domain:farhakhalidi.substack.com
AvocadoPanic
1d ago
But just as people who want to "end masculinity" and "end the gender binary" are not talking about literally exterminating males
It seems to me they are clear advocating for eliminating what many people would think of when they think of males. While they may be allowing for XY individuals to still 'exist' in some sense, it's likely it would be in the sense that a woman can have a cock, balls and beard. Those aren't women, and their new men, won't be men.
They are talking about eliminating males in a real sense. We do them and ourselves a disservice by not believing they are sincere in their advocacy especially when they show us time and again who they genuinely are and what they believe.
You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs
Obviously I understand Ignatiev's beliefs, better than you apparently. No, I don't think Ignatiev is calling for a literal murder of all white people. Instead he is using his own non-negligible cultural influence to deconstruct and pathologize White Identity, in an effort to undermine it. I understand that perfectly well, I more than most here understand that you don't undermine a race by just committing murder, you do it at a symbolic and ultimately cultural level. It remains an expression of a strong ethnic hostility even if it's not actually advocating for physical violence.
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.
Citation strongly needed! He regards the Black Race as a social construct also, but one that is sympathetic and he does not call to Abolish Blackness. If you're going to provide a claim for that, please provide evidence. While you're at it- provide evidence that he called to Abolish Jewry. Of course he did neither such thing, it is Whites who who receive the enmity of his ideological worldview and no other racial group.
There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
Calling for the Abolition of Whiteness while simultaneously declaring anti-semitism as "Crime against Humanity" is a far more important demand for Jewish privilege than the question over whether Jews at Harvard should be given dedicated kitchens. He is demanding Jewish privilege by socially deconstructing White identity while declaring in-kind criticism of Jewish identity to be a Crime against Humanity. His position on dining at Harvard notwithstanding, which is entirely irrelevant to the question at hand.
Please provide evidence Ignatiev called for the Abolition of Blackness or Jewry. He did not. He called for the Abolition of Whiteness, and he declared anti-semitism to be a crime against humanity. Which is exactly what I said in my original post.
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.
I challenged your absurdly naive notion that combining all the races of the world would magically combine all the relative strengths of each group into one superior specimen:
I do believe that the optimal genetic admixture of people in the future will be some combination of European, East Asian, Jewish, and a small but non-negligible amount of Amerindian. You might think this would be a mystery-meat catastrophe, but I think it would be a healthy and vital blending of the best each of these elements would offer.
That was the juvenile claim you made which I challenged.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I don't think "anti whiteness" is the same as "anti white," at least not the way you mean it.
I also don't believe you were not implying he only cares about Jews when you intentionally isolated his statement about anti-Semitism from his opposition to bigotry in general.
That context is significant, and you know you were trying to frame his words to mean somethingother than his intent.
You only mention him objecting to anti-Semitism, as usual implying that Jews only care about Jews and are enemies of everyone else.
There is no implication of that at all. My implication is exactly what I said: he is vehemently anti-white and he strongly objects to anti-semitism. Absolutely nothing about the context challenges that fact, there is no implication that he "only cares about Jews." He's a commie, I'm sure he cares about a bunch of stuff! But he's vehemently anti-white while strongly objecting to anti-Semitism (very very many such cases).
That was my point, it is 100% true, it is not changed at all by the context, and it's not challenged by anything you wrote here.
@Amadan, would you agree that he's vehemently anti-white and he simultaneously strongly objects to anti-Semitism, regarding it as a Crime Against Humanity? If not, why not?
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
1d ago
Whoops, that's what I get for writing when I'm tired.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The modern theory of deterrence may look more like identifying the humps that disrupt the slippery slope, and trying to beat your opponent back to one of those humps but no further, versus... trying to push your humps as far up the slope as possible?
I think the term in the literature you're looking for is "escalation dominance."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers...
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.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d ago
Hm, did not expect to end up sympathetic about the murder part. Can you link the essay?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1d 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
1d ago
What risk? AFAIK if you're not 80 or diabetic, covid is a trivial inconvenience.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It's a name for a region encompassing deep east Texas as well as parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
Hadad
1d 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
1d ago
Whether ADHD is real or just hasn't been spanked syndrome, I highly doubt it's caused by food additives.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
We have no indication he doesn't, even if abortion is a weirdly prominent issue for him.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Would anyone mind if he treats this as a nomination?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d 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
1d ago
There's definitely conspiracy theorists of all stripes who believe the colored population is being controlled with food.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Probably neither of them voted republican, though.
hydroacetylene
1d 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
1d 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.
Your claim is that I was saying "Ignatiev only cares about Jews" when I said no such thing and would have no reason to believe this. I said he is anti-white and he strongly opposes anti-semitism, which is a claim that is not refuted by anything you or anyone else has wrote in response.
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