culture war roundup
NullHypothesis
6d ago
There are only so many novel ideas and viewpoints, and eventually you end up with the applications of those ideas and viewpoints, so I'm not surprised if you feel like you aren't seeing many new unique ideas and perspectives. The posts with the most activity is the weekly culture war roundup which by its nature will be around current day events.
I like this space, even though I go long periods of just lurking. I too am admittedly not a good writer nor do I have much novelty to offer in unique/interesting analysis or perspective. Usually all I can offer is effort, but I'm glad to know some people appreciate it.
I still haven't found a better place on the internet with this level of diversity of viewpoints and ideas, even if the Motte seems to have shifted more rightwards over the years and prominent left leaning posters have left or were banned. Most places that discuss culture war topics spiral into low effort sneers, ingroup signals, and outgroup outrages, with very little intellectual honesty or posters with opposing viewpoints.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Bro, this place is just a hangout without pretensious ideals like Less Wrong, I doubt there's a lot of people who post here with the goal to blow lurkers' minds, and the ones that do are probably eyeing a S***tack career. Anyway, if you're mainly here for consoooming instead of participating as an equal, you're probably doing it wrong.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
But you're distracting from the real question, of course. It appears that even the Trump administration is coming around to the idea that it's best to go after specific things, where they are strong, and enforce them broadly, using the hook of federal funding and existing mechanisms. As I suggested months ago. Not indiscriminate chemo for no purpose, no rhyme or reason, just blasting randomly. It's not like blasting randomly is going to solve these concerns you're now bringing up. It's just silly misdirection.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7d ago
Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.
Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
It's still as dumb as it was eight months ago. They can just lie. You'll have a blue-haired university administrator affirming to whatever it is they are told to affirm at the same time that they do whatever they want anyway.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Continued Evolution on "The Plan" to Deal with Universities
WaPo cites two anonymous "White House officials", one of which is described as a "senior White House official". They claim that the purpose of anonymity is "because [the plan] is still being developed". So obviously, take that for what it is. Plausibly just a trial balloon to see how it plays; plausibly just a push by one faction within the WH to change direction.
“Now it’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” said a senior White House official
At least somebody at the WH is observing that doing things like indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working, and now little targeted things might be struggling, too.
The new system, described by two White House officials, would represent a shift away from the unprecedented wave of investigations and punishments being delivered to individual schools and toward an effort to bring large swaths of colleges into compliance with Trump priorities all at once.
Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.
Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
This was pretty straightforward all along. The playbook was already there. The hooks were already there. There are ways to affect change that are actually oriented toward the goals you want to accomplish. It seems like at least some people in the administration are continuing to find their way to it.
Of course, the wild response is wild:
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the outlines of the proposal amounted to an “assault … on institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”
“Suddenly, to get a grant, you need to not demonstrate merit, but ideological fealty to a particular set of political viewpoints. That’s not merit,” he said. “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this.”
Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past. Some academics basically just tried to stay silent on the matter, while others jumped all over it.
A slightly less insane response:
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.
But Chemerinsky, one of the attorneys representing UC researchers in a lawsuit challenging terminated federal research funding, also said the administration’s view of what the law requires could be at odds with other interpretations: “It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional.”
Chemerinsky said it would be a First Amendment violation to put schools at a disadvantage in competing for funding if they profess a belief in diversity, for example, because government is not allowed to discriminate based on viewpoint. He said it “would be very troubling” if the White House proposal deviates from the standards that have been used in awarding grants based on the quality and importance of the science, peer review and merit, and uses ideology as the judgment standard instead.
Still sort of lacking, as there was previously a (more-or-less, depending) soft disadvantage in competing for funding if one didn't profess a belief in diversity. If you want me to take this complaint seriously, then you should also say that the left having done that before was wrong. You should say so publicly and publicly commit to a position that the previous regime was, indeed, subject to the exact same concern that they were discriminating based on viewpoint.
But indeed, the Trump admin is in a legally privileged position here. They can, indeed, just demand that universities comply with existing law. I think Prof. Chemerinsky is being a bit coy about whether some universities will complain; my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
As I indicated in my response to him, it's to illustrate a point in principle. Sure, the US military has often been used badly. The US military's record over the last thirty years is pretty darn embarrassing. The point I am making, citing Heinlein, is that past incompetence notwithstanding, it is both necessary and good for the US military to be able to deploy a wide range of levels of force, as appropriate for many different mission profiles.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
What is the utility of the creeds if not to define who is Christian? Again, that is what they are for. They were created for that specific purpose - to clearly mark orthodox Christians apart from heretics. You could, I suppose, take one of two views. You could suggest that this purpose is laudable but the actually-existing creeds do it wrongly, and instead lock in heresy or error. (I understand this to be the historical Mormon position.) The creeds are in the wrong place or cement the wrong views. Alternatively, you could suggest that this whole endeavour is a mistake. That seems like it would have pretty big implications to me - should Christians not seek to delineate Christianity from heresy?
I interpret your position to be that a basic, perhaps creedal, definition of Christianity is reasonable, but that the actually-existing creeds are too narrow. Perhaps a more minimal creed, one that encompasses not only Nicene orthodoxy but even the likes of Arianism or perhaps even some Gnostic belief systems, would have been better, in your view?
As regards Mormon beliefs - well, I would say that the early church seems to have believed that Christ being one in substance with the Father was a core part of Christianity. They believed that enough to put it into the creeds, and to exclude people who denied it. Presumably you take the view that they were wrong, and you can do that, but I don't think it's absurd or uncharitable of me to suggest that, by doing so, you have removed yourself from community with the people who believed that.
As a final note:
in the end what it boils down to is that you believe God will damn me and my family for eternity because, while we accept his divinity and worship him, and accept his Son as our Savior, we don't have the nature of the relationship between them quite right, and unlike others with those same misunderstandings we're not part of a creedal Christian community. Does this not strike you as obviously wrong?
I previously said, twice, that I don't think that Christianity is coextensive with the community of the saved. "You are not Christian" does not mean "you are damned to hell for eternity". I also said "I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that".
Personally I consider it usually inappropriate to speculate on who is saved or not saved. That is a matter for God. What I do in life is hope for the salvation of all peoples - as in the Nunc Dimittis: "for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all nations". That is the part given to me.
I therefore, at least, knowing that God desires to save everyone, hope for the salvation of all who earnestly seek God, and who show proof of that desire in their love of neighbour. This does, for what it's worth, put me in company with the Catholics, who teach (para. 15-16, and at more length here) that though all salvation comes from God through Christ, this is possible for those of other religions. If I have given you reason in this conversation to think that I don't sincerely hope for your salvation as well, then I apologise.
Tenaz
7d ago
You can read about it here.
- Perdition, not a kingdom of heaven, is for true monsters like Judas. People who would, with a perfect knowledge of who Christ is, choose to crucify him again.
- The Telestial kingdom is basically for bad people
- The Terrestrial kingdom is for good people who "weren't valiant" in their testimony of Jesus. "Blinded by the craftiness of men" does not refer to other Christians, though they may in large part end up in this kingdom.
- The Celestial kingdom is for people who repent and receive the necessary ordinances, such as baptism. Since we believe in proxy baptisms for the dead, this is a place anyone who exercises enough faith in Christ can end up. It's also for anyone who dies before accountability (due to age or mental capacity)
- Within the Celestial kingdom, the highest division is called Exaltation, and is limited to those who keep the "new and everlasting covenant", meaning they make and adhere to all of God's covenants. The last necessary covenant is the marriage sealing, which we also do by proxy, so anyone can end up here too.
Nobody is getting sorted into a kingdom of heaven based solely on their religion. It's all about which covenants you've made with God, or in other words, how high of a law you are prepared to keep. I've elaborated on that a bit here.
Yes, certainly. But I don’t think that ‘some farmers have a rifle in the barn’ is what we’re talking about here. A Hassan wouldn’t be able to get a hunting rifle, and certainly wouldn’t be allowed to carry it into town or anything. There is essentially no probability that someone you meet is ‘packing’.
I made a post way back saying that lots of countries and England in particular are fine with sporting/hunting guns to some degree, but are absolutely rock-solid on forbidding personal weapons (with some unavoidable fuzziness in between).
My understanding of American gun rights supporters is that it’s the opposite: they feel it’s existentially important for their civilisation to allow people access to personal weapons specifically.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
Great writeup, thanks for sharing. As I have asked in the past,
How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?
This is a very old problem. In Plato's Republic, he speaks occasionally of the lower castes in his ideal system, but the great bulk of the work is an obsessively detailed examination of the proper upbringing of the ruling class. Aristotle calls him out on this, suggesting that Plato's vision fails to adequately capture the breadth of human experience. Today, rather than frankly acknowledge the mental incapacity of the masses, we push free compulsory public education (substantially modeled on Plato's prescription!) as a way of supposedly "leveling the playing field," bringing everyone up to some minimum level of functioning (and insisting despite the evidence that everyone has basically the same potential to achieve and succeed).
Occasionally I meet people who are spending their retirement years caring for dependent adult children. Sometimes that responsibility falls to siblings instead, or even more distant relations. The ability and willingness to be a conservator for an adult of diminished capacity is not the stuff of romantic Hollywood aspiration (Love Actually notwithstanding!). Of course we talk about prisons and mental institutions and the government curtailing of important individual rights--because there's nothing any of us can do to fix the damage that liberal individualism has done to the institution of the family. There are all sorts of reasons why strong tribal ties might be undesirable, particularly in a Western liberal democracy, but as Thomas Sowell says--there are no solutions, only trade offs. The same forces that liberate some of us from the oppression of a tyrannical tribal chieftan also liberate the Hassans of the world from the moderating influence of tribal support.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
8d ago
Well, so much for my simple left/right shooter/target heuristic (https://www.themotte.org/post/3277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/370315?context=8#context).
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I... don't see how one can comment on the meaning of the word 'Christian' without being primarily theological. 'Christian' is a theological term.
I am actually, like C. S. Lewis, willing to bite the bullet on many, or even most, self-proclaimed Christians not really being Christians. I'm not hugely strict about this in practice where I tend to think that any good-faith attempt to genuinely know and follow God, to the best of one's limited ability, is acceptable worship, and in that light, sure, there are no doubt individual Mormons who render that worship. I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that. But if you ask me to accept that most Americans who call themselves Christians are not meaningfully Christian, then I will do that. That is probably and unfortunately the case.
(I am not quite as pessimistic as your linked study - I think survey design can be unreliable, most people struggle with theological language, and there is often a sensus fidei that exceeds the ability of people to explicate their faith. If a Catholic says the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass, sincerely intending to believe it, but when asked to define the Trinity during the week descends into waffle, I would extend some charity. The linked paper doesn't include the questions themselves and has some red flags for me - who the heck are 'Integrated Disciples'? they possess a 'biblical worldview'? huh? - so I'm skeptical. Nonetheless, no one could deny that ignorance or confusion around the Trinity is very common.)
So perhaps it would be helpful to refine a little. I claim that Mormonism, which is to say that which the Mormon church presents for belief, is not a form of Christianity.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I don't think one needs a detailed knowledge of theology to be a Christian. The good thief addressed Jesus directly and appears to have perceived him to be the messiah and believed that he would be the ruler of the kingdom. The reference to the kingdom of God as well as the good thief's confidence that Jesus had done nothing wrong suggests that the thief was aware of at least the basic outline of Jesus' preaching. At any rate, he put his faith in Christ to the best of his ability. That would appear to meet most minimal definitions of Christian faith. (Some definitions might add something like "faith in Christ as God", but I think we can safely presume that the thief had that.)
I don't think that scenario is directly comparable to Mormons, though. The thief would naturally have been unaware of doctrines formally laid out after him - doctrines intended to clarify and explain the nature of what the good thief was privileged to witness directly - but ignorance does not constitute denial. Likewise for, even today, the Catholic or Protestant in the pews who happens to be theologically ignorant. The issue with Mormons is not ignorance, but rather denial of core doctrines.
For what it's worth, I specifically do not use the word 'Christian' to mean people that I believe are saved. I do not think that the categories 'Christian' and 'saved' are coextensive. There are Christians who are not saved (cf. Matthew 7:22-23), and there are non-Christians who are saved (cf. Luke 16:22).
You could draw a distinction whereby people who call themselves Christians, are recognised as Christians by the world, and appear in good standing in the church are not real Christians if they are rejected by Christ, and likewise that people who in their lives were never aware of Christ or put any explicit faith in him (like Abraham) are in some way implicitly Christian, but I think that does too much damage to the everyday uses of the words. My understanding is that all salvation is from Christ (cf. John 14:6), but that not all who are called by the name Christian partake of this, and that some who do not call themselves Christians do. The power of God is not constrained by human labels or categorisations.
My main use of the word 'Christian' is to identify members of the church. I believe Peter van Inwagen once argued that the word 'Christianity' is itself a mistake - there is no such thing as Christianity. There is only the church, and its various members. I'm not as rigid about the word as he is, and I'm happy to use the word 'Christianity' to mean 'that which the church professes', but I think there's something to be said for the basic point. Christians are the fellowship or the community of those who follow Christ - or perhaps more properly, those who follow the triune God, because I would probably exclude Christian atheists. I exclude Mormons because I do not understand them to follow Christ in the sense that Christians do. As the Catholic document you cited says, the Mormon understanding of who 'the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit' are is so divergent 'from the Christian meaning' as to not even be heresy. The utility of the ecumenical creeds is as guardrails - they lay out a basic minimum understanding of who God is and of the economy of salvation.
Tenaz
8d ago
My last conversation here was about precisely this though I don't think I did a good job of explaining myself.
They themselves presumably agree on this principle, because as you note, they believe that all traditional churches have fallen from the faith.
We still think traditional churches are Christian, though.
I agree that at some point it's reasonable to have a dividing line. Simply worshipping an entity called "Jesus", whatever the nature of your worship and your idea of who Jesus is, is not enough to be Christian. On the other hand, was the thief on the cross Christian? Sociologically, absolutely not, but in truth I'd argue that he was Christian, despite probably knowing virtually nothing of even core Christian doctrine.
Categories in general are made for man, and when it really comes down to it, which category to sort a group into depends on what you are using that category for. If your main use of the term "Christian," like most Christians, is to identify people who you believe are saved (whose faith is not misplaced, whose doctrine about Christ is close enough to reality, etc.), you probably don't consider Mormons part of that group. But I hope you recognize this is a more complex theological issue than it appears at first glance, and the assertion that "Mormons aren't Christian" is primarily a theological point, fairly irrelevant to those who do not recognize your theology as true.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Well, I think I was implicitly tabooing 'Christianity' here. What I assert is that there is a broad category of belief into which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants generally fit, but which Mormons do not fit into. I assert that Mormon belief and doctrine is significantly qualitatively dissimilar to that of these other groups.
It seems to me that two things are going on when people say "Mormons aren't Christian". The first thing is just "you don't believe what I believe" or "you don't worship what I worship". There are implicit claims about differences in doctrine and practice. The second is "you are not my people". They are attempting to differentiate themselves from Mormons in a tribal sense.
Thus when I, for instance, say "Mormons aren't Christianity", what I'm actually saying is "you're not affiliated with me!"
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Because I think that historically the Christian community has defined and policed its boundaries in ways that place Mormons outside of it - I apologise if that was not clear.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)
It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"
(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)
Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroup immediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.
(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)
So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.
(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)
The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:
They also confirmed on Sunday that “Mr. Nigel Edge actually changed his name some years ago,” adding that they are working to identify “all of his past.”
One authority referred to him as “Sean,” and according to public records that Newsweek obtained, he previously identified as Sean DeBevoise.
...
According to a 2020 self-published book on Amazon, Headshot: Betrayal of a Nation (Truth Hurts), DeBevoise wrote that on tour, he took "four bullets including one to the head." He said from that moment on his "life would never be the same," adding that "all of this was at the hand of friendly fire that would provide the most crippling mental damage."
This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that
...Edge has been behind several bizarre lawsuits filed in North Carolina this year — including one accusing a Southport church of trying to kill him.
The suit, filed in May, claimed the Generations Church was behind a “civil conspiracy” masterminded by the LGBTQ community and white supremacist pedophiles to kill Edge because he’s “a straight man.”
In January, Edge filed a similar suit against the Brunswick Medical Center, accusing it of being part of a conspiracy launched by “LGBTQ White Supremacists” who were allegedly out to get him because he survived their attack in Iraq.
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.
This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.
I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
8d ago
Can I ask where you live and your cultural background?
I live in America and I like anime.
This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.
Can a meal -- particularly a certain type of meal, repeated by custom on a certain schedule, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, etc -- be imbued with deep ritualistic significance? Indubitably. But then, it's not just the literal food that acts as the "bearer" of culture alone in this case, but the body of ritual surrounding it, and the network of social and historical relations that that ritual exists in.
Immigrants coming to the US to sell their wares like any other fungible anonymized commodity on the free market would then represent the destruction of culture rather than its continuance, because the network of human relations that constituted the actual center of culture has been obviated. (At the very least, people who think that eating lasagna is the same thing as "experiencing another culture" are actually doing nothing of the sort.)
What other lens would they use at that point?
TikTok as a Weapon of War
When the TikTok forced divesture was passed over a year ago, after failing to gain sufficient support in earlier efforts, it was immediately clear to me that alarmism over Chinese ownership of the algorithm was only a pretext obscuring the political forces that actually dictated the sale: the Jewish lobby induced Congress to act in order to transfer TikTok to a new owner who would censor and manipulate the content algorithm of TikTok to be in favor of Israel and the Jewish people. This certainly wasn't a leap, there were secret recordings of Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL saying that something has to be done about TikTok. And then hundreds of Jewish groups lobby for the forced divesture, and then it happens in a highly divided Congress, with some lawmakers explicitly citing this pressure as being decisive in securing support for this legislation that had previously failed.
Still, @2rafa disputed that characterization of the forced TikTok divesture. But now that the dust is settling we can review what has happened:
TikTok and its algorithm is now essentially under the control of Zionist Jew Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, who has been described as the largest private donor to the IDF (FWIW I could not find any evidence Ellison has given private donations to the US military). Ellison's son, David Ellison, acquired CBS news last month which is reportedly going to hire Bari Weiss to manage the editorial direction of the organization:
As part of the deal, I am told David plans to give Bari a role at CBS News that would, among other things, task his fellow Millennial with guiding the editorial direction of the division. Bari’s avowedly pro-Israel and anti-woke worldview—not to mention her broadly shit-kicking anti-establishment disposition—would inevitably inspire blowback from various corners of the newsroom, and could dramatically change the editorial posture and reputation of one of the most storied, and certainly self-important, institutions in American journalism. For David, that’s likely part of the point.
TikTok's algorithm, which is now under the control of Ellison, will be audited and retrained. But the significant reforms to content moderation on TikTok are already well underway, in July a Jewish Zionist and former IDF solider Erica Mindel was hired for the position of "Public Policy Manager, Hate Speech":
The position involves developing and driving the company’s positions on hate speech, according to the job description...
It also involves “spearheading long-term policy strategies” regarding hate speech, monitoring online content, and advocating for the company’s policy stances. It specifically states that the position involves “serving as a subject matter expert on antisemitism and hate speech in internal and external meetings” and “analyzing hate speech trends, focusing on antisemitic content.”
Netanyahu on the TikTok acquisition
Most remarkably, in a focus group session with American social media influencers last Friday in New York, Benjamin Netanyahu himself simply admitted that the acquisition of TikTok was the most important development in enabling Israel to wield social media as a weapon of war:
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu briefed American influencers on TikTok, calling it the “most important” weapon in securing support for Israel on the right-wing.
He went on to say, “Weapons change over time... the most important ones are the social media,” and, “the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok... I hope it goes through because it can be consequential."
Near the end of the clip Netanyahu says "if we can get those two things [TikTok and X] we can get a lot... we have to fight the fight. To take, give direction, to the Jewish people, and give direction to our non-Jewish friends or those who could be our Jewish friends.
What's astonishing is that they are now simply admitting what they are doing openly. They aren't even hiding it. When Netanyahu discusses social media as a weapon of war, the war he is referring to is not against Hamas, it is against us and our access to free public discourse, the information we receive in news media and content algorithms, and the propaganda we're exposed to on a daily basis.
Last year in 2024 a major scandal in alternative media erupted with the investigation into two Russian media executives from Tenet Media, in a $10 million scheme to illegally fund Tenet Media and influence it to promote Russian propaganda. And certainly this is a major problem. But this Russian propaganda campaign does not even remotely reach the levels of deeply-embedded foreign influence in American news and social media in comparison to Zionist influence.
Larry Ellison is a foreign agent. David Ellison is a foreign agent. Jared Kushner is a foreign agent. This enormous level of foreign influence in our information stream is a huge problem, and it's not limited to Netanyahu and Israel. It's endemic to the entire international Jewish community across the entire world. The level of support among the Jewish community for this foreign influence deeply embedded in our society is extremely high and the opposition is basically non-existent. The extremely small number of what 2rafa calls "self-hating Jews" who acknowledge what is happening and oppose it are outliers. The rest either actively support it or deny the problem, citing "anti-semitic conspiracy theories" about Jews controlling the media and wielding it as a weapon of war against the minds of the gentiles. And yet Netanyahu, a foreign leader, travels to New York and simply admits what they are doing. Russian or Chinese nationalists engaging in this behavior would be wildly intolerable, but Jewish nationalists are systematically engaging in this behavior with total impunity.
Netanyahu's meeting with the social media influencers seems to foreshadow more pressure on X, now that the TikTok problem is being solved according to Netanyahu.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10d ago
· Edited 9d ago
This is a common intuition gap between the general public and the legal system. Most people walk around in blissful ignorance about how common things like sex crimes, domestic violence, or driving with substance abuse are. If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.
Necessarily, the police exercise discretion in who to throw the book at. This state-of-affairs doesn't mix well with moral panics about racism, but that's another topic.
It doesn't mix well with a lot of things; when prosecutions are massively underdetermined by the law, they're being determined by something else, which leaves a gaping hole for corruption and political repression.
but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.
The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?
I admit that I keep falling back to the same ~1000 songs that I enjoy listening to, very few of which are less than 5 years old, many of which are older than I am. And most 'new' songs I'll play like a dozen times and then they sit in an unused playlist for months or years.
I don't think I've heard a SINGLE pop song in the last year that I consider 'memorable' (not entirely true: Chappel Roan's "HOT TO GO!" sometimes pops into my brain unbidden).
I truly do enjoy Kendrick Lamar's music, but after listening to GNX on repeat for a couple weeks I've not felt any desire to add it to my main playlist. Humble is on there though.
And I lamented before that there's really no such thing as a new 'genre' anymore. So the AI does have the advantage of letting me play around with combining genres to see if anything neat falls out or is worth pursuing.
I am going to agree there's no actual replacement for having a talented live performer in front of you.
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
I very much did not say that addressing the problem "in any way" is "too much to ask". I was replying to your first comment, where you claimed that because the Left isn't reacting as violently as when they're tilting at racist windmills, they may as well not be doing anything at all. My point is that "address the problem as violently as they address supposed racism" (or even half as violently as that!) is a much higher bar than "address the problem in any way at all", and just because they aren't doing the former, doesn't prove they aren't doing the latter.
But also,
then at least spare me the farce of rolling up in the first place and asking what I expect the left to do.
that wasn't actually me. Different users altogether. Check the usernames.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
12d ago
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view,
Wild. I never imagined anyone would use that feature to read 2,000 comments a week.
I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do
You're a good guy. So is Whiningcoil; I imagine we could easily meet at a party and have a few drinks without incident. But two things drive me crazy, insofar as I let anything on the internet drive me crazy: blackpills and political violence.
Even setting that aside, you're like the friend who's a huge sports fan and is either constantly bitching when his team is in the dumpster or gloating and rubbing it in your face when he's winning the division title. Your specific ideology (and I don't mean Red Tribe ideology here) means that you're either constantly winning or losing an existential struggle, with all the attendant emotions.
Life's a lot easier when you can just kick back and watch the game with a few beers.
Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing
I've already expressed my skepticism on this point.
we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
On the contrary, your lack of a progress narrative makes your message ultimately soulless. People don't want to believe that it's iphones and laissez-faire capitalism and poverty until the heat death of the universe. And they certainly don't want a retvrn to housewives and the cultural norms of the early 20th century let alone whatever era twitter has decided is best this week. If anything, malaise is from a lack of progress relative to the norms of the last century, and it's clear your movement doesn't have a widely palatable solution to that problem beyond grievance politics.
Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
What? The bad guys, narratively speaking, are white nationalists/white suburban teen boy school shooters, and wealthy old white men oppressing the lower classes for the latter two. The Social Justice narratives write themselves.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force.
Did abolition occur through social pressure campaigns, legal and actual military force? Desegregation? Pick any social change in history - the rise of Christianity, American independence, whatever you like - which of these were legitimate? And what criteria did you use to decide?
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved.
It seems ironic that you would accuse the gays of strongarming you into accepting their movement, then quote someone who literally waged a war to force acceptance of his.
Regardless, large numbers of people opposed to the gays were converted. There are plenty of gay conservatives, and they don't seem to suffer any major consequences for it. After abolition, slaveowners didn't disappear, and yet we've still arrived at a future where genuine supporters of slavery are vanishingly rare. Give it a couple generations.
My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history
They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.
I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain.
It's funny that you should frame it that way, when I raised in a much more secular area and the stereotype is that Americans are obnoxiously in-your-face Guns & God religious. And there is some of that, to a degree you likely don't notice and can't comprehend because you've been swimming in these waters from birth.
I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
They're also the years where we had just won the cold war, were the sole hyperpower in the world, ran a budget surplus with bonkers economic/technological growth and it also just happens to be the time of our childhood/adolescence. It's bread and circuses with a side of martial victory, not normies longing to spend two hours of their Sunday doing bible study.
This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down?
Yes, and no. I agreed with whichever post you wrote in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting that this event certainly moves us towards the brink and I denounce it. But no, I do not think we are close in any meaningful way.
The culture war, defined as people self-assorting into tribal groups and flinging shit (verbal and otherwise) at each other is eternal. To dream otherwise is to dream of Progress and Trying Something Different, but I'm not holding my breath. I do think the temperature is lower than the early 2020s when I would literally routinely watch proud boys and antifa beat each other with sticks in the streets. Do you genuinely think that tensions today are as high as they were in 2020 and 2021? Or 2016? Or what I imagine the 70s were like?
Whether we're in a trough, a peak or just about to keep chugging along for a while - I don't know.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable.
I wish you luck. But I'm pretty sure 'restore accountability to power' means 'my political opponents don't have power anymore' and 'generate common knowledge' means 'teach Actual History to other people's kids.' Not to mention people have been mouthing 'restore accountability to power' since at least the 2000s on reddit, if not the ancient Greeks.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition.
It might amuse you to hear that I've considered going to church recently, largely to try and surround my family with a functional social circle. It's a tough trade-off when I have such limited time to teach my children already.
That said, you're living in a bubble, my man. But then again, I suppose I am too.
A wager then - weekly church attendance isn't going to significantly increase in the next couple years (say, an increase of 20% or more - so if 30% of Americans attend church weekly, a boost of 6%). Me, living in a large blue city, will be 100% unaffected by political violence in the next year. By this, I mean I will not witness any shootings/melee/violence between two large gangs of Red/Blue tribers/insert your definition here, nor will anyone I know. There will be some nonzero number of school shootings/political assassinations/assaults on ICE at maybe a rate of 1 every 1-3 months? Were real money on the line, I'd dig up the actual numbers to get a background level over the last decade but I can't imagine it's much more frequent than that.
Feel free to make your own wagers.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
lol. This is funny on so many levels, but maybe in the interests of brevity: we'll see whether people freely choose conservativism and Christianity and the Hallmark channel or whether they want to smoke weed, watch netflix and have premarital sex. And I say that while holding a dim view of at least smoking weed and watching television! Your idea of freely choosing is fiercely teaching your children 'Actual History' because you're terrified they'll internalize values and ideology from mainstream culture instead.
I'm not even making a value judgment one way or the other, but to say that the people will freely choose your way is both breathtakingly hubristic and seemingly ignorant of the last century of history.
Oh hey, if only I had an entire comment responding to that, which you seem to not have engaged with.
More options
Context Copy link