholicism" and walk away a free man, having suffered only a wound to my ego.

but any rules need to be transparent and very carefully constructed.

I agree with the need for transparency. But you seem to imply that lack of transparency is an issue with the current rules, which I disagree with.

The current rules change with time (About 20 years ago, the statement "a man cannot become a woman" was considered so obvious that no one would even say it, but now this would be considered transphobic) - however it's pretty easy to get a sense of what beliefs are socially appropriate to express.

In my experience, when I have made statements that have fallen outside of the Overton window amongst acquaintances it was made pretty clear to me (an awkward silence, someone explaining that I'm being "narrow-minded" or "ignorant", etc) and so I know to drop the issue and ensure to never bring the idea up again in polite company.

And historically, every famous story about someone being persecuted for their beliefs seems to include multiple opportunities to recant the offending belief, which they explicitly reject.

As for "carefully constructed", I disagree. I assume you mean the rules should be as meta as possible, and try and reflect general moral principles instead of just taking a stance on some specific contemporary controversy (i.e. "It is unfair to blame a group for the actions of an individual" is better than "you can't say Black people are violent because of their crime rate")

It can be tricky to figure out what your foundational moral principles are (I'm honestly not sure about my own) In practise this is just done by considering how you feel about various controversies/thought experiments and then trying to find the simplest possible consistent framework that explains all of these feelings. But you can easily get wider framework wrong, in ways you might not think of.

Consider my example about Black people again. A typical progressive would agree with the object level statement that you can't judge the entire group of Black people by the behaviour of a tiny unruly minority, and the meta level rule is a pretty reasonable attempt to create a general moral framework that would let us derive this conclusion.

But of course a typical progressive would also agree with the idea that "The police are racist towards black people". If you asked why, this would at least in part be because of events like the death of George Floyd, i.e. actions committed by a small subset of the group. This is of course a pretty common right wing talking point, and can be easily patched by amending the general principle to exclude groups you join voluntarily.

But had our progressive tried going the meta route, they would find themselves hoist by their own petard (Even the amended version runs into difficulties - do homosexuals lose their protected status now, as they can choose to just not indulge their preference? I have yet to see a general moral framework for progressivism that doesn't lead to undesired conclusions)

So instead, our censor (whatever their ideological persuasion), should focus on attacking specific object-level beliefs instead of running the risk of logicking themselves into a corner (and this has the bonus of being more transparent)

I see blasphemy laws as the same in character to hate speech laws, and I'm saying both of them are a good thing.

OK, hard disagree. I'll be honest, I stopped here. We have a completely different understanding of history.

It's that is always ends up getting abused...

Censorship has been an obvious and pervasive aspect of American social technology since well before the founding, all the way back to the initial colonization. How did our long and rich history of censorship amount to abuse, and what were the concrete negative consequences of that abuse?

Orangecat clearly isn't talking about every form of censorship, the impression I got was they are talking about censorship to protect people's feelings or in some other impulsive fashion - the kind which simply wallpapers over an issue, usually to shut up agitators. I can't think of any time that has had a positive impact on society.

When did it have a notably negative impact on society, though?

...I've just finished one big debate on censorship, and I'm not really up for jumping into another one. I know the consensus is supposed to be that censorship is very bad, m'kay. I observe that large amount of censorship, through a variety of methods and with a variety of targets, appears to have been the norm throughout our nation's entire history, excepting perhaps two decades bookending the turn of the last century which were unusually permissive, and which were immediately followed by an acute decline in social conditions.

I know how this all is supposed to work. I am skeptical that it actually works that way. I note that a lot of the standard narrative about censorship conveniently ignores most of the censorship actually happening in the past or present, and gets pretty hand-wavey about nailing down cause and effect.

Covid would be my first example, but it's the first of thousands so I assume I am misunderstanding you. The way I see it, people who argue against censorship aren't arguing against censorship, which is an amorphous concept found in every sphere of life, and as you (and @orangecat) say, often with positive effects. They are trying to stop power grabbing. Someone proposing censorship is trying to assume power they didn't previously have, and anyone grabbing power should be suspect, because the unscrupulous outnumber the scrupulous a thousand to one.

Speech is a particularly important power because it is the basis of communication, allowing our hierarchies to exceed our physical limitations. So I immediately suspect anyone who tries to take it, and it completely blows my mind that anyone would willingly give it up, especially for a reason as minor as hurt feelings or to cover up a mistake. And since in my lifetime I haven't seen any negative consequences to telling censors to fuck off - ever - but can list multiple times I desperately wished everyone else had told the censors to fuck off, I don't see a problem with drawing a line in the sand at 'no censorship'.

I mean, you're right that permissiveness leads to worse social conditions, but if that's all that mattered Saudi Arabia would be a utopia. It's not, (unless you have a fetish for censorship, then it's pretty great) so we get back to the same problem as always - who gets to inflict their values on whom? We can only go forward from here - there's no getting back the Hayes code and CCA.

How did our long and rich history of censorship amount to abuse, and what were the concrete negative consequences of that abuse?

As a non-exhaustive list:

  • The Sedition Act was near-instantly turned into a political tool, including of jailing dissenters and political opponents, including with charges related to writings predating the Act's enactment. In addition to not doing much good about the whole War With Napoleon thing, the statute legitimized a lot of internal revolutionary speech and literal rebellions, and badly damaged interstate comity; while not the sole cause of current red-hot judiciary problems, it's very much the first bite at the fruit.

  • Comstock personally used the law to charge sufferagettes in response to publishing an alleged affair by one of Comstock's . Leaving aside the object-level debates for his censorship itself being bad, the expansive and often quixotic efforts undermined much of his more conventional anti-fraud and anti-spam efforts, was an absolute mess when it came to actual STDs, and often publicized and promoted the very works he was opposing. (Also, from a social perspective, he also inspired a certain J. Edgar Hoover.)

  • McCarthyism blurred the lines between communist party Russian stooge, 'mere' philosophical sympathizer, and People Who Annoyed McCarthy well before the Army inquiries. In doing so, he both destroyed future anti-Soviet-espionage efforts and provided cover for tankie academics for decades.

Of course, the more morbid question is when did it have a negative impact on the censors; telling people that they'll win but burn down society invites a lot of Joker cosplay. The Adams administration didn't win reelection, but that was probably off the table before the Adams administration first won the presidency; Adams himself nor the Sedition Act's authors were prosecuted. Comstock made his keep off of those he fined and punished. McCarthy died abandoned, so there's that one I guess?

This was an excellent post, and a perfect example of what I was looking for: strong historical cases of actual censorship.

But that's outweighed by the first order effect of actually censoring them.

Is it? Is it really?

Because we can actually have a look at a country that followed your proscription! Weimar Germany had very strong laws against hate speech, and they prosecuted and banned publication of Der Sturmer more oppressively and consistently than we ban The Daily Stormer in the modern day. Hitler was banned from speaking in public for several years, and many high ranking nazis went to prison for violating the criminal code in their public statements. Did this stop the rise of anti-semitism in pre-Nazi Germany? Because I think the actual outcome we observed was the opposite of what your theory here predicted.

Weimar Germany had very strong laws against hate speech, and they prosecuted and banned publication of Der Sturmer more oppressively and consistently than we ban The Daily Stormer in the modern day.

According to the wikipedia page:

"In 1936, the sale of Der Stürmer was restricted in Berlin during the Summer Olympics, in an attempt to preserve the Nazi regime's international reputation and prestige. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels tried to completely ban the newspaper in 1938,[2] Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring forbade Der Stürmer in all of his departments, and Baldur von Schirach prohibited Hitler Youth members from reading it in Hitler Youth-sponsored hostels and other education facilities by a "Reichsbefehl" ("Reich command")..."

So it seems they were only censored by the Nazis themselves? (I'm unsure whether you just didn't know this or they were also independently censored by the Weimar republic - I couldn't find anything suggesting the latter by a quick google search, but I'd welcome any evidence of this)

For an actual example of hostile censorship of the Nazis, we can note the party was banned following the Beer Hall Putsch.

Did this stop the rise of anti-semitism in pre-Nazi Germany? Because I think the actual outcome we observed was the opposite of what your theory here predicted.

Let's consider the national election results of the Nazi party (prior to Hitler becoming Fuhrer)

In 1928 they had about 10 seats, which is basically nothing, and then they rose to relevance in the 1930 election (alongside the Communists) with about 100 seats. This was due to the Great Depression in 1929 causing unemployment to increase.

On the other hand, the ban of the Nazi party happened before 1928, and so this censorship did not have the effect of somehow rallying the base. Rather the obvious thing happened - i.e. the ban just worked in suppressing them.

I never claimed that censorship is some kind of silver bullet that grants a regime total unqualified immunity from any kind of dissent. It's just a useful tool that increases the odds of a favourable outcome. But in the case of Weimar/Nazi Germany, there was too much ruin to be papered over by propaganda.

Also, if you really believe in what you're saying, I assume that means you are happy when a cause you care about is censored/suppressed? (This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm honestly asking for a yes/no)

So it seems they were only censored by the Nazis themselves? (I'm unsure whether you just didn't know this or they were also independently censored by the Weimar republic - I couldn't find anything suggesting the latter by a quick google search, but I'd welcome any evidence of this)

I was basing my claim off the following report - https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitism_September-October_1940.pdf The source doesn't seem like a nazi one so I'm not particularly bothered, but if you look up the history of Julius Streicher he was in a lot of trouble with the law in Weimar Germany. It isn't a surprise that the nazis also went after him later - wikipedia says that it was due to embarrassment at his vulgar, low-brow and attention grabbing style, which I find very plausible.

On the other hand, the ban of the Nazi party happened before 1928, and so this censorship did not have the effect of somehow rallying the base. Rather the obvious thing happened - i.e. the ban just worked in suppressing them.

OK, and what happened next? Yeah, you had the immediate effect of lowering public support... but that doesn't actually do anything to my claim, which is that censorship ultimately has a self-defeating effect even if you get a bit of suppression at first. I feel pretty confident in saying that the Nazi party wasn't actually wiped out or defeated by being censored in Weimar Germany, and while I've heard of holocaust deniers I've never encountered any Nazi Germany deniers.

I never claimed that censorship is some kind of silver bullet that grants a regime total unqualified immunity from any kind of dissent. It's just a useful tool that increases the odds of a favourable outcome. But in the case of Weimar/Nazi Germany, there was too much ruin to be papered over by propaganda.

It is my contention that propaganda and suppression of speech like this will always fail and has only a short-term efficacy. For something like the Biden laptop story, where all that matters is suppressing coverage just before an election, censorship can work - but that's far more limited than what you're claiming, and even then the negative consequences are already starting to show up.

Also, if you really believe in what you're saying, I assume that means you are happy when a cause you care about is censored/suppressed? (This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm honestly asking for a yes/no)

Absolutely not. Censorship like this is a waste of time and energy, causes problems in the short term and the long term and completely fails to address the root causes of whatever noxious belief you're trying to censor is - not to mention it lends credibility to the censored ("The powers that be fear this message so much they do not want you to hear it! I will bravely stand up for my convictions and suffer the slings and arrows of our powerful enemies due to my love for the people" etc). The spreading of ideas and philosophies, especially negative and anti-social ones, are essentially a warning light that something in society is failing. If you're the captain of a ship and a massive warning siren comes on telling you about incoming danger, you might want to temporarily shut off the siren so you can have a bit of time to think - but if you think turning off the siren is a substitute for dealing with the problems that it actually signifies, you're setting yourself up for ruin.

I was basing my claim off the following report - https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitism_September-October_1940.pdf

Thanks for the evidence.

I feel pretty confident in saying that the Nazi party wasn't actually wiped out or defeated by being censored in Weimar Germany, and while I've heard of holocaust deniers I've never encountered any Nazi Germany deniers.

Well yes, it didn't work in this particular case. But it does work in other cases (for a recent example, consider how Western public attitudes/treatment of homosexuals has shifted in the last 20 years)

Just because a technique has a < 100% success rate doesn't mean it's never effective. In this case, the reality of the situation was so bad that it overcame the propaganda and censorship.

For something like the Biden laptop story, where all that matters is suppressing coverage just before an election, censorship can work - but that's far more limited than what you're claiming, and even then the negative consequences are already starting to show up.

How is this not a perfect example of my point? Hunter did what he did, and the Democrats couldn't fix it. So instead they suppressed it, and managed to win an election.

There was fallout later on, but that was just because there was an actual problem that had occurred. If they had just allowed the story to be disseminated freely, they would have been in even more trouble.

It is my contention that propaganda and suppression of speech like this will always fail and has only a short-term efficacy.

"All forms of medicine are an exercise in futility - the human body inevitably tends towards decay and death, any kind of pill/surgery is just a short-term delay tactic"

...completely fails to address the root causes of whatever noxious belief you're trying to censor is ...

Yes, ideally you just address the actual problem. But what happens when one of the following is true:

  • The problem is beyond your ability to address (What exactly would you propose the Weimar republic have done differently? German currency was backed by US dollars, so when the US was ruined by the Depression, so were they. That's not some policy that the German government could just reverse)

  • The establishment's values and priorities misalign with the that of the majority. My understanding is that the people running the Weimar republic valued progressive ideals such as loosening sexual mores, women's rights, etc - and like the progressives of today, saw these things as intrinsically good - they were the end which justified the means. And the Nazi party saw these things as degenerate and unnatural.

So in either case, whether it because you can't solve the problem, or you don't even believe the "problem" is a problem - you do the next best thing, which is to discourage anyone causing any ruckus by thinking about the problem.

not to mention it lends credibility to the censored

But you have to hear what the censored person is trying to say to pass any kind of judgement on their ideas in the first place.

(for a recent example, consider how Western public attitudes/treatment of homosexuals has shifted in the last 20 years)

???

Where's the censorship of gay rights activism? I do not understand what point you're making here.

Just because a technique has a < 100% success rate doesn't mean it's never effective. In this case, the reality of the situation was so bad that it overcame the propaganda and censorship.

First of all, I'd just like to point out that if the result of your strategy to defeat antisemitism is the actual literal holocaust, your strategy most likely has some big problems! Your comment about the reality of the situation also has me slightly confused - are you saying that the jews were actually so terrible that not even the power of censorship was enough to prevent anti-semitism? I really, really don't think this is a winning approach for your argument, but if you want to stand on this hill and proclaim that censorship is so effective that it can turn pervasive anti-semitism into a fascist dictatorship that tries to ethnically cleanse the semites I'm not going to stop you from advertising how correct my point is.

"All forms of medicine are an exercise in futility - the human body inevitably tends towards decay and death, any kind of pill/surgery is just a short-term delay tactic"

This doesn't mean you give people heroin to relieve the pain from a mild toothache. There are some things which we know do not work in medicine, and the fact that everyone ultimately dies one day is not a good reason to bust out the trepanning equipment.

What exactly would you propose the Weimar republic have done differently?

I don't actually know how you conclusively defeat anti-semitism or stop it from being a problem - as far as I can tell, nobody in the entire history of the world has a good answer to this question, so I don't think my failure here should reflect negatively on my argument.

But you have to hear what the censored person is trying to say to pass any kind of judgement on their ideas in the first place.

If an idea is at the point where it needs censoring then this process has already started. Again, I don't really think I have any point I can make that is stronger than "You think the strategy that took an anti-semitic society to the point where they committed genocide against the jews is a good idea".

???

Where's the censorship of gay rights activism? I do not understand what point you're making here.

I meant that anti-gay-rights activism has been censored in recent decades.

And I believe that this was a major factor in turning homosexuality from being seen as an unusual kink that should be tolerated based on "live and let live" ideals, to a legitimate, wholesome lifestyle which is deserving of widespread support and state-backing.

The homosexual advocates didn't come up with some devilishly clever new argument. Through the use of slogans ("love is love", "love is a human right", etc) and shaming, in the space of about a decade - we went from center-right politicians voting against homosexual marriage, to any opposition towards homosexuality pushed outside the Overton window (indeed - even a conservative can only protest the excesses of the movement like Drag Queen Story Hours, they have to make it clear that there's nothing inherently wrong with the lifestyle)

First of all, I'd just like to point out that if the result of your strategy to defeat antisemitism is the actual literal holocaust, your strategy most likely has some big problems!

I'm claiming that the holocaust wasn't the result of censorship. Instead it was due to pre-existing anti-semetic attitudes and that Germany was going through a tough time (Treaty of Versailles, the Depression, etc)

There are lots of good examples where censorship has lead to otherwise unpopular agendas gaining power (just look at contemporary issues like BLM, trans rights, gay rights, etc) - which is why I claim it is an effective tool (there was just too much societal ruin prior to the holocaust)

are you saying that the jews were actually so terrible that not even the power of censorship was enough to prevent anti-semitism?

Due to a higher IQ than Whites, Jews naturally tend towards being overrepresented in politics, and being wealthier than average, with the Weimar republic being a special case. Further, they are more liberal than Whites, which likely increased the extent of their impact on various forms of "degeneracy" brought about by the Weimar republic.

So if you have a problem with the Weimar republic, and are against sexual liberalism, then you would be drawn to anti-semitism (unless any criticism of Jews were made socially unacceptable and associated with schizophrenic losers)

However I believe that anti-semitism (whether based on genuine problems or not) played a very small role in the rise of Hitler. The biggest cause was obviously just the bad economic situation of Germany, which lead people to feel resentful and desperate, and seek out an extreme solution, blowing their grievances way out of proportion.

For the most part, certainly in contemporary Western society which is the context for most discussions about censorship, there isn't any such desperation. People might have problems with policy X, but if you just make it inconvenient to voice opposition to it, they'll eventually give you your way.

nobody in the entire history of the world has a good answer to this question [preventing anti-semitism]

It's been pretty well accomplished in modern Western society. The only people/organisations which I can think of that are anti-semitic would be completely irrelevant fringe figures from White/Black Supremacist movements (indeed, even in the case of actual White supremacists, there seems to be disagreement on this issue - with Jared Taylor considering them as Whites)

And this has been accomplished by making criticism of Jews completely forbidden. Indeed, whilst they are far from alone in the long list of groups which you're not supposed to criticise, we go even further in the case of Jews - you can't even mention the fact that you're not allowed to criticise them (as that would be affirming the anti-semitic trope that Jews control popular culture)

If an idea is at the point where it needs censoring then this process has already started

Yes, the process has started - that doesn't mean it can't be stopped.

There is a massive gulf between some greentexts and forum posts by aryanpepe1488 on Storm Front, and an idea entering the public conscious to be discussed in polite conversation amongst normies.

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If I understand you correctly, you're saying that (idea) censorship, as a technique, is inherently bad - even if its being done on behalf of your in-group in order to suppress the out-group. . . . But as suppression techniques go, censorship is rather underrated:

You do not understand me correctly. It is not the technique of suppression that I object to, but the suppression itself.

And, while I suppose it is true that censorship of dissidents is better than murdering them, it is also true that some techniques of murdering dissidents are better than others because of the lower risk of collateral damage, if we are discussing "what it the best method of silencing those with whom we disagree," I think perhaps we have taken our eye off the ball.

If you genuinely believe that all criticism of Jews is unfounded in reality and that allowing such ideas to exist in the mainstream could lead to a 21st century Holocaust, then why shouldn't you stop these anti-Semites from trying to prosecute such a wantonly cruel agenda?

  1. Because some principles, such as freedom of conscience, are so intrinsically valuable that instrumental concerns are not particularly relevant. See discussion of value rationality here
  2. I will defer to Justice Holmes on this one: "Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."

You do not understand me correctly. It is not the technique of suppression that I object to, but the suppression itself.

I expressed myself clumsily. That is exactly what I thought you meant. I was pointing out that suppression, in an of itself, isn't an inherently bad thing (I don't want dissidents murdered, but only because I don't want anyone killed or otherwise physically harmed unless there is no other option)

if we are discussing "what it the best method of silencing those with whom we disagree," I think perhaps we have taken our eye off the ball.

Obviously, since I don't see a regime silencing it's detractors as wrong, that question is extremely relevant to me (And my answer - as thoroughly as you can, so long as it's done non-violently and only to people who are being intentionally hostile to your interests)

I will defer to Justice Holmes on this one:

I've never seen this quote before, but it nicely captures a lot of my thoughts on this issue.

"Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole-heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises...

What an eloquent and persuasive steel man of my position.

...But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."

I wrongly inferred from your OP that you were making the "what if the tables were turned" argument.

The market place of ideas thing makes sense - even if you truly believe something, and have total authority, you could just be wrong about the thing, and so being able to critically examine your beliefs is clearly to your benefit.

However social media/the public square/etc aren't platforms for dispassionate rational debate. They are primarily a platform to spread propaganda and push an agenda based upon a belief system you've already decided upon.

I like to use The Motte precisely because of what Holmes is saying - so that my perception is as close to objective reality as possible. I use twitter to enjoy memes/rants that affirm my pre-existing world-view.

The current system of hate speech laws/cancel culture works gives the people holding the lever the best of both worlds. They can impose their will, which they believe will make the world a better place, and also can go to obscure corners of the internet to test out their thinking in private.

since I don't see a regime silencing it's detractors as wrong

If that is what you think, I am afraid that we don’t have much to tallk about. But I can say that if you think that social media can't be a vastly better space for rational debate than The Motte, of all places*, then you are following the wrong people on Twitter.

As my father would say, if The Motte is not a platform to push an agenda based upon a belief system you've already decided upon, it will more than suffice until such a platform comes along.

Here is the problem with advocating censorship of "bad" ideas: If it is permissible make rules about what ideas can be expressed, then someone has to make those rules. And who will that be, people with power, or people without power. Obviously the former.

I don't see why that's a problem, though I can certainly see why it would seem problematic to people with certain assumptions.

And what assumption would that be?

That your side will ever be out of power.

I don’t know why these people find it tough. It just isn’t. Don’t censor. But someone said something I consider naughty? Who the fuck cares.

There are plenty of people who aren’t interested in a place that tolerates anti-semitism. Somebody on /r/TheMotte or /r/slatestarcodex once made the interesting point that maximizing speech is completely different from refusing to censor anything — at a certain point you’re driving out as many viewpoints as you’re enabling by tolerating certain people.

Also advertisers – advertisers care.

That idea is itself a central and noxious example of what it describes.

"I use the [speech act] leverage at my disposal to make you censor my enemies."

at a certain point you’re driving out as many viewpoints as you’re enabling by tolerating certain people.

Might be true, but trying to carefully micro-manage which views need to be pruned to what extend in order to give room to which other views, and deciding which views bring how much value, and having an apparatus in place to enforce all of that...well, it might work on small internet forums where small teams of savvy mods who know their userbase well and actually care to maximize viewpoint diversity (though still - by what metric?), but I don't think it scales at all without devolving into conformity enforcement machinery.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record that goes "AI will fix it", that sounds like a job for AI.

I suspect a model finetuned on the moderation decisions of The Motte will beat the brakes off the typical internet or reddit mod.

I think you underestimate how many humans want censorship. To me reddit is a boring sterile place in most areas where any political sub becomes parroting of the same agreed ideas. But humans seem to want that because we converge on it repeatedly.

Even here if someone parrots a few ideas like more communists leaning they probably get enough disagreement that they end up just deciding to go to the place where everyone will call them geniuses.

AI might be able to maximize for users by never showing that posts they don’t like. Effectively letting everyone live in their self-reinforcing bubble. But it does seem many on the left don’t like the idea of supposedly something they think is a Nazi being on the same platform whose thoughts they never see.

I think you underestimate how many humans want censorship. To me reddit is a boring sterile place in most areas where any political sub becomes parroting of the same agreed ideas. But humans seem to want that because we converge on it repeatedly.

I think people are confused about what they want. They don't understand that in order to get lively, creative, intellectually stimulating conversation, they have to be willing to tolerate people with beliefs that are far different from their own.

The modern progressive movement has sold the idea that you can have all the vitality, ingenuity, and fun that we've always had without the dissidents and the ghouls and the witches. Hell, they push the line that without those bad people, there will be even more of the good stuff!

Unfortunately this message is, likely unintentionally, a classic example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

They don't understand that in order to get lively, creative, intellectually stimulating conversation

Who's they? How big exactly do you reckon the audience for these things is?

'They' are the 'average person' that @sliders1234 is referencing above. The standard, everyday, stereotypical person or I guess 'NPC' (although I find that term demeaning). People who for whatever reason don't have the ability or time or inclination to think deeply about their beliefs and struggle towards improving them. Who tend to latch onto mainstream messages and not question them too deeply.

In terms of the audience for these things, well, I'd say everyone? If you ask a person on the street if they prefer interesting conversation over boring conversation, what do you think they'd say?

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In this particular case they could be both the establishment and the normie audiences.

It's ginormous. Why else were they (the establishment) raiding all the lively, creative, intellectually stimulating cultures for popculture entertainment?

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Completely true. I’m not saying Twitter is trying to (or even can) cultivate a garden if ideological diversity, which was (roughly) the goal of /r/slatestarcodex

Twitter is probably more interested in maximizing users (which, as you say, isn’t the same as diverse viewpoints), but a similar principle still holds: if you want to maximize the number of people using your services, a policy of allowing entry to all often isn’t optimal (as users here often point out for public transportation).

At the risk of sounding like a broken record that goes "AI will fix it", that sounds like a job for AI.

What AI? The commercial versions which are being carefully monitored, pruned, and edited to make sure no No-No Words or Thoughts get through the sieve?

I think you replied to the wrong comment

Finetuning is the process by which such goody-two-shoes AI can be coaxed into almost anything you like. You could remove the guardrails, turn it into a member of the gestapo, or in this case, teach it the tenets of Motte moderation.

Of course, this is for open source models like Llama where we can tinker with their brains, not GPT-4, which is locked down and if you get naughty, OpenAI will spank you.

Also advertisers: advertisers care.

To be clear: they care about not being attacked by establishment NGO's, not about "being associated" with something objectionable in the eyes of the consumer.

I’ve heard this claimed before but admit to knowing nothing about it. What is the evidence for it?

Examples of companies losing business due to reaction from consumers are few and far between. Bud Light is probably the only one in recent memory, and they didn't really change course all that much as a result of it. Also advertisers were constantly being associated with offensive content on Twitter, Youtube, etc. It's not until the establishment media do a "it's bad to advertise on $platform" report that they actually bother to pull out.

All in all, there's very little evidence they care about being associated with something offensive, and a much simpler explanation is that it's the media coverage that bothers them.

In part, probably because the only people who saw those ads were “bad people” anyhow so there was no taint to their brand. But then the media blew their spot up.

That’s a fig leaf for a forum like Twitter to block views that are abhorrent to the people who run Twitter. Oh — this post criticizing Soros prosecutors is just anti-semitism so we are banning it.

Well, Soros choose to give a lot of money to elect prosecutors who seem to only like prosecuting people who defend themselves. He should be criticized regardless of whether it may or may not be a dog whistle.

That’s what it always devolves to so the only way to really run a program at scale that isn’t going to devolve into censorship of ideas I dislike is the free speech paradigm.

That was the old attitude of those fighting censorship. Aw, you don't like sex/naughty words/other things, you prude? Well then just don't read or look at that stuff. Anyone has the right to say anything they want.

Of course, that couldn't last long in the pure state, because (1) okay so are you saying it's really okay to spew lies about people and call for their murder? and (2) some of the people who were fighting censorship were only doing it because it was their views or wishes that were being censored; when they got the right to say/write what they wanted, they soon moved on to "no, you can't say/write that because it's hate speech or violence". In other words, they were not committed to fighting censorship, they wanted the power and authority to censor what they didn't like.

EDIT: My natural instincts are pro-censorship. There are things I think are harmful or stupid or wrong and should not be publicised. I've had to consciously make myself more 'tolerant' on this, and then when I finally get to the point of "okay, I may not agree with it, I may not like it, but they have the right to say it", then the liberal side goes for "now we have the upper hand, censorship is okay!"

I’m fine with libel laws and the incitement standards. They are robust narrowly defined set of rules (I would overturn NYT v Sullivan).

And yes, there is a problem that some people only like free speech when it’s their speech that is being censored. I am honestly okay with allowing progressives, commies, Nazis, or even the Amish to have free speech rights.

Honestly I don’t think you are being intellectually honest saying your fine with those people having free speech.

If the commies were in position to actually win and their numbers just went from 20 to 30% and you knew in 5 years they would succeed taking over every institution and you would suddenly being living in Mao China then you would not say you support free speech for them.

Let’s say you are Musks. You own twitter. You can hit a red button let’s call it the deplatform button. If you hit it the commies lose momentum and disappear. If you don’t hit it then you live in communists china in 5 years.

I would not believe you if you told me you won’t hit the red button. You are fine with them having free speech provided they are small and not in charge of real power. But that changes quickly if their free speech leads to winning the ideology battle.

The point of free speech is

Speech = win battle of ideology = win power = enforce their ideology on you

Honestly I don’t think you are being intellectually honest saying your fine with those people having free speech.

If the commies were in position to actually win and their numbers just went from 20 to 30% and you knew in 5 years they would succeed taking over every institution and you would suddenly being living in Mao China then you would not say you support free speech for them.

Let’s say you are Musks. You own twitter. You can hit a red button let’s call it the deplatform button. If you hit it the commies lose momentum and disappear. If you don’t hit it then you live in communists china in 5 years.

"Imagine you are richest man in Russia who (among other things) owns largest network of newspaper kiosks in St. Petersburg in April 1917. Would you stop selling Pravda if it is the only way to stop the dastardly commies?"

This is hypothetical scenario unconnected to real life.

1/Nowhere in history communists won due to "free speech" , nowhere communists won by convincing majority on free marketplace of ideas that communism is the best thing since sliced bread. Countries where communists prevailed were countries that practiced heavy censorship (at the time), it did not helped.

Closest example is possibly Czechoslovakia after WW2, but it was heavily managed "democracy" with only four political parties(and their newspapers) alloved and all criticism of Soviet Union treated as fascist treason.

2/ In situation where communists are in such ascendancy and ready to take power, they now have their political party, trade unions, organizations of all kind (including well armed militias) and their own newspapers, radio, TV stations and, in modern conditions, their equivalent of Twitter.

Speech = win battle of ideology = win power = enforce their ideology on you

Does Elon have any comprehensible "ideology"? He is against long list of things (that changes every week), but what exactly is he for? What he wants the world look like?

I think his core is what I’ve heard to as Victorian ideology. Striving to still do great things. I think he probably has a great deal of HBD realism probably even magnified by his experience in S Africa and it now being a failing state.

Maybe you are right. Communist China sucks. But at the same time, I know the allure of wanting to ban disfavored speech is to turn everything I don’t like into commies. Don’t stare into the void.

Censorship is merely a tool that can be used to further a goal. If you only want to ban commies, and not go any further, then just do exactly that and no more.

It's not some kind of addictive substance or dark magic that will warp your mind into something unrecognisable. It's a simple, non-violent press of a button - the victims will be frustrated and angry, but unharmed physically.

In the last few years I think I’ve just lost faith that the better argument will win and society will be better off. And historically a lot of bad things seemed to have happened.

I grew up in America being mostly good but it seems like path directionality sometimes matter.

I am honestly okay with allowing progressives, commies, Nazis, or even the Amish to have free speech rights.

I'm more a fan of the Solomon-type "cut the baby in half" approach (as in, only those that would otherwise allow their world view to be censored for common-good reasons will never be censored; those that would do that will be judged by their own standard and silenced), which is the only way you will ever preserve a free-speech paradigm in a socioeconomic environment otherwise unfavorable to it.

Censorship cannot co-exist with a mutually assured heckler's veto or among equals; it arises when the former stops being a natural consequence of economic prosperity and, for the latter, when the (later to be oppressed) group on the downswing fails to guard that balance of power sufficiently jealously.

What does a heckler’s veto have to do with economic prosperity?

I understand the position. My concern with the paradox of tolerance paradigm is that it is an easy cudgel to stifle dissidents.

I'm more a fan of the Solomon-type "cut the baby in half" approach (as in, only those that would otherwise allow their world view to be censored for common-good reasons will never be censored; those that would do that will be judged by their own standard and silenced)

Can you expand a bit on what exactly this means? It's a bit confusing to me.

The Amish are run like a society-wide cancel mob.

I don't think that's true. They use shunning as punishment, but as far as I know the mob element is absent; the punishments are deliberated by the leaders of the communities, right?

It is somewhat of a matter of definition, but I'd say that it's close enough. You can disobey the leader, but then you'd get shunned too. I admit I have no idea how common this is compared to the leader actually using force against people who refuse to participate in the shunning.

I wish it was that simple. I really do.

I've been a moderator on /r/slatestarcodex and then /r/themotte. I also semi-moderate a few different real life non-profit thingies.

I'm also an anarcho-capitalist by philosophy, and a libertarian via practicality.

At the end of the day, censorship is a consumer demand, not a platform demand. After all, if you are a platform the easiest move is not to censor anything. But there are many things that will absolutely turn off users. Maybe those users suck, and they shouldn't be so picky. But I can guarantee that you, as a user, want at least one, and more likely all three of these things censored on the platforms you use:

  1. Child Porn.
  2. Gore and death.
  3. Spam.

Spam is really the trickiest though. One man's trash is another man's treasure. And one man's spam is another man's news. It is subjectivity all the way down on "spam". Because spam is ultimately just content you don't want, sent by people that want you to have the content.

What I find by far to be the most sensible proposal would be user-chosen blocklists/filters. People should be able to pick and choose what they want to see, so the no-gore and no 7000-yo-lolis crowd can give their eyes a break.

In terms of spam, let multiple filters, some community run, exist, so that people can pick their poison. I suspect a middling AI like Llama can do this on the cheap, for "good enough" results.

Outright CP is well, illegal, so I don't suppose platforms that exist on the open web have much choice in removing it.

That's a good start, but use any but the very most clearly-defined labels and you start getting into fights over what should or should not be labelled. I for one would prefer not to see normal pornography on my feed; must I specify each action and bit of anatomy I consider pornographic, or hope the arbiters of the label share my views on the matter? If they do, they present an enormous target to anyone who wants to stir up trouble. Labels could be crowdsourced, and I think a good solution in that area is possible, but would require quite a lot more innovation than the centralized tyranny we currently enjoy.

In general, given the world's recent pattern of institutional capture by people who hate me, I'd prefer my filters to be more concrete and more resistant to change. The current tactic of flagging questionable material and reducing its reach is certainly imperfect, but it at least mostly sidesteps the debate and the power games.

I generally agree, but the issue is a bit more complex than just allowing more customizable filters.

I for one would prefer not to see normal pornography on my feed; must I specify each action and bit of anatomy I consider pornographic, or hope the arbiters of the label share my views on the matter?

Sure, this would be easy - just provide a clear, concise and accurate definition of pornography and the filter will be produced in short order. Good luck!

That's pretty much my point--I can't tell if you're trying to agree or disagree with me.

You would presumably subscribe to a blacklist source who shares your notion of what counts as pornography.

Labels could be crowdsourced, and I think a good solution in that area is possible, but would require quite a lot more innovation than the centralized tyranny we currently enjoy.

Many years back this problem came up in an Actual Adversarial Environment. The Freenet distributed anonymous network, though various cryptographic contrivances, supports the semi-persistent storage and retrieval of files associated with a key. Furthermore, there is a mechanism publish updated versions of a file, which can be discovered by someone in possession of the old key. This was first intended to be used to publish blogs and the like, but at some point in Freenet's history (way before my time) someone figured out how to build something like Usenet on top of it (but without binaries because there's no point when you can just upload a file and include the key in your message).

The first such usenet-alike was called Frost. From what I've read about the motivation for the second one, Frost was quickly filled with people discussing and sharing CP, and almost as quickly, by enormous volumes of automated spam created by people who didn't like CP. More importantly than filling up the UI, the automated spam made Frost effectively unusable, taking message latency and reliability from, "something like metro area snail mail in 19th century London", to "something like sending a letter to Jamestown from 17th century London".

The replacement was FMS (Freenet Message System, iirc). In order to combat the spam problem, it used some kind of web-of-trust thing where you could mark messages as spam/ham, and also mark other nodes as honest sources of spam/ham labels and labels about other nodes. Or maybe the trust was automatic based on agreement with your own labels or something. I don't recall exactly. In any case, messages that were too spammy would not be propagated, protecting the network from overload.

FMS's WoT censorship system was just a single axis spam probability, because this was 2011 and everyone involved was a cipherpunk free speech partisan solving a technical problem. Anyone who didn't want to see pedos talking about pedoshit was offered the simple expedient of not subscribing to alt.erotica.redacted. But I don't think there's anything inherent to the web-of-crowdsoruced-moderators idea that says you can't have a whole smorgasbord of labels.

Trust webs do sound like a good way to crowdsource the whole thing.

It may be the most sensible if you are sufficiently (classical) liberal, but there are many topics for which most people are no less bothered (or even more bothered, in the "I can handle this/don't get off on this, but what if this gets seen by someone more gullible/degenerate than me?" way) by the prospect of a consenting third party receiving the content as they are by being exposed to it themselves. Pick your poison: CP, loli, gore, racism, porn, pro-homosexual or -transgender content, "misinformation"/worldview reinforcement for the outgroup...

It's like the old "Is there someone you forgot to ask?" meme.

Well, sure, in a vacuum most people gravitate towards censoring speech they don't like. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. We shouldn't structure society around people's natural destructive impulses; we should structure society around what allows humans to flourish. And we've known for centuries that that is a free and open exchange of ideas. Not because there are no ideas which are genuinely harmful! But because humans and human organizations are too fickle, ignorant, and self-interested to be trusted as arbiters of which ideas meet that standard.

To be clear, I agree with your stated position here - it's just that I have grown cynical about the willingness of people, even those who are vocal free speech maximalists, to stick to the principle when faced with speech they find particularly disgusting or threatening to their tribe. Would you be okay with removing obstacles to consenting parties sharing all entries in my list above?

Me personally? Yes, for all the things you listed. But is that really all that surprising? We're on The Motte. The only one you listed that people here would really find controversial is CP, and while I (of course) agree that creating real CP should be illegal, sharing virtual/generated CP harms nobody and should be allowed. (This is basically the situation we're already in with hentai, which is full of hand-drawn underage porn.)

But if you want issues that do challenge my stance, I'd suggest revenge porn, doxxing or the Right To Be Forgotten. So, you're right that my "free speech maximalism" only goes so far; there's always something in this complex world that doesn't have an easy answer.

And then there is the "right side of history" crowd, where even the mildest disagreement is met with "you are literally genociding me!" and calls for "this should not be allowed" action by social media, mainstream media, schools, governments, libraries (I get a kick out of the 'banned books' weeks in libraries because dang sure something not on the approved thought list is going to be banned by the cat's eye glasses wearing ladies), advertising, billboards, placards, and you just walking down the street thinking your own thoughts in your own head.


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