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Why is it so taboo for white people to advocate for their ethnic identity? Can we at all attribute this phenomenon to the narrative-generation of cultural elites? If so, what are those narratives and what are their origins? Even boomer-cons have picked up terminology like "critical race theory" from which we get closer to acknowledging an actual origin for these narratives, rather than pretending they fell from the sky.
Every discussion with you reaches this point, where I observe that for post after post, you have ignored all my direct and specific challenges to each point you made, and simply try to grab the ball and run in a different direction with it.
Until next time, I am done playing "Look, squirrel!"
You never even bothered answering my question re: Caplan, and I guess you don't want to answer the question I just posed either. "But Caplan said he didn't want Jews to get too much power" is a non-answer. The point was that Caplan looks at society and says "damn, it would be better for it to be diverse so that the majority cannot organize against me." I asked you if this could be considered an example of disempowering a legacy majority and reading your post I see no answer.
This is a falsehood. I wrote an entire paragraph in response, which you have chosen to ignore. "Caplan directly contradicted your entire premise, and also you snuck in a lot of assumptions that weren't actually there" is not a non-answer.
Caplan wants more diversity because he considers it to be less threatening than a homogenous population, it doesn't matter how many paragraphs you write, that is what Caplan is talking about and I'm simply asking if we can interpret "more diversity == less threatening" to be an advocacy for disempowering a legacy majority?
Tell you what - when you answer some of my direct questions, I'll take up the task of dissecting yours again.
I will answer your questions by attempting to clarify my position:
Let's say that 100% of the Jewish academics, Hollywood producers, media execs, financiers, etc. who acquired station in the United States since the 1900s were Chinese instead of Jewish. For example, take every single Jewish intellectual in the Frankfurt school and suppose they were Chinese instead of Jewish, and repeat that across all of society for the past century. Freud was Chinese, Franz Boas was Chinese, every media exec in this image were Chinese instead of Jewish... Let's say that all the exact ideological, academic, and cultural movements have otherwise been identical, except instead the prevailing consternation over anti-Semitism, anti-Chinese sentiments were regarded with equal severity in the United States today.
If I were to say, "these Chinese are a hostile elite: they promote ideology and radical movements that criticize white identity and call for a whole-of-society effort to dismantle 'White Supremacy' while simultaneously calling for a whole-of-society effort to prevent anti-Chinese sentiments. They present this dynamic as a universal moral good, a healing of the world, but it seems pretty self-serving. They themselves are Chinese ethnic nationalists, many of them have Chinese citizenship and identify strongly with that country, even as they criticize and suppress any advocacy for white identity in our own country. Anybody who criticizes Chinese influence or behavior is regarded as a deranged genocidal lunatic who should be de-personed from social media, the labor force, payment processors, and polite society. This is hostile."
Do you think it would be reasonable to say: "So you're saying that the Chinese are lizard people who have it in their DNA to destroy their outgroup?" I am saying the Chinese are a hostile elite, that is not a statement on the behavior or motivation of every single Chinese person.
Now this scenario with the Chinese playing this role is unlikely for two reasons: First, despite their intelligence they completely lack the Jewish talent for creating myth, propaganda, and social narratives... amazingly, people here are citing the worldwide adherence to Abrahamic religion as evidence for the innocuity of Jewish mythmaking, rather than acknowledging that as evidence for the potent psychological influence of their talents. This is without a shadow of a doubt derived from their cognitive profile that goes way beyond IQ alone. This talent is the most HBD-relevant point and what sets Jews apart, as indeed trying to influence culture to the benefit of your ingroup isn't unique to Jews, they just have the most success in convcing society that Moral Progress means dismantling whiteness and protecting Jews from anti-Semtism.
Secondly, if every time an American turned on a TV and saw a Chinese person or academic talking about how evil white people are and how they need to be removed from positions of influence, that would probably have incited an anti-Chinese backlash decades ago. But Jews present as white when they say "fellow white people, we need to dismantle white supremacy and engage in a whole-of-society effort to combat anti-Semitism." So their outgroup criticisms are interpreted by the population as an ingroup moral enlightenment, who in their naivety have no suspicion whatsoever of an ethnocentric motivation for the intellectual and cultural ideas being presented as moral progress or healing of the world. They actually think it is moral progress to hate white identity and be obsessed with protecting Jewish identity from any measure of criticism.
We can also consider a proof by contradiction: "The Jewish elite has been hostile to Jewish identity and a fierce advocate of white identity." Which hypothesis seems more likely to you, that one or mine?
So, firstly, you've omitted the context of that disagreement entirely and in doing so changed its meaning. You quoted part of the Aleinu with the implication that it's a call for outright ethnosupremacism - for the supremacy of the Jewish tribal deity over other deities. Per your own comments, you think that Adonai is just 'a metaphor and synonym for the Jewish people'. I thus understand you to be claiming that the Aleinu is an outright call for Jewish supremacy - for the superiority of the Jewish race over other people.
In that context I think it is extremely relevant that the part of the Aleinu you quoted is not only common knowledge but also uncontroversially accepted by billions of non-Jews. I can only assume that the non-Jews who agree with that statement do not see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. Certainly I don't. If so, then it also seems at least imaginable that Jews themselves don't see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. This seems supported by the fact that if I ask Jews directly, they tell me that it isn't a call for Jewish supremacy.
As such I think your claim about the Aleinu is a tissue of nonsense. I invite you to consider that it actually means what it says it means - that it is a statement about God, rather than one about race.
Moving on...
Why is the global success of Abrahamic religion 'without a shadow of a doubt derived from [the Jews'] cognitive profile'?
For a start, 'the Jews' in a macrohistorical sense aren't a single clear genetic profile. Even if for some reason there was proof that Ashkenazim or something have a unique genetic tendency towards subterfuge and malevolence, it is not clear how this would equip you to productively speculate about the genetic profiles of the 'myth-makers' of Abrahamic religion. Bluntly, we don't know anything about the genetics of Abraham or Moses, if they even existed, or David or Solomon, or Jesus or St. Paul. So you're attributing whatever storytelling genius they might have had to an entirely mysterious genetic factor, which there is no evidence they even possessed.
It is worth bearing in mind that, as far as we can tell, the early narrative tropes of the ancient Hebrews weren't particularly unique. If you read something like the Mesha Stele, it is remarkable how similar it is to biblical narratives. Ancient Hebrew stories are often visibly influenced by contemporary stories - Genesis 1 is informed by Babylonian creation narratives, for instances, and indeed in places the Hebrew Bible seems to get mixed up with Babylonian stories. (e.g. Gen 1 itself reads like a response to or parody of the Babylonian motif of Marduk slaying the sea monster and fashioning creation from her remains, but with the sea monster removed, indicating God's absolute supremacy. However, in other places - Job 26, Psalm 74, Psalm 89, Isaiah 51 - the monster-slaying narrative element has crept back in and God is depicted as having killed a sea monster to create the world. Ancient Hebrew narratives don't look like the uniquely genius products of a malevolent culture of subverters - they look like what was going around at the time.
Maybe some Hebrew thinkers brilliantly remixed it all into the perfect combination to survive and spread. If so, I don't see how that's evidence for the unique storytelling genius of Hebrews - after all, they were probably pretty darn similar, genetically, to all their neighbouring peoples. It seems more likely to me that whichever strand of ancient Near Eastern religious thought came out on top, you could accuse it of being the product of a genetic community with a unique gift for myth-making. But that doesn't make it so. Any number of contingent historical factors apply as well.
Moreover, I think the argument about the Jews as supremely good myth-weavers, creating narratives that powerfully spread on their own, has to reckon with the fact that it is not Judaism as we know it that actually spread to half the world. It seems to me that non-Jews deserve some credit for the spread of Christianity and Islam. If judged purely by personal success (and ruling out the possibility of divine intervention), the decidedly non-Jewish Muhammad seems to have been a far superior maker of myth than any Jewish figure. If we consider Christianity, sure, maybe you can declare that Jesus and Paul have whatever mysterious genetic trait you're ascribing to Jews, but the successful spread of Christianity across Eurasia seems to have had less to do with super-capable Jewish Christians and more to do with a vast array of apostles of many different genetic backgrounds. To take a specific local example, the Christianisation of Britain seems to have had more to do with non-Jewish missionaries like Augustine of Canterbury than it did any Jews.
You might reply that even if the standard-bearers and the myth-tellers weren't Jewish, the fundamentals of the narrative had been worked out by Jews, with whatever this unique gift they apparently have is. But by the same logic I might as well say that the Jews themselves deserve no credit at all for Judaism, because the fundamentals were worked out by the Egyptians or by the Babylonians. Judaism modifies many ideas from other ancient Semitic religions, but then, Christianity and Islam modify many ideas from Judaism. (Although to be fully pedantic I should say that rabbinic Judaism in the modern sense is itself a modification of more ancient ideas - Second Temple Judaism was destroyed in the first century, and both Christianity and the rabbinic tradition from which modern Judaism descends are innovative reactions to that disaster. Both had to significantly reformulate what it meant to worship God.)
I'm not sure how you can get past this - if Jews are uniquely gifted at myth-making and the formation of religious narrative, it seems at least a bit odd that Judaism is the least successful of the major Abrahamic religions. When it comes to formulating a narrative memetically optimised for spreading, the Christians and the Muslims seem to have significantly outdone the Jews.
Why were the Abrahamic religions so successful at spreading?
Well, leaving aside the possibility that God wanted them to, there is indeed the possibility that many of the basic elements of the Abrahamic religions are memetically optimised for spreading. But that possibility does not require the hypothesis of a unique Jewish talent for myth! It does not follow.
Who is Thor? If you ask the average person, they will not relate a Germanic tribal deity who was, at one time, a religious symbol of resistance to Christianization. They will say "Oh I love Thor, the last movie where he joined the Guardians of the Galaxy to save humanity from aliens was epic." Stan Lee, who was also Jewish, was a particularly effective mythmaker and storyteller precisely because he appropriated a base of existing myth and archetypes in the creation of a new Pantheon that memetically captured the imagination of Gentiles. The interpretatio romana likewise incorporated non-Roman deities into the Roman pantheon, which served a cultural and civic function. A talent for mythmaking specifically entails appropriating existing symbols and integrating them into a particular cultural and religious consciousness.
Christianity and Islam both belong to the Judaic pantheon, which is deeply meaningful in spite of localized "DLC" to the pantheon, so-to-speak. There is an incomprehensible mishmash of deities in the Hindu religion inspired by local interpretations and "new characters", and likewise Stan Lee hired gentile writers to create new characters and stories for his pantheon, but ultimately it's his universe.
If all prevailing followers of Abrahamic religion (including Jews themselves) worshipped the god Apollo from Greek myth instead of the Jewish god from the Hebrew bible, but also formulated their own innovations- heroes and myths, under the auspices of His Image, we would properly regard the cult of Apollo as the most successful religion. Even if globally influential cults emerged which worshipped some derived heroes like the martyred son of Apollo or warrior-prophet of Apollo... They would still, at the end of the day, be worshipping a European god who is the embodiment of a race of people as the master of the universe. Christians and Muslims worship a Jewish god, so their religions must be considered mythological "success" of the Judaic pantheon in the same way.
Of course, the earliest Christians were Jewish and St. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles - the Stan Lee of his day - was a Jewish pharisee.
Abraham and Moses are heroes in the Judaic pantheon, this is like saying "we don't know the genetic profile of Iron Man so we can't say anything about his behavior in that regard", the storytellers are the Jews themselves who keep these myths alive and propagate them among themselves and others with their rituals and behavior. This often takes esoteric form in modern culture, where a film like Spartacus functions as a mythological homage to Exodus and inspires audiences to root for the slave revolt against Roman civilization. This is sophisticated storytelling, and the Jews are better at it than anyone. They are also able to pick up on it whereas gentiles remain oblivious to deeper esoteric meaning to myths like these (FWIW I agree with the author here that Zach Snyder's Superman is less Jewish and more Apollonian than in the written canon, while the Nietzschean-Übermensch Lex Luthor is more Jewish in Snyder's work).
In order to calibrate our baseline perspectives, would you accept the proposition that HBD provides explanatory power for why Jews tend to be more successful lawyers than non-Jews? I am suggesting that this holds for culture-and-myth-creation, and the cognitive traits that explain this go beyond simply IQ.
You don't see how the global-memetic spread of a myth body, and its survival as a diaspora for thousands of years, is evidence for the power of its storytelling?
Secondly, we should dispense with the absurd claim that the Aleinu is not supremacist, if a group of white people all cited some refrain proclaiming that the master of the universe chose them as his favorite people and made them differently from everyone else, and all else will bow under the yoke of the Creator who made Europeans his chosen people, you would unambiguously call that supremacist. I think the Aleinu is in fact similar to cultural rhetoric like Manifest Destiny or the British Empire which saw itself as the light unto the world, bringing civilization to the savages. Of course it's supremacist.
Judaism is an ethnically supremacist religion, and I don't mean that as a criticism, it is the entire reason it has survived under hostile conditions for thousands of years. Their god is their race, and their race is their god. I have heard Jews, in the wild, say "us being God's chosen people doesn't mean we are superior, it in fact means we are mandated greater responsibility for the world", which is not much different that you would hear from some European colonizer in Africa, we have a responsibility to civilize these savages because of our unique gifts bestowed by God. It is supremacist.
Christianity is a personal salvation cult. There are many theories for why it spread. The decline of Rome undoubtedly played a part, but I think there were also some micro-phenomena, like women being dazzled with the Gospel and then insisting that their pagan husbands convert as a condition for marriage. Bio-Leninism and Nietzsche provide a different explanation. I don't claim to know the how, but there is no question that they were successful at spreading because of their memetic potency. Concluding that the memetic potency is related to the people that created the pantheon, and relates to dynamics in modern-day culture, would be well-supported by taking HBD seriously as more than just "IQ-realism."
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