Volk Politics
Further to recent rumblings in the comments, here’s Jeff Goldstein on the ‘alt-right’ manifesto:
This counter-trend [to the identity politics of the left], make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimises individualism. As with much of the left, the alt-right remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent. […]
It is an identity movement on a par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other tribal products of the kernel assumptions that inform cultural Marxism. That it pretends to throw off some of those trappings — it enforces an anti-PC ethos in a way that creates yet another tenor of the same PC, this time attached to white nationalism instead of multiculturalism — is but camouflage.
Worth reading in full. In the comments at the Federalist and on Twitter, things get lively, and a little strange.
Those Normans, coming over here, polluting our pure Germanic with their bastard Norman-French. By God!, they even corrupt our bloodlines by intermarrying.
I hate to quibble, but perhaps, given their brutal subjugation at the hands of their new Norman overlords, and the resulting destruction of their culture, their language, their way of life – even their names – the Saxons might’ve had a teeny, tiny point?
Perhaps the lesson from history is don’t end up like the Saxons or the Red Indians?
I’m pretty sure this was covered in an episode of Star Trek.
@Steve 2: A better wit than me once said on that matter “Ah yes, Britain, a nation of immigrants, like William the Immigrant, who arrived at the head of the Norman Immigration.”
What’s most important about Klingon immigration is to be below the critical assimilation rate. Our police aren’t trained in the least to handle an uptick in bat’leth murder.
You daft racist. They’ll do the jobs our security officers won’t, like Worf son of Mogh.
Well, certainly that Worf chap was vetted, right? Brought in through existing measures (adopted) and completely acculturated. These “refugees” coming in from planets pledged to the clone of Kahless might be worth a bit more scrutiny, yeah?
Plus which, for a professional, he seems to get thrown about a lot. If we’re going to import Klingons, maybe ones that have had a bit of military training and have served as expert trackers for men serving in the Neutral Zone. This Worf, bit of a dud on the security officer front.
“Ah yes, Britain, a nation of immigrants, like William the Immigrant, who arrived at the head of the Norman Immigration.”
It’s always startling to be told that despite one’s British ancestry stretching back to the Domesday Book and likely much earlier, we’re actually a “mongrel race”.
How come nobody lectures the Japanese or the Chinese or the Indians that they’re “mongrels”? Probably too afraid of being arrested.
These “refugees” coming in from planets pledged to the clone of Kahless might be worth a bit more scrutiny, yeah?
But think of all the vibrant new restaurants serving gagh and blood pie.
“how did Trump get into this?”
My error: I was switching back and forth between this blog and an email thread.
But my prior comment stands: If “no enemies on the left” is reprehensible then so too is “no enemies on the right”.
“Perhaps the lesson from history is don’t end up like the Saxons”
Hastings 1066: Not Enough Saxon Violence
(seen on a t-shirt)
Microbillionaire: my favored alternative is the return of the kings, and this time they pass out hemlock when the philosophes start having weird ideas, or at least decree the abolition of sociology departments at the first sign of communist infestation.
I am, up to a point, willing to consider that proposition. If only the monarchist economic track record were better. Dierdre McCloskey has been arguing convincingly for many years (in the WSJ for instance) that we owe our relatively enormous wealth compared to the rest of history to the burgeoning of liberal ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Hastings 1066: Not Enough Saxon Violence
(seen on a t-shirt)
That’s an awesome tshirt.
I’ve always pictured the Saxons as cool, chilled out guys with long hair and big moustaches like a 70’s prog rock band.
William the Bastard’s guys were like punk rockers.
I hate punk rockers.
Well, thus far this thread has certainly been enlightening, and not necessarily in ways I would have expected.
@Steve 2: Well, you know how it is. It’ll take American audience marketing to really come up with a form of gagh that everyone will enjoy. I suspect it’s all in the seasoning, though there’d probably be something to do with flatbread. I expect Klingon purists would call it gaghqoq or “so-called” gagh, but sometimes cultural cuisine needs to adapt for its audience. I’d expect a Chicago gagh to have more cheese than most, for one.
Without comment.
“Chinese airline magazine in racism storm over article warning tourists to avoid parts of London ‘populated by Indians, Pakistanis and black people'”
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/chinese-airline-in-racism-storm-over-article-warning-tourists-to-avoid-parts-of-london-populated-by-a3338501.html
If only the monarchist economic track record were better. Dierdre McCloskey has been arguing convincingly for many years (in the WSJ for instance) that we owe our relatively enormous wealth compared to the rest of history to the burgeoning of liberal ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Paywalled; but I see it opens with “The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment” and I’m curious now as to how the argument goes.
Because my impression is that the Great Enrichment was a combination of manymanymany things: automated production, mass production, production lines, ease of transportation, the idea of science, small contracts, eugenic downward social mobility, the joint-stock corporation, various efficiency increases in various processes, and other innovations and inventions, — some of which were no doubt facilitated by the liberation of ordinary people, others of which were facilitated by the royalty that had e.g. the concentrated capital to afford large amounts of experimental basic research, and the clout to override entrenched guilds and unions.
Jonathan –
Whoops – somebody’s grasp on html isn’t as firm as he thought
Happens to the best of us. 😉
This comments section seems even more “rumbly.” 🙂
Hmmm . . . some random witterings:
1. Just ‘cos something upsets the SocJus types, it doesn’t mean it’s automatically a “good thing.”
2. If you go far enough in one political direction you’ll eventually bump into opposite direction.
3. I like Western Civillisation, and yes I beleive it is under attack both from without and within, but . . . but being open to knew ideas is a very important part of Civillisation. (NB This is not the same as embracing anything new just ‘cos its new.) The alt-right’s assumption of automatic superiority and emphasis on genetic purity is against this. Example: what have non-Western civilisations done for the world? Zero. No, zero. It’s a vital mathematical concept, and it didn’t originate in the Western Europe.
Well that’s my two pennyworth of random witterings/JIMHO
my impression is that the Great Enrichment was a combination of manymanymany things
Her argument is that those other things, primarily the technological advances, had happened in other places and other under conditions but didn’t take off until they were explored in an atmosphere of equality and freedom under the law. I subscribe to apriorism and as such concede that there’s no way to completely prove that argument. Sorry about the paywall, I didn’t notice it or I would have found something else for you.
2. If you go far enough in one political direction you’ll eventually bump into opposite direction.
I hear this a lot, but it does not appear to be borne out by the evidence. The Khmer Rouge went about as far as it was possible to go into the depths of communism, but I could swear they stopped because they were bumping up against “everyone is ruddy well dead” rather than because they realized they were on the verge of turning capitalist.
Microbillionaire –
I forget where I saw the quip “you call us Hitler, we hurl a swastika”, but I think it sums up much of the situation. After Bush was Hitler, McCain was Hitler, Palin was She-Hitler, Mitt bloody Romney, generic suit incarnate was Hitler, and now (of course) Trump is Hitler… If one’s opponent in a brawl is biting, gouging, and going for the nuts, I can see how imprecations to be the better man and not strike below the belt might be less than convincing…
What you’re seeing, I think, is people gouging back.
I don’t think that’s it.
Let’s imagine a typical Trump supporter, or UKIP voter, or whatever: the kind of person that the alt-right claims to be speaking for. This person, knowing that they will be called a racist no matter what they say, decides they “might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb”. What do they say when they’re no longer restrained by political correctness? Well, I see them saying stuff like: the police aren’t racist, it’s just that blacks commit more crimes than whites; there’s a problem with fatherlessness in the black community; that sort of thing.
But now consider the alt-right – the ones using triple brackets and pouring scorn on interracial marriages. Having decided to be hung for a sheep, what do they say? From what I’ve seen, they say things like: black people are fundamentally inferior to white people; it’s best for white people that they don’t co-mingle with blacks; things of that nature.
The former bit of plain-speaking is all perfectly agreeable, as far as I’m concerned, and I think it’s a big problem that those views are so frequently dismissed as racism. The latter simply is racism.
The alt-right is claiming to speak for these UKIP-voting ordinary people, but there’s actually quite a fundamental difference between the two. One group is sick of being called a racist precisely because they’re not racist, and the other… well, I guess they just don’t like the negative attention.
I think what’s happening here is that there’s a trend in politics at the moment – an anti-PC wave, let’s call it, and the crest of that wave, perhaps, is the alt-right. But trying to ride that wave are all sorts of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Kremlin stooges who seem to think that this alt-right thing represents their chance at sneaking into the mainstream. I think what we’re seeing is something akin to entryism: the alt-right is an opportunity to get back in the game for the various people and ideas that National Review kicked off the team, so to speak.
To be clear, that’s not to say that everybody who considers themselves alt-right is a Nazi. But, well, I’ve read a lot of Vox Day, and while you can never be totally sure that he means what he says, lately it feels like there’s been a slipping of the mask. I’m starting to worry that it’ll turn out that he was always a Nazi, but he just hid it well.
I hope I’m making myself clear, I’ve been going back and forth struggling to make my point. Let’s try another tack:
Vox Day, I’m sure, will justify (((this nonsense))) with recourse to the argument made above, i.e. “they’ll call me a Nazi no matter what I say, so I might as well be a Nazi, yeah?”, i.e. “lol I’m just trollin'”. But once you start putting every Jewish name in triple brackets, haven’t you crossed the line between ironic comedy anti-Semitism and actual anti-Semitism? Have you not just given away the fact that you’re not trolling, and that actually you’ve just found a way to get away with saying something you’ve always wanted to say? I too have political beliefs that mean I get compared to Hitler in arguments – but the unfair comparison doesn’t inspire me to hate Jews.
Again, hope this makes sense.
The only watchable episode of Star Trek: Enterprise surprised me by finally explaining the great Klingon mystery – to wit, how a bunch of overly macho space biker Vikings managed to form an empire and the sophisticated technology necessary to keep it together.
Turns out Klingon culture used to be much more diverse, with great achievements in art and science, before a retrograde cultural element espousing the values of a mythical Klingon Golden Age based on warrior culture and a form of racial and ideological purity took hold and swept the Empire.
I have to admit, I did Nazi that coming.
It’s become a case of s/he who shouts loudest wins.
Well, granting for both the right wing as well as the left, tries to shout the loudest.
At the very least for us bookended by alt-right, et al, through whomever are the maoists these days, also et al, they do provide entertainment . . . and the googlemancy is getting nowhere: David?
Where’s that clip of wannabe leaders standing in a circle and vehemently arguing who gets priority based on the made up precedence of the moment?
Where’s that clip of wannabe leaders standing in a circle and vehemently arguing who gets priority based on the made up precedence of the moment?
Did you mean this? The one with the bare-breasted lesbian and the cacophonous shrieking?
but being open to new ideas is a very important part of Civilisation.
I think what we’ve been seeing is the ideological exploitation of a more general desire to be, or be seen as, welcoming, cosmopolitan, not fixated by race, etc. This general tendency – which some might regard as a marker of being civilised – is being perverted into a self-abasing mindset, a kind of pretentious collective atonement, in which ethnic identities are to be loudly affirmed and deferred to – except one, of course. By this thinking, or emoting, our borders should be flung open to “the other” indiscriminately and regardless of compatibility, or number, and regardless of the economic, cultural and social consequences. Because, being pallid and fairly successful as tribes go, we, The Great White Oppressor, deserve punishment.
You morons.
JEFF.
IS.
ITALIAN.
He was adopted by a family with a Jewish surname. They didn’t even PRACTICE.
How come nobody lectures the Japanese or the Chinese or the Indians that they’re “mongrels”? Probably too afraid of being arrested.
Kim Jong Il and his spawn do all the time. Only North Koreans are racially pure, you see. South Koreans are mongrels (especially from a certain southern region). You want unabashed racism? Go to east Asia or India.
The first and most important difference between us and them is we’re us and they’re them.
That statement is no damn good unless you can define US and THEM in a way that leaves no ambiguities.
@Steve2
I’m having difficulty in translating your Arabic sentence. Might it equate to “my hovercraft is full of eels”? If so, I do sympathise with your predicament.
I have to admit, I did Nazi that coming.
Hmmm…
South Koreans are mongrels
Well, you are what you eat, I s’pose.
Might it equate to “my hovercraft is full of eels”?
That’s insane. Who would say a thing like that???
I think what we’ve been seeing is the ideological exploitation of a more general desire to be, or be seen as, welcoming, cosmopolitan, not fixated by race, etc. This general tendency – which some might regard as a marker of being civilised – is being perverted into a self-abasing mindset, a kind of pretentious collective atonement, in which ethnic identities are to be loudly affirmed and deferred to – except one, of course.
Yarp.
And as unedifying as it might seem, it was inevitable whites would jump on the identity politics bandwagon at some point. Especially as we are increasingly blessed with marvellous diversity like from those Muslims who show such a keen interest in our children.
Identity politics is a bit like Affirmative Action in the US: perfectly sustainable when only 10% of the population qualifies for it, the 90% hardly notices the difference. But when it shifts to 30%, 40%, 50% plus of the population demanding special treatment at the expense of the rest, well… that’s not a recipe for a happy ending.
Did you mean this? The one with the bare-breasted lesbian and the cacophonous shrieking?
Yes!!!, that’s the one . . . and then the right wingers try to claim that Oh, no, no, there’s no resemblance whatsoever, we don’t look the least like that . . . .
Define racism. Because as far as I can tell, it really is best for white people that they don’t co-mingle with blacks, on average, due to factors such as the excessive black criminality you mentioned; whites are at greater risk of being murdered by their spouse if they marry blacks than if they marry whites; and I can’t find anyone on Google actually saying “black people are fundamentally inferior to white people”, only people attributing it to their opponents.
(Or don’t – I personally ban cant such as “racism” at my own blog, and require commenters to express their point in other words, as a means of occasioning more thoughtful expression.)
I sorta doubt that. Vox’s line seems to be much more “I don’t care. I have no reason to justify myself to you.”
No.
Because there’s no anti-Semitism there. Jews might not like the attention, but ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t mean ‘anything Jews dislike’. Triple brackets might occasion anti-Semitism among those who object to the high Jew density in the halls of power, but so might reading Who’s Who or Category:American Jews. Doesn’t make them anti-Semitic.
You don’t have to hate Jews to think that e.g. “my interests are not Jewish interests, in fact my interests are at odds with Jewish interests” and then wish that your country’s leadership wouldn’t contain so many Jews seemingly working for Jewish interests. (Compare how much attention American politics devotes to Israel compared to, say, India.)
Or, working for leftist interests, for that matter. Here’s a Jew writing in the Jewish Journal that Jews are forever and always on the left, it’s in their blood. A non-Jew accusing Jews of the exact same stuff described here would probably provoke screams of “anti-Semitism!!!” from anti-semanticists before getting halfway through. And a rightist non-Jew reading it might reasonably draw conclusions along the lines that the Jews have always cautioned about — “when your enemy reveals himself, believe him”.
(I don’t believe a word of it myself, for the record. I believe it’s more a matter of Jews defaulting to trying to make nice with power and public opinion, for all the obvious reasons that an oft-hated minority might do that. If tomorrow the right took over all power the left holds over media, bureaucracy, academia, and the like, I predict the Jewish Journal would swiftly change its tune to saying “Judeo-Christian” a lot and talking about the inborn traditionalism of Jews who go back four thousand years and giving wall-building tips and so on and so on. But since the left dominates those institutions, the JJ will be prone to flatter the left at present.)
Agreed.
OTOH, I think it should be acknowledged that there really is an issue with Israel and Jews where some pointed questions are in order. As a quick crude proxy, a search of the Congressional Record turns up some 20k references to Israel and 7k references to India. This is absurd on the face of things. India is far more important: population, nukes, neighbors, geographically, strategically, you name it. Likewise with another quick example, Jews are 33% of the US Supreme Court and 2% of the US population, and similarly overrepresented elsewhere in the halls of power. Why?
And is the answer to that “Why?” perhaps one which might also explain/justify why blacks are underrepresented? When is it legitimate for representation to be not proportionate to population?
Something something sunlight, disinfectant, etc. Give a reasonable answer to the question, and you undermine the ability of neo-Nazis to claim it must be for nefarious reasons. Unfortunately, I don’t have one myself, my last two hypotheses both having been hacked apart by contradictory data in arguments elsewhere.
I suppose I should address some of the rank imbecility I’ve just read here and do it in a way that won’t, I hope, strike anyone as if I’m being either naive or leftist — both of which traits I can assure you I lack.
First, no one believes in magic dirt, nor does anyone believe had Somalis, say, formed this nation, things would be as instantly “meaty.” The civil society is a prerequisite for the kind of procedural country our Founders envisioned, and they were well read men in western philosophy. Liberia, for instance, lacked this base — and as we’ve seen in ill-fated democracy projects, you can’t simply slap a Constitution onto a people and expect them to understand it.
The civil society formed in colonies began a century and a half plus before the Revolutionary War. It was a collection of various religions, from Quakers and Anglicans to deists and so forth, all of whom shared certain Judeo-Christian values that underlay the morality side of the western Enlightenment and the civil society built in what would soon become the United States. So. There’s the historical backdrop. It is my contention that anyone who abides the compact forged by our Founders and Framers is capable of useful citizenship, regardless of their DNA markers.
It is clear to me that we are living in post-constitutional era, and I’ve advocated for ways to re-group, be it a Convention of the States or simply state nullification of fed judiciary rulings that are on their face unconstitutional or beyond the purview of the courts as laid out in the Constitution.
There have been innumerable poor court rulings, but the leftist activism is getting even worse, and state Governors need to find the balls to tell the feds to keep their money and stuff their bathroom demands, eg. This is hardly “pacifist,” and we may well soon see a kind of soft civil war I’ve been writing about as inevitable since at least 2005. I reject stare decisis as necessary and believe only originalists / intentionalists have a right to interpret law, because it is only they who are actually interpreting in the first place.
What I don’t want to see as a battle strategy is “my side” becoming what the left wants it to become: just another competing identity group vying for special dispensation. That is the wrong way to go, in my opinion, no matter how good it makes you feel or how cathartic it might be. White nationalism is left-progressivism in its bones. It devalues the individual and requires tribal loyalty.
Fuck that and fuck anyone who needs it.
Secondly, I’m no pacifist, and I’m familiar with the “muh Constitution, muh principles” bullshit certain people who fancy themselves fed up FIGHTERS! throw around. Seems an odd thing to mock — after all, we’re talking about the central document to our country and its governance, and the desire to adhere to it, in such a way as to make it seem somewhat silly — but then, these are strange times, where people like I’ve who’ve spent decades fighting the scourge of PC leftism, faux-diversity, and pernicious multiculturalism, are suddenly lumped in with BLM.
The fact of the matter is, I’ve spelled out the reasons why white identity politics is no different than any other identity politics in terms of how it is organized and where it must necessarily leave. You may wish to bleat about how you’re FINALLY FIGHTING BACK, but that’s just self-serving garbage. I defended Stacy McCain when he was called racist; I defended Trent Lott (whom I detest); I’ve defended Bill Maher; I’ve defended David Letterman. I’m an aggressive proponent of free speech, and I don’t much care what political letter it wears behind its name. I’m also a tenacious enemy to PC in any of its forms. I was never known not to fight, and in fact, when I wasn’t fighting the left I spent most of my time bashing the quisling Rs. I’d link but my site was hacked and my archives removed by Trumpers. For freedom! This will have to do as an example: http://hotair.com/archives/2009/03/09/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-f-bomb/
Calling something what I believe it to be — and the AltRight is rife with racialism, racism, antisemitism, and batshit crazy pseudo-scientific white nationalist “sociology”– then drawing out the argument to make the case, doesn’t make me PC, or a “pacifist,” or someone who advises against raising our weapons against a foe. I just believe we need better weapons, not the shared shit weapons imported from socialists. In fact, the very idea I play by Queensbury rules is completely ludicrous, given how I’ve spent years teaching people just how to combat the left, and how to disentangle ourselves from the linguistic traps institutionalized in how we believe language works that were always going to bring us to this point of competing identity blocs. Whether it’s more nuanced racialists or outright racists within the AltRight, the fact remains it’s there, it’s ugly, and it is inherently anti-individualistic. As such, it is anti-American.
The undercurrent here, be it pointing to early Naturalization Acts or “our posterity” — two of the go-to bits whipped out ever so proudly by racialist morons — is that the US was formed as a discriminatory country. To believe this, one must believe that both the Constitution and the Declaration were somehow mis-written, and that the Founders and Framers simply forget to build in firewalls to prevent citizenship to anyone not, eg., born in one of the original colonies. You must believe that Jefferson’s “all men” line was an oopsie, and that what he REALLY meant was “all free white Christians only” and was just self-conscious at being overly verbose. You must believe the Framers forgot, during the drafting and ratification processes, to include discriminatory language in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It forgot to set up a state church, for instance, when it was crafting 1A.
All of which would be in keeping with how progressives view the Founders: racist slave holders who cared only for themselves and built a country on the backs of disenfranchised chattel slaves and on the bones of Natives. The difference being, you’d be celebrating what the progressive left uses as a cudgel. And yet both of you are basing your positions on lies and slanders.
Now, some of you can pretend that what was of necessity (given the venue) a brief essay doesn’t answer certain key questions about what to do, and you can trot out the now ubiquitous line from the AltRight that conservatism and classical liberalism hasn’t conserved anything, but the truth is, Coolidge, Reagan, and Gingrich’s Contract all lead to prosperity, while for most of the last 100 years, dating back before Nixonian free trade and 1965’s Hart-Celler Act, a 90% European “meat” white country elected repeatedly progressives informed directly by Fabianism imported here from white Europe.
It was conservatives who opposed Hart-Celler, incidentally, and as anyone who’s read me knows, I’m a proponent of a border fence (just not a fantasy King Kong enclosure promised by an old orange Mondale Democrat); I believe we need to enforce our own immigration laws, including sponsorship, means testing, and required assimilation; that we need periodic moratoriums, particularly on low-skilled workers; and that I’d refuse any refugees from countries that are tied to terrorism unless and until we have a means to accurately vet petitioners.
Hi, Jeff. In case you hadn’t heard, or heard often enough, Protein Wisdom is sorely missed.
Hi Microbillionaire,
“2. If you go far enough in one political direction you’ll eventually bump into opposite direction.”
Try thinking of it as if you go far enough in one direction, you’ll become indistinguishable from those who have gone too far in the opposite direction i.e. there isn’t really any difference between the extreme right and the extreme left; both are evil. (Although the extreme right probably has shinier jackboots.)
Right, it’s time for me to be horizontal. Place nicely. Use coasters.
Hi, David. I keep trying to get in touch with Pixy Misa to get the site back online, but he’s not returning my emails. Maybe he, like Ace, is blocking me because of “muh principles.”
Also, gotta love the “Jews like Goldstein” bit above. Nope. These aren’t anti-individualists leftists playing Euro-righties at all. No sir!
The alt-righters are extremely dangerous to those of us on the conservatarian spectrum in large part because they give our enemies a cudgel with which to beat us.
Define racism. Because as far as I can tell, it really is best for white people that they don’t co-mingle with blacks, on average, due to factors such as the excessive black criminality you mentioned… I can’t find anyone on Google actually saying “black people are fundamentally inferior to white people”, only people attributing it to their opponents.
One of the defining features of these alt-right entryists is disingenuousness, and here we might have an example. I shouldn’t accuse you of that, of course, but I hope you can understand why I might suspect such: you seem like an intelligent person, and yet you apparently don’t think that there exist people who think that whites are better than blacks, even if they didn’t use my exact words. You also want me to define racism. I thought it was pretty clear from what I wrote that I’m not someone who throws the term around where it’s not warranted, and that I’m not trying to pin a label on people to shut them up.
But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. I’d define it as an irrational animus based on race. The alt-righters I’m talking about are of the opinion that black criminality is innate and incorrigible, rather than, say, a product of the welfare state and a noxious culture. And there’s a nasty edge to their comments on the subject. We’re talking about people who are disingenuous about what they truly believe, so to a certain degree we’re left to draw inferences from their tone. But to me at least the irrational animus is often clear. They may hide it behind reasonable concerns like those mentioned above, or behind legitimate science like that on intelligence, but I’ve often been left with the impression that there are no improvements that blacks could make that would satisfy them. It’s not rational, they just hate niggers.
Jews might not like the attention, but ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t mean ‘anything Jews dislike’. Triple brackets might occasion anti-Semitism among those who object to the high Jew density in the halls of power, but so might reading Who’s Who or Category:American Jews. Doesn’t make them anti-Semitic.
You really don’t think there’s anything behind those triple brackets? Who else would feel the need to clearly identify every Jew when their Jewishness was totally irrelevant, except somebody who had an irrational animus towards Jews?
There are obvious reasons that politicians from lots of countries pay more attention to Israel than to India. I would also wager that not all congressional references to Israel are positive.
As for why Jews are more successful and blacks are not: I’ve seen various arguments and I don’t know which is right. What I think is wrong is when people read something nefarious into those discrepancies. This applies as much to those who think black people are conspired against as it does to those who think that Jews have conspired to succeed. It’s one thing to note that Jews are “overrepresented in the halls of power”, and another to say that they’re all working towards “Jewish interests”.
As for the Jew who wrote that Jews are always leftist, that’s his opinion. Ironically, he submits to the same fallacy that an anti-Semite does, namely that Jews are a monolith working towards a common interest. I’ve actually already seen that article linked at Vox Popoli, and they are drawing the conclusion you mention, i.e. “when your enemy reveals himself, believe him.” I would disagree that that was a reasonable conclusion to draw.
Here’s the problem with people who worry about Jews:
When Mitt Romney ran for President, I didn’t see many complaints that his religion meant he’d put Mormon interests ahead of everything else. But if a Jew rises high, people question his loyalty. Why? Is there something different about being a Jew than being a Mormon? I suppose it’s an ethnicity as well as a religion; and, sure enough, there are lots of alt-righters who’d make the objection based on ethnicity: I recall people who insisted on referring to Nikki Haley as Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, ignoring that she was married. But still, these people never seem to think Nikki Haley or Bobby Jindal or Ted Cruz’s loyalties are quite as divided as a Jew’s would be. Why? Is there something different about being a Jew than being Indian?
Once you hack away at it, you’re usually left with nothing but that definition of racism I used earlier: an irrational animus.
Perhaps I’m a bit touchy on the anti-Semitism at the moment (does the “s” get capitalised?), but I remember Vox Day making that exact point about Israeli influence in the American government, and I thought, by gum, that’s perfectly reasonable. And then he started doing (((this))), and now I have to wonder: wait, was he being reasonable? Or did I just get tricked into accepting the thin end of the wedge?
Also, gotta love the “Jews like Goldstein” bit above. Nope. These aren’t anti-individualists leftists playing Euro-righties at all. No sir!
So what of it? It seems like even recognising Jews as a group, in any capacity that isn’t purely positive, immediately relegates one to the status of a jackbooted thug. I find that very curious. Cue the cries of individualism. Your precious individualism! It’s all or nothing, isn’t it? Yes, yes, we’re all individuals after all, but to pretend that society is composed entirely of individuals alone is to improperly reduce society to something it is not; a bunch of aimless satellites occasionally bumping into each other through the aether. Further, this focus on individualism as the defining aspect is magically untethered from the fact that it is a belief held collectively and enforced as such, though it seems many moderns are clueless of this fact and assume their individualism just is because it’s just so inherently right.
Hi Jeff
What David said at 22:31 …. turned up to 12 because that’s two more than ten.
Here’s a Jew writing in the Jewish Journal that Jews are forever and always on the left, it’s in their blood.
A response to Dennis Prager, an observant Jew who writes, and lectures, extensively about Left-Jews have given up Judaism for Leftism (even coupled with atheism.
It seems like even recognising Jews as a group, in any capacity that isn’t purely positive, immediately relegates one to the status of a jackbooted thug.
When you recognize us as a group for the purpose of making invidious claims about us, the problem of course is with the claims, not the aggregation. We then ponder where we’ve heard these sorts of things before.
When I complemented Texans en masse above I did so knowing that there are numerous exceptions, and neither I nor anyone else felt the need to issue reservations. That’s because praise and blame set off entirely different dynamics. That something so obvious needs explaining is the real curiosity here.
“Complimented,” of course. Some of my best friends are homophones.
When you recognize us as a group for the purpose of making invidious claims about us, the problem of course is with the claims, not the aggregation. We then ponder where we’ve heard these sorts of things before.
Here’s another invidious claim for you: Jews have a neurotic obsession with victimhood and imagine Nazis around every corner. No wonder you’re such ripe targets for trolling on the Twitter.
Jews have a neurotic obsession with victimhood and imagine Nazis around every corner.
Oh the irony.
Jeff has spend his life debating language deconstruction. “Alt-right” is a language construct just like “social justice”. The language game is to argue the constructs and not the reality. Don’t play. America offered color blind and it was refused. If color matters than color matters.
Trigger warning!
Trump will win a landslide if he ever uses words “white children”.
THIS =====> “It devalues the individual and requires tribal loyalty. Fuck that and fuck anyone who needs it.” <===== THIS The difference being, you’d be celebrating what the progressive left uses as a cudgel.
The alt-right is an eerie photo-negative of the identitarian left that makes my skin crawl.
Yeah, that’s virtue signalling, and I’ll own it, right now. Brand me. Brand me as a non-racialist ALL DAY. I BEG YOU.
Cripes, people, if all it takes to be virtuous is to NOT hew to a movement that embraces ~90% of Hitler’s views on race (EVERYTHING BUT SUPREMACY), then you’ve set the bar too #$*%@ low.
They may hide it behind reasonable concerns like those mentioned above, or behind legitimate science like that on intelligence…
Permit me to interject that there is ZERO correlation between IQ and virtue.
Stupid criminals commit stupid crimes: robbery, assault, murder. Those crimes scare us because they’re scary things to experience.
Smart criminals commit crimes that are actually WORSE in their scope and impact but not as scary because there’s no precipitous instant of violence against its victims: identity fraud, insurance fraud, hacking into the NSA, securities fraud, accounting fraud, embezzlement, indoctrinating college students with clever lies, holding Senate seats forever, writing seminal lies (aka “damned lies”) about your struggles or capital, occupying the Oval Office, crashing national currencies, staging coups against Batista or the Shah, maintaining death camps and gulags, pillaging vast swathes of Eurasia with your Mongol Horde…*
If you expand your definition of “crime” to include all of the horrible things that people do, across history, you’re not going to see a racial signal in all that noise.
Humanity sucks. Always has; always will.
That’s all there is to it. Sticking with people you are comfy with won’t change that.
*Crushing your enemies. Seeing them driven before you. Hearing the lamentations of their women.