domain:abc.net.au
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power.
-Frank Herbert
Though this is a quote, I believe that it is so precisely said that it is worth posting on the top level.
yofuckreddit
10mo ago
I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
The Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto
There has been intense debate between US and Israel on an impending ground operation into Rafah. It appears the operation is starting to take form, and it's going to look a lot like the evacuations from the Warsaw Ghetto on a much larger scale.
This is not going to look like the assault on the Northern Gaza, since the Israelis have already concentrated the Gazans within Rafah. One of the primary points of disagreement between US and Israel seems to be on the timeline of the evacuations, with the US insisting that it's going to take months to evacuate and sift through the civilian population while Israel has proposed a much more aggressive timeline. Here's how it is going to unfold:
- Israel will establish secure checkpoints and transit facilities around Rafah: registering, delousing, providing medical treatment and food to deportees.
- There will be some weekly target for the number of civilians to process at these transit camps.
- Deportees will then be transported to one of the many
concentration camps"humanitarian islands", they are calling them, with military-aged males likely being segregated from the rest of the population, or at least highly likely to be detained based on other criteria. - Israel will assault Rafah and the city will face a level of demolition similar to but probably not as intense as Northern Gaza.
Historical comparisons are always messy, and you aren't going to see journalists in good-standing noting this, but I can't think of another historical operation that is closer to the impending evacuation of Rafah than the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The second battle of Fallujah and the evacuation of Phnom Penh provide other examples of civilians evacuating cities by force or military action, but neither of those approximates the circumstances or tactics which will be used in Rafah.
The Brutal Reality of Resettlement and Partisan Wars
There seems to be two camps: on the one hand, Israel is waging a Genocide, a secret desire to kill all the Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel is engaging in a fight for its very existence and doing everything it reasonably can to limit civilian casualties. But the truth lies in the middle, and can be summarized with two points:
- Israel is fighting a partisan war, which cannot be won without high civilian causalities, in the first place because the militants live among the community but, more importantly, because reprisals against the civilian population are a requirement for winning a partisan war (Israel knows this, the US could never accept that). "Reprisal" provides a better interpretation of the high rate of civilian casualties than either a secret plan to genocide all Palestinians or the absurd notion that Israel is doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties.
- Israel wants to resettle the Palestinians outside of its aspirational territory, to enemy territory like Egypt.
The actions of Israel, including the impending evacuation of the Rafah ghetto, can be understood by accepting the above two points. It so happens that the above two points are identical to the position of Holocaust Revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, regarding the Nazi policies with respect to the Jews. Those policies also resulted in the concentration and mass resettlement of the Jews, culminating most famously in the evacuations of the Warsaw Ghetto, those infamous deportation trains, which took place over many months.
In contrast with the Official Narrative- that the secret policy of the Germans was to kill all the Jews, Revisionists maintain the policy was to resettle the Jews to a territory in Russia, with a Jewish state likely being created after the war in Madagascar or Palestine. The Revisionist position is supported by documents, which all refer to "resettlement" as the policy objective of the deportations. But historians maintain that, in all these documents throughout the sprawling German bureaucracy, everyone was "in" on the conspiracy to use "resettlement" as a codeword for "extermination". Even in internal, top-secret communication which was intercepted or captured after the war. That's why, they say, there are no documents outlining the German policy with respect to the Jews as claimed by historians, but there are very many documents outlining the Resettlement policies as claimed by Revisionists.
Israel's insistence it cannot win the war without evacuating Rafah speaks to a similar motive claimed by Revisionists for the evacuations of the Jewish ghettos. We lionize partisan efforts against the Nazis, including the Underground Resistance operating out of Warsaw, but Israel's calculus provides some evidence for the Revisionist claim that, also, the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos was not motivated by a secret policy to exterminate them all within shower rooms in secret death factories.
A Year in Rafah
Despite the similarities described above, there is obviously one major claim in Mainstream Historiography regarding the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos that is an outlier in all respects, from anything else that has happened in human history. Whereas documents all describe these evacuations being motivated by economic and security concerns, and deportees were told that they were being evacuated to Humanitarian Islands where they would have work, this is what actually happened according to orthodox historians:
The Nazis set a quota for the evacuations of the Warsaw ghetto. Deportees were given food and told they would be resettled to camps where they would have work. The deportation trains brought the deportees to a small, secret camp called Treblinka that was set up as a fake train station, complete with a fake train platform and clock, fake ticket booth and posted train schedules. They were told that they were going to take a shower before being transited onwards. They were given soap and a towel and tricked into entering what they thought was a shower room. Then, the doors were locked and they were poisoned by carbon monoxide exhausted by a captured Soviet tank engine.
More than 5,000 people were said to be killed daily in this secret camp staffed by no more than several dozen German personnel, a larger Ukrainian auxiliary, and Jewish workforce. After being killed, all of the victims were buried onsite in huge mass graves. According to the Standard Work on the Treblinka extermination camp by former director of Yad Vashem, Yitzhak Arad, Himmler visited Treblinka in February or March 1943 and:
Himmler learned from his visit to Treblinka that, in spite of his orders, the corpses of the Jews who had been exterminated in this camp had not been cremated, but buried. Immediately after this visit, the big cremating operation began in the camp. This was the main task imposed on Treblinka during the last months of the camp’s existence...
After Himmler’s visit, the date for closing and liquidating the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka became dependent on the completion of the cremation of the victims’ corpses and the erasure of all traces of the crimes that had been carried out in these camps. The timetable for carrying out this decision lay mainly in the hands of the camp commanders and in their ability and desire to accomplish the erasure of the crimes as quickly as possible...
In Treblinka, the camp command faced the most difficult task—unearthing over 700,000 corpses and cremating them while at the same time continuing to receive new transports with Jews for extermination. In this camp the entire cremation operation lasted about four months, from April to the end of July 1943. To accomplish the task, the cremating took place simultaneously in a number of sites and the largest number of Jewish prisoner-workers were put to work in the various required stages.
So the 700,000 victims of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto and other deportees were unburied and then cremated over the course of 4 months along with newly-arrived victims. In total, Arad estimated 850,000 victims at Treblinka, meaning that about 6,000 - 7,000 corpses were cremated every single day in this camp during cremation operations. Treblinka was not constructed with any cremation facilities, and so these corpses were cremated on huge outdoor pyres using locally-gathered brushwood although there are no documents or contemporary reports at all describing this process. The cremations were said to take place immediately adjacent to a major civilian rail-line, and adjacent to several Polish villages, and in spite of this there are no wartime contemporaneous accounts of this enormous cremation operation.
Yitzhak Arad heavily relies on an alleged eyewitness called Yankel Wiernik, whose account is by far the most important in the historiography of the camp. Given the complete absence of documentary or physical evidence for any of this- a Soviet excavation of Treblinka in 1945 found no mass graves on the site, and no investigation since then has ever found a single mass grave at Treblinka, Wiernik's eyewitness account is the keystone to the entire Treblinka historical narrative:
He remembered the horrors of the enormous pyres, where "10,000 to 12,000 corpses were cremated at one time." He wrote: "The bodies of women were used for kindling" while Germans "toasted the scene with brandy and with the choicest liqueurs, ate, caroused and had a great time warming themselves by the fire."[6] Wiernik described small children waiting so long in the cold for their turn in the gas chambers that "their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground" and noted one guard who would "frequently snatch a child from the woman's arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away."[7] At other times "children were snatched from their mothers' arms and tossed into the flames alive."
He was also encouraged by occasional scenes of brave resistance.[8] In chapter 8, he describes seeing a naked woman escape the clutches of the guards and leap over a three-metre high barbed wire fence unscathed. When accosted by a Ukrainian guard (Trawniki) on the other side, she wrestled his machine gun out of his grasp, killed the guard, and shot another guard before being killed herself.
You can read the witness account for yourself if you are inclined. In spite of the enormous historiographical importance of Wiernik's work, you cannot purchase it on Amazon in either print or digital form. I only learned about this work from Revisionists, it seems to be something of an embarrassment despite its extremely important position in the historiography of the camp. Excerpts from Wiernik were submitted as evidence by a Soviet Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, along with a ~15 minute examination of another Jewish witness, who claimed to have been deported to the camp from Warsaw. That's all the evidence that was presented at Nuremberg, for the murder of 900,000 people- a Soviet excavation of the site uncovered no mass graves and no physical evidence was submitted.
I interpret it as a tacit admission to the weakness of the source, that this work is not required reading in every school across America in contrast with, say, Elie Wiesel's Night or Anne Frank's Diary, both of which have important literary significance to the Holocaust narrative but no historiographical significance. Wiesel, for example, makes no mention of gas chambers in his account, instead opting for extermination by burning people alive, which is not claimed by mainstream historians today. Anne Frank's tragic story likewise provides no historiographical relevance to the "extermination camp" narrative and actually contradicts it. She was deported to an alleged extermination camp, Auschwitz, and then transferred to another camp where she died in a hospital of Typhus.
Needless to say, Revisionists regard A Year in Treblinka as literary fiction. This is supposedly a direct eyewitness to the murder of 850,000 people who organized a prisoner revolt in Treblinka (which also has no documentation whatsoever) and heroically killed a Ukrainian guard with an axe.
Suddenly we heard the signal - a shot fired into the air.
We leaped to our feet. Everyone fell to his prearranged task and performed it with meticulous care. Among the most difficult tasks was to lure the Ukrainians from the watchtowers. Once they began shooting at us from above, we would have no chance of escaping alive. We knew that gold held an immense attraction for them, and they had been doing business with the Jews all the time. So, when the shot rang out, one of the Jews sneaked up to the tower and showed the Ukrainian guard a gold coin. The Ukrainian completely forgot that he was on guard duty. He dropped his machine gun and hastily clambered down to pry the piece of gold from the Jew. They grabbed him, finished him off and took his revolver. The guards in the other towers were also dispatched quickly...
Just as I thought I was safe, running straight ahead as fast as I could, I suddenly heard the command "Halt!" right behind me. By then I was exhausted but I ran faster just the same. The woods were just ahead of me, only a few leaps away. I strained all my will power to keep going. The pursuer was gaining and I could hear him running close behind me.
Then I heard a shot; in the same instant I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I turned around and saw a guard from the Treblinka Penal Camp. He again aimed his pistol at me. I knew something about firearms and I noticed that the weapon had jammed. I took advantage of this and deliberately slowed down. I pulled the ax from my belt. My pursuer - a Ukrainian guard - ran up to me yelling in Ukrainian: "Stop or I'll shoot!" I came up close to him and struck him with my axe across the left side of his chest. He collapsed at my feet with a vile path.
I was free and ran into the woods. After penetrating a little deeper into the thicket, I sat down among the bushes. From the distance I heard a lot of shooting. Believe it or not, the bullet had not really hurt me. It had gone through all of my clothing and stopped at my shoulder, leaving a mark. I was alone. At last, I was able to rest.
Wow! How have you never heard of this guy? If his account is true, this work must be so remarkable as to have nearly biblical significance. But you cannot purchase it on Amazon, and Holocaust Deniers are the only ones who actually talk about this guy, rather than historians who quietly use his account as the most important primary source in the historiography of the camp, but who otherwise do not attempt to attach any cultural significance to the man himself who witnessed these things. It is very suspicious, and it's likely because if you read his account yourself you would not find it believable.
Parallel Interpretations
In case the point of my post isn't clear:
Israel's motive and tactics for dealing with the Gazans generally, but especially the impending Rafah Aktion, mirror the Revisionist interpretation of the resettlement of Jews in Eastern Europe. The part of that history which has no parallel- the allegation that the Germans tricked millions of people into entering a shower room, gassed them with exhaust from a captured Soviet tank engine, buried them, then unburied them, cremated them on open-air pyres and reburied the remains, is the part which has no parallel and is also the part of the story which is contested by so-called Holocaust deniers.
In the several years in which I have studied Revisionism, I have only ever noticed Revisionists really talk about Revisionism. But this seems to be changing, on Twitter from a pretty broad array of Twitter accounts I am noticing people talk about Holocaust Revisionism who are not known for that. It might be going viral and become the next forbidden knowledge now that HBD is being digested by the Twitter intelligentsia. The fact that Israeli conflict with the Palestinians is presenting so many direct parallels: the brutal reality of partisan warfare, the mass resettlement of undesirable populations, the ease with which false propaganda becomes "news", are all contributing to what appears to be a growing skepticism among right-wing Twitter that I have never seen before outside of Revisionist circles.
The growth of Holocaust Denial will likely be another consequence of this war.
Edit: Forgot to mention, One Third of the Holocaust is the most well-known Revisionist video discussing these alleged secret extermination camps, although there are many technical studies done for each of the individual camps by Revisionist scholars.
True The Vote, the group behind the wildly popular "2000 Mules" film that purported to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn't have evidence to back its claims.
Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials. TTV has a pattern of making explosive allegations of election fraud only to then do whatever it takes to resist providing supporting evidence. TTV has lied about working with the FBI and also refused to hand over the evidence they claimed to have to Arizona authorities. In Georgia, TTV went as far as filing formal complaints with the state, only to then try to withdraw their complaints when the state asked for evidence. The founder of TTV was also briefly jailed for contempt in 2022 because of her refusal to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit where TTV claimed an election software provider was using unsecured servers in China. Edit: @Walterodim looked into this below and I agree the circumstances are too bizarre to draw any conclusions about the founder's intentions.
I have a theory I'm eager to have challenged, and it's a theory I believe precisely explains TTV's behavior: TTV is lying. My operating assumption is that if someone uncovers extensive evidence of election fraud, they would do whatever they can to assist law enforcement and other interested parties in fixing this fraud. TTV does not do this, and the reason they engage in obstinate behavior when asked to provide evidence is because they're lying about having found evidence of election fraud. It's true that they file formal complaints with authorities, but their goal is to add a patina of legitimacy to their overall allegations. TTV's overriding motivation is grifting: there is significant demand within the conservative media ecosystem for stolen election affirmations, and anyone who supplies it stands to profit both financially as well as politically. We don't have direct financial statements but we can glean the potential profitability from how 2000 Mules initially cost $29.99 to watch online, and the millions in fundraising directed towards TTV (including a donor who sued to get his $2.5 million back). There's also a political gain because Trump remains the de facto leader of the conservative movement, and affirming his 2020 stolen election claims is a practical requirement for remaining within the sphere.
I know this topic instigates a lot of ire and downvotes, but I would be very interested to hear substantive reasons for why my theory is faulty or unreasonable! I believe I transparently outlined my premises and the connective logic in the above paragraph, so the best way to challenge my conclusion could be either to dispute a premise, or to rebut any logical deduction I relied on. You could also do this by pointing out anything that is inconsistent with my theory. So for example if we were talking about how "John murdered Jane", something inconsistent with that claim could be "John was giving a speech at the time of Jane's murder". I would also request that you first check if any of your rebuttals are an example of 'belief in belief' or otherwise replaying the 'dragon in my garage' unfalsifiability cocoon. The best way to guard against this trap would be to explain why your preferred explanation fits the facts better than mine, and also to proactively provide a threshold for when you'd agree that TTV is indeed just lying.
I'm excited for the responses!
Edit: I forgot I should've mentioned this, but it would be really helpful if responses avoided motte-and-bailey diversions. This post is about TTV and their efforts specifically, and though I believe stolen election claims are very poor quality in general, I'm not making the argument that "TTV is lying, ergo other stolen election claims are also bullshit". I think there are some related questions worth contemplating (namely why TTV got so much attention and credulity from broader conservative movement if TTV were indeed lying) but changing the subject isn't responsive to a topic about TTV. If anyone insists on wanting to talk about something else, it would be helpful if there's an acknowledgement about TTV's claims specifically. For example, it can take the format of "Yes, it does appear that TTV is indeed lying but..."
guesswho
4mo ago
When NY Times starts investigating this page and wants to interview me as the one sympathetic-to-their-audience 'progressive' venturing into the lions den, I promise to tell them y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms. Probably the best I can do.
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
That thread is by far the most popular ever on that subreddit, and lists evidence that IH is a Nazi. I’d summarize the evidence as “IH has a 4-chany sense of humor, has made some edgy jokes, and **follows mainstream conservatives on Twitter.**”
The issue with the bolded part is that that's not a defense. In particular, the ones they cite are Libs Of Tik Tok, Gavin McInnes, and Ron Desantis. You could maybe excuse Desantis, but you still have to grapple with the question of whether mainstream conservatism itself moved in the direction of Nazism in recent years, which is probably something IH's accusers don't have any issue believing. They might be wrong, but it's not a trivially dismissed point of evidence.
For instance, many of the evidence points are that IH has made jokes in his videos about Nazis and the KKK. In one video, he put 14/88 in the background
You're improperly summarizing the actual point that post made - The game being referenced where he put "14/88" in doesn't allow values for that field if they aren't divisible by 5. He had to choose that number.
These arguments strike me as so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to bridge the gap. These jokes are not actually making light of Hitler, Nazis, and the KKK.
This is a valid defense, but it's impossible to prove just from IH's actions where he actually stands on the topic, and so you can't tell he's saying these things to just mock the left or he's doing it because he's inserting what he actually thinks as jokes. It's not an unheard of strategy - Nick Fuentes has a clip of him saying that humor was a way to promote his brand of politics and that he couldn't obviously be forthcoming about what he actually believed.
I've watch IH's videos, including the ones mentioned in the post you linked. The Bike-lock professor one was straight up "4chan does good thing by catching attacker" and mocks neopronouns at the beginning of the video. Which part of this is mocking the lefties?
Ultimately, IH needs to cease his policy of silence and be forthcoming - both about the plagiarizing and where his actual politics stand. That's inherently the burden you take on when you aren't in the Overton Window. That applies to literally anything a person does.
Hello! Today, on "Fucking Stupid Politics", here's a peach, a pippin, a doozy of an example.
'Why is peepul thinking we wuz talkin' 'bout killin' peepul? Y they not get de IMPORTANT ENVIRONMENTAL CLIMATE CHANGE FIGHTIN' POINT?'
Because you idiots made it about "killing", "taking out", "terrorists", etc. That is why people are discussing the ethics of murder and not your BIG IMPORTANT POINT.
These are the same people who would lip-wibble over "speech is violence". Imagine I did a graphic about "this is the harm reduction we could ensure by killing just one trans activist". Do you think they'd be all "Well Chauncey, that is an interesting rhetorical device to illustrate your thesis"? No, they'd be screaming about hate speech, death threats, inciting violence, and demanding not alone banning from all online media but the police to get involved.
And this is why they are shooting themselves in the foot over such campaigns. Never mind that if right this minute all fossil fuel extraction and production stopped, and we only had renewables and limited nuclear power to rely on. Our entire global civilisation would be in a lot of trouble because we haven't yet solved the transition problems.
The notes are getting hung up on how the carbon offset for killing an oil executive was calculated, and y'all, it's not supposed to be an accurate calculation of exactly what would happen if you killed an oil executive, it's meant to highlight just how unbelievably vast the environmental impact of the bigwigs at BP or Exxon is compared to yours, and ultimately how the planet is being knowingly and purposefully killed by a small handful of uber wealthy individuals.
No, let's keep discussing ethics. They could use a stern course of Aquinas. Even BP oil execs do not get up in the morning and go "Today I think I shall be Evil. Let me knowingly and purposefully kill the planet!" (Moustache twirling, evil laughter and gleeful hand rubbing optional).
Those guys are trying to make a living, provide a service, and sell goods. Yes, increase the profits of their company. Yes, get rich. Yes, all that. But that only happens because the entire world pretty much runs on oil. Up until the mid-19th century, petroleum deposits were useless or even seen as devaluing land if you had a lake of thick black goop slopping out of the ground. Ironically, petroleum could be seen as the environmentally friendly option, given that it replaced whale oil (due to the dwindling population of whales that were being hunted to provide oil). And so our industrial civilisation was built around it.
You can't slam the brakes on all of a sudden to move from fossil fuels to other sources. And the dumb stupid "punch a Nazi" lazy 'we're fighting a war here and we're the soldiers in the army of right' tropes on display here about "killing" people just for the job they do don't help. This is why ordinary people think the Just Stop Oil etc. campaigns are damn stupid.
Because they are.
EDIT: Ah feck it, while I'm being ranty anyway: this is instructive to compare to what I'm seeing about "Trump's 'we're coming for you' tweet is being investigated" as presumably incitement to violence and death and treason and coup and the rest of it. I was already thinking about "I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of political speeches and speeches by police commissioners and DAs and so forth about 'coming after/coming for/look out you're next' political opponents, crime, etc." so singling out this as a unique example of "no it's a definite threat of physical harm" seems to be leaning heavily on the scales.
The same way the Gabby Giffords assassination attempt was portrayed as "the Republicans with their target crosshairs poster set her up for this", never mind that people found examples of Democratic politicians also using targets/crosshairs in similar statements.
And now this: 'if we talk about killing someone, you should understand it only means 'if there were one fewer oil exec in a job' but if you use languatge like that, you really do mean to kill/harm your opponents' perfect example of one law for me and another law for thee.
Highpopalorum
10mo ago
Content aside, I find the repeated use of massively over-sized font as an attention seeking measure in your posts obnoxious and wish you'd just format them normally.
This place is right-wing twitter (insert "always has been" meme) but verbose and you're not allowed to call stuff gay or retarded. Accept that and you'll have more fun.
EDIT: Come on guys, you know it's true. Don't shoot the messenger.
guesswho
4mo ago
The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
More right than you know.
Missing children are overwhelmingly runaways, actual abductions are overwhelmingly the parents, non-parent cases are overwhelmingly someone else known to the child, actual stranger abductions are overwhelmingly of teens.
Young children being abducted from a playground doesn't happen literally never, but it's so close to never that spending time thinking about it, and letting it drive larger policy issues, is both insane and counter-productive.
We talk about it because it's emotionally valent and easy to imagine. Not because it's important, not because it happens.
Same thing here. You can clearly imagine this situation in your mind, but it doesn't really happen. Not enough that we can actually say that trans bathroom rights make it more likely, not enough that it's worth warping public policy over.
Also, you know, the whole claim is mistaken to begin with, because: if trans people must use the bathroom of their birth gender, then Buck Angel has to use the women's room.
If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women, then you should be in favor of letting trans people use the right bathrooms. Because way more male-looking people will go into trans bathrooms if you force all trans men to use them, than if you don't.
guesswho
4mo ago
Can I just take a moment to say:
Racists do not describe themselves as racists. They always have beliefs that re perfectly reasonable and normal from their own perspective, and generally have either sources of evidence they consider authoritative or arguments they consider persuasive to validate those beliefs.
That being said: are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
And if not, who in the world could we call a racist, then?
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
But in many cases, it's pretty easy to tell when that stuff is all happening above someone's bottom line. This also relates to epistemic learned helplessness, with people being rightly skeptical of arguments and citations that seem persuasive but are highly optimized to seem that way by lots of distributed effort in some cases, but being more amenable to those types of arguments when they come from certain people/groups or support certain things they're disposed towards.
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
The answer is simple. What you are starting to notice the lies that underpin the whole secular progressive worldview.
You're expecting social constructs and conflicts to abide by inductive logic when they don't.
You're expecting IQ scores and educational attainment to be proxies for intelligence and rational behavior when they are not.
You're trying to assign value based on identity only to realize that the whole concept of identity is incoherent.
You're starting to notice "the leviathan-shaped hole", and you are starting (if only just starting) to become red pilled.
You know why white nationalists are hated don't you? Because they are losers. Look at who they seek to emulate, the Nazis? don't make me laugh. The Antebellum South? as much as it might pain some of my long-dead ancestors to hear me say this, that dog wont hunt. Like I said losers. Now imagine the most stereotypically racist, and toxically masculine, man that you can. Sheriff Buford T. Justice himself transplanted into the modern day. Now ask yourself what does white nationalism and the dissident right have to offer such a man that he can't get for a better price elsewhere. Why would a man like Sheriff Buford T. Justice want to associate himself with a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer? or the cavalcade of faggots, furries, and perverts that follow him?
You can try appealing to academic consensus but academia is a progressive feminist bastion and Sheriff Buford T. Justice is suspicious of your fancy city talk.
You can try appealing to strait Nietzsche "will to power" nonsense but Sheriff Buford T. Justice is a god-fearing man.
You can try appealing to simple racism and this plan might just succeed but Sheriff Buford T. Justice, being a southern man, will be sure to point out that not all niggers are black.
FarNearEverywhere
5mo ago
Mate, they're in the middle of a war right now, and all you can think about is "Does this affect my chances of getting laid?"
Would you prefer the women stay there to get killed? That's not going to help the fertility rates post-war, either.
Content like this is why I can't take incels seriously: it's like the crazy guys going on about being circumcised as babies which means that now they are being denied mind-blowing orgasms like men who were not circumcised get. Bringing everything, even a war that is killing people daily, around to "I am not getting the fantastic sex I should be getting because I'm owed that!" makes you sound like a toddler demanding to get those cookies instead of the veggies for dinner.
Call me nuts, but I kinda think a single young man in Ukraine is more occupied with the bombs, bullets and missiles flying around him than chances of getting his end away. You have to be alive to have sex, after all.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
7mo ago
What is the end goal of white nationalism?
To see our founding principles utterly discredited and destroyed so that they might be replaced with a load of post-modern psuedo-marxist intersectional nonsense.
If you want to understand "white nationalism" as it exists on twitter and various rat-adjacent spaces, you need to understand that they are motivated by the same thing the intersectional left is. Specifically, certain sense of entitlement/having been chosen coupled with belief in the ideology of victimhood that ultimately manifests as a deep and abiding resentment of what the West in general, and the Anglosphere/US in particular has historically represented. The idea that all men are created equal is simply intolerable to them because it means they have to actually work at being better if they want to be perceived as being better.
Idiots like Steve Sailor and Greg Johnson can bitch about dysgenics all they want but at the end of the day the middle-class white guy who marries a thicc Latina and pumps out a couple of kids is doing more to actually implement and embody the 14 words (not to mention build a nation) than the vast majority of so-called "white nationalists" are.
Astranagant
9mo ago
I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.
More time to do actually enjoyable things instead of faffing around on a child's toy?
Gregory Hood illustrates why White Nationalism as it currently exists within the continental US should not be taken seriously as an intellectual movement.
This essay is a load of psuedo-marxist nonsense written from a place of deep historical ignorance that is presumably aimed at disaffected white progressives.
The obvious problem with advocating a for "a white homeland" is that the homeland already exists, it's called Europe. Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans. Funny how that works out. The alternative of course is to move to a state like Iowa or Vermont which is >90% white but living in one of those States doesn't confer the status or "validation" that guys like Hood so desperately crave. A white guy wearing a nice button-up in Iowa is just another white-guy. It doesn't convey the separateness from the laboring class that it might in a far more stratified place like Coastal California.
I don't know much about Hood's background, or whether he would consider himself a "Berkely Marxist", but in any case his writing strikes me as representative of that genere. The choice to place the start of history at the end of World War II is such a common rhetorical trick that it has become something of a 'tell'. The reason that American Marxists might wish to avoid discussing history prior to World War II (and prior to June 22nd 1941 in particular) in anything but the broadest strokes is left as an exercise for the reader.
Hood wants his readers to believe that "World War II is the foundation of our entire civilization." because it is convenient to the narrative that he is pushing. The problem of course is that this patently and obviously stupid. Any story of World War II and the societies that waged it that doesn't at least acknowledge the aftermath of World War I is going to end up an as incoherent mess. It would be like starting the story of the Illiad with Hector already dead. Similarly, you can't meaningfully discuss the story of the US as a nation, without acknowledging it's founding conditions as a frontier colony. Or the bloody crucible of the American Civil War from which so much of our industrial might and martial ambitions arose.
Of course, Hood is not interested in meaningful discussion. What Hood (and I suspect you) are really interested in is this bit here...
Whites of all economic classes are being displaced or prevented from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Smart, ambitious, young whites are the ones who are hit hardest, and that’s traditionally who you want as a revolutionary class. -emphasis mine.
And thus, the mask comes off and the wannabe Bolshevik under the skin-suit is fully revealed. I catch a lot of flak on this forum for pointing out that much of the so-called "Dissident Right" is really just the "Woke Left" under a different name, but it's right there in their own words for anyone with even a modicum of intellectual honesty to see.
"The 14 words" get bandied about a lot in these discussions but I find it telling that those who go on about them the most often seem the least inclined to actually build or secure anything resembling that future. It begs the question "Who's Children?". The funny thing is that in my personal life I am what the white nationalists say they want. I am teaching my kids to read and enjoy the classics. I am teaching them to, hunt, fight, cook, and work as part of a team. I go out of my way to be active in my community, to build relationships with the other folks at my church, my job, the gym, my local sports bar etc... In short, I am working to secure a future for my children. Or at least give them a sturdy foundation upon which to secure it for themselves. What are you doing?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
This is a crappy post that reminds me of this guy. While I banned @Astranagant for personal antagonism (and to be clear, this was a continuation of a pattern, not just for insulting you), you don't seem to have much to say here beyond cackling triumphantly at "effete liberal Europoors."
We are frequently accused of not modding people for posting low-effort culture war sneering if they use enough words. Well, you used a lot of words, but this is just low-effort culture war sneering.
The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
the people who pull the strings in the federal government seem to be okay with defacto open borders.
Easy: the US does not have de facto open borders. "De facto open borders" is a mood expression of nativists who don't like current state of immigration enforcement. If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.
The people who "pull the strings" are wedged because there's no magic solutions to the material factors driving Latino migration. Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border. Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them. Unfucking Latin America to the point where you don't have tens of millions of people who'd rather be an illegal or quasi-legal day laborer in a country where half the people hate them than stay where they are is a nontrivial exercise, and there isn't much support for that either (try and sell the guy who wants to deport all the Mexicans on spending trillions of dollars failing to develop Latin America). On top of that, the US is like most developed countries in that it has an aging native population that demands increasingly high standards of post-retirement living at the same time the retiree-worker ratio is getting worse, so it also just needs immigrant labor.
New York and other cities are howling about migrants being bussed into their communities, but so far seem reluctant to change their sanctuary city policies.
NY and other blue states already absorb the majority of immigrants, including illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
9mo ago
I think your entire premise is wrong. People don't generally assume that someone who is unsuccessful with romantic relationships is lacking in moral virtue. That might be the case, but there are many other explanations: he's terrible at dating, he has unrealistic standards, he just doesn't put himself out there enough, he has some baggage that becomes evident once a woman shows interest (not necessarily the same as "lacking in moral virtue"), or he has so convinced himself that he's undateable (because he's short) that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yes, there are men (and women) who try and try and fail and never find love. That's very sad. But it's never because of any one thing (like height).
When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue.
Look dude, ima be honest. You've been banging this "Short men can't land anyone but a morbidly obese hag" drum for a while now, to the point that you've actually been warned about giving it a rest. It's tiresome, and when you refuse every bit of advice that's been given to you, starting a top-level thread to pose it as a "general question" about why short men who can't get dates are treated so unfairly, it's no less tiresome.
This post is... okay, I guess. If it were anyone else posting it, it would be fine. But seeing your name, I immediately knew what the post would be about before reading it. So seriously, give it a rest. Yes, consider this an invocation of the single-issue posting rule.
cincilator
Catgirl Alignment Researcher
11mo ago
My theory: most of what is now called "white supremacy" is just boomers attempting to prolong "boomer reality." (Obviously not all boomers)
What do I mean by "boomer reality"? Boomers are an American cohort born in unprecedented wealth when America was the only intact industrial power. They are also quite large cohort and were therefore over their lives able to use their influence to "fine-tune" America to their specifications. Boomers like to drive, therefore America is easy accessible via cars, not so much via public transport. This is also why gasoline tends to be cheaper in America than elsewhere. Boomers love to see their property values soar, therefore pretty much nothing is legal to build anywhere in America. (or so I hear)
What looks like white supremacy is boomers' dislike towards brown immigrants. But I would argue that the reason is not that they are brown, it is because they are not part of "boomer reality." Hispanics are more used to public transport (compared to white boomers) and are also okay with living in higher density. If lots of Hispanics materialize in America, and have a chance to vote for their preferences, this might result in more public transport (which boomers don't need) and more dense housing (bringing boomer property values down).
This also explains boomer opposition towards global warming. Global warming implies that car-centric culture might not be completely sustainable and anything that implies "boomer reality" might not be sustainable is an enemy.
I do think "boomer reality" is now very toxic, but here's how it is different from old white supremacy: Southern white supremacists cared a lot about their own legacy. They were thoroughly evil people, but they did care for their own white children (and noone else). White plantation owners could picture the world without themselves in it. Not the world without plantations (they fought a war over it), but one with different owners (their sons) running these plantations.
Boomers are fundamentally narcissistic and they cannot imagine anyone else as main characters of life, not even their own children. And that's the black heart of "boomer reality". Real white supremacy would be white male tenured boomer professor retiring and giving his tenured seat to his younger -- also white male -- protege. That's not at all what's happening, instead cushy tenured professorships are being replaced with insecure nontenured positions -- mostly held by brown and female people.
Calling this "white supremacy" almost gives it too much dignity. This is fire sale.
"White supremacy" is simply not the right terminology to describe what is happening. It is also unfair because younger whites are not profiting at all from "boomer reality". Accusing a poor white millenial of "white supremacy" is kicking the chained dog. I suspect the popularity of the concept -- alongside most of "awokening" -- is the result of elite millenials getting radicalized by realization that their Boomer parents intend to spend everything on luxury cruises and leave them with jack shit. In other words awokening is fueled precisely by a lack of actual, working white supremacy. (As well as a lack of any other safety net for precarious millenials)
(Don't get me wrong, I do think it is good white supremacy is no more, my point is that boomer narcissism is also bad, but in a very different way)
Why do I think my theory is correct? Because there was a similar generation divide in my native Serbia (then Yugoslavia) in the early 90's although generations were one step back. It was "Greatest Generation", Silent Generation and some elder boomers, versus younger boomers and x-ers (millenials were still young children or not yet born). The former still lived in "communist reality" while that reality begun to unravel for the latter.
One of the reasons why Milosevic ruled over Serbia for so long is because he promised the pensioners that their pensions will remain untouched no matter what. So there was a bloody civil war with younger generations being thrown into meat grinder which had comparatively little impact on the old people (not zero impact due to inflation, but lesser impact). What Milosevic promised to the old was continuation of "communist reality" till they die. And they followed him.
Not saying that the younger Serbian generations were completely innocent here -- there were some rabid warmongers there too -- but the whole thing would have been impossible without the compliance of the old people.
I don't think it is a coincidence that both Trump and Milosevic have promised to the old people continuation of their respective realities. Hence old people disproportionately voting for them.
Returning to situation in America, what I think is going to happen is that "boomer reality" is going to continue unraveling and it will be replaced with "woke reality." The advantage of woke reality is that it is cheap -- you don't need a car and a house to live it, just internet connection. Problem is that it is not all that much more real than "boomer reality". It is based on throwing around inaccurate inflammatory terms like "white supremacy" (as I explained) and on funding things like DEI offices -- which make people MORE racist. A self licking ice cone. None of it is as toxic as boomer reality, true, but it is still a type of unreality.
One variable I am unsure of is how much of boomer wealth will millennials be able to actually inherit. Are boomers really going to spend it all on luxury cruises and nursing homes? If not, if millennials actually inherit something valuable, they might switch from woke into something similar to "boomer reality," possibly also justified by wokeness. Something something building more housing is racist somehow. Obviously I am not saying that EVERY millenial is going to end up like this, but then not every boomer is Trump voter.
But I am just a millenial from Serbia, and first to admit that I don't know jack. What do you think?
Jordan Peterson deserved it.
You may be aware that an Ontario court recently ruled that Jordan Peterson is required to undergo social media training. This was discussed in a previous CWR, and the general vibe from that discussion was that this was a political attempt to silence or punish Peterson for unpopular political opinions, but I disagree. Instead, I think Peterson genuinely crossed the line with regard to the professional conduct required of him.
First, this argument rests on the belief that it's ethical for certain professions to impose limits on practitioners' freedom of speech. We've decided that certain professions require some degree of public trust and accountability. We expect lawyers to provide correct legal advice, auditors and adjustors to provide unbiased reviews of the facts, and physicians to treat any patient equally, regardless of their personal beliefs. However, we establish limits on this, generally agreeing that these professionals are individuals and are free to express their opinions when it does not cause direct harm to their profession, their clients, or the public at large.
Accepting this, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, of which Peterson is a member, is responsible and obligated to investigate and act on complaints against its members when acting as a clinical psychologist. Now the question is whether or not Peterson made these statements as a clinical psychologist, and whether or not his statements violated professional standards. Specifically:
The Complaints
From the court's decision, which I highly recommend you read yourself, these are the complaints against Peterson:
The Inquiries, Complaints, and Reports Committee ("ICRC"), in their investigation, determined that some of these complaints were valid, and others were not. Specifically, they determined that statements a and c, while provocative and inflammatory, could be interpreted as innuendo, a joke, or parody, and did not rise to the level of "disgraceful, dishonorable or unprofessional" conduct.
They argue that the remaining statements do, but this is where I disagree.
The most relevant complaints are b. and f, and including the other statements in their decision cheapens their reasoning. By focusing on the more subjective criteria of "disgraceful" and "dishonorable", they miss the low-hanging fruit of "unprofessional".
Between statement B and F, Peterson disparages a former client as "vindictive", dismisses their complaints as a "pack of lies", and refers to a fellow practicing physician as "criminal" for performing an otherwise legal surgery.
Regardless of his political opinions, these statements seem to easily pass the standard of "unprofessional" conduct you would expect of a psychologist.
Past Complaints, and Aggravating Factors.
Peterson has been registered with the college since 1999, and he's no stranger to complaints. To date, this coaching is the first action taken by the ICRC against Peterson with the most recent investigation closing in 2020 with no action taken. 2020 was arguably a "hotter" year for the culture war and the college likely would have had more political cover for any sanctions. So what materially changed?
Peterson's counsel describes him as "a prolific author, podcaster, and YouTube content producer who maintains an active social media presence. In his social and political commentary, Dr. Peterson is often colorful and controversial.” Arguing in effect, that Peterson the social and political commentator is not Peterson the clinical psychologist. And I think this is a fair point because in the conclusion from the 2020 investigation that resulted in no action, the ICRC noted:
In 2020, Peterson's Twitter bio made no mention of his being a clinical psychologist. Peterson, in addressing this at the time, stated he "opted not to advertise this title on his Twitter". However, in 2022, this changed, he added "Clinical psychologist" to his Twitter bio.
Since Peterson effectively stopped practicing in 2016, this was a position of contention by the ICRC. Peterson, in responding to concerns that he continued to publicly identify as a clinical psychologist stated:
If we accept Peterson's reasoning that he continues to practice in a broad and diffuse manner in public - it stands to reason that his primary interactions with the public via his Twitter and podcast appearances should be examined under the lens of the standards expected of a clinical psychologist. And even if you don't agree with this argument, Peterson himself seems to agree based on his rejection of the board's recommendation
Peterson's Counter Proposal
In rejecting the board's recommendation for social media training due to the recurrence risk of unprofessional tone and language, Peterson argues that any social media coaching would be redundant - as he had already taken steps to address these concerns.
I'll quote the relevant section from the decision:
The ICRC, to little surprise, found that his business associates, close family members, and "various professionals", many of whom would have a financial incentive not to restrict Peterson's brand of controversy, were not capable of being independent, and would not examine his behavior through the lens of his obligations as a member of the College.
The Conclusion, and Why You Should Care.
At this point, I've laid out why I think Peterson's statements crossed the line of professional behavior, and why the board was fully justified in taking action against him. Along with outlining his counter-proposal which feels particularly poor.
I'm under no illusion that "social media coaching" is anything but laughably ineffective. Peterson's brand is controversy, and he's unlikely to take any serious advice to heart. In my opinion, the College is already providing Peterson with incredible leeway that would not be granted to less inflammatory members, and his framing of this dispute as a suppression of free speech instead of a professional dispute is incredibly hypocritical for someone who spends so much time pointing this out in others.
But the true nefarious reason I spent time on this write-up, whether you agree with my conclusion or not, is because I didn't see -any- of this discussed previously. As someone whose opinion differs strongly from the average expressed here, I've grown spoiled by the high-effort discussion this community normally generates. It was disheartening to see a culture war topic engaged with so heavily without a cursory discussion of the opposing view.
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