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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Is the left-right distinction really the relevant political metric we should look at the in US?

The president of NYU's student bar association lost their job offer after expressing support for Hamas. I say they, because it's a trans person who also happens to be black. Can you hit higher on the diversity bingo? Well, take the wrong side where Israel is involved and apparently that does not help you. And it's not like NYU is a conservative campus.

I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives). But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism. So, this isn't a case of being a leftist or a rightist. It's a case of being against perceived Jewish interests. Sometimes people talk about the progressive stack and we have once again found out that being black and trans is no defence if you go against Jews. No such punishment against being anti-White. This seems to imply two things:

  1. The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.

  2. People who claim Jews are White must explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does. In other words, Jews have relative privilege in America in a way that is not available to Whites.

is no defence if you go against Jews

I think dropping the context around timing here is important. As of now it's not socially-policing pro-palestine view points. It's socially-policing those who support it immediately after a terrorist attack.

If anything it's putting common decency and humanity above intersectionality & showing it's limits.

I'm not sure we're seeing any of the real pushback come from those inside intersectionality disciplines to even make your arguments. Now if/when they do you bring up some points, but it's the none-crazy world that normally lets intersectionality devotes just ramble is finally speaking up.

It's socially-policing those who support it immediately after a terrorist attack.

It's not even just that! There are a number of standard pro-Palestine viewpoints in that message, but "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." isn't a middle-of-the-road pro-Palestine viewpoint, it's a pro-Hamas-massacring-civilians-without-consequences viewpoint. Merely pointing out Israel's past wrongdoing with such timing might have been tasteless, but excusing Hamas' wrongdoing is what crossed the line to outright evil.

But as long as I'm in @MelodicBerries ' thread:

explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does.

My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category. In the wake of that Las Vegas festival massacre, was there anyone like a student bar association president who said "Well, country music fans, you know they had it coming" but got away with that?

I'm not generally thrilled with the way "safety" gets used as a buzzword to cancel people, but there are "safety" fears where your potential coworker might say mean words in the office, and then there are safety fears where your potential coworker believes innocent blood is a good way to terrorize their enemies and you can't help but notice that you happen to be filled with conveniently located blood.

I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives).

Were any of these statements (which I'll presume you read, because just making that sort of thing up has no place here, right?) as bad as excusing mass murder while the bodies are still being counted? If so, then your ethnic bias theory would deserve another look. But if not, then I hope you'll reexamine the "terrorist massacres are especially bad" theory and figure out why (a different direction of ethnic bias, perhaps?) it wasn't as easy as it should have been to come up with that theory on your own.

My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category.

Off the top of my head some of the public statements about the race-motivated prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine would seem to contradict this. Not to mention it actually becoming U.S. government policy and killing many thousands of people. There are probably closer analogues, but I remember that particular one well and wrote this post about it at the time:

The CDC has officially recommended ACIP's vaccine distribution plan that deprioritizes the elderly, even though they estimate this will save less lives, in part because more elderly people are white

The most overt quote mentioned in that post would be this one:

The New York Times: The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

Or from the same article a quote from a member of the ACIP committee (the people responsible for writing the CDC's recommended prioritization):

Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well, noted Lisa A. Prosser, a professor of health policy and decision sciences at the University of Michigan. “To me the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country,” Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a committee member and a pediatrics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said at the time, “and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among essential workers.”

I think even the dry language of ACIP itself would be beyond the pale, like when they list "Racial and ethnic minority groups under-represented among adults >65" in red as a reason to not prioritize them. If it was instead "Whites under-represented" or "Jews over-represented" I do not think they would have remained in charge of writing the CDC's recommendations, nor do I think states would have adopted those recommendations.

You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated. That is the main reason I said the analogy is not particularly close. But at the same time saying "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." is less extreme than actually saying that loss of life is a good thing, let alone using your position in the U.S. government bureaucracy to deliberately cause that loss of life and being permitted to do so.

Regardless of exactly where the line is for anti-white statements and (more importantly) anti-white policies, it is obvious that they would not and could not have done something like this in the name of increasing black or jewish deaths instead. It is the product of explicit institutional racial bias. (Note that their policy actually did kill more black people because of how much more vulnerable the elderly are, it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. And naturally it killed more jewish people as well.) Of course, that doesn't prove anything about the ordering of favored groups against each other like the OP was arguing. It just shows that social justice disfavors white people and is influential enough to shape the decisions of institutions like the CDC/ACIP and the states that followed their recommendations or prioritized by race outright.

There was some… fairly extreme partisanship in 2020-21, and the Covid hawks had very strong and obvious reasons to come down on one side rather than the other.

Those are good examples, logically; I just doubt that public reaction is "logical but philo-semitic", I think it's "emotional". Jewish-Americans are classified as white, and average older than other white Americans, so they were also getting burned by the same policy.

You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated.

I think I'd have to. You're right that that policy was a heinous crime, but it's the sort of crime whose magnitude can only be reasonably grasped through statistics, rather than through video of screaming bloody women being kidnapped and festivals strewn with bodies.

Heinous crimes in healthcare regulation, from a logical standpoint, are a dime a dozen, and nobody seems to do anything about most of them. The FDA dragged its feet on approving beta-blockers for a decade, with something like a hundred thousand deaths in that time of people who could have lived years longer, and I think literally the only person I've seen vociferously complain about it was David Friedman, a source with negligible popularity.

COVID healthcare decisions were an especially weird instance of this. Pfizer changed its vaccine test protocols from their original design to avoid examining the results until after the election, with no better public reason than "er, we were kinda nervous" handwaving, in the face of public demands that they not give "the Trump vaccine" a big high-profile win right before people went to the polls ... and this time I think the biggest champion of "shouldn't we have gotten a bigger head start and saved tens of thousands more lives" was Steve Sailer, a source with negative popularity. When half the public seemed to think that the vaccines are a deadly big Pharma scam, and the other half of the public seemed to think that they're magic spells from technocrat experts (Biden said flat-out "You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations" during the Delta wave; even the original tests were only 90% effective!), is it really so surprising that nobody was rising up to complain that the technocrat experts were making mistakes allocating vaccine doses?