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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Peterson vs Fuentes twitter drama

The entire story is shown in this thread. Someone is asking why something is 'like this', Fuentes predictably answers 'Jews', Peterson swoops in to condemn, and then the rest follows.

The AmericaFirst/Groyper movement seems to have finally found another 'gatekeeper' to poke. After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

Bullies thrive on weakness, and whilst it might not be nice to push peoples buttons like this, I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite. The trolls can only do what you allow them to get away with, as Charlie Kirk demonstrated by defusing the avenues of attack. Peterson seems to be doing the opposite of that.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying? I'm not sure how Peterson is doing. Last I heard he did a rather big media deal with Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. Whilst the AF 'conference' or whatever it's called, didn't do so well.

  • -10

  1. Peterson should know by now that he's really bad and unpersuasive at X-posting. Every time he gets in an argument there he comes across much worse than when he's talking.

  2. As is often then case with X threads, it's kind of hard for me to evaluate what's going on. It's like everyone is sitting around drinking absinthe and yelling at each other (in free verse? And drawing angry pictures?), I walk into the room for 5 minutes, and then walk right back out again thinking that maybe I prefer social contexts with babies and tea after all. Except that it's conducted in a public online venue, which is weird and probably not a good idea.

Quick compilations:

It's amazing watching these figures collapse into a deluded schizo-philosemitism. These figures used to represent the "Right of mainstream" perspective but that is falling apart as this nauseating Israel worship gets exposed to increasingly skeptical audiences.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying?

What do you mean by "this part of the right wing sphere" here? I wouldn't consider Peterson and Fuentes part of the same sphere. I also wouldn't consider the AF 'conference' being canceled an indicator of that sphere dying. Engagement on X is probably the biggest indicator for the growth of those spheres. And Fuentes was able to ratio the Petersons handedly. And yes, ratios matter- they are the memetic fitness signal among the genetic algo of X discourse.

There also appears to be an enormous proliferation of DR engagement on X. It's quaint to imagine not too long ago where the most "radical" decile of the right wing youth would be listening to Glenn Beck or something. But now they are on X signal-boosting DR talking points and engaging in WWII revisionism. The engagement is huge and appears to be growing.

Another area in which X discourse seems to be changing is Holocaust Revisionism. I am increasingly seeing posts alluding to or outright endorsing Holocaust Revisionism and WWII Revisionism with high engagement and high numbers of likes. The ranks of "Holocaust Deniers" are certainly bigger than they have ever been before and appear to be growing judging by the number of accounts I am seeing endorse it on X. The taboo is collapsing, and it is largely because of the actions of Israel and the collapse of the credibility of the Jordan Petersons and Glenn Becks unable to corral young right-wingers any longer.

"Western civilization would die without Israel"

It's takes like this that are utterly baffling to me. And I say this as someone who's very pro-Israel and who generally likes Jews (even though I generally hate their political leanings). Like Nikki Haley saying Israel doesn't need us, we need them, it just strikes me as a completely delusional way of looking at the relationship between Israel and the West. I'm more than happy to sell Israel all of the weapons they need to glass Gaza or replenish the Iron Dome or bomb Iran or whatever tickles their fancy, but I'm not happy to be the one paying for them via our foreign aid. Israel has clearly been very dependent on us for both arms and the funding to buy those arms, and it's completely insulting when people like Shapiro and Haley suggest that we need them and not the other way around.

It’s funny that JP’s own hero Solzhenitsyn, who he quotes and praises endlessly, wrote a ~1000 page tome on the influence of Jews in Soviet Russia, criticizing Jewish Russians as well as gentile Russians. Yet Peterson is unable to discuss the topic as it applies today. As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900. I think this is just part of his boomer programming. Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption. Not far from the original circumcision-exodus narrative, just applied to gentiles.

is this part of the right wing sphere dying

Nick Fuentes continues to grow in popularity, he is literally ratioing the Petersons and getting shoutouts from the Tate brothers. Fuentes-adjacent Sam Hyde is sitting down with zoomer influencer Matan and KillTony regulars, and also has a bizarre inroad to underground rap through Joeyy. They sorely lack IRL infrastructure but their influence is expanding I’d say.

As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900.

But it is. No way in heck would any Jewish community in either 1900 or 900 have outmarriage rates nearing 50%, for one.

Antisemitism is rising in popularity among younger people in the west. I don’t think that Fuentes is the story- he’s too much of a dweeb- but it’s definitely a thing.

Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption.

I like this metaphor even if I disagree with lots of the specifics. The overall thrust is definitely true in the sense of boomers thinking Jews are special perpetual victims.

The west can’t solve antisemitism because the west isn’t a fact based society. Maybe no societies are fact-based. The left can’t deal with antisemitism because oppressed-oppressor ideology makes the Jews look like the bad guy because they’re the most successful society on earth. The right is probably more aware of the reasons but they still can’t have the honest debate on the Jewish question.

they’re the most successful society on earth.

The Jews are America now?

Most successful group in the most successful country

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish. They get the bomb when we did and you just have to guess their intellect is enough to delay D-Day.

That quite clearly didn't work for them the first time they tried it, although I suppose the treaty of Versailles was a better deal than the end of WWII.

Truth there. Taking France so easily completely tilted it. I guess that was the difference. Even Oppenheimer was a NY born German Jew. It’s not hard to imagine the scenario if they got the nuke first if they somehow were friends.

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish.

Who is "we"? Maybe we never get into a war with Herr Schicklgruber; he nukes Moscow and unites Europe under a 6-armed swastika, and the US just deals.

Point being that a WWII Germany that's pro-Jewish is so different that you can't really assume anything will be the same.

Is the reason “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck”?

What did Charlie Kirk do?

Started using the term 'anti-white'.

He used to get 'invaded' a lot by AF/G, both online and in real life. He could hardly hold an event without the open question line being filled with AF/Gers asking about his stance on immigration, demographics and the relationship between Israel and the US. Most notably asking him over and over about the USS Liberty incident.

Charlie, to his or his handlers credit, changed his tune a bit. Becoming more aggressive against anti-white rhetoric. There's a layer of irony here, but there was definitely a change. But if there's lore here I'm missing I'd be happy for someone to correct the record on this. I'm not as tuned in to politics as I used to be.

I think it's because JP spend a lot of time thinking about evil, and he seems to have learned about the human capacity for evil by studying WW2 and concentration camps. He knows how easy it is for somebody to fall into an ideology like nazism and rationalize ones hatred for an outgroup, and he's quite determined to keep this from happening (again, this is just my view). Sadly, because he feels so strongly about this, he seems unable to pick up on the patterns relating semitism and wokeness.

Ethos is downstream from Mythos, it really is as simple as the boomer-internalization of the gas chamber mythos.

What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?

The Revisionist position is the same it has always been: the story that millions of people were tricked into entering gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower was wartime atrocity propaganda. This propaganda originally centered around the Western camps until those claims were proven false after Allied investigation.

The mainstream position admits the gas chamber story in the Western camps was a hoax, created by false testimony and confessions, but then they claim that the "extermination camps" conquered by the Soviet Union were all totally real. Revisionist scholars have spent decades proving that the gas chamber story was likewise a wartime atrocity propaganda hoax in the currently alleged Eastern 'extermination camps' like Majdanek.

So the Revisionist position is simply that the gas chamber story is as real in the Eastern camps as it was in the Western camps. The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West but totally real in the camps "investigated" by the Soviet Union, where they fabricated evidence and denied access to Western observers.

The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West

[citation needed] that it is mainstream position

The mainstream narrative says that the six alleged death camps were in the east. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps

Notice how all the camps in the west were not death camps. So in the context of the mainstream narrative, how do you explain contemporary newspaper articles from the time confidently claiming otherwise? Obviously they are understood to be propaganda. In other words, a “hoax.”

Can you link mainstream position confirming that camps on West were described as extermination camps?

(It was claimed upthread that "western extermination camps were hoaxes" and want to see confirmation of that)

(again: it would not make big difference to me whether they gassed people to death or starved them to death in Auschwitz, but I obviously prefer to have an accurate info)

At Nuremberg, the series of Eastern camps allegedly responsible for the majority of gassing victims were barely mentioned at all in the trials. What was filmed and submitted as evidence were allegations that the camps liberated by the Western allies were the centers of extermination. Here is the Nuremberg Concentration camp footage which was submitted as evidence and shown in the trial courtroom supposedly showing a gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp, here's a short transcript of that part:

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided...

Even mainstream historians admit today that the clothing hanging outside the delousing chambers was not from prisoners executed in gas chambers, but that these were real delousing chambers use to disinfest clothing to prevent epidemic typhus. Dachau was one of the camps mentioned in the document I cited earlier, admitting that this claim was a hoax created by false testimonies and confessions:

The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, ...

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that the confessions had been extracted by tortures and the testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.

The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates, who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.

The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. But it insists that the identical claims made in the camps conquered by the Soviet Union, the camps where the Allied Commissions of Inquiry were not allowed access to investigate, are the only camps where those claims were actually real.

Revisionists though have shown that likewise these Eastern camps which are currently claimed to have been extermination camps are the exact same story as the Western camps: real delousing facilities and shower rooms which were fabricated as gas chambers by Soviet propagandists, tortured confessions, and false testimonies.

Fun fact, if you review the Wikipedia page of the Nazi Concentration Camps film submitted as evidence and screened at the Nuremberg trial, the "Contents" section omits Dachau entirely and makes no description of the falsely alleged gas chamber described in this film. This is part and parcel for Wikipedia treatment of the Holocaust topic as a whole.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

He hates Fuentes for the same reason he hates the feminists.

His reaction to complaints from UofT pro-trans progressives was to liken them to Maoists. He accuses Trudeau of having a "murderous equity doctrine" for defending gender equity. Anything that blames/focuses on groups earns his ire as the revival of some murderous 20th century movement.

If feminists are like murderous communists and pro-trans activists are Maoists, how should he feel about anti-Semites?

There are absolutely philosemites nakedly driven by shared enemies (Douglas Murray comes to mind) but Peterson has always leaned towards unhinged rhetoric about people if he feels they resemble certain baddies. We don't need an explanation. What would be strange is him having any patience for Fuentes at all.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

I understand it to be similar to my own embrace of Zionism - I just despise Israel's enemies. If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly, I would apply a great deal more skepticism to things like their colonization of the West Bank. As it is, I just need to pick sides and the choice is very easy. Notably, this extends to the spillover of the causes in the United States, where enthusiastic Zionists are no real problem for me, but the Hamas enthusiasts are spectacularly annoying leftists.

If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly

They aren't. Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived. Assad fights to keep Syria together. Israel fights to cause a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. AIPAC and ADL want to open the borders to the west and ban right wingers off twitter. Israel financed jihadists in Syria while bombing the country. Meanwhile, israAID was shipping migrants to Europe.

We heard similar arguments for invading Iraq. The result was a giant refugee crisis, a spike in islamism and a disaster for local christians. Israel is not the anti-islam option, it is the pro Islam option.

Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived.

Must be a really great place. I can't imagine anyone fighting that long to stay in Jersey City or Bayonne, NJ.

the enemies of the West and free civilization

The West and free civilization seem to have led inexorably to everything you now decry. Are you sure this makes sense?

Are you sure you're thinking of me? I am quite literally proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. Disagreeing with my fellow Americans about whether Chevron deference or Skidmore deference is the appropriate degree of license for administrative agency discretion does not shift me to wishing I had more Islamic theocracy in my life.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

Because your standards for being a philosemite are absurdly low such that everyone seems to be defending the Jews too much.

After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

What did he do? I mean in general Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, it’s clear he’s in another dimension to the whole AF wing.

Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

The impression I'd got from this article in Unherd was that Trump doesn't like Project 2025 because:

a) He's the big boss and nobody tells him what to do (in his self-conception). He's not interested in being some pencil-neck's sockpuppet.

b) He thinks that small-state conservatism is stupid and electorally unpopular.

How accurate is that? I don't really know much about the Heritage Foundation.

Trump didn't write it and hasn't read it. Reporters keep asking him questions about it and he doesn't like how those questions hijack his messaging strategy.

More or less, with a side of project 2025 being way overblown and not coordinated well enough with Trump.

What is going

On with Peterson’s

Spacing, capitalization, and punctuation

In that thread

Been reading e e cummings?

It makes a little sense if you try to do a Jordan Peterson impression when you read it.

You know, I forget the interview I was watching. Maybe it was Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. They stumbled onto the topic of Worlds War II history, and how "infected" it is. Which is to say, you can question the facts, the narrative, the scholarship, the normie understanding of virtually any other historical event. "Well actshually..." to your hearts content. "Just asking questions..." all you want. But you do that with World War II and people lose their god damned minds, as though you were poking an infected wound.

Now in the interview, they mostly take this framing, and talk about how WW2 was the dawn of the American Empire, and all the stories we tell ourselves about how America is a force for good in the world. This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since, not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so. And it all goes back to the story we aren't allowed to question at all about how we were the good guys in World War II.

Now they don't go down this rabbit hole, but I will. Wrapped up in our unquestioning moral superiority that gives us the right to intervene anywhere in the world we want, is that we stopped the holocaust. And so philosemitism is baked into that story that is holy to our civic religion. Jews are our chosen people, and protecting them gives us the moral standing we need to bomb brown people for any reason what so ever.

This is an example for how X discourse influences the Tucker Carlson's and creates a feedback loop. Carlson will wade further into WWII Revisionism as it continues to gain ground on X. These twitter Spats actually matter.

This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since...

When did this idea become so popular? Korea was a stalemate that has sharply bettered the lives of many people in the long run. The US won in Grenada, in Panama, in Kuwait, in Haiti, and so on. Maybe the results suck anyway or maybe these are just too lightweight of opponents to be treated as serious, but the United States does win military conflicts. Iraq was a stupid idea, but Saddam Hussein is emphatically dead. Muammar Gaddafi doesn't think he kicked the Americans out of Libya, notably because we came, we saw, he died.

The US Military is highly effective. The US State Department is completely unable to do any of the "establishing a peaceful liberal democracy" tasks that it thinks it's capable of.

But the State Department is also where people who study international policy dream of working, so they push it's failures back onto the military.

That sentence also stuck out to me as very strange. I generally think of it the opposite way. The US has generally won every specific engagement its been in. They seem very good at winning battles. The rare times they do lose become rallying cries for the improvement and betterment of the armed forces.

The US achieving its foreign policy goals seems heavily related to just how realistic and specific those goals are. If the goal is something specific like "kill that guy, or destroy that small country's military" then they do well. If the goal is more nebulous like "spread democracy, or prevent the spread of communism" then they seem to consistently fail.

Did Vietnam result in meaningful improvement? Judging by Iraq our counterinsurgency skills were still lacking.

South Vietnam didn't fall to insurgency. Both the Ngo family and the later variants of kleptocracy were able to handle the VC. South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese tanks, and the US military is quite good at conventional warfare- both in 1975 and today. In actual fact, US involvement did prolong the life of the South Vietnamese kleptocratic minority-rule dictatorship(which is what it was) meaningfully- the ARVN couldn't have stopped the Tet offensive on its own, and required US air support and political advisement to stop the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive.

I thought the general goal with Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism. They failed at that.

Vietnam seems like it's in a good place nowadays, my guess would that the Vietnam war made that happy ending take longer.

I suspect that in two to twenty years we will have retroactively lost the Korean War.

Can you explain?

In other words, I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle. If that happens, it will be difficult to look back at the 1950 Korean War and call it a victory, even if it really was a mostly successful military operation at the time. A similar thing happened with the first Gulf War, which is now much less rosy in the American memory after the 2004 Iraq war and the current state of Iraq now.

I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle.

That is certainly a bold prediction. I don't see it going quite so well for the Norks. Say whatever you will about the US military's ability to deal with insurgent groups, if you give them a stand-up fight against an organized state military it'll be Christmas at the Pentagon. Generals who cut their teeth as butter bars in Desert Storm will weep tears of pure joy.

I suspect that any scenario in which Kim goes for it will involve the US military being tied down elsewhere.

When did this idea become so popular? [...] Maybe the results suck anyway

When figuring out what someone is trying to say in a compound sentence, it helps to read the part after the comma

not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so.

Yes, you have correctly restated my point that even when we "win" on the field and have a great big "Mission Accomplished" celebration, we are worse off for it.

Perhaps you didn't intend to use "and" to join those clauses, but there it is, clear as day. Many of these conflicts were won militarily. In fact, many of them even achieved the publicly stated foreign policy goals.

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