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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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US government agrees to confer ‘minority’ status on Jewish-owned businesses

“We’re going to be able to benefit from billions of dollars of these programs, contracts, some loans, grants, the hundreds of different programs that every single Jewish business is going to benefit from,” Duvi Honig, founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce, told JNS.

Tribalism is here to stay. I cannot actually find much information about the total amount of benefits that Hasidic Jews will reap from this ruling. The Minority Business Development Agency considers Hasidic Jews to be “socially disadvantaged”, which means that they would be eligible for the $50,000,000,000 in yearly benefits allotted to Small Disadvantaged Businesses. Harris increased Black SBA loans to 1.5 billion in 2023.

Trump is handing shit out in ways that benefit his party, everyone saw this coming. Orthodox Jews are a relatively easy growth area for the GOP- religious socially conservative zionists already mostly agree with the party platform, a few handouts to bring them onboard is cheap.

Same reason Trump wants to admit Afrikaners as refugees, if they get naturalized they'll vote republican just like the Vietnamese.

Awful. Race (or whatever)-based spoils is bad. Expanding it to include more groups just make such policies even more permanent and further punishes people who aren't on the minority-subsidies list. I'm not sure how this happens in post-1964-CRA America but the last time I looked it up, the courts more or less punted on the issue in the 90s.

Again, I see this as a clear case of "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced fairly" vs. "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced unfairly".

Surely part of having a triple-lock on the branches of government allows you to get past varieties of "your rules" towards "our rules"?

Trump does NOT have a triple lock. He's got maybe 3 Supreme Court justices (some of his own picks being wishy-washy) and not even a plurality of Congress. The Democrats have the plurality, with non-MAGA Republicans making up the rest and it is almost certain enough will defect (while no Democrats defect) if he tries any sort of major legislative push.

Giving spoils to some random ethnic minority doesn't benefit me (or the Trump/right coalition) in any way. It's not even a real tit for tat because it doesn't cost the left anything. This is much more a case of doubling down on idpol and spoils and creates a new enemy to any movement trying to remove these kinds of gibs.

Hasidic Jews got minority status for federal programs back in 1974.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/07/06/rights-chief-erred-about-eligibility-of-hasidic-jews/479a7679-2127-4d03-b735-57d04fc1aaff/#:~:text=But%20what%20Pendleton%20didn't%20know%20is%20that,when%20the%20Opportunity%20Development%20Association%20of%20Brooklyn%2C

I think this was actually a key plot point in War Dogs, Jonah Hill had to pretend to be Hasidic.

This rule seems to be just extending that, since trying to determine if a given Jewish person counts as Hasidic or not is probably pretty difficult.

It is kind of silly that the two wealthiest religion groups in the US, Jews and Hindus, get special treatment for loans.

This rule seems to be just extending that, since trying to determine if a given Jewish person counts as Hasidic or not is probably pretty difficult.

Seems pretty easy to me, at least for men, you just check the hat. Small, round, flat -- regular observant Jew. Tall, black or brown, fur, cylindrical -- Hasidim. Black felt with a wide brim of any sort -- probably still Hasidim.

I'm sure Goodhartberg's minority-owned Shtreimel shop would do brisk business under that rule.

Can you imagine the 'how dare you say I'm not Jewish enough' conversations?

Ethnic spoils indeed.

There is a rebuttable presumption that the following individuals are socially disadvantaged: Black Americans; Hispanic Americans; Native Americans (Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, or enrolled members of a Federally or State recognized Indian Tribe); Asian Pacific Americans (persons with origins from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Vietnam, Korea, The Philippines, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Republic of Palau), Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Samoa, Macao, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru); Subcontinent Asian Americans (persons with origins from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands or Nepal); and members of other groups designated from time to time by SBA according to procedures set forth at paragraph (d) of this section

There's another 50 billion we could save, plus all the time wasted having to order from your local "minority owned office supplies" company at a 50% markup.

Good.

This strikes me as an easy lay-up from the perspective of both the Trad and MAGA right. Jews are clearly a minority so if we are going to have carve-outs for minority-owned buisinesses they should obviously apply to jews.

Both the woke left and dissident right hate jews so naturally they're going to argue against this move, which in turn will only hieghten the contridictions furthering the shared Trad/MAGA goal of discrediting/dismantling Id-Pol entirely.

Its not 4-d chess, but it is some competent Jui Jitsu.

Its not 4-d chess, but it is some competent Jui Jitsu.

Jew Jitsu?

Jew Jitsu?

I dunno, seems more like Krav MAGA to me.

Banned for punning.

(Just kidding. This was reported for "Quality Contribution" and "Crime against humanity.")

Accelerationism has a bad track record.

"Surely if we heighten the contradictions by taking stupid ideas to their logical conclusion and making things as bad as possible for everyone people will realize that the stupid ideas are, in fact, stupid and destroy the whole system!"

They really, really won't.

Its not "accelerationism", its an incremental step towards the pro-civilizational end goal. We are going from "your rules enforced unfairly" to "your rules enforced fairly" and if either the woke left or dissident right have a problem with that, crush them.

You just last week strongly opposed identity politics for white people, but you support it when it benefits Jews?

If the identitarian right and the wider priestly caste are going to hold on to Identity Politics as an organizing principal/value they are going to have to have to confront the fact that the perception of Identity Politics in the popular zeitgeist is that of an ideology for losers. An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy.

But when Jews get ever more handouts from the federal government, that's a good thing? Do I have that right?

I oppose identity politics for white people but support it for specific groups of republican white people(eg, Cuban-Americans, combat veterans). It is perfectly reasonable to oppose white identity politics which in practice will mostly go to democrats.

You are clearly unfamiliar with the common game theoretic formulation of "My rules > your rules enforced fairly > your rules enforced unfairly"

Im not endorsing identity politics. Im saying that "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced fairly" is preferable to "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced unfairly".

Wouldn't identity-politics enforced fairly mean White people participate in identity politics? But you oppose that? So you aren't even consistent in your pseudo-"game theoretic formulation." You just every step of the analysis support Jews and oppose white people and then find some justification for it.

"White people"? no. Because "white people" is a stupid made-up catagory with no real basis in history, culture, or science. Anglos, French, Italians, Portuguese, Et Al. on the other hand...

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No, "white people" do make up a cluster when doing genetic principal component analysis. Those 19th century racialists have some pretty good modern support.

If you’re going by genetic distance, Ashkenazim and Sephardim are as far as Lithuanian to Spanish, Ashkenazim are better clustered with Sicilians than Sephardim, and the English and Spanish are closer genetically than Sephardim and Mizrahim. From a Principal Component Analysis at least.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Principal-Component-Analysis-PCA-on-all-present-day-west-Eurasians-with-ancient-samples_fig3_259441354

Europeans absolutely have a shared history and culture, and, as with other racial groups, they form a distinct natural cluster. To take two obvious examples of shared culture, all European countries are historically Christian and trace their intellectual heritage back to Greece and Rome. That alone makes them more unified than “Native American” as a single ethnic category.

All identities are fundamentally made-up categories. American Whites certainly have a history and culture. But anyway, it's been demonstrated you don't actually support "Your rules (Identity-politics) enforced fairly", you support Identity Politics for Jews and oppose it for White people.

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You seem to be saying 'identity politics enforced unfairly' (no gentile white identities allowed) > 'identity politics enforced fairly' (all ethnic groups allowed).

What contradictions are there here? What is it you hope is going to be highlighted?

EDIT: I think you are trying to say that giving money to literally all minorities will make it clear how stupid it is to give money to people just because they are a minority. I don't think this is going to work. Everyone can conceive of themselves as a minority in some way, and it's easier to force yourself into the buffet than to dismantle it. Dismantling it will require much more power than adding yourself to it, and you're not even going to benefit. This is why the British Conservative strategy of 'take power, then performatively throw it away" never works. It just gets picked up by everyone else who lacks those scruples.

Its not "accelerationism", its an incremental step towards the pro-civilizational end goal. We are going from "your rules enforced unfairly" to "your rules enforced fairly" and if either the woke left or dissident right have a problem with that, crush them.

Nah, more likely antisemitism will continue to grow as people wake up to Jewish influence in the American government. I'm not sure reforms like this are going to be effective owns against the Dissident Right when it validates their criticism of Jewish behavior in American society.

Fuck it, why not? They’re a minority right? What’s kind of crazy about this though is that Jews by and large did not vote for Trump, despite Oct 7 and all the fallout of that. But in an accelerationist sense maybe this is a good policy, heighten the contradictions and hypocrisy of these programs

But are these benefits going to stay around under Trump?