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Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20hr ago
Again, I’m not saying that Ignatiev’s beliefs are good — I oppose pretty much every aspect of his worldview — but simply that they are sincere and internally consistent. They’re not hypocritical. He doesn’t appear to want any special carve-out for Jewish people, nor does he seem to have any special affinity for Jewishness on account of his own personal ancestral background.
Like, yes, many Jews, Ignatiev himself, are hardcore believers in deracinated progressive abolishment of blood ties. So are many non-Jews! If you want to oppose their beliefs — and I do! — it is a useless distraction to try and smoke them out as secret Zionist special-pleading hypocrites. We can just oppose their actual stated beliefs, which are bad enough, instead of grasping at straws to call them liars.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20hr ago
There are plenty, including within China, who want to see “the Han nation” — as in, a national self-understanding in which Han people are believed to be the central example of what a Chinese person is, in which their language and their customs are given pride of place, and in which they are “supreme” over other ethnic groups within the borders of the country” — abolished as such. This can be true even while also believing that every individual Han-descended person should live a happy, thriving life as a deracinated invidual.
I agree that this would be a foolish thing for me to advocate were I to move to China. It would also be laughable because I have no power whatsoever to effect such an outcome in China. Ignatiev does believe, with some justification, that he can do his part to move the needle closer to that outcome in America. He has been extremely open about that, and has also been equally extremely open about not wanting to replace the cold American white-centric paradigm with a new Jewish-centric one. He is, so far as I can tell, a sincere believer that the entire concept of a hegemonic “national ethnicity” should be abolished everywhere. This inherently means taking power away from hegemonic groups; there’s no time-sensitive reason, and therefore no reason to expend any political/intellectual capital, in also trying to abolish the folkways of minorities whose ethnic preferences are already not given pride of place within America.
Ignatiev does not expect to live to see the day when any non-white ethnic group(s) have achieved hegemonic dominance over America (and I assume he believes that such an outcome is both implausible and undesirable) so why would he waste his time distracting from the far more urgent need to discomfit and dispossess (culturally and otherwise) the dominant group? Thus, again, the “double standard” makes perfect sense and is entirely intellectually justifiable, given Ignatiev’s priors.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
20hr ago
He vocally supported ending the white race, while at the same time declaring anti-Semitism a Crime against Humanity. That was my statement, and your context does not refute that in any way.
You only mention him objecting to anti-Semitism, as usual implying that Jews only care about Jews and are enemies of everyone else. The context makes it clear you're being disingenuous:
Finally, at least one Crimson headline writer and one cartoonist have suggested that I am anti-Semitic. I regard anti-Semitism, like all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry, as a crime against humanity
As for "vocally support ending the white race," when academics and activists talk about "ending whiteness" they are not talking about literally genociding white people. Their argument is that "whiteness" is an arbitrary social construct. Of course most of us consider this a stupid argument, much like the claims that "male" and "female" are arbitrary social constructs. But just as people who want to "end masculinity" and "end the gender binary" are not talking about literally exterminating males, you know perfectly well what Ignatiev actually meant.
Hadad
20hr ago
SS says a lot of pretty nakedly racist things, but man, a screed defending a literal call to abolish the White race that ends in claiming the desire to protect one's culture and homeland from foreign replacement is some vile thing -- as if literally every people don't want to do that, as if it wouldn't be considered mad, bigoted offense to promote this same replacement for minority groups -- is quite possibly the only situation where Secure sounds more sympathetic than the person he's arguing with.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
20hr ago
Hm, did not expect to end up sympathetic about the murder part. Can you link the essay?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
21hr ago
However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group.
This is one way to look at it. You could also ask if maybe the double standard is what's causing the hostility in the first place.
If you immigrate to China, say "abolish the Han nation" and when called out on it say "I just mean the Han should stop persecuting the Uyghurs, why I am always being scapegoated and blamed for everything," that might not be the best idea.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
What risk? AFAIK if you're not 80 or diabetic, covid is a trivial inconvenience.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
It's a name for a region encompassing deep east Texas as well as parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
Hadad
21hr ago
It'd be a very odd right-winger of any sort who concerns himself with the Congo. Even a genuinely Christian soul, selfless and eager to help, would probably not then pair it with anti-American conspiracy theories. More than anything, the guy codes as pure crazy, but definitely crazy from a liberal direction.
That said, he's absolutely fucking cuckoo for cocoa puffs, and no one should take any sort of vindication. I'm a right wing man and I don't think him being a Democrat or a left-leaning weirdo is a slamdunk against progressives in general. This guy is actually just mad, and he would have done some mad thing no matter what group he attached to.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Whether ADHD is real or just hasn't been spanked syndrome, I highly doubt it's caused by food additives.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
We have no indication he doesn't, even if abortion is a weirdly prominent issue for him.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Would anyone mind if he treats this as a nomination?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
I’m just looking at his particular interest in Africa, and food insecurity in Africa and tge Congo. None of this sounds like a guy with right-leaning tendencies. He does have a grandiose agenda and vision for how and what he’s going to do in DRC, but the choice of “American hunger to control black people in Africa” has no right-coded hooks, but does have left-coded hooks (international food security, American Empire, etc). This just doesn’t read like even a center left idea. This sounds pretty progressive in its choice of location and race-hierarchy and America-booing. I don’t think anyone remotely MAGA, NRx, or dissident right is going to glom onto “people in Congo need my help because America is using food to control black people in Africa.” They won’t because this isn’t on the list of concerns right leaning people would have. Right spaces tend toward nationalism, religion, masculinity, and similar issues. He doesn’t care about any right-coded ideology at all.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
There's definitely conspiracy theorists of all stripes who believe the colored population is being controlled with food.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Probably neither of them voted republican, though.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
An interesting factor here is that a number of not-themselves-nuclear powers in NATO(including Poland, but also Turkey and the Netherlands) have technically-American nuclear weapons in their arsenals. Absent this program I'd expect Poland and Turkey, at the very least, to have their own nukes.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21hr ago
You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
ABigGuy4U
21hr ago
There is a rumor that Saudi Arabia put up a lot of the funds for the Pakistani bomb project, and as a result has an agreement that they could get a shipment of nukes if they ever decided to ask for them.
It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
There’s nothing preventing such a transfer. The problem is, if whoever you gave them to uses them, the victim is probably going to hold you liable for that and respond accordingly. And second, who would you trust with that, long term? Alliances sour, governments change and maybe in forty years they are pointed at you.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Isn't there probably some deal where Pakistan will sell a nuke to Saudi Arabia if Iran tests one already on the books?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
21hr ago
Okay, I'm also confused now.
Dean
Flairless
21hr ago
Gaddafi did fall to a NATO air campaign stopping and then reversing the civil war's progress, which at the time of intervention he clearly had the momentum in. Had Gaddafi had a nuclear weapon, it's extremely doubtful the NATO air campaign would have occurred, and without that, he would have been doing the butchering.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22hr ago
It's weird that "National" refers to the US and Canada together here (the NBA has one, previously two Canadian teams). The last guy to call them one country got a lot of grief for it.
Can you explain how the context contradicts my summary? He vocally supported ending the white race, while at the same time declaring anti-Semitism a Crime against Humanity. That was my statement, and your context does not refute that in any way. Sure, he made that affirmation in order to defend himself from the accusation of anti-Semitism for his position on Harvard food accommodations but that is no matter. What I have said is not changed whatsoever by the context you provided, he simultaneously held both positions exactly as I described.
FistfullOfCrows
22hr ago
That doesn't mean the Holocaust deniers are right.
I have bad news for you.
It seems like "on the outs with major geopolitical powers" is doing a lot here. It's not even "be a democracy": nobody is threatening to invade Eritrea (not far from Yemen, also a dictatorship). It's not exclusively Muslim nations either (Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea are in the club).
As best as I can tell, the only consistent rule seems to be "don't be jerks to your neighbors beyond your borders," but I'll accept there's some level of Realpolitik at play.
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