To understand modern America, you have to understand the main players. They no longer break simply into left and right, liberal or conservative.
The three religions of modern America are Old-Stock Christianity (American Boomerism, Constitutionalism, Evangelical Christianity, etc,) Wokeism, and anti-Wokeism (basically the alt-right).
(If the lack of explicit deities in two of these bothers you, replace “religion” with “belief system.” Note that Wokeists and anti-Wokeists can also be members of various religious groups, eg, Universalist Unitarians, but this is not critical for understanding their motivations.)
Wokeism is an explicit argument against Old-Stock Christianity (old conservatism is weak to progressive arguments since prog arguments are specifically designed to respond to old conservatism, which was more culturally powerful in the past). In Wokeism, the greatest of sins is racism (followed by the other ‘isms). Wokeists have converted Christianity’s original sin of illicit fruit consumption into the original sin of racism.
To Wokeists, Christians are pagans who have not yet accepted the new religion. Anti-Wokeists, by contrast, are apostates who have rejected the new religion.
The latter are considered far worse than the former. Pagans can be converted to the True Way, but apostates cannot: they have already explicitly rejected it.
To the Old-Stock Christians, the Wokeists are a confusing extension of their religion–maybe just a youthful, semi-heretical phase (while the anti-wokeists are invisible and inexplicable).
By contrast, Anti-Wokeists (including the alt-right) are making explicit arguments against Wokeism. Thus they are to Wokeism as Wokeism is to Christianity.
Steven Pinker recently gave a short speech at Harvard (where he works) on how hearing certain facts without accompanying leftist counter-arguments causes people to become “infected” with right-wing thoughts:
The difference between Pinker and the Left is that Pinker is (trying) to be honest. Pinker believes in truth. He believes in believing true things and discussing true things. He believes that just because you believe a true thing doesn’t mean you have to go down this road to believing other, in his opinion untrue, things. You can believe more than one true thing. You can simultaneously believe “Blacks commit more homicide than whites” and believe “Blacks should not be discriminated against.”
By contrast, the Left is not trying to be honest. It is not looking for truth. It just wants to win. The Left does not want people to know that crime stats vary by race, that men and women vary in average interests and aptitudes, that communism is an atrociously bad economic system. Merely saying, “Hey, there are things you can’t say out loud without provoking a very loud controversy from the left,” has provoked… a very loud controversy from the left:
The Left is abusing one of its own because merely saying these things out loud is seen as a betrayal of Leftist goals.
And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ —George Orwel, 1984
I’ve spilled a lot of ink trying to figure out why people hold the political opinions they do–Genetics? Neurology? Game theory?–but maybe it’s just the fact that we’re tribal creatures stuck in a two-party system.
The US is legally set up as a two-party system. Doen’t matter how much you like a third party: our system of counting votes makes it nearly impossible for it to win.
A two-party system means that whatever one party supports, the other party–if it wants to win–opposes. It doesn’t matter what you support. You could be the Cute Puppies and Kittens Party, and your opponents would start writing diatribes about how “cute” puppies and kittens are a serious menace to society. “Millions of babies have been smothered by puppies and kittens!” the headlines would scream. “Why won’t the Cute Puppies and Kittens Party acknowledge the dangers of flea-borne BUBONIC PLAGUE?”
And we, being tribal creatures, believe that it is absolutely critical to support their own tribe against that other, awful evil tribe that is clearly evil because of its obviously EVIL stance on puppies and kittens.
If you don’t want to play this game, then guess what? You aren’t going to win votes.
The Democrats have increasingly focused on race and other identity-politics issues for the past 8 years or so, (culminating in the BLM protests.) The initial Republican strategy (embodied in Hispanic-friendly candidates like Jeb, Cruz, and Rubio) was to try to win by attracting Hispanic voters. But Cubans aside, being the “slightly welcoming to immigrants” party isn’t good enough to woo immigrants away from the “Open borders now” party, and it’s going to alienate all of the voters who are concerned that immigration is too high.
By not opposing the Democrats, Republicans left themselves open to internal sniping: hence Trump’s takeover.
A lot of people blame Trump for the Alt-Right, but the AR existed long before Trump. The AR emerged as a response to the left’s SJW-Identity politics, politics mainstream conservatism had no credible answers to. Trump is simply a product of the same forces.
It’s bad enough when tribal lines are being drawn over puppies and kittens. Throw in actual ethnic and group identities and you are asking for trouble.
Now add to this the fact that democracy is essentially how we are trying to run our country. “Want to get something done? Want to improve your pet issue? Vote!”
We are incentivising people to OPPOSE GOOD IDEAS because if they don’t, someone else who DOES will GET ELECTED INSTEAD.
Spencer I regard as somewhat like the Boogeyman: journalists like to pull him out when they want to scare someone. He doesn’t represent the Alt-Right inasmuch as the Alt-Right is mostly a vague collection of people/groups on the internet who don’t fall into mainstream conservatism, rather than a coherent entity with a single leader.
I am not personally well-acquainted with Spencer’s work–if I’ve read any of it, I’ve forgotten it–but he is famous enough that I am familiar with the gist of it.
According to Tablet:
…alt-right luminary Richard Spencer declared himself to be a “white Zionist.” Just as Jews want a state of their own, the Charlottesville far-right organizer argued, he merely seeks a state for white people.
“…you could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland that’s for us and ourselves just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”
So far, so good: this sounds a lot like things Spencer has said elsewhere, eg, Wikipedia says:
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer has advocated for a white homeland for a “dispossessed white race” and called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to halt the “deconstruction” of European culture.[19][20][58] To this end he has supported what he has called “the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent”, an “ideal” that he has regarded as a “reconstitution of the Roman Empire.”[59][60]
The white nationalist wants a white nation. Sounds tautological. But this is where Tablet gets interesting:
It’s an analogy with superficial plausibility. It’s also a malicious lie, and a deliberate one. …
Essentially, the alt-right maliciously appropriates the deeply held values of liberals and minorities in order to attack them. This is not because the alt-right shares those values, but because it wants to troll those who do.
This is quite the claim! It’s one thing to claim that someone has appropriated a cultural item, such as a white person performing a style of music invented by black people or an Asian person wearing a Mexican hat. “Cultural appropriation” is a logical mess in practice, but at least it rests on the somewhat coherent idea of “this is my culture, we do and make these things, therefore these things belong to us.”
What does it mean to appropriate someone’s values? “You can’t be an environmentalist, only people whose ancestors were environmentalists are allowed to care about the environment?” “I’m sorry, but since Freedom of Speech was not originally enshrined in your country’s laws, you’re not allowed to want it.”
But if we read the paragraph again, it becomes clear that Tablet doesn’t really want to accuse Spencer of appropriating liberal values, (which it thinks he does not hold) but instead the logicalarguments used to support liberal positions.
And for what purpose? Here Tablet’s answer is simple: to troll them:
This disingenuous dynamic of using liberal values to troll liberals has been documented elsewhere by journalists who have followed the alt-right. … As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his 1946 treatise Anti-Semite and Jew:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. … they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
Spencer’s doing it for the shits and giggles, folks.
To be fair, the alt-right is full of trolls and jokers, and many of them are anti-Semitic. Spencer himself is probably anti-Semitic, or at least anti-people-who-write-for-Tablet, but anti-Semitic trolling of the frogs-and-gas-chamber-memes-variety doesn’t appear to be his primary concern. He seems to be primarily concerned with promoting white nationalism. (It’s almost as though “alt-right” were a vague, poorly-defined term that includes a lot of people who might not even believe in the same stuff besides a general dislike of both the mainstream left and right.)
If Spencer is just trolling you, then what is his real intention? In this case, we have nothing–nothing but sound and fury, blustering for no reason. What’s the point? Does Spencer have secret reasons for promoting white nationalism other than white nationalism?
In my many years of trying to figure out why people believe and advocate for the politics they do, I have observed two things:
People often ignore each others’ arguments, respond to arguments their opponents didn’t make, assume their opponents are lying, or lie themselves about their opponents’ arguments
People I disagree with make more sense if I assume they are generally trying to be truthful
For example, in a debate about abortion, one side might argue, “We think women should have the right to control their own bodies,” and the other side might argue, “murdering babies is immoral,” and then side A responds, “You hate women and want to force them to be breeding cows,” and side B shoots back, “You hate babies and want to murder them.”
But it actually makes more sense to assume the anti-abortion side is opposed to baby-murder than that they’re interested in using women like cattle, and it makes more sense to assume the pro-abortion side is more interested in controlling whether or not they are pregnant than in maliciously murdering people.
Interestingly, conservatives tend to understand liberals’ motivations and reasons for their political beliefs better than liberals understand conservatives’. As Haidt reports in The Righteous Mind, (quoted on The Independent Whig):
In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right.)’ …
The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.
I find this holds among people I know in real life: the conservatives tend to understand what liberals believe, while the liberals tend to despair that they live in a country full of evil psychopaths who voted for Trump.
There has been a lot of debate (and public marching) lately about Free Speech, especially whether people like Richard Spencer should have free speech. It seems that some people see even their political opponents as basically honest and well-meaning, their political opinions therefore something a good person might believe if they had different life experiences or were just working with different information.
By contrast, some people see other people as fundamentally dishonest and malicious, their “opinions” as just justifications or deflective cover for being a bad person. (Would you debate the ethics of murder with a serial killer?)
If you fall into the first camp, then the principle of Free Speech makes sense, because knowledge and experiences can be conveyed. But if you fall into the second camp, then there are positions that you think are not honestly argued nor susceptible to logic or debate–in which case, there’s no point to extending “free speech” to such ideas.
Will this shift lead to a less diverse Eidolon? Our writers always have been, and will continue to be, a diverse group. Our writer pool has excellent diversity of race, age, gender, professional status, and sexuality. … we’ve been accused of not being “ideologically diverse.” This charge is a common one, but I think it is misguided, in addition to being morally bankrupt. Making ideological diversity a primary objective is fundamentally incompatible with fighting against racism, sexism, and other forms of structural oppression, and we choose to prioritize the latter.
In other words: liberals don’t think conservatives deserve free speech because they assume conservatives are basically lying to cover up their real agenda of hurting various minorities.
But why are liberals more susceptible to misunderstanding their opponents than liberals? Let’s return to Tablet, which makes two interesting arguments. First:
Thus, [the alt-right] wrenches causes like affirmative action, black pride, and Zionism from their historical and moral context—as defenses of minorities against long-standing majority oppression—and inverts them to serve white supremacist aims against minorities.
Well, I don’t think Spencer mentioned affirmative action in this article, but the rest is sensible.
In general, American conservatives tend to believe that moral principles should be applied universally–to quote Kant’s categorical imperative:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.[1]
Tablet is in effect saying that nationalism is not meant to be a universal political value, but particular to specific groups in specific contexts. The universalizable principle is not nationalism, but, “Nationalism for minority groups in order to protect them from majority groups.”
By this logic, American whites shouldn’t be nationalist vis American non-whites, but South African whites would be perfectly justified in nationalism against South Africa’s black majority. This rule does not tell us, however, whether a group that expects to become a minority in the future is justified in pre-emptively trying to prevent this or look out for their future interests.
When does the right to nationalism kick in?
(Incidentally, US infants are already majority non-white, and the entire US will be majority non-white around 2050. NPR also estimates that about 20% of the 2060 US population will be foreigners. By contrast, the nation was 84% white back in 1965, before passage of LBJ’s immigration act.)
“Nationalism for everyone” is at least a clear principle that doesn’t get hung up on such nuances as “Are we a minority yet?” or “Are we sufficiently oppressed?” Unfortunately, it leads to other questions, like “Should Basques have their own country?” or “What about Northern Ireland?”
But to return to Spencer and Tablet, it appears that Spencer is working under the assumption that “nationalism is good” is a universal principle applicable to all peoples, while Tablet is working on the assumption that “nationalism is a defense for minority populations against oppression.”
Tablet unnecessarily muddles the waters by adding:
In this manner, the return of Jews to their indigenous homeland is recast by white nationalists, who are not indigenous to America, to justify kicking Jews and other minorities out of the country.
Whoa whoa whoa. “Indigeneity” is a whole different argument. If anyone gets to be called “indigenous” in Israel, it’s the Palestinians. Genetically speaking, claiming indigeneity based on having lived somewhere 2,000 years ago is nonsense–during the 1,900 years of diaspora, pretty much all Jewish groups intermarried with their neighbors and are now about 50% “non Jew” by DNA (most of that on their mothers’ side, as men are nigh universally more likely than women to travel long distances and then take local wives.) Ashkenazim–the majority of Jews–are about 50% Italian, having taken wives from among the Romans after their expulsion from Judea following the destruction of the Second Temple.
For that matter, I would like to point out that the majority of Jews are genetically “white” and that Jewish culture has been part of European culture for almost 2,000 years. (I don’t know how to politely express just how dumb I think two different groups of whites arguing about “white nationalism” is.) Jews have been living in parts of Germany for almost as long as the ethnic Germans, having been officially invited in during the Ostsiedlung. If Jews are indigenous to anywhere, they have a much better argument for Germany and Poland than Israel.
Luckily for me, I think “indigeneity” is a stupid argument and that countries should exist because there exists some entity with the military power to secure the area. By my logic, Israel gets to exist because it does exist: Israel is the only entity with the military strength to control the area, and denying this would just destabilize the area and lead to more deaths.
Likewise, Americans (whites included) have a right to their country because they are already here and controlling it.
Tablet’s justification for why it thinks Spencer (and the alt-right generally) is lying about being interested in white nationalism, or perhaps that white nationalism is comparable to Zionism, is that alt-righters tend not to like Israel or Jews:
That the alt-right does not genuinely support Israel or Zionism—that “they delight in acting in bad faith” on the topic—is readily apparent from how its members talk about Israel when they are not engaged in trolling.
(Here the article quotes several people from Twitter saying negative things about Zionism or Israel, none of whom, I note, are Spencer.)
But I don’t think Spencer (or any other alt-right spokesman) ever claimed to care about Israel. Just because someone believes in the generalized concept of “nationalism” does not mean they care personally about the national ambitions of all peoples. In fact, I wager a Serbian nationalist and a Kosovar nationalist take pretty dim views of each other. Kurdish nationalists have difficulties with Iraqi nationalists; Northern Irish Catholic nationalists don’t get along with Northern Irish Protestant nationalists. An American nationalist may not care one way or another about nationalist ambitions in Guatemala or Indonesia. And white nationalists are under no obligation to care about Jewish nationalism, nor Jews to care about white nationalism.
Here, I think, is the crux of the matter: the point of Zionism is to benefit Jews; the point of white nationalism is to benefit whites. If white nationalism results in Jews getting hurt, then that’s a pretty big practical difference (from the Jewish POV) between the two ideologies. And this, of course, is why Tablet would prefer that you not use Zionism as a justification for an ideology that is–at the very least–filled with people who are anti-Zionist.
“Nationalism for everyone” is a clear principle, but “nationalism for me but not for you,” benefits me much more. This is true for everyone. The only reason whites probably don’t generally think this way is that we’ve been the majority for so long.
But what’s best for the whole of society? It’s easy to say, “Hey, let’s do what’s best for the whole of society” when your group already is most of society. What about minority groups in that same society? Should they–as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma–cooperate with others for the greater good? Or should they look out preferentially for their own good? And what happens in a multi-ethnic society where no group has a clear majority? Can you convince people to cooperate for the greater good, or does the inevitable presence of some people who prefer to cooperate only with co-ethnics and defect on strangers inevitably drive everyone apart?
Long term, how does a multi-ethnic democracy prevent itself from breaking down into everyone voting for their own tribal self-interest?
As I mentioned yesterday, among many important things, Scott’s post on Cost Disease explains (IMO) the rise of the Alt-Right (VERY broadly defined) and Trump’s victory in a way that I don’t think any mainstream publication can. (Not explicitly, mind.)
“Cost disease” is Scott’s (and others’) term for “things getting more expensive without any increase in quality or quantity.”
Over the past 40 years or so, some of the most expensive–and important–things in life like housing, education, health care, and infrastructure have doubled, tripled, or dectupled in price with very little improvement to show for it (except maybe in healthcare, where we are in fact living longer.)
Getting less bang for your buck is downright frustrating.
Now let’s suppose you’re an American conservative of some stripe. Maybe you think abortion is immoral. It’s been about 40 years since Roe V. Wade, and abortion is still legal. Maybe you’re opposed to gay marriage. Sorry, that horse has left the closet. Did you hope to bring democracy and freedom to the people of Iraq? Yeah… Good luck with that.
Maybe you’d just like to live in a community full of people who share your religious beliefs and cultural norms, like the average person actually did back in 1950 and before. Well, demographics have not been on your side for a long time–not only have whites gone from about 88% of the country to <50% of babies and thus soon a minority overall, but the whole country is becoming increasingly atheistic.
Or perhaps you’d just like to get an entry-level job without going 100k into debt and having your entire paycheck cleaned out by health insurance and rent, in which case you and Scott are on the same page.
So what, exactly, have Republicans been “conserving” all this time? Tax cuts for the wealthy? Hell, they didn’t even succeed at building a democracy in Iraq, and they spent trillions of dollars on it! And that’s our money, not theirs! They killed a bunch of people in the process, too.
Looking back, the two biggest Republican victories (that I can see) in my life time have been “getting tough on crime” and overseeing the Fall of the Soviet Union. That one was basically a coincidence, rather than the results of any specific Reagan/Bush I policies, but they do generally get credit for the Tough on Crime business. Note that this is all stuff that happened in the 80s and early 90s; for the past 20 years
And come this election (2016,) who were they running? JEB BUSH. Yes, little brother of the last Bush. You might as well make his campaign slogan “Just like last time, but with more Mexicans!”
Disclaimer: I understand wanting the Mexican vote. I understand wanting to appeal to Hispanics. They live here, they’re a huge voting block, (most of them are great people,) and I hear they’re not really down with the whole SJW agenda thingie.
But do you know the problem with Bush II?
It was pouring our money into a black hole in Iraq, inflating housing prices, and then crashing the economy. It was the general progression of every single thing outlined above that has made life harder for everyday Americans.
Maybe I’m missing some finer details here, but “not enough Mexicans” was not even remotely on the list of complaints.
The folk running the Republican Party had their heads so far up their asses they thought they could just play demographic games (“It works for the Democrats!”) without offering a plan to actually CONSERVE anything.
Okay, I am pissed that these incompetents have any role in our politics.
I stole this graph from Steve Sailer
I’ve noticed that people tend to be liberal when they’re young and become more conservative as they age, essentially locking in the liberalism of their college years but then erecting barriers against the liberalism of college students a decade younger than themselves. While this is natural and probably sensible in many ways, it leads to certain inconsistencies, like people who champion “women’s lib” but criticize “feminism.” Um. So many of the older conservatives I know basically just want to return to sometime in the late 70s/early 80s–you know, the cusp of the AIDs epidemic, the crack wars, rising crime turning America’s cities into burnt-out shells, etc. Great times!
Some people try to correct for this by invoking their grandarents’ or great-grandparents’ time–as though anyone were actually eager to re-live WW2 and the Great Depression. I don’t know about you, but I hear those times were pretty awful. And if we go back further than that, we start hitting things like “Massive epidemics kill millions of people.”
Simply trying to rewind the clock to some earlier year doesn’t solve today’s problems, but I understand the urge to conserve the things you value and love about your own society, childhood, culture, etc.–and the Neocons/Mainstream Republicans have failed miserably at that.
Trump’s message–and the “alt-right,” broadly–has focused on Law and Order; safety (from Terrorism;) jobs (“it’s the economy, stupid;) Cost Disease (“repeal two regulations for every new one” and “repeal Obamacare;”) and the general preservation of Americans as a people/culture (by limiting immigration, especially from groups that didn’t contribute to America’s founding stock.)
Meanwhile, mainstream Republicans are still kicking and screaming that what the country really needs is more Bush II policies.
Frequent poster unknown128 (okay, I’ve got to give you a nickname–you’re now Leuconoë,) has asked me to weigh in, from an HBD-perspective, on several studies about race, crime, poverty, etc:
What is your opinion of the “racial invariance hypothesis” which says that poor whites have about the same crime rate as poor blacks and that if you control for socioeconomic status all the differences between the races in crime go away?
We’re going to have to start with basic definitions: What are HBD, NRx, and the Alt-Right?
These are separate but obviously somewhat overlapping spheres of thought.
Nobel-prize winner and personal hero, James Watson
HBD, or Human Bio-Diversity, is the somewhat disreputable (by mainstream standards) end of normal human genetics/evolutionary theory. We start with a scientifically accepted point–evolution is true–and propose that evolutionary pressures have affected recent human development, including the development of personality traits.
If different groups of people are exposed to different environmental pressures, then evolution will select for different traits in different groups of people. “Groups” here can refer to men, women, social classes, isolated tribes, entire races, cultures, etc.
This is the short version. If you want the long version, try the Human BioDiversity Reading List. It is long. It goes into A LOT of detail. Any topic you think HBD-ers haven’t addressed is probably addressed in there somewhere.
The most controversial HBD-related claims are that that racial differences in IQ and criminality are probably genetic. James Watson got watsoned for saying as much, proving that no amount of scientific reputation or expertise in the field will save your reputation from the shrieking accusation of “racism.”
NRx, or Neo-Reaction, is a set of political ideas/philosophies popularized by Mencius Moldbug. This is hard to summarize, but one of the core underlying ideas is the application of evolutionary theory to systems, groups, countries, ideas, and ideologies.
NRx asserts that Democracy creates bad long-term incentive structures. In particular, democracies are liable to trade off long-term well-being for short-term votes, increase the franchise to get more votes, and create ethnic strife by pitting different groups against each other. It also claims that the basic idea underlying democracy, that “All men are created equal,” is basically untrue–some men are smarter than others, some are taller, some are more conscientious, etc.–and that society should recognize natural hierarchies.
Most neo-reactionaries probably believe in at least some version of HBD.
The Alt-Right can be defined narrowly or broadly. Narrowly speaking, the term refers to white identitarian (ie, white nationalist or white supremacist) groups. Most of these groups, traditionally, had little to do with NRx, which they see as having been started by autistic Jews. However, some NRxers are white identitarians, and vice versa. Likewise, some alt-rightists believe in HBD, but it’s not required, and some HBDers are white identitarians, but not all.
Broadly defined, the alt-right includes everyone who is not a liberal nor a traditional, mainstream GOP conservative. This is an umbrella term that defines people more by what they are not than what they are. Lots of folks who probably aren’t identitarians, such as Steve Sailer, Roosh V, and Pat Buchanan fall into this category.
Almost everyone in HBD is, very broadly speaking, alt-right, because mainstream conservatives are actively hostile to “evolution” and mainstream liberals are hostile to the idea of genetic or even cultural differences between different groups. Some of them, however, aren’t really traditionalists or identitarians, and some seem to be otherwise pretty liberal. HBDers are an eclectic lot.
The point of all of this verbiage is that you’ll probably get a different answer to your question depending on whether you ask someone who’s primarily interested in NRx, HBD, or white identity.
The white identitarians will probably tell you to fuck off, concern troll, they don’t care. They don’t care that much whether the causes of ethnic differences are genetic or cultural–they just prefer being around whites to being around non-whites and the rest is just details.
The NRxers would probably say that this is more egalitarian propaganda and besides, they’ve figured out a way to align incentives so that criminals get punished and society becomes more peaceful over time.
And the HBDers would say, yes, they have heard of this “environmental” hypothesis, here are a few reams of data on the subject, would you like to read Lynn’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations?
Yes, I am being a bit flippant. But if you’re wondering why so few of us have looked at these specific studies/posts, it’s just because we’ve already looked at a whole bunch of data on the subject and aren’t necessarily interested in yet one more study. Personally, I consider IQ and criminality basically settled issues. They vary by race and gender, they have a genetic component, and I’m not sure how much more you can say about that without getting repetitious.
But sometimes it’s a good idea to discuss things things again, so we’ll take a look at these other theories (tomorrow next week.) :)
Overall, anti-Semitic violence rose by 40 percent worldwide, according to figures provided by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University. A total of 766 violent incidents were recorded worldwide last year, a “sharp increase” over the 554 tallied in 2013, according to the European Jewish Congress, which contributed to the report.
Milan Chatterjee, a third-year law student at UCLA, on August 24 informed the school chancellor of his decision to leave the university and finish his UCLA law degree at New York University School of Law. In a letter that was made public earlier today, he alleged that since November 2015 he has been “relentlessly attacked, bullied and harassed by BDS-affiliated organizations and students” and that the harassment had become intolerable.
A number of studies conducted among the Muslim youth in various western European countries have showed that Muslim children have far more anti-Semitic ideas than Christian children- in 2011 Mark Elchardus, a Belgian sociologist, published a report on Dutch-language elementary schools in Brussels. He found that about 50 percent of Muslim students in second and third grade could be considered anti-Semites, versus 10% of others. In the same year Unther Jikeli published his findings from the 117 interviews he conducted with Muslim male youngsters (average age 19) in Berlin, Paris and London. The majority of the interviewees voiced some, or strong anti-Semitic feelings. They expressed them openly and often aggressively.[47]
A large number of violent antisemitic attacks in Europe were done by Muslims- the murder of 4 Jews in Toulouse in 2012 by Mohammed Merah,[48] the 1982 attack on the Jewish Goldenberg restaurant in Paris that was carried out by Arab terrorists, the kidnapping and murder of the French citizen Ilan Halimi in 2006 by a Muslim gang and the antisemitic riots in Norway in 2009 are a few examples to this phenomenon.[47]
This is not really surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention.
Now, I know many of you have been in favor of helping Syrian refugees, on the grounds that suffering people fleeing from warzones ought to be helped. It’s a kind impulse, a humanitarian impulse. And it’s not in your own best interest.
If you want to help refugees, then help them get to safety in countries that are similar to their own, where they won’t face major linguistic and cultural barriers to starting new lives.
I know more about the American situation because I live here. Most American Jews, whether liberal or conservative, vote Democrat–even though it’s Republicans who are your staunchest allies. I mean look at this:
White Evangelicals are the Jews’ biggest fans, and they like Jews better than any other religious group (except themselves.) By contrast, Jews like Evangelicals less than everyone one–even less than Muslims.
Sure, Evangelicals can be kind of loud, they may support Israel because they think it’s somehow going to trigger the apocalypse, and they seem to think that Jews are just Christians who don’t yet believe in Jesus, but they don’t mean you any harm and they’re still trying to be supportive.
I figure this disconnect is largely due to Jews being heavily concentrated in NYC and LA, while Evangelicals are concentrated in the South. NYC and LA are Democratic strongholds where Evangelicals are disliked for their habit of voting Republican, so Jews have picked up this dislike.
But this is not sensible. Just because something earns you social approval in NYC does not mean it is in your own long-term self interest.
In Part 2 of his Saviours’ Day address at Mosque Maryam in Chicago, Farrakhan received a standing ovation after telling his audience that “the Satanic Jews that control everything and mostly everybody, if they are your enemy, then you must be somebody.”
Farrakhan says a lot of other, similar things. The “Nation of Islam” is not your friend.
Black Americans of all education levels are significantly more likely than whites of the same education level to be anti-Semitic. In the 1998 survey, blacks (34%) were nearly four times as likely as whites (9%) to have answers that identified them as being of the most anti-Semitic category (those agreeing with at least 6 of 11 statements that were potentially or clearly antisemitic). Among blacks with no college education, 43% responded as the most anti-Semitic group (vs. 18% for the general population). This percentage fell to 27% among blacks with some college education, and 18% among blacks with a four-year college degree (vs. 5% for the general population).[83]
Modern liberals see themselves as a coalition fighting for the rights of non-whites (“PoC”) against white oppression (structural racism.) While Jews are perfectly well aware that they have suffered from racism in white countries, PoC logic dictates that Jews are “white” and Palestinians are “brown,” and therefore Jews are white supremacist oppressors of non-whites.
Did you know that a majority of whites haven’t voted for the Democrats, in a presidential election, since 1964? American politics, viewed from the outside, is pretty darn racial: blacks and Hispanics vote overwhelmingly Democrat (For example, 90% of blacks voted for Gore; 62% of Hispanics and 55% of Asians voted for Gore. By contrast, 55% of whites voted for Bush II.)
To skip forward to the current election, (which, to be frank, is no longer interesting,) of the three major candidates, Sanders is explicitly Jewish; Trump has an Orthodox Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren; and Clinton’s daughter married a Jew, but does not appear to have converted and her grandchildren therefore aren’t Jewish under Jewish law.
Say what you will for the man, but I don’t think Trump hates his own grandchildren.
One of the weirder parts of this election has been people accusing the candidate with more Jewish family members of saying anti-Semitic things about the one with fewer Jewish family members–as though anti-Semitism were some kind of selling point with the Republican base! (No, that’s Hillary’s base.)
The media, in particular, has been actively pushing the whole “Trump is literally Hitler!” rhetoric for a long while.
Now, you might be saying, “Hey! We aren’t the entire media!”
Yes, I know. But you are visibly over-represented in the media, and many Jewish media folks have been vocally anti-Trump. Fair or not, being a small minority always means that people will be judging you.
To be explicit: You look like you are actively siding with non-whites (who hate you) against whites. With Muslims (who hate you) against the Evangelicals (who like you.) With internationalists (like Hillary) against nationalists who want to promote American interests.
And on top of that, you are super-successful, dominating Ivy League admissions and high-paying professions, way more than your % of the population, (while at the same time claiming that white over-representation in various areas is due to “white privilege.”) You writethings like this:
White people need to open ourselves up to a particular type of wounding to genuinely understand and then work toward racial justice. Our comfort and privilege generally keeps us from incurring these wounds naturally, and thus they must be sought out, disseminated, and used to motivate action.
From the outside, this looks really weird.
And this is why the far-right thinks you are doing it on purpose to destroy white America.
Let’s show a little common sense. Stop working against your own long-term interests. Step away from divisive politics. Being simultaneously high-profile and opposed to the interests of the biggest groups in the country is a good way to get the majority of people mad at you. Stop supporting people who don’t support you. Shame and ostracize Jews who make the rest of you look bad. Figure out who your friends are and be loyal to them.
Do science. Live well. Build civilization with me.
Oh, everyone, I know this goes without saying, but please be polite in the comments. Comments that impede discussion will be deleted.
evolutionistx 