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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Yes, I understand your point. Your point is that your interpretation of "your" people's foundation myth casts you as the heroes, whereas your interpretation of your enemy's foundation myth casts them as invidious parasites. And my point is that all foundation myths are mythical, and can be characterized as heroic or villainous depending on how you want to write it. Look at how you represent Jews as "larping" while Aryans are "classical heroes." Why could we not say the Aryans "larp" as heroes when they were just an invading horde?
As I've said before, if the actual objective of you and other Holocaust deniers was simply to clarify history so we have as accurate a picture as possible, I wouldn't roll my eyes every time you wiggle and dance around whether any Jews were actually persecuted and whether they deserved it. Is the 6 million figure off by a few million? Possible - and I wish the question were not so politicized as to make investigating it off-limits. You are right there. But of course, you are the reason the question is so politicized, because your concern is not whether it was actually "only" 4 or 2 or half a million, but to convince people, once again, that it didn't happen and if it did, the Jews had it coming. So as much as you blame the Jews for their control over the narrative, I blame you more than them for making it impossible to honestly question historical details. Your narrative is as fixed and motivated as theirs. If you uncovered ironclad proof that the "official" Holocaust narrative is 100% true, it would not alter your agenda an iota. You'd find it more inconvenient to argue that the Jews are an enemy who only ever got what they deserved, but you would still argue that. Am I mistaken?
At the end of the day, Aryans are an invading horde. What are Jews? They are not that. They operate differently and this is actually reflected in their foundational myths. Yes, the Aeneid is an aesthetically sophisticated mythology to reify what is essentially an invading horde on the Italian peninsula. What's Exodus? To this day, Jews very publicly celebrate the myth of their tribal god murdering the first-born, non-Jewish sons of their host civilization.
Yes, you would blame me wouldn't you. Even if it were to turn out Revisionists are 100% right, you would still blame them and not the people most associated with creating and maintaining those lies, and actually creating and enforcing the laws and rules you are complaining about.
No, I would not argue that, I would probably just argue "it's in the past so we shouldn't put so much weight on this mythos for the questions of our day", which is an argument that is common enough already on the Right. But I think Revisionists are correct, and I don't think the narrative can survive long-term, it's highly vulnerable. I find the issue interesting because it is such an important mythos, but it is vulnerable at the same time.
Are we supposed to treat foundational myths at face value or not? If we are, why should we view Jews are more sinister and untrustworthy than anyone else when everyone's foundational myths can be read as "These people were barbarians who did horrible things"? If we're not, then why are you using your uncharitable reading of the Old Testament as an argument that Jews are sinister and untrustworthy?
I would and do blame you for polluting the discourse and hampering genuine efforts to examine history critically, because I value honest engagement and a genuine interest in the truth, whereas you are not actually interested in that, you are interested in prosecuting a campaign of racial animosity, for which history is either merely instrumental or an impediment.
No, if you could prove you're 100% right, I'd have to reevaluate a lot of things. One of the problems, of course, is that you are pretty cagey about what you are actually claiming. You always vaguely handwave in the direction of "Jews bad/Holocaust fake," but it's hard to latch onto the part you think can be proven or disproven. 6 million Jews were not killed in World War II, sure, that's something that could theoretically be proven or disproven. "Jews are evil and we should remove them from all positions of power and influence" isn't really a truth proposition.
I think one of the most salient arguments of contemporary antisemites is that Jews as a people are a (somewhat) distinct biological entity.
Whatever evolutionary mechanisms brought about the association of white people with 'work ethic', 'politeness' or 'delayed gratification' by the Smithsonian could also explain the discrepancy in behavior between a 'Jewish population' and a Western one.
Genesis 41 essentially describes how a Jew was miraculously able to take over Egypt's economy.
I don't know how prominent this story is in the Jewish scriptures but a vaguely similar situation seems to have developed in Middle-Age England, to the point that the Magna Carta was chartered to curtail the jewish lenders influence on the kings and the country's real estate.
From grain to feudal lands to mortgage-backed securities... The problem is still ongoing.
How could somebody believe in underlying mechanisms that would explain HBD and not consider that the same underlying mechanisms would also apply to a population which for thousands of years spread while keeping a somewhat consistent set of moral guidelines they inherited from their ancestor 'Moses'?
I think it would just be a healthy starting point for the average organization to consider that individual Jews have an unusual tendency to optimize for consolidating power to their own group's benefit over other considerations that might be beneficial to the organization. Does that make them 'evil'? That would be a subjective consideration.
For those who are just starting to notice that the US government's foreign policy seems to have a lot more to do with the interests of Jewish groups, whether American, Israeli or Ukrainian, wouldn't that be practical advice?
In nominal democracies where the people, who in majority (>95%) are not Jewish, knowing that Jewish leaders or Jewish-allied leaders are sometimes, if not mostly, working against their interest, seems like a somewhat important information.
Similar considerations would apply to say, top 1% Indian immigrants who go out of their way to only interbreed with fellow immigrants and keep their wealth and culture separate from the locals as much as possible.
If in 3 generations the descendants of these IT company founders roughly live the same way as their neighbors, then you're probably clear to work with them, but if they go around pointing to an old book that says that God chose them to rule over every other people and if you disagree you're oppressing them, it's probably a bad idea to put them in charge of your finances and government.
Jews as a "distinct biological entity" - what are they, literal lizardmen? Are they a separate species? Or somehow more genetically divergent than any other human ethnicity?
Sometimes I wonder if you lot have ever actually met any Jews.
I live around and work with plenty of Jews. They all act like me, and no one thinks their holy book says they're supposed to rule over me. Although maybe that's just the mask they're wearing around us goyim.
DEI enthusiasts make largely the same claim about white men, you know: that we need to be removed (or reduced) from positions of power because we have historically used it to benefit our own kind to the detriment of others.
I guess if you'd ironically "yeschad" that, then the paranoia about Jews makes more sense. But in fact I find Jews are a lot closer in alignment to me than, say, the average black or Asian or Muslim person. And I don't think any of them are sneaky aliens plotting against me as a race either, though historical and cultural grievances are, as you put it, more "salient."
A separate subspecies perhaps. But the definition of biological boundaries is mostly political these days, just ask any college-educated Westerner what a woman is. It's a 'social construct'.
Why would they need to be? Interestingly, the distinction does not need to be fully physiological. It's obviously a combination of underlying physiology and changes acquired during socialization as a member of the tribe.
These people would be more credible if they 1 - stopped dating white men 2 - didn't in one way or another depend on white men's generosity for their basic survival. I'm personally not sitting in a Tel-Aviv basement on israeli welfare, so I don't think that criticism would apply to me.
I don't think there is anything wrong with seizing power and working to benefit your own group if your interests align with the interests of those you have power over. Westerns don't really have any reason to spend billions or trillions on defending the borders of Israel and Ukraine (more than their own), but the people in Biden's cabinet do.
Or perhaps you act like them. Most Westerners don't work 'with plenty of Jews', and most influence they get is from TV, radio, social media, print. They go to church, spend time with their family and they have hobbies that have nothing to do with Jews, and if kept away long enough from all the electromagnetic jewish chatter, they would perhaps wonder why they have to care about terrorism in Israel or what flag is being flown in Ukraine.
Or possibly they don't tell it to your face because they know that's not serving their interests as well as simply creating a consensus that the interests of the Jews are what you wanted all along. In fact, they do, and there's not much you can do about it. For example : The ADL will not let you get away with expressing the same border policy about your own country that they do about Israel.
Since you and I don't believe that, this is a glib answer. You are making claims about Jews as a "distinct biological entity." Are you in fact endorsing the notion that race and sex are simply social constructs? In which case, sure, I'll accept that your personal redefinition of Jews as a separate subspecies is true for you, but no one else should be expected to accept your definition.
Perhaps. What does a Jew act like?
Yes, yes, and Muslims are all practicing taqiyya.
I know it's a very attractive theory, that these hostile, alien people you hate are all secretly conspiring against you, but do you think it is just remotely possible that Jews, like most people, are individuals, and some deeply identify with their co-ethnics and may even be hostile to outsiders, while others are not, and that most don't even give it much thought?
Or do you sincerely believe that even open-minded Jews who aren't actively conspiring against the goyim have some malignant evolutionary programming deep in their Jew-brains that compels them to do so anyway?
I don't care much what the ADL thinks and I don't consider them the Official Voice of Jewry, but let's be clear, if Mexicans were literally lobbing rockets into border states, launching terrorist attacks across the border, and openly expressing their desire to destroy the United States (and allying with countries that had a credible ability to threaten this), our border policy (and likely the ADL's position on it) would become a lot harder.
They are. Biological constructs are socially defined by groups of scientists and doctors. Everything we can talk about is a social construct. Then we can talk about how social constructs are products of brains which we socially-defined to be biological entities... My point is that if the average overeducated Westerner has trouble grasping the most apparent sexual dysmorphism, then how much more difficult will it be for them to understand the nuances of the boundaries between Jew and goy, when they are a lot more subtle?
To be fair, sexual dysmorphism is mostly important in medical settings these days, for example it would be paradoxical during a shipwreck to have a captain, supposed to go down with the ship, prioritize the evacuation of women and children, while being a woman themselves.
Have you quantified that or is that just a hunch? I'm sure there are perfectly upstanding Jewish people up there, just like there are perfectly upstanding people of any given race, and there are very smart Sub-Saharan Africans, and many African-Americans never commit any violent crime. Yet, there is still data showing that certain human groups are associated with certain traits, behavior, civilizational outcomes, etc.
Do I believe that there are personality traits that can be conserved across history in different proportions in different human groups? I do. Do I have evidence, biological correlates of an inheritability? No, I can't say I do. All I see are repeated patterns of behavior across time and space associated with certain outcomes.
Here are a few traits that I could see getting carried with higher than average likelihood in a 'Jewish subspecies' :
I'm not saying all of these hypothetical traits are absolutely necessary to define a member of a Jewish subspecies, but if we could quantify these traits at birth, I would imagine a PCA would cluster Jews away from Europeans based on at least some of these traits.
In adolescence I would definitely expect to see that, as many of these traits can be expected to be completely culturally transmitted or at least culturally reinforced (for example negotiation skills).
I would not say that most of these traits are necessarily malignant, some of these traits can lead to good outcomes in business, which explains that the underlying biological substrate were selected. Perhaps the problem is a matter of geometry. With the right technological substrate, a small software company can grow enormously given that once designed their product can be infinitely replicated at very little cost. Does that mean that their software is much more valuable than a manufacturing company with profit margins constrained by the physical availability of their inputs, etc?
Unfortunately, a population optimized for trading, rent-seeking, usury, etc will have a higher rate of power consolidation than a more diversified population which provides other essential agricultural, defense, manufacturing services..., ie labor. Therefore the first population can quickly hijack the power processes of the second population by ways of resource and influence control, and we end up with American taxpayers supporting Zelensky and Netanyahu's adventures. The problem is not that that population gains control, if they are good at having control, but that they have a different moral system, and different goals than the majority population. An alignment problem.
They would. If the US were blockading Mexico, US occupation forces expelled Mexican homeowners to house Americans, killed random Mexican citizens, and subjected them to a thousand other humiliations on a daily basis. See for ex.
Arguably, Israel is a far-right country engaged in ethnic cleansing on thousands of civilians, right now. Yet Jewish Americans can afford the double standard of both demanding more assistance to Israel (above and beyond what they have been getting for decades), and talking down on border-minded Americans who demand 1/100 of what Israel gets away with? We're talking about the most 'privileged' group of Americans, by any metric of wealth, education, political and media representation...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link