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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The Jews waited 2000 years.

And how many other minority groups ended up assimilating and dying out? There's a survivorship bias here.

But if you have a tight knit group, with money, that practices endogamy, that produces children,

That's a lot of "ifs." Especially the money part, these days; but also endogamy (few manage it, and are often under suspicion, save maybe the Hasidim — who have the advantages of being Jewish — and the Amish — who are seen as "quaint" and harmless) and producing children.

it also allows you to impose your own kind of order on a community,

Only as much as the broader society allows you to.

preserving a space for yourself and people like you

Until the government decides to crush your communities, arrest your leaders, and take and "residential school" indoctrinate/assimilate your children.

Fine, yeah. But consider how many times the Soviet Union used extremely harsh measures to try to eradicate ethnic identity and still failed at doing so. Nothing is guaranteed. But the option is still better than either (a) fighting impotently and getting crushed or (b) doing nothing and guaranteeing failure.

Again, the only alternative is coup-complete and in that case the far right just doesn’t have the necessary amount of elite human capital versus the center and left as Tracing and others have (in my opinion) persuasively argued.