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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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A leftist talking point between 2017 and 2019 was that if someone seems to deny someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights. Therefore, it is okay to "punch Nazis".

Now, I'm hearing a lot of the opposite, that queers and feminists stand with Palestine because homophobic transmisogynists are human too.

It's hard to know for certain what happened. My hunch is that these are largely the same people, and that they've never been interested in meta level principles. But it's possible that these are totally different people who've replaced the leftist activists of a few years ago. That's certainly a more charitable explanation.

(I'm not posting this in the Israel/Gaza thread because it's not directly about that conflict.)

This is not a new phenomenon. The Black September massacre of the 1972 Israeli Olympic delegation in Munich was supported and facilitated by German anti-fascist radical leftist groups, and the airplane hijacking that resulted in the Entebbe raid a decade later was also a joint effort between the PFLP and German leftists.

Literally the kids of Nazis, who were so obsessed with being anti-Nazi and repudiating the sins of their parents that...they wound up separating Jews from non-Jews to figure out who to shoot. The contemporary far left has a pattern of these kinds of contradictions.

What are the names of the German anti-fascist radical leftist groups who supported the Black September massacre? I see RZ was half of the hijacking team from the Entebbe raid, but couldn't find anything about local German support for the Black September stuff.

I'm not sure. I'm pulling from Darryl Cooper's account, but he doesn't give names. Apparently a German Neo-Nazi was also involved (Willi Pohl/Voss).

There is, of course, a consistent idea- it’s totally wrong but consistent- behind this.

And that idea is that Nazis have power in the western societies these leftists live in(lol) are about to have total power(lol) and so they’re punching up to save themselves from imminent oppression, while realistically there’s nothing Hamas can do to hurt western minorities(this is basically true; no doubt Hamas could carry out the odd lone wolf terror attack in the US or France or wherever if it really wanted to, but they’re pretty busy with Israel at the moment and also they can’t carry out a big enough campaign of organized violence to be worth worrying about in America or Europe, it’s beyond their capabilities). Obviously the first things are wrong, but by every indication the people actually making excuses for western leftist violence(as opposed to just trying to downplay it) genuinely believe that modern western rightists are going to create some kind of horribly oppressive authoritarian regime.

Cynically, the only consistent principle on the far left is best described by quoting Lenin: "who will overtake whom?" -- "кто кого?": to quote that article "In this view, all compromises and promises between enemies are just expedients." Everyone is just using what angles they can to get as much for themselves as possible, and any sort of principles really exist as rhetorical cudgels rather than lofty ideals to strive for.

Even more cynically, it's interesting to see that the masked far-left protesters shouting about "punching Nazis" a few years back have disappeared, but now we have masked far-left protesters shouting about exterminating Jews. It's funny, I don't think we've seen both groups at the same time.

Now, I'm hearing a lot of the opposite, that queers and feminists stand with Palestine because homophobic transmisogynists are human too.

There is nothing inconsistent about this; Race and identity will always be above tolerance/intolerance. It has been this way for decades. In 2002 during the Iraq War, or the far-left support for PLO in the 60s. Non-whites are always oppressed and their illiberal views are either irrelevant or somehow as a result of being oppressed

I don't think there's necessarily any contradiction or change of mind. One can think of it this way:

"In this situation, the Israelis are the bigger Nazis, which is why it's ok for Palestinians to punch them. Yes, Palestine is controlled by homophobic sexists, but that is something that can be fixed after we take care of the immediate problem, which is that Israel is violently oppressing Palestine. Palestinian women and LGBT folk are themselves the victims of the homophobic sexist culture that is perpetuated by Palestinian straight men, which is all the more reason why Israel is being barbaric by bombing Palestinian areas even though on the ground Palestinian women and LGBTs are mixed in together with the straight men who are oppressing them. Palestinian women and LGBTs are the biggest victims here and Israelis are the biggest Nazis here. Palestinian straight men are somewhere in the middle, but getting Israel to stop its genocidal attack is a more pressing issue than trying to reform Palestinian cultural norms in the middle of the war and oppression."

I'm not saying it's necessarily an accurate view of things, but I think it's more or less coherent and non-contradictory at least by the low standard of how coherent and non-contradictory the average political ideology is.

The real motivations behind these attitudes are probably much more emotional than rational, and the rational arguments are made up after the emotions in order to justify the emotions. But then, that's the case for the vast majority of political thinking everywhere, including here on The Motte. And to be technical, I don't even think it's possible to ever get rid of emotion-driven politics because a lot of politics boils down to preferences which in principle cannot be argued for or against. But that's a tangent. My main point is that even if the dominant progressive attitude toward this conflict is emotion-driven, it is not hard to come up with pretty coherent rationalizations of it.

One might as well ask why most US conservatives who support small government, social conservatism, and armed resistance to an oppressive state here in the US also support sending a bunch of my tax money to Israel's military-intelligence complex to help it fight against a rag-tag band of socially conservative resistance fighters who are using their guns to fight government oppression.

One might as well ask why most US conservatives who support small government, social conservatism, and armed resistance to an oppressive state here in the US also support sending a bunch of my tax money to Israel's military-intelligence complex to help it fight against a rag-tag band of socially conservative resistance fighters who are using their guns to fight government oppression.

If the boomercons I spent the weekend with are any indication, the answer is ‘the people in Palestine are basically the scum of the whole region that no one wants to have to deal with so Israel’s stuck with them. If gypsies rebelled I would support the EU, and it’s kind of the same thing’. Kto-kogo, indeed.

One might as well ask why most US conservatives who support small government, social conservatism, and armed resistance to an oppressive state here in the US also support sending a bunch of my tax money to Israel's military-intelligence complex to help it fight against a rag-tag band of socially conservative resistance fighters who are using their guns to fight government oppression.

That's a good question too, why not ask it as well? And why on earth are you trying to lowest common denominator this? Holding people to the standard of average political discourse, defending emotional reasoning because it's really easy and requires no thought, boiling everything down to preferences and then giving up. "Hey, even on the motte people have shitty arguments sometimes, so may as well give in to your basest impulses and go who, whom like everyone else".

If you find yourself lowering your standards to rationalise your ideological bedfellows behaviour, doesn't that imply they aren't really your bedfellows on this issue? You don't have to become conservative instead, just hold yourself to the standards I know you prefer deep down (because your post is full of reluctant resignation.) It's the only way to raise the bar again.

I'm not defending the emotional reasoning, I'm just explaining it. Also, progressives are not my ideological bedfellows any more than conservatives are. My political views are too complex to describe succinctly, but if I had to put a simple label on them I'd say that they are probably closer to classical liberalism than to any other major political ideology.

If I come off as being full of resignation, it's probably because I have spent my entire life so far feeling like no major political movement represents my politics well and I have seen just how much more powerful emotion-driven politics usually is than reason-driven politics. However, I do not think that improvement is impossible. It clearly is possible, because modern Western societies are on average vastly different politically, and in my opinion almost in every single way better, than they were say 2000 years ago. So despite my cynical view of the political landscape, I have not given up hope, nor do I think that my efforts to make things better are meaningless.

I feel lie your political position and mine are about the same and every time an election comes up, I'm simply floored by the amount of people who actually believe and are energized by their chosen party. It really baffles me that anyone can believe any of it. I often feel like my lack of faith is my biggest failing.

they’ve never been interested in meta level principles

Almost nobody is interested in meta level principles. Tons of the same right-adjacent people who were advocating for free speech and against cancelling were instantly on the front lines of trying to cancel pro Palestinian college students in the wake of the Hamas attack.

Some are self-conscious enough to justify it with slogans like “my rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly” but ultimately a good model of public debate is that people advocate for their side on the object level using whatever weapons they can.

I think you are right. Of course those who do not care about meta principles get eventually devoured by their own for their troubles, as Scott pointed out in his "why don't whales get cancer more often post.

One could argue rightists are aware of this and just want to give them a taste of their own medicine. Not that revenge is a healthy thing to pursue. I don't advocate punishing anyone for criticism of Israel, but I do get a perverse delight in seeing leftists do a surprised Pikachu face when the exact thing they asked for happens to them.

A leftist talking point between 2017 and 2019 was that if someone seems to deny someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights. Therefore, it is okay to "punch Nazis".

I think this is incomplete. The standard framing of this is "if a person in a position of power denies someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights, therefore it's okay to punch Nazis."

It's the same reasoning that underlines "you can't be racist against white people" - racism = prejudice + power, ergo it isn't racist for a black person to say "if it was up to me I'd send all those fuckin crackers to the gas chamber" in the way it would be if the boot was on the other foot. The debate about "punching up" vs. "punching down" in standup comedy may seem innocuous and trivial, but it leads directly to people defending Hamas for gang-raping Israeli women.

So we aren't entitled to punch Richard Spencer in the face because of the things he said: we're entitled to punch him in the face because of the things he said and because he has power.

"What do you mean Richard Spencer has power? He's never been elected to public office, the membership in the organisation he founded is vanishingly small, he was so broke he had to move back in with his parents." Well, who has "power" and who doesn't (who's punching up and who's punching down) are intentionally defined in a manner which is fuzzy, opaque and prone to being gamed. It's practically a defining characteristic of leftists/woke people that they see themselves as always and forever supporting the oppressed and downtrodden, which means that whenever a leftist/woke person supports Alice over Bob, they must find (or invent) a reason that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob.

Israel and Palestine is a relatively straightforward case, in that it's hard to deny that Israel is the stronger of the two belligerents - technologically, economically and militarily superior, backed by the US, nukes etc. - but you will often find murkier cases, wherein the claim that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob seems a lot more contrived than this. For example, I've seen woke people argue that wealthy black people making fun of homeless white people is "punching up", because the homeless people are still beneficiaries of "white privilege". The whole "punching up" vs. "punching down" framework has so many degrees of freedom that it will almost always be possible to find some reason why the person you like is actually disempowered relative to the person you don't.

If it was done in a systemic way, we would aggregate all of the relevant characteristics of the two individuals or parties ("Alice makes €50k, is myopic, is a lesbian, speaks English as a second language and is a recent migrant; Bob makes €40k, wears hearing aids, is straight and suffers from pronounced PTSD") and then make a determination of who is allowed to crack jokes at the other's expense/beat the other one up/steal the other's shit. (This was probably the idea behind "privilege walks", in which you take a group of people, a series of statements are read out, and each person moves one step forward if the statement applies to them and one step back if it doesn't. I haven't heard much about them for years, probably because the technique's objectivity meant that it could easily show that a female person is more privileged than a male, or a POC more privileged than a white person - and we can't have that, can we?) In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)

This is one reason woke people get so hostile and defensive when people bring up class, education and income as axes of privilege: on some level they are well aware that almost all woke people are well-educated middle-to-upper-class people whose salaries are well above the national average, and that many anti-woke people are none of those things. It must be profoundly discomforting to simultaneously think of yourself as someone who always sticks up for the little guy, while also being aware that you routinely express sneering contempt for people who are poorer and less educated than you. Their preferred strategy for defusing this cognitive dissonance is to insist that they don't hate poor white people because they're poor but rather because they're racist and sexist and etc.; that race matters more than class; that if you're white and poor in a white supremacist society then that means you must have squandered your white privilege ("why can't you just pull yourself up by your Klanstraps?").

As a person who thinks, fundamentally, that what's good for the goose is good for the gander, I was never going to feel at home in woke spaces. I've read tens of thousands of words trying to justify the claim that it's okay for black people to express seething hatred for white people but not vice versa (and by extension that it's okay for Palestinians to gang rape Israelis but not vice versa). Dozens of people have tried to explain to me in person why they believe it to be so, or treated it as so self-evident that they're honestly baffled why I don't accept it face value (like I didn't understand why 2+2=4). It's obviously an assertion that makes a great deal of intuitive sense for a large proportion of the population - I'm just not one of those people and I don't think I ever will be.

They have meta level principles, but those aren't it. You're reading the slogans that are meant to beat liberals into submission, not the inner thoughts of the movement. These people do not believe in rights as a concept.

Their philosophy is ultimately one of love of the weak and hatred of the strong, they are slave moralists above most things and if Hebrew and Palestinian were swapped in perceived relative power they would likely have different allegiances.

Do note that the hierarchy of power seems to have been dogmatically set and isn't mutable. If the oppressed become the oppressors they don't switch sides, it's "justice".

You're reading the slogans that are meant to beat liberals into submission, not the inner thoughts of the movement.

I often wonder whether neurotypicals can read minds, since they so often as though they can.

I see your point, though. And I think you may be right, but I'd like to be charitable.

I'm not quite mind reading here, so much as actually reading.

They plainly say the slogans are bullshit for libs in their own writings. Go read the CRT authors, they literally explain how they're trying to trick liberals into bringing about a real revolution instead of extinguishing it.

They will deny it in interviews (there's this hilarious bit where Crenshaw is asked point blank if she's a Marxist as a softball and has to give a non answer which puzzles the interviewer) but they are pretty open about this in their esoteric literature.

I don't know who Crenshaw is. I only know who Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are. Tell me more about this Crenshaw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Crenshaw

She coined the term intersectionality, influenced the equality clause of the South African constitution and is one of the major founders of CRT with Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado.

I recommend reading Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement which gives a good overview of the movement and its authors.

To give a candid reading of their ideas: Liberals tricked American blacks into false liberation through the idea of colorblindness and individualism, true liberation can only come from race consciousness, Common Law and private property are inherently incompatible with black liberation and their existence is a structural inequality that requires no less than a new constitutional order that places social justice above such principles.

I often wonder whether neurotypicals can read minds, since they so often as though they can.

Your post reminds me of captchas where the user is presented a single picture, divided into squares, and asked to identify all squares with a bicycle (or whatever) in them. Sometimes there are perhaps a few pixels that are from the bicycle on the edge of one of the squares. Does that count or not? What if the pixel in the square is only partly colored by the bicycle, and the other half of its color comes from background? What about reflections? I used to get a bit stressed trying to answer correctly based on my understanding of what "correct" was. That is wrong. You are not being asked to identify all squares with a bicycle in them. You're being asked to reproduce how an average person would respond to this task, given the prompt "identify all squares with a bicycle in them". An average person doesn't think about reflections, or subpixels, or any of that. And so I am no longer stressed about captchas.

It's not reading minds exactly, but it is a combination of "not overthinking" and "enough shared culture so that they all understand those critical, unstated assumptions".

Ah. Sadly, not only do I not share normie cultural assumptions, I don't even understand the assumptions of the terminally online culture I've grown up in.

Your formulation makes it sound like it is intended as an attack, but as a (hopefully not too non-central) leftist, I'm fairly happy to stand by "[love the weak and] hate the strong" - more the latter than the former - as a tenet. Right-wingers who celebrate strength, in my general experience and certainly on here, are very quick to conflate strength and excellence (in the sense of being good at something that the speaker values terminally, hopefully not circularly including strength qua strength); but as I see it, the evolutionary telos of strength is the telos of evolution itself - that is, survival, domination and reproduction - and though strength makes it easier to attain excellence, it only does so reluctantly as a side effect when excellence is the least-resistance path to attain said domination. This, in turn, is actually more often the case when we do not grant strength the compound interest of celebrating it for itself, but instead denigrate it to force it to camouflage as something else.

I think many right-wingers, at least here, actually understand the difference between strength and excellence quite well; at least I do not see them, looking out to the sea as the SJ juggernaut rises, going "Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?" with sparkly eyes. What draws me to oppose the SJ movement is its strength, and to the extent any conservatives are drawn to support it on that basis, they become the "liberals who are the real authoritarians" that are only spoken about in hushed tones, whether you fear the modus ponens or the modus tollens.

Maybe this is a total failure of reading comprehension on my part, but passages such as

the evolutionary telos of strength is the telos of evolution itself - that is, survival, domination and reproduction - and though strength makes it easier to attain excellence, it only does so reluctantly as a side effect when excellence is the least-resistance path to attain said domination. This, in turn, is actually more often the case when we do not grant strength the compound interest of celebrating it for itself, but instead denigrate it to force it to camouflage as something else

read as complete word salad to me. I genuinely have no idea what point you’re trying to make, or why strength is supposed to be a bad thing in this construction. Are you saying you hate strength because it’s instrumentally useful to rhetorically deploy expressions of hate toward strength, because strong people have to strive harder to achieve excellence if we don’t just let them use their strength to take the shortcut to excellence? That’s my read of what you’re saying if I squint, but honestly I’m not confident that I’m interpreting anything of value in your post.

This is how I interpreted it:

  • Strength makes it easier to attain excellence.
  • But strength does not particularly care about excellence. Strength only produces excellence as a side effect under certain conditions.
  • If strength is widely denigrated, then the only way for strength to make itself look good is to be excellent.
  • Therefore, we ought to denigrate strength, to force it to be excellent.

That’s the thing that I find interesting (the fact that hierarchies can’t change). Why? Is it that they hated the strong for so long that even when they aren’t strong the hate remains?

Because it's not about weak vs. strong. It's about signalling.

Poor people can't afford to have slave morality. They need to fight for their rights. Rich woke people are thriving and can afford to send expensive signals such as "white people are evil", "defund the police", and "raise taxes".

It's worth pointing out that these people are overwhelmingly more likely to send their own children to private school and live in a safe neighborhood.

Hate for the strong and love for the weak is just another layer of the onion; it's not a true meta-principle either.

Part of me thinks it isn’t really hate for the strong and love for the weak but hate for the competent and love for the dysfunctional.

It's hate for the weakness and dysfunction within themselves that leads to the hate for the strength and competence they see in others. Also the fear of being weak and dysfunctional themselves and not knowing enough about themselves to know their own strength or weakness. People who have pushed themselves to see themselves fully aren't as easily led astray into these modes of thinking.

Competent are competitors, the dysfunctional are clients ?

There are children in Palestine, too.

'Hold specific people accountable for their personal actions, don't vilify and attack entire ethnicities based on the actions of a few of their members' has also always been a leftist philosophy (whether or not it shows up reliably in tactics).

Will the pro Israel people promoting this line of argument so consistently try to pay a little attention to the pro Jewish far left?

Recently, Harvard declared that Jews are to be considered as non white as far as their policies go. Many far left donors decided that wokeness is just fine but not criticisms towards Jews or Israel. So what are you doing about the influential faction that is pro jewish and anti white, and wants Jews high in the progressive stack? Because it seems that only focusing on muslim wokeness is helping them to get their agenda through.

Also, unlike the fact that the woke left is promoting nonsense, Palestinians are genuinely oppressed. Both in West Bank and in Gaza. days ago I heard the number 10000 dead. Their homes have been mass obliterated.

It is the Jewish side which abuses identity politics. Of course if one looks at the politics of palestinians, they are if they are accepted as immigrants on mass join with movements against the native people. But they are oppressed in their homeland.

My problem with leftist whining is not the same with the Green Greenwald antiwar type of opposition to actual attrocities. It is ironically excessive tribalism, feelings over facts emotionalism, manipulative and identity politics to disminish real issues because of dichotomizing politics into different packages of beliefs and tribal allegiances. So we should reject as leading humanity into monstrous teritory to dismiss actual morality, due to our correct opposition to those who complain over BS and are actually the oppressive force in society. Actually the Jewish identitarians qualify more as part of this than being targeted by this and the reinforcement of Jewish victimhood including with Christians and Europeans as perpetrators is something we constantly see. My stance is that the obvious antiracist path is these cult of personalities for ethnicities to stop and to recognize that Jews didn't do nothing and is all evil non jewish, or white and christians and demonizing othe ethnic groups and calling any resistance and disagreement as antisemitism, is actually insanely racist hate speech, which shouldn't be tolerated. Actually the anti racist and less tribalist and more moral and factual path is to aknowledge that the Jews and also non jewish racists in favor of Jews, have done and are doing plenty against europeans, palestinians and should stop. Books like one written from a Jewish rabbi I found once about the Jewish role in multiculturalism and victimhood industry that is negative about it but has a reconciliatory tone.

Is there an element of third world nationalism islamist and even anti western in the broad sense civilization that is pro palestine? Of course. And same applies with pro Jewish, probably even more so among institutional power but probably less applied to the ground activists.

But that should be addressed directly, rather than us at any point thinking the correct attitude to it is to support atrocities against the Palestinians. At the end of the day, ethnic groups that I consider extremists (and I consider the Jews to be an ethnic group with pervasive problem of extremism and racism) and don't want them to rule over others still have human rights. So do others, since there are some Jews with sane politics and non Jews who are racists for Jews and other groups.

The way I talk about human rights and I don't have Israel in mind which actually is a country that routinely violates the genuine human rights of others its not a suicide pact, not an excuse to avoid self defense or pathological altruism. Its about avoiding predatory attrocities but still defending yourself and taking the right measures that do not allow criminal factions to act with impunity. Punishment is still a necessary element of justice and so is people with criminal agendas being stopped from enacting said agendas.

Also in regards to coalitional politics, you should try to give the anti woke you are trying to appeal a better offer. Because I see the Jewish supremacist antiwhite left (part of that are many neocons who are leftists and converge in most things ADL does and are the type to call for replacing the white working class) being the faction that gets most of what it wants. It includes in it those who pretend it doesn't exist by the way and promote postmodernist FUD on reality.

That some of the people this manipulative one sided offer aren't playing harder to get and making demands probably has something to do with why they are never getting a better offer. Its a relationship when one party makes unconditional demands and willing to call you a jew hater and evil or nazi if you don't go along with them, and the other party's reaction is grosslly idiotic if it just complies with this moral blackmail. It is also dishonorable Reek behavior. The attitude of "if you don't give us what we want we will slander you" is a very good reason additionally to be hostile to the pro jewish racist faction. Which slanders your ancestors and anyone who isn't subservient to them anyway.

Anyhow, in both the USA and in Britain, people are persecuted both for supposed Islamophobia and supposed anti jewish sentiment. The end result isn't targeting hatred but promoting supremacy of said groups and promoting totalitarianism.

Why shouldn't Christians and the native european types demand to be treated with respect and getting at least some level of protection instead of unconditionally supporting a faction that has been quite comfortable to a) mistreat them due to their identity politics and part of this mistreatment includes the enforced consensus of Jewish moral superiority and opposition to valid criticisms b) have been actually willing to make some common ground with third world nationalist especially non islamists (of course delegitimizing the rights of the native people also makes common cause with them) but even allow room against negativity towards muslims, at least when done outside pro jewish context, but have been very hostile to european tribalism. This is a very bad offer provided by those who are much more willing to promote aggressively pro jewish identity politics than work to support or tolerate the identity politics of others. Not to mention the support of the invade the world types for the invite the world agenda.

The end point of both islamist and pro jewish faction's agenda and what they are promoting is a progressive stack intersectionality that has some level of compromise among those two factions and is a totalitarian racist supremacist society at expense of right wingers, christians, europeans and other groups not part of the progressive stack alliance. While lying about how it is a society against racism, for freedom and the typical lies. Actually Britain is one example of a society already there and will go even further in said direction on the short term. However, I don't think the currently pro jewish direction is stable.

Of course, the pro jewish faction are going to find that their victories have plenty to do with native westerners being willing to stupidly side with them which doesn't apply actually to many of the people they invited over at the expense, especially with changing of the guard of power and even the guilible native westerners can just take so much abuse, especially as it intensified and new generations have been turning against them. Plus their cause is blatantly unjust also in Palestine. Lets just say that I don't expect on the long term the white-ish Jews to be treated very well as the west stops being the west and some of those of native descent identify with an antiwhite ideology which is going to be hostile to Jews too and remaining parts of the west in spirit too understand how hostile the Jews have been and are to them, and therefore are not pro Jewish when the Jews have consistently mistreated them. But for the majority of those Jews who have been participating in politics and the culture war it would be reaping what they have sowed.

*** But aren't the Jews supergeniuses who wouldn't pursue this strategy if it could prove detrimental? I don't see this display of supergenius. I see a disciplined fanatical attempt to promote jewish identity politics and a resentful prejudice agaisnt european christians. There is some method in the madness and to the racist agenda but plenty of irrationality too. Their arrogance exceed the Ashkenazi Jewish IQ. In their interaction with the right and europeans and christians they really are driven by irrational racist resentment with a heavy crossover with parts of non jewish left too which have succeeded also due to fanaticism, ruthlessness and probably some other advantages but also quite irrational and driven by resentment. They are more willing to compromise and respect ironically left wing identity politics despite the cynical targeting of it.

I blame the western right and native people in smaller part. The reason both the left and the Jews in west have become so resentful and unwilling of any sane compromise with them was the fact that the right wing have been complete pushovers and that feed into the arrogance of the Jews and he far left. This is why they demand that the right be self hating racist pushovers or else call them nazis. They have become accustomed to this, even though it would make more sense to be much kinder to the european natives.

Enforcing moderation and good rules and not allowing people to promote one sided racist demagoguery and propaganda at your expense and then pretend that they are antiracists and anyone else is a nazi antisemite, was the sane thing that the non Jewish establishment failed to do. Fixing things requires we do just that and not tolerate this kind of propaganda ever again.

This is a worthwhile post, but it doesn't relate to what I'm talking about and would better fit in the Gaza megathread.

The influence of the pro Jewish far left like the ADL and how just focusing on the woke pro muslims empowers it is definitely directly relevant.

Fundamentally my position has been that rather than hateful extremism the idea of the Jews as a racist party is the sane and less racist way to understand Jewish behavior, and Jewish identity politics are genuinely poison for western civilization. Contrarilly the idea of Jews as the people who never done nothing and have a legitimate grudge against others to demonize them and it is antisemitic to question it, is in fact extremist racist hatred. Of course this shouldn't be conflated with attrocities towards Jews or any group. Not tolerating racist propaganda is different than that and it is in fact possible to do so without having the same mentality of what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine.

Of course there are many ways I disagree with certain far righters. Fundamentally stopping all the annoying and immoral grudge stirrers against your civilization is the obvious way to go and this means stopping both the pro palestinian anti western far elft. But I have more of a moderate end. I don't want the dominant discourse to be propagandistic in the other direction. I do want of course to make the whole woke framework taboo. I am more into moralism than some people on the right.

Additionally, I always found a respectable decency in certain more fact based anti war leftists. If someone opposes warmongering and attrocities I see this as a good thing and different than someone who is out to get your civilization. The whole attempt to associate wokeness with pro palestinians which was part of your post foregoes actually analyzing the facts of the situation. We shouldn't reflexively side against a group when they are actually mistreated.

Lets just say that I think our reaction towards group X should be much different if they are a) promoting propaganda against your civilization and disrespecting its human rights promoting mass migration, and all sort of other policies b) Are getting bombed.

I have little sympathy for say the Palestinian cheering for Islamization of the west even if they are using the mistreatment of palestinians as part of their argument but much more for the Palestinian getting bombed and the argument against that. The problem of wokeness is they take the side of people in the wrong and have an extreme mentality for their ingroup and against their outgroup. It is the wrong reaction to that to always take the side of groups and against other groups. This applies also in cases were it would be favorable to Jews. Like I think when Jews were targeted by attrocities such as in WW2, opposing that would be the correct thing to do although now we should disentangle the past history with the modern movements milking it dry. It is more about opposing it as it happens.

Also we should be careful to not let sympathy against certain mistreatment mean tolerance for propaganda movements.

You shouldn't support say 19th century slavery but you should be intolerant of the movement using it as a weapon towards modern people and their general civilization and overly promoting narratives that also shit on their ancestors. Same with holocaust but with the Jews there is also a promotion of false narrative of Jews historically as always oppressed, victimized, doing nothing wrong and others as oppressors. Which narrative has plenty to do with authoritarian persecution of opposite facts. A few on the right thing that the way to go is to actually cheer for that as the way to counter the left and of course I disagree. The bigger problem is tolerance of propagandists out to get you, or thinking that said history is inherently sacred. Its not sacred but profane for people to use it against you and must be made taboo. A bit like Poland criminalized blaming the Poles for the holocaust.

The whole "wokeness muslim" argument as people here promote it is an arguement to completely forget the pro Jewish far left and join them in promoting authoritarian racist Jewish identity politics and also abandon considerations of human rights entirely but only in the case of regime approved targets and support Israel in its atrocities against Palestinians. Both of these approaches are wrong.

My hunch is that these are largely the same people, and that they've never been interested in meta level principles.

It's almost always this, but I think most Motteposters (myself included) ignore this idea since it would make 90% of CW-analysis posting moot, and we enjoy our hate-read dopamine too much.