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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Anti-Semitism: It's not rocket science

The familial relationship takes certain actions of the table and requires others, even when it's bad. You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps. You probably wouldn't want him imprisoned, hanged or shot, even under pretty hostile circumstances. On a more general note, there may be countless family members who are not awful people but are simply less capable than you. If they weren't family members, you might have little to do with them and might rarely even consider them in your plans. But because they are, you do. Ethnies are partly socially constructed, but largely racially constrained families, and they contained a weakened form of the same instinct of moral obligation towards the members of the ethny. Elites from the same ethny may see their peasants as retrograde, but they don't normally arrive at the belief that these should be mercilessly crushed, or that public policy should show no concern whatsoever for their wellbeing.

Now take an ethny with a dramatically higher average IQ (10 -15 points) than the members of the society they live in. You have at once, a guaranteed factory of new revolutionary ideas; and no instinctive limiting concern for the vast majority of people who will be affected by those ideas. Now sometimes ethnies merge and form new identities. Most British, Germans, Irish and even Italian Americans eventually came to see themselves as Americans first. But the gaps between your average German and Italian are not remotely similar to the gap between your average Jew and non-Jew. This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room, or the thousands of years of hostility it involved. No one wants to merge with a family that has a comparatively large percentage of loosers to the one they came from. So the Jewish ethny remains separate, and as such it's members pursue their ideological goals without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society. Naturally, eventually people get tired of this and respond with anti-Jewish measures.

Note that this theory of Jewish gentile relations requires no belief in a unique Jewish malevolence in order to arrive at the conclusion that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews will always naturally develop into hostility.

  • -17

See also - Amy Chua's discussion of market dominant minorities in World on Fire. This phenomenon plays out any diaspora that has human capital advantages over the local population.

Jews and non-Jews will always naturally develop into hostility.

Only if we keep playing the identity politics game. Erroneously ascribing group traits to individuals, or conflating group criticism with bigotry, is the poison pill which melts brains. For example, its possible to criticize aspects of 'black culture' (population level) without impugning individuals. I'm not claiming people will interpret such criticism charitably, but that's because they swallowed the poison pill. It's possible to notice that the Jews are successful without spite for members of that group. It might be expedient to simply join a different tribe (American, the middle class, Democrats, Republicans, Unitarians, (who, coincidentally, may have the highest IQ's)). But this is only because people keep playing identity politics.

Anglos ... got pushed out of virtually every powerful position in their own country

Come now. The halls of power in this nation are overflowing with Anglos. At least "Anglos" in the American sense where they're probably part Irish and German and French and English. But they're part Anglo and live in American Anglo culture. And they are largely in charge.

While I can empathize with discontent caused by anti-Anglo identity politics, the claim that they have been pushed out every powerful position is so factually incorrect it borders on fantasy. Wealth, political power, judicial power, institutional power, and business power is overwhelmingly and disproportionately in the hands of Anglos. This is neither inherently good nor bad, but it can take thick skin to understand. I fail to see anything wrong with aspiring to achieve the highest ideals of the declaration of independence and US constitution.

Are you intepreting Anglo to specifically mean Anglo Saxon Protestants, so Anglo Saxon Catholics don't count? Let alone the other northern Europeans usually included?

You probably need to specify that as modern usage would generally include any non Hispanic white. Let alone exclude Anglo-Saxon Catholics.

"A white person in the U.S. who is not from a Latin American country: The students are Anglos, Latinos, and Native Americans." from Cambridge English dictionary.

Under your definition, people have been “playing identity politics” for thousands of years. Why would they stop now?

People can stop out of self interest. The strength and nature of identities can have varying utility. For example, it isn't optimal to violently persecute the Quakers because they're a different tribe, or hold back the Irish because they're more recent immigrants than, say, the English. Being a Yankee vs Red Socks fan isn't likely to produce huge negative externalities for the individual or society, whereas being a Hindu or white nationalist would. If the irrationality of identity politics can't be eliminated because it is innate to some extent, we can chose more optimal levels of identification and tribal delineation.

how do you convince other people to stop

That's the million dollar question. It don't think it will be easy, fast, and I don't claim that it's necessarily possible. Tribalism is almost certainly a useful evolved trait. Nevertheless, the long view of history makes me optimistic that slow incrementalism can get us to form tribes/tribal identities which lower net human suffering compared to the status quo. Within the US, The Know Nothing party would seem absurd today. So would a war of Quakers vs Catholics, or whatever. Skin color, ethnicity, and religious affiliation are the lowest hanging fruit. The fact that Thomas Sowell and Glenn Lowry are black is the least interesting thing about them, and reveals almost no useful information about their essence.

The modern west is a hajnal shredder and talking about the exact selection pressures involved is interesting, but suffice to say for now that we are not hurtling towards lowering net human suffering through more intelligent tribalism.

Doesn't this theory suggest welcoming with open and encouraging arms atheist jews who integrate and marry into normal western society? Yet almost all antisemites suggest that left-wing or revolutionary ordeconstructing jews, most of which aren't that ethically jewish and marry into broader society, are a key driver of societal decay or w/e.

It's members pursue their ideological goals

If jews had a pattern of malevolent "ideological" (or non-ideological) goals (in a way gentiles didn't), and had disproportionate power due to their IQ, that'd be enough to prove antisemitism without the 'and it works better because of lack of care for non-co-ethnics' part. Conversely - if they don't, caring less about gentiles doesn't matter that much. Most ideological goals today claim they benefit the general population / people of all religions, including most of those held by jews - so "loving the gentiles" wouldn't restrict the ideological zeal of powerful jews - if you're a communist, "caring more about people of all races" in a simple sense won't stop you from being communist even given that as a matter of fact communist harms people of all races, because the communist doesn't believe that.

Doesn't this theory suggest welcoming with open and encouraging arms atheist jews who integrate and marry into normal western society? Yet almost all antisemites suggest that left-wing or revolutionary ordeconstructing jews, most of which aren't that ethically jewish and marry into broader society, are a key driver of societal decay or w/e.

The problem with 'atheists' is that they actually follow a different religion. From example egalitarianism, or 'woke' religion.With Western Jews I would say that their primary religion is the holocaust / antisemitism.

Bad things happen to everyone every day, but every time somebody steps on a Jew's toe, it seems to make international news.

There seems to be a lack of self-reflection as well. Show me a person descended from Jews who says :'you know what, Kanye and Kyrie Irving have a point, these Jews sure have a lot of wealth, maybe they ought to act nicer', who is not trashing Jesus Christ, who is not lambasting white people or anyone else for freedom of association, and I'll be pretty welcoming to them.

Stephen Miller is pretty okay I guess, from what I heard about him.

Egalitarianism is not wokism, and neither are inherently religious.

I’m sure some “atheists” are really filling a God-shaped hole with social justice rhetoric. I’m not one of them, and I doubt that most are. Some of us just don’t have that need.

It's not a very common occurrence but here's an example from h3h3

His job is, in part, to make edgy-but-still-socially-acceptable jokes though. Religion is an acceptable target for mocking among people who lean left. compare to "racist comments against asians". This is like using nick mullen to prove all whites are racist.

He has a job because he's not cancelled. I think he helped cancel Sam Hyde's tv show.

It's acceptable to hate on Jesus but hating on Mohammed will get you killed while hating anything that has to do with Jews will get you cancelled.

All I'm saying is that part of my personal minimum for acceptable non-Christians is that they show some respect to the faith.

Then one of the other thing, if you're wealthy and powerful, and this is not specifically a Christian thing, is to not lord it over other people. Noblesse oblige they call it?

Antisemitism is hardly ever 'punching down' as the progressives put it.

H3H3 may not be "cancelled," but he's lost quite a lot of his respectability among his creative peers, and that can be effectively the same thing.

Sorry yes the twitter acct was deleted today and I found an alternate youtube commenting on it but somehow did not copy it. Fixed.

Agree on this. Progressive narratives about Christianity can be annoying and offensive, but it doesn’t seem like they’re disproportionately Jewish. And religious Jews have narratives about Christianity which are offensive to Christian(and yes, the double standard where that’s all well and good but Christians need to tailor their narrative around not offending the Jews needs to be called out), but it doesn’t seem like it influences anything that isn’t directly connected to religious Judaism.

No one wants to merge with a family that has a comparatively large percentage of loosers to the one they came from. So the Jewish ethny remains separate, and as such it's members pursue their ideological goals without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society. Naturally, eventually people get tired of this and respond with anti-Jewish measures.

I recall a different line of argument which argued that those Jews who were most inclined towards Western civilization left and intermarried with gentiles. Eventually, only those who were least favorable towards the West, as it was then, remained Jewish.

Interestingly, the rate of Jew-Gentile intermarriage has increased massively with the 'Reform' movement in Judaism and liberalization across the Western world. The world of 1850-1890s was very different socially, intellectually and politically (even ignoring the gigantic economic changes). That was the era of scientific racism, now science is racist. Jews had no small part in these transformations - Boas, Freud, Gould... Jews were integral to the US civil rights movement, apparently making up 90% of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi for example. If one quickly checks wikipedia there are considerably more noteworthy Jewish feminists than the next largest most prominent ethnic group, British feminists. I already wrote about Jewish prominence in US entertainment, finance, media and politics here. I noted then that Jewish political megadonors tended to be liberal in the pro-LGBT/minorities sense, while gentiles didn't. Disney, Blackrock and the New York Times have a similar tendency, similar controllers.

So I disagree with the conclusion that Jewish-gentile relations will always develop into hostility. Gentiles in the West have been consumed ideologically/culturally but now Jews are being consumed demographically, at least outside of Israel. Perhaps this is an example of suffering from success?

The TDLR about this is that Jews being very well represented in the cathedral is the null hypothesis from everything else we know about them and doesn’t require any additional information to explain. Jews on the whole are wealthy, secular, well-educated, high-IQ, white passing people with a history of(in the US relatively minor) discrimination. Of course civil rights lawyers and editors at prestige newspapers and academics are going to be disproportionately Jewish and Jews are going to lean fairly progressive. There’s a similar dynamic, in reverse, where Mormons and conservative religious Catholics are way over represented among the conservative equivalents of these things.

I'm not at all convinced that ethnic subgroups can maintain their heterogeneity through brute force IQ gaps.

-there is some evidence for assortative mating based on IQ, but there's also plenty of confounders. (college professors are likely to marry within their profession, but inevitably share much more than above-average cognitive ability)

  • if humans really have a 'your brain must be this big to ride' rule, intellectual accomplishment should be percieved as way sexier than it actually is, being a reliable proxy for IQ.

-in any case, it would be inadequate to maintain small minority groups of high IQ - if your people are only 1% of the population, ten IQ points on average is going to slightly increase the fraction of (your group) in the pool of intellectually attractive potential partners, but you'll still be massively outnumbered & swiftly assimilated into the majority population without other forms of cultural protectionism.

-if we're at the point of invoking cultural awareness of 'comparatively large percentage of losers', there's no need to involve IQ gaps on top. It's not really controversial to note that cultures that last tend to include beliefs & practices that encourage conversion & expansion, and discourage apostasy and assimilation. This sort of cultural perception doesn't even need to be accurate! (It's not like medieval Christians were lining up to marry off their daughters at the local synagogue) It can function just fine as pure unsupported protectionism.

Jewish communities in Europe also historically "pick lemons". Anyone not bookish enough for a bar mitzvah always had the option to convert to Christianity and leave the Jewish community.

We don't have any stats. But there were times when labour demand was high, and I imagine a lot of boys were tempted by the idea of spending their days outdoors taking care of horses.

We don't have any stats.

No, but we have stories, and they show that Jews who converted were always rare, either sincere believers in Christ or totally desperate.

But there were times when labour demand was high, and I imagine a lot of boys were tempted by the idea of spending their days outdoors taking care of horses.

Yes, future of backbreaking labor outdoors for starvation wage, abuse and beatings 24/7 from your fellow Christian for killing Christ (In theory, Jewish convert was to be welcomed as beloved brother. In practice, attitude of Christians on the ground was somewhat different.) and, when the next plague comes, being burned at stake for poisoning the village well.

You might be tempted by this life, but few people would agree with you.

What did happen with Jewish failsons and adventurous young men, then? In Christianity they were mostly absorbed by the church or military, but medieval Jews didn’t have that option.

This might be meta, but why are all my posts getting delayed by several hours? @Amadan

You are a new poster which means all your posts are automatically filtered until a mod manually approves them. Once you've been posting for a while, you'll no longer be caught in the new user filter.

Got it. Thanks.

Jesus wept.

But because they are, you do.

Not necessarily. The parable of the prodigal son hinges on the contrition of the son, not on his foolishness.

Ethnies [?] are partly socially constructed, but largely racially constrained families, and they contained a weakened form of the same instinct of moral obligation towards the members of the ethny.

Do they? How weakened? I can find plenty of examples of intra-racial snitching, backstabbing, shifting alliances, or outside allegiance. You are glossing over the step where I am supposed to find the Jews uniquely scary on this front. This is the usual demand for a "belief in a unique Jewish malevolence."

Elites...don't normally arrive at the belief that these should be mercilessly crushed,

Oh, is that so?

or that public policy should show no concern whatsoever for their wellbeing

But of course. I notice you also don't bother to demonstrate that the Jews do both those things.

a guaranteed factory of new revolutionary ideas

Ah yes, the famed revolutionary zeal of the Ashkenazim. Except when it's time to talk about Israel, and suddenly the modal Jew is a Hasidic fundamentalist and a hidebound reactionary.

no instinctive limiting concern for the vast majority of people

It may beggar belief, but some humans are capable of extending empathy--even charity!--beyond their racial group. Again, you assert that Jews must be unusually malevolent, yet do not provide your evidence.

[rambling about how Jews can't integrate]

Uh huh. The Jews that you Notice™ in our American elite sure look like they're engaging with American culture. "The enemy must be both strong and weak," I suppose.

You conclude by, yet again, forgoing evidence in favor of assertions that your enmity is "natural." Congratulations: now that you've solved the Jewish problem, you can go back to living in the woods and getting in tribal fights with bands of monkeys. Civilization is about being better than this, about breaking the defect-defect equilibrium and unlocking a world of unnatural ideas like "comparative advantage" and "law."

If anti-Semitism were rocket science, it would be far more coherent.

''' It may beggar belief, but some humans are capable of extending empathy--even charity!--beyond their racial group. '''

People are also capable of extending charity outside of their family, yet the norm for most people, most of the time, is to extend far more empathy and charity to family members than to outsiders. In fact, most people would seriously distrust a person who told them, hey I care about family members and non-family members equally.

''' Again, you assert that Jews must be unusually malevolent, yet do not provide your evidence. '''

Once again, I think that every elite group is tempted to feel contempt for those it rules, and that the vast majority of it's capacity for benevolence towards those ruled stems from ethnic identification with those ruled.

You are, of course, correct. Charity may well be applied inversely proportional to distance. I think I've seen it described as a model of concentric circles, in which the closest (and smallest) circles receive the most attention.

But that does not mean the outer circles are empty. You could have someone who cares strictly less about those outside his immediate family, yet still be able to treat with them, even respect them. I say "could," but as you observe, this is the normal state of affairs.

the vast majority of it's [sic] capacity for benevolence towards those ruled stems from ethnic identification with those ruled.

Why do you believe this?

But that does not mean the outer circles are empty. You could have someone who cares strictly less about those outside his immediate family, yet still be able to treat with them, even respect them. I say "could," but as you observe, this is the normal state of affairs.

Not sure about the original thesis, but this counterpoint ignores the ingroup/outgroup/fargroup dynamic. It is common for some of those concentric circles to include functional complete apathy and even outright hostility. The "Early Life" trope does exist, and politics is the mindkiller.

True. But then, assuming there are only three circles (family, “ethnie,” and “no instinctive limiting concern”) isn’t compatible with it, either. I think OP needs to do more work to explain why everyone is in an “outgroup” circle and not one of the more favorable ones.

What’s “Early Life?” Kind of hard to google.

What’s “Early Life?” Kind of hard to google.

When you see some paleface writer, journalist, researcher, etc, condemning western civilization and white people, check the "Early Life" section of their wikipedia article. Purportedly, it will let slip their otherwise unremarked Jewish heritage. Obviously subject to massive selection effects and convenient memory loss when it doesn't hold, but it does seem to bear out more often than I would have expected.

Ahh, I see.

It’s the section I checked, yesterday, when trying to see if recent newsworthy figures were suitable examples for my post...so yeah, the trope is real.

"Early Life" is the section in a person's page on Wikipedia that usually mentions if they were born in a Jewish family.

Why do you believe this?

Because as soon as our elites oficially abandoned racial identification as a legitimite value they immediately transferred their allegiance to racial minorities, advancing their alleged interests with psychopathic disregard for the safety or security of their primary citizens. Nixon for example, dramatically expanded affirmative action, despite being at least tentatively convinced that Hernstein was correct and racial intelligence gaps were genetic - https://youtube.com/watch?v=PwXOEFK6Swo.

Your evidence for a grand historical trend...is just Nixon?

I don’t find that very compelling. How does removing segregation cause Nixon to go mask-off? Why should any particular citizen be treated as “primary?”

Wouldn’t this predict that Jewish elite should favor gentile subjects over Jewish ones?

The elites of every major western European nation have accepted massive populations of migrants despite these being entirely a financial negative, several times more violence and criminality prone than the native populations, and on top of that open hatred for western society and social attitudes that were in every way the polar opposite of everything enlightenment or post-enlightenment. And they've done this wave after wave, with full awareness of the consequences. They did this despite massive public disaproval, with little to no opposition by conservatives.

In America, A black man born to a family in the top one percent is as likely to be incarcerated as a white man born to a family making 36K. The average black teenager in a family making 200K will get the same SAT score as a white child from a family making 20K. Our elites (including the conservative ones) respond by discriminating against whites, decreasing penalties for criminality and burying the race of anti-white criminals while boosting every single case of a white hurting a black.

The nature of America's new creed is so obvious, that even white red tribe normies whose family members are murdered by blacks understand that they are expected to express their forgiveness for the killers to the national press.

AS FOR JEWISH ELITES:

  • ''' Wouldn’t this predict that Jewish elite should favor gentile subjects over Jewish ones? '''

In many cases they do. But the important divide isn't Jewish vs gentile, but Western vs foreign. You could make hundreds of millions of people temporarily better off by bringing them to European countries. But they inevitably make European society worse. If a non-ethnocentric Jew does not gain a special willingness to privilege the interests Europeans over non-europeans, being a general lover of gentiles makes them a worse enemy than an ethnocentric Jew, because then undermine your society even when their ethnic interests are aligned with it (keeping muslims out).

Who are primary citizens in this context?

Nixon is the worst possible example for this argument. It was perfectly possible in 1969 to believe both that 1) black people are genetically inferior; and 2) nevertheless, most of gap in economic success was the result of other factors. It is even possible that both of those things are true.

The link is to one of the Nixon tapes, in which he discusses race with Moynihan.

In fact, most people would seriously distrust a person who told them, hey I care about family members and non-family members equally.

This seems like a strange assertion. If I told a stranger "I care about you as if you were family" I think most people would think it was a compliment!

Yes, because you're elevating that person to a special importance. Literally, the complimentary nature of the line is entirely dependent on the unique care level of family. If I told someone "I care about you as much as a random North Korean peasant", they would think of that as an insult.

Ah, but what people hear given that phrasing is “I care as little for my family as I do for any stranger on the street.” It sends up sociopathic flags.

To an actual stranger? Like, if you told that to someone on the day you met them? Nope, I'd start looking around for exits the moment I heard something like that.

You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps.

And yet, there's nothing quite so terrible as the hatreds caused by family splits. The heathen is combatted less fiercely than the heretic or apostate.

This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room

What, the elephant that most Americans are blindingly philosemitic? Or is the elephant that religion is less and less important in most people's lives, particularly the young?

So the Jewish ethny remains separate

72% of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 married a gentile.

as such it's members pursue their ideological goals

Which ideological goals? The goals of insular hasidic sects in NY? The goals of deracinated "cultural jews" scattered all over? The goals of Reform Jews (basically the same as Unitarian Universalists at this point, including the whole "god" thing being pretty much metaphorical)? The Jews that support Israel or the Jews that oppose it? There is no uniform "Jewish" ideology.

without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society.

Nope. Jews are more charitable, on average, than gentiles, and jewish charitable fund money goes overwhelmingly to non-sectarian causes.

What's a non-sectarian cause?

'Helping everybody move to the USA' would clearly be a non-discriminating type of charitable act, but also very clearly politically-slanted.

There's probably a lot of Jews working for and supporting NGOs helping refugees move to the USA but how many of them support helping refugees move to Israel, or to their own neighborhood (Martha's vineyard anyone?)?

What's a non-sectarian cause?

Presumably one not identified with a particular (religious) sect.

There's probably a lot of Jews working for and supporting NGOs helping refugees move to the USA

Well, the House GOP just told three NGOs to preserve documents in connection with the southern border, and the three are each overtly religious. One Catholic, one Lutheran, and one Jewish. Just because of the religious affiliation of the migrants in question, I would naively expect the Catholic group to have an easier time networking, but who knows?

how many of them support helping refugees move to Israel

Jews in the U.S. care more about US politics than Israeli politics, for the sensible reason they live here, not there.

or to their own neighborhood

Jews tend to live in the biggest American cities, like LA and NYC. Aside from border areas which directly process new arrivals, those cities have the highest foreign-born population in the country.

jewish charitable fund money goes overwhelmingly to non-sectarian causes.

That article seems to dispute this, describing Jewish philanthropy as heavily weighted towards "non-religious but ethnic Jewish" causes and organizations. A rich doctor donating to the ADL is not quite a counterpoint.

This is the section I was referring to:

For the past year and a half, I have been studying the giving patterns of North American Jewish grant-making institutions.

These include nearly 150 Jewish federations. There are also thousands of Jewish community foundations, family and corporate foundations and donor-advised funds, such as the Jewish Communal Fund, which pools giving by about 6,000 affluent people.

I found that many of these U.S. and Canadian institutions actually give more to non-Jewish causes than to Jewish ones. In fact, my preliminary findings suggest that despite differences between distinct categories of grant-makers, at most an average of 25 percent of this money backs Jewish causes.

There is also a link in the article to this 2013 piece from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

I think the op is saying it's a vicious cycle where nobody/everybody is at fault. Some Jews feel distrustful of gentiles and some gentiles distrust Jews, and those people will act in ways that hurt them, which will then cause other gentiles/jews to defend them and other Jews/Gentiles to be suspicious and on and on.

I...do not think the OP is interested in such a game-theoretic interpretation. He is asserting, in spite of historical evidence, several patterns of human behavior. Then assuming the Jews fit all of them at once.

Antisemitism as Marxist class struggle.

Possibly! A lot of things do happen because of misunderstandings! But a lot of the object-level claims are inaccurate, which makes me distrust the meta-level conclusions/narratives.

It really boils down to ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

African-Americans and their allies commit large-scale arson for several months and the result is the non-African-American majority's response is : 'Well maybe they have a point, maybe we can be nicer to these people, let's give them some reparations or whatever'.

Meanwhile African-American entertainers complain about unfair business practices, nepotism, dishonest contracts and other unfortunate experiences from Jewish millionaires and billionaires and the response is 'oy vey, how dare you claim I hold disproportionate power in this society, I'm shutting down your contracts and your bank accounts.'

As a group, the Jews encourage and profit from multiculturalism in other countries, where they have access to the highest positions and where they deploy extensive lobbying groups, but they can always retreat to Israel that they have shaped as an ethnostate where they have primacy over other groups.

The worse thing? It's not the scheming, the money-laundering, the international human trafficking / blackmailing networks... It's the hypocrisy!

Broadly speaking, African Americans in entertainment and in general have benefited from Jewish involvement in Civil Rights groups, media organisations and business much more than they’ve suffered from it. My heart bleeds for the leading sports player who thinks they should be worth $400m instead of $300m while ignoring their Jewish lawyer who negotiated a much better deal with Adidas or Nike, the Jewish PR guys at their agency or the team’s agency who promoted them and built up their public reputation, the Jews who run the league that provides the other half of their income, the Jewish activists who were instrumental in them even being allowed to play in said league, and so on and so on.

Now extend that argument on behalf of the rest of Western civilization.

I meant that your argument seemed like it could generalize out much further, into the land of spicy takes like "Getting to live in the West is such a benefit that you should consider slavery a net gain." Or "Having a large, functional economy to be a financial professional in is so beneficial that Jews should just eat some predatory clawbacks and random hate crimes." "English speaking empires ended slavery and crushed the Nazis, so quit your bitching."

That's one way of looking at it.

The 'lack of gratitude' is not the issue in this case.

One could argue that Jews are not necessary to elevate the talented African-Americans. Even Hitler recognized the talent of Jesse Owens for example.

American entertainment Jewish millionaires and billionaires are not exactly acting out of pure disinterested concern for their brothers.

The issue is that African-Americans who are not grateful for billions (trillions?) of dollars of welfare and other perks associated with living in a Western country, can freely criticize white Americans, even colonize or burn down their city centers, and not much happens to them.

Yet for some mild criticism of Jewish billionaires, they get fired, unbanked, etc.

And everybody has to say 'Jews don't have power' or a similar fate awaits them.

Why would you have to be grateful for the perks of living in your own country?

Most of the perks come from living in proximity with the people they complain about.

Meanwhile African-American entertainers complain about unfair business practices, nepotism, dishonest contracts and other unfortunate experiences from Jewish millionaires and billionaires

This is a...strained reading of what Ye et. al. have been saying. I think if they came out and said "the studios are not treating us fairly; agents take disproportionate cuts of money; contracts are written to take advantage of poorly-educated but suddenly-wealthy celebrities; we are targeted disproportionately by fraudsters and other nefarious individuals" they would get some sympathy, because their claims would be true. But instead they've sublimated these object-level complaints into meta-level theories about group-wide tendencies that somehow both claim too much (religio-ethnic conspiracies) and not enough (not detailing specific abuses or problems).

Also, American jews and Israeli jews are very different; there really isn't some grand unified plan here.

In mild fairness:

-Kanye put his weight behind Tidal, which promised a more competitive cut for artists (or at least a whole-ass stake), and exclusively released The Life of Pablo through it.

-There was that time he went a rant on Twitter about the record industry, and posted an entire PDF (of his record conract, I think) as a long thread of images (yes, seriously, but I don't think I can find it now...).

-Kanye also backed the Stem Player (a device and streaming service(?) whose whole shtick was being able to isolate instrument and vocal stems/tracks from songs, allowing you to customize your listening experience, though it works best with albums that are already broken-up into stems), releasing Donda 2 exclusively for it (which was such an album, alongside the original Donda which released around the same time as the Stem Player).

It's possible that Kanye started out being frustrated at the music industry, but Kanye being Kanye, his...unique mind probably led to him escalating his frustrations into conspiracy territory.

Not being an assiduous Kanye-follower, I did not know this! Those seem like good things for him to have done (without knowing more about the particular projects involved), and it seems a shame they didn't work. I agree that Kanye is much more a tragic, rather than wicked, figure.

But instead they've sublimated these object-level complaints into meta-level theories about group-wide tendencies that somehow both claim too much (religio-ethnic conspiracies) and not enough (not detailing specific abuses or problems).

It's a matter of habit for social justice movements. Gender Critical Radfems, bless their hearts, still frame their activism in terms of fighting the patriarchy, women's rights, etc. Why is it a surprise that after years and years of "white privilege" and "white fragility", religo-ethnic conspiracies are suddenly beyond the pale? If anything, the experience of only receiving praise for one and scorn for the other, might actually strengthen the conspiracy theory.

I'm not saying the framing's a surprise. But it's still bad. The fights against "patriarchy" are also bad when they're not pointing to specific, object-level claims of disparity which can be assessed on their merits. White privilege and white fragility are also extremely bad. The whole edifice is bad! I feel like my posting history, both here and at the old place, should buy me some credibility here.

All you're observing is that Jews tend to be liberal, and the things you describe are done by liberals. Being Jewish has nothing to do with it.

Not really, Israeli ethnonationalists are a target for liberals.

Here's an article detailing the root of the issue with Israel-affiliated lobbying groups like the ADL.

On Wednesday, the left-wing Jewish columnist Peter Beinart tweeted that the contradiction identified by Carlson makes the ADL vulnerable to criticism.

“This is the problem with being an anti-bigotry organization in the US but opposing equality for Palestinians,” Beinart tweeted. “You have a glass jaw. As I wrote a while back, white nationalists like Carlson see Israel’s system of ethnic privilege as a model for the US.”

'being liberal' didn't fall from the sky. The direction of American liberalism has been influenced and directed by jews for close to a century.

Yes, but often jews self-consciously running from a judaism that they found embarrassingly backward and medieval. One could (and the Orthodox often do) equally say that American liberalism has infected judaism and perverted it from its historical and religious roots.

Isn't the birth of Reform Judaism literally basically case of (non-American) liberal/enlightenment thought and trends originally formulated in progressive Protestant churches being adopted by various Jewish congregations and figures? At least Wikipedia says:

With the advent of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Central Europe during the late 18th century, and the breakdown of traditional patterns and norms, the response Judaism should offer to the changed circumstances became a heated concern. Radical, second-generation Berlin maskilim (Enlightened), like Lazarus Bendavid and David Friedländer, proposed to reduce it to little above Deism or allow it to dissipate. A more palatable course was the reform of worship in synagogues, making it more attractive to a Jewish public whose aesthetic and moral taste became attuned to that of Christian surroundings.[39] The first considered to have implemented such a course was the Amsterdam Ashkenazi congregation, Adath Jessurun. In 1796, emulating the local Sephardic custom, it omitted the "Father of Mercy" prayer, beseeching God to take revenge upon the gentiles. The short-lived Adath Jessurun employed fully traditional argumentation to legitimize its actions, but is often regarded a harbinger by historians.[40]

A relatively thoroughgoing program was adopted by Israel Jacobson, a philanthropist from the Kingdom of Westphalia. Faith and dogma were eroded for decades both by Enlightenment criticism and apathy, but Jacobson himself did not bother with those. He was interested in decorum, believing its lack in services was driving the young away. Many of the aesthetic reforms he pioneered, like a regular vernacular sermon on moralistic themes, would be later adopted by the modernist Orthodox.[41] On 17 July 1810, he dedicated a synagogue in Seesen that employed an organ and a choir during prayer and introduced some German liturgy. While Jacobson was far from full-fledged Reform Judaism, this day was adopted by the movement worldwide as its foundation date. The Seesen temple – a designation quite common for prayerhouses at the time; "temple" would later become, somewhat misleadingly (and not exclusively), identified with Reform institutions via association with the elimination of prayers for the Jerusalem Temple[42] – closed in 1813. Jacobson moved to Berlin and established a similar one, which became a hub for like-minded individuals. Though the prayerbook used in Berlin did introduce several deviations from the received text, it did so without an organizing principle. In 1818, Jacobson's acquaintance Edward Kley founded the Hamburg Temple. Here, changes in the rite were eclectic no more and had severe dogmatic implications: prayers for the restoration of sacrifices by the Messiah and Return to Zion were quite systematically omitted. The Hamburg edition is considered the first comprehensive Reform liturgy.

and

In the 1820s and 1830s, philosophers like Solomon Steinheim imported German idealism into the Jewish religious discourse, attempting to draw from the means it employed to reconcile Christian faith and modern sensibilities. But it was the new scholarly, critical Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) that became the focus of controversy. Its proponents vacillated whether and to what degree it should be applied against the contemporary plight. Opinions ranged from the strictly Orthodox Azriel Hildesheimer, who subjugated research to the predetermined sanctity of the texts and refused to allow it practical implication over received methods; via the Positive-Historical Zecharias Frankel, who did not deny Wissenschaft a role, but only in deference to tradition, and opposed analysis of the Pentateuch; and up to Abraham Geiger, who rejected any limitations on objective research or its application. He is considered the founding father of Reform Judaism.[46]

At the very least it would seem to be a process of reconciling Judaism with the modern society being borne all around them by the (post-)Christian reforming and progressive Europeans.

Also worth noting that probably the most famous (ethnically) Jewish radical of them all, Karl Marx, had grown up in a liberal Protestant convert family. One might at the very least take this background in account when considering that his co-partner, who had independently already formulated many of the most important "Marxist" points before meeting Marx - Friedrich Engels - came from a similarly liberal Protestant background, expect without being ethnically Jewish.

Yes, and what to make of "judaeo-bolsheviks" like Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) who, yes, abolished the Pale of Settlement, but also were equally devoted to destroying the particularity of Judaism (alongside all other nationalisms and religions) as just another backwards false consciousness preventing people from becoming enlightened socialist deracinated "new men"?

Is "ethny" some kind of slang for "ethnicity"?

But the gaps between your average German and Italian are not remotely similar to the gap between your average Jew and non-Jew.

Why do you believe this?

A German Jew would have much more in common with a German gentile than a German would have in common with an Italian.

More broadly, your thesis that Jews are clever parasites who prey on their host society and anti-Semitism is just the natural response of people who resent being preyed on is not a new one. Nor does it really stand up to scrutiny. There are many reasons why Jews tend to remain insular, not least of which is external prejudice. Jews are not at all unusual in this regard, nor is it unusual for the majority to view a small, insular minority that keeps its own customs and religion with suspicion.

You're right that anti-Semitism isn't rocket science, but your final graf notwithstanding, this just reads like yet another version of "Why the Jews have it coming."

Is "ethny" some kind of slang for "ethnicity"?

Poster might be German; "Ethnie."

edit: Or French, apparently.

I ran into the term in sociology/anthropology literature, though I can't remember where.

IQ! The fact is your average normie isn't all that interesting, and can be pretty dull and annoying. Now elites are kind of stuck with the normies in their ethny and if another ethny has a similar proportion of normies, forming a common identity is plausible (though difficult). But to form a common identity with another group that has a dramatically higher proportion of normies?

This argument does not seem intuitive to me because I do not feel any special love for my family qua family, let alone people who share my ethnicity. Definitely I do not think I have any special moral obligations towards my family or members of my ethnicity that I do not have for others.

Have you considered that this is because you’re weird rather than being an experience to model the general public off of?

Yes! I think it is quite likely that others feel quite different on this question than I do, but the fact that others feel differently doesn't make me feel differently.

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Surely one can derive rich life meaning by dedicating oneself to serving the needs of strangers. Many people do, after all. And it does seem a bit . . . unreflective to cast what is little more than ingroup bias as " a moral world of intimacy." Not all that is normal is good.

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I would not describe feelings of intimacy and obligation to one's family as "little more than ingroup bias," and I would hold that describing it in this way demonstrates my point that something is lacking in the moral worldview of someone who describes it as such.

I didn't say that. OP said: "I do not feel any special love for my family qua family, let alone people who share my ethnicity. Definitely I do not think I have any special moral obligations towards my family... that I do not have for others."

So, IF someone feels intimacy with his family, great! But OP didn’t say otherwise. OP's point is that one need not feel greater moral obligations to your family , qua family -- simply because they are family, than you do to others. The argument otherwise -- that you per se have a greater moral obligation to your cousin than to a stranger, regardless of your personal feelings for him, is precisely a form of in-group bias. Your argument re the value of feelings of intimacy relate to a different question.

Depending on what we mean by 'rich'. You can derive a 'rich' life from servicing a litter of cats. That doesn't change the fact that the people who do so look, for some reason, desperate, pathetic and pitiable next to a person who serviced their own children instead.

I'm not trying to cast shade on people who dedicate themselves to servicing animals. It's just a matter of fact. Any substitute for an actual child and an actual family looks like the cope that it is. All energy expended in a direction that's not familial has, in some sense, an essence of waste about it in comparison.

I don't understand how how it looks to others is relevant. And, is every Catholic priest and nun "desperate, pathetic and pitiable"? Their congregations, etc, are explicitly described as substitutes for actual children, if I am not mistaken.

I think the truth value of the pity people feel towards a person who dotes over their cat as if it were a child is that cats are not children. A cat will never say 'I love you' back. So much emotional effort being spent on something that will never return it to anyone. It's the same reason people feel pity when watching someone earnestly playing slots as if they were going to win their money back. It's not visible to the person that is emotionally invested in their little world. But from an outside view the entire endeavor is obviously sad, since you can so easily see the futility of it. Instead of throwing your money away, maybe save it or buy something useful. Maybe instead of investing all your love into a cat, invest it into a child.

I think Catholicism is much more than just desperate, pathetic and pitiable. It's tragic. And that's, I think, part of the point of the plight of nuns and the burdens of celibate clergy. There is beauty in sacrifice. There is honor in deadly devotion. And those elements exist precisely because of what is being sacrificed. None if it changes the fact that it is stupid, and that I am against the practice of celibacy for those who have so much to give. But at least, to some extent, they are self aware. It's a plight. A burden. A sacrifice. Proof of devotion to a higher power. An overcoming of sin. I don't think many cat oriented people couch their love for animals in the same manner.

Compare the 'tapestry' of life of an ancient rvman warrior or military commander to that same person's life if they stayed a family peasant for life. Or CEO of company vs janitor who spends lots of time with his wife and kifs. Multiple things compete with 'intimacy with family' in 'purpose for life', and the latter isn't always, or even usually, better. Dedicating oneself to animal rescue, which isn't a strawman so much as a massive field of charity, may be worse than 'family', but that's a criticism of the former, not an endorsement of universal superiority of the latter.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. You can find purpose in life pulling the handle on a slot machine. The point being made is that even if it might not be obvious to the one emotionally invested in buying spins, it's very obvious to the outside observer that they are doing something sad. That there is in fact a universally superior alternative to spending all your time devoted to your pet animals. Even if it might be hard for the animal lover to see. Just like it might be hard for the slot machine player to see. None of that changes the superiority of the alternatives.

Note Urquan that your ancestors would have said the exact same thing about ethnic loyalties. Or rather, it would have gone without mentioning. There is no justification for special familial bonds that does not also encompass ethnic bonds and I suspect a similarly brutal campaign as the one that turned the first taboo, will do the same to the second.

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