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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29581 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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He has seen these institutions treat mild to moderate social aggression as a threat to the existence of various minority groups. And here he is, hearing loud and clear that words aren't violence when directed at his ethnic group. None of it counts when you do it to Jews.

How is any of this surprising at all? He has been cataloguing the exact same system of social aggression that is being turned not on Jews qua Jews, but on White Nationalist jews. Antizionist jews aren't just applauded, they're celebrated by the left for entirely consistent reasons. If you advocate for an ethnostate for white people the fact that some of those white people wear funny hats and don't like Santa Claus doesn't change the fact that you're a white nationalist in the eyes of the left, especially when there's a daily feed of photos of brown people getting blown up and killed. It isn't like the left has been hiding their views on this situation, and while I don't pay for his content I have a sneaking suspicion that Singal has actually got a bit of first-hand experience with the modern left (and may in fact make a living talking about it).

Israeli Jews are majority indistinguishable in phenotype from Palestinians and Israeli society is ethnonationalist, but it’s not that ethnocentric and racist- Arab Christians in Israel have better educational and labor market outcomes than the Jewish majority despite being Arab. Muslims do worse, but that’s probably partly HBD and partly cultural dysfunction.

Israeli Jews are majority indistinguishable in phenotype from Palestinians

In my experience this is extremely incorrect and I can tell the difference fairly quickly. I'm not going to confuse Yair Netanyahu for DJ Khaled anytime soon.

Muslims do worse, but that’s probably partly HBD and partly cultural dysfunction.

As I've mentioned in discussions on this topic before, good luck convincing the left that disparity in outcomes between white people and people of colour are due to brown people having genetics which make them dumb, violent criminals.

You’ve mentioned this a few times, including the bit about HBD likely explaining the different outcomes between Arab Christians and Muslims. Do you have any idea how that could have come about historically? My possibly incorrect understanding is that Jews and Christians were ineligible for public service and positions of authority under the Ottomans and various previous Islamic states. They could remove this handicap, and many did, by converting to Islam; they’d also avoid additional taxes that way. Under those conditions, I would have expected the most ambitious (and therefore possibly more intelligent? I’m not sure how well correlated those two traits are) to have converted to Islam over the centuries, leading to a slightly dumber Christian population. Do you know of anything I’m missing?

Christians in the Middle East are a well-educated, relatively wealthy minority everywhere, and when there’s separate IQ data it’s higher. This despite often fairly severe discrimination.

Exactly how this came about is the sort of thing that has lots of different explanations. I personally think Islamic law is dysgenic, but you’ll also notice that 1) the groups are not ‘different religion, same ethnicity’ like northern Irish Protestants and Catholics- there’s over a thousand years of divergence and 2) it’s been hypothesized that the dumbest Christians were unable to afford the jizya and were enslaved, melding into the general Arab Muslim gene pool.

The other elephant in the living room is consanguinity- Arab Muslims have close to triple rate of cousin marriage that their Christian neighbors have- but I don’t think that explains the magnitude of IQ gap(in Israel, the lowest to highest performing groups on college entrance exams, which are probably pretty close to an IQ proxy).

The cousin marriage thing completely slipped my mind. I think you’re probably right that that plays a role, perhaps even a major one.

By white nationalist Jews, are you referring to Zionists? They are certainly Jewish nationalists, but they are demonstrably not white nationalists; see the Mizrahi and Maghrebi Jews.

Yes, that's who I'm referring to. Some of them having darker skin is not actually an argument against them being white nationalists - The Daily Stormer's readerbase doesn't get to go "Oh we're not white nationalists, we have a Sicilian division". Israel is essentially viewed as a colonial settler project on the left, with a bunch of white europeans coming in and oppressing a bunch of people of colour. Don't forget that "blackness" in the modern left is contingent upon being a leftist as well.

What views has the left not been hiding? Their opposition to a movement they perceive as white nationalist?

Yes! This support for Palestine and opposition to Israel isn't some surprise that was sprung on the jews after they reacted to an attack, but a core part of left-wing political ideology for the past few decades. They have been saying loudly, for years, that this is what their response would be.

What "sneaking suspicion" of Singal are you talking about?

I was making a joke - it is extremely obvious that Jesse Singal would have first-hand experience of what it is like to get Blocked and Reported.

Perhaps this by itself is not, but surely their broadly welcoming stance toward non-European co-religionists is. So too is their explicit policy of using Judaism, not whiteness, as an eligibility criterion.

Christian nationalism is largely thrown into the same bucket of deplorable ideologies that good leftists are duty-bound to oppose, and the religious aspects are often derided as simply cover for ethnic chauvinism. In the case of Israel it is actually just naked ethnic chauvinism, and 90% of the jews that modern leftists encounter are going to be white ashkenazim. Nobody is ever going to believe that Amy Schumer and Jerry Seinfeld are people of colour, and so when they see people like them advocating for an explicitly racist ethnostate they're going to call that white nationalism.

The whiteness of Jewish people is a matter of debate among the kind of left- and right-wingers whom I find distasteful,

I also find that interminable quibbling to be distasteful, which is why I largely don't engage in it. I find that categorising ashkenazim as a sub-category of white people is the most useful approach when it comes to discussing politics, so that's the approach I take. I don't really have an opinion on the actual question because I don't think it matters at all.

Zionism advocates for an ethnostate for Jewish people. An estimated 30 - 45% of Israelis are Mizrahi. The Venn diagram of Jewish people and white people is not a circle.

"We want an ethnostate for a people who are 55-70% white" pattern matches directly to white nationalism in modern politics, and I don't even think people are being particularly wrong or incorrect when they call that ideology white nationalism. When you look at actual Israeli policies (settling Gaza, surreptitiously administering contraceptives to black people, discriminating against muslims) that initial judgement seems totally correct from a left-wing perspective.

This is true, and recent polling suggests that the left, particularly the youth, no longer regard Jewish people as a historically or currently oppressed minority.

And why should they? The idea that Lloyd Blankfein is a victim of discrimination is just farcically wrong, and when you try to talk about how oppressed poor Harvey Weinstein was people are just going to laugh in your face - and they're correct to do so. If they actually are an oppressed minority, then that would show up in the data the same way statistics reveal discriminatory treatment towards black people... But when you look at the statistics you get the opposite result, which suggests that they are actually the opposite of oppressed. HBD answers (higher average verbal IQ translates to better outcomes in a society that rewards higher verbal IQ) can provide an explanation, but good luck getting the left to agree to that (and I'm not even entirely convinced that HBD covers all of it, I feel like there's at least some element of ethnic nepotism that contributes as well... but that just might be genetic too).

Sure, fair enough, Jewish progressives could maybe have predicted that the leopard would eat their face.

The only real surprise to me is that people are actually surprised about this - I was under the impression that most Jewish progressives in this case considered themselves part of the metaphorical leopard.

You don't believe it matters if Jews are white,

Correct. I'm not a white nationalist and don't think that "white" is a strong enough basis for any kind of group identity. Whether or not individual jews qualify under that umbrella is just not a question I care about because I don't think that information is useful at all. But when I'm talking about politics at a broader level, jews absolutely fall under the category "white" as defined by the modern left and it isn't even a question.

you also believe that progressives inevitably - and correctly! - regard Zionism as a white nationalist project because only 35 - 50% of Israelis are nonwhite? (Note that Mizrahim are not the only non-white Jews in Israel.)

If a Christian nationalist group arose with 40 - 50% non-white membership, and which demonstrably opened its doors to non-whites and made Christianity, not whiteness, its overriding membership criterion, it would be odd to insist that it was a "white supremacist organization." You can use words that way, but I confess the reasoning looks very motivated to me.

I'm not trying to be glib or motivated here, I'm basing my opinion on what I see people on the left saying and doing. Are you familiar with the Proud Boys? They were a right wing political organisation that was explicitly christian, and they've been called a white supremacist group as well... despite being led by a black cuban and not having any racial requirements for prospective members. It isn't like they're the one exception or anything - here's Al Jazeera saying that Zionism is "white supremacy" and not jewish supremacy. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/1/9/the-zionist-fallacy-of-jewish-supremacy Here's Newsweek talking about how orthodox-raised jew Jared Kushner's white supremacy "shines through" https://uscpr.org/jared-kushners-white-supremacy-shines-through-opinion/ (though Newsweek later edited the title to remove the term white supremacy, they didn't change the URL and the author kept the original title for his website).

I actually agree with you that this is a bad use of language, and political thinking is made less clear by simply terming everything "white nationalist", but that's the world we live in right now and that's the approach that the left has decided to take. If you want to go and tell the left that they're being a bit too free and flippant with accusations of racism and white supremacy, I think that's an admirable goal and you should definitely pursue it if you're rich enough that you never need to worry about working again.

The outcome of this dust up is not that Jews are white, it's that Jews need to rejigger DEI with an explicit cut-out for themselves. I'm quite happy to bet on this if you're interested

Ackman explicitly rejected that idea, which he said Gay offered. Perhaps that was just a negotiation tactic, but he could have been serious. Or he could have, probably correctly, figured the cut-out would wither away as soon as the heat died down.

It'd also be extremely hard to justify and explain. What would even be the argument here? "White people are all evil/privileged, except for jews, who are not privileged beneficiaries of racism because they are so rich and powerful that we can't piss them off by attacking them like this."

I don't think you'd have to wait terribly long for this cut-out to come into dispute, and there's no way you can even make it that doesn't just immediately fall apart under interrogation.

This is like saying feminists need to rejigger DEI with an explicit cut-out for themselves. It's missing the point, both groups already have their cut-outs, it's that they are not allowed to be self-determined groups. Their primary loyalty must be to DEI, and they are asked to prove it, hence no female only spaces for women, and no Israel for the Jews. If they give these things up they'll be free to engage in all the cis-straight-white-male bashing they want, and enjoy DEIs full protection.

Thank you Jesus for the expression 'cart before the horse.' All the feminists were Jews. Jews have been doing all the DEI stuff, quite openly. They can and have openly murdered 10's of thousands of innocent people and the consequences are more protection, more funding, more support, more philosemitism. Like I already said I'd be more than happy to bet on this

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"All the feminists were Jews" followed by railing about Jews is going to require you to provide more justification than just your unfiltered emotions. Feminism, Jews, DEI, and "murdering 10's of thousands of innocent people" are all fair game for criticism, but wrapping them all together in a frothy rant devoid of any argumentation, particularly for the more inflammatory statements, is not.

My bad bro, it was only 337 out of 400. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Feminists_by_ethnicity

Next time I won't say the snack bowl is all poisoned if it's only 84% poison.

I hate to break it to you, but "C" is supposed to stand for "category" and "P" for "Pages" (at each level of category). The names don't seem to overlap between levels, so to get the number of people at the top level, you need to count all the pages on that level, and then recursively add all pages from it's sub-levels.

Eyeballing it, "Jewish feminists" will have a total of around 400 entries under it, "European feminists" will easily have over 1000, possibly something around 2000. While (as usual) over-represented, it doesn't seem like the amount of Jewish feminists goes over 10%.

I could point out the logical fallacies here, but "all the feminists were Jews" was only one part of what was wrong with your post. Doubling down on the attitude does not result in the mods saying "Gosh, maybe I was too harsh and I didn't understand the very salient and reasonable point he was making."

Care to justify any of those claims? Ideally with a source that at least pretends not to froth at the mouth.

The nakba probably fits the second part of his claim, at least, although ‘all the feminists were Jews’ seems obviously falsified.

Simone de Beauvoir, for example - probably the most crucial figure in the formation of the second wave - was Jewish now?

Once you notice you do not un-notice

https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2016/jean-paul-sartre-simone-de-beauvoir-loved-the-jews

Whatever their opinions, Sartre and de Beauvoir, as said, weren't Jews, contradicting the "All the feminists were Jews" statement.

Yeah I should have said 'virtually' before the word 'all' - but that feels like a pharisaical retort to learning simone de beauvoir was a philosemite

All of them? Damn, and I thought Jews don't proselytize.

You're still missing the point. Yes, there are still feminists happily aligned with DEI, screaming at you about "patriarchy" as they gush over the stunningness and braveness of Lia Thomas, but it is a sacrifice on their part. One that not all feminists are prepared to make. Likewise, we might end up with a new type of Jew that will have to now happily chant "from the river to the sea"...

Like I already said I'd be more than happy to bet on this

I'm not, because I recognize there's a good chance you're right about the final outcome of this spat. I think I saw somewhere that Harvard already lost, or is about to lose, a cool $1 billion in donations, that should be enough to give pause anyone in the administration. On the other hand, this feels too much like testing the front lines for vulnerabilities. What is even the point of this theater if they've been running DEI all along?

All of them? Damn, and I thought Jews don't proselytize.

It's the reason Jewishness is inherited via mother's line. ;-)

Fully, entirely, and totally embracing the irony of this response, you're familiar with Golem meme, no? Might be more familiar to some as 'Frankenstein' where the master loses control of the monster.

But the master is still the master. And my master said we could only serve one master. And now I've gone and typed the word so many times it looks and sounds funny.

So... Jesus good, but Jews bad? Is that the point you're making?

It wasn't, but that's not necessarily something unworthy of consideration.

If we're talking Golems, I don't get the terms of your bet. It would also imply that there's a decent chance the monster turns on it master, no?

Christ wins in the end, the rest I can't say for sure. But 'Jews lose' is not a safe bet. It seems infinitely more likely that Jews get a DEI carve-out than that the Golem succeeds in slandering the Jews as white.

It seems infinitely more likely that Jews get a DEI carve-out than that the Golem succeeds in slandering the Jews as white.

I feel like something has got to give here. It can't both be infinitely more likely, and for your response to be "haha, haven't you heard of the Golem?" in the event you get the opposite result.

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