This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm just going to register my schadenfreude at Sailer, BAP, et Al. This is probably a prime good usage of "but I didn't think they would eat MY face" meme, n'est pas?
Jewish HBDers, racists, etc send the message that my Aunt Hilda was 100% right about niggers, and probably correct in a limited way about 'Ricans too; but then they do this dance as to why she was completely wrong about Kikes.
I feel similarly when people tell me that HBD is obviously true, because "evolution didn't stop at the neck;" then are shocked Pikachu when people start dusting off the conniving greedy Jew stereotype and say "no no no we were just talking about IQ!" Maybe, but before iq tests were invented the differences you purport to notice existed, why can't other metrics exist even if we haven't found how to measure them yet?
How would you even measure 'greediness'? My experience has been that it's basically just a word used enviously. If I'm a tenant who can't afford rent, then landlords are greedy. If I'm a low-paid worker, then my boss is greedy. If inflation is making food more expensive, then supermarkets are greedy.
Antisemites don't think Jews are greedy because they've observed it, they think Jews are greedy because Jews are rich, and to the envious, rich=greedy.
By contrast, it's pretty easy to notice intelligence effects dispassionately. Even blank slatists notice that Asian kids do well in school.
Holy Thread Necromancy Batman!
There was a time before IQ tests, there was even a time before schooling. Would intelligence still have been noticeable? Sure, but in inchoate ways. You'd notice who was intelligent and who wasn't, but not in ways you could easily measure. Then we'd go on to invent things like testing, apply it to diverse groups, and we'd be able to see this in numbers.
Meanwhile, HBDers like Sailer are peddling that the racists of the 1800s were correct in their inchoate understanding of the racial differences between whites and blacks; BUT those same racists were completely wrong in their inchoate understanding of Jews. Sailer argues for a biodeterminist approach to capability, but a blank-slatist approach to morality: humans all start out with no genetic moral tendencies.
But why would this be the case? Looking around, dispassionately, even Blank Slatists notice that humans have different moral tendencies, and folk traditions would hold that they seem to be genetic in nature, the same folk traditions that HBDers say were accurate about intelligence. Take it from the horse's mouth:
Moreover, I disagree that greed is not understandable or measurable as a negative trait. Any more than the other six deadly sins aren't measurable or understandable as negative traits.
"Wrath isn't actually bad, the weak call the strong Wrathful out of envy of their strength." (Tbf, this is, like, half of Nietzsche)
"Lust isn't actually bad, incels call the beautiful lustful out of envy because they can't get laid." (Tbf, this is most of the incel discourse)
"Pride isn't actually bad, losers call the proud sinful out of envy because they have no achievements to be proud of."
I should admit I am somewhat taking the piss here, I don't believe that HBD is true in the way it is typically presented. But I find it difficult to argue, using HBD premises, that antisemitism is ridiculous and unscientific.
I think what weakens the 'Jews really are greedy' hypothesis is that every market dominant minority has been accused of being greedy. Chinese in southeast Asia, Indians in former British colonies, Boers in South Africa, Parsis in India, Igbos in Nigeria.
The complaints are exactly the same ones that medieval European peasants and Confucian scholars made about merchants generally. That they were greedy middle-men who didn't charge 'fair price' and who didn't produce anything themselves. Sometimes the targets of these complaints were an ethnic group, sometimes they weren't. But the root of the complaints seem to always be envy, and the fact that humans prefer moralistic condemnation to the cold, impersonal reality of the forces of economics.
Honestly, it sounds like you're just trying to tar HBD by association. What you've written suggests that you're uncomfortable with the reality of racial differences in intelligence, and so you want to associate it with the primitive Jew-hatred of the past.
And every poor peasant/slave minority has been accused of being some mix of stupid, lazy, racist, violent. Romans on the Germans, British on the Irish, WASPs on Polish and Italian immigrants, Americans on Mexicans. Does that undermine your arguments about blacks?
Further, there's no logical reason why two different minority groups in different parts of the world can't both be greedy.
You're making the anti-HBD arguments that any Vox thinkpiece by a history professor at a mid-tier liberal arts college would make, which would be dismissed by the HBDers when it comes to intelligence.
No, because we have actual scientific evidence. There actually are racial differences in IQ, in brain size, in reaction time, in educational attainment and we can measure these things objectively. What anyone thought in the past is irrelevant. The fact that one group of people in the past believed (correctly) that there were racial differences in intelligence doesn't mean that another group of people in the past believing that Jews were unusually greedy or sneaky (without evidence) is correct.
You may want us to talk about the past because making an anti-HBD argument is easy that way, because everyone in the past believed a mixture of true, false and crazy things and its easy to pick and choose. But the only thing that matters is hard evidence. If someone presents actual evidence that Jews are greedy or that all racial groups are equally intelligent then I'll update my beliefs. But if you are (I assume) trying to convince me away from the hard-HBD position, telling me that I'm obligated to hate Jews as a consequence of that belief isn't very convincing.
Come now. I've been around the block. I know better than to try to convince any mottizens of anything, let alone that they're obligated to do anything.
I'm making the point from the first that Jewish or philosemitic HBDers who are shocked, shocked to find the same arguments turned around strike me as tragicomic figures, in the classic leopards eating people's faces party mold.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The stereotype around here is that Jews are misers, something more quantifiable than "greedy". Penny-pinching, huge effort to eke out a bit more profit, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
TBH, I'm much less predisposed to believe HBD claims about Jews (in either direction) than sub-Saharan Africans (or *nesians), simply because of the shorter timescales. With sub-Saharan Africans there's a fairly-long timescale and lack of Neanderthal admixture; with *nesians there's Denisovan admixture. Neanderthals and Denisovans had almost a million years to diverge, and Out of Africa II was ~70,000 years ago (with additional time if you're comparing to West or South Africans due to divergence within Africa); Jews are what, 4,000 years old at best?
"n'est-ce pas". "n'est pas" is pronounced approximately "nay pah" and means "isn't"; "n'est-ce pas?" is pronounced approximately "ness pah" and means "is it not?"
It's difficult to assign divergence times on what looks more liike net than a tree.
More options
Context Copy link
Got me on the months old correction. Thanks. Still not sure why people are going back to a half assed comment.
I'm always surprised that Neanderthals have gotten such bad marketing, when it would be fairly easy to play them as the lost super race, scientifically.
Well, I can't speak for @Crowstep, of course (perhaps he uses the "Comments" feed and saw my post?), but in my case it was that I did a search for "stop at the neck" since I wanted to find an old post I'd written that used the phrase, and happened across yours on the way since it was more recent.
Well, the thing is that that interpretation only really became coherent in 2010, when it was proven that whites and Asians are Neanderthal in significant part but not whole. Neanderthals were first thought to be our full ancestors (and thus no particular master race, plausibly less intelligent than modern descendants due to intervening selection), and then thought to have been yet another dead branch (and thus the same sort of thing as Australopithecus/Paranthropus robustus, who absolutely deserve the reputation of pop-culture Neanderthals). And, well, to state the obvious, by 2010 "whites and Asians are, as a whole, intellectually superior to sub-Saharan Africans because they have Neanderthal blood; Neanderthals were the real 'Numenoreans'" - which is the claim we're talking about, stated plainly - was something that mainstream journalism and big-budget fiction wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
(To be clear, I'm agnostic on that claim; there aren't any obvious reasons it can't be true, but the well of research on the topic has been so badly poisoned by both sides that it would be foolish to be confident in almost any claim in the area without having done the research oneself. I'm merely stating, descriptively, why it is not part of the pop-culture understanding of Neanderthals.)
You're probably correct. I'm just surprised by the lack of Neanderthal as Atlanteans, and the inverse lack of "only blacks are pure humans."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
“Secret” is doing a lot in the OP. In any case, Sailer and BAP have very different views on most of these issues, Sailer is largely a form of civic nationalist, BAP has an incoherent kind of gay misogynist LARP more focused on contempt for women than other groups. Neither attempted to ‘hide’ their Jewishness, Costin wore an IDF t-shirt in college and posted his DNA test results and is open about it, Sailer is adopted but has speculated his birth father (iirc) could have been Jewish on several occasions over the last 20-30 years. In either case I don’t think that Jews shouldn’t participate on the right or in these spaces because some people might deploy related evopsych arguments in favor of antisemitism. As MacDonald and others show, they would do this anyway.
The logic of your argument is exactly what led to a lot of Jewish academics being unwilling to believe the obvious evidence for a lot of this stuff in the mid-20th century, not because they were nefarious manipulators trying to destroy European civilization but often because they didn’t want to be ‘on the side of’ people who justified antisemitism which they were personally afraid of. That doesn’t stop scientific enquiry, though, and the truth is the first duty of the principled researcher, wherever it leads.
It reminds me of ‘tradwife regret’ discourse (see Lauren Southern recently) and associated schadenfreude. But that doesn’t mean modern western gender relations are good, let alone optimal. It certainly doesn’t “disprove” women being socially conservative because hurr durr leopards ate her face lol, girlboss discourse is back because one person tried the hashtag tradlife and it wasn’t all that fun. There’s the famous cautionary tale of Ettore Ovazza, loyal Jewish Italian fascist, shot by the Germans in 1943. Did leopards eat his face? Perhaps, but no moreso than anyone destroyed by a twisted version of a belief system they once supported, and that is a very large number of people. I’m not going to become a leftist just because there are antisemites and misogynists on the right.
Do you think that Jews ought to compromise themselves at all in regards to Jewish identity politics that can be anti christian and anti european? Or is it only on the other side to be tolerant?
For example, they should oppose laws that enforce a story of Jews as oppressed and European Christians as oppressors, and in fact support institutions promoting a narrative that does include some criticism of Jews for their contributions to far left extremism, and antiwhite movement.
It isn't really a complicated issue. There are Jews who are an asset to the right like Stephen Miller who tend to have an identity that encompasess more than the Jewish one. And Jews who do have resentment towards right wingers and Europeans and strong Jewish identity, do exist aplenty, and are not caused by insufficient appeasement, since there is ever abudance of the appeasing right.
Only a minority of Jews are such in their ideology and behavior that it would be wise to accept them. Neocons for example are a subversive force on the right. However, this can theoretically change.
Ironically, Jews would have assimiliated more, if organizations like ADL, WJC, etc, etc were banned. And in fact, Jewish support of multiculturalism and anti-european identity politics and intersectionality is in part related to the more radical Jews wanting the Jews not to assimiliate to whiteness.
Anyway, both Jews as a pattern and non Jewish pro Jewish types, are not even handed people only opposing antisemitism, but are highly biased to an extend that could be described as Jewish supremacist. And paint as antisemitism things through that lense. It would be both moral in general from a more unviersalist point of view, but also good in regards to the right and European-Jewish relations, and more friendship, for Jews and those promoting pro jewish narratives, to water down their wine. To compromise. To accept their own sins, instead of doing the narcisist manifesto.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
Avoiding the narcisist manifesto, does not make them self hating.
When Amy Wax claimed that her father was unduly too critical towards Christians, that wasn't self hateful.
And on much of the right they will find people who are going to accomodate them and aren't going to be promoting some demand of maximalist self hating dogma. The Jews who enjoy a positive reputation among the kind of right that doesn't like Shaprio aren't just Unz, but plenty of non self hating Jews but who have compromised on level of seperate jewish identity politics and do see the interests of europeans as legitimate and identify with a broader category rather than seeing them as a hostile other.
Of course, the issue is that laws currently promoted are Jewish supremacist in nature. And those who support that.
Another issue, is that if you got some hateful Jewish supremacists pushing their agenda, that is going to inflame the passions and anger on the other side. Just like Jews who have compromised and are more moderate and friendly towarsd the right incentivize a more positive reactions.
One's ideology in regards to nativism, immigration, AA and such issues is of course fundamental. And whether a Jew in a european country identifies as being part of that group and sees them as his people.
Jews claiming to be right wing who still retain sufficiently strong liberal views on such issues and are motivated by seperate ethnic identity are going to be treated with more suspicion. And even if their liberal views are somehow unrelated to their Jewish identity, they are a problem. Like I said, neocons should be reasonably excluded because of having sufficiently different and hostile ideology, and have a history of cancelling actual right wingers and conservatives for being insuficiently liberal on racial, and other issues. And more so especially for being insufficiently subservient to Jews and making any criticisms.
Sailer also wrote a short post after the issue discussed critical of the Israel lobby that the uncomrpomising Jewish identitarians wouldn't have promoted. So I wouldn't consider him the same as those types. More of a positive force than a negative. https://www.unz.com/isteve/not-getting-the-joke-2/
Which doesn't make this good article https://keithwoods.pub/p/protestantism-jews-and-wokeness arguing against his thesis a bad thing. Even those who are sufficiently a positive force to not gatekeep them out can promote bad ideas, which would be good to debate and counter.
Anyway, excessive compromise in pro female, pro jewish, pro black, etc direction is a key part of our current situation. This isn't to say purity spiralling in the opposite direction is correct, but appeasement is the wrong move and having those who are excessive pro jewish, pro female, etc, etc compromise is correct in general, but especially for the right. The right will become indistinquishable with the left in fundamental issues, if it listens to women and Jews and LGBT Republicans and pro migration types and pro black types arguing for more appeasement. More compromise. Laws giving their favorite groups preferential treatment. And there is a connection with appeasement to one, leading to appeasement to all and the same intersectional story. While painting anything but that as antisemitic, misogynistic, anti black, racist, etc, etc.
The right has compromised too much in these directions, is losing its own identity as a right and moving too far to the left in the process and needs to fix this overreach and not increase it.
Jews wanting to be a part of the right have an even bigger moral obligation than Jews in general to water down their wine, and compromise from the more extreme positions typical in Jewish community that are part of a progressive Jewish nationalist narrative of Jews as always oppressed, always in the right against especially a European Christian historical, present, and possibly future oppressor. Some level of admitting fault is not only accurate but necessary because if Jews are progressive as a pattern, and as Prager says "the conscience of humanity" why oppose the ADL, and the activities of those Jews who do see with hostility european christian civilization? Since Jews didn't do nothing wrong, then they were correct to be leftists under this perspective and only reacting to "antisemitism" under this false narrative. So why oppose the current leftist trajectory? That compromise I mentioned towards a more moderate position and having a stronger broader identity that sees European rightists as your people would also make it justifiable for European rightists to accept such Jews.
Sure, I agree with this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This strikes me as a touch overcooked. BAP is quite willing to go on about "shtetlbillies", and Sailer regularly talks about the perversity of Jewish support for immigration and the failure of high-achieving American Jews to show appropriate noblesse oblige.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link