site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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.

24
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As certain as the Sun that daws in the Morning, with the new Italian Right-wing government there is a new refugee scandalous crisis.

A NGO ship full of immigrants, after picking them in the front of the Libyan Coast, came in front of Italian coasts asking for a safe port. Crisis ensures.

Considering that only in the last 30 days over 10.000 immigrants came illegaly in Italy, it is not like it is the first time. As always, the NGO ship menaced that all the people on board are basically dying, that the government should take them and if they are not they are complicit in killing hundreds.

Now the ship came to the port after an agreement where they could let disembark only children and ill people before leaving... and after the first thing happened the ship refused to leave the port. To add to the confusion, a newly elected MP from the left-wing opposition, born in the Ivory Coast, is right now aboard the ship.

Another mess in the Mediterranean migratory crisis, who has no end in sight and has a lot of very powerful forces that try to obstacolate every immigration control.

Now the ship came to the port after an agreement where they could let disembark only children and ill people before leaving... and after the first thing happened the ship refused to leave the port.

In other words, the authorities got cucked?

Everyone on board the ship who orchestrated this nonsense should be thrown in jail, the ship sold for scrap and the book thrown at the NGO types.

You know the French had an interesting solution to nautical NGOs messing with their geostrategic interests...

Ever heard of the Rainbow Warrior?

They need to copy-paste Australia's tactics. Offshore processing! Alas Italy is bereft of unpleasant countries like Papua New Guinea where refugees can be sent - but it gets the job done. Incentives work.

On 19 July 2013 in a joint press conference with PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd detailed the Regional Resettlement Arrangement (RRA) between Australia and Papua New Guinea:[40]

"From now on, any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees. Asylum seekers taken to Christmas Island will be sent to Manus and elsewhere in Papua New Guinea for assessment of their refugee status. If they are found to be genuine refugees they will be resettled in Papua New Guinea... If they are found not to be genuine refugees they may be repatriated to their country of origin or be sent to a safe third country other than Australia. These arrangements are contained within the Regional Resettlement Arrangement signed by myself and the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea just now."

The real problem isn't anything to do with the Refugee Convention or similar - Australia was fully capable of ignoring the human rights lawyers and similar. The EU is much more powerful than some university centre for refugee law. I'd bet all my assets that the EU would rain hellfire and desolation upon an Australian solution in Italy. They actually have teeth, they have leverage over Italy's borrowing.

I see this as calling the bluff in a De Santis/Martha's Vineyard sense. If they are truly not economic migrants and are in danger of persecution then they should be reasonably happy to be placed in a safe country as compared to a first world one. If they're just there for economic advantage then they can apply through formal immigration channels.

Clearly the massive drop in boat arrivals in Australia after implementation of this policy makes it obvious they weren't just trying to avoid persecution.

Interestingly the Australian government made the claim that deterring refugee boats saved lives due to mysterious hull breaches when approaching the coast or the coast guard.

Alas Italy is bereft of unpleasant countries like Papua New Guinea where refugees can be sent - but it gets the job done.

It has enough small islands in the Mediterranean that can be used to house detention camps for the migrants, Nauru style. For example, there's Linosa, which is about 1/4 of Nauru by area and has only 430 inhabitants. Give them 1mln Euro each, and you get a nice uninhabited island with a real volcano, a perfect place for a detention camp.

They need to copy-paste Australia's tactics. Offshore processing! Alas Italy is bereft of unpleasant countries like Papua New Guinea where refugees can be sent - but it gets the job done. Incentives work.

Didn't the British plan to send refugees to Rwanda and that got scuttled?

Israel gets rid of their infiltrators by sending them to Rwanda.

IIRC the British deal got scuttled.

A NGO ship full of immigrants, after picking them in the front of the Libyan Coast, came in front of Italian coasts asking for a safe port. Crisis ensures.

Which NGO ship and who runs this NGO?

Humanity 1. The NGO is "SOS Humanity", a German organisation.

The new Italian government is arguing that the host countries of these organisations should agree to take in some of the migrants who are being picked up at sea.

SOS Humanity argues that any migrant whose ship capsizes etc. and gets rescued by them has a right, under the law of the sea, to be taken to the nearest safe port. The incentive effects that this creates are obviously monstrous: you can go anywhere, provided you can do so unsafely. NGOs will make every effort to help you get into the country you want, provided that your boat sinks and the lives of e.g. your children are threatened...

It's like offering a child toys and candy every time they drink bleach.

The Italian government must be very careful, because the last interior minister who tried to reduce mass migration over the Mediterranean is now being prosecuted for "kidnapping" migrants and could face 15 years in jail for his actions as minister...

The solution is to take the refugees/migrants with open arms, pass a law that says you'll give them welfare, but that the funds can't raise the deficit, they have to come from funding for foreign aid and similar programs. Each time a boat of refugees come, you get to defund various NGOs.

The NGOs will then have a reason to not dump refugees in your country. And you can do this for every problem that NGOs try to saddle you with. Then NGOs are going to be a bit more cautious, and maybe even push back against other NGOs that try political stunts.

That sounds complicated and open to a hundred angles of attack that you can be sure the very active pro-immigrant elements will find long before the sluggish anti-immigrant side patches the holes. Trying to be clever seems risky when the other side has proven consistently more capable and subversive.

I doubt that SOS Humanity is funded by the Italian government. Maybe by the German government, but they're not taking the migrants to Germany.

The migrants will try to skeddadle for Germany. They all do.

Right now a waiting room at a border railway station I used to use a lot can't be used because it's permanently camped by a bunch of unwashed thirty-ish bearded brown men trying to get to Germany. I have very limited sense of smell due to some permanent upper airways infection but.. yuck.

Probably Syrians or some North Africans, as they have fairly nice clothes and phones. which would be odd for Pakistanis or Afghans.

I asked some locals, supposedly they change fairly quickly, they get tossed out from cross-border trains and end up there.

More importantly, who are the individuals behind SOS Humanity and who is bankrolling them? I couldn't find a single name in their website's About Us section.

How about prosecuting the individuals who are funding cross border people trafficking ? Because these NGOs were found to be cooperating with people smugglers.

If you can't win a case against the NGO, you're not going to win a case against people funding it.

There's a simple solution here that doesn't need to destroy Maritime law, you put everyone that immigrated into a country through this method into camps until they are fit to be shipped out or legally apply, and make the camps only slightly better than prison.

Anyone would take internment over drowning, but you wouldn't sail miles just to get interned and ultimately shipped back.

But then you run into the institutions that think incarceration of aliens which they are free to leave at any moment is a violation of their human rights for some reason.

I would think the ECHR much more relevant in this case. But yes this is quite exactly what prevents any reasonable scheme to prevent this situation.

Well, the simple solution is to repudiate those treaties.

I know it's part of the West's psychology to say "never again" about anything to do with WW2 (including the issue of people not wanting Jewish refugees) but this situation is unsustainable.

This is not a problem of having no solutions, it's a problem of will

And, frankly, dissimilar to the original situation. Massive difference between long-term - often assimilated- Jewish minorities in European nations being deported and no European doing anything and being on the hook for any unfortunate victim of racism, sexism, homophobia (as defined by the West - i.e. most of the world would be victimizing people on these grounds) or even climate change and other long-term baked in economic and material considerations.

Can Italy repudiate those treaties ?

If the constition isn't a suicide pact, neither are treaties which depend on it for validity. A treaty which abolishes the right of a state to prevent entry of armed, hostile foreigners, abolishes the state itself.

The first link is paywalled, but the second story quite clearly is about a state/states preventing entry, or at least doing their best to prevent so. There's no indication any treaty prevents this, and the Spanish (left-wing) prime minister says as much that they're going to prevent migrants from doing that. I'm not sure how it is relevant for this case, then?

The first link is paywalled

This, or this.

prevent migrants from doing that

I was wrong. It seems ECHR had given their blessing to treat a storming mob, differently than an orderly queue.

Alternatively, you can let them apply and then ship them back to Libya until their application has been processed(and most likely denied).

It's not like Libya is in any state to prevent that.

I think a sufficiently motivated prosecutor could probably make out a case that SOS Humanity are criminally conspiring with human traffickers to capsize ships and put migrants' lives in danger. Seems like an unavoidable conclusion in light of their MO that whatever maritime law compels a right of safe harbor under duress has been incorporated into SOS Humanity's standard operating procedures and they are complicit in creating those circumstances of duress.

Italy should confiscate every property and freeze bank accounts of all politicians complicit in tearing apart Lybia

Just a quick Sunday morning reflection, but just wanted to briefly float an idea about affirmative action, ethnic identity, and university reform. As most people probably know, the Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down affirmative action in the near future. However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds. Sadly, I expect this to continue trumping any kind of class-based affirmative action, for which a far stronger moral case can be made.

If the US is indeed headed towards a new regime of ethnic spoils, how can young Americans who don't benefit from being in an officially recognized URM group - especially those who are nonetheless disadvantaged - still reap spoils of their own in the higher education systems? There are two particular groups I have in mind here. The first is Asian-American students, long the ones who have paid most of the price for boosting enrollment of otherwise underrepresented minorities, while the second is white Americans, especially those from working-class or otherwise economically underprivileged backgrounds.

I wonder if a similar solution might work in both cases. Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture? Of course, non-Asian candidates wouldn't be barred from applying, and you'd probably want to take a hefty chunk of non-Asian students anyway, but it would provide a plausible and conveniently illegible selection mechanism to ensure that Asians and Asian-Americans applying to the university would have a natural advantage in getting in.

Could something similar work for white students? As stated so baldly, I think not. "Whiteness" as an identity is seen as too toxic, too vague, and too novel an identity to ground any kinds of claims for preferential treatment; any scholarship program for self-identified White students would be regarded with utter hostility, and would be a poison chalice for any student foolish enough to accept it. What might be more acceptable is to found institutions dedicated to one or another group of "hyphenated-Americans", the most obvious candidate groups being Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish- (or more broadly Slavic-) Americans. Again, in each of these cases, you wouldn't have any kind of explicit cultural discrimination in place, but candidates could be assessed heavily based on how deep and sincere their affiliation, identity, or attachment to the given identity was, as expressed in their relevant candidate statement.

While any such institution would be the target of snarky articles from the New York Times et al., I think that if done sincerely (and ideally using the language of DEI) it would be hard to truly tar the endeavor with the charge of Asian- or white-supremacism. There's simply too much obvious conceptual overlap with existing programs that favor URMs, so to truly rail against it, commentators would have to say the quiet part out loud, so to speak, which would alienate moderates.

Of course, the really hard part would be making these universities places that students actually wanted to go to. For my part, I think the current higher-education system in most of the world is a stagnant cartel, with actual teaching being near the bottom of priorities, and the whole edifice is ripe for disruption. The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues, and that's hardly a trivial obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the best two initial strategies in this regard would be (i) hiring a bunch of very good emeritus faculty, who could write excellent letters of recommendation for grad school etc., and (ii) focusing in the first instance on teaching disciplines with relatively legible outcomes, e.g., material sciences, machine learning, data science, mathematics, etc., rather than the humanities. Over a few years, I think it would be entirely possible to cultivate a reputation for providing a superb education in these disciplines, such that employers would have to take note.

All of this would require a large amount of startup capital, but there are Silicon Valley libertarian-types who could - ideally anonymously - bankroll this kind of operation (so Peter Thiel, if you're reading, get in touch).

But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?

The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues,

You could help there by spreading the meme that to fight whiteness and promote equity, white men need to be barred from all higher education explicitly not reserved for them. I'm sure a number of sincere idiots would lap that up and setting up universities solely for white men would go a long way towards fixing the problems of academia.

America already has this in the form of Catholic schools and BYU. i assume other Christian denominations have set up schools as well.

If someone is smart, not going to Harvard won't impact them too much. Many of these people will land on their feet, and they'll create paths for others to follow. Every smart student that is rejected from these top universities ends up eroding the prestige of those institutions. Every 'dumb' student that gets in also erodes the prestige.

If someone is smart, not going to Harvard won't impact them too much.

I disagree entirely. These days it's not what you know, it's who you know, and you don't get to rub shoulders with princelings when you're valedictorian of Iowa State University no matter how much smarter you are than that years' Harvard cohort.

Also: yeah, sure, 0.01% galaxy brain supergeniuses probably aren't going to be living out of the dumpster whatever happens. But these people are, definitionally, 0.01%ers - rounding error people whom should not affect our policycrafting precisely because of their rarity.

It's not the 0.01% supergeniuses I worry about, it's the rather larger "elite overproduction" 5%, who as a class start civil wars when they get mad, that I worry about.

I wouldn't count on erosion of prestige happening faster than the collapse of institutions that prestige was gained in. One might have presumed that the weakening of Rome would have caused people to lose faith in Caesars, perhaps reestablishing the wholesome old days of the Republic or something, but the opposite happened: monarchs were still using that name for titles more than fourteen hundred years after Rome collapsed.

One might have presumed that the weakening of Rome would have caused people to lose faith in Caesars, perhaps reestablishing the wholesome old days of the Republic or something

One might, but in reality the tradition of ancient republic and democracy was at the time completely forgotten, and medieval representative institutions - even in Italy itself - were derived from Germanic traditions.

https://fpb.livejournal.com/141494.html

The chairman of the modern English Parliament bears the ancient title of Speaker, clearly derived from the Lawspeaker who presided the Scandinavian Things, and the earliest name of the city councils that ruled Italian cities in the first age of free republics was Arengo, from Longobard Hring

I think the biggest factor this overlooks is that it's not like the Asian and White students who aren't getting into Harvard or a UC school aren't getting into any colleges- it's been a minute since I've personally looked into it, but my general impression is that you have to be pretty darn incapable to not get into any school. And there's not only no obvious reason to prefer a new private school to northwestern Iowa Tech, there's cost related reasons for the opposite.

Almost any high school graduate in the US can get into college. The affirmative action fight is about attending elite colleges, which are different because of prestige that can't actually be copied. Yes, MIT and Stanford probably have tougher courses than podunk state. But prestige is the main reason employers prefer MIT diplomas to podunk state diplomas, and you can't actually replicate MIT's prestige with a new college no matter how tough the courses are.

I'm guessing there's some set of highly qualified kids who get rejected from all schools they applied to. I'm going to use some completely imaginary but plausible probabilities to demonstrate this.

Let's say that you're poor and don't have the funds for more than three application fees, and you're too prideful to ask for fee waivers. I know this happens because this was my situation when I was in high school. I didn't became aware that I could use my poverty to my advantage until I was already in college, and even then I was too prideful for it.

There's some chance that you'll not be selected for a top school like Harvard even though you have grades and scores that would put you in the 90th percentile of kids they do admit. Let's say that if you're Asian and have these qualifications you only have a 1% chance of admission. You apply anyway.

Let's say that you also apply to a top state school that you're pretty confident will admit you, but there's no guarantee. Say this is a 95% chance.

And then you apply to a safety school, which is still not a guarantee, but a 99% chance.

The probability of getting rejected by all three schools would be .99 * .05 * .01 = .00049. Roughly 5 in 10,000 people in this situation would find themselves with no acceptance letter. Are there 10,000 such people applying each year? According to Wikipedia there were 2.9 million college freshman in the United States in 2019. That seems plausible.

With such a huge population you're going to find very unlikely outcomes hiding in the tails. Especially with illegible admission criteria, it's not possible to know with any certainty that you'll be admitted unless you go through some assured admission program.

I'm guessing there's some set of highly qualified kids who get rejected from all schools they applied to.

Seems like it did happen.

https://www.wsj.com/story/she-scored-1550-on-her-sats-top-us-colleges-still-rejected-her-68767071

False. Did not get rejected everywhere. Going to Arizona state. Not a great school, but I predict that founding a brand new private school better than Arizona state will be harder than we think it is.

  1. I didn't say anything about the difficulty of creating an alternate education system. Even though I don't think its as onerously difficult as you claim it is, nor do I think its as easy as many others think it is.

  2. It's not too difficult to imagine an alternate reality where this girl did not Apply to ASU or Rice. And did infact get rejected from all the colleges she applied to despite being very accomplished. Ofcourse that can happen to anyone who doesn't choose a safety school, but its more than likely that this time around AA has something to do with it.

In the comment I replied to you said

Seems like it did happen.

Now you're saying it hypothetically could have happened in an alternate reality where an obvious gunner didn't do basic best practices, like applying to safety schools.

The standard when I was a kid was seven, two reach two safety three target. That number just keeps getting bigger, I advise kids I know to apply everywhere, if the application isn't free send a letter to the dean asking for a free application and they'll give it to you 90% of the time, you never know who might give you money and money from one school you don't really want to go to can be leveraged against a school you do want to go to. Among kids gunning for ivies, they're going to be following best practices, the average among my AP friends was around 12 undergrads applied to in high school.

Fwiw, AA obviously plays a role in every marginal candidate's fate, but can never really be pointed to as playing a decisive role. Until you're applying your fate is always in your hands, you could always just be better.

This is why the object of Any effective american class war should be to either nationalize the top 100 schools and force them to expand admissions til their brand value is dead, or ultimatum them into expanding or withdraw all federal funding/accreditation

It's rare that I wholeheartedly agree with you, but this time I do. At the very least the states should be incentivized to do what California did. Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UC Davis and UC Irvine are in the Forbes top 30, with only four more public universities from other states on the list. And they did it while competing with Stanford. There's no real reason why University of Texas or A&M can't compete with Rice or why CUNY and SUNY can't compete with Columbia and Cornell and Aquafresh.

How easy is it for students to simply lie about their race in their application? It's not like the university is going to run a DNA test to see if your grandma was actually native American.

If you wanted to disrupt race-based admissions, the highest effect/cost thing you could do would probably be publishing a guide on how to pretend you're a minority like that. It doesn't even necessarily have to be very effective in practice, just be well known as something that happens, and it'd undermine the entire thing.

If it comes out later that you lied you're screwed, see Elizabeth Warren (though she thought family lore counted.)

At the M7 business school I attended all the applicants who selected Black as their race were interviewed by a member of the Black Students Association - if you didn’t seem “Black” when interviewed I doubt you would be accepted.

Jesus.

Absolute crazy reading this as a non American. How are people not turning into blithering racists amidst all this?

I might be particularly disagreeable but I would go especially out of my way to make things as bad as I can for blacks if any such thing was done to me.

Students making admissions decisions???? Absolute madness.

Absolute crazy reading this as a non American. How are people not turning into blithering racists amidst all this?

They are, the catch is that it's also rapidly becoming "class" thing with racism, in the classical sense, rapidly becoming correlated with being wealthy and college educated.

To clarify - if you tried to get in university on allegedly being black, and the university let someone who's black verify that you're black, you would "go especially out of your way to make things as bad as you can for blacks"? If I were black and thought I was surrounded by people prone to such disproportionate retaliation for slights (where the slight in question is a minimal attempt to see if you're not bullshitting me), I'd just want to make sure there ain't gonna be no retaliation.

disproportionate retaliation

I mean, you did set up a system of race-based admissions, complete with a student committee that determines your racial purity.

His reaction may be uncalled for, in the sense that most black people had nothing to do with the decision, but it should be expected for unjust systems like that to breed resentment.

It is not lost on me that I would be a lot more sympathetic if it were a black student trying to earn admission to a university where white students would rank him on the "okay-not okay" skin color chart. But if it was a black student in a black-dominant country who was trying to get in on a white quota? Very much less so.

Is it a black dominant country, when there's a race based system of admissions designed to exclude black people, and the nation's media and academia regularly blame social problems on "blackness"?

Do remedial classes "exclude" pupils who are doing fine? Does welfare "exclude" a healthy 6 figure maker? If that's your definition of exclusion, then yes, it is still a black-dominant country.

More comments

Absolute crazy reading this as a non American. How are people not turning into blithering racists amidst all this?

The meme "And then one day for no reason at all..." came into being for a reason, and it wasn't just Forrest Gump fanatics. But most people, even those rejected for their whiteness, accept this sort of thing as their due; the propaganda is just that good.

But most people, even those rejected for their whiteness, accept this sort of thing as their due; the propaganda is just that good.

There's probably a truckload of adaptive self-deception going on here. If you've been screwed over by the dominant ideology, there's nothing to gain and everything to lose from opposing said ideology - all you'll do is dig your hole even deeper. The best way forward is to take the loss and still continue to espouse these dominant beliefs, which helps you gain status among your peer group and in society at large (and the best way to do so is to actually, sincerely believe it regardless of what happened). Indignation is only productive if you can change something or if people are willing to listen to you, and in this case, neither are true.

I genuinely think political dissidents inherently need to be disagreeable in their personality and at least a little bit suicidal. The incentives for compliance are unbelievably strong.

Eventually, I see this going south. The thing is that our wealth and power of the West and America as the imperial core are shrinking. And that means it’s coming to a point where you’re faced with the problem that you’re shut out of good paying positions due to the progressive stack working against you. And at this point, you will create a white bloc much like other minorities have. At which point, we’ll have a racist and radicalized society where your race is the most important cultural touchstone you have. It will determine your lifestyle, your political stances, where you live and to some extent what you do.

And at this point, you will create a white bloc much like other minorities have.

I disagree, the anti-nazi antibodies are way too strong for that to happen. Whites would sooner exterminate themselves than view themselves as whites.

I’m not convinced of that, in fact, history seems to show that the fastest way to get people to think of themselves as a bloc is to convince them that they’re oppressed. It doesn’t have to be real, but the effect is very real. That’s how we got Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Once people started to perceive that the other ethnic group got most of the goodies of society, those on the outside start to see themselves as their ethnic group first and then part of the country.

deleted

I mostly agree, but I think I would go even further than you:

Everyone online believes they've uncovered the TRUE glorious secret behind society, but at the same time they disagree fundamentally about what that secret is in ways that are rather obviously self-serving.

It depends what you mean by self-serving. If you mean self-serving as in "adopting this benefits me individually in the context of the larger culture", I could perhaps agree with that. If you mean self-serving in the sense of benefiting their own identity group, I've seen far too many whites and especially men who hold beliefs that actively work to the detriment of their in-group as a whole to believe that people actually consistently act in the interest of their identity group. While I think there's a case to be made that white liberals' out-group biases are a product of specific cultural circumstances, in the case of men I think their out-group biases favouring women might be evolutionarily ingrained and thus intractable.

My problem with the woke has never really been with black people advocating for things that they see as being in the interest of black people, or feminists advocating for things that they see as being in the interest of women, or gay people advocating for things that they see as being in the interest of gay people, or what have you. That seems perfectly predictable, and entirely their right in a democratic society.

While advocacy for one's own identity group is part and parcel of free speech and should not be made illegal or censored, I will not go so far as to say I don't have a problem with this. In a society where people see your words as carrying more weight and more value than others, and where you can override others by invoking the social status of your identity alone, using it to unduly benefit yourself and to promote threat narratives against a target identity group is a flagrant abuse of power. I see it as taking advantage of other people's goodwill, and while it probably shouldn't fall under the ambit of the law I think behaviour like this should be taken care of in the social sphere and shunned appropriately. Unfortunately the fact that the social environment allows that in the first place means that social opprobrium for this behaviour is unlikely. It's the most underhanded form of power-grabbing - it can't be easily regulated and entails minimal risk on one's part, and can result in havoc for others.

To speak frankly, it is because of this ethical code that it massively irks me whenever I see a PoC promoting critical race theorist rhetoric, or a woman promoting feminist beliefs, or LGBT people promoting various critical-theorist talking points that helps them gain social and legal privileges. I fall into some of these groups myself, and adamantly refuse to take advantage of the minority status that these things confer upon me. I expect others also granted "epistemic advantage" to do the same, and if they don't I have no problem labelling their behaviour as being fundamentally objectionable.

We're currently seeing an attempt at an unchecked, shameless power grab, and if that's not going to change, one of the only real ways out of that hegemony which I can think of is to develop strong identity-narratives of one's own and to try to beat them at their own game. This is not to say that this is an ideal outcome, but the combative dynamic is in place and is here to stay (mind, I would prefer if it wasn't). And if I'm right about this, I see absolutely no other viable option but to play that game in order to balance the social scales at least a little bit. There is no scenario I can see where you can contest them by perpetually taking the high road and refusing to engage - you simply can't beat conflict theorists like that.

Voluntas pauci suprema lex.

"The will of the few is the supreme law"? Although, shouldn't that be "paucorum"?

Anyway, I look forward to seeing your comment in the next quality contributions roundup.

Was there a surreptitious paper bag hanging on the wall behind the interviewee for comparison, or do you think they just went by vibe?

If we're going to have racial caste systems, I just wish the gatekeeping wasn't so arbitrary and in the hands of the kind of people who ran my school's BSU.

They did have some pretty light skinned Black people who could pass as White in my class but I’m sure they check social media to see if your mom / dad is Black looking if you’re of mixed race and or ask you about your family history.

There was one guy from South Africa who claimed he was a Cape Coloured but I was 75% sure he was faking it so I’m guessing it’s not fool-proof.

Suppose you're being honest, what is the requirement for claiming indigenous ancestry? The average white American has 0.2% indigenous ancestry, which means 1 out 500 of their ancestors were indigenous.

About 10% of my ancestors I can't trace back to Europe, and they were mostly New Englanders with English last names. Depending on what the marriage patterns were in the 17th and early 18th centuries, I think that means I probably have a few indigenous ancestors.

Suppose you're being honest, what is the requirement for claiming indigenous ancestry? The average white American has 0.2% indigenous ancestry, which means 1 out 500 of their ancestors were indigenous.

There is no universal "official requirement", no one wants to be one deciding how much black or native you have to be to be "black" or "native", no one wants to open this can of worms.

The rules are widely varying, inconsistent and changing all the time as one should expect. For intro into modern Amarican racial classification (with interesting historical tidbits and amusing anecdotes) see this paper

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3592850

The Modern American Law of Race

How easy is it for students to simply lie about their race in their application? It's not like the university is going to run a DNA test to see if your grandma was actually native American.

Mindy Kaling's brother did just that. In his words:

I shaved my head, trimmed my long Indian eyelashes, and applied as an African American. Not even my own frat brothers recognized me. I joined the Organization of Black Students and used my middle name, Jojo.

Vijay, the Indian American frat boy, became Jojo, the African American med school applicant.

Doing this would work perfectly until you wanted to run for public office, and people go investigating your background. From that point onward, the strategy would only work and you could only continue to dodge scrutiny if you're a Democrat favorite. Since democrats are the ones who are able to bring the wrath down for doing this sort of stuff, if you're on their side, you don't have to worry too much about it, people would be happy to excuse your indiscretion for whatever reasons.

Most people have no intention of ever getting into politics I don't think. Even so, for the examples we've seen of politically active people getting called out (Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren, and Shaun King, from the top of my head) they've leaned into their racial category more than simply using it for admissions. Even then, for Warren it took a while and she had to do something foolish like having her DNA tested for it to become obvious. Comparing with a strategic person who never mentioned their fake race again after being admitted and they'd probably never be found out.

For all we know, this is already happening. I attended a prestigious school in which there were rumors that at least two people in my class had identified as black, and at least one professor (!), all of whom were lily white by visual inspection.

The awkward part, and probably the only real check on this behavior, is that if you check black on your application, you are auto-enrolled in the black students' orientation programs, and other students can look at you askance.

Wouldn't be too hard to argue you don't want a separate but equal orientation and you want the white people treatment implying it's better.

I think the black students' orientation is optional, prior to and in addition to the regular orientation that everyone attends. So sure, you could skip it, but the administrators are probably going to include your name and bio in the informational packet they send to everyone who is eligible.

From a cursory googling it seems to be common in Australia, at least. Looking at graduation photos for those who've received scholarships for indigenous people (e.g.), I'd say that for most of them it's impossible to tell that they're supposed to have any aboriginal ancestry at all.

In Australia, there are no widely-held rules about identifying as Aboriginal - any amount of claimed ancestry is sufficient, and plenty of Aboriginal-identifying people pass as something else, often with only the tiniest amount of Aboriginal descent. The media sometimes publishes stories about how racist it is to question the Aboriginality of fair-skinned, white-passing people.

You might ask then why everyone doesn't just tick the Aboriginal box on all forms all the time, since it can be advantageous for employment and so on. As far as I can tell it's still just the honour system, though.

The awkward part, and probably the only real check on this behavior, is that if you check black on your application, you are auto-enrolled in the black students' orientation programs, and other students can look at you askance.

this would be a great beavis and butthead skit

Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture?

To be clear, if you're talking about starting a new college as a real option rather than a theoretical exercise, the problem is the "Starting a new college and raising its prestige" part not the "giving it a pro-Asian ideological bent" part. Going by USNWR rankings *, but the youngest school outside a big state system is Carnegie-Mellon founded in 1900. Which is A) 120 years old, B) Backed by Andrew Carnegie, C) Still a small school and ranked all the way down at 26th. What's the most prestigious non-state school that was founded in the last 40 years? I'm not sure there even is one that's past laughable.

To make it prestigious you're going to attract students. And not just any students, talented students with other options, attracting nothing but low performers who couldn't get in anywhere else won't help. And no, abandoning affirmative action alone will not deliver a significant number of ignored but talented Asian/White students, if you had the resume for affirmative action to matter to you just go somewhere else. There is no pool of kids who don't go to a decent school because of Affirmative action, only kids that got into a modestly worse school. If I were Black I would have been shoe-in anywhere in the top 5, but it's not like as a result of being white I slid into the 100s or something. The kids who get bumped from Harvard get into Cornell, from Cornell to Lehigh, from Lehigh to Penn State, from Penn State Main Campus to Penn State local campuses; the kids below Penn State don't matter.

Students will need to choose to go to your brand new school over highly ranked schools. Some of the issues attracting students to unwoke college groups I discussed in a prior motte conversation here. So let's just be real here, Unwoke university needs to attract women, and it needs to place students in prestigious organizations and jobs. If a university can't get kids jobs, and you can't get laid, it ain't happening; Asian and white guys at the 165 LSAT range will just cruise on to Penn State Honors instead.

Most observers put the male:female ratio at, say, a Jordan Peterson show at around 9:1 male:female; that's a big hill to climb. 68% of Young Women, 72% of women with a college degree identify as Feminists, we can basically write them off from Unwoke university; it's tough to claim numbers on multiple issues, but how many of that remaining quarter-to-third of young women who aren't woke are religious? Those girls are going to pick Messiah or Liberty over Unwoke U. I understand we have some women around themotte, but no one is going to sit here and claim it is better than a third are they? Very few people are going to choose to go to a college that is 90%+ male over one that isn't. I guess you could just go full-send and make it a male only school, I'm not sure that's legal anymore but it might be worth a try at that point.

I'm not going to say it is impossible to bootstrap prestige, but it certainly isn't easy. Takes decades. The Federalist Society is the best example we have, but it was grafted on top of existing schools; notoriously because it had better funding our FedSoc always had better food than the liberal equivalents, and people sometimes went to events just to get a free burrito. Carnegie type money and a commitment from some business leaders would make that easier, but you need serious money to overcome the inbuilt advantages of the existing schools. And given that this is an honest to God shot across the culture war bow, don't think the woke colleges will take this lying down. Grads from woke schools will commit to not applying to businesses that hire from Unwoke, etc. Would, say, Exxon commit to getting nobody from Harvard/Yale/Stanford to get kids from Unwoke? By the time you successfully bootstrap prestige we're probably four full SCOTUS turnovers from now, and who knows what AA law looks like.

But let's assume you could start a new prestigious university, I doubt it would work from a legal perspective, because you'd have to show a compelling interest in only letting in Asian kids or Irish American kids or whatever. Which doesn't really exist, there is plenty of Asian or Irish culture at other schools already. Conservative SCOTUS justices want to overturn AA, they don't want to institute legalized white nationalism and overturn a century of precedent to get us back to Plessy or something.

So, no, in conclusion this wouldn't work at all.

*Just from a quick glance at the rankings, if I missed a more recent one let me know.

I think Monash University, Australian National University, and University of New South Wales in Australia (1958, 1946, and 1949) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1991) are cases of success in growing a new university even though there were other local universities that were already relatively prestigious.

That said, I’m not sure it’s replicable exactly in all situations. It may be that the market space at the time of these universities’ founding was unsaturated and they could absorb a glut of talented students that the existing institutions would’ve been happy to admit but did not have the capacity for. I think - correct me if I’m wrong - they also tend to be more unbalanced in their subject strengths; Monash is a world leader in pharmacology, ANU is excellent in a bunch of anthropology and humanities-focused subjects as far as I can tell, UNSW in water resources and mineral sciences, HKUST in (surprise!) business and finance.

Maybe a way to grow a new institution’s prestige is to focus really hard on one thing a la UCSF? You could even do it to the point of only offering programs in the field of interest (again, like UCSF). Still wouldn’t be easy, but it’s probably easier than trying to compete in all fields. (I think this was touched on in the OP.)

The big difference is that those are government funded. I don't want to speak to that overseas, I'm not familiar with the contrasts in the systems. In the USA some California state schools were founded much later, but they are part of the broader California state system and have huge resources to draw on. OP's hypothetical was a private university, which in the US sense means it is not under the orders or or primarily funded by the government, outside of grants and scholarships and such.

Fair!

I'm not sure about real numbers, but my feel from experience is that if you're a serious candidate at a top ten selective school, you're a free ride at a lower ranked school no problem. Hence how I never paid tuition in my life.*

Speaking personally, I had LSAT scores to be above median at HYS, but lacked anything else to make me interesting enough to get in so I was rejected at all three, if I'd been Black I would have gotten into all three statistically. I wound up on a tuition scholarship at a T14, and had full tuition+ rides lined up at schools in the 40s (I didn't apply to any schools between the T14 and the 40s, along with Liberty which I applied to because this really sweet Christian girl from their recruiting department kept calling me and finally got me to fill it out from guilt). So you could definitely do a lot with a billion dollars, but just free tuition alone you'd still be competing with schools a tier down from the one you're targeting. Can you insta-found a school that beats out schools in the 50-75 range right out of the gate?

That said, a big enough endowment is probably step one. Probably enough that the university could run with no income for decades, which would insulate it against political attacks.

*Actually, now that I read it over, that's a lie, I paid my wife's for a couple semesters.

Exxon runs all of its business out of a state whose top economic regulator is spending most of his energy going after ESG to burnish his resume for primarying Abbott from the right in '26. "Commit to not hiring anyone from the ivies" might be a bit of a stretch, but "recruit from, say, University of Dallas(a religious school, but also a notoriously unwoke one which provides ideological advisors to the Hungarian government) instead of Yale" is within the realm of possibility if the right political pressure is applied. After all, they ostentatiously refused to celebrate pride month.

I think it is clear that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have been laying the groundwork to engineer an opinion that all of the titles of the Civil Rights Act protect white and asian people from discrimination as surely as they protect black people. That was their long game in Bostock, which held that trans people are protected under the Civil Rights Act via the syllogistic logic that the CRA bans discrimination on account of sex, so (roughly) it is a violation to treat a man who wears a dress differently from how you treat a woman who wears a dress. I predicted that this was their intent in Bostock, and I think it was Gorsuch who indicated as much during the oral arguments in the affirmative action case -- I can't remember his exact phrasing but he invoked Bostock and asked why the same logic shouldn't apply to the same language in a different title of the CRA.

If SCOTUS clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally, then every tool that has been used to police covert discrimination against black people over the past century (sting operations, disparate impact theories, indications of animus, etc.) could in theory be used to police covert discrimination against white/asian people ("holistic" applicant reviews, rhetoric about "dismantling whiteness," etc.).

At that point all that is needed is a sufficiently motivated executive. Ron DeSantis in particular has proven apt at using the tools pioneered by civil rights activists to effect conservative change, and has been pretty sharp with other types of executive power to curtail liberal excesses.

So I don't know what odds I give it of coming to pass, but it does seem like the pieces are falling into place for a conservative campaign to dismantle affirmative action across the entire ambit of the Civil Rights Act, which is much broader than just higher education -- and to fight back against a slide toward ethnic spoils.

The biggest threat to this campaign is if the GOP nominates Trump instead of DeSantis. Trump can be counted on to fumble the opportunity, as he does everything. At this point I am hoping that fate intervenes to secure the nomination for DeSantis.

If SCOTUS explicitly clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally

Are there rulings saying it doesn't? I'm not familiar with the subject but I would have guessed that it is already interpreted that way but the selective enforcement happens at some other stage of the process.

Grutter v. Bollinger which is one of the two cases that established the current standard is explicitly laid on the idea that race conscious programs to help "underrepresented minority groups" are a temporary measure. And says "that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

SCOTUS has suspended the constitutional rights of whites on this issue for 19 years and counting pretty much. We'll see if they change their mind this time.

Right, I was wondering if he was referring to something other than affirmative-action itself. But I guess the affirmative-action carve-out is already broad enough that it can be used to justify most relevant forms of discrimination against whites and asians. Compared to employment it doesn't much matter whether restaurants are allowed to refuse to serve white people.

I was thinking about how the lawsuit against Youtube regarding their employment discrimination against white/asian men was apparently considered worth attempting, but that's probably because the methods used were so overt (like the recruiter plaintiff being told to "immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black or Hispanic") that they thought it might fall outside the carve-out. Plus looking at the lawsuit it's all based on state-level laws. (Though there's a mention of the plaintiff telling them "it violated state and federal law".)

Note that lawsuit just kind of vanished into the system, which happens often to such "reverse" discrimination lawsuits.

Did that lawsuit ever go anywhere? It just vanished from the news.

Trump might well use people who burnished their conservative credentials in the Abbott and Desantis governments to actually do the governing while he shows up in photo ops.

If SCOTUS explicitly clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally, then every tool that has been used to police subtle discrimination against black people over the past century (sting operations, disparate impact theories, indications of animus, etc.) could in theory be used to police subtle discrimination against white/asian people ("holistic" applicant reviews, rhetoric about "dismantling whiteness," etc.).

But it won't. If the Supreme Court puts out a ruling that says "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. And by the way, we aren't fooled by the 'Asians have bad personality' crap, George Wallace could have come up with that one, so cut it out.", the people in charge of all those tools will simply ignore it. Their allegiance is to AA/antiracism/DEI first and to the institutions they serve a distant second. Just like with Heller and Bruen, the people (university administrators, alphabet-agency bureaucrats, and lower court judges) who have to change their behavior to implement the decision simply will not, and the Supreme Court will be powerless to do anything about most of it. A few more cases might make it up to SCOTUS, but all SCOTUS can do is issue strongly-worded opinions. And eventually SCOTUS will turn left and AA will be officially allowed again.

Even President DeSantis can't solve this because he can't just fire the bureaucrats.

President DeSantis can investigate these universities for racial discrimination and take away their federal funding if they're discriminating.

President DeSantis can investigate these universities for racial discrimination and take away their federal funding if they're discriminating.

He could direct the Department of Education to investigate. They would investigate and find the universities had done nothing wrong except maybe not enough blacks and Hispanics were admitted.

Is the Dept of Education under the executive? If so can't he just fire everyone and place his own people there?

No, he can only fire the political appointees, not the civil servants.

I'm pretty sure Trump did this kind of thing when he was in office. Keep firing the secretary of a rebellious department until they get the message. Didn't seem to work.

I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds.

I recognize this is not the main point of your post, but I'll preregister that I do expect a SCOTUS ban on AA to have a very substantial and enduring impact. I pulled some very basic data below. In all, I found considerably less support than expected, but enough to not make me want to recant my prediction.

I start with the top 6 public universities ranked by US News (6 because #5 was tied between two schools).

School | School Black % | State Black % | School Asian % | State Asian %

UCB 3% 7% 43% 16%

UCLA 5% 7% 33% 16%

U-M 5% 14% 15% 3%

UVA 8% 20% 18% 7%

UF 6% 17% 10% 3%

UNC 10% 22% 22% 3%

I've bolded schools in states where public universities are prohibited from considering race (date of ban): California (1996), Washington (1998), Florida (1999), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), Arizona (2010), New Hampshire (2012), Oklahoma (2012), and Idaho (2020).

All data exclude multi-race categories.

Inconveniently for me but tellingly, UCB's diversity page declines to have a consolidated Asian category in favor of one broken down by Pacific Islander, Chinese, Filipinx [sic], etc.

Next, three top private schools, including the main culprit that's part of one of the SCOTUS cases:

Harvard: 15% 9% 28% 8%

Yale: 9% 13% 22% 5%

Princeton: 10% 15% 27% 10%

Yale's page is frustratingly (and probably revealingly) ambiguous. It lists only university wide, which is predominantly graduate rather than undergraduate. It also excludes international from the one table, and likely those who don't report (rather than scaling up to 100%), meaning all the ethnicities add up to just 73%. So the above figures were scaled up to 100% (6.4% black -> 9%, 16.2% Asian -> 22%).

Also, I recognize it's imperfect to compare a top school to its state demographics considering it would draw talent from all over America and the world, and comparison to state demo also is less meaningful for huge states like CA where more local demo is more useful, but this is a basic analysis so...

Observations and thoughts:

  1. Out of nine schools examined, only Harvard has a Black % higher than its state demographics, while also being higher than all the other schools, suggesting far higher boost from AA, or perhaps also superior recruiting ability considering its name. But it's so skewed relative to the rest that I don't know what the lawyers were thinking. Yale and Princeton are less egregious but generally hew closer to their state demographics than the public schools.

  2. UVA and UNC, the two public schools that aren't banned from AA by state law, do have higher Black % relative to the other four in states where AA is prohibited, but they're also in states with higher Black %. When you compare ratios instead of absolute %, the two seems to boost AA more than the others, with the exception of UCLA which has a fairly high Black % as a ratio of its state demographics--perhaps UCLA has more zealous DEI staff who skirt around the law, so this does rain on my prediction a bit.

  3. This superficial analysis doesn't really make it obvious that Asians are significantly discriminated against, whether by UVA and UNC or HYP. Perhaps whites are the main victims of AA, but it's politically convenient to say it's Asians instead.

  4. At any rate, if and when AA is struck down, I expect risk-averse institutions like these top schools, which are sometimes labeled billion-dollar-endowment-with-a-school-attached, to substantially comply. If the Harvard class of 2030 retains the same racial makeup thanks to clever substitution of overt race-consciousness with class and DEI extracurriculars etc., Ed Blum will just sue again. By having already secured landmark victories at that future point, he'll attract even more donors and human talent support. It'll also be worse PR for Harvard the next time around because I believe the popular support for AA, like with gay marriage, will quickly catch up to the SCOTUS order.

Links for anyone who wants to dig in more robustly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_United_States

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/NC,FL,VA,MI,CA,US/PST045221

https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-new-undergraduates

https://www.ucla.edu/about/facts-and-figures

https://diversity.umich.edu/data-reports/

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/universityofvirginiacdpvirginia

https://cdo.ufl.edu/strategy/metrics/

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MA,CT,NJ/PST045221

https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts

https://inclusive.princeton.edu/about/demographics

Will the universities accept federal government money, including federally backed loans and Pell Grants? If the answer is "yes" then they'll be subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin in programs that receive federal funds, unless that discrimination is necessary for the achievement of a legitimate non-discriminatory objective. Might also want to look at 34 CFR 100 which are the federal regulations the Department of Education has put out effecting Title VI of the CRA by that agency. There are also likely to be state level anti-discrimination laws any such University would be subject to.

I see three broad options here.

Firstly, you can refuse to take any federal money. This (probably) evades any liability for federal anti-discrimination protections but also cuts your University off from a very large source of funding and many of the disadvantaged students it is presumably aimed at helping.

Secondly, you can take federal money and just not discriminate on the basis of race or natural origin. This evades liability but fails to function as the ethnic spoils system you want it to.

Finally, you can take federal money and discriminate on the basis of race insofar as necessary to achieve a "legitimate nondiscriminatory objective." This is what current universities do, with their purported objective being the obtainment of the educational benefits that flow from having a racially diverse student body. I do not think the Department of Education, or a court, are going to agree that something like "the promotion of Asian/Irish-American identities" is a "legitimate nondiscriminatory objective." Indeed, they seem like straightforwardly discriminatory objectives to me.

But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?

I think your Universities would rapidly find themselves useless to help their targeted audience, most likely via litigation from either the federal government or a prospective student.

Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making

[Citation needed]

In most of Continental Europe admission to universities is based on entrance exams or national exams test scores. This eliminates any power the school has in selecting applicants.

Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making

[Citation needed]

In most of Continental Europe...

The topic is clearly referencing U.S. education and U.S. law (via the Supreme Court of the United States). If you listen to the oral arguments in this case, you'll hear counsel for Harvard and UNC explain the multi-factor "holistic" admissions practices of their respective universities in some detail. "Illegible subjective decision-making" seems like a pretty fair characterization of what they described.

European universities definitely do things differently, no question. Of course, in most of Continental Europe they haven't got universities where half the matriculating class is of Asian descent sitting in the middle of cities where half the local population is of African descent. It's amazingly difficult to even begin to have a discussion about what's happening in such places, especially when a large part of the population is also ideologically committed to denying the influence of biology on academic performance.

In the US, there's a very quiet goal to admit a healthy number of future donors. One of the most interesting topics covered occasionally by Steve Sailor is how admissions try to do this and how effective it is.

However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds.

i was listening to an interview on npr yesterday of a vice chancellor of DEI from one of the california state universities. at the end he complained that it would take a while before they were able to basically reinstitute affirmative action without calling it that, so yeah, even when scotus overturns it, university administrators will find a way around it.

I think you are being naïve. Do you really think a carefully crafted mission statement for Irish American fraternity would not get lambasted instantly as a "fig leaf for white supremacy"? White flight is already the subject of derision, a university founded on any white identity would be cast as "another system of excluding POC" even though it's essentially whites vacating space for POC. No mission statement, no creed, no delicate sophistry will matter because you are forgetting the most important thing is who, whom?"

If a university could be set up with staff who did buy into the DEI mantra, no careful mission statement would be required anyway, simply rely on an entrance exam or the SAT plus interviews and you can admit whomever you want on merit alone.

Whiteness really isn’t vague at all. Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category. Look at the bio of some composers or monks, for instance, and you’ll find Poles copying British composers, Italian composers in Spanish courts, German composers in Hungarian courts, Irish monks in Italy, French leaders reading Scottish writers influenced by old Greek epics, and so on. This stretches at least 400 years. We don’t even have to bring up religion.

Also, is there hard evidence that Asian students do indeed perform better in regards to the purpose of education — becoming highly skilled and intellectually balanced? If they are not more likely, than the universities are correct to balance test scores with some other, even amorphous, metric.

Whiteness really isn’t vague at all. Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category. Look at the bio of some composers or monks, for instance, and you’ll find Poles copying British composers, Italian composers in Spanish courts, German composers in Hungarian courts, Irish monks in Italy, French leaders reading Scottish writers influenced by old Greek epics, and so on. This stretches at least 400 years. We don’t even have to bring up religion.

This seems an absurd overstatement on its face to me, and suggests an abject ignorance of world history. India and China both have cultural works/institutions (and in the case of China, actual records) that stretch farther than the Mycenaean collapse, let alone Archaic and Classical Greece, and China is well known to have used the Four Books and Five Classics (texts written in centuries BC) right up to the collapse of imperial China, as well as for having an uncommonly stable cultural and civilizational lineage in general.

India was not so unified for a single composer to be well known across the region, with compositions proliferated from one end to the other. Without monotheism, you did not have one monk travel from one end to the other and obtaining immediate employ in the Hindu culture. So no, in India there is no equivalent for a Brit and a German both listening to the same composer, or for a Spanish monk immediately working in hierarchy of the Vatican. The polytheistic Indian subcontinent may be the same religion in category, but the differences in regional worship means it is much more varied than Europe under Catholicism or even with the split between Catholics and Protestants. An Indian on one end of the subcontinent and one on the other would not be following the same liturgical calendar, listening to the same compositions, taking about the same novels and philosophers, or anything like that.

Even granting that (which I am loath to do but I think others can pick on it better than I), you have rather forgotten the other example I gave.

Edit: and that isn’t even noting that this is moving the goalposts amazingly far from the original statement…

Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category.

… or that the arbitrary criteria of “composers and books” doesn’t even necessarily get your preferred racial category up there.

My first impression is that "Asian American" is way more of a hyphenated identity than "White American" - the opposite of what you're saying. Most Asian people will identify primarily as Chinese-, Indian-, Filipino-American, etc., while a lot of white people in America don't even know their ancestry, or come from a mix of different European ethnicities. Is there a comparable amount of intermingling between different Asian groups? Is e.g. a Chinese-American any more likely to marry a Korean-American than a white or black person? (My guess is no, but I don't have any citations for this.) That would be an indicator of whether "Asian-American" is a real culture and not just a census checkbox.

Also, is there hard evidence that Asian students do indeed perform better in regards to the purpose of education — becoming highly skilled and intellectually balanced? If they are not more likely, than the universities are correct to balance test scores with some other, even amorphous, metric.

Hard disagree on that one. "Highly skilled" is evident in their grades and test scores. "Intellectually balanced" just screams "I arbitrarily invented this criterion to exclude you", you're the one that needs to provide hard evidence that they aren't "intellectually balanced" or universities can just say "well, it turns out it's black students who are the most intellectually balanced of all!".

Test scores do not carry over into music composition ability and ability to write important books, which are two of the most meritocratic domains we have. Certainly it would carry over if you’re an engineering academic or mathematician, but in the real world the problem sets are not “solve these clear instructions and do nothing else”. The importance of intellectual balance (which is not some ad hoc formulation but was found in European culture in its most dominant period) is that you want a programmer who can determine when his instructions are errant and convey this, or can follow the instructions with the greater goal in mind versus gunning for a promotion.

with the greater goal in mind versus gunning for a promotion.

There goes about half the workforce of google lol

Good, make space.

Test scores do not carry over into music composition ability and ability to write important books

Care to back this wild claim up? By what manner was this measured? Any chance you just made this up?

Test scores do not carry over into music composition ability and ability to write important books, which are two of the most meritocratic domains we have.

If they're actually meritocratic, you should be able to come up with a test that can judge that ability regardless of race, instead of coming up with ad-hoc adjustments.

Correct, the test is whether the most important books or compositions are from that group

Actually, the test is in depth of poetic tradition, in which case the Arabs and Iranians, at the very least, are strong contenders , while Chinese is the unrivalled hegemon of strictly metered poetry.

Obviously I’m not actually espousing that because that would be really really fucking stupid, but I don’t see why your criteria is any better. What “important books”? Are we discounting the Vedas and its effect on the Indian subcontinent, even taking opposite parts together? The entirety of the medieval Arabic literature? The Confucian canon, or the Records of the Grand Historian, which was studied extensively in the China and the Sinosphere, along with countless other texts? The Tale of Genji, a Japanese work, widely considered the first novel in the world? And why compositions, of all things? And how well versed are you in the traditional works of other civilizations, and what about them to yours? Is your “important works” mainly a result of your myopia than a realistic assessment?

It is true that European civilization, through genius and luck, produced a way of thought in the last few centuries that resulted in astonishing progress, and that culminated in hegemony over the world for two centuries. It may even be that there is some inherent superiority to European civilisation, though what you have written does less to substantiate this than to discredit it. But you would do well to remember that that was not the way of the world before, and it would be unwise to assume that the current superiority you see is, in fact, universal law.

You just said that. You haven't given any reason for anyone to think it's true. For all we know you could have made it up on the spot.

If you really got it from somewhere, tell us where it's from. If not, don't make things up.

Using this purely subjective criteria and having ideologically motivated DEI employees judge people based on it, what is the outcome?

Not to mention how very flexible "group" will become when motivated people use it. "Race is a social construct" when certain races might plausibly benefit. Awarding racial spoils is very important and in fact morally required when other races might benefit. The same person will effortlessly push for both points simultaneously without any sense of contradiction.

So I guess someone decided black people's books and composition are disproportionately more important, and affirmative action is not an issue after all!

I think the claim is that our methods of testing are inherently biased in favor of diligence over brilliance. Therefore, relying solely on test scores will tend reward the former too much and the latter too little. If true, then some kind of counterbalance may be desirable.

That is completely backwards. Our tests do a great job of noticing the smart kids with unexceptional grades, and inspiring despair in the dilligent-but-unexceptional.

Absolutely not. If you want to propose such a counterbalance you first have to come up with a reasonably objective way to test "brilliance", and only then can will you be able to decide how much counterbalance is necessary. But if you have such a test, you don't need a counterbalance at all, you can just use it as an admission criterion.

The objective test for brilliance is lifetime achievement, and it correlates with but is not the same as being good at academic tests.

Then I guess we have to wait until someone dies to admit them into a university.

I don’t think continuous cultural sharing is what’s key for identity, though, otherwise “Yugoslav” or “Balkan” would be a very strong identity. Identities tend to be forged oppositionally, eg precisely when a significant number of people you interact with semi-regularly don’t share your identity. That’s why the one circumstance in which Balkan or Scandinavian identities are most salient is when a Croat meets a Serb or a Norwegian meets a Finn in a third country, and also why living abroad is a great way to become more aware of your own national identity. With the exception of some Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan identities, the primary outgroup of most white European peoples has been other white European peoples, hence why whiteness doesn’t have much weight as an in-group identity. While that’s perhaps changing in the US now, I’d wager the same has been true for most American identities — due to the exclusion of black Americans from competition with whites until recently and the historically fairly low proportion of Hispanic Americans, the most salient identities have been things like Catholic/Protestant/Jewish or Irish/Italian/WASP/German. That’s why I don’t think “whiteness” is an identity with much force yet, although I’ll grant that’s changing over time.

As for the over/underperformance of Asian-Americans in education, my experience as a university lecturer in the US was that Asian-Americans were significantly over-represented among the absolute best-performing students in my classes by pretty much every metric (including things like participation and creativity, areas where some have doubted Asian-American performance). I will flag though that the same was not true of my Asian study-abroad students, especially Chinese students; in that case, there were many who just did not give a fuck about doing well in class, and this was the group where cheating was most rampant. There were some notable exceptions, but these tended to be the Chinese immigrants proper rather than the study-abroad crew.

Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making

They inevitably appear to involve that in the US, yes. In most of Europe - certainly in Finland, insofar as I've understood elsewhere too - they're based on highly objective and legible testing.

Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, now conspicuous 2.4% stake owner in Elon Musk's Twitter just unveiled a new social media venture: BlueSky Social and the AT Protocol.

This is on paper what he's been telegraphing for a while as a decentralized base for social media that puts control of accounts and algorithmic curation back in the hands of the user using similar tech as pioneers like GNUSocial and Mastodon. But now with large enough potential backing to break the network effects that robbed us of an opportunity for interoperability in this space so far.

It's hard not to see this convenient turn of events as something of a plan. There was for a long time some rumor that Dorsey was something of a hostage during his tenure as CEO, an old school tech libertarian who helmed the notoriously censorious and partisan centralized platform (which was so in part on direct orders from the State as we now know) despite seemingly contradictory personal views.

This could just be opportunism and seizing the moment to promote what is now his pet project, but given what Elon Musk has insinuated about his vision for Twitter and the hypothetical X "everything app", and their common affection for web3 and decentralization, maybe this was more than just happenstance.

So what do you guys think, is this yet another decentralized social media flash in the pan, which will be forgotten like the countless others that also had some names backing them up (including Tim Berners Lee at one point) or is this actually part of a dastardly scheme that might form the base of the new twitter that will rise from the current turmoil?

It will be smeared as a refuge for the alt-right. The people having conniptions over paying for blue checkmarks want censorship. They want a badge of "this is a right-thinking person and that is a fascist white supremacist alt-right sexist transphobe". They do not want 'live and let live', they believe (and I have no reason to doubt that a lot of them really do believe) 41% of trans kids try killing themselves which is why society must be forced to accept and proclaim that the guy with a beard and a functioning dick in drag is a real woman.

Anything that does not line up with their beliefs is hate speech, and you cannot tolerate the intolerant. If there is no way of punishing the crimethink, vulnerable people may become radicalised! So crush the snake right now! And if you set up someplace that is "if you don't want to see content like this, flip this filter on", that is not good enough, because you are still letting the bad speech be expressed openly. It is not sufficient that they can choose not to see it, it is imperative that nobody gets to see it.

I have no doubt that whole class of people believes such things, but as we know that alone doesn't matter. Can they enforce it is what matters.

So far one must admit they have been adept at it, impressively so, but that will not last forever. Elites circulate.

I also find this question very interesting, I can’t find the link now but there were a couple of texts released in the threatened a lawsuit where Elon and Jack were talking about potentially building a new network, and Elon said he was very interested and on board.

That being said, Elon is far too invested in Twitter now and indebted to just tank the company. On top of that I don’t see how a decentralized app could be a huge moneymaker. I’m interested to see how it plays out, my optimistic hope is that the blue sky network proves the case for decentralized social media being feasible at scale, and eventually Elon can move Twitter to that model.

Dorsey has too much political valence now to helm a major company and attract enough of the right and non-woke left. Without those groups, you might as well tune in to The View.

Fair enough, but that doesn't preclude him from building infrastructure that can then be used by his more charismatic friends.

....like principle of embrace, extend, extinguish?

So what do you guys think, is this yet another decentralized social media flash in the pan, which will be forgotten like the countless others that also had some names backing them up (including Tim Berners Lee at one point).

This seems to be the first big project that figured out that to do decentralization right, users need to own their identity. They also aren't sticking blockchains where they don't belong, and unlike Elon, I rate Jack's competence fairly high. I catiously predict Brave Browser levels of success.

or is this actually part of a dastardly scheme that might form the base of the new twitter that will rise from the current turmoil?

I hope I'm wrong, but I think there's not a chance in hell for that. The establishment will implode if they don't control access to information so they'll use any means necessary to prevent this from happening.

The Intercept ran a pretty damning piece of investigation that goes into detail about DHS efforts against "disinformation", and includes among other things a web portal (that is still up btw) where government officials can just straight up demand things be taken down on those grounds, regular coordination meetings between feds and social media companies for the express purposes of such censorship and other fun stuff like that.

I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up with impeachment after the midterms actually given there are actual ties to the white house in there and this is the tip of the iceberg. But given we're talking about conduct as blatantly unconstitutional as the Snowden affair, it would also not be surprising if nothing comes of it.

My surface level thought after you mentioning impeachment is that there actually is a path to Biden’s removal here. Democrats want him out, and they’re already sharpening their knives and preparing post-midterm hit pieces. Republicans will want to impeach when they take the house. If that happens on these grounds, the party could let swing state senators vote for removal if that’s the public sentiment. Biden either sees which way the wind is blowing and resigns or he’s convicted and removed. Kamala takes the reins and begins campaigning from office for 2022.

Strategically, the question is are dems willing to make Kamala the incumbent. She’s probably not their best 2022 shot.

As people here might recall, I believe very strongly that social media companies should be forbidden from removing any material that would be protected by the First Amendment from censorship or censor by the government. And, I am pretty close to a free speech absolutist in most respect. Yet, I do not see, from what is in the Intercept article, much support the claim of "blatantly unconstitutional" conduct. IF government officials intended to compel social media companies to remove material, that would be blatantly unconstitutional. If there was no such intent, but social media companies felt that they were being compelled, that might not be unconstitutional at all: "a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State." Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991, 1004 (1982).

There doesn't seem to be much evidence in that article that any conduct has fallen on the "blatantly unconstitutional" side of the line. For example, you say that there is a web portal "where government officials can just straight up demand things be taken down," but that is not what the article says: "There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed." Now, again, maybe in reality those are not requests, but rather demands, but evidence for that conclusion is not in that supposedly damning article.

Not also that the article says that these efforts started during the Trump Administration, so I would not hold my breath re impeachment, absent evidence of very different behavior more recently.

In the final analysis, all of these companies have rules forbidding speech which is protected by the First Amendment. For govt officials to notify them that some post by User X violates those rules might be wrong, but it is awfully difficult to claim it is unconstitutional, let alone blatantly so. After all, if a user posts, "16 year old girl looking to get laid by adult" in a state where the age of consent is 16, that is protected speech which might well violate the terms of service; is it "blatantly unconstitutional" for a govt agency to notify the company of the existence of the post? Nor is it likely unconstitutional for the govt to help a social media company improve its methods of finding content that violates its terms of service; I assume that social media companies forbid gang-related speech (which, again, is protected by the First Amendment), but it would not be unconstitutional for the LAPD to inform FB that "slobs" is a derogatory term used by Crips to refer to Bloods.

So, again, although the actions set forth in that article might be immoral, poor policy, or 100 other things, we need a lot more specific evidence to conclude that it is unconstitutional at all, let alone blatantly unconstitutional.

Enough evidence to get them in legal trouble? Probably not. But there's a very dangerous aspect to the government knowing that they filed requests under the authority of the government and seeing the posts not come down. It's the kind of thing where the government can lean on a company and start asking some questions like "Why'd you refuse our request?" where both sides know that the government can make life hell for the company.

FB and Twitter are probably large enough that they could fight back, but it's not a good setup, imo.

Yes, I agree, and as I said social media companies IMHO should not be taking any of that stuff down (note, however, that the article states that only 35% of flagged posts were moderated). But there is a difference between1) the claim that what the government did was wrong; 2) what the government did was illegal; and 3) what the government did was blatantly illegal. The evidence for 2 and 3, given the current state of the law, is sorely lacking at this point.

There's not enough to convict anyone in there, but give me a special prosecutor and a couple of years and I'll produce some heads. Ain't no way you run this kind of operation without committing some crime, and if necessary that's why we invented all those process crimes to go after clever criminal conspiracies. Then we can appeal it all the way to the keepers of anglo-american civilization and see how they think about "malinformation".

I'm going to just ignore all the accurate legalese you've painstakingly weeded through and say that, as it was with the NSA spying on everyone, even if the feds hired a legion of lawyers and greased every palm to make sure their treasonous conspiracy to subvert the constitution by laundering censorship through private companies can't be prosecuted, it doesn't change it's nature.

I don't really need to build an analogy since we have the NSA's blatant violation of the 4th amendment available, but let's do it anyways just for the fun of it.

Let's say that the government disbanded the Marines and hired them all back as PMC contractors, and let's say that they strongly hinted at asset management companies that they should let the contractors stay in the homes of their renters.

Is this a blatant 3a violation?

Moreover, if the answer is no, what the hell is the point of having a constitution?

Is this a blatant 3a violation?

As implied by the quote I cited, if by "strongly hinted" you mean threatened sanctions for failure to do so, then yes. There is plenty of caselaw on that very issue. And if that is what happened re social media, then there was a First Amendment violation here. But I already said that.

BTW, I don't want to go off on a tangent, but whether the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment is actually "a rather difficult question". See also here

I must say I find it pretty risible by now the way we pretend that it could ever be the case that the State can do anything without carrying with it the implied threat of it's might.

But alas, this is one of the load bearing fictions of Liberalism. The idea that State and society are distinct. I haven't dared yet to think of what lies beyond the shattering of that particular illusion.

The state and society are antithetical. Per hobbes society is the group of men agreeing to resolve their disputes through appeal to the sovereign... the sovereign is not a party to this deal, and remains forever in the state of war.

Thus societies ample ability to liquidate the state...

TL;DR there will never be enough evidence to stop people saying "haha you can't prove it and also you deserve it"

Given the very first sentence in my post, I am very curious how you infer that I think "you deserve it."

I don't think he was referring to you as the 'people' above.

Because it is unusual to see a 'free speech absolutist in most respects' who writes a post about government censorship of social media arguing that the government were maybe doing the wrong thing (but maybe just stemming the tide of real life porno scenarios) but were definitely not doing anything blatantly unconstitutional because they didn't have to force their comrades to cooperate with them.

You don't understand that all of the following can be true: "I think x is wrong," "I think x should be unconstitutional" and "x is not unconstitutional under current law"? You must have hated Justice Scalia. And anyone with principles.

I don't think I failed to understand anything. I even understand how you can use semantics to claim to be a free speech absolutist in most respects while excusing the government's censorship of its political enemies because everyone involved is ideologically aligned and so force isn't necessary. I've been watching social media companies do it for the past two decades.

More comments

Arguing over whether something is constitutional is silly to start with. The only people deciding that are the Supreme Court, and if they could decide that growing your own crops for your own consumption is interstate commerce, then they can decide literally anything is or isn't constitutional.

The other problem with your argument is that it would mean U.S. citizens have basically no constitutional rights, as long as their violation is laundered through private companies.

Surely the OP's claim that the actions are "blatantly unconstitutional" was a claim that they are unconstitutional under current precedent, which is not a silly claim at all.

As for whether my argument means that US citizens have no rights at all "as long as their violation is laundered through private companies," I suggest you reread the quotation I included, which says the exact opposite. And see the voluminous caselaw on state action in general.

To clarify, I ultimately don't believe constitutions are paper documents or even lawyerly interpretations thereof but the living compact that creates a sovereign nation and makes it legitimate.

That's supposed to be the meaning of the word. The document is called after the compact, not the other way around. But I understand that isn't the most common usage.

Surely the OP's claim that the actions are "blatantly unconstitutional" was a claim that they are unconstitutional under current precedent, which is not a silly claim at all.

That still sounds pretty silly. A judge needs to decide whether what you bring up as precedent is relevant to a particular case.

I suggest you reread the quotation I included, which says the exact opposite.

Sorry, I guess I misunderstood. The disagreement is over whether it's blatantly unconstitutional or might be constitutional, not whether it's constitutional or not?

From a comment on Reddit’s Daystrom Institute, a Star Trek subreddit:

scared people don't evaluate a potential authoritarian's worth on how many boxes they've checked on the formal etiquette checklist, but by their ability to convincingly sell an illusion of prosperity just around the corner if only they would hand him the power.

The framing of this statement made it clear they were switching from talking of a specific fictional character to obliquely mentioning former President Donald Trump. So, I have a question for the non-Trumpers, never-Trumpers, and former Trumpers of The Motte: prior to and excluding the events of January 6, did you honestly believe Trump was a Hitler-to-be, a potential ender of democracy, a dictator thug, or any other sort of authoritarian who would end the rule of law and instead rule by might? And if so, whose opinion on the matter did you value?

(Please note that you will probably not convince me personally, and a Gish gallop will make me even less likely to listen to your arguments.)

None of the above. Any person with such aspirations was handed a wonderful gift, a global pandemic and a population and intelligentsia that revealed itself to be overwhelmingly in favor of anything sold as helping to fight the pandemic. It's even better than a war. The pandemic can't surrender, and the people won't rise up and start burning their draft cards.

Trump didn't do anything to capitalize on this fantastic opportunity for any would-be dictator.

did you honestly believe Trump was a Hitler-to-be

Something that is endlessly frustrating to me: Hitler isn't infamous for wanting to "end democracy", he is infamous for the industrialized extermination of millions of people in death camps. Do I think Trump wanted to construct death camps and lock millions of people inside of gas chambers and kill them and then bury them in mass graves? No. Do I think Trump wanted to set up a secret police force to go house to house and look for members of some ethno-religious group and then load them onto train cars and send them to death camps where they would either be vivisected, starved to death, or force into gas chambers? No.

I think Trump wanted to build a wall to prevent illegal immigration, and to avoid the US getting pulled into another world war. It is a source of endless frustration to me the work that American Liberals are doing to rehabilitate adolf fucking hitler into "a bad guy with some bad ideas about elections".

At this point, Hitler/fascist/Nazi are just political jargons for "a-hole" in the progressive dictionary. I don't believe we have another Hitler of our time that's threatening world peace. The hawks apparently want a cold war 2 with Russia and China. Well fine, but culture wars at home do not achieve any unity abroad.

In short: no.

In long: in the beginning, he seemed not too different than other politicians. Lots of smiling, hand-shaking, and declaiming the other side as evil ne'er-do-wells. With time, though, and the demands of the office, I came to see him as a person far out of his league. Not a good administrator. Not a good leader. Not a good engineer. Great at speaking to a certain sort of crowd and turning up the emotions, but that seems to be his only skill. I also found his denial of election results disgusting.

For an example, read the Paris Climate Accord speech. He starts it off by talking about how great America is doing, how many jobs he and his party have given Americans, etc. Off topic. Worse, a cheap shot of flattering his audience, almost insulting. Then he goes over the reasons for getting out of the accord. There he gives some good reasons, but fails to put them together into a well constructed argument. The average themotte user could do better here. I mean, he makes claims full of pathos, without much backing. He loves the American worker. He loves the coal miner. They're his people. So we should mine coal (what about the country's energy policy? Why can't we have nice, dense energy production like nuclear? Why is the coal miner better than my children and grand children, who could have much better lives if we switched to clean, abundant nuclear energy?) And then, throughout the whole piece, you have little snarky remarks about the blue tribe. He and his tribe are working hard to help the American, but the other tribe isn't doing anything, just standing around with their hands in their pockets. Come on, this is high-school-level mockery--at least hit them with something that matters, I mean it's not like the blue tribe doesn't do stupid things.

If we're talking about providing cheap entertainment, he's your man. But if we're talking about leading the country through the tumultuous beginnings of a new century? Bah.

Why is the coal miner better than my children and grand children, who could have much better lives if we switched to clean, abundant nuclear energy?

Because he exists? Your children and grandchildren might, but the coal miner is alive now and trying to live in the world today, and hopefully make any kind of world at all for his children and grandchildren. Why are your children and grandchildren better than his?

Also do you really think Trump would have been treated better if he'd backed out of Paris to ramp up nuclear?

Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.

Because he exists? Your children and grandchildren might, but the coal miner is alive now and trying to live in the world today, and hopefully make any kind of world at all for his children and grandchildren.

Doesn't this argument justify all short-term thinking?

Also, why can't the coalminer find a different job? Yes, there's both a physical and mental cost to this. But does that justify forcing 330 million citizens to live under a worse energy policy so that 62 thousand of them don't have to re-educate themselves into a different profession? This is the USA--many people here have careers that span half a dozen professions.

Why are your children and grandchildren better than his?

I never said that, nor was it implied.

Also do you really think Trump would have been treated better if he'd backed out of Paris to ramp up nuclear?

Treated better--by whom? His enemies would be just as critical of him as they were always. His supporters would be just as supportive. A small handful of people who care about energy policy would be happy.

Doesn't this argument justify all short-term thinking?

Doesn't the absence of this argument justify working everyone to death in Elon Musk's rocket factories in a desperate attempt to seize the cosmic endowment even one second faster?

This is, of course, a rhetorical question. Yes it does, and Bostrom proved it mathematically some years ago:

https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste

Your argument justifies any and all long term thinking the same way what I said justifies short. Both are necessary for a functional society however. And I would argue that in this situation, where we are required to make a trade off between them, we should go with the one that doesn't hurt people who actually physically exist.

As for the coal miners "forcing 330 million citizens to live under a worse energy policy so that 62 thousand of them don't have to re-educate themselves into a different profession" avoiding that sounds fantastic. Sadly however, it also sounds fantastic, as in not based in reality. Which countries have benefited from shutting down coal power?

Also you implied your grandchildren are better than his to the exact same extent that Trump implied that coal miner is better than your grandchildren. If you never implied it, neither did Trump.

Regarding nuclear, you are right that his enemies would not be less critical than they currently are. Because they would be a thousand times more critical. Environmentalists don't care about the benefits of nuclear power, they are too concerned about the potential dangers.

Edit: forgot a word

I'll concede that my long-term thinking argument was a slippery slope. I should have constrained it by something like "moving to nuclear power sooner rather than later will be advantageous in this half century."

I'm not sure I understand your question about which countries have benefited from shutting down coal power. I want to say--all of them--which is why more governments are building reactors. India and China are building multiple reactors, and I suspect the cleanliness of the energy is secondary to its abundance, which also entails a larger degree of sovereignty. This seems obvious to me, which is why I think we're coming at this from very different angles. What's good about coal power? Does it outweigh the benefits of cheaper, more abundant sources?

I don't think his enemies would be a thousand times more critical. They're already at max critique. They'd critique him for using the wrong side of toilet paper to wipe his butt. Note that I don't consider myself in that camp. I just think he's lacking as a leader.

So, I have a question for the non-Trumpers, never-Trumpers, and former Trumpers of The Motte: prior to and excluding the events of January 6, did you honestly believe Trump was a Hitler-to-be, a potential ender of democracy, a dictator thug, or any other sort of authoritarian who would end the rule of law and instead rule by might?

I thought then and think now he's a corrupt huckster and a clown, and I'm sure he would like to be a dictator (I don't think he respects the rule of law or the Constitution whatsoever), but because he's petty and egotistical and would love a world in which no one can tell him no, not because he has anything as coherent as a fascist ideology.

But he's not the first president who wanted in his heart to rule as an emperor, and so far our checks and balances have prevented that. Trump fans decry the "Deep State" for foiling him, but much of that was simply the obstructionism that was built into our system of government by design.

Trump fans decry the "Deep State" for foiling him, but much of that was simply the obstructionism that was built into our system of government by design.

I think the people decrying the deep state were getting at the notion that Trump was put under an isolated demand for rigor, and that if he aligned with their ideology, they would not have been as obstructive. The essay about resisting Trump from inside his administration was notable for a reason, and it was a man who didn't even work directly for Trump, but for his DHS secretary.

I think there is a degree of truth to that (certainly many people within the government disliked Trump and opposed him, passive-aggressively if not with outright insubordination), but I think this is dramatically overstated by his followers. Every president has had to contend with an entrenched bureaucracy that is willing to wait them out, in a system that's set up to make it hard for presidents to just sweep away all opposition to their agenda.

But has it been to the extent Trump was scrutinized? It seems kind of obvious that he was different and repulsive to the people who made up the administration's staff in a way previous presidents were not.

I'm struggling to think of examples of, e.g., Obama being hamstrung by uncooperative executive bureaucracies.

I do think that at the point that generals are lying to the President and deliberately disobeying directives, that rises to a level of insubordination worthy of being called exceptional.

Literally Hitler 2? No. Wannabe authoritarian? Yes. Trump was - to the consistent rage of his supporters - too bounded by American institutions to consolidate power (and too incompetent to effectively dismantle them), but the spirit was willing.

So, I have a question for the non-Trumpers, never-Trumpers, and former Trumpers of The Motte: prior to and excluding the events of January 6, did you honestly believe Trump was a Hitler-to-be, a potential ender of democracy, a dictator thug, or any other sort of authoritarian who would end the rule of law and instead rule by might?

No. First, I never believed he would seriously run, then like everyone else I accepted that Hillary would win. His victory was a total surprise to me, and to be honest, rather enjoyable for the amount of seething and screeching about it. I thought the "basket of deplorables" remark was very badly done, and of course it was a gift to the Trump campaign.

I didn't think he was the Anti-christ cross between Hitler and Stalin who was going to set up a Fourth Reich to imprison and torture women, minorities, and gays that the more hysterical online reaction was painting him as. The same way I did not believe all the hype about Obama being a lightworker, but rather a career politician who would get some things right, some things wrong, but in the main it would be business as usual, I thought Trump would be a one-term president who didn't do all that much and he was certainly not going to start the Third World War.

And guess what, he didn't! The country ended up pretty much the same at the end of his term as it was at the start. The one thing that really amazed me, and it has only paid off in Biden's time in office and not in Trump's, was the Supreme Court decision on Roe versus Wade. After the years of Republicans running on "trust us, we'll do something about it" and nothing happening, the fact that a loudmouth, vain, no previous experience guy who was more interested in building a business brand was the one to actually get something achieved, who kept his word about doing something, was astonishing to me.

It honestly doesn't surprise me because it's pretty clear that Trump had systematically alienated every section of the competent, institutional right except for Catholic conservatives, and overturning Roe has been their #1 priority since 1973. Also their #2, 3, and 4 priorities.

Of course a regime that is now staffed with them will put together the court that overturns the ruling they've wanted gone more than anything else in the world for fifty years.

did you honestly believe Trump was a Hitler-to-be, a potential ender of democracy, a dictator thug, or any other sort of authoritarian who would end the rule of law and instead rule by might?

Mostly no, I considered that such fears were overblown, that he was "just" an incompetent and boisterous asshole that people elected as a big "fuck you" to the establishment and especially the sanctimonious "I know better what's the best for you racist rednecks so shut up and listen to your betters" left.

However, I saw his refusal to accept the election outcomes as despicable, showing that maybe in fact he would have liked to strong-arm his way into staying if power if he could get away with it.

However, part of the blame for that seems to be the crappy electoral system in the US, especially the lack of voter ID which is just baffling. If people don't trust the system, the proper response is to make the system more trust-worthy, not to tar anybody voicing criticism as a fascist.

And if so, whose opinion on the matter did you value?

I mostly made my opinion of Trump by reading his Twitter. I don't trust journalists to give an accurate portrayal of Trump, they have a "boy who cried Hitler" problem.

My opinion of Trump circa 2016 (that I think has largely been borne out) was that he would be like Silvio Berlusconi. He would be corrupt, he would be outrageous, he would weaken existing norms, he would drag political discourse into the mud and create a lot of drama. But the country wouldn't be much worse off after him.

The January 6th thing does make me think he was more sinister. I assumed that he had little interest in actually illegally seizing any power, because he had no interest in actually exercising it. But even all the "stolen election" bullshit seems more focused on his personal pride rather than any dictatorial aim.

As old guard of the Motte will know, I have always been extremely anti-Trump. I don't think I ever regarded him quite as a Hitler in the making, and pieces like this this Andrew Sullivan op-ed from 2016 struck me as at the very least hyperbolical. My main concern about Trump (besides deep doubts about his basic competence) was that he had scant regard for political norms, and would badly weaken the invisible pillars of liberal democracy in a way that could facilitate more explicit forms of tyranny in future from both right and left. An historical analogy here might be someone like Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose largely ineffectual pro-fascism paved the way for Mussolini.

Trump's greatest weakness in my mind was that, contra Teddy Roosevelt's advice, he spoke in a loud voice and carried a small stick, effecting little significant change while simultaneously alienating moderates and creating bad precedents. What the GOP would have benefited from instead, in my view, would have been someone who could have positioned themselves rhetorically as the sensible adult in the room while simultaneously quietly pushing back against progressivism via things like judicial appointments and spending bills.

Since you're asking about broad sentiments rather than requesting a detailed case, I'll leave it there for now, but happy to elaborate if you wish.

badly weaken the invisible pillars of liberal democracy

Do you think there is any merit to the argument that all he did was short-cut a lot of them? Even the "election denial" is always done, it's just normally run through deniable paid secondaries, like Jill Stein. From my view, a lot of the things people hyperventilate about Trump doing is just what they have always done, with one or two steps of deniability eliminated.

What the GOP would have benefited from instead, in my view, would have been someone who could have positioned themselves rhetorically as the sensible adult in the room while simultaneously quietly pushing back against progressivism via things like judicial appointments and spending bills.

I won't quite say they were spoiled for choices in this regard, but in 2016 you had at the very least Rubio, Kasich, and Jeb! as Responsible Adult candidates and... they didn't do well. As more than one observer has remarks, the great irony of Trump winning is that any of the above would have been far more effective at achieving conservative policy (judicial appointments, repealing Obama's executive policies, etc...) where Trump's mixture of incompetence and naked intent to discriminate constantly undermined his own efforts on that front.

Trump had two qualities that set him apart from the "responsible adult" candidates. First a willingness to entertain outside views. For all the accusations of him being a closet authoritarian and being unable to take criticism his staffing choices were notably devoid of the usual "yes men". If anything he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid them. Second, and most important in the eyes of the GOP base, he displayed a willingness to stand and fight. As I've said before, if Cruz had told Trump to go fuck himself when Trump made that comment about his wife's looks during the debate or gone full scorched earth-on the Washington Post for going after his kids and their elementary school teacher, Cruz would have been the 46th POTUS. That he didn't, was interpreted as a sign that he lacked the 'grit' required to stand up for his own, and by extension his voters' interests, and that perception is ultimately what lost him the race.

if Cruz had told Trump to go fuck himself when Trump made that comment about his wife's looks during the debate or gone full scorched earth-on the Washington Post for going after his kids and their elementary school teacher, Cruz would have been the 46th POTUS. That he didn't, was interpreted as a sign that he lacked the 'grit' required to stand up for his own, and by extension his voters' interests, and that perception is ultimately what lost him the race.

100% agreed. "He fights" was the #1 reason people were willing to put up with all of Trump's other obvious faults. It doesn't matter if Cruz was better on every policy, failing to react to attacks on his wife and kids was fatal to an electorate who just wanted a candidate to treat the media like the hostile operatives of the Democrat party they are.

Trump repeatedly telegraphed that he would not accept the election outcome if he lost. There was a distinct sense that we'd all become very familiar with the post-election process because there's no way he'd ever concede.

I mostly considered him too incompetent/lazy to stage a proper coup, not that he would be against one on principled grounds of respect for democracy or whatever.

At no point did I believe (nor do I believe now) that Trump is an authoritarian who is willing to usurp the democratic government. Bad president, yes. But nowhere near the wannabe Hitler zone, that (imo) is a completely unfounded fear.

In the earlier years of his presidency he couldn't even build a wall, so I never thought he could build a dynasty.

He didn't seize the reins of power when people were begging him to do it in the COVID era, which laid my remaining doubts to rest.

The strange place of Jewishness in the culture war

I find that Jewishness has a very strange place in the culture war, and I think it merits examination. I welcome people trying to help me make sense of it and figure out exactly where the battle lines lay. Both left and right fancy themselves champions of Jewishness, and paint the other side as antisemitic. It's very strange how it breaks down, and I don't fully understand why and along which lines.

On the left, they're very eager to portray the other side as fascists, holocaust deniers, and old-fashioned anti semites. We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right. I particularly disliked the handling of Marjorie Taylor Greene last year, where she said something (which admittedly did sound stupid and crazy to me) about Rothschild, and immediately, I was hearing about "jewish space lasers" from every jewish acquaintance I know. While I do agree that Greene sounded crazy, I think there was a few steps and a lot of filling in the blanks between what she said and something that's legit antisemitic.

On the right, everyone I know is very eager to say that the left hates Jews. These people are fans of people like Bari Weiss. I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews, maybe because we've had a run over the past month of a number of cases of the left supposedly championing Jews (like in the Kanye situation). I know that one such thing that people on the right take issue with is the left being very anti-Israel. Though really, I think it does make sense that being anti-Israel isn't the same as being antisemitic.

This state of affairs makes it difficult for me to predict how my Jewish acquaintances will react to any culture warring. I've found that sometimes, the very same people are eager to claim that liberal American institutions hate Jews due to their stances on Israel, but then will also turnaround and claim that Trump was about to start shipping Jews out to the camps for the 2nd holocaust. It sort of seems to me that most of them are so eager to see oppression everywhere, they're like a leaf blowing in the wind, following whatever the current is, claiming that anyone and everyone is out to get them. Instead, to me, it seems more like (almost) no one is out to get them, and instead everyone wants to claim that their tribe is the only REAL supporters of the Jews.

One could argue jewishness is at the top of the culture war, which helps explain why it's a weapon for both sides.

The history of the holocaust is perhaps the most powerful victim narrative there is - a people brutally killed by the millions in a way that is modern, industrial, and driven by pure hatred. The powerful victim framing is used by the woke left to attack any opponent who publicly identifies the elites as jews.

Of course, when elements of the legacy left and the woke speak out for the rights of palestinians, the right is not going to forgo the opportunity to use the anti-semitism label against them. Rarely does the left criticize the jewish elites these days, apart from some elements of it that have been driven to the very fringe.

And it is the subject of jewish elites that is the most relevant to the culture war. The insanity of many of the trending cultural movements, the racial conflict, anti-energy "ESG" movements, pedophile story hour, #metoo, ubiquity and desensitization of pornography, pro-war/anti-war, and so on, represent such a regression of humanity that you really have to question the extent to which any of it is organic. Insofar as modern American cultural trends are manufactured, it is with the blessing of the elites.

It does not need repeating that jews are over-represented in the sort of elite circles relevant to shaping cultural narratives, media, banking, politics, media, technology, media.

Not all elites are jews, and not all jews are elites, but ingroup preferences and biases are going to play a role both consciously and unconsciously in the decisions of who is and isn't let in. Not really good or evil, just human (and potentially evil).

But certainly some forces at play in the culture war could be fairly called "evil". Beyond the promotion of degeneracy and "pitchfork people versus torch people" distractions, the most obvious example is the insanity and crushing of the human spirit following the amplification of the fear and hysteria around covid that lasted two years and in some circles persists to today. A rational society led by benevolent elites would be discouraging fear and encouraging calm in response to a novel cold virus.

So we know these elites can use the jewish victim narrative as a shield against criticism and use the vast and well-funded network of "anti-hate" groups to ostracize and ruin their opponents as soon as they start to notice and vocalize the apparent overrepresentation of jews among the people who appear to be perpetuating these evils. One of the most famous people in the world saying "Jews control the banks" and losing access to his bank immediately thereafter brings this into the forefront of the collective consciousness.

With this in mind it's useful to clarify the relevant issue here, which is not jewishness generally, but a group of people that obtains and maintains wealth and power through careful cunning, manipulation, and deception, caricatured in the meme of the "grabbler" and broadly repeated in anti-sesmitic stereotypes dating back centuries.

So what exactly is the connection between all of these elements:

  • Over-representation of jews in elite circles of media, banking, politics.

  • "Anti-semitisism" as the most stigmatized form of hate.

  • Superiority complexes, "goyim", and narrative control / censorship.

  • Glamorization of cultural degeneracy and wokeism.

  • Demonization of family and traditional values.

  • Promotion of racial conflict, and anti-whiteness.

  • Covid lockdown hysteria, vaccine apartheid, the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

  • Ye sacrificing his career and professional reputation because he's "off this meds".

  • Epstein didn't kill himself; human trafficking and blackmail of influential people.

  • Financialization of the economy over the past 50 years.

  • Debt, compound interest, ESG, growing income/wealth inequality, inflation, and poverty.

  • "You will own nothing and be happy"

That is the realm of the jew-illuminati conspiracy. There may even be no connection at all, and the trends we see are just a natural result of free markets, globalization, and technology intersecting with human nature.

The extent to which jewish thought may be influencing the elites control of culture nonetheless warrants some consideration from anyone seeking to understand the culture war, though you won't find any real answers amidst the sea of anti-semitic nonsense out there, and must bear in mind that merely speculating on the connection between nefarious behavior of elites and jewish thought is itself met with hostility and used to further the victim narrative.

Ultimately it is likely a fruitless endeavor, though if the connection is real then continuing to sweep it under the rug is perhaps a recipe for holocaust 2.0. And now, even if you conclusively prove some "evil jews" conspiracy to be true, sharing it widely will only cause problems, you are better off sharing the more nuanced anti-semitic take of "don't kill the jews; kill the jew inside you"; meaning, don't perpetuate any of these toxic cultural elements and resist the temptations of greed, status, and materialism, in favor of a life of service and respect towards others. Because the power to do these evils comes only from exploiting human weakness and temptation, and the more we recognize that and refuse to comply, the weaker that power becomes. In the end, whether the jewish influence is 0% or 100%, isn't that the outcome we should all want?

We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right.

Major nit: There's a difference between saying something "bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory" and saying something that can, without much interpretative effort, be understood as literally meaning "I want to systematically kill Jewish people".

Using Kanye West's outbursts as an example to prove a point about how you can't criticize Jews without being deplatformed is at least as misrepresentative of reality as claiming you're being victimized by somebody's (unwitting) use of the 'OK Sign' hand gesture.

I'm certainly no expert, but I think you're making the mistake of conflating different sorts of jews. Both Democrats and Republicans are quick to support "the Jews", but it's mostly different jews! Democrats support elite western jews, and Republicans support Israeli nationalist jews. These two groups often hate each other, and have two different approaches to their "jewishness". So, for the Democrats, and their elite jewish constituency, Israel is an embarrassingly competent state which has engaged in all the sorts of state-level fuckery that all countries do, especially when they have power. Plus, there's a "colonialism" flavor to it, and perhaps a bit of distaste for the realpolitik required to create an actual physical state rather than an abstract ideal of "Zion".

OTOH, the muscular, militaristic nationalism of the jewish state, religious nature and conflict with arab and muslim groups which also attack US interests appeals directly to American advocates of militant religious nationalism.

So the question is, do you like your jews militarily weak but politically powerful as a small minority, or strong as a majority in their own country?

You're probably right to some degree, but as far as some of the Jewish people I know, they themselves seem to defy factions. They are elite Western Jews, who are also Zionists. As a consequence, they are eager to believe that western liberal institutions hate them, and also that the right is full of fascists who want to have the second Holocaust.

Literally anybody that does not cheer for team J gets deplatformed, fired, unbanked, sued for millions of dollars...

Countersemitism is actually a broadly popular mindset, as it always was.

You just wouldn't know if you only watch TV or youtube and read reddit.

American politicians will one day say that it's unacceptable that foreign countries influence American elections [talking about Trump/Russia] then attend an AIPAC meeting where they will pledge their undying support of Israel.

You only hear about the people that have the wealth and fame combination that allows them to 1 - have some people listen to them 2 - have the resources to survive getting cancelled.

Everyone else just can't afford to openly talk about jewish power, even if they are acutely aware of it, so they self-censor.

Most self-censor themselves before even formulating an actual thought, as they are bathed in a constant semitic propaganda.

Countersemitism is actually a broadly popular mindset, as it always was.

Has countersemitism, broadly popular as you say, been able to articulate a way to oppose semitic hegemony to achieve political, cultural, and financial sovereignty? What does freedom look like and how do we arrive there?

I haven't even read some of the most prominent countersemitism experts, but there is a wide array of solutions.

I think most are focused on drawing awareness.

For example :

How seriously would Americans take impeachment proceedings if they were aware that a large majority of the key actors all belong to the same tiny minority of the population?

How much less would they trust the Biden administration if they knew how under-represented the average American is?

What's gonna happen to that small subset of the population if/when the economy/Ukraine war/etc come crashing down?

I think there's already been a lot of work done historically, I'm thinking of the yellow hat of the Middle Age or the real estate regulations of the Magna Carta.

But I think that a good starting point would be to simply investigate a lot of these power players just to see what is going because clearly there's been a lot of coverups going on, from Epstein and the other heroes of #MeToo era to even the bankers under Obama and beyond, or the warmongers under Bush.

There hasn't been a lot of accountability in all these rotten events.

Zionism (right) vs Bolshevism (left).

Also, Jewish space lasers are as true as turning the frogs gay.

Can you explain Jewish space lasers? Metaphorically turning the frogs gay was true- everyone’s gay now and we don’t know why.

Iron Beam and similar directed energy weapons. They can allegedly shoot down satellites. Apparently China, Russia, Israel, and the US have these weapons. There also may, or may not be, DEWs in space, which can either shoot down other satellites or possibly ground based targets (I can't imagine they'd be too effective shooting the ground, unless they are one time use, or spend a hell of a long time charging; maybe a nuclear powered one could do it?).

The Jewish space laser conspiracies started with simple 'space laser' conspiracies. There was a growing conspiracy around various forest fires being done by DEWs. Lots of videos of California neighbourhoods burned down, but all the trees and stuff being untouched; melted cars; and then there were 'strange' light beams visible on some weather satellites. I just follow conspiracies for fun, so I don't really try to remember all the details.

Then the Space Force came out, talking about how China and Russia had DEWs in space (or targeting space?). And so then the conspiracies around DEWs went into overdrive. I don't know how the Jewish part ended up being added, but I assume Israel. If not Israel, then it's probably just 'The Powers That Be'. You can attribute any conspiracy to the Jews.

Turning the frogs gay was about a chemical (atrazine) that was getting into the water (usually from runoff from farms), and frogs exposed to it would change into females. So it's really the frogs are trans, rather than gay. And if 'they' means the government, then I suppose we could blame them. So 'they are turning the frogs gay' is mostly true.

And space lasers almost certainly exist; whether they are space-based and shooting at other satellites, or ground-based and shooting into space. Don't know about space to ground. I imagine there's a >90% chance that a Jewish person was heavily involved in designing it. And I imagine there's a >50% chance that Israel has some. So Jewish Space Lasers seems mostly true to me, though probably not quite as nefarious as the wording makes it seem.

I don't know how the Jewish part ended up being added, but I assume Israel. If not Israel, then it's probably just 'The Powers That Be'. You can attribute any conspiracy to the Jews.

Jewishness got added because Greene mentioned Rothschild Inc in her original statement. This is why I said:

I think there was a few steps and a lot of filling in the blanks between what she said and something that's legit antisemitic.

Yes, the Rothschilds are Jewish, and some people probably link that to their conspiracies about them ruling the world. But they're also super rich, and people think they rule the world for that reason, too. We have no evidence (as far as I know) that Greene was coming at this from an antisemitic perspective, yet people quickly latched onto that, until people wouldn't shut up about "Jewish space lasers", driving me insane.

The frogs turning gay was almost literally true.

Also literally turning the frogs gay. (Really, turning the frogs trans, but who's counting...) I will never cease to be amazed at the ability of the internet to take Conspiracy Theories Czar Alex Jones and unerringly zero in on the like one thing he ever said that actually has a shred of evidence to it.

(To be clear, that effect has been questioned a bunch, and I have no idea what's actually up with it. But "Alex Jones cites a study that may not hold up" is hardly how you see the claim treated.)

Alex jones' talent is digesting tons of internet conspiracy info and sources, and regurgitating it in the most evocative, outrageous, and poetic manner. He also invariably always frames it US vs. THEM.

Thus sex deformities in amphibians caused by chemical runoff, turns into "THEY"RE PUTTING CHEMICALS IN THE WATER TO TURN THE FREAKIN FROGS GAY"

But 99% of what he says doesn't originate with him... it originates in invariably more respectable sources, or online discussion... but because he's such a virtuoso with phrasing, the most popular summary of the story is always his summary...

Most of his predictions aren't even predictions. As he says "WE HAVE ALL THEIR WHITEPAPERS", he just read the WHO documents about vaccine passports from like 2014, was going on about how they're going to take all your freedom away with a pandemic and vaccine passports...and then COVID hit and what do you know Alex Jones was right...except they'd openly planned and published their vaccine passport ideas in 2014, it wasn't a "Conspiracy" it was open policy, its just Alex Jones is the only person who hates them enough to read their boring speculative white papers about things that aren't going to happen, until they do.

deleted

It sure was lucky for the left that the Kochs aren't Jewish.

deleted

Honestly I'm not sure how many of his opponents even know he's Jewish. It seems like the median right winger thinks of Soros as "billionaire from something or other, eastern european but I don't know what country, uber-liberal views and supports lefty organizations in a way that isn't really fair and I couldn't explain why". Sort of like a less specific version of Bill Gates(who they also don't like).

The Rothschilds are the same thing; I'm not sure if they people ranting about their influence even know they're Jewish, or anything about what they are other than "vaguely wealthy family with vaguely sinister behavior".

My estimate is "about as many as those who know there is such a thing as Jews".

deleted

Thank you, I think you've well-put a lot of my frustrations over how people responded to Greene, latching so quickly onto anything that seemed like it could be used to tar her, when it's not quite so clear. When I first looked into what exactly she said, I also thought "wait... she didn't really mention Jews, exactly, why is everyone taking this stance in opposition to her?"

Because the Rothschild family features in a lot of conspiracy theories due to being enormously wealthy and influential during the 19th century. You really don't need any additional explanation for why a family that had that level of wealth and influence over governments for a century accumulated conspiracy theories exaggerating their power further. Look at the conspiracy theories that have accumulated about Bill Gates in just a couple decades. Someone did the usual conspiracy-theorist thing of playing Six Degrees of Separation and noticing they were connected to PG&E, and then MTG read and repeated it.

For fans of irony - Despite being super into any conspiracy as a kid, I used to mindkill anyone who mentioned any antisemetic conspiracy (this is back when I was a good boy, 11 or 12 or so). That was until I got accused of trying to spread antisemetic conspiracy theories for doing a history report on the amazingly cool (to a poor stupid x files fan) Rothschilds, who were so awesome back in the day that people still thought they ran the world. Apparently I was trying to dog whistle antisemetism despite not actually knowing they were Jewish (the term dog whistling wasn't used back then, the teacher just called it being sneaky).

So much has been said on this topic over the centuries, it's tedious.

The long and short of it is that Jews truly have «systemic power» that the left accuses White-cishet-male-etc. outgroup of having; perhaps this accusation is better understood as a deflection. They are overrepresented in positions of power, they are substantially coordinated specifically as Jews, including in those positions of power, via a rich and dense network of Jewish organizations focusing on outreach to/bargaining with/pressuring people in power – well, this «they» necessarily excluding those who neglect their ethnic identity or its illegible political terms (e.g. Greenwald), and the fruit of in-group preference that those factors provide, but in terms of total influence this isn't a noteworthy caveat – and their coordinating structures are dedicated to maintaining and furthering this power, first of all by means of promoting the doctrine of Jewish victimhood (to the point of it having become a kneejerk quasi-religious dogma, with Hitler impersonation being about as taboo as Devil worshipping was in the Middle Ages – at least the medievals could have their Festivals!), and secondly by eroding the capacity of other peoples to coordinate, except to again erode the bigger and stronger group's capacity. So we have Civil Rights support and assorted pro-Black activism including BLM, but the moment Blacks begin to build their identity on the Black Hebrew Israelite/Nation of Islam ideology (admittedly a complete schizo clown show), Jews pull the plug and we see those performative lustrations.

This isn't new. I think the difference this time is that Western elites are progressively becoming, well, less Western, and more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism, especially when powered by genuine differences in capability: for a good illustration, see @BurdensomeCount here. Due to all people nominally having the same rights and obligations, there is no notion of noblesse oblige either, the useful bits of Western egalitarianism being combined with useful bits of Eastern might-makes-right logic.

I think in my lifetime, even with moderately pessimistic estimates (i.e. the next 15 years) I'll see the flip-flop on this topic, a sharp transition to normalization of the belief that Jews, as a politically represented ethnic fraction, are just inherently better and have more rights than Gentiles. Those demands of admitting the advantage, with the promise of recognizing it as valid, are not as clever as people like Roko may imagine.

Sorry to reply to old comment (was browsing the threads after just making an account here). But I had to ask about your bold prediction here:

I think in my lifetime, even with moderately pessimistic estimates (i.e. the next 15 years) I'll see the flip-flop on this topic, a sharp transition to normalization of the belief that Jews, as a politically represented ethnic fraction, are just inherently better and have more rights than Gentiles

Really? On what grounds will this belief be justified? Certainly not religious ones in the secular mainstream. You expect HBD beliefs to be normalized as well? You perhaps consciously exaggerate by adding 'and have more rights' though I'm not 100% sure; I have no idea what sort of rights you think would be claimed. Maybe it seems so vastly unlikely to me because I don't think mainstream sentiment tolerates such extreme dissonance as that, the message for several decades being so vigorously against that kind of claim-to-superiority. The majority of non-Jews will not tolerate it and the taboo on HBD is sufficiently severe in terms of normalized public discourse. If anything, I think the attempt to normalize the claim would be dangerous for Jews, a lot of cultural and financial power can be taken from a small minority if they offend their neighbors as what happened in Weimar Germany illustrates.

And I don't think you provided a good illustration of Western elites becoming more tolerant of explicit ethic casteism, a comment here with our idiosyncratic commentariat is not a good illustration of any mainstream elite opinion. I am not aware of any good evidence of Western elites becoming more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism in the way you have in mind, did you have any better examples in mind?

I would ask to bet on it with terms in your favor given how unlikely I consider the proposition concerning the Jews but probably neither of us would offer enough money to make it worthwhile and give motivation to coordinate over a period as long as the next 15 years. Feel free to give more precise details of how we would determine the outcome of such a bet just for fun if you like, though.

Yes, in the highest-likelihood scenario [without AGI-scale events flipping the board and making it unrelateable to our terms], I assume that HBD beliefs, whether truly informed by science of based on folk notions of essential superiority and inferiority, will become significantly less taboo, probably as a result of popular knowledge about elites who'll begin to break away from the normal population using technologies like embryo selection/editing.

On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised by the general discrediting and collapse of wokeness among the secular population (maybe following some CRT/BLM type debacle) and, on the religious side, mainstreaming of the obsequious Evangelical Christian approach to interfaith relations, as other denominations follow with their slowdown or decline – starting with the election of and good performance by DeSantis. Also, as Israel continues to grow and increasingly assert its strategic independence, there will be even less use for the victim narrative, and organizations currently enforcing it will be divested from. In fact, this may already be happening. Greenblatt speaks like an insane cartoon villain; simply saying «yes we are strong, now stop fucking with us» will be better even in terms of optics.

And needless to say, Jews already belong to a comparatively higher caste «with more rights». Though they're not alone there (except they are alone as the group which can both assert perfect assimilation and lobby for their distant ethnostate) – regular Gentile Whites are the sole ethnic grouping that cannot plead for its interests directly, and that affordance is, in my mind, fair to call a «right», if an informal one. Formalizing or at least admitting this difference, at first coyly, then matter-of-factly, is not unthinkable.

I believe that the status quo of hysterical blank slatism and faux-egalitarianism is artificially maintained; its resistance to refutation is not self-sustaining, its arguments are just too weak and infertile, and there's a generation of people who grew up seeing DESPITE memes, followed by «forbidden» PGS/IQ infographics and pathetic shut-it-down responses. It's a minority to be sure, but one that can easily explode in numbers. This is a metastable, fragile situation.

I don't think you provided a good illustration of Western elites becoming more tolerant of explicit ethic casteism, a comment here with our idiosyncratic commentariat is not a good illustration of any mainstream elite opinion

It's sufficient for this attitude change to import more Western elites and their mores from the subcontinent. It just so happens that the first in line to the presidency of the US right now is a half-Brahmin (married to a Jew) and the most powerful person in the UK is a Punjabi. Call me racist, but I don't believe that Count is highly atypical among his kin, as far as perception of group differences is concerned. What's the proportion of Gentile Whites graduating Ivies now, anyway?

Feel free to give more precise details of how we would determine the outcome of such a bet

I agree that this is impractical, but we could establish a series of bets in my favor on specific assertions about mutually exclusive scenarios towards the ultimate outcome, most of which I'd necessarily lose.

regular Gentile Whites are the sole ethnic grouping that cannot plead for its interests directly, and that affordance is, in my mind, fair to call a «right», if an informal one. Formalizing or at least admitting this difference, at first coyly, then matter-of-factly, is not unthinkable.

Then sure, Jews have that right, along with various other ethnic minorities, including even specific Gentile white ethnic groups like Italians and so on (although of course those interest groups became much less vigorous as they integrated into the white mainstream and their ties weakened. But my point is that such interest groups are still around at the local level all over the place in America). The fact that Jews share this right with other minorities makes it very weak evidence for your specific claims about future of Jewish status and its public articulation in America. I grant that they manage to do more with the right than various other minorities, sure.

I also don't think the HBD denial is sustainable in the long run either by the way, but I think the issue will still be sensitive enough that no group is going to be having some kind of literal superiority, in the mainstream, predicated upon HBD details for quite a while if ever in the public sphere. That said the exact timeline on accepting HBD details I'm pretty unsure of. Maybe it will relate to development of bio-technology interacting with genetic details. You read the Jewish scholar Nathan Cofnas's use of HBD details with regard to Jews to argue against various alternative theories of their success, like that of Kevin MacDonald? Is that the sort of use of HBD details you imagine in public discourse with regard to Jews? He was not trying to argue for anything beyond that with it though, let alone legitimate future explicit formal privileges as far as I know.

Your examples of Indian elites in the west are interesting. I agree it would probably be one indicator of increased ethnic caste-ism if a lot more people with Indian cultural background became Western leaders, although I would still want to see the actual evidence and details of them bringing in caste-ist tendencies; the most elite, public-facing could easily be the most culturally integrated. I did hear about Indian executives in American tech bringing Caste-ist discriminatory tendencies with them though (against fellow Indians from lower castes), there were some lawsuits.

How will it relate to the tendency you predict if the American courts strike down affirmative action, barely implicit racial discrimination (like against the Asians at Harvard) in elite universities? I take all the recent hubbub with regard to that as evidence of how uncomfortable Americans remain with explicit racial privileges even for unfortunate groups, let alone already successful groups. I agree without checking the exact statistics that Jews do quite well in American universities for various reasons (some combination of connections, talent, wealth, general success in America, good networking; perhaps their merit advantage has declined in America with Asian immigrants and so on), that is one reason why they definitely wouldn't need or desire to claim any literal formal privileges with associated legitimation through HBD. I don't think they have much incentive at all to radically rock the boat in terms of public claims to privilege.

By the way, is part of your general prediction that American anti discrimination laws will be repealed to allow for the greater privileges you imagine?

And also, unrelated, but hope you are doing well in Turkey or wherever you are now after fleeing Russia, per your previous sharing of personal situation on forum.

Thanks for your concern, I'll probably manage, though I had more confidence in that before crypto crash.

including even specific Gentile white ethnic groups like Italians and so on

Italians not only don't make as much of a use of their identity, but it is qualitatively a lesser card, they cannot insert themselves into conversations about «marginalized peoples» and being targeted and needing police protection in their houses of worship and so on, they cannot very well collect data and wring their hands about the Holocaust of free admixing or falling birth rates in the Italian community, and of course they have no capacity (nor, frankly, interest) to lobby for the national Italian benefit. Armenians have learned recently, too, that not all diasporas are equal, as their homeland was getting pummeled with Israeli weapons. (To her credit, even the staunch Zionist Pelosi made indignant noises and gestures, unlike us «Orthodox brothers», so I don't hold this war against Americans, Jewish or not).

But you are right that there are Gentile white subgroups with lobbying capacity. It's only the central case of whites, normie cishet WEIRD Americans of Anglo-German stock and those who have politically joined them, who cannot advance their collective interests. Some say they don't have those interests and just aren't «a thing», but all sorts of sociometric proxy data correlated with their identity, and identitarian concerns underlying e.g. Trumpism, suggest the opposite; had they their own think tanks and advocacy groups to coordinate explicitly, I believe they'd have been a thoroughly dominant force.

By the way, is part of your general prediction that American anti discrimination laws will be repealed to allow for the greater privileges you imagine?

Not quite. I believe that wokeness justifying affirmative action and founded on the denial of inherent group differences is becoming a toxic asset on its own, both due to the general dilapidation of its supporting rhetoric and due to getting in the way of new, non-White high-performing groups, which are immune to White-targeted guilt-tripping and can organize somewhat. Progressive Jewish organizations (chiefly ADL, of course) which are committed to enforcement of woke views in the public discourse are becoming a liability to the community (which is also changing demographically from something out of a Coen Brothers movie towards something akin to Lakewood, NJ). So Jews with less progressive, more neocon-like and Zionist inclinations, Bari Weiss and her ilk, will feel encouraged to spearman the «revolution» against it, regaining the trust and goodwill of the broader society that's currently being expended, and appropriating the credit of Gentiles like Sailer (who have been speaking against wokeness, and getting silenced, for decades). You can take it as a more or less conspiratorial and bitter spin (e.g. seeing Weiss and Weinstein/IDW and other clowns as trial balloons at seizing the contrarian narrative), but it can be read as a simple, opportunistic response to incentives in real time.

Cofnas isn't a specifically «Jewish scholar», he's more of a good-faith autistic scholar who feels offended on behalf of his people and gets a bit biased; I understand his opposition to MacDonald as something very natural, but ironic given surnames of people who have precluded his own ability to advance in the academia. (On balance, pro-KMac papers in that sequence are stronger, but some parts of the story did get damaged).

I believe he is a true believer in race-blind meritocracy and would have been that way even if his people weren't at the top of HBD totem pole.

Speaking of incentives, I just don't see how Jews can let go of ethnic organizing and its fruit after largely giving up on wokeness and the eternal victim card, so some sort of privilege will emerge and be acknowledged. No positive discrimination, in the form of literal allotments, will be needed. In the end, if your company's board of directors is largely made of one ethnicity because that ethnicity just has higher board-of-directors PGS, and they act in their collective ethnic interests in ways not available to others, and this is not framed as redressing past wrongs, providing support to vulnerable groups and leveling the playing field – what can such a position be called, if not superior?

Speaking of incentives, I just don't see how Jews can let go of ethnic organizing and its fruit after largely giving up on wokeness and the eternal victim card, so some sort of privilege will emerge and be acknowledged.

Jews didn't attain most of their powerful position in society through wokeness and the victim card, they can maintain their position just fine without any need for the kind of explicit discourse shift on the matter you predict. In fact I don't think recent wokeness was even all that beneficial for the Jews, when whites are purposefully disprivileged at high levels that includes the elite Jews that would be competing for those positions; many liberal-left Jews that supported these things are sincerely ideologically universalist and I have not yet seen strong evidence that their positions would be explained primarily in functionalistic terms. I do better understand the prediction when you clarify that you don't have in mind literally formal discriminations, which be would be rather strange.

So I am making the fairly simple to defend prediction of a continuation of the status quo, more or less. I think there is a massive burden of proof on those predicting significant shifts on such sensitive matters. I mentioned Cofnas as that's a good recent example of someone using HBD details to try to refute hostile analyses with other reasons for Jewish success in America; to ask precisely, is that the kind of discourse you imagine being used to legitimate Jewish success alongside the added value judgement that Jews are better and have more rights (by rights you apparently just mean social permission to ethnically organize and inhabit high positions and so on? You say they already do this, so I don't see why the discourse would need to change on it. Acknowledging the existing situation so explicitly just invites hostility).

Also, would you say your position on Jewish power and reasons for it is somewhere between KMac and Cofnas? Should I read KMac if I want the fleshed out details you have in mind with the claims about Jews in power and their doings? Feel free to recommend any other author if there is one with the canonical analysis, presentation of details for you. I'm sure we would disagree on plenty of details, extent but we don't need to go into all of that as I could assume them for sake of argument and still disagree I think on the basic claim about the discourse shift you predict to justify, legitimate, etc Jewish power in next few decades; groups think they are better than the rest all the time but they don't easily get the rest of society to accept such claims in the open and that basic fact plus society's remaining uncomfortability with HBD discourse even if scientific facts are accepted is what makes me fairly confident about your prediction being mistaken; I think you under-estimate how much such claims based on HBD details would be intuitively repugnant to the average American and indeed most liberal-left universalistic Jews regardless of their power and I don't know how I might show that to you.

This state of affairs can hold without any especially significant discourse shift, I also think, which maybe is another reason I am confident:

In the end, if your company's board of directors is largely made of one ethnicity because that ethnicity just has higher board-of-directors PGS, and they act in their collective ethnic interests in ways not available to others, and this is not framed as redressing past wrongs, providing support to vulnerable groups and leveling the playing field – what can such a position be called, if not superior?

Also, on this:

But you are right that there are Gentile white subgroups with lobbying capacity. It's only the central case of whites, normie cishet WEIRD Americans of Anglo-German stock and those who have politically joined them, who cannot advance their collective interests. Some say they don't have those interests and just aren't «a thing», but all sorts of sociometric proxy data correlated with their identity, and identitarian concerns underlying e.g. Trumpism, suggest the opposite; had they their own think tanks and advocacy groups to coordinate explicitly, I believe they'd have been a thoroughly dominant force.

I think WASP elites choose not to advance interests on ethnic lines, this is a matter of ideology. I do not believe they are vigorously prevented by other groups, basically. This is however a complex issue where multiple factors may be at play but I incline against explanations where them being prevented by other groups play a major causal role. Their own ideology is more important and this is what I think happened historically with WASP elites in America by the way, in the 20th century. I can cite to you the book "The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America" by Eric Kaufmann, the narrative of which is summarized as such:

Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.

It seems to me that understanding this historical sequence properly where the facts are all settled can help us evaluate contemporary claims about these groups, so feel free to dispute this further.

Thanks for your effortful comments but I've lost interest in this chain. There are many nitpicks and objections we could discuss (e.g.: Affirmative Action does not substantially harm Jews who, having very high average scores, make it in regardless, but it reduces the relative representation of White Gentiles in prestigious institutions, and accordingly the political power of this competing demographic; iirc Sailer had addressed this years ago, as well as Jewish opposition to AA, that didn't survive this basic observation). What would come out of it, though?

I basically agree with KMac's lens of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, provided in the Culture of Critique. Religions in general are group evolutionary strategies, though the effect is understudied. I also accept broad strokes of his characterizations. Where we differ is in value judgements. I am not that enamored with Northwestern Europeans and their Church-molded mentality, and not that unsympathetic to Jewish traits, doctrines and approaches. Even pretty silly and biased critiques like The Authoritarian Personality have more truth than strongly identifying Whites like KMac, who only recognize humblebrag-worthy faults like «too altruistic» or «not clannish», are willing to admit; if anything, my people have been illustrating this spectacularly since February, and no doubt many NWEs would have gone down the same path with modest prodding. It's not just a libel.

The quasi-conspiratorial issues, leftism, ingroup preference, whatever, those are anodyne. The most devastating and perhaps the most contentious point of those KMac raises is the trait of self-deception prevalent in Jews both on individual and organizational level, its unusual strength, unironically reminding one of doublethink, and its scarily opportunistic nature; though perhaps we need another term, because other peoples self-deceive too, just not so productively on average. Either one sees it, or one does not. It changes everything about the topic, and precludes the possibility of productive engagement between the two camps. In my mind, it's an undeniable reality that cripples your observations like «many liberal-left Jews that supported these things are sincerely ideologically universalist and I have not yet seen strong evidence that their positions would be explained primarily in functionalistic terms».

A very typical case in point:

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948—and Israel’s military victories over larger Arab forces in 1949, 1956, 1967, and 1973, fostered a surge of pride in Jewish Americans. From antiquity until the creation of the Jewish State, Jews were largely people of the book, merchants and scholars. The creation of Israel unified them into one strong peoplehood, with a homeland and with an army committed to defending the Jewish people worldwide. For the first time in centuries, Jews around the world were no longer victims but architects of their own secure haven that they could flee to in crisis. From the establishment of the Jewish State until the beginning of this century, Zionism came to replace religious observance amongst secular American Jews as a core element of their own Jewish identities. […]

The “New Antisemitism,” also known as anti-Zionism or hatred of Israel as an acceptable stand-in for the classical hatred of Jews, initially gained currency in universities and in leftist intellectual circles. It has since metastasized to much of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Today, several U.S. congresswomen have claimed that Jewish Americans have dual national loyalties.

And so it goes, into rather absurd places, including the victim card:

While we undoubtedly face grave challenges as American Jews, we must not give up. Until now, due to lack of information and fear of rejection and persecution, many American Jews have been complicit as anti-Zionism morphs into the new antisemitism. Now is the time to stand up, fight back with all our remaining might and hold antisemites accountable.

We must form alliances with groups that share the same Judeo-Christian values of freedom and democracy, inspire today’s Jewish youth to be proud of their people and the Jewish homeland, and bring Israel back to the center of our Jewish life in the diaspora.

Or straight from the horse's mouth, right at the top of the hierarchy of the party preaching universalism:

"You can be, all at once, completely Jewish, completely pro-Israel and completely American,” he said.

Schumer bellowed a pro-Israel message at the annual event, while calling out fellow politician Rep. Ilhan Omar who had questioned the Jewish ability to be pro-Israel and pro-American at the same time.

Stunning and brave. (Can you be at once completely Chinese, pro-PRC and completely American? It seems you can't even work for civilian Chinese semiconductor companies and be American these days. This is the qualitative difference in diasporal lobbying power).

This self-contradictory doublethink, the demand to support your double standard in deed and vociferously deny the existence of double standard in word, comes naturally to those universalists, and it is swallowed without objection by Americans, so I do not believe there will be crippling problems with the transition to a more explicit state of affairs.

Yeah, it's a big topic where's confident opinions come from holistic impressions based on lots of history, contemporary anecdotes and rhetoric, etc so reasonable to end it with that; knowing where you agree with KMac, I can read him if I want lots more details on your perspective. Obviously there are a lot of crank-ish commentators on this topic so good to know what to look into beyond my present indefinite questioning of your perspective here.

I see how the point about self-deception would eliminate the contribution of various observations, and that actually helps me understand your justification for sudden shift in discourse to ethno-centric HBD legitimation quite a bit. So reading KMac would be very helpful for me to see that, yes.

Even harder to analyze than Jewish power is future trajectory of ideological justifications, discourse; seems like intuitions about what is or is not acceptable and pace of change on them are based on one's reception of the vibes. As one needs not just confidence on Jewish double-think but acceptance in rest of society. I do hope the IQ HBD taboo gets eradicated, awfully annoying in dealing with all sorts of mundane policy issues.

My point with the book reference about WASPs was just to point to the extent native American forces contributed to the same left-liberal political dynamics that helped eliminate WASP hegemony, which could undercut some of the more ambitious claims about how non-WASP elite actors contributed to their decline. But we don't need to prosecute such details further, though I do recc the book if you are curious about 20th century WASP decline.

us fish, nobility obligates our water

so much of what i see is point-retort noblesse oblige. progressivism wholly, but all the little post-yarvins and their listeners are falling to it. everything, thought, word, premise and conclusion. we know better, we are better, we ought rule. we should do A; no we should do antiA. trying to solve the question of Just Rule invokes it with every answer but one.

but the moment Blacks begin to build their identity on the Black Hebrew Israelite/Nation of Islam ideology (admittedly a complete schizo clown show) …

This is why Conservatives should have encouraged the parallel Black Egyptian Hypothesis movement, also known as Hotep culture. It preserves Jewish/Hebrew identity for Jews of all colors while still encouraging Black men to regard themselves as heir of a great legacy and thus above the petty spites and feuds of street crime culture.

Hoteps are also usually nuts.

for a good illustration, see @BurdensomeCount here. Due to all people nominally having the same rights and obligations, there is no notion of noblesse oblige either,

I very strongly believe in noblesse oblige and perform it when in the midst of my own people. Back home people can basically tell at a glance that I am better than them simply based on my dress (even when I'm wearing local dress my clothes have higher quality fabric are crisper and fit me better due to having been specifically tailored for me) and in such a case I even go out of my way to e.g. at the airport lift my own baggage rather than getting a porter as that is demonstrating the virtue of self sufficiency to others around me. Also when praying I have no qualms to standing next to janitors and ditch diggers, reflecting the fact that while in Earthly matters people have different ranks, in the eyes of God we have all been created equal (and infinitely beneath Him) and that we will be judged for our sins in the same way on the Day of Resurrection regardless of whether one was a prince or a pauper.

When talking to people in my language no matter how low they may be I always use the formal, polite way of referring to them and in conversation always treat them like an equal (because it is possible to tell from my dress, manner of walking, height etc. that I am their superior, I don't need to articulate it). They know they are beneath me, I know I am above them but treating them like dirt beneath my feet isn't going to get us anywhere in relation to the reason I'm talking to them, instead I have a duty of care towards them similar to a parent's duty of care towards their children and I try and make sure that what I'm asking of these people doesn't cross the line over into exploitation (equally I would never ask someone to do something I wouldn't be willing to do myself, I've cleaned plenty of toilets and even once dug a ditch to find out what it was like).

In the west though I don't do any of it, because the proles here believe themselves to be equal in worldly matters to me (lol, lmao even) and so I treat them like equals; much like how my job is focused on figuring out ways to make money off of other market participants in the west these people get to deal with a version of me that only looks after my own self interest, and naturally since they are beneath me they lose out more often.

Once I made close to £500 off a student acquaintance of mine who was making wildly overconfident claims about the probabilities of certain events, I challenged him to trade on it and he accepted, despite knowing I work in quant finance and him being a history & politics student who stopped studying maths at 16. I even pushed to do a big sized trade given how confident he seemed by dangling the carrot of potentially winning £2000 in front of him. Naturally he was wrong, I was right and suddenly he had lost a month's worth of discretionary expenses for him. Had this been back home I would never have proposed the bet in the first place, seeing it as exploitation of those below me in this domain, and even after I had won would probably have returned the money along with a life lesson in being less confident in your assertions but here in the West I was perfectly happy to take the cash as I had rightfully won it from an equal, never mind that it was supposed to be his food money for the rest of the term while it was something I wouldn't even notice (you can probably tell I didn't really like him).

Once I made close to £500 off a student acquaintance of mine who was making wildly overconfident claims about the probabilities of certain events, I challenged him to trade on it and he accepted, despite knowing I work in quant finance and him being a history & politics student who stopped studying maths at 16. I even pushed to do a big sized trade given how confident he seemed by dangling the carrot of potentially winning £2000 in front of him. Naturally he was wrong, I was right and suddenly he had lost a month's worth of discretionary expenses for him.

Just as a curiosity, what were his predictions and what did you do a big trade with him for?

Funnily enough it was the night of the 2020 US election and the trade was over the number of senate seats that the Democrats won on the night. He was your typical snooty nosed liberal who I think wanted to impress a girl also present by claiming to be "leftier than thou" with all of us. At the very least his actions pissed me off pretty early in the night. Also he was the type of "all bluster, no substance" person that is unfortunately pretty common at Oxbridge (wanted to go into politics after graduation etc.) He loudly proclaimed that everyone hates Republicans and was making unprompted statements like "there is a 50% chance Dems get at least 52 seats tonight" and I decided to teach him a lesson. All I did was check 538 predictions for what the real probability of that was and challenged him to trade, mentioning that if he really thought there was a 50% chance Dems got 52 seats he should be very happy to do a 4:1 trade with me that it's not going to happen (maybe he said 53, I can't exactly remember as it was 2 years ago and I very frequently do these sorts of trades with coworkers).

I suspect because there was a girl he wanted to impress and he didn't want to look like a pussy he didn't back down, most people I propose trades to back down when you suggest involving real money and at that point I decided it would be good to teach him an expensive lesson. I first proposed to do the trade for a small amount, my £80 vs his £20 but he taunted me (or at least I took it as a taunt) by saying I don't really believe in my position considering what a small proportion of my income £80 is given my job salary. At this is was pretty damn pissed off, and decided to properly teach him a lesson and asked him if he wanted to raise the bet size to my £2,000 vs his £500 and he accepted (it's a bit like redoubling in Bridge after your opponents double, they say they can beat you and you say "no you can't we're gonna punish you for thinking you can beat us"). We both transferred the money to the bank account of a trusted mutual acquaintance and waited until morning, whereupon I got my £2,500 once it because clear that it wasn't possible for Dems to get 52 seats any more and the best part was that he didn't even flip out or anything at me, despite having lost significant money and his body language showing he very clearly wanted to do so, because the girl was still there and it would look like he was having a tantrum.

To this day I haven't talked to him again, I saw him a few times walking around college after that event but never exchanged words, he should have graduated by now.

Looking back this probably wasn't the best bet to make because of the Georgia runoff which could have locked my (and his) money up for a pretty long time, but hey it worked out for me in the end.

You both sound like highly unpleasant people but then again, a fool and his money are soon parted, so you did teach him a valuable lesson.

You both sound like highly unpleasant people

Funnily enough pretty much nobody who actually knows me in person decently well would describe me as unpleasant. People generally consider me to be fun, easy going, patient and extremely generous. Perhaps I'm giving off the wrong vibes with my writing style, I don't know...

I will pray for you.

Back home people can basically tell at a glance that I am better than them simply based on my dress

The son of God rode in on a donkey and never expected anybody to 'tell at a glance that he was better than them'.

Those who believed in him created the civilization that lucky people like you get to visit and 'work in quant finance' in.

my job is focused on figuring out ways to make money off of other market participants in the west these people get to deal with a version of me that only looks after my own self interest, and naturally since they are beneath me they lose out more often.

You didn't choose your job? Who forced you to 'only look after your own self interest'? I pray that we all find the alternative version of ourselves that treats others better than ourselves.

I will pray for you.

Thank you, and I will remember to pray for you too.

The son of God rode in on a donkey and never expected anybody to 'tell at a glance that he was better than them'.

While I believe in Jesus and respect him as a prophet bringing the word of god to mankind I'm not a Christian but rather a Muslim. There is an Authentic Hadith that goes:

Abu Huraira reported: I have not seen anyone more graceful than the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, as if the sunlight emanated from his face. I have not seen anyone quicker in his walking than the Prophet, as if the earth was folded for him. We would exert ourselves, while he would not endure any difficulty.

As well as others like (this is one of the miracles attributed to Muhammad);

Imam Ibn Abi Khaythamah has recorded the following narration on the authority of Sayyidah ‘Aaishah : “None who was regarded to be tall would walk alongside him, except that Muhammad would be taller. At times two tall men would stand on either side of him and he would still be taller than them. When they would go away, they would once again be described as being tall and Muhammad as moderate”

In Islam it's pretty well established that Muhammad from his appearance stood out and displayed nobility in everything he did. There is also a Hadith that says:

Anas ibn Malik reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Noble character is among the deeds of Paradise.”

Islam is rather more of a warrior's religion than Christianity. I find the latter very much reflects a slave mentality that (in my opinion) isn't the best for individuals to hold, for example from the Sermon on the Mount there are statements like “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." and things like "You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you". To me this reflects a warped viewpoint of the world and in this case I identify more strongly with the Confucian doctrine of "treating your enemy the same way you treat your friend is an insult to your friend" (I suppose this provides an example of fundamental differences in the basic beliefs that Western/Eastern cultures were built on that then went on to cause the cultures to diverge further and further as they developed, a bit like different starting conditions in a chaotic system).

Those who believed in him created the civilisation that lucky people like you get to visit and 'work in quant finance' in.

True, but those people have gone now and western society is trending towards godless heathenism, that culture is slowly going extinct even though the genes are still there, basically in inverse of how the Magyars strongly contributed to modern Hungarian culture, but very little to their genes. A modern Hungarian saying Magyars were his genetic ancestors would elicit a scoff from me, much like how a modern non-believing westerner would do if they said that the believers in Christ who built the West were their memetic ancestors.

You didn't choose your job? Who forced you to 'only look after your own self interest'? I pray that we all find the alternative version of ourselves that treats others better than ourselves.

Nobody. I actually always try to treat people I know better than myself, it's just that in the West without noblesse oblige I don't really give a shit about providing direction and being a good role model towards low class people I don't personally know or have relationships at at least the level of "friendly acquaintance". Back home I do indeed look out for others, even random strangers before caring for myself to an extent. It's considered bad form to say how much you give to charity but I give freely to the poor and always have done so, this being a value instilled in me by my parents from an early age. In fact I consider my high paying finance job as sort of a reward from God for freely giving to the poor and needy, indeed I didn't keep that £500 I won from that overconfident western idiot but instead donated it to the Edhi Foundation which provides hospital and ambulance services to the extremely poor back home and saves countless lives a year (Edhi himself was a great man, in Islam it's generally frowned upon to donate organs but even then shortly before he died he asked his doctors if any parts of his body might be of use to patients and they replied that while most of them wouldn't - he was 88 at the time - his eyes could still be implanted so he gave those up too when he passed away, one final act of charity towards those who need it).

I too hope we all find the ability to put others before ourselves.

Islam is rather more of a warrior's religion than Christianity. I find the latter very much reflects a slave mentality

Warrior of that?

The Christian god very much intend his followers to be obedient to him, but the ideal Christian behavior is not really to be a slave, as Christians have historically rather chosen to die as a martyr than conceal their faith or deny their god.

Any persecution can be tolerated for the sake of the actual life with god, after this worldly one.

I actually always try to treat people I know better than myself, it's just that in the West without noblesse oblige I don't really give a shit about providing direction and being a good role model towards low class people I don't personally know or have relationships at at least the level of "friendly acquaintance". Back home

What do you mean by that dichotomy?

Do you have a switch on your morality based on where you are located?

One side effect of the Christian behavior of wishing good on your own enemies is that it may potentially lead to a certain admiration by enemies or bystanders for your peaceful, moral behavior.

Perhaps that is one reason you work in quant finance in the West instead of IED development wherever you come from.

If people like you won't use a porter, how are porters going to make a living?

Porters aren't slaves. Hiring one (including as part of a package) is a business transaction from which the porter benefits.

I agree, and the reason I won't use a porter is to demonstrate that relying on servants to do small menial tasks is not necessary (as pretty much everybody back home does, even we have a live in cook) and there is virtue in doing these things yourselves. I don't have anything against using a porter when I have lots of luggage (and do use them) but plenty of people back home with the means hire a porter even when all they have is 1 carry on bag and 1 suitcase, both of which they could easily have moved themselves together because they see the small pittance handed to the porter to be worth less than the effort expended in rolling a single bag along.

This wasn't an attack on your attitude, which if anything is refreshing in its boldness and consistency. Even an explicit Varna system where our neo-Brahmin Judeo-Hapa CEOs are recognized as spiritually (and racially) superior but are also expected to fulfill certain paternalistic prosocial obligations befitting their greater capability would be preferable to the current having-the-cake-and-eating-it-too arrangement, where Whites both underperform and carry the inexhaustible moral burden of transgressions, real and imagined.

Note, however, that in the West you feel noblesse oblige towards, and intend to save, «the West» as an abstraction and a communal cultural legacy. As you have indicated many times in the past, ignorant, wretched lower-to-middle-class Anglos can only inspire an almost-genocidal contempt on your side. You justify this by pointing out their unmerited pretension of equality. Fine. But if we compare values, they are, on average, superior to the median member of your nation (if not your lineage) in all respects one could care about – work ethic, intellect, honesty, fucking cleanliness – except maybe knowing their place; they provide the substrate for your flourishing; and they are not afforded the opportunity to lord over those lesser people in their countries, nor do they seek it – as opposed to their, or rather their upper classes', forefathers of the Colonial era. And indeed both in the US and the UK they calmly accept even the political leadership of your kin; a situation unthinkable in any South Asian nation, no matter the respective merit.

In my eyes this largely redeems their superficial arrogance, and brings the ball back into your court.

they are, on average, superior to the median member of your nation (if not your lineage) in all respects one could care about – work ethic, intellect, honesty, fucking cleanliness – except maybe knowing their place;

Oh absolutely, we've failed to even potty train our lower classes properly...

I have an uncle back home who worked for a few years in the west but went back to take care of my grandparents. He constantly laments the lack of talent and general low performance of the people he can hire compared to what he could get in the West, almost all the competent people basically emigrate and back home we're left with the dregs. It's good for the country as a whole due to remittances but bad for growing successful businesses.

@2rafa says that we should feel deference towards the Anglos at the top and I will freely admit that the superior Anglos are better than the superior South Asians but it is not enough to merely be superior, one has to use it for the benefit of society. A king who does not rule as a king but instead prefers to spend his time slumming it out with the peasants isn't doing them a service, instead he is damaging the realm and in turn the peasants themselves by leaving it headless. Western elites losing the desire to take their natural place and rule justly over society is not something to credit them with, but rather it's a mark on their character.

Modern western elites have very conveniently dropped all the noblesse oblige that required them to put effort into providing direction to society, while adopting all the worst hedonistic impulses that allowed them to focus on putting themselves first over the rest of society. Sure, they spun up a welfare state that now takes up a huge portion of their (and my) taxes and uses them to try and fix the problems they themselves have created but these people by and large are already rich enough to live a good life because of their assets. Instead of earning say £1,000,000 a year and living life according to norms that provide a good role model for others they have chosen the path of earning £500,000 (after taxes) and giving in to personal hedonism where because of their support structures they still do well, nay better than the first case, in the end, while setting fire to what remains of society.

I think your accusation of my "almost-genocidal contempt" towards the lower classes is unfounded. What I dislike about the western lower classes is their insubordination, this doesn't merit their (or anybody's) genocide, other than that I think they are probably the best lower classes you can find anywhere in the world. They are not to blame for the degenerate culture they have adopted, in a functioning society culture is set by the elite, and it is modern western elites who have failed to articulate and indoctrinate a good and successful way of life/vision of society to the lower classes.

If I were to have "almost-genocidal contempt" towards anybody it would be towards the memes of the modern Western upper class. It is their dereliction of duty that has led to the current state of affairs, I would classify it as a sin towards their own lower classes, and as we all know, the wages of sin is death. This dereliction of duty is not something I am thankful to the western upper classes for, they have chosen the path of easy hedonism for themselves over their ordained role of ruling wisely over the rest of us. And for this they deserve to be at the very least memetically replaced.

Indeed I lay the blame at the feet of western elites not only for the modern state of the West but also the subcontinent as a whole. There is a saying, said half jokingly, back home that in 1947 the white man took his independence from us and left. After plundering India for a hundred years once the concept of universal human rights had developed to the point where taking care of us as our master and leader was about to become more of a burden than a boon the white man very craftily packed his bags, sowed in us the seeds of "freedom" and left us to our own devices, whereupon the local elites who were less competent in almost every way and more corrupt etc. were forced to try and make a go of things. Naturally this led to worse outcomes than one where the white man would still be ruling over us justly and fairly. Well many of us weren't having it and instead of consigning ourselves to be ruled over by our own incompetents we sought our way to the home of the white man, where he was still in charge and things were better. A friend of mine once told a white person he was talking to that the reason there are so many of us now in the UK is that because "you were there, so now we are here".

These days though the white man doesn't even want to rule over his own lands and tries to pass off shirking his duty to enjoy the hedonistic life as being the morally "right" and "just" thing to do, how far has he fallen...

Nobility, as far as I understand it, is about owning land, developing it and those who dwell on it and protecting it and them from harm. (Whatever "bloodline" and "good stock" are, they only contribute to nobility as much as they contribute to what nobles do). Perhaps Burdensome has neglected to mention everything he does that makes him, as he puts it, "better", but from what I gathered from his post he moves money around the Western market and earns a premium based on how much of it ends up in his employers' hands. Hardly evokes an image of a noble patriarch, that.

Right, the devil is very much in the details as far as @BurdensomeCount’s account of his noblesse oblige. The nobility of medieval Europe were expected to actually materially improve the lives of the people living under them, and to provide military protection for them. They were warlords - warlords with culture and at least the trappings of a genteel bearing, to be sure, but we’re talking about a network of guys who were expected to raise and lead armies in brutal combat.

I’m sure that @BurdensomeCount would say that he’d be happy to be a benevolent patriarch to the Western proles, and to provide for and protect them, if only they hadn’t pre-emptively spurned his noblesse with their gross insubordination. But could it be that he has gotten the causation backwards? Maybe the Western proles hate him and revolt against him because they are fully aware that he is in their country specifically to do something parasitic which produces zero actual value for anyone who isn’t a mega-wealthy vulture capitalist, and they don’t believe that he has anything remotely useful or beneficial to offer them.

A shake-up a few years ago in the executive suite of the multi-billion-dollar corporation with which I’m employed led to the ascension of an Indian Brahmin CEO, who then hired a few of his co-ethnics to major positions in the company. I’m sure that this guy probably sees himself precisely the way that Burdensome sees himself; as a paragon of superior breeding, here to rescue a flagging company with his immense and visually-obvious inborn talents. What most of us proles see, though, is a painfully awkward empty suit with not one iota of integrity or love for the common man in his bones. A parasite, here to bleed the company dry, dither about wage increases, and give a leg-up to other immigrants from his caste. A massively well-compensated parasite, and almost certainly a profoundly intelligent and numerate man, but someone I wouldn’t let into my home.

I would actually be fine with an immigrant overclass who displayed a genuine noblesse oblige. I agree with Burdensome that Anglosphere proles - I can’t speak to the state of Western proles more broadly - are degenerated and unworthy of the mantle of self-rule. They are crying out for someone to be their champion, but their shitty tastes and miscalibrated instincts keep leading them to elevate what, to the rest of us, are obvious grifters and charlatans. A ruling class with a combination of genuine erudition, hyper-competence, and noblesse oblige is exactly what these people need, and while I’m far from convinced that we’re past the point that we could construct such a class entirely from native-born talent, it’s at least plausible. The problem is that we can sense, with zero difficulty, that the overclass we’re actually importing are soulless sycophants and parasitic quants, saying whatever they need to say to get ahead while privately undermining and bleeding dry the people they’re ostensibly supposed to be protecting. Until the proles see concrete changes, of course they’re going to be insubordinate. You can play chicken-and-egg games all day, but from my perspective the ball is in your court to earn their deference.

I find the position strange because cursory research shows a clear over-representation of Jews in key areas of society, yet you have Jewish advocacy groups whose aim seems to be to replace any thought of this with the propaganda that “white people” are over-represented, which most people do not interpret as “mostly Jews”. The sheer chutzpah of this group to go after rappers because they “spoke truth to power” inarticulately is staggering, because their crime is not misinformation — saying it about white would get a pat on the back —but naming a group a little too accurately. Since when do we expect rappers to be articulate, anyway? When Lebron James, king of the first page of books, says that every day black people are hunted by white people, was he called out or was he praised?

So I think this is the strange place of “organized activist jewry”, or whatever you want to call the alliance of Jewish-identifying advocacy groups and journalists. You have a wealthy, influential cabal, united by a belief in the superiority of their bloodline, and they’re pushing a little too much and the curtain is started to tear. While of course I hope that every Jewish life is safe in America, the blacklash seems utterly natural, and I’m not going to catastrophize the words they pick when they speak truth to power. As organized Jewry is pretty much against my interests, I hope awareness continues to spread, and this awareness will of course be deemed anti-Semitic.

"Since when do we expect rappers to be articulate?"

I don't know. Rappers do truck in wordsmithery after all. The gift of gab is out front in that particular genre of music more than any other.

I thought that as a kid listening to rap, but when I listen to it now I find the vocabulary to be exceptionally poor. With most of the stories and/or the message of the songs superficial and presented in the most ineloquent and straightforward way possible. Compared to extremely simple poetry like The Life of A Cupcake most rap doesn't even compare.

Ya Rap survives because black people and lesbians are the last people allowed to produce Bawdy poetry (and somehow the lesbians are even worse at it), the most popular genre of poetry for most of human history

Regime de Vivre

I rise at eleven, I dine about two,

I get drunk before seven; and the next thing I do,

I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,

I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap.

Then we quarrel and scold, 'till I fall fast asleep

When the bitch, growing bold, to my pocket does creep;

Then slyly she leaves me, and, to revenge the affront,

At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.

If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,

What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!

I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage,

And missing my whore, I bugger my page.

Then, crop-sick all morning, I rail at my men,

And in bed I lie yawning 'till eleven again.

-- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (approx 1675)

united by a belief in the superiority of their bloodline

If you think that that is what "the chosen people" means, you are quite mistaken.

Imagine I told someone that God has singled white people out for special responsibilities and wants me to keep the bloodline pure, that my worship must be led by those of special German descent, and that God has made special promises with rewards to my European ancestry, including a carve out of land in, hm, Uzbekistan. They will obviously think I am crazy, because such ideas are crazy, but they would also come away with the idea that I am a white supremacist and an extremely dangerous person.

Well, it depends. Did you also say, "According to the [leaders of the white people], [whites] has not been chosen as the people of the Law on account of its racial superiority.'? or that ""A [non-white] who consecrates his life to the study and observance of the Law ranks as high as the high priest"? Or that "Poverty is the quality most befitting [whites] as the chosen people"? Or that "Only on account [their] good works [are whites] among the nations "as the lily among thorns" ? Then, no, I would not draw that inference.

And if I said “God has chosen us and sanctified us out of all the nations”, “[europeans] only have I singled out of all the families of the earth”, and “[europeans will] be a peculiar treasure unto God from all the peoples”?

We can try to lighten the statements however we want, but this is what is believed. For those versed in the Talmud it’s no problem to say “Jews were not chosen from racial superiority”, because this is true in their legalese, as God is said to have chosen Jews on His own accord thereby making them superior. Such a statement does not answer whether Jews functionally believe that they are superior.

The Talmud rolls back Meir’s assertions, with

they will receive reward not like those who having been enjoined perform commandments, but like those who not having been enjoined perform good deeds

And in some cases prescribes the death penalty for a gentile who studies the Torah

the punishment of a gentile who studies Torah is like that of one who engages in intercourse with a betrothed young woman, which is execution by stoning

And the fruits of being especially chosen have been persecution, so make of that what you will.

I'm curious what your qualifications are to say "what is believed." And,re who gets rewards, if you are not familiar with the Jewish concept that any righteousness person gets said rewards,regardless of faithm, you don't know much

I think it's as simple as Jews say [positive statements about themselves] and that if a group of white people ever said [positive statements about themselves] on account of being white then they'd get called Supremists. Not because they actually think they are supreme, just, calling a group of white people White Supremists is just a Thing You Do to boo them. See also: conflation of White Separatists/Nationalists with supremists.

This angle fits the rest of the post, which was about overrepresentation, which is true but unacceptable to mention about Jews, but is acceptable to mention about whites. See also: the way to get the ADL to defend Ethnonationalism is to mention Israel.

I don't know what that has to do with the statement that I took issue with, which was that Jews are "united by a belief in the superiority of their bloodline." That is a very different claim than "Jews can get away with saying positive statements about themselves but whites can't,' which I don't take issue with as a factual claim.

Those who believe it only believe it unconsciously. Few believe it consciously, and of the ones that do, I'd expect 0 to be secular progressive NYT writers.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?

To the same extent that a Protestant work ethic doesn’t go away when Protestantism is discarded, or the residue of guilt doesn’t go away when Catholicism is discarded. If you are raised going to Temple, or have parents who do, and spend time in a social circle that is influenced by the religion, that will have an implicit effect. Essentially, as these progressive Jews believe that the stain of racism isn’t easily washed off of white Americans, I assert that the mark of tribal ethnic supremacism doesn’t immediately disappear once attendance to Temple discontinues.

They aren’t raised going to temple, though, that’s the whole point. Jews are about as religious as any other northeastern ethnic group(that is, not very) and the secular reform Jews writing for the NYT may have gone to synagogue on Hanukkah and Passover growing up but they mostly weren’t regular attendees, didn’t keep kosher, didn’t have a predominantly Jewish circle, etc.

Why would that be the defining feature? Culture alone could carry on for generations after explicit religious attendence stops. My ex-wife was one of those secular Jews, but she still grew up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn; she used to criticize the in-group solidarity she saw, even as she was heavily acculturated into it. There is a very noticible difference compared to our children who are being raised in an almost entirely gentile community.

Moreover, virtually all "white billionaires" are no card bearers of pro-white activism. Quite the contrary. On the "Jewish Question" though, I think part of the reason why Jew-owned newspapers like NYT have seen an uptick in criticisms towards the IDF's excesses in Gaza for example is the right's co-option of the Zionist cause and pacify the would-be criticism from the left. Perhaps the conventional right wing antisemitic tropes of Jewish influence in the west to lobby for Jewish nationalism militaristically and violently while eroding gentile nationalisms through diversity and mass immigration are not too far off the mark.

I also think the adage that today's conservatives are mostly yesterday's liberals is largely correct, and this is where large parts of the pro-Zionist right stands on the matter (of course, we also have the grassroots Evangelical movement in favour of Israel). The accusations they lay against the left are by and large within the liberal framework, you could see this in statements like "leftists are the real antisemites/bigots", "leftists are the real fascists", and so on. The same people however are also vehemently opposed to regime change operations in the MENA region against Assad, etc.

That said, while I do see what the left, tankies and Arab Ba'athists say about the Zionist lobby in the US, its still difficult for me to believe that American mainstream media is biased towards Israel and silent on IDF atrocities against Palestinians. Tons of Democratic voters outright believe that Israel shouldn't exist, I suppose two of those groups are primed to just see anything western as a hostile outgroup?

EDIT: As an aside, could it also be that this is another reason why the "incel" movement is so reviled by the mainstream? After all, young lonely men are very prone to political indoctrination and they often rail against the hyper-individualist hyper-capitalist culture for atomising society into loyal consumers and eroding all traditional support structures (or their own idea of said structures), rendering them unhappy. Often times, this does infringe on espousing antisemitic tropes. And what do they have to lose for it that the Jewish elites could threaten to take away!

Tons of Democratic voters outright believe that Israel shouldn't exist

What's your proof? I found a survey from 2019 that says Democratic voters positively view Israel while not being as positive about its government.

united by a belief in the superiority of their bloodline

Would you say this belief is wrong?

Not a master race per say, but better than most whites, much like how most whites are better than most member of my race (in fundamentals, if not belief systems).

I would say that Jews do have a hugely disproportionate amount of power in society, but they are also generally higher IQ and higher achieving than pretty much any other group so I guess I’m OK with it. I mean hell the whole reason America and the West won World War II is because the Jews came over and built super weapons for us.

Speaking as someone who is not Jewish.

The war was won because Japan decided to attack the largest and wealthiest developed country in the world, and Germany decided to invade the second largest industrialized country and fight the aforementioned largest and wealthiest developed country in the world, and Germany’s European Allies were a clown show that needed constant diversion of military resources to protect.

The Jews had nothing to do with it except making it easier to shut down questioning of the war narrative after the fact.

The war was won well before the bomb on the back of access to much superior industrial capacity, manpower and oil.

yes. US industrial capacity was so great we could supply both american theaters and underwrite the soviets' materiel efforts.

the bomb shortened a war that was already decided

I mean sure the Allies probably would’ve won, but the quality of the victory is important too. Without the bomb I highly doubt we would’ve had 80+ years of the Pax Americana and US hegemony.

The Soviets having the bomb soon afterward was also directly due to the efforts of a network of spies that were predominately Jewish.

the rosenbergs were framed

those powerful who framed them is a question steeped in shadow

More comments

Hah, I think there is certainly reason for Jews to be proud of their ancestry and group accomplishments. But the way that the religion of Judaism codifies this superiority, in combination with activism, is a somewhat toxic combination.

Jews know that an antisemitic white-meets-antisemitic black coalition is unlikely since black Israelite types tend also to hate white people

This ignores left-wing antisemitism based on either Israel as colonial oppressors or Jews as capitalists. There's not much keeping radical blacks with allying with that.

I think you're understating the possibility of a White/Black antisemitic alliance because Covid changed a lot of dynamics, especially around what certain communities are willing to put up with from potential allies. In particular a lot of Black nationalist groups are genuinely kind of crazy and unpredictable and lots of White nationalists/Christian nationalists are willing to look the other way and or keep their mouths shut because they expect to be the dominant partner in such a coalition. And that both might easily take a "the real enemy is the Jews" attitude.

I mean, I don't think it's the most plausible scenario, but I do think dismissing it as "haha, they don't get along" is overlooking some things.

If we define the left as extreme progressives - both BDS and the left tolerance of anti jewish crime when the perp is not white make compelling cases.

I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews.

The left has historically played host to a wide range of activism sympathetic to the Palestinian side in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. This can range from everything from genteel two-state-solutionism, through the Boycott, Divest, & Sanction movement, to borderline (or at least claimed) anti-Semitism.

Second, leftist attacks on fat-cat capitalists and vulture financiers have verged into imagery that can be interpreted as referring, obliquely, to rich jews.

Third, and most provocatively, radical strains of black activism (such as the Nation of Islam) can be extremely anti-semitic, and during the past few decades there have been a series of anti-jewish incidents in the black community from the Crown Heights riots in the late 90s, all the way to the recent shootings a kosher grocery in New Jersey (iirc).

I'm not sure why one would put NoI on the left, though. In addition to their black nationalism and antisemitism, NoI has espoused, as far as I know, strongly traditional gender roles, anti-gay attitudes, a pro-capitalist (ie. black business) economic policy, and worked with various far-righters (some may have seen this photo of George Lincoln Rockwell at a NoI meeting). What, exactly, would place them objectively on the left?

When NoI-aligned people get involved in partisan politics, they either run as or support Democrats, not Republicans.

Which NoI-aligned people have been involved in partisan politics?

The founding members of the Women's March, for example?

There are probably quite a few people on the right who, if push comes to shove, would admit that they wouldn't really want their daughter to marry a Jew, even though "some of them are OK", but overwhelmingly, full-blown Judenhass is coming from the mainstream left, or people who are defended and enabled by the mainstream left.

I think it's more complicated than that. I doubt that many right wingers outside maybe the most extreme fringes would object to their daughter marrying an ethnic Jew(although there's a lot who aren't even that religious who would expect their daughter's affianced to be at least nominally Christian), but I also don't notice full blown Judenhass as being overwhelmingly left wing. I mean, disproportionately Black and Muslim, sure, but demographics alone don't make weird fringe groups far left. The SPLC claims that IRL tradcaths make up the main group of serious antisemites, and while I don't know that I'd trust the SPLC on anything even remotely related to issues like that, I do think it's pretty clear that real antisemitism is spread pretty far and wide among dissidents, cranks, and fringe groups.

Interesting. I would call the way Kanye situation played out (especially when you compare it to the way the Kyrie situation played out) a prime example of how the Left is perfectly OK with a moderately high level of antisemism, so long as the people spouting it don't step out of line and indicate that they might (gasp!) hold positions that could possibly be described as conservative, or pro-GOP, or pro-Trump.

That's interesting. What about the Kanye situation signifies that to you? I've seen nothing but people on the left hating on Kanye for this and claiming that his fraternizing with the likes of Candace Owens is what did this to him.

Ah, I see. Then my next question would be, what has Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib done that you feel the left is turning a blind eye to? As far as I'm aware, Omar has said a lot of anti-Israel things, but has she said anything like Kanye, which implies some sort of Jewish conspiracy? Or anything else that we've seen the left take issue with in the past?

Is this implying that Kanye was already in Nation of Islam territory? I'm unaware of him being influenced by that, although some of his initial comments probably made it sound like it was in the vicinity of that.

Given that this is the second top-level post in a row that has asked the exact same question, and it's a question I bet a lot of people are wondering, I would suggest reading The Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald. This book provides the most definitive examination of the place of Jewishness in the culture war. MacDonald's observations consistently generalize to help explain these behaviors which are driving controversy today.

Can you give a summary? My reading list is too long as is.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XHK-WjxMShI

This is a 'quick' overview of most of the big interesting points of the book.

Critiques by Cofnas are particularly valid, in my opinion, particularly Cofnas's contentions that there's really not much there in TCoC proving that the particular "Jewish-dominated" movements under study in the book are the ones most important for the social developments MacDonald presumably opposes, and that even in those movements MacDonald tends to exaggerate the influence of the Jewish actors and underrate the influence of the gentile actors. I've seen some contend that MacDonald's second reply debunks those criticisms, but to me it just reads like MacDonald getting Big Mad at Cofnas and leaving particularly the first claim largely unaddressed.

You can endlessly debate whether or not MacDonald over-exaggerated the influence. It is very easy to argue until the cows come home whether or not that influence is over-exaggerated or under-exaggerated given any particular perspective.

The point is MacDonald establishes directionality of that influence and the motive for that directionality. Arguing that the impacts of MacDonald's argument are overstated is a lot easier than disputing those two things, which are the main focus of the book.

But when it comes to things like The Authoritarian Personality, which is a big part of MacDonald's book, you can say that he overstated the impact of that intellectual body of work. But that body of work is still regarded as hugely influential. So saying that his case against that body of work is overstated is just splitting hairs.

The important question, as far as I'm concerned is: is the idea of Jewish influence necessary for the changes mentioned (and opposed) by MacDonald to happen? ie. if there were no Jews at all, would something like these developments still take place? Or is it just a sequence of events that would, in some form, have happened anyway, and it just happens that for various reasons there was a larger-than-expected number of Jews visible in the process of those developments? (Chiefly, I think, that the developments are just mostly the results of secularization and globalization, and Jews just happened to secularize and globalize earlier than most other Western peoples and thus got a head start at populating the social positions opened up and made more important by those trends).

For this question, things like the particular influence of Jewish actors vis-a-vis gentile actors (ie. is Mead or Boas more influential for anthropology?) and the existence of other contributing movements with less Jewish influence (liberal Protestantism, French Revolution and everything downsteam, the various esoteric movements etc.) take on an important role, and it's not really a question that MacDonald answers in any coherent way, beyond what's largely a circular logic (Why be concerned with the Jews? Because they're influencing these movements! So why are those movements important? Well, who cares, that's just what I chose to study! Why did you choose to study them? Because there's a lot of Jews in them, and that's the theme of my study! Why be concerned with the Jews? etc.)

The important question, as far as I'm concerned is: is the idea of Jewish influence necessary for the changes mentioned (and opposed) by MacDonald to happen? ie. if there were no Jews at all, would something like these developments still take place?

MacDonald demonstrates the obvious double-standard that you are appealing to here. You are placing on MacDonald an isolated demand for rigor, demanding that he debunks some Alternative History that was absent these Jewish influences but led to similar outcomes. He doesn't venture to do that, nor should he.

Creating Alternative History is so insanely arbitrary. You could just say that Protestantism without Jewish influence would have led to Wokeism x 10 and the Jews have reigned them in! You could also say that without Jews the Grantians would have won the immigration question and America today would be 95% Nordic and America would have fought on Germany's side in the Second World War. It's not MacDonald's job to debunk your alternative history, it's his job to establish the motivations behind intellectual movements which are universally regarded as influential in the cultural developments of the past century. He's not supposed to speculate on intellectual movements on some alternative historical timeline, which is completely impossible. Obviously his opponents are motivated to try to place that burden on him because then that becomes the arena of pure speculation, rather than simply observing the evidence for what has actually transpired in this historical timeline.

When it comes to building models to explain anti-Semitism, one thing MacDonald points out is that academics never even consider the behavior of Jews to be in the hypothesis space for explaining anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism question from their perspective always revolves around trying to explain the pathologies of Gentiles. Your criticism of MacDonald is another example of that. If we want to accept that Jews were influential in twentieth century intellectual movements, and in significant part motivated by their Jewish identities, it's not enough to prove that, you also have to disprove some alternative historical timeline that would have similar outcomes without Jews. It's an absurd demand for rigor, and to me it basically shows that there's not a great argument against MacDonald's core observations.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats