Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
11hr ago
True; we should have re-negotiated, changing '10-15 years' to 'until the signatories unanimously agree to lift the restrictions, which won't happen as long as you keep supporting Palestinian claims on Tel Aviv.'
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
12hr ago
· Edited 12hr ago
My ruling on that particular case would have been something along the lines of "Before the Civil Rights Act, Defendant explicitly excluded black people from the higher-paid jobs. Therefore, the Court can conclude that Defendant harbours animus toward black people. Defendant did not require white people to pass any kind of test before hiring them. Therefore, by revealed preference, Defendant had no objection to a low-scoring white person holding higher paid jobs. Therefore, Defendant's imposition of the testing requirement, on the same day that the Civil Rights Act took effect and defendant could no longer exclude people on the explicit grounds of skin colour, indicates that,
- Defendant is attempting to keep black people sub-ordinate to white people (the exact thing Congress just outlawed), and
- Defendant apparently thinks that they can pee on Uncle Sam's leg and tell him it's raining."
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
12hr ago
Do you genuinely believe that businesses do not have a preference for intelligent employees over non-intelligent employees?
No, I was attempting to present the strongest possible case for disparate-impact laws. Thus, in the situation I described, the standard wasn't 'must be more mentally capable than McNamara's 100,000' so much as 'must have 'professional-looking' (i. e. white) hairstyle' or 'must be able to lift 50 pounds' for a desk job that won't involve lifting anything heavier than a full cup of coffee.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
13hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
I can only think of two reasons why someone might come to that conclusion, neither of which I would consider even close to reasonable.
The first is if one values 'costs and benefits to someone of the same ethnicity as me' more highly than 'costs and benefits to someone of a different ethnic group'. This covers pretty much all of what 'racism' meant before the 'prejudice-plus-power' gerrymandering. It tends to end badly.
The second is if one has an understanding of history and current events that, to put it charitably, is very different from what I understand to be the case. The only examples I know of in which white people qua white people were, or even may have been, persecuted are:
- Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia, formerly Southern Rhodesia)
- South Africa (questionable to what extent it is racially motivated, but I will concede the point for the sake of argument)
- Haiti, following the overthrow of the slavers.
All of these occurred in countries which had, until immediately before-hand, been governed under a system in which black people were oppressed, the people doing the oppression were white, they attempted to justify the oppression using a world-view in which one's ethnicity is more relevant than one's character as an individual, and there were few if any white people questioning the system and advocating for racial equality. This was not conducive to making the distinction between 'this white person who personally wronged me' and 'this person who didn't technically do anything to me, but shares skin colour with the people who did.'
Anti-Semitic persecutions, however, were generally not preceded by any action by Jewish people other than 'existing while not being exactly like us', and were perpetrated under circumstances which had very little else in common.
I am willing to listen if you can offer any examples of white people who were minding their own business, not harming anyone, and were persecuted for being white; or if you can describe a 'way of drawing the cost-benefit differently' that does not fall into either of these two categories.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
19hr ago
· Edited 12hr ago
At this time, I would like to steelman disparate-impact legislation.
Some people decide that they don't want to hire (or sell to, or admit to their schools) black people (or women or Chinese people or Irish people...), but are forbidden by law from having such a policy. They then impose a standard that many white people can meet, few black people can meet, and that they most likely wouldn't give a rat's arse about if it were un-correlated with race, and in some cases didn't give a rat's arse about when they were allowed to discriminate openly. (Sometimes they go further, and enforce a zero-tolerance standard on black people while ignoring violations by white people.) The government than comes in and says "That sounds like a whites-only sign with extra steps; I thought we had made it perfectly clear that you are not allowed to do that! What part of 'do not discriminate on the basis of race' did you not understand?"
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
19hr ago
· Edited 13hr ago
Let’s suppose that Jews do indeed have the greatest past history of genocide, and that this makes them the most liable to be genocided again, and that as a consequence they ought to be first in line for a homeland. I can follow this line of thinking. What I fail to see is why any white person would be persuaded to abstain from forming their own homeland.
Because maintaining an ethnostate involves discriminating on the basis of ethnicity, which has major costs, almost always greater than the benefits (if one is primarily concerned with the well-being of individual humans.) In the case of Israel, past events create a sufficient threat that the cost-benefit calculation passes the zero-line (the MS St. Louis passengers et al. being the factor pushing it over the top); white people do not face any threat great enough to outweigh the reasons for avoiding ethnostates in general.
Ideally, there wouldn't be any countries deciding citizenship based on ethnicity; however, given both past events and current attitudes towards ethnicity and immigration, the N deliberate N maintenance N of N a N Jewish N majority N in N at N least N one N state N is, N at N least N at N this N time, N an N un-fortunate N necessity N for N the N well-being N of N individual N Jewish N people, N in N much N the N same N way N as N poking N someone N with N a N pointy N bit N of N metal N is, N given N our N current N medical N technology, N an N unfortunate N necessity N for N telling N the N immune N system N 'watch N out N for N this N specific N microbe'.
(The 'N's stand for "Not to be taken out of context".)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
22hr ago
political affiliation is not a protected class
A good response to an argument is one that addresses an idea; a bad argument is one that silences it. If you try to address an idea, your success depends on how good the idea is; if you try to silence it, your success depends on how powerful you are and how many pitchforks and torches you can provide on short notice.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
23hr ago
· Edited 22hr ago
The principle “usually, it is not justifiable to take coercive measures to keep certain ethnicities in the majority” has a big exclusion for “unless it prevents genocide”.
The exception is more 'unless a group has been repeatedly been persecuted by many other groups, to a degree greatly above background, and given no refuge when they tried to escape a mad-man bent on their extermination.'
Just a cursory look through the annals of history shows that every group which lacks dominance over a territory risks genocide, and that these happen at mostly unpredictable times. Therefore, it is justifiable to take coercive measures to keep an ethnic group in the majority of some territory (or subsection thereof) to prevent its genocide, as this is the best way to protect against genocide.
But this is not an argument for why other groups should not get a homeland. Shouldn’t our interest be in reducing genocides down to 0%?
Such a plan would be very destructive to human freedom and well-being; furthermore, even if it had been accomplished fifty years ago and every ethnic group had their own country, the division between ethnicities is not a constant throughout history.
Therefore, to prevent genocides from occurring, the best method is to
- establish a principle that members of ethnic minorities ought to be treated as equals, and that the relevant subject of moral/ethical concern is not 'a group of people defined by distant¹ blood-relation' but 'an individual human being', and
- establish that if an individual is at risk of being murdered by the country they live in because their neighbours have decided that their ethnic group are undeserving of life, other countries ought to let them in.
Once this has been accomplished, and the ideas that 'an individual is less worthy of concern because they are of a different ethnicity' or 'we have the right to send an individual back to a country where they will be murdered rather than risk them causing some inconvenience² to us' are taken no more seriously anywhere among the Nations than the idea that '2.00 + 2.00 = 5.00', then we can discuss whether the State of Israel is justified in limiting the number of Arab citizens to less than the number of Jewish citizens.
¹'Distant' meaning 'far enough apart that even the Medieval Church wouldn't object to them marrying.'
²Such as 'they're poor enough that they might cost us money in social support', 'letting in 10,000 of them might contain one or two people who might wish us harm³', or 'we can't distinguish which ones are in actual danger, so avoiding type II errors (deporting someone who will then be murdered) will cause type I errors (some people might move here for economic opportunity, even if we have told them not to!).
³During the interbellum period, some Unitedstatesian opinionists opposed the admission of Jewish refugees on the grounds that Germany might hide saboteurs among them.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
The biggest flaw in the JCPOA was that the restrictions on uranium enrichment, intended to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, expired at T+10-15 years, thus potentially allowing Iran to obtain a nuclear arsenal 'later' rather than 'never'.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
I don’t think it follows that other groups should be prevented from such a state.
That follows from the principle of "Ethnonationalism Considered Harmful" leading to the notion that, usually, it is not justifiable to take coercive measures to keep certain ethnicities in the majority.
The list of genocides in history is long and the subjects are totally random.
Not totally random. Some groups have been dis-proportionally targeted; this pattern becomes more visible with a data-set that includes sub-genocidal persecution.
It’s reasonable, then, for every group to desire a clear majority territory in order to decrease their risk of being genocided.
No, because not every group has the same risk.
It’s unreasonable to say, “because this group has already been subject to genocide, they should have an eternal homeland”
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that "Because this group has been subjected repeatedly to genocidal and lesser persecutions, and were turned away and sent to their deaths when they tried to flee the most recent attempt, they should have a homeland as long as there is widespread animus against them and government control over immigration."
If the passengers on the MS St. Louis, and all the other Jewish people fleeing the Nazis, had been allowed into America, there would have been a lot less impetus for the formation of a Jewish State.
If all other countries had open borders, showed no sign of any desire to change this, and that situation continued for several decades, it would be reasonable to urge Israel to follow suit.
(Often cast is the accusation of wanting 'open borders for every country except Israel'. I think a better description, at least of those whose political opinions reside on Level 1, would be open borders for every country, with Israel bringing up the tail end of the process. [Those on Level 3, on the other hand, {if their social circle consists of the kind of people in the Respectable Media} will oppose immigration enforcement in the U. S. because their friends do, support Israeli policies because their friends do, and give no more regard to resolving any apparent contradiction in their ideas than they would give to ensuring that their ideas are expressed in sentences ending in words with an odd number of letters. {The same applies to people whose social circle consists of college radicals yelling "From the river to the sea" without any knowledge of the bodies of water to which that slogan refers.}])
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
do you really think there’s going to be another Holocaust? ... Jews will be safe in the west for the foreseeable future ....
In 1900, would anyone have thought the Shoah would have been started by Germany?
If you brought someone forward from that era, told them that there would be a persecution and mass murder of Jews on an un-precedented scale, and asked them to guess what country it would come from, I suspect most people' first guess would be Russia, possibly followed by France.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
how oppressed they’ve been
It's not 'how oppressed they've been', per se, so much as 'how likely are they to be oppressed in the future'.
The former is largely relevant as evidence of the latter.
I am happy to support the Jewish ethnic homeland exactly to the extent that they support mine
This would be reasonable if there were a danger, supported by historical precedent, of your ethnic group, if a minority in every country, being declared unwelcome in your country of residence, denied admission to other countries, and then targeted for mass murder. (I don't know what ethnicity you are, so I cannot say for certain that that is not the case. If it is, than your group would also be justified in wanting its own country in which it is the majority. 'White people', on the other hand, do not fit this criterion; if that were to change, then you would have an argument for wanting to live in a white-majority country.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
There is a difference between supporting Zionism because "we'd rather stay here, but just in case they decide they don't want us here..." and supporting Zionism because "the normal purpose of a country is as a home for a specific ethnic group; we were born with an un-changeable primary duty towards our group's homeland."
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
The Right Wing shouldn't support a people that don't support them
Many Jewish people do support the right wing, at least the more idea-focused parts. More might have done so if they didn't get the impression (whether accurate or not) that "You support us, we'll support you" meant something along the lines of "You obey and agree with us in every way, and we'll grudgingly let you live in the crappiest parts of our land instead of leaving you to be slaughtered, as long as you acknowledge us as your superiors."
Also, not everything ought to be transactional. Sometimes, one should help people not because they have done or will do something for you, but because it is the right thing to do.
Jews are overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel.
Sympathy is not the same as loyalty. Many Jewish American citizens have sympathy towards Israel, because they have relatives there whom they know personally, and because they need there to be a place where they are allowed to exist even if every Gentile doesn't want them.
(Also, some people complain that Jewish U. S. citizens don't have enough loyalty to Israel.)
If accepting them
Grudgingly, when at all.
and handing them power
The Jewish people were not 'handed power' as a group. They were, in fact, often systematically kept away from power.
failed to earn their loyalty to the ethnic stock
Or don't consider an 'ethnic stock' to be a thing one can be loyal to.
you should wonder why they were expelled so much throughout history
My hypothesis is that a religion founded on arguing with G-d, and which has a big book consisting of centuries of arguments by its clergy over every minute detail of Scripture, is likely to be inconvenient for any person or group whose agenda relies on being able to say that black 0.4–0.7 μm albedo < 0.01 is white 0.4–0.7 μm albedo > 0.99 and have everybody reject the evidence of their own eyes and ears. This would explain the rise of anti-Semitism among the wokists SJWs PJFTMWTIAATUftSSaPCYDs.
However, I don't think it matters why they were not welcomed. What matters is that millions of human beings, each with hopes, dreams, feelings, people they loved, eyes, hands, organs, senses, dimensions, were denied a safe place to live, and sent back to be slaughtered.
That is why Jewish people are justifiably not confident that they are safe if they are a minority in every country; the same logic does not apply to white people.
The US took in the Jews
Except for the ones on the MS St Louis.
and didn't treat them as second-class citizens
Except when they did.
but apparently that didn't earn the US any claim to maintain a White population in your mind?
No. You're not supposed to treat people as second-class citizens, just like you're supposed to take care of your children and not end up in gaol.
Furthermore, even if white Americans had gone shown supererogatory virtue, that would still not entitle them to an ethnic majority, because, in the general case, 'being entitled to an ethnic majority' isn't a thing. We make an exception in the case of Israel and the Jewish people due to their long history of being regularly persecuted, combined with the post-WWI implementation of modern border controls. (If I had a magic 'open borders, for everyone except horrifying predatory criminals [judged on an individual basis], in every country including Israel, I would at least be tempted to press it, knowing that Jewish people facing anti-Semitic persecution would always be able to leave any country which persecuted them. However, in a world in which countries claim a general right to refuse entry for any or no reason, it is anti-Semitic to expect Jewish people to bet their lives on the hope that the Nations will be feeling generous.)
It certainly failed to earn the ethnic loyalty of Jews to White Americans.
Ethnic loyalty? No, largely because Jewish people sympathetic to ethno-nationalism mostly live in Israel! Jewish Americans sympathetic to civic nationalism show loyalty to American ideals such as the Constitution.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
This is only coherent if you set the clock at a completely arbitrary cutoff
Only semi-arbitrary. We cut it off post-WWII because that's when we realised that the seizure of territory by force of arms was increasingly damaging, and thus could not be allowed to continue in the future. Thus we set the cut-off at 'now' as a Schelling point, because we had to set it somewhere, and 'now' was the least disruptive.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
As the old line goes, the socialists will never forgive the Jews for surviving the Holocaust.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
That comparison might make more sense if white people had been a minority in every country for c. 2,000 years, been treated as second-class citizens when tolerated, expelled whenever the majority needed a scapegoat, and then subjected to attempted extermination with everyone prescient enough to try to escape refused entry by every country they tried to flee to.
Unless and until that happens, I see no contradiction in asserting that Jewish people are entitled to a state in which they are a majority, while white people are not.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
You can say, as a matter of principle, that no ethnostate should exist.
The problem is that it practically seems to end up as "Israel in particular should dissolve itself first". People find that suspicious.
I believe that Israel might very well be the only justified ethno-state; every invocation of '109 countries' by certain political tendencies only serves to strengthen that conviction.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1d ago
What about the position that it’s perfectly fine and dandy for the Jews to have somewhere they can exist, but that it should be somewhere other than the Levant?
That would not necessarily be anti-Semitic, if it were argued in good faith, and the proposal involved the alternate Jewish homeland being an independent state, with a Jewish majority, and whichever country it was carved out of renouncing all claim to the territory.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
2d ago
In my view, someone boycotting Israel could, theoretically not be anti-Semitic, but I don't know of any organised movement that qualifies.
For such a movement to demonstrate not being anti-Semites, they would need to state conditions XYZ, such that:
- Israel could fulfil XYZ without jeopardising its existence, and
- the movement declares that, if Israel fulfils XYZ, they will end the boycott.
However, doing this would lose the support of those who oppose Israel not out of sympathy for Palestinian children but anger that the Jews have somewhere where they can exist without the permission of the Nations.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
4d ago
The only case I can see is a relative one - people opposed to liberal views aren't banned as much anymore, and that's a disadvantage compared to what they have.
"When one is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
4d ago
Point remains if a parent makes a mistake they'll usually by wrecked with guilt
I'm not talking about mistakes but conflicts of interests; 'parent has ideology with which child does not agree, makes decision based on that ideology, causes suffering to child, refuses to consider that they may have been wrong.'
So it just so happens that this blog post was talking about the exact same drug
That'll larn me to skim the article -- I thought they were talking about surgery!
In the case of puberty blockers, I would only intervene insofar as to ensure that the child and parents had at least heard the counterargument to their proposal; I could see applying the same argument to gender transition.
If you want to live in platonic / marxist utopia where all children belong to the state
Again, children aren't property. Not belonging to their parents doesn't mean that they must belong to someone else, it means that they belong to themselves; whatever authority we give to parents starts from zero even if it doesn't stay there.
If you actually believed that this means parents have no authority over their children, you'd be quoting Rousseau, not the American founding fathers.
I was quoting the Declaration as opposition to the divine right of kings.
"As above, so below" was the extrapolation to the divine right of parents.
Yes, that's my point. If you were advocating pure libertarianism, I could consider your idea of removing all authority from parents, and ensuring the child's autonomy. But since you don't, the idea is completely absurd to me.
The idea of something between 'pure libertarianism' and 'status quo' is absurd to you?
If parents have no authority over their children, than an adult has even less authority over another unrelated adult.
A having authority over Bs personal decisions is not the same thing as A having authority over B's authority over C. A parent has every right to forbid their child from making unreasonable demands of their younger sibling.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
4d ago
It is a bit odd how worried people are about credentials.
"Remember, a lone amateur built the Ark. A whole team of professionals built the Titanic."
The last, I believe, comes from an ideology which seems to approach the notion that the relevant subject of moral enquiry is racially-defined subsets of humanity, that individual human beings are rightfully thought of as cells within the racial super-organism, and that the 'white' super-organism has wronged the other super-organisms and is obligated to atone for its sins; the last point being the largest difference between them and the ideology which killed
6,000,000 people who had done nothing to provoke so much as a sharp glance, thus leading to the necessity of a Jewish State.The antidote to this ideology is not to say "Ackchyually, the white super-organism has never done anything wrong and is entitled to its demands.", but to reject the entire framing of races being more fundamental than individual human beings. This brings us closer to a world in which the principle of 'states should not be defined by ethnicity' can be applied without exception, and the State of Israel can extend citizenship without regard to ethnicity. Giving more ethnic groups the entitlement to stay the majority in "their" countries moves us further away from that world.
The perpetrators and victims in this case are usually either the same ethnic group, or groups more closely related to each other than to Northwest Europeans.
The persecutions are often motivated on religious grounds; they ask not so much 'is Fulan al-Fulani white or brown' as 'is he a Christian or a Muslim', and if the latter, 'what kind of Muslim'; they often show no less vitriol towards the 'wrong kind' of Muslims than towards Christians.
... caused by the same 'races-over-individuals' ideology mentioned above.
Which is at the root of many of the issues plaguing us today; people asking "What can I get out of this?" rather than "What is the right thing to do?".
However, we can talk about 'what you’re going to do for the native British'. (I'm not sure what you mean by 'native British'; sensu strictissimu, it would only include Welsh, Scottish, and Ulster Irish people; sensu latissimu, it would include anyone born in the United Kingdom to a British citizen or permanent resident. I will assume we are setting the cut-off in 1491, thus including the aforementioned Celtic peoples, plus the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Norman peoples arriving between the 5th and 12th centuries.)
If Omega-the-super-intelligent-computer-with-a-100.00%-track-record-of-being-right were to predict that, if ethnically British people become a minority in Britain, they will be expelled by the whatever ethnic group becomes the majority, regularly driven from whatever countries they have lived in for 2,000 years, and ultimately targetted for industrialised mass murder, then I would concede that you are justified in wanting to maintain your current majority status. (Note that ethnic British in Britain and Jews in Israel both constitute approximately three-quarters of the population.
Furthermore, if Omega-tsicwa100ptrobr were to predict that there will be a backslash against racism, ethnonationalism, and nativism in the United States, that, from 2040 onward, the United States will not privilege any ethnic group over any other, and will admit anyone who might plausibly be in danger of ethnic/religious violence in their current country of residence, disirregardless of any of the usual reasons for limiting immigration, and that opposition to these policies will not rise above the lizardman constant at any time in the next 10,000 years, then I would be more sympathetic to a secular, ethnically-neutral, union of Israel and Palestine, admitting any of the descendants of the Arabs who fled in 1948 on the condition that they respect the right of their Jewish neighbours to live peaceably as equals.
No, there is a difference between favouring one's immediate relatives and favouring one's own ethnic group. If two people can trace each generation their lineage back to a common ancestor, and that ancestor is recent enough that, as I linked to previously, the Ninth century Catholic Church would have considered a marriage between them to be incestuous, then one of them favouring the other over a random stranger becomes more justifiable in your example, and, in cases such as favouring someone for employment, is 'nepotism' rather than 'racism'.
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