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 -
You will find that topics absent from the discourse are much more commonly so for reasons of being completely unimportant/uninteresting to anyone than vice versa...
Yes?
Yes.
I would say that being uninterested in JQ is quite a condemnation of intelligence – or maybe just social intelligence – of anyone who is so uninterested in JQ, because obviously Jews as the sample of humanity with the highest effective raw intelligence (which is abundantly claimed and demonstrated from the kids' television with that silly Einstein photo, to surnames in 20th century history textbooks and billions still affected by "Marxism", to creative products consumed every day to the grave) and the population with the most effective collective actions (again, clear both in mundane details like thriving, non-assimilating traditional neighbourhoods with private police and kosher stores, to the highest level like the Israeli lobby and Israeli TFR and – speaking of Culture War – the ability to turn on a dime, organize and curb stomp the oh-so-invulnerable Democratically backed woke political machine as it started to show real animus towards them) are among the most interesting entities on the planet.
There are other interesting people – SMPY sample, Thiel fellowship, Jains, Parsis, Tamil Brahmins, AGP transsexuals, Furries, IMO winners etc. – but one can be forgiven for being ignorant of their properties. Nobody is ignorant of Jews, they've made that impossible.
Oppositely, and more appropriately in this venue, which is downstream of Scott "THE ATOMIC BOMB CONSIDERED AS HUNGARIAN HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT" Alexander's blog comment section, downstream of Eliezer "wrote the script for AI risk discourse with some fanfics 20 years ago" Yudkowsky's web site:
– performative, even aggressive disinterest in JQ, despite Jews obsessively working to be interesting, may be a sign of high social intelligence and capacity to take a clue.
Obviously, not "Jews" but Ashkenazi Jews.
Other kinds of Jews are as interesting and as world historically important as Alawites, Copts, Maronites, Mandeans or Yazidis but Ashkenazi are indeed sui generis group.
Descendants of few hundred Middle Eastern merchants and Italian women (presumably from merchant families too) who wandered around Europe until they found home
on deadly desert planetin the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, where the nobles needed managers for their estates willing to squeeze the peasants as hard as humanly possible. The rest is history.If billions are affected by Marxism, it is by its lingering memory, classical Marxism is as dead as Pharaoh's worship (together with Freudianism and other high IQ fads of the past), but in its heyday it was indeed world changing force.
How would world look like without Askhenazi Jews? In broad strokes, not so different. The scientific, commercial, agricultural, industrial, intellectual and political revolutions that created modernity happened with minimal Jewish influence. Old feudal and monarchic systems undid themselves, no "subversion" was necessary.
In smaller strokes, you can make any alternate timeline you wish. Maybe world of sunny smiley face Russia :-)
Another interesting subgroup that recently appeared: if @KulakRevolt report is representative, Free State libertarians, who are actually doing something to promote cause of liberty, including breeding new generation of liberty lovers.
More options
Context Copy link
I've known smart Jews, dumb Jews, interesting Jews and tiresome Jews -- are you proposing that they are interesting for HBD reasons, due to disproportionate population prevalence of smart/interesting? I'm not very interested in that either.
What is this folksy muttering supposed to demonstrate? I am not interested in helping you signal just how uninteresting and not worth noticing you find the most salient pattern of interest in humanity. If you are incapable of recognizing salience and need its relevance obsequiously justified for you to bother, then that's nothing less than a cognitive blind spot; my condolences, but I do not agree with the right of cognitively impaired people to censor interests of others.
But I think you're noticing the patterns alright – even this bigram, indeed.
Meanwhile, in other news: it seems that Libs of TikTok now have the capacity to cancel people for mean posts online. A few years back, when the woke was on the upswing and this community was at its prime, this would have seemed hard to believe – and a cause for investigation and much debate about secrets to building alternative institutions and whatnot. Today I was astonished (not) to discover that Libs of TikTok, this completely unsinkable, obsessed juggernaut of anti-wokery, itself immune to any cancellation, is ran by an Orthodox Jewish woman. That part, however, is pointedly not interesting. Got it.
Good News -- I don't care about your interests either! Like, go nuts man.
I mean, what's so interesting about it? To the extent that this person is interesting, would she be less interesting if she were a WASPy housewife? (as I'd also assumed)
I think you are definitely over-pattern matching if you are suggesting that culture warriors are in general particularly Jewish -- it's not clear to me, is that what you are suggesting? If so it's pretty easy to find a
chinese cardiologistnon-Jewish counterpart to LoTT -- is our own TracingWoodgrains evidence of the relevance of "the Mormon Question"?I'm pretty interested in CW, and not unamenable to thoughts of something like a Jewish conspiracy to the extent that there is indeed a remarkable solidarity there (particularly among Israeli-born Jews) in terms of supporting each other in business & politics -- I think you will need to do a lot more work than "even LoTT is a Jew!" to get from there to "the Jews are to blame for the Kulturkampf".
Fair point! To me it would even be more interesting if a "WASPy" housewife were so aggressive in harassing "libs", so prolific and so invincible, yes. Would probably get crushed by the peer pressure alone, nevermind all the bans.
But maybe I'm wrong. There's like OOMs more of WASPy housewives. Can one point to an example of one doing what Chaya Raichik does, and at comparable scale? After all, that's what you assumed, so this should be a more typical occurrence.
(I think I know there isn't one).
Mormons are very interesting too, if less so and for different reasons.
Trace is an account with ≈25k followers whose infamy mainly comes from being associated with Chaya Raichik and, more directly, Jesse Singal; regrettably (not because he's a Gentile, I jut believe he had more constructive things to offer than those two), his own ideas have had less impact on the conversation thus far. This is a self-defeating comparison.
My contention has been very clear that Jews are interesting, first of all, because they, individually and collectively, easily attain prominence in whatever they do, tend to act with atypical (for their class) irreverence towards established norms (but without typical White collective self-sacrifice), and affect society to an absurdly disproportionate degree. Culture warring is one specific expression of those qualities, maybe not the greatest absolutely but the most relevant to this place.
More extremely, I believe this topic is objectively interesting, as in, dissent here is not a matter of taste or preference or whatever, only of failure to form a correct opinion for some reason. This I believe because perception of things as interesting must be subordinate to effectiveness at world modeling; and not being able to reason about Jews as a whole as interesting indicates inability to model the world, as that'd require being surprised by parts of its mechanism.
Further, I think that either it's been clear what I mean and you are being obtuse, or you are biased in a way that makes this exchange a dead end. Seeing as we've been at it for like half a decade, I lean towards "doesn't matter which it is".
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The topic is certainly not absent from the public discourse, it is the most important issue in the public discourse. The Holocaust narrative, being pro-Israel, "fighting anti-Semitism", these are all expressions of this issue and they are treated with utmost importance by everyone on both sides of the political aisle. What is lacked is any critical perspective because of the consensus held by both sides of the political aisle.
Does this look like a guy who thinks the issue of Jewish influence is uninteresting and unimportant? No, it looks like someone who is ritualistically submitting to Jewish influence, and whatever exposure to NRx he had hasn't helped him. "Vote Republican and support Israel", same old same old.
...
Make up your mind, guy.
Nobody gives a shit though -- except for a handful of obsessives such as yourself.
The "JQ" is parlance for the critique of Jewish influence in culture and politics. That criticism is ignored and countersignaled across both sides of the political aisle. They don't criticize it, they operate within established boundaries. NRx doesn't criticize it either. So someone like JD Vance, with his first breath as the VP pick, advocating for war with Iran and shilling for Israel, even as he plays isolationist when it comes to Ukraine, is basically what we can expect from someone who claims NRx influence. The JQ can't be assimilated, NRx can be because it respects those boundaries.
Your suggestion that a consensus among political and cultural elites indicates a topic is unimportant or uninteresting is so unfathomably wrong. It would be like saying the Christian Question isn't important because all elite political and cultural figures agree that criticisms of Christianity are entirely off the table and verboten. Obviously if that were true, you would consider the Christian Question to be pertinent especially because all criticisms of it are functionally or legally outlawed.
I would suggest that if both sides of the political dialectic, despite their large apparent differences and hatred of eachother, agree on a major area that defines moral boundaries and cultural consciousness, that is the issue which defines the entire political dialectic. This is because, despite incessant conflict in all areas of political and cultural life, both sides of the aisle are working together to advance the interests of that particular issue. Vance isn't going to break the dialectic, he's just going to be new window dressing on shilling for Israel under the influence of some other Jewish thinker.
Vance, as a 39-year old possible VP could actually make history by challenging Zionist influence in American life. He's not going to do that. He's going to play ball.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all -- I'm suggesting that the consensus amongst virtually everyone in North America, with the exception of yourself an perhaps a not-quite-enough-to-fill-an-average-high-school-gym contingent of fellow travellers, is that this question is not only uninteresting and unimportant -- but profoundly silly and/or boring.
A total nullity.
There's not exactly a consensus on that. There are a lot of anti-Zionists on the progressive side of the aisle. The thing is, though, to get to full Nazi you need to be an anti-Zionist and a particular flavour of HBDer; if you're not an HBDer, or think that Ashkenazi Jews are mostly just smarter white people, then all you really want is to destroy Zionism the cultural phenomenon and assimilate Jews a bit better - no gas chambers here.
This might be naive, but I don't understand how HBD would lead someone to be anti-jewish. I'd expect the total opposite, in fact.
Like I said, HBD doesn't necessarily lead there, but there's a particular flavour of HBD that does. HBD isn't solely about intelligence, after all, much as that tends to hog the limelight.
The Nazi position is that Jews are genetically predisposed to exploitativity and conspiracy, which is an obvious deal-breaker for anyone who doesn't think he can get in on the conspiracy. Genius is not prosocial if it's evil genius.
(NB: I'm explaining a position I disagree with, here.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To get to full Nazi you need to believe in all sorts of superstitious mystic babble and stay away from all science, logic, facts and reason.
Real unironic hard core Hitler heiling Nazis are either barely literate tattooed thugs or deranged occultists.
Evolutionary HBDIQ science does not lead to NSDAP politics, it leads to old time Swedish social democratic politics.
Can you explain more about this?
NAZI: We must return to our noble and glorious ancestors.
SCIENCE: Our ancestors were savage beasts, we must move forward.
NAZI: We need living space to provide food for our people.
SCIENCE: We barely started to use scientific methods of plant and animal breeding and we alredy improved crop and livestock yields manyfold over limits previously thought "natural" and "unbreakable".
NAZI: The lowly mob should not rule. We need Great Leader chosen by Destiny to unify our people.
SCIENCE: The mob indeed should not rule, and neither should any man alone. Relying on one man is single point of failure (especially when the man is drug addicted failed artist with no education), the best and the brightest need to be in charge.
NAZI: The Leader must command and everyone must obey without questions. There will be no place for such treason as criticism, especially criticism of The Leader.
SCIENCE: No one and nothing should be above criticism, free exchange of ideas among smart and educated people is necessary for progress and advancement. No one's word should be trusted all alone.
NAZI: War is glorious, war is noble, there is nothing greater than war. War considered awesome.
SCIENCE: War is pointless destruction of capital both physical and human - the best people die first and cannot be replaced. War was beneficial for human evolution during Stone Age, but these times are long gone. Especially in industrial age there is nothing more dysgenic than war.
War considered harmful.
NAZI: We need eugenics to purify our race from sickness and degeneracy.
SCIENCE: Yes, and we must start with hereditary psychopaths like you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Appealing to public consensus is weak here, because obviously the differential between public consensus and reality is what makes the issue important. True, the public cannot in their wildist dreams imagine even mild criticism of Jewish influence in American political and cultural life. Does that mean the issue is not important for Culture War, or does it mean it's the single most important issue?
I've already stated the issue is important because the consensus actively ignores it.
Average Joe grew up watching Schindler's List and reading Anne Frank, so criticism of Jewish influence for him is silly at best and beyond-the-pale at worst. That doesn't mean the issue is unimportant, it means the issue is culture-defining.
As I said several posts ago, the odds are typically on the former -- it's certainly not indicative of the latter! (unless you are also suggesting that we should be imagining Flat Earthery to be intrinsically important since more-or-less nobody thinks it's even worth talking about?)
If you want to make the case for why your brave fringe is right and everybody else is wrong, then make it -- but 'check it out, nobody is talking about this!' is a really weak case.
Yes, that is what I am doing. People who think that critique of Jewish influence in American political and cultural life is silly and immoral are wrong- all of them. That perception is just an artifact of the prevailing Culture, it's not based on reality. I'm interested in challenging that Culture, and my prediction is that J D Vance is going to be a manifestation for how easily NRx is subsumed by the prevailing Culture.
You aren't doing it though -- European anti-semitism is kind of lindy I guess, but it doesn't exactly stand on its own. What's exactly your issue with the jews? Like, what's wrong with them?
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link