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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I've known smart Jews, dumb Jews, interesting Jews and tiresome Jews

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.

I do not agree with the right of cognitively impaired people to censor interests of others.

Good News -- I don't care about your interests either! Like, go nuts man.

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.

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 cardiologist non-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".

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)

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).

is our own TracingWoodgrains evidence of the relevance of "the Mormon Question"?

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.

if you are suggesting that culture warriors are in general particularly Jewish -- it's not clear to me, is that what you are suggesting?

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".