It's just not true Britain fought for Poland. Britain fought for centuries against powers attempting to dominate Europe, because it could see that one power astride Europe would be bad for Britain. WW2 Germany, WW1 Germany, France three separate times in the 18th century, Spain in the 16th.
It's the same reason Britain and other countries in Europe are resisting Putin now. It's not just sympathy for Ukraine, it's recognition if he got an easy win there, the rest of Europe is next on the menu.
Right, one of the notably brain-dead aspects of this particular right-wing critique is the idea that any war which resulted in an unfree Poland represented, ipso facto, a failure of British policy. As though British inter-war policy was actually committed to Polish independence, as opposed to restraining German power and aggression. This goes hand in hand with the credulity these reactionaries need to extend to Adolf Hitler, of all people, when it comes to his supposed willingness to allow the British to keep their empire in peace if only they'd come to the negotiating table in 1940. Because if there's one conclusion you can draw from Nazi foreign policy, it's that they always lived up to their promises of peaceful coexistence...
Soviet domination of Poland was a failure of a British (and oddly Japanese) foreign policy, it was preferable to Nazi domination but it was an outcome that the British spent resources in 1920 and 1944 trying to stop.
And it isn't as if Britain didn't try to fight for a Free Poland. Churchill was very keen on Mediterranean campaigns into Italy, Greece, and the Balkans so that Western Allies could beat the Soviets to Poland and Yugoslavia.
There were also efforts at Yalta to ensure free and fair elections in Poland post war which the Soviets reneged on in addition to their failure to support the Warsaw uprising and the decimation of the Polish government in Exile when they returned home.
>Britain fought for centuries against powers attempting to dominate Europe, because it could see that one power astride Europe would be bad for Britain<
Yes. It's also why the US decisively entered two world wars and plunged into a Cold War.
It’s the same as the observation that the Brits joined NATO to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." Or this this observation from the 80s about British participation in the EEC:
Buchanan does have a shadow of a point, in that the end outcome *might* have been better if Britain and France had drawn their hard line someplace other than Poland, since in that case Hitler might have just charged through Poland into Russia and fought the Soviets while Britain and France could have stayed out until both Hitler and Stalin were considerably weaker. But that would have required them to know some stuff that *we know now* but they were not in a position to know before the fact.
No one knew ex ante that the German tanks were way better than the French tanks and would beat the French army soundly. No one knew for a fact (other than Hitler himself) that Hitler was going to break his pact with Stalin and invade Russia regardless of what the western powers did. And no one knew that Hitler's empire would operate at a financial loss, making him weaker over time rather than stronger.
From the standpoint of 1939, it was not at all unreasonable to predict that if Hitler took Poland, its resources would strengthen him, he'd maintain an alliance with Stalin securing his eastern border, and then go after France as a more formidable enemy. So drawing the line at Poland made sense ex ante.
So Buchanan is still wrong, but it's worth unpacking exactly why he's wrong.
This is propaganda to be sure. It's infuriating to hear the Biden/Obama/MSNBC liberals joking about Putin's inability to take over relatively small parts of Ukraine with his "paper tiger" military (which appears to have some truth to it) and then parrot the debunked "Domino Theory" of the Cold War and Vietnam. How could Putin take over Europe when he can't even hold small land masses in Ukraine? Putin is not being resisted, he is being weakened by the west and NATO as this has been their wet dream ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Last I checked Putin isn't responsible for our health care crisis, genocide in Gaza, bombing of Yemen, epidemic of homelessness, crisis of affordable housing, record wealth inequality, privatization of public education and so on. The foreign country that controls our government is Israel. They have been directly responsible for the bipartisan suppression of free speech, fascist arrests and beatings of student pro-Palestinian protestors, and our warmongering and bombing across the entire Middle East. This energy should be directed towards the warmongers heading our government and AIPAC. As for bigotry, it's not just the right that has reinforced Islamaphobia and the criminalization of immigrants. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/ukraine-for-dummies-take-the-quiz
It's always nice to see a comment from an infrequent poster to remind us of the incredibly high quality of the vast, vast majority of commenters here at SB.
Thanks for giving us a peek at what the rest of the Internet is like, Barry.
The first part of this comment re: Ukraine doesn't really make sense. You are looking at a world where a thing X has happened, and then using it to argue that because of the state of that world, there is no reason to think thing X needed to happen. The reason Putin can't conquer Ukraine is because of Western support. I am sure the Ukrainians would put up as good a fight as they could if they had to do it alone, but the reality is their entire war machine is dependent on Western supplies and money.
Assume the actual counterfactual, where the West doesn't do anything to help Ukraine. Whether it takes three months or three years, Putin would inevitably conquer Ukraine. In that time, he would have built out his military capabilities, not lost them -- military capabilities are not stocks that are stored up in peace and then depleted in war, they are flows that are intensified in war, such that a victorious nation at the end of a war, if it has not been devastated at home, typically has more military capacity than it did at the beginning, a la the USA in WW2. The main stock in question is available manpower, of which Russia still has plenty. Having conquered Ukraine, it would make little sense for Putin to stand this war machine down if he could use it to eat more of Europe. Again, assume the West is unwilling to defend the Baltics (a reasonable assumption, given in this world they abandoned Ukraine), Putin would roll them up trivially with a military that just conquered a far more powerful ally. At that point, if Poland stands alone, he might decide to go for it, too. And suddenly there are Russians on the border of the West proper. The domino effect is real, what you are observing is that the West has been more competent at preventing it than you are willing to give it credit for, because you dislike liberal internationalism.
As far as Israel goes, I think you just entirely misunderstand the nature of Israel's role in American politics. It's not some secret shadowy cabal of Israelis manipulating the natsec community -- the natsec community is far more Israel-skeptical than the actual public. The reason pro-Israel foreign policy is dominant in the U.S. is because it is a political imperative handed to the leadership by its voters. In my view, this is a deeply stupid thing on the part of American voters, but it is far from the only stupid opinion said voters hold.
Really strong article Matt, thanks for writing and publishing it.
For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction, and now we're seeing it as some people become emboldened amid Trump's reelection to say what they've really meant, with hope for less backlash. This could get scary without reminders like this.
And related to reminders, one reason why I find generational history so fascinating is that it really helps to explain why humanity keeps repeating mistakes. As the old generation dies out, so too do the direct experiences they have from seeing mistakes happen. With regard to World War II, there are increasingly scant people left who can recall one of the deadliest times in human history, and how it came to be. So again, thanks for a check on that.
The generational history point is a good one, but it's still shocking that this is happening considering that American victory WWII and the Nazis as default villains are both such key mainstays of American culture.
An unfortunate byproduct of mainstream elites embracing Kendi’s villainization of people who disagree with him is that it created a permission structure to be the villain. Add in heavy doses of negative polarization, and you end up with people thinking it’s a high compliment to be the villain in progressive politics.
Related to this is that it was a winning strategy for a long time for the GOP to denounce Democrat policy proposals with "Socialism!".
Until they applied it to a broadly popular policy (PPACA) which had the effect of moving identifying as a socialist into an Overton window of sorts: a lot of people began thinking "maybe I'm a socialist" and some owned that.
Likewise, racism accusation was incredibly successful for a long time, until things that were pretty common among those who would normally recoil at the accusation were being used as the basis for this. People start thinking "maybe I am actually racist" and decide to own that.
For younger millenials I think it is 4chan, 8kun and Groyper subcultures that crawled out of the computers, formed an alliance with a flamboyantly degenerate Boomer in 2016, and won unexpected political power, which gave them the chance to meme their way across the cultural landscape. And they clearly twisted Gen Z Republicans in turn. This would have never happened in the nineties. The internet corrupts.
Post-2016 politics really is the story of The Rise of the Edgelords. The elder right-wingers embraced immature internet iconoclasm just as irresponsibly as the elder-left did Tumblr-era social justice vibes. Both camps have ceded too much ground to the youngest and most intemperate of them. It's an Arendt-ian Crisis of Authority and the result has been terrible for everyone involved.
Ugh... They are all edge but no point lol. Honestly, talking to some of them online makes me feel like I'm back on the Ebaumsworld forums or something.
Meanwhile Inglorious Bastards is here saying "Am I joke to you?"
LOL, just kidding obviously. But I totally agree, between Indiana Jones, The Blues Brothers, Marvel Comics (Capt America), Hellboy, Schindlers List, The Sound of Music, and other general media, I don't get the whole lets try to sane wash Nazi movement going on right now. Especially when it comes from people who should have a cursory knowledge of US history and know that Nazi's were sinking US merchant ships before we entered WW2, and after Pearl Harbor they declared war on the US a few days later. Like that is all basic US History stuff from high school. Either these people are ignorant and confidently incorrect, or they view everything as a counter culture and are knowingly engaging in bad faith simply because they hate all liberals. Frankly, I'm not even sure which is worse anymore.
Also an elder millennial, same here. WWII was very much in the popular consciousness when I was growing up, and any sympathy for the Nazis was unthinkable.
I've made this point before but there's a very big difference between "my grandparents told me these stories while I sat at their feet" for millennials and "the nerdy kids in my class liked this part in that one unit of 11th grade history" for Gen Z. That first degree connection and sense of pride in the achievement is a big deal and it's naturally dying out, and of course is always in tension with other generational memory anyway.
It did not survive the people who actually did it. Fascism became en vogue pretty much the second the proportion of the population made up of WW2 vets fell under 1%.
Because if they tried that shit when those guys were still young(ish), vital, and in charge of public spaces and private businesses, they would get Buzz Aldrin'ed.
Unfortunately this was predictable, it happened with Trump 43 too. I remember a lot of hateful groups felt emboldened to be more publicly racist. Aziz Ansari had a good SNL monologue on it:
"The problem is, there’s a new group. I’m talking about this tiny slice of people that have gotten way too fired up about the Trump thing for the wrong reasons. I’m talking about these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like, “We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore! We don’t have to pretend anymore! We can be racist again! Whoo!”
[MR. ANSARI PUMPS HIS FIST, THEN LOWERS IT INTO A NAZI SALUTE]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! No, no! If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. You’ve got to go back to pretending. I’m so sorry we never thanked you for your service. We never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending. But you gotta go back to pretending."
As I told you when we met, I think one reason I’m so appalled by Trump is that I’m old enough to have memories of Poland as a USSR client state, and Solidarity fighting for freedom. And while im far too young to remember WWII, there is very strong cultural memory in Poland in a way that there isn’t in the US. The war was fought on Polish soil. I have been to the museum at Auschwitz.
There's a somewhat goofy kinda true meme that floats around the right in particular that Strong Men make Good Times-> Good Times make Weak men -> Weak men make Hard times-> and Hard times make strong men. I guess the defense of it would just be that crisis creates high variance in both directions. Sometimes you get Buchanan/Chamberlain sometimes you get Lincoln/Churchill. But I think the more high brow version of this meme is when the seemingly elemental lessons of the past get just far enough away in the rear view mirror of history mistakes can repeat themselves.
It's derived from the last words of Herodotus' Histories:
"[A Persian advisor says to Cyrus,] “Seeing that Zeus grants lordship to the Persian people, and to you, Cyrus, among them, let us, after reducing Astyages, depart from the little and rugged land which we possess and occupy one that is better. There are many such lands on our borders, and many further distant. If we take one of these, we will all have more reasons for renown. It is only reasonable that a ruling people should act in this way, for when will we have a better opportunity than now, when we are lords of so many men and of all Asia?”
Cyrus heard them, and found nothing to marvel at in their design; “Go ahead and do this,” he said; “but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.”
The Persians now realized that Cyrus reasoned better than they, and they departed, choosing rather to be rulers on a barren mountain side than dwelling in tilled valleys to be slaves to others."
It's one of those things that sounds true until you actually try to map it to actual history. Sometimes it rings true, other times it doesn't. Plenty of "strong men" left their hard times completely broken and unable to reconstruct any kind of "good times". Sometimes what doesn't kill you doesn't make you strong, it just maims, disables, and ruins you psychologically.
Interesting, never encountered this before. It also pretty neatly tracks with the Stephen Skowronek Presidential Time cycles which I tend to be in favor of as an explanatory device. Here's hoping for the glorious 2030's on both fronts?
A bitter, dark irony: when I was in college, the consensus opinion was that, once the greatest generation died off (always with air quotes), we would finally prevail over racism.
One of my longstanding generational pet peeves is that Boomers have somehow handwaved that they were responsible for civil rights..... despite obviously being much too young. Lots of important civil rights battles happened in the 50s and early 60s! You guys probably weren't even in high school then! But they've cast this vague idea onto the generations younger than them, so the impression persists. I've come to the conclusion that they believe it themselves, despite the dates not lining up
And even the great women's rights movements of the 70s are still dominated by Silents--the oldest Boomers were only 32 at the middle of the decade, and the youngest only 15.
I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"
Well said. It’s something I find frustrating about all the “what should Democrats do?” takes - none of them seem to account for the counter-message. And in some cases they do not even account for the fact that in much of the country our messages aren’t even heard before being drowned out by the counters!
It’s like when a hypothetical policy (say, single payer healthcare) is popular with voters across the aisle - that doesn’t mean “if you pursue single payer healthcare Republican voters will be jazzed about it,” it means “Republicans will redouble their efforts to prevent single payer healthcare, if it ever becomes a substantive issue, and their voters will start to hate the idea.”
There just seems to be a lack of emotional acknowledgement that we are in a competition. That we don’t get to decide what happens on our own. That you can get outplayed! It requires keeping perspective, and maybe not thinking that “you lost” means “you did everything wrong.” You don’t go and tear down your entire lineup because Corbin Burnes shut you out, you say “damn, Burnes was really dealing today.” Sure, maybe there are issues with your lineup - but when you are evaluating what the outcome of a particular game is telling you, maybe account for the guy throwing 98 with crazy spin rather than deciding that your all-star hitters actually suck? You need more context to evaluate your own actual deficiencies.
In this case the political equivalent of Corbin’s nasty stuff is the Donald’s 50 years of successful self-mythologizing, his infinite financial backing from the oligarchy, and his unquestioned dominance over half the media landscape.
None of this should be read as fatalistic, and I understand that what appears, to us, to be the fundamental illegitimacy of our opposition makes it seem less acceptable. But we just ARE going to lose sometimes, and part of how we win is to make sure that when we do lose, it doesn’t scrap the whole project - unfortunately, that may be where we are right now.
"But we just ARE going to lose sometimes, and part of how we win is to make sure that when we do lose, it doesn’t scrap the whole project"
This is the exact problem with the instrumentalizing of Critical Theory/post-modern thinking in social justice rhetoric. Much of CT argued on the basis that much of our world is socially-constructed, had no empirical basis in fact, and was thus infinitely arguable and could not be taken for-granted. They did this because 1) it's kind of a truism, 2) it was necessary in order to undermine the existing order that sold itself as self-evident and unassailable.
The problem is that this is a nihilistic and self-defeating line of attack. If everything is socially-constructed, and power is the only concern, then there is no basis on which to build a political project. It's just "turtles all the way down". Trump, Bannon, and the "post-modern right" just decided to basically adopt the same rhetoric (often in bad faith) and use it against the left. They could do this because it is ultimately a cynical and paranoid view of society, and the moment was ripe for it. It was a rhetorical judo flip. And it happened because too many activists never stopped to consider "could this argument be easily turned against me?".
This is right on point. Well said. I am only 71 but all my life debating the pure evil of Hitler would be considered crazy. As it is and as Buchanan was when he started spouting that crap.
I think this gets causation backwards. The Great Awokening was in response to Trump. The softening position towards Naziism was already underway, and those forces became emboldened under him.
As David French observed, Trump makes everyone worse. Not just his allies, but his opponents as well.
Something I like to do when understanding contemporary viewpoints of World War II is look at the Gallup polling of the U.S. public (available on their website) and see what the people who were living through these events believed at time. At the outbreak of war in 1939 the U.S. public was against directly involving itself in the fighting, but notably a large majority believed that England and France should reject any offer for peace by Hitler in exchange for some or all of Poland.
In January 1940, 68% of Americans believed that the future safety of the U.S. depended on England winning the war, and in June 1940 (as the Blitzkrieg was steamrolling through France) 65% believed that "if Germany should defeat England and France in the present war, Germany would start a war against the United States sooner or later." By January 1941, even though the majority of Americans continued to oppose direct involvement, 79% felt that England should keep on fighting Germany rather than make peace, and by April fully 82% of Americans expected that the U.S. would eventually join the war in Europe.
The point one can draw from this, I think, is that even in the isolationist United States there was a clear sense that Germany was an aggressive and expansionist power with which peaceful co-existence was unlikely.
I've gotten a bit back into online video games and the level of slurs and vitriol was genuinely surprising. I think I had believed that even mean people online had sort of toned down that specific version of rudeness.
When I was younger, it was common to use"gay" as an insult, but eventually that stopped as norms shifted, but it seems like this type of open and sort of permorative bigotry is now kind of popular with some younger people.
In general, while I think it is common to invoke politeness as a reasoning for certain actions, it has, in the past decade or so, seemed more opportunistic than sincere. Meanness and rudeness towards acceptable targets(and everyone has their own acceptable targets) seem to be considered okay and even good.
The consensus that being polite is good seems to have been eroding for years and it doesn't seem poised to make a comeback.
And the more I hear about this Hitler guy, the less I like him.
I think it's really the internet. I think there are a lot of Matt-aged dudes like me around here whose baptism with the internet was flame wars about Windows vs. Mac or N64 vs. Playstation, unresolvable conflicts that turned incredibly nasty. It turns out it had a lot more to do with the mode of communication than we thought, rather than just being the product of male adolescence (which utterly dominated the internet pre-broadband.)
I used to BBS. I did appreciate that mods were good at kicking people out when they crossed a line. That was most of the fun of being SysOp. Also telling that a feature for user discipline was added so early on.
I also spend a lot of time on that internet, but it did feel like we had been trending towards improvement for a while before entering this new decline.
You know what Miles, you and I never did settle our dispute over N64 vs Playstation. It's been 30 years but we are going to settle this one way or another lol, just kidding. :).
Part of the reason I think discourse also seemed better back then on the internet is that there was a higher barrier of entry to using forums, or the internet and chat rooms in general than there is today. Nowadays everyone has a phone that comes preloaded with all the apps they need to be an asshole, back in the day you had to have a computer, and then you had to have internet service and then know how to access how to chat with others. It was just way harder to communicate, nowadays there is a lower barrier of entry and there are so many people who have an overwhelming need to be heard, validated, etc.
Not to sound like a 1990s Republican, but character counts, and leadership matters. Donald Trump acts and talks like a poorly adjusted high-school age boy and never faces any consequences. That kind of thing trickles down into the culture.
Matt and I both came of age in the 1990s, which of course was renowned for edginess, but it very much felt like a different type where it was punching up against a stodgy old type of bigotry. They sometimes crossed wires with what was then called PC attitudes. It seemed to reach its natural conclusion in the aughts when most of that stodginess died out, and then in the middle of the 2010s came the Great Awokening and its backlash, which again feels much different.
I sort of understand the backlash idea in a political sense, but the societal turn against politeness in a sort of ideological but non-political way is what confuses me.
Politeness, like almost anything, can sometimes go too far. Sometimes people need tough love. Nonetheless, "don't be an asshole" is a pretty regular virtue to aim for.
"which of course was renowned for edginess, but it very much felt like a different type where it was punching up against a stodgy old type of bigotry."
I think that many young people today would describe their behavior the exact same as this - just a different stodgy old type of bigotry. I also came of age in the 90s and while the rebels have changed means and targets against who they are rebelling against, the *attitude* feels remarkably similar.
I think there's a workplace version of this that's tied to the revenge of the bosses. One outgrowth of MeToo was a more general "no asshole bosses" idea - ie prohibitions against yelling at subordinates, unreasonable demands, etc (like the Klobuchar stuff). The backlash to this has been part of the tech turn to the right.
It is outlier driven, and a survivor bias thing. Most senior execs either don't want to be assholes (in the general veneer of politeness sense, they may still be Machiavellian) or would be fired if they did something that crossed the HR line. But some high-performing leaders of massive growth tech companies have both led their companies to great success and been assholes. Is that causative or just happenstance? I might differ per person. And I suspect that more assholes just don't succeed. But those that remain look like lightning to be bottled, rather than non-repeatable one-offs.
Definitely, though there also was an outgrowth of "anything that invades my ability to shirk work is assholish," which was especially problematic in work from home situations. Probably more of a "this is why we can't have nice things" observation than anything else.
I agree and it's why I don't love your formulation above about bending over backwards to be extra polite to historically disadvantaged groups. On it's own it's fine, but in an increasingly rude online addled society the one way directional politeness doesn't seem sustainable. Way too many people think "punching up" is doing justice.
I understand this complaint; we see a similar thing with privilege discussions,, reducing sympathy for some groups, but it seems less like being "extra polite" to some group is the issue than just the shift to the idea that we don't need to be polite unless there is an underlying reason to do so.
I think this crops up when people talk about just treating everyone as a human, where the question becomes, how do you think you should treat fellow humans?
I remember an old episode of "House" where they talk about House not being a misogynist, he is a misanthrope, with the implication being that misantropy is preferable but House being a jerk to everyone does kind of suck even if its not bigotry related.
Omg I know!! I tried out the multiplayer function of Civ VI and it was a nightmare in there. Like 25% of people's screen names had the words dong, dick, or cock. Everyone assumed I was a man so I added the word "lady" to my screen name. Then once I joined a game with that screen name and some guy asked me to leave and sent a barrage of messages along the lines of "why did you pick a girl name? Are you a fag? Leave fag. Pussy fag." And then a lot of racial slurs that don't even apply to me.
Who ARE the guys in there that talk like that? How old are they? Are they okay?
I don't know who they are but they are not Okay, especially if they are adults. But probably some of them are 13 year old boys and that's an age when some fraction of "mostly normal" boys will genuinely enjoy that kind of stupid crap.
I can't even play any multiplayer game on console anymore without muting the lobby. Like I'm married and have a kid, if my wife heard me saying some of the things these adults say to each other while I was playing video games she'd probably think I had a stroke or needed to be medicated.
I don't know how people who live with others and should be playing video games as a hobby to relax, genuinely seem to get off on pissing people off they don't know online. It's quite a sad state of affairs.
The screen name thing is super weird. I've been surprised at how many are sort of weirdly horny/fetishy recently. Sort of a separate issue, but it makes it feel less comfortable to play a game.
I assumed it was just kids but some of the voice chat people saying this stuff seem to be at least late teens or 20s so its adult men just being really anti-social.
I haven't had the experience as a woman, which sounds like its own type of hell but I have gotten slurs that don't really apply to me which makes it feel like its a slurs for the sake of slurs kind of rudeness/edginess/whatever that really makes things terrible.
There was a brief reprieve when social media and other companies were worried about the toxic environments they had enabled and started more aggressively monitoring communities. Now they've pretty much given up and it's showing almost immediately.
I don't know about games, but social media has pretty much reverted back to the wild days of its birth, and might be even worse now.
One game I played recently notifies you that it records voice chat to help create a safe environment but hasn't banned any of the dozens of people I have reported for using 6 letter slurs with "gg" in the middle.
My son is in middle school and I was unpleasantly surprised to learn from him that “that’s so gay”, “you’re so gay”, “don’t be gay”, “is that your boyfriend?” etc. are fully back in vogue as middle school boy insults
All these WWII revision histories fail to account for the fact the Hitler was going to invade the Soviet Union no matter what the UK and France did. Somehow modern Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers have written Slav-hatred out of Nazi political philosophy.
Something else that they miss was just how utterly shocking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact was when it was revealed. It made no sense whatsoever given what was known at the time, and as you say, what would become known. It provided all the more reason to stop Hitler's advances with Poland, even if it was not known at the time that the Pact had Stalin doing the same.
Yes, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact showed the cynicism and mendacity of both Hitler and Stalin. Both of them justified their rule by pointing to the dangers of fascism/communism but were quick to cut a deal when it suited them to carve up Poland.
The logic for Molotov-Ribbentrop is the same as that of the other Soviet NAP - the one with Japan.
Stalin's expectation was that there would be a recurrence of WW1 style trench warfare that would weaken all of the 'capitalist powers', which in turn would allow the Red Army to grow in strength and sweep up Europe once the time was right.
This was exactly what happened in East Asia - Stalin was able to goad the Japanese into getting sucked into a quagmire in China, which weakened not just them but also the KMT. This in turn hugely empowered the CCP and set in motion the Cold War in Asia.
This doesn't happen in Europe as the Nazis beat the Allies too quickly, and Stalin doesn't change his plans in time to anticipate Barbarossa in 1941
Germany also fully intended to go to war with the UK and France by 1941, and had based their military production and development schedule upon that expectation. The idea that the UK and France could have just safely chilled while Germany and Russia fought each other was not in the cards.
Yeah, the UK and France didn't mess up by declaring war on Germany over Poland, they did it by not taking an earlier opportunity to strangle Hitler's expansionism when it would've been easier.
I low key disagree in that Hitler's dream was to expand east, not west.
Had France and Britain really wanted to stay out of it, and completely ceded all of Eastern and Central Europe to the German sphere, Hitler would have happily let them be and invaded the Soviet Union.
While I agree that German plans for western Europe did not resemble the genocidal conquest envisioned for the East, Hitler certainly desired the economic and political subjugation of western Europe in a manner that would have first required the defeat of France.
The alligator would have turned back to the West after he’d finished digesting the East, though; that’s the underlying strategy of Britain since at least the Napoleonic Wars, to keep one power from capturing all the victory points on the continent.
His goal for France was to put it in a subservient position relative to Germany, which maybe doesn't fully require war, but certainly makes war extremely likely.
It is awkward because Nazi racial classifications don't really make sense to anyone today, because they were nonsensical. That the Nazis viewed Chinese and Japanese as their equals but the neighbouring similar looking Poles as completely alien, seems strange in a way that even neo-Nazis can't defend.
Ibram Kendi in his book Antiracism talked about how he used to believe in five races, Black, White, Red, Brown, and Yellow, not so far from the Nazi worldview. He says he no longer believes it, but the logical conclusion of the policies he favors is consistent with him still believing it, and leaves unanswered the question of how to classify and what to do with people who aren't perfect specimens of one of the archtypical five.
Didn't he also believe the Whites were transported by alien spacecraft? There is a point where it stops being bad ideology and bad science and just becomes being nuts.
Black nationalism has picked up a lot of truly insane stuff of which “black people built the pyramids” is only a taste, and white people generally won’t be exposed to because those groups are legitimately self segregationist and won’t talk to white people. I think most people know who the Black Hebrew Israelites are, and that’s one example, but it gets even more extreme.
Frankly, just given how few black people there are in this country, I’m surprised those groups can exist over the decades. But they do!
I get lots of really odd misogynistic Black nationalist propaganda about how the Mayans and Chinese cultures are descended from African culture promoted in my Facebook feed. I am a White guy in London so I have no idea why.
The Black Hebrew Israelites come from the Nadir of Race Relations, like some other faith groups like the Nation of Islam and Moorish Science where people were trying to create a unique religious experience for African-Americans. They failed- most African-Americans joined southern baptist churches, and even among the non-Christian faithful, actual Islam generally reigns over the other faith traditions.
That being said, the zany shit Moorish Science people or NoI or Black Hebrew Israelites say and do plays very well on the internet.
I grew up in Europe, and while Nazi racial classifications don't make sense to me either, hating the neighbor you have fought for centuries more than someone many thousands of miles away absolutely makes sense.
Americans put Germans and Slavs (or Germans and Greeks) in the same group, and that makes absolutely no sense to me (a non-American) given all the history and cultural grievances of the continent.
(I haven't found any racial classification system that makes sense yet.)
It's a result of the history of mass immigration. Classifying Europeans differently based on nationality and ethno-linguistic groups was common in the United States into the first third or so of the 20th century. However after a couple of generations and the ill fit of these variations into America's older white/black/red divide results in any distinction being reduced to appearance and cultural signifiers.
A lot of people the KKK and people like HP Lovecraft would have looked down upon are now 'white enough' for today's sympathizers with racialist ideology. Ironically many of them probably share significant ancestry comprised of just those people. The silliness of this view of things, from the right or the left, is pretty easy to break down with even a cursory understanding of relatively recent history.
This is my regular reminder that the KKK hates Catholics too. So all these right-wing thinkers who have converted to Catholicism (e.g., Vance, Douthat) may be surprised at where they are classified.
It's weird how quickly the US got past the whole Catholic/Protestant thing.
My father told me that when he was growing up (early 1960s, Chicago suburbs) this was a huge deal. All the Catholic children went to Catholic schools, and it was common knowledge among public school children (Protestant, Jewish, and some other random ones) that the catholic schools all had armories in them because the Catholics were getting ready for some religious war in the US.
We've only ever had two Catholic presidents: JFK and Biden. JFK was a huge deal and there was substantial concern among right-wing Protestants that he would take direct orders from the Pope. Biden had a different problem where many right-wing Catholics said he wasn't a "real Catholic" because of his political positions. Interestingly, right-wing Catholics tend to be fine with the death penalty views of Republicans even though they are expressly against church doctrine.
I don't really see how that is an attack on Vance, a group he has never had anything to do with, that stopped being relevant long before he was born, that would oppose his marriage also hates his religion.
The paradigms of the past don't really make sense to modern ears, in 1928 the KKK campaigned for a non-White GOP vice presidential candidate because the Democratic candidate was an English ancestry catholic they also recruited men and bought for a campaign for secular socialism in Mexico.
The right-wing movement in the US is traditionally associated with evangelical Protestant Christianity. To the extent Vance and Douthat want to harness that energy, they should be careful to make sure they don't fall afoul of the religious issues here. Catholicism has always been a minority religion in the US. If they want to get very religious, then they will come into conflict with Protestant movements. If they want to combat secularism and institute soft Francoism, then they are struggling against the increasing secularism of the US. Either way, they should be careful.
Does the modern KKK hate Catholics? They might, still, but even if so that might make them unusual among the many other hate-groups that are at least as influential as they are.
Like, I get that [random Balkan subgroup A’s] hatred of [random Balkan subgroup B] is a lot more *salient* and *motivating* than whatever they might feel about Laotians or Navajos.
But surely they will grudgingly accept that at a basic phenotypical level, an Evil B Person still physically resembles them more than someone far away? (As, indeed, genetic clustering and other analyses will confirm).
More generally, there’s an annoying equivocation between saying that racial and ethnic categories have fuzzy boundaries, that edge cases exist, that “lumping” and “splitting” approaches yield different results - all of which are true - to saying that they have no basis in reality whatsoever and a Greek is no closer to a German than to a Zimbabwean - which is false.
It gets more weird than this, as the US has tried to fit old racial classifications to today. "White" includes Irish and Egyptian people, for example. "Black" includes Somali and Jamaican. "American Indian or Alaska Native" is of course a huge category.
Hating your neighbours makes sense, the Nazi classification system was based on hating 1/3 of your neighbours, seeing another 1/3 as equals and the other 1/3 as bad but not that bad, while having very strong views on people thousands of miles away.
On racial classifications you can use modern cluster PCA charts if you need to identify groups for organ donations comparability etc
"the Nazis viewed Chinese and Japanese as their equals"
Eh, no, not really. That was a backtrack by Hitler to help facilitate the German relationship with the GMD in China and then later the Japanese. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler explicitly described the Japanese as a "culture bearing," but *not* "culture creating" race -- meaning they were capable of preserving "culture" that was bestowed upon them, but not generating major advancements in science, technology, art, etc. (The hierarchy in Hitler's telling from highest to lowest being "culture creating," "culture bearing," and "culture destroying.")
The Nazi foreign ministry had to finesse that later on, which is how you get references to "little brown supermen" and such, but I think it's very safe to say that Nazi ideologists like Rosenberg and Goebbels did not actually consider any East Asian populations to be the equals of those ethnicities they classified as "Aryan" (which included high caste Indians and a number of other ethnic groups that many 21st Century Americans would say weren't "white").
Putin lost two brothers in the Siege of Leningrad.
I don't really feel Nazis and modern neo-Nazis share that much apart from conspiratorial anti-semitism. An American far right teen posting memes isn't likely to be upset about WW1 or be an ardent German irrendist in Alsace or Poland and they have completely different definitions of race.
One brother was born 12 years before him and died aged 2 in the siege, I am not sure exactly when his eldest brother died but it was in childhood. They were full brothers.
"Somehow modern Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers have written Slav-hatred out of Nazi political philosophy."
Some years ago I decided to explore the stormfront forum, and this really struck me. There were a lot of people proudly sharing their Slavic heritage! I spent a while digging and eventually found a thread where someone asked how other users reconciled their acceptance of Slavs, their support for Hitler, and Hitler's thoughts about Slavs. Responses initially tried to hand wave the problem away, but the original poster really pushed back --- providing a lot of direct quotes from Hitler and refusing to have the contradiction ignored. After a lot of argument, the final response seemed to be roughly that, yes, Hitler was anti-Slav --- at least initially. However, he soften his anti-Slav stance over time (I'm not convinced this was true, but people did argue this, and perhaps there's some truth to it?), and Hitler had indeed gotten it wrong.
It seems that Nazis have really expanded the tent to include all white people. As crazy as it sounds, they may even be opening the door to Jews slightly. To quote Dylann Roof in his manifesto: "I am of the opinion that the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the jewish identity, then they wouldnt cause much of a problem." This absolutely isn't a common opinion among white supremacists (Roof notes as much), but it's also not unheard of, which I think is kind of nuts.
No, they don’t. They range from viewing the Nazis as better than the Soviets (a la Patton’s “we may have been fighting the wrong side all along”) to viewing that fight as not England’s business and certainly not worth wiping out ~500K British people, along with much of the national wealth and the Empire over. A “let the two evil superpowers fight” sort of view.
It's this quote by Harry Truman, minus the last clause:
"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
To the extent that there is any single iota of sanity in this crap, it’s that the Nazis’ feet of clay were wildly heavier than the Soviets’, so it’s vaguely possible to envision a world in which the Germans win out on the Continent only to implode by the end of the 1960’s, leaving the world to the United States and co to remake in her favored image.
It doesn’t seem to enter into the revisionists’ thinking that the much more insane Germans might have taken everyone with them in the collapse, nor that the US would have had little more luck in the 1960’s of this world than it did in the 1990’s in our world at the whole “remaking” thing.
I grant your premise, but it only strengthens the argument that Britain really screwed up. Britain’s long term foreign policy is the European balance of power. Allowing Russia and Germany savage each other and subsidizing whoever was losing would have been a fine strategy.
Except Britain's only interest wasn't balancing power. It's hard get your head into it from today's vantage point, but a lot of people in Britain genuinely saw themselves and their Empire as a force for good in the world, bringing light to dark places. Rudyard Kipling is cringe today, but wasn't always, nor William Wilburforce, compared to their contemporaries rather than compared to today. Many British were genuinely appalled by King Leopold's actions in the Congo , for example. Of course, reality is messy, and motivations often a mix of altruism, averice, and ambition. But that doesn't mean good motives don't exist and actually affect behavior.
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about (on this and many other issues). Even a fairly simple reading of the situation would inform you that by around 1920 independence was inevitable, and the only question was when and how (eg a violent uprising such as Algeria or a peaceful resolution as what happened). Indian nationalism (setting aside the ML, which had similar demands though smaller) had developed and take root to the point where the populace wasn’t willing to countenance a lack of self-rule (literally swarajya), so the only way for the Raj to remain in the empire was to give it equal representation - which would turn it into “India plus some random islands in northwest Europe” which the British wouldn’t countenance.
But the Raj hung on throughout the inter war period. It gradually assimilated Indians into the civil service. Indians composed half to the civil service by world war two.
Eventually, there might have been an Indian viceroy.
I admit that Britain had a very real sense of national honor, which compelled to to go to war over the political status of Danzig. However, taking principled and violent stands based upon honor when one lacks the means to accomplish one’s goals is generally called suicide.
Well, we won in the end didn't we? Ok that involved a bet on the USA joining the war. But it was a bet that proved correct!
And I'm not sure that I really buy the idea that WWII *caused* the downfall of the British empire. It might have accelerated it, but most of the trends that caused it were happening before WWII.
The Indian National Congress was becoming a powerful force in the subcontinent. With the jewel gone, the justification for some other colonies starts to look weaker. And India was far from the only country where native elites (often educated in the European metropole) were creating popular nationalist movements.
Similarly at home, mass democracy and the rise of Labour meant that governments were more likely to see social welfare at home as a more important use of funds rather than defending colonies.
America would still eventually be economically and militarily dominant and unlikely to simply accept Britain's empire and impediments to its own economic interests.
Overall, WWII benefited Britain - I don't think the benign, peaceful and pro-free trade climate that proliferated post-WWII is likely after a Nazi-Soviet scorched-earth war.
the worst nazi apologists were the french right in 1939-40, but they couldn’t be wished away. watch la regle de jeux and you’ll see this lampooned even before the war began
I'd take exactly the opposite perspective. Where Britain really messed up is submitting meekly over Czechoslovakia the previous year and not being willing to go to war with the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and France fully on board and Mussolini distancing himself from Hitler. It's only after Munich that collective security fell apart and Stalin started looking for new arrangements. Nazi Germany would have been surrounded. It would have been a much shorter and easier war, with no Holocaust, and tens of millions of Europeans would have lived.
How would Britain refusing to go to war with Nazi Germany, or striking a peace deal with the Nazis after the fall of France, have made it more likely that Russia and Germany would fight? If anything, Britain's decision to continue the war with the Nazis hastened the Nazi-Soviet war, since Hitler's big, dumb strategic idea in 1941 was that the British were clinging to the hope of American and/or Soviet entry into the war, and if the Germans could knock out the Soviets quickly, the British would finally be forced to the table.
When Napoleon defeated one opponent, he moved on to the next. Ditto Alexander. That’s was conquerors do. Also, Stalin had his own ambitions in eastern Europe which made a German Russian war inevitable.
To clarify my comment here: if 'what conquerors do' is 'move on to the next opponent' then I think we can be skeptical that Britain could have sat on the sidelines smugly enjoying the destruction of Europe without fear, regardless of the morality.
hitler was less of an existential threat to britain than napoleon because his navy was way too small. villeneuve brought more ships and many more guns to trafalger than nelson.
Germany had plenty of ship-building capacity and a powerful airforce. If they'd been left in control of Europe for any length of time, Blohm and Voss would have been churning out Bismarck-class battleships and bigger, and there'd be Focke-Wulf and Messerschmitt fighters and Junkers and Dornier bombers crawling all over the Channel.
And the British were well aware of the threat of German naval shipbuilding capacity. They'd only just barely built enough battleships to outbuild a Germany that didn't control Austria or Czechoslovakia or Poland in 1905-1914.
British shipbuilding after the Depression was weaker, while Germany, with the conquests it was adding, was stronger. Britain was rightly concerned that it couldn't sustain the naval dominance if Germany was allowed to spend a few years in peaceful control of Europe.
That doesn't answer my question. You characterization of the British "screwing up" makes sense only if you can point to Britain's decision to go to war with the Nazis in 1939, and keep fighting in 1940, as somehow delaying a war between the Nazis and the Soviets. And there's just no reason to think that's the case; Stalin was very much aware of how the capitalist powers like Britain and France could benefit from the Soviets solving the Nazi problem for them, and was very much committed to not doing so (hence the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and his "pull their chestnuts from the fire" speech). The evidence is pretty overwhelming that British policy actually hastened the Nazi-Soviet war by goading Hitler into his idiotic "beat the British by crushing the Soviets" strategy.
But could Russia have savaged Germany? The USSR was highly dependent on US supplies to sustain its fight against Hitler. Are you assuming that would have occurred? And if so, why? We barely helped Great Britain when we were still legally neutral in the war.
Napoleon took Moscow and still regretted making war on Russia. Retreat beyond the urals was always an option. In any event, Germany would not have emerged stronger.
I suspect Hitler would have been fine with the USSR retreating behind the Urals. Holding the European part of the USSR was enough for him. And Japan almost certainly would have entered the war and taken vast chunks of the Asian USSR.
How that would not have made Germany stronger is a curious conclusion to draw from this alternative history.
Honestly incredible that you write this article which is both morally, intellectually, and pragmatically correct, and still some of the first comments are WELL AKSHUALLY WE NEED TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT RACIAL DIFFERENCES OTHERWISE BLAH BLAH BLAH and also GEE BRITAIN REALLY BLUNDERED BY DEFENDING POLAND BECAUSE AKSHUALLY
I'm not going to pretend to be nice to this person. I don't care how enlightened "I'm just being up ideas I cannot believe you'd be this irrational I'm just trying to talk sense" you are trying to be.
You know the story about goat fuckers? The guy who gets mad because he fucks a goat as a joke and no one likes the joke and just remembers him as a goat fucker? Articulating race science and parroting Nazi talking points on why it would have been better AKSHUALLY to have aligned with the fucking Nazis against the Soviets makes you a goat fucker. And also it's incorrect. No I won't debate you on this. Fuck off.
Comments like this are the reason we got a Republican party headed by Trump instead of Mitt Romney.
There are great arguments against "race realism": John from FL's downthread response to Abbot is a terrific example, and succinct.
Your comment makes it look like there aren't any actual arguments against it. It makes liberals look like babies that can't handle disagreement, like a high-school clique that thinks everyone else will do anything to join them: it projects intellectual entitlement combined with social superiority and emotional immaturity.
I disagree that the Republican Party abandoning norms has anything to do with talking in disgusted terms about racists. We were disgusted by racists in the 90s, too, but Pat Buchanan didn’t take over the Republican Party.
No, I'm disgusted by racists too. The problem is continuously expanding boundaries of what counts as *-ism while also turning up the emotional temperature, engaging in embarrassing acts of moral exhibitionism and enlisting others in a crusade to ostracize someone.
There was plenty of that going on in the 90s, but it was mostly the religious right.
I think the scene in 12 Angry Men where the other 11 characters all turn their backs on the racist is effective and not contemptible, and I see this reaction to Abbott as parallel to that.
Let me take another stab at this: communities have norms and they are going to do their thing. If that thing involves expelling members from society instead of trying to persuade or rehabilitate them, the community should not be surprised when the expelled members band together, radicalize, and act in concert.
Okay so my 12 Angry Men analogy was a good one! In that scene, a character is arguing for the accused’s guilt based on his ethnic background. Rather than arguing the point, the other 11 jurors turn their back on the racist, leaving him to sputter on hatefully until he runs out of steam, at which point a character says “now shut your mouth, and don’t open it again.”
Obviously the fact that it’s presented as good in a movie doesn’t mean it’s actually good. My point is that even at that time there was not a norm in favor of “debate everyone, exclude no one.” And I think the idea that such exclusion kicked way up at some point and that led Trump to take over the Republican Party is underdeveloped. I think the simpler narrative is that Dennis Duffy Republicans—“socially conservative, economically liberal”—were a huge Republican constituency but didn’t have an avatar in Romney/Jeb Bush’s Republican Party, and Trump was that for them.
This is not just directed at you, but in general I would like to see people play the “this is why Trump won” card much less in these comments. It strikes me as solipsistic, frankly. Blog comment fighting is not very consequential!
I haven't read 12 Angry Men in decades, so I can't weigh in on whether or not their behavior is contemptible, but it sounds like a weak analogy that doesn't fit the situation here very well.
Fair enough (I was thinking of the movie btw). I’m really unclear about what you’re saying the link is between being mean to David Abbott and Trump taking over the Republican Party (wasn’t that decided in the GOP primary? Were a lot of voters refugees from liberal blog comments?) so maybe that led me to make a poor analogy.
People are welcome to read books about the fundamental instability and unviability of Nazi political economy if they want, but I do think the strongest, shortest argument against the Nazis is what we did to Dresden.
You could call it witticism except that I'm a very impulsive, angry person who tends to act on these kinds of impulses when someone actually puts up swastikas around me.
The joke is much older than Ken White's use of it. I heard it from some laborers on a construction site in 1979, lamenting that they could not call themselves "bricklayers," even though they had performed the act. It was old even then.
"Okay, maybe my dad did steal Itchy, but so what? Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing the Honeymooners, we wouldn't have the Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sgt. Bilko, they'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney. Your honor, you take away our right to steal ideas, where are they gonna come from?"
I have blocked one person. Well, two people. Well, sometimes it's two people sharing one account, but sometimes it's just one of the two people commenting...
Let's just say this is an account for whom "he/she/they" is literally the most apt set of pronouns. Like many individuals who use "he/she/they" as pronouns, he/she/they is/are completely insufferable. I think they've popped up here once, but mostly they're on Jesse Singal's substack, where he/she/they basically aggressively demand(s) that people personally apologize for wokeness driving him/her/them out of the Democratic Party, usually while invoking one or more of his/her/their their 14 (or so) grandchildren.
He/she/they suck(s), is what I'm trying to say, and I am losing precisely nothing by blocking him/her/them.
I understand. I'm sure I will get to that point some day, and I'd block an outright spam account in a heartbeat.
For what it's worth, you're right - the account you're talking about rarely pops up here (though IIRC, they had a pretty solid presence for about a week in the runup to the election).
Yeah, I sympathize with the desire to hear all viewpoints. But you can't have freedom of speech without also having freedom to not listen. (Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach)
I agree 100%, I just think it's a tragic self-own.
Also Substack's implementation makes it especially egregious, since not only does it hide the other person from you, it hides you *and all your respondents* from the other person..
Believe it or not, I actually think the last two weeks of tariff insanity actually ties in to your post today. Because the market volatility we’re seeing is an extraordinary window into the worldview of way too many investors, Wall Street GOP donors and quite frankly “Normies” at large. Namely; large, large swaths of people just didn’t believe, 10 years later, that Trump is as bad as Progressives and Never Trumpers say he is. It’s how you can get people who would normally never vote for someone who has bragged about sexual assault or been convicted of a sex crime to ignore the same stuff with Trump. It’s how you can get supposedly sophisticated finance guys to vote for someone who over and over again espouses the stupidest economic policies this side of Peronism.
And it’s how you can get voters who normally would reject Pat Buchanan style bigotry and antisemitism to vote for someone who believes in Pat Buchanan style bigotry or at least empowers those who do.
So that begs the question. How do you end up with this dynamic. I think it’s in part the power of right wing media; specifically the fact that right wing media considers it its job to be cheerleaders for GOP and conservatism and media mostly consumed by democrats consider it more more important to be “balanced”. Think it’s in part of actual conservative takeover of various social media organs and news sources. And I think (an underrated one) too many elected politicians and media think their personal social lives would be more disrupted by super progressives than by super right wingers.
And yet all of what I lay out above, while I think true and has contributed to our current dynamic….feels still inadequate. How is it, even now, large segments of the investors class still doesn’t quite “believe” that Trump is this clueless about trade for example (hence the wild swings upward on merest hint Trump might back off. Call it the “come on, no way he really is this bad” bet)?
I think you are correct in this analysis and this explains 80%+ of the situation. But I think Little-Boy-Cried-Wolfism on the part of the American left concerning prior Republican presidential candidates/Presidents plays an important role too. I mean you can still find people in *2025* explaining that Reagan was a fascist!
But the Republicans were generally wolves. Reagan's legacy can be debated. Bush the Elder was truly a good man and at least a not bad President. Nixon was heinous in some real ways: interfering with the Vietnam peace process thereby quite possibly extending the war for his own political gains, and then committed crimes in office for the same venal reasons. Bush I, notwithstanding that in contrast to the current guy he looks like a model of good humanity, did start an unnecessary war on terrible or made up grounds plus authorized widespread spying on Americans, and of course there's Trump.
I'm very willing to agree that various Republican Presidents were *bad*, whether just measured relative to Democratic policy objectives (e.g., George H.W. Bush) or objectively (e.g., George W. Bush). What I'm referring to is the catastrophism that many people on the left broadcast about them. If you want to say, "Reagan was bad because he cut social welfare spending," that's a 100% legitimate line of criticism if you think social welfare spending shouldn't be cut! I'm talking about the people literally saying stuff in the 1980s like, "Reagan will end democracy in America," and then who've continued to act even after he left office as though Reagan governed as some sort of blood-soaked tyrant.
(1) I made no claim about who cries wolf more? The relevant point is that in 2016 numerous people almost certainly tuned out warnings about Trump's authoritarian leanings because they've also heard that said about every preceding Republican candidate for decades.
(2) There was absolutely a strong contingent in the Democratic party for decades that favored massively greater restrictions on private gun ownership. (Dianne Feinstein was infamous for this and she wasn't some backbench state house member.) While Democrats have moved away from that in the past 20 years or so, that's very clearly in large part because polling showed they kept losing voters over the issue!
My sense is that there is a broad idea that Trump will cut taxes and not do much else and they’re fine with that. They think the system is strong enough to stop Trump if he goes too far.
Except he's demonstrably shown he's trying to do more than just cut taxes even before this latest tariffs insanity?
I mean I will say, the fact that the dollar has plummeted and the 10-year sky rocketed is a blaring (And scary) signal that enough investors have gotten the message that Trump is dangerously unhinged and that even if various Wall St. titans and insiders have convinced him to at least somewhat back off a bit, that there's clearly less restraint on this man than the first term and that he's clearly a crazy person. Basically, (and I"ve read a version of this recently), there's a "Mad King" premium now being priced in to Treasury debt which is scary AF.
And yet today, the market is booming on the news there is tariff exceptions announced. The nature of these exceptions should actually move the market in the opposite direction. It's clearly a corrupt bargain with Apple; talk about a terrible signal regarding how economic policy will be conducted going forward. Second, it still means the tariffs in place are utterly illogical as they are. Based on the morning shows yesterday it's extremely clear that none of the economic advisors around Trump actually know what the message is supposed to be or the purpose or even what's going to happen next. And oh yeah, it's just a 90 day pause, are we doing this dance again in July?
Like at a certain point, there's just a delusion going on.
I said before and I'm going to start saying this over and over again. A huge reason that conmen succeed is that most people don't think they can be conned. They think they're too smart or sophisticated to be conned. And maybe more important, most people when conned will feel too much pride to admit they've been taken. I think it explains a lot, I mean a lot of why so many people refuse to see what's in front of their face when it comes to Trump.
" And maybe more important, most people when conned will feel too much pride to admit they've been taken."
I agree that this is probably the more important one. Admitting (even to yourself) that you've been conned/made a potentially bad decision is hard.
Any outs like "well this ended up poorly but it was still the correct decision based on available information" will tend to be taken. (And that out isn't necessarily _wrong_, you can bet 1:1 on something that is actually 90% likely and still lose 10% of the time)
The one person I know personally who significantly changed against Trump based on his character/behavior did so a few months _before_ the 2020 election, and then got to feel enormously vindicated by what he did afterwards.
I think you are right about this. But I also feel that there is a sort of "Let's all look after ourselves and we'll be fine" aspect. A lot of people want to be rich, glorify being rich, and think Trump will be more likely to make them richer, and the rest will take care of itself. They don't actually care about the overall economy, just whether they can take more money home and live better personally.
" media mostly consumed by democrats consider it more more important to be “balanced”"
ROFL
That right there is why you got the rise of ring wing media. The belief that more traditional media was balanced instead of the big time democrat cheer leaders they have been,
To me: World War II revisionism basically gives away the game. You can castigate the Allies if you want (and many of those attacks have fair points): the British Empire, and especially the Churchillian defense of it: was bad. The United States was not just problematic on race: it was failing badly, and FDR's treatment of Japanese Americans was downright appalling. The Soviet Union has countless terrible atrocities attributable to it. But you know what? The Allies were the good guys and no amount of cold water changes that, and the blunt reason is Hitler (and to shocking degrees so were the Italians and Japanese). They had to be stopped. The US & Britain promised not to take any land after the war, and they stuck to that pledge. Say what you will about the UN: but the Pax Americana/Cold War era post WWII has been among the most peaceful and prosperous in world history.
If you want to argue against THAT outcome: you better have a DAMN good argument and bluntly the idea that "Britain should have just left Hitler in Poland and Eastern/Central Europe" is so downright loony and outrageous that I am STILL furious I listened to Darryl Cooper's arguments and it's been MONTHS. The fact Donald Trump's coalition includes a LOT of morons like that is telling.
I agree strongly, and allied behavior post-WWII is a great point. Even strategically useful stuff they could have kept (e.g. Minamitorishima, Greenland) was returned.
This is a great piece, and it really emphasizes how appalling it is that the mainstream organs of the American Jewish community are allying themselves with these people in order to deport op-ed writers.
As a Jewish American who is definitely right of center when it comes to Israel/Palestine I to fully agree. I'm not sure how many truly mainstream American Jewish organizations are out that are are actively attempting to deport anyone who opposes Israel but there are definitely several "Stop Anti-semitism" social media pages that have gone full fascist in this regard. For example, @ "Stop_Antisemitism" is not only actively targeting foreign students who have spoken out against Israel but is also actively appealing to Pam Bondi to go after Ms. Rachel, the JEWISH children's entertainer, not for supporting for Hamas but for being Pro-Palestine. I don't personally agree with her politics but going after Ms. Rachel for a perfectly normal political view that more than half the world agrees with is not going to win the hearts and minds of people at large. If anything, these targeted attacks by Jewish organizations will only feed anti-semitic stereotypes that "Jews" control the levers of power. These actions are just totally misguided and will inevitably hurt Jews in the long run.
Which mainstream Jewish organizations support Trump? Which ones, specifically, support the deportation of that op-ed writer? Do you think that *most* of the Jewish mainstream organizations voiced support for the deportation of the op-ed writer?
Well, the ADL put out a public statement supporting the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. And a public statement defending Elon Musk when he made a nazi salute.
To think the ADL is a right-wing organization is kind of ridiculous, in my view. They spent a long time studiously focusing exclusively on right-wing antisemitism and on other liberal causes that have nothing to do with Jews. Grinblatt walked back his naive support of what Trump was doing, and if you've listened to him talk about the "Nazi salute," he's not a guy who's soft on Nazis.
Anyway, organizations like the American Jewish Congress have been against the deportations, and your original claim was that the Jewish mainstream supported the deportation of the op-ed writer. Where's your evidence for that?
I agree that the ADL has not traditionally been a right wing organization; they are a mainstream organization. And they have been terrible on Trump and his approach.
jewbelong.org bought a billboard that I have to stare at every day that says "Radicals ruin America." Looking at it on "Liberation Day" really made me feel like I'm living in an Orwell book. For added irony, the subway station it overlooks was built in 1984.
The Trump administration arrested and is trying to deport Reyna Ozturk for writing an oped about Israel. If you don't think that Stephen Miller is involved in high profile Trump administration immigration enforcement decisions I don't know what to tell you.
On this topic I think the book Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is essential reading. I think it's fair to say that we turned a blind eye to just how bad Stalin and the Soviets were, as is unfortunately not so unusual with allies of convenience. None of that is any sort of rehabilitation of Hitler.
To me this has always been an obvious danger of the push towards an overly identity based view of the world. It assumes an identity politics for me and not for thee is something that can be sustained. Now we are seeing the online edgelords wonder if maybe they don't actually agree with their sad little jokes, and of course they have an audience in parts of maybe the dumbest and absolutely most extremely online administration ever.
Big picture I think it's worth getting back to the view of America as an idea, where the principles and philosophies that underpin the country are available to everyone. From that perspective historical failures to live up to those ideas and their correction can be understood as a matter of great progress (as they are). Yes you give up the ability to go on and on about America being a permanently, structurally racist sham but in exchange you get to stand on firm ground when you say no to jackasses proposing going backwards to an uglier past.
You can't get away from identity in politics, as long as there are humans in politics. The question is what identity is elevated to primacy -- is it an exclusionary, ancestry-based identity, or an inclusive, open, values-based identity, such as that of American citizen?
What do people see in this charlatan? It's mind-boggling. I think maybe the biggest factor helping to expand the ranks of the new, reactionary hard right is their massive *gullibility* flowing from the fact that they're very poorly read, especially in history.
Totally. Again, the gullibility makes one an easy mark for that which is transgressive. I think to a lot of people his schtick (and that of many like him) comes across as brave! bold! edgy! and so on—he's a courageous utterer of Truths Forbidden by the Establishment ("The Cathedral" I believe is what he calls it). But yes, "unremarkable" is a good word to describe it. I might go with "dreary."
I would say (1) most of what he writes is just incomprehensible; this list of quotes is just insane: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin. So yes, how he's popular makes no sense.
(2) He does do this one-weird-trick where he says FDR was super successful (Okay, check) -> FDR was a "dictator CEO" (Seems wrong) -> the US needs a "dictator CEO" President (WTF). The trick though is he starts with FDR to say ... look, FDR was a Dem., I'm just an objective observer here. I think also the idea of a "dictator CEO" is probably just really popular with maniacal strivers (i.e., JD Vance).
In retrospect a culture obsessed with "anti-heroes" was destined to fall in love with Hitler the second that all the men who watched their brothers die at his hands were gone from the world.
I know that this is Slow Boring and the slow boring of hard boards is not about new age feel-gooderies about the righteousness of "our" position compared to the degeneracy of "their" position.
But if you'll indulge me, this, like the Cory Booker piece from last week, put tears in my eyes.
Some commenters take issue with the Cory Booker piece, or with the filibuster itself as being ineffectual, and that's fine. But I am having a hard time keeping an even keel and I really need something to hold onto these days, and celebrating the light (Booker's filibuster) while declaring that the darkness (right-wing hubristic triumphalism with regards to the "righteousness" of racial and ethnic stereotyping) is, indeed, darkness helps.
Two small additional observations:
One: Nathan Cofnas is a clown; read his essays and it's basically glorified teenage emo angst. I was going to respond to something he wrote on another "heterodox" (read: really into racial hierarchies and IQ) Substack, and my pitch to the newsletter editor was that Cofnas's piece was "literally the funniest thing I've read in months."
Two: It is true that Cooper et al.'s revisionism is more about the present than the past. They're more interested in taking down a pillar of liberal global order than doing anti-Semitism. It is, to be clear, anti-Semitic, but it's not the original intent.
Patriotism is good, actually. During the Iraq war (and maybe before, I'm too young), we all decided that patriotism was the same thing as endorsing the actions of the current administration. (citation: Green Day.) That was a bad idea. That feeling where someone talking about freedom brings a tear to your eye is what holds a democracy together, and without it we're just 300 million people shouting at each other.
To be fair, the Iraq War made patriotism hard because the very concept was so politicized. It's not unlike how more recently it became very hard to endorse "equality" (a generally very good thing) because its meaning was so warped by a certain very loud and momentarily influential movement.
But more to the point...yeah. These declarations are also good because they help hold me to a democracy that I don't currently live in. It's tough - very tough - sometimes to feel like the US is a place I want to have any connection to anymore. So I'm glad MY is able to sometimes bring me back to my senses.
(I mean, I probably won't come back, but because my career is elsewhere, not out of resentment).
I am disappointed in two things: 1) that my totally-awesome-bare-my-soul comment has sunk to the bottom of the pile - but I can deal with that, I'm (ostensibly) a big boy; but I cannot countenance 2) that no one, in this comments section that should know better, picked up on "new age feel goodery."
I've had to block David Abbott for his outright Nazi apologism. The mute feature in substack appears not to work, as I discovered I'd had him muted for some time and I was still seeing all his comments.
Funny, I was blocked *BY* David Abbott, for what reason I know not. Which is not the greatest loss (for me) in the world, to be sure, but it does deprive me of anything down thread of his remarks. Apparently there was interesting reply by John fr Fl. Sigh.
Gen Z specifically seems obsessed with race talk. It’s not really skull measuring stuff but it’s just a little weird to me. I think part of it is the academic scorn and censorship about any discussion around genetics, heritability, and race. The other part is just young people wanting to be edgy and freak out older people.
Seems like there are better things to focus on but I think it’s going to be a fixture of cultural debate for the foreseeable future.
Agreed, this seems downstream of the reaction to cancel culture. If you're not allowed to point out biological differences between sexes, why not see what's up with race science? But as Matt points out here, it's really important that that stuff is taboo.
Any topic around IQ and race/country of origin is so tired at this point and not worth informing public policy.
Something I'd like to better understand is whether people think that taboo should be around discussions of race and genetics or race and culture or both? Because I see them as two wholly different issues. Cultural explanations can be quite powerful, while genetic ones usually are not. And I feel like ignoring cultural explanations leaves the door open for racial explanations from people who don't care about these taboos.
In contrast to cultural explanations, economic ones are always welcome on the left, which I feel is basically tied to politics.
On the left cultural explanations are usually dismissed as victim blaming. There’s some truth there, as anyone who lived through conservative Urban Decay Discourse in the 80s can attest, but that critique is often taken too far.
Yeah, a basic element of political discourse since at least the 60s, has been the left saying various things are due to economics and the right saying it's more about culture, with the preferred solutions for each faction following from their arguments.
I think a lot of people don't make the distinction, though. A few months ago Scott Alexander posted a pro-race-realism essay with the premise that Africans have an average IQ of 90 instead of 100. Lots of "therefore black culture is degenerate because they're all borderline retarded" followed in the discussion.
Fwiw - I found that essay and skimmed the comments. I expected to see some comments like that, but I don't think I saw a single one. I'm sure there was somewhere, but that doesn't seem to be the vibe of that place.
In any case - I agree that many people don't necessarily make that distinction, but we could also say that many others do, and among people in, say, Academia, or Policy discussions, I'd think the vast majority are capable of making the distinction, and would if it was encouraged.
I agree but I don't think saying "look this is taboo we shouldn't discuss it" is going to fix it. At this point I think we have to be willing to engage with it in constructive ways.
With respect, not wanting to engage with scientific reality because you are afraid of how it might be misused is not going to be a particularly defensible position in the future, especially as genetic science improves. Any number of scientists have written books to try and break this to the left. Matt's desire for willful ignorance will not hold. And the idea that race/country of origin somehow does NOT play in public policy now is risible. Disparate impact is very race/ethnicity based, and has led (my opinion) to a dumbing down of public employees in search of some sort of balance. IF you accept there are broad differences in group IQ -- which seems pretty clear based on decades of research -- the theory that racism is behind all the outcomes loses quite a bit of steam. There are other arguments against disparate impact, but that one is clearly influencing the debate. If you want to stop that you need to actually engage on the science. Blank slatism is not going to cut it.
It's hard to stop people from noticing. Refusing to consider there may be genetic reasons for outcomes in humans as groups is not going away. Especially as the U.S. economy more and more rewards IQ. Which, if you look at economic outcomes, it already does.
This does not mean you engage in racism against individuals, or treat anyone as though they are better or worse than you based on perceived physiognomy. I don't look at my East Asian friends and think "geez, they are smarter than me" based on group averages. Because broad group generalizations are not useful when dealing with individuals. But when looking at broad outcomes, pretending there is no there there will not be sustainable, especially when the default of so many on the left is "it must be racism."
There is quite a bit more to a person than their IQ, and immense variations within groups, and all kinds of other qualifications. But there is plenty of science, it's only getting better, and it will influence public policy. Do we allow gene editing for embryos to increase the share of positive (to the parents) traits? To raise intelligence, height, pick a skin color and eye color? If not, why not? Do we use race (or populations, or whatever word feels right) in medicine? Yes. Much like gender, it plays a role. Enough.
My great grandfather got my grandfather out of a speeding ticket by telling the cop he shot down three planes in WW2. He didn’t. He just was a boat mechanic.
My father worked with a guy who was getting crap from a customs and border guy at the Berlin airport and he said “I apologize. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Berlin, but that was more of a flyover.” The crap stopped right with that clever line.
True but it cuts in multiple ways. My grandfather was an NCO in the infantry and was in 6 or 7 landings in the Pacific (he later fought in Korea as well). It is hard for me to describe how tough this guy was, and I'm just not sure they make them like him anymore. I can tell you the things he said about the Japanese were.... not consistent with modern sensibilities. His reaction to my mother buying a Toyota Camry in the 80s is the stuff of family legend. That said his sense of patriotism was second to none and it's hard for me to see him getting on board with the implicit anti-Americanism of the modern right or any sort of apologia for our WW2 adversaries.
There does feel like some sort of moral decline in our society and decline in character. It makes me think of Socrates whole myth of peoples based on different metals.
The character stuff is hard because the "greatest generation" was on-average horrible racists and terrible misogynists. So yes, my grandfather fought the Nazis in Poland but he also had terrible views on like 15 other things and I wouldn't characterize his marriage as "loving". Tough as nails though. Far tougher than me on even my best days.
EDIT: We've also shamed beating our kids out of our culture in like just two generations. This is a tremendous accomplishment. When I hear people in their 70s talk about *their* childhoods ... holy smokes, it's like a war zone.
Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I grew up in a time when a lot of my grandads generation served in ww2. I remember my grandad telling me about his cousin that was shot down over Italy. Nazi hating was a family affair that was engrained from early on.
There’s a lot of race talk among progressives too. Racial and gender identity is considered a core part of identity and perhaps the most important part of one’s identity.
Not just race talk but all sorts of Nazi stuff. For example, calling people and things “filth”. At some point in the recent past, the Nazis became cool for edgy thirteen year olds and we’ll be dealing with the fallout for a while.
It’s a very parsimonious way to describe some of the nihilistic antisocial behavior you see from people. I never thought of its Nazi association until now, and that alone gives me pause in using the term, but many cities have a “degen” subreddit where there is an authentic celebration of depraved behavior. I don’t think the posters on those subs are being ironic, and I’m not sure what else to call it.
I'm just replying to you almost at random, as I've seen a lot of people make similar comments. And my question is one of genuine curiosity, and not based on pushback or disbelief.
So here goes: Where are you guys seeing this stuff? Because I'm personally not exposed to it. I don't spend any time on X or Facebook, but I do read Youtube and Reddit comments, and I can't recall noticing any difference? So I'm wondering if I'm missing it, not noticing it, or just what's the explanation?
Twitter can feel like a Nuremberg rally at times, at least if one makes the mistake of clicking on the wrong kind of tweet (which immediately makes the algorithm think you've got a swastika tattoo). The "for you" feed is the offender. I mostly stay off it in favor of the "following" feed.
People say that Twitter is a hellhole and I'm trying to figure out the dynamic here. There are about 10 people I read on Twitter (such as Matt). I read their tweets and never never look at the comments. I pay no attention to "For you" or "following."
Is there a benefit to doing these other things that balances the crap that you apparently then get exposed to? If not, why look at that stuff? Why not just limit yourself to the postings of smart people you respect?
Hey, I used it in this very thread! To describe the President, though, in the sense that Jimmy uses it here. I do accept that words themselves can be weaponised and lose descriptive or clarifying power.
Sorry that I asked this somewhere else and I'm repeating my own comment, but where are you seeing this? I don't doubt you're noticing it and I'm not trying to argue or disbelieve, but it's just something I have not personally been exposed to so I'm curious.
I also said this somewhere else, but your comment is part of why Matt's quote today: "I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions." struck me as untenable, at least with respect to cultural determinants.
If "we", I guess meaning the polite Left, are unwilling to answer questions that humans are naturally curious about, then someone else will whether that's the new Right or China or whomever.
Again I'm more thinking about this from a cultural angle, and less from a genetic one, because culture likely plays a much bigger role than genes in explaining why outcomes can be different between ethnicities in the US. But culture is also often taboo to discuss.
It's bubbled up through reddit dungeons into more mainstream discussions, same in discord chat, it certainly comes up in young conservative circles a lot these days but it isn't limited to them.
A lot of it isn't pro nazi or anything but it is more of a "huh, they say we can't talk about this, why? are any of these observations about race and genetics true?"
It's not only a reaction to Kendi but the denial of any true difference between the sexes in liberal circles, if the people are telling you race chat is taboo but denying human biology isn't, how can they trust you? what else are the biological wrong think people lying to you about?
“I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.”
At least Matt has the integrity to admit that he’s sticking his head in the sand. I’ll say the quiet part out loud. There are significant racial and ethnic differences in both physical and cognitive ability. These differences will make racial gaps in achievement difficult to eliminate. We can only have professional basketball teams that look like America by excluding meritorious black players and choosing under qualified whites. We can only have elite science departments and research outfits that look like America by excluding qualified Asians. Hiding from the truth is rarely a great strategy.
The problem with population-level statistics is that there is no population-level solution to ameliorate differences. And the more one looks at and engages in those population-level differences, the more one gets sucked into the idea that immutable characteristics from birth actually matter at the individual level, and they do not. And the idea of population-level interventions leads to very, very bad places.
Therefore, I agree with Matt that it is unseemly and inappropriate to spend much time with those who want to "preoccupy oneself with such questions", yourself included.
I think we don’t talk enough about countries who try proportional representation through hard quotas and how much of a fucking failure it is (eg India and South Africa).
I do believe that underrepresentation of certain groups in the US in knowledge professions is a product of structural racism unconnected to actual ability. I also believe that almost any attempt to administratively correct that underrepresentation through some sort of quota or quota like system has done harm to the organization imposing the administrative remedy.
I don't think that this is entirely correct. I hire people for the top of the top of knowledge professionals (Analog IC Design). We would love to hire an occasional girl or some (non-Chinese/Indian) diversity. Obviously, at this level, everything adds up. You have to be exceptionally bright and have had exceptional opportunity. One of the two won't cut it. Communication skills and ability to ace an 8-10 hour interview both pay off as well. I don't see structural racism as being a significant factor, at least in my neck of the woods.
To me a lot of our issues are with this fixation on the most elite of the elite areas, which is what leads to the kind of crude balancing games that are now probably illegal in light of SFFA v. UNC or if not are almost certain to soon become illegal given the composition of SCOTUS. To me the clear solution is to aim efforts at raising the floor on quality of life with mundane stuff like making sure every citizen no matter who they are has health insurance and basic nutrition is available to everyone via public schools and that sort of thing. Preventing people in the most precarious of situations from falling through the cracks is more defensible on virtually every metric than going insane trying to engineer demographic balance in the STEM pipeline or trying to make the number of CEOs in the country mirror the racial balance of the national population.
Strong agree with the addition that actually helping to make the STEM pipeline more available to disadvantaged groups that, while unlikely to have many top achievers, will nonetheless have some, is the right thing to do for those individuals, their families, and the country as a whole.
Agree 100%, making sure rungs on the ladder are accessible even from unlikely places is completely consistent with the liberal project. It's also a worthwhile investment in developing our own human capital.
I think we’re at a point where we’re dealing with the human capital implications of long gone structural racism more than structural racism itself.
We’re also at the point where the cures in terms of quotas are worse than the disease, and while it doesn’t sound like you have to deal with it, some others of us have (and a subset of those people have had a lot of trouble when pushing back on it). I’m in academia though, and financial consulting before that, and I think those are particularly vulnerable to having some “soft” pressures to diversify, high risk from hiring the wrong person, and administrative pressure to tell you neither of the previous things are true.
If we are going to call things that happened decades ago, "structural racism," then it is impossible to end "structural racism." I thought the point of the term was to encompass all of the present decisions (and systems) being made without obvious racial intent that nonetheless perpetuate disadvantage.
If the respectable consensus included your premise that “there is no population level solution to ameliorate differences,” I would embrace it. It does not. Too much effort goes into measuring and attempting to remediate racial gaps. As long as that continues, I will not abandon the sharpest tool for pushing back.
The obvious solution to that is to have objective standards and fairness. The reason Kendi promoted anti-racism is because he knows that the end result will be worse than it is now if companies and institutions were to adopt those practices.
You're such a pitiful festering pustule. Stop trying to drag this filth into this comment section every single day. Don't you have a real life to live? I'm so sick of seeing you insidiously sneak racist garbage into here.
The psychology of someone who reads this article and says “ah, someone’s playing my song” is not hard to guess, and it’s not “dogged pursuer of truth”.
No, you are a total parasite and a loser. You come in here every day, posting at exactly 6:00 am when the story drops, and it is always some snivelingly, superficially polite post that is transparently trying to smuggle in some odious, evil idea like this one. Every time I read a comment and am viscerally repelled by it, it always ends up being you. I am sick of your posting here, I am sick of your disgusting politics, I am sick of your mediocre intellect that thinks you are being subtle or clever in what you are doing, and I am sick of having to tolerate what is obviously the product of a deep pitiful loneliness. Go make some friends in the real world and maybe you'll feel less compelled to spread this garbage here.
Thanks for this, actually. I had tried to block this guy several times, but I guess you can only block someone by going to their profile, so I hadn't realized it was possible.
The problem with your position is that this “truth” was also asserted as the reason that blacks in the post Civil War period were starving—certainly couldn’t be the fact that Southern Whites were resisting reconstruction and even basic emancipation and, with the aid of President Johnson, ensuring they remained subservient gang laborers working under the lash through illusory and coercive “contracts” and systematic extra judicial violence. Nope, must be that the negro isn’t fit for independence!
Which goes to Matt’s point that you need two scoops of “let’s be really careful and delicate here” whenever approaching this stuff so you don’t end up justifying Nazis or Jim Crow—not an area to go boldly forth.
It may be true that population level differences in IQ (or height) help explain perceived racial gaps in various elite settings, but if you are not at least a little nervous around this topic you end up throwing off a big “let the blacks play basketball while the Asians code—it’s natural” vibe and people will be rightfully suspicious that you are trying to smuggle racial hierarchy in through the back door rather than just acknowledging the reality of pipelines when gauging racial gaps in various fields and not tilting at windmills etc.
The better way is “judge everyone as an individual, try very hard not to stereotype and feel bad when you do, and address transfer payments and the provision of public goods on their merits rather than veering off into anti-racism”.
I agree with your “two scoops of caution” formulation, and I hope you’ll see my phrasing here was more circumspect than usual. However, it is impossible to discuss racial gaps sensibly without incorporating this issue. To the extent progressives seek to reduce racial gaps, they need to confront facts that render reducing them difficult or impossible.
Jim Crow was not founded on IQ science. It was an effort to enforce racial domination. There was no effort to extend opportunity to intelligent blacks. W.E.B. Du Bois was brilliant, but Jim Crow made it impossible for him to live in the South.
Also, racial inequality after the civil war was overdetermined. Freedmen were illiterate and penniless. Knowledge and financial capital are both crucial to running a successful farm or really any business. Without extreme social engineering, racial gaps were inevitable.
You need to get some bigger scoops my man! You clearly did not avoid your comment pattern matching to "I'm a racist, and here are my racist beliefs"--as you can tell by your reception. If this issue is important to you, which it seems to be, you need to be bending over backwards to avoid coming across the wrong way, not proudly "saying the quiet part out loud" as a bold teller of forbidden truths! I could steelman your position (which I disagree with).
Also, these are epistemic scoops, not just presentation scoops. As an analogy, racism is booze and we are all alcoholics. "Removing standardized testing to combat racism seems dumb" is, like, rum cake. "Population level differences mean that "a racial gap exists" is a poor proxy for "something is unfair here" and we need better heuristics" is like a glass of wine with dinner--perfectly fine...but you miiiiiiight just finish that bottle (and then another!), as you are primed to do. Maybe don't drink at all (like Matt) or, if you do, be very careful. Most of the people who post on this stuff, like that Cofnas guy, have become drunks. You walk around with your "#1 Wine Fan" shirt on, and people will rightly wonder!
if you knew more of my career, you would know i fought against racial quotas that denied blacks equal representation on henry county juries. it hurt my career considerably and i lost. i’ll finish the bottle occasionally and then go for a bracing jog the next morning.
It’s not incumbent on me or anyone else to know your career or anything else about you when reading your posts, and you shouldn’t assume people will read it with basic charity, let alone that kind of knowledge. Your posts need to speak for themselves and they are evidently saying something you do not intend.
You are free to disregard my advice, I am just an internet stranger, but I think it would help you. Have a good one.
It's both true that culturally/geographically segregated populations develope distinct statistical distributions of heritable traits and that racial and ethnic categorizations are fundamentally bunk. They don't tell you anything useful about what traits any individual has inherited and they disappear basically immediately when the causal segregation ends. In a healthy society we're all mutts.
I’m not sure what you mean about differences “disappearing basically immediately when the casual segregation ends.”
If you mean that groups will interbreed and average out any allele differences, well, on a scale of many millennia that is true but I sure don’t think that’s “immediate“ except maybe in the geological sense. The Indo-Aryan invasion of India was around 3500 years ago and you still have significantly more steppe ancestry in the higher castes.
If you mean that group differences go away in the ordinary short term once formal discrimination ends… I’m not trying to make a “gotcha” here but can you give me a single example of this? US racial segregation ended ~60 years ago, and I would not say that the gaps have closed. Various countries have tried affirmative action schemes, of both the “help the previously hated downtrodden group” variety (India, the US, China for some non-Han) and the “help the majority against the Sinister Successful Minority variety” (Malaysia against Chinese people, various African countries against Indian or white groups, arguably US universities against Jews in the 1900s and against Asians today), and as far as I know all of these gaps still exist.
I suppose immediate is a somewhat weird word choice when the scale is generations. The point is that one or two generations of reproduction outside of ones segregated ethnic group effectively eliminates whatever racially correlated inferences one might try to make about those offspring. It takes a single step to homogenize away a huge amount of what one might try to classify as a "racial" genetic clustering.
for voluntary interbreeding to occur, status has to be roughly equal in the first place. very few people choose yo reproduce with others of vastly higher or lower status
And yet we can decide not to exclude meritorious black basketball players or qualified Asian scientists without preoccupying ourselves with questions about why the racial balances in these endeavors are different.
Actually a strong policy of “we are not going to obsess over racial difference” might be help prevent the policies you oppose! Both the “IQ noticers” and the “anti racists” are pretty obsessed with race and racial conflict. “Keep your racial opinions to yourself and extend a helping hand to whoever needs it, regardless of race or creed” is exactly what you want!
It seems to me the solution in light of being a multiracial, multicultural society is to focus on being as rigorously objective as possible about individuals.
I agree. Just like Democrats should focus on abundance rather then identity, However, when the subject of group differences comes up, you have to have a strategy, and tent shrinking is a poor one.
How certain are you of this? What is your estimate of the probability that you're wrong about it?
How certain should we have to be about racial genetic differences in intelligence before we make policy on the basis of that assumption? It seems like the risk of wronging people in this way is something we should be very careful to avoid.
How good are your sources of evidence on this? Have you considered their biases? Steve Sailer and Emil Kirkegaard don't seem to me like good people who just accidentally stumbled onto some inconvenient facts.
I'm not attacking your character here. Nor do I think it's been scientifically proven that you're wrong. There are plenty of dogmatic progressives who won't even entertain the possibility that science hasn't 100% proven you're wrong already. These people are making a dumb mistake. But what about people like David Reich or Paige Harden, who would grant that it's possible but would argue that the total evidence is so confounded that it's pretty much useless? The quality of the data in behavioral genetics and social science more broadly isn't all that great.
We already know that it's possible for non-genetic factors to create massive disparities in cognitively demanding fields. Look at the underrepresentation of men in developmental psychology, or of Asians in Romance language scholarship.
Don't you think you might be wrong? If we're being honest, isn't there a very strong possibility that you're wrong?
If you want me to describe my confidence, you have to be more specific. I am 99% confident I am wrong about something.
I am 95% confident that if you gave every white person and every black person in the US an IQ test, whites would have a higher average. That could be the effect of class or culture or genetic.
I am 99% confident that enough of the 43 million plus blacks in the US are really smart for there to be a high human capital black political and cognitive elite.
I am 95% confident there is a tremendous amount of genetic variation within Africa. Just as there are plenty of African nations which don’t produce good basketball players (anywhere with a low average height) there are certainly places in Africa that have more smart people than other places.
This all would be about as interesting as other genetic issues if we weren’t being force fed the idea “there are no group IQ differences” or “any group IQ differences must be the product of economic and social differences.”
Finally, in policy terms, I’m happy to say “individual ability is the only relevant thing and we won’t worry about racial gaps.”. I will do this when a majority of other progressives stop worrying about racial gaps, so don’t hold your breath.
This sounds more subtle than a lot of "HBD" thinking that's out there. But I would insist that when it comes to the question of whether there's a genetic tendency toward significantly higher intelligence among white people vs black people, the evidence is weak enough that one's probability should be well under 50%, and not much different from one's probability that a genetic advantage exists going the opposite direction.
I think attention should be paid to gaps, because of the high likelihood that they have problematic environmental causes. But the idea that gaps can be improved by affirmative action starting at age 18 or later is ludicrous in my opinion, so I'd tend to agree that a lot of progressives are full of shit when it comes to this sort of thing.
given that iq is not purely genetic and owes a great deal to education and nutrition, i would be suprised if average iqs between the races were equal. if the only difference between the races were that blacks are more likely to be exposed to lead as children and drugs/alcohol as fetuses, that would be enough to create a racial iq gap
there is tremendous biodiversity among africans. to use a sports example, kenyans sprint worse than europeans and nigerians run the marathon worse than europeans or east african highlanders. there’s more diversity among africans than among europeans. writing a person off intellectually because they are black is vile racism. having a weak, bayesian prior you are willing to update is sophistication.
I think MY has the better position here. Genetics and race are very complex issues and we’ve seen the bad effects historically of basing policy on supposedly even consensus science (that then gets overturned). You can still argue against affirmative action. MY does.
i called her behavior whorish and stand by my truthful statement. she wasn’t exactly eager to talk about it, maybe she thought the feminists would agree with me
I'll never forget how you were like "you know what, people with mental handicaps aren't worth an education or extra services to help them live in society, they should be warehoused until their early deaths." Top-level decency and compassion, that.
It's just not true Britain fought for Poland. Britain fought for centuries against powers attempting to dominate Europe, because it could see that one power astride Europe would be bad for Britain. WW2 Germany, WW1 Germany, France three separate times in the 18th century, Spain in the 16th.
It's the same reason Britain and other countries in Europe are resisting Putin now. It's not just sympathy for Ukraine, it's recognition if he got an easy win there, the rest of Europe is next on the menu.
Right, one of the notably brain-dead aspects of this particular right-wing critique is the idea that any war which resulted in an unfree Poland represented, ipso facto, a failure of British policy. As though British inter-war policy was actually committed to Polish independence, as opposed to restraining German power and aggression. This goes hand in hand with the credulity these reactionaries need to extend to Adolf Hitler, of all people, when it comes to his supposed willingness to allow the British to keep their empire in peace if only they'd come to the negotiating table in 1940. Because if there's one conclusion you can draw from Nazi foreign policy, it's that they always lived up to their promises of peaceful coexistence...
Also, Poland is free today, and that is in part thanks to Britain joining the decades'-long US-led effort to contain Russian expansionism.
A fact that today's Poles absolutely do not take for granted, and are petrified of a Trump-led retreat from this stance.
Yep, see drosophilist's reply to my top level comment for an example.
Soviet domination of Poland was a failure of a British (and oddly Japanese) foreign policy, it was preferable to Nazi domination but it was an outcome that the British spent resources in 1920 and 1944 trying to stop.
And it isn't as if Britain didn't try to fight for a Free Poland. Churchill was very keen on Mediterranean campaigns into Italy, Greece, and the Balkans so that Western Allies could beat the Soviets to Poland and Yugoslavia.
There were also efforts at Yalta to ensure free and fair elections in Poland post war which the Soviets reneged on in addition to their failure to support the Warsaw uprising and the decimation of the Polish government in Exile when they returned home.
Wait, what? Russians reneged on an agreement? Somebody should tell Vance & Trump, maybe this Zelenskyy guy was on to something...
Consider that these are the same people who say Trump is an honest broker.
>Britain fought for centuries against powers attempting to dominate Europe, because it could see that one power astride Europe would be bad for Britain<
Yes. It's also why the US decisively entered two world wars and plunged into a Cold War.
"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world."
--Halford Mackinder (1919)
It’s the same as the observation that the Brits joined NATO to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." Or this this observation from the 80s about British participation in the EEC:
https://youtu.be/rvYuoWyk8iU?si=woqF4UCNR63H1vpa
Also the same reason we don't want China to totally dominate South East Asia or the Pacific
Buchanan does have a shadow of a point, in that the end outcome *might* have been better if Britain and France had drawn their hard line someplace other than Poland, since in that case Hitler might have just charged through Poland into Russia and fought the Soviets while Britain and France could have stayed out until both Hitler and Stalin were considerably weaker. But that would have required them to know some stuff that *we know now* but they were not in a position to know before the fact.
No one knew ex ante that the German tanks were way better than the French tanks and would beat the French army soundly. No one knew for a fact (other than Hitler himself) that Hitler was going to break his pact with Stalin and invade Russia regardless of what the western powers did. And no one knew that Hitler's empire would operate at a financial loss, making him weaker over time rather than stronger.
From the standpoint of 1939, it was not at all unreasonable to predict that if Hitler took Poland, its resources would strengthen him, he'd maintain an alliance with Stalin securing his eastern border, and then go after France as a more formidable enemy. So drawing the line at Poland made sense ex ante.
So Buchanan is still wrong, but it's worth unpacking exactly why he's wrong.
This is propaganda to be sure. It's infuriating to hear the Biden/Obama/MSNBC liberals joking about Putin's inability to take over relatively small parts of Ukraine with his "paper tiger" military (which appears to have some truth to it) and then parrot the debunked "Domino Theory" of the Cold War and Vietnam. How could Putin take over Europe when he can't even hold small land masses in Ukraine? Putin is not being resisted, he is being weakened by the west and NATO as this has been their wet dream ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Last I checked Putin isn't responsible for our health care crisis, genocide in Gaza, bombing of Yemen, epidemic of homelessness, crisis of affordable housing, record wealth inequality, privatization of public education and so on. The foreign country that controls our government is Israel. They have been directly responsible for the bipartisan suppression of free speech, fascist arrests and beatings of student pro-Palestinian protestors, and our warmongering and bombing across the entire Middle East. This energy should be directed towards the warmongers heading our government and AIPAC. As for bigotry, it's not just the right that has reinforced Islamaphobia and the criminalization of immigrants. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/ukraine-for-dummies-take-the-quiz
Ahhhh, an internet tradition.
Original post: "Mustache man bad"
Comments: unironic ZOG
It's always nice to see a comment from an infrequent poster to remind us of the incredibly high quality of the vast, vast majority of commenters here at SB.
Thanks for giving us a peek at what the rest of the Internet is like, Barry.
The first part of this comment re: Ukraine doesn't really make sense. You are looking at a world where a thing X has happened, and then using it to argue that because of the state of that world, there is no reason to think thing X needed to happen. The reason Putin can't conquer Ukraine is because of Western support. I am sure the Ukrainians would put up as good a fight as they could if they had to do it alone, but the reality is their entire war machine is dependent on Western supplies and money.
Assume the actual counterfactual, where the West doesn't do anything to help Ukraine. Whether it takes three months or three years, Putin would inevitably conquer Ukraine. In that time, he would have built out his military capabilities, not lost them -- military capabilities are not stocks that are stored up in peace and then depleted in war, they are flows that are intensified in war, such that a victorious nation at the end of a war, if it has not been devastated at home, typically has more military capacity than it did at the beginning, a la the USA in WW2. The main stock in question is available manpower, of which Russia still has plenty. Having conquered Ukraine, it would make little sense for Putin to stand this war machine down if he could use it to eat more of Europe. Again, assume the West is unwilling to defend the Baltics (a reasonable assumption, given in this world they abandoned Ukraine), Putin would roll them up trivially with a military that just conquered a far more powerful ally. At that point, if Poland stands alone, he might decide to go for it, too. And suddenly there are Russians on the border of the West proper. The domino effect is real, what you are observing is that the West has been more competent at preventing it than you are willing to give it credit for, because you dislike liberal internationalism.
As far as Israel goes, I think you just entirely misunderstand the nature of Israel's role in American politics. It's not some secret shadowy cabal of Israelis manipulating the natsec community -- the natsec community is far more Israel-skeptical than the actual public. The reason pro-Israel foreign policy is dominant in the U.S. is because it is a political imperative handed to the leadership by its voters. In my view, this is a deeply stupid thing on the part of American voters, but it is far from the only stupid opinion said voters hold.
I don’t think israel actually controls us foreign policy. Alas, American zionists have way too much influence.
Really strong article Matt, thanks for writing and publishing it.
For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction, and now we're seeing it as some people become emboldened amid Trump's reelection to say what they've really meant, with hope for less backlash. This could get scary without reminders like this.
And related to reminders, one reason why I find generational history so fascinating is that it really helps to explain why humanity keeps repeating mistakes. As the old generation dies out, so too do the direct experiences they have from seeing mistakes happen. With regard to World War II, there are increasingly scant people left who can recall one of the deadliest times in human history, and how it came to be. So again, thanks for a check on that.
The generational history point is a good one, but it's still shocking that this is happening considering that American victory WWII and the Nazis as default villains are both such key mainstays of American culture.
An unfortunate byproduct of mainstream elites embracing Kendi’s villainization of people who disagree with him is that it created a permission structure to be the villain. Add in heavy doses of negative polarization, and you end up with people thinking it’s a high compliment to be the villain in progressive politics.
Related to this is that it was a winning strategy for a long time for the GOP to denounce Democrat policy proposals with "Socialism!".
Until they applied it to a broadly popular policy (PPACA) which had the effect of moving identifying as a socialist into an Overton window of sorts: a lot of people began thinking "maybe I'm a socialist" and some owned that.
Likewise, racism accusation was incredibly successful for a long time, until things that were pretty common among those who would normally recoil at the accusation were being used as the basis for this. People start thinking "maybe I am actually racist" and decide to own that.
As an elder millenial raised on Indiana Jones, it's the one aspect of contemporary politics I really can't wrap my head around.
The other cultural touchstone around that time was The Blues Brothers. Illinois Nazis are so obvious to hate.
For younger millenials I think it is 4chan, 8kun and Groyper subcultures that crawled out of the computers, formed an alliance with a flamboyantly degenerate Boomer in 2016, and won unexpected political power, which gave them the chance to meme their way across the cultural landscape. And they clearly twisted Gen Z Republicans in turn. This would have never happened in the nineties. The internet corrupts.
Post-2016 politics really is the story of The Rise of the Edgelords. The elder right-wingers embraced immature internet iconoclasm just as irresponsibly as the elder-left did Tumblr-era social justice vibes. Both camps have ceded too much ground to the youngest and most intemperate of them. It's an Arendt-ian Crisis of Authority and the result has been terrible for everyone involved.
>Edgelords
Ugh... They are all edge but no point lol. Honestly, talking to some of them online makes me feel like I'm back on the Ebaumsworld forums or something.
Yet another example of the internet pervading discourse in a heretofore impossibly rapid and improbably degenerate manner.
Meanwhile Inglorious Bastards is here saying "Am I joke to you?"
LOL, just kidding obviously. But I totally agree, between Indiana Jones, The Blues Brothers, Marvel Comics (Capt America), Hellboy, Schindlers List, The Sound of Music, and other general media, I don't get the whole lets try to sane wash Nazi movement going on right now. Especially when it comes from people who should have a cursory knowledge of US history and know that Nazi's were sinking US merchant ships before we entered WW2, and after Pearl Harbor they declared war on the US a few days later. Like that is all basic US History stuff from high school. Either these people are ignorant and confidently incorrect, or they view everything as a counter culture and are knowingly engaging in bad faith simply because they hate all liberals. Frankly, I'm not even sure which is worse anymore.
Also an elder millennial, same here. WWII was very much in the popular consciousness when I was growing up, and any sympathy for the Nazis was unthinkable.
I've made this point before but there's a very big difference between "my grandparents told me these stories while I sat at their feet" for millennials and "the nerdy kids in my class liked this part in that one unit of 11th grade history" for Gen Z. That first degree connection and sense of pride in the achievement is a big deal and it's naturally dying out, and of course is always in tension with other generational memory anyway.
It did not survive the people who actually did it. Fascism became en vogue pretty much the second the proportion of the population made up of WW2 vets fell under 1%.
Because if they tried that shit when those guys were still young(ish), vital, and in charge of public spaces and private businesses, they would get Buzz Aldrin'ed.
Unfortunately this was predictable, it happened with Trump 43 too. I remember a lot of hateful groups felt emboldened to be more publicly racist. Aziz Ansari had a good SNL monologue on it:
"The problem is, there’s a new group. I’m talking about this tiny slice of people that have gotten way too fired up about the Trump thing for the wrong reasons. I’m talking about these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like, “We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore! We don’t have to pretend anymore! We can be racist again! Whoo!”
[MR. ANSARI PUMPS HIS FIST, THEN LOWERS IT INTO A NAZI SALUTE]
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! No, no! If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. You’ve got to go back to pretending. I’m so sorry we never thanked you for your service. We never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending. But you gotta go back to pretending."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/arts/aziz-ansari-monologue-transcript-snl.html
+10000
As I told you when we met, I think one reason I’m so appalled by Trump is that I’m old enough to have memories of Poland as a USSR client state, and Solidarity fighting for freedom. And while im far too young to remember WWII, there is very strong cultural memory in Poland in a way that there isn’t in the US. The war was fought on Polish soil. I have been to the museum at Auschwitz.
There's a somewhat goofy kinda true meme that floats around the right in particular that Strong Men make Good Times-> Good Times make Weak men -> Weak men make Hard times-> and Hard times make strong men. I guess the defense of it would just be that crisis creates high variance in both directions. Sometimes you get Buchanan/Chamberlain sometimes you get Lincoln/Churchill. But I think the more high brow version of this meme is when the seemingly elemental lessons of the past get just far enough away in the rear view mirror of history mistakes can repeat themselves.
"...a somewhat goofy kinda true meme...."
It's derived from the last words of Herodotus' Histories:
"[A Persian advisor says to Cyrus,] “Seeing that Zeus grants lordship to the Persian people, and to you, Cyrus, among them, let us, after reducing Astyages, depart from the little and rugged land which we possess and occupy one that is better. There are many such lands on our borders, and many further distant. If we take one of these, we will all have more reasons for renown. It is only reasonable that a ruling people should act in this way, for when will we have a better opportunity than now, when we are lords of so many men and of all Asia?”
Cyrus heard them, and found nothing to marvel at in their design; “Go ahead and do this,” he said; “but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.”
The Persians now realized that Cyrus reasoned better than they, and they departed, choosing rather to be rulers on a barren mountain side than dwelling in tilled valleys to be slaves to others."
Hdt. 9.122
I think the exact quote is from the sci-fi book "Those Who Remain", no?
And been pretty well debunked?
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
It's one of those things that sounds true until you actually try to map it to actual history. Sometimes it rings true, other times it doesn't. Plenty of "strong men" left their hard times completely broken and unable to reconstruct any kind of "good times". Sometimes what doesn't kill you doesn't make you strong, it just maims, disables, and ruins you psychologically.
Yeah, didn't Caesar invent it as propaganda to make him seem tough for beating up all those barbarian tribes?
Fascinating!
Not dissimilar to Ibn Khaldun as well.
Eh, not really true in my view, see e.g. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
Strauss-Howe generational theory aligns very neatly with that meme.
Within a degree of approximation it’s Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of history and ‘asabiyya as well… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah
Yes, it's a concept that's existed long though humanity.
Interesting, never encountered this before. It also pretty neatly tracks with the Stephen Skowronek Presidential Time cycles which I tend to be in favor of as an explanatory device. Here's hoping for the glorious 2030's on both fronts?
I'm pretty sick of the Fourth Turning by now, hopefully we're finally getting to that climatic time and resolution soon.
... Is this Wheel of Time
Chamberlain wasn't ideal but doesn't deserved to be lumped with Buchanan.
A bitter, dark irony: when I was in college, the consensus opinion was that, once the greatest generation died off (always with air quotes), we would finally prevail over racism.
Most of the great activists of the Civil Rights Era were of the Silent Generation...a generation that got derided for being racist itself as it aged.
One of my longstanding generational pet peeves is that Boomers have somehow handwaved that they were responsible for civil rights..... despite obviously being much too young. Lots of important civil rights battles happened in the 50s and early 60s! You guys probably weren't even in high school then! But they've cast this vague idea onto the generations younger than them, so the impression persists. I've come to the conclusion that they believe it themselves, despite the dates not lining up
And even the great women's rights movements of the 70s are still dominated by Silents--the oldest Boomers were only 32 at the middle of the decade, and the youngest only 15.
"For whatever excesses the Great Awokening may have had, once it ended there was always a risk of overcorrection in the other direction"
It's extremely disturbing to me that anybody would need that risk pointed out to them.
I think it's because people don't really understand how big that risk is. They think it's just a small possibility. Unfortunately I think the opposite is true. The more off-course and disruptive a political movement becomes, it will almost by necessity give rise to a counter-movement that is equally if not more disruptive in opposition. The question people should always ask themselves is, "what kind of opposition do I want to create?"
Well said. It’s something I find frustrating about all the “what should Democrats do?” takes - none of them seem to account for the counter-message. And in some cases they do not even account for the fact that in much of the country our messages aren’t even heard before being drowned out by the counters!
It’s like when a hypothetical policy (say, single payer healthcare) is popular with voters across the aisle - that doesn’t mean “if you pursue single payer healthcare Republican voters will be jazzed about it,” it means “Republicans will redouble their efforts to prevent single payer healthcare, if it ever becomes a substantive issue, and their voters will start to hate the idea.”
There just seems to be a lack of emotional acknowledgement that we are in a competition. That we don’t get to decide what happens on our own. That you can get outplayed! It requires keeping perspective, and maybe not thinking that “you lost” means “you did everything wrong.” You don’t go and tear down your entire lineup because Corbin Burnes shut you out, you say “damn, Burnes was really dealing today.” Sure, maybe there are issues with your lineup - but when you are evaluating what the outcome of a particular game is telling you, maybe account for the guy throwing 98 with crazy spin rather than deciding that your all-star hitters actually suck? You need more context to evaluate your own actual deficiencies.
In this case the political equivalent of Corbin’s nasty stuff is the Donald’s 50 years of successful self-mythologizing, his infinite financial backing from the oligarchy, and his unquestioned dominance over half the media landscape.
None of this should be read as fatalistic, and I understand that what appears, to us, to be the fundamental illegitimacy of our opposition makes it seem less acceptable. But we just ARE going to lose sometimes, and part of how we win is to make sure that when we do lose, it doesn’t scrap the whole project - unfortunately, that may be where we are right now.
"But we just ARE going to lose sometimes, and part of how we win is to make sure that when we do lose, it doesn’t scrap the whole project"
This is the exact problem with the instrumentalizing of Critical Theory/post-modern thinking in social justice rhetoric. Much of CT argued on the basis that much of our world is socially-constructed, had no empirical basis in fact, and was thus infinitely arguable and could not be taken for-granted. They did this because 1) it's kind of a truism, 2) it was necessary in order to undermine the existing order that sold itself as self-evident and unassailable.
The problem is that this is a nihilistic and self-defeating line of attack. If everything is socially-constructed, and power is the only concern, then there is no basis on which to build a political project. It's just "turtles all the way down". Trump, Bannon, and the "post-modern right" just decided to basically adopt the same rhetoric (often in bad faith) and use it against the left. They could do this because it is ultimately a cynical and paranoid view of society, and the moment was ripe for it. It was a rhetorical judo flip. And it happened because too many activists never stopped to consider "could this argument be easily turned against me?".
This is right on point. Well said. I am only 71 but all my life debating the pure evil of Hitler would be considered crazy. As it is and as Buchanan was when he started spouting that crap.
I think this gets causation backwards. The Great Awokening was in response to Trump. The softening position towards Naziism was already underway, and those forces became emboldened under him.
As David French observed, Trump makes everyone worse. Not just his allies, but his opponents as well.
Something I like to do when understanding contemporary viewpoints of World War II is look at the Gallup polling of the U.S. public (available on their website) and see what the people who were living through these events believed at time. At the outbreak of war in 1939 the U.S. public was against directly involving itself in the fighting, but notably a large majority believed that England and France should reject any offer for peace by Hitler in exchange for some or all of Poland.
In January 1940, 68% of Americans believed that the future safety of the U.S. depended on England winning the war, and in June 1940 (as the Blitzkrieg was steamrolling through France) 65% believed that "if Germany should defeat England and France in the present war, Germany would start a war against the United States sooner or later." By January 1941, even though the majority of Americans continued to oppose direct involvement, 79% felt that England should keep on fighting Germany rather than make peace, and by April fully 82% of Americans expected that the U.S. would eventually join the war in Europe.
The point one can draw from this, I think, is that even in the isolationist United States there was a clear sense that Germany was an aggressive and expansionist power with which peaceful co-existence was unlikely.
Even more remarkably to me, by April 1941 (before Barbarossa and well before Pearl Harbor) 68% of Americans believed that the US should enter the war if it was the only way to defeat Germany and Italy. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/gallup-polls-april-october-1941/
Really interesting point.
I've gotten a bit back into online video games and the level of slurs and vitriol was genuinely surprising. I think I had believed that even mean people online had sort of toned down that specific version of rudeness.
When I was younger, it was common to use"gay" as an insult, but eventually that stopped as norms shifted, but it seems like this type of open and sort of permorative bigotry is now kind of popular with some younger people.
In general, while I think it is common to invoke politeness as a reasoning for certain actions, it has, in the past decade or so, seemed more opportunistic than sincere. Meanness and rudeness towards acceptable targets(and everyone has their own acceptable targets) seem to be considered okay and even good.
The consensus that being polite is good seems to have been eroding for years and it doesn't seem poised to make a comeback.
And the more I hear about this Hitler guy, the less I like him.
Yes I think society has become broadly ruder for a variety of reasons
I think it's really the internet. I think there are a lot of Matt-aged dudes like me around here whose baptism with the internet was flame wars about Windows vs. Mac or N64 vs. Playstation, unresolvable conflicts that turned incredibly nasty. It turns out it had a lot more to do with the mode of communication than we thought, rather than just being the product of male adolescence (which utterly dominated the internet pre-broadband.)
I used to BBS. I did appreciate that mods were good at kicking people out when they crossed a line. That was most of the fun of being SysOp. Also telling that a feature for user discipline was added so early on.
> kicking people out when they crossed a line. That was most of the fun of being SysOp
We all know this, but it's kind of gauche for mods to say out loud that they get entertainment out of having power over the users.
Janny culture.
I also spend a lot of time on that internet, but it did feel like we had been trending towards improvement for a while before entering this new decline.
You know what Miles, you and I never did settle our dispute over N64 vs Playstation. It's been 30 years but we are going to settle this one way or another lol, just kidding. :).
Part of the reason I think discourse also seemed better back then on the internet is that there was a higher barrier of entry to using forums, or the internet and chat rooms in general than there is today. Nowadays everyone has a phone that comes preloaded with all the apps they need to be an asshole, back in the day you had to have a computer, and then you had to have internet service and then know how to access how to chat with others. It was just way harder to communicate, nowadays there is a lower barrier of entry and there are so many people who have an overwhelming need to be heard, validated, etc.
Not to sound like a 1990s Republican, but character counts, and leadership matters. Donald Trump acts and talks like a poorly adjusted high-school age boy and never faces any consequences. That kind of thing trickles down into the culture.
Is it just a Trump/Covid thing or is it more than that?
Politeness seems to be thought of as cringey.
Rightwing anti-politeness has been around as anti-PCness for a while.
We now have some Leftwing version with emotional labor/tolerence paradox/Trump norm errosions.
It just seems hard to build a functional liberal society where people view basic day-to-day kindness as an unreasonable burden.
Matt and I both came of age in the 1990s, which of course was renowned for edginess, but it very much felt like a different type where it was punching up against a stodgy old type of bigotry. They sometimes crossed wires with what was then called PC attitudes. It seemed to reach its natural conclusion in the aughts when most of that stodginess died out, and then in the middle of the 2010s came the Great Awokening and its backlash, which again feels much different.
I sort of understand the backlash idea in a political sense, but the societal turn against politeness in a sort of ideological but non-political way is what confuses me.
Politeness, like almost anything, can sometimes go too far. Sometimes people need tough love. Nonetheless, "don't be an asshole" is a pretty regular virtue to aim for.
I agree. We see some of this in the old "geek social fallacies" post.
https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
"which of course was renowned for edginess, but it very much felt like a different type where it was punching up against a stodgy old type of bigotry."
I think that many young people today would describe their behavior the exact same as this - just a different stodgy old type of bigotry. I also came of age in the 90s and while the rebels have changed means and targets against who they are rebelling against, the *attitude* feels remarkably similar.
I think there's a workplace version of this that's tied to the revenge of the bosses. One outgrowth of MeToo was a more general "no asshole bosses" idea - ie prohibitions against yelling at subordinates, unreasonable demands, etc (like the Klobuchar stuff). The backlash to this has been part of the tech turn to the right.
Surprisingly, the heads of large corporations would like to be able to asshole bosses and still be socially accepted.
It is outlier driven, and a survivor bias thing. Most senior execs either don't want to be assholes (in the general veneer of politeness sense, they may still be Machiavellian) or would be fired if they did something that crossed the HR line. But some high-performing leaders of massive growth tech companies have both led their companies to great success and been assholes. Is that causative or just happenstance? I might differ per person. And I suspect that more assholes just don't succeed. But those that remain look like lightning to be bottled, rather than non-repeatable one-offs.
Definitely, though there also was an outgrowth of "anything that invades my ability to shirk work is assholish," which was especially problematic in work from home situations. Probably more of a "this is why we can't have nice things" observation than anything else.
I agree and it's why I don't love your formulation above about bending over backwards to be extra polite to historically disadvantaged groups. On it's own it's fine, but in an increasingly rude online addled society the one way directional politeness doesn't seem sustainable. Way too many people think "punching up" is doing justice.
I understand this complaint; we see a similar thing with privilege discussions,, reducing sympathy for some groups, but it seems less like being "extra polite" to some group is the issue than just the shift to the idea that we don't need to be polite unless there is an underlying reason to do so.
I think this crops up when people talk about just treating everyone as a human, where the question becomes, how do you think you should treat fellow humans?
I remember an old episode of "House" where they talk about House not being a misogynist, he is a misanthrope, with the implication being that misantropy is preferable but House being a jerk to everyone does kind of suck even if its not bigotry related.
Omg I know!! I tried out the multiplayer function of Civ VI and it was a nightmare in there. Like 25% of people's screen names had the words dong, dick, or cock. Everyone assumed I was a man so I added the word "lady" to my screen name. Then once I joined a game with that screen name and some guy asked me to leave and sent a barrage of messages along the lines of "why did you pick a girl name? Are you a fag? Leave fag. Pussy fag." And then a lot of racial slurs that don't even apply to me.
Who ARE the guys in there that talk like that? How old are they? Are they okay?
I don't know who they are but they are not Okay, especially if they are adults. But probably some of them are 13 year old boys and that's an age when some fraction of "mostly normal" boys will genuinely enjoy that kind of stupid crap.
When I hear them in voice chat they are way older than you would think.
100% agreed, they sound all like adults to me...
I can't even play any multiplayer game on console anymore without muting the lobby. Like I'm married and have a kid, if my wife heard me saying some of the things these adults say to each other while I was playing video games she'd probably think I had a stroke or needed to be medicated.
I don't know how people who live with others and should be playing video games as a hobby to relax, genuinely seem to get off on pissing people off they don't know online. It's quite a sad state of affairs.
The screen name thing is super weird. I've been surprised at how many are sort of weirdly horny/fetishy recently. Sort of a separate issue, but it makes it feel less comfortable to play a game.
I assumed it was just kids but some of the voice chat people saying this stuff seem to be at least late teens or 20s so its adult men just being really anti-social.
I haven't had the experience as a woman, which sounds like its own type of hell but I have gotten slurs that don't really apply to me which makes it feel like its a slurs for the sake of slurs kind of rudeness/edginess/whatever that really makes things terrible.
Is this new? I've avoided playing online with strangers with open chat for the last 20 years.
Racist or not they can be real jerks.
See this comic from 2004:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies
It feels like it is making a comeback compared to maybe 10 years ago.
Perhaps I am just older and it feels worse to me now.
There was a brief reprieve when social media and other companies were worried about the toxic environments they had enabled and started more aggressively monitoring communities. Now they've pretty much given up and it's showing almost immediately.
I don't know about games, but social media has pretty much reverted back to the wild days of its birth, and might be even worse now.
One game I played recently notifies you that it records voice chat to help create a safe environment but hasn't banned any of the dozens of people I have reported for using 6 letter slurs with "gg" in the middle.
"We have reviewed your complaint and concluded that the reported behavior does not violate our community guidelines" energy.
My son is in middle school and I was unpleasantly surprised to learn from him that “that’s so gay”, “you’re so gay”, “don’t be gay”, “is that your boyfriend?” etc. are fully back in vogue as middle school boy insults
And the war against "retard" was lost in the blink of an eye.
That's unfortunate to hear. It really did feel like we moved away from that stuff for a while.
All these WWII revision histories fail to account for the fact the Hitler was going to invade the Soviet Union no matter what the UK and France did. Somehow modern Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers have written Slav-hatred out of Nazi political philosophy.
Something else that they miss was just how utterly shocking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact was when it was revealed. It made no sense whatsoever given what was known at the time, and as you say, what would become known. It provided all the more reason to stop Hitler's advances with Poland, even if it was not known at the time that the Pact had Stalin doing the same.
Yes, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact showed the cynicism and mendacity of both Hitler and Stalin. Both of them justified their rule by pointing to the dangers of fascism/communism but were quick to cut a deal when it suited them to carve up Poland.
The logic for Molotov-Ribbentrop is the same as that of the other Soviet NAP - the one with Japan.
Stalin's expectation was that there would be a recurrence of WW1 style trench warfare that would weaken all of the 'capitalist powers', which in turn would allow the Red Army to grow in strength and sweep up Europe once the time was right.
This was exactly what happened in East Asia - Stalin was able to goad the Japanese into getting sucked into a quagmire in China, which weakened not just them but also the KMT. This in turn hugely empowered the CCP and set in motion the Cold War in Asia.
This doesn't happen in Europe as the Nazis beat the Allies too quickly, and Stalin doesn't change his plans in time to anticipate Barbarossa in 1941
both parties to it planned to break it. they were equally cynical
Germany also fully intended to go to war with the UK and France by 1941, and had based their military production and development schedule upon that expectation. The idea that the UK and France could have just safely chilled while Germany and Russia fought each other was not in the cards.
Yeah, the UK and France didn't mess up by declaring war on Germany over Poland, they did it by not taking an earlier opportunity to strangle Hitler's expansionism when it would've been easier.
I low key disagree in that Hitler's dream was to expand east, not west.
Had France and Britain really wanted to stay out of it, and completely ceded all of Eastern and Central Europe to the German sphere, Hitler would have happily let them be and invaded the Soviet Union.
While I agree that German plans for western Europe did not resemble the genocidal conquest envisioned for the East, Hitler certainly desired the economic and political subjugation of western Europe in a manner that would have first required the defeat of France.
The alligator would have turned back to the West after he’d finished digesting the East, though; that’s the underlying strategy of Britain since at least the Napoleonic Wars, to keep one power from capturing all the victory points on the continent.
His goal for France was to put it in a subservient position relative to Germany, which maybe doesn't fully require war, but certainly makes war extremely likely.
It is awkward because Nazi racial classifications don't really make sense to anyone today, because they were nonsensical. That the Nazis viewed Chinese and Japanese as their equals but the neighbouring similar looking Poles as completely alien, seems strange in a way that even neo-Nazis can't defend.
The alien is just alien. You can hate the familiar.
Ibram Kendi in his book Antiracism talked about how he used to believe in five races, Black, White, Red, Brown, and Yellow, not so far from the Nazi worldview. He says he no longer believes it, but the logical conclusion of the policies he favors is consistent with him still believing it, and leaves unanswered the question of how to classify and what to do with people who aren't perfect specimens of one of the archtypical five.
"... he used to believe in five races, Black, White, Red, Brown, and Yellow...."
He what?? I never read the book, so did not know that about Kendi. It does not raise him in my estimation.
Didn't he also believe the Whites were transported by alien spacecraft? There is a point where it stops being bad ideology and bad science and just becomes being nuts.
Black nationalism has picked up a lot of truly insane stuff of which “black people built the pyramids” is only a taste, and white people generally won’t be exposed to because those groups are legitimately self segregationist and won’t talk to white people. I think most people know who the Black Hebrew Israelites are, and that’s one example, but it gets even more extreme.
Frankly, just given how few black people there are in this country, I’m surprised those groups can exist over the decades. But they do!
I get lots of really odd misogynistic Black nationalist propaganda about how the Mayans and Chinese cultures are descended from African culture promoted in my Facebook feed. I am a White guy in London so I have no idea why.
"Frankly, just given how few black people there are in this country, I’m surprised those groups can exist over the decades. But they do!"
The US has more black people than Ghana, Mozambique, Cameroon, Niger. More than 44 of the 54 countries on the continent of Africa.
The Black Hebrew Israelites come from the Nadir of Race Relations, like some other faith groups like the Nation of Islam and Moorish Science where people were trying to create a unique religious experience for African-Americans. They failed- most African-Americans joined southern baptist churches, and even among the non-Christian faithful, actual Islam generally reigns over the other faith traditions.
That being said, the zany shit Moorish Science people or NoI or Black Hebrew Israelites say and do plays very well on the internet.
I grew up in Europe, and while Nazi racial classifications don't make sense to me either, hating the neighbor you have fought for centuries more than someone many thousands of miles away absolutely makes sense.
Americans put Germans and Slavs (or Germans and Greeks) in the same group, and that makes absolutely no sense to me (a non-American) given all the history and cultural grievances of the continent.
(I haven't found any racial classification system that makes sense yet.)
It's a result of the history of mass immigration. Classifying Europeans differently based on nationality and ethno-linguistic groups was common in the United States into the first third or so of the 20th century. However after a couple of generations and the ill fit of these variations into America's older white/black/red divide results in any distinction being reduced to appearance and cultural signifiers.
A lot of people the KKK and people like HP Lovecraft would have looked down upon are now 'white enough' for today's sympathizers with racialist ideology. Ironically many of them probably share significant ancestry comprised of just those people. The silliness of this view of things, from the right or the left, is pretty easy to break down with even a cursory understanding of relatively recent history.
This is my regular reminder that the KKK hates Catholics too. So all these right-wing thinkers who have converted to Catholicism (e.g., Vance, Douthat) may be surprised at where they are classified.
It's weird how quickly the US got past the whole Catholic/Protestant thing.
My father told me that when he was growing up (early 1960s, Chicago suburbs) this was a huge deal. All the Catholic children went to Catholic schools, and it was common knowledge among public school children (Protestant, Jewish, and some other random ones) that the catholic schools all had armories in them because the Catholics were getting ready for some religious war in the US.
We've only ever had two Catholic presidents: JFK and Biden. JFK was a huge deal and there was substantial concern among right-wing Protestants that he would take direct orders from the Pope. Biden had a different problem where many right-wing Catholics said he wasn't a "real Catholic" because of his political positions. Interestingly, right-wing Catholics tend to be fine with the death penalty views of Republicans even though they are expressly against church doctrine.
I don't really see how that is an attack on Vance, a group he has never had anything to do with, that stopped being relevant long before he was born, that would oppose his marriage also hates his religion.
The paradigms of the past don't really make sense to modern ears, in 1928 the KKK campaigned for a non-White GOP vice presidential candidate because the Democratic candidate was an English ancestry catholic they also recruited men and bought for a campaign for secular socialism in Mexico.
The right-wing movement in the US is traditionally associated with evangelical Protestant Christianity. To the extent Vance and Douthat want to harness that energy, they should be careful to make sure they don't fall afoul of the religious issues here. Catholicism has always been a minority religion in the US. If they want to get very religious, then they will come into conflict with Protestant movements. If they want to combat secularism and institute soft Francoism, then they are struggling against the increasing secularism of the US. Either way, they should be careful.
Does the modern KKK hate Catholics? They might, still, but even if so that might make them unusual among the many other hate-groups that are at least as influential as they are.
I get a little confused by statements like this.
Like, I get that [random Balkan subgroup A’s] hatred of [random Balkan subgroup B] is a lot more *salient* and *motivating* than whatever they might feel about Laotians or Navajos.
But surely they will grudgingly accept that at a basic phenotypical level, an Evil B Person still physically resembles them more than someone far away? (As, indeed, genetic clustering and other analyses will confirm).
More generally, there’s an annoying equivocation between saying that racial and ethnic categories have fuzzy boundaries, that edge cases exist, that “lumping” and “splitting” approaches yield different results - all of which are true - to saying that they have no basis in reality whatsoever and a Greek is no closer to a German than to a Zimbabwean - which is false.
It gets more weird than this, as the US has tried to fit old racial classifications to today. "White" includes Irish and Egyptian people, for example. "Black" includes Somali and Jamaican. "American Indian or Alaska Native" is of course a huge category.
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/technical-documentation/questionnaires-and-instructions/questionnaires/2020-informational-questionnaire-english_DI-Q1.pdf
I think it would be interesting to just have a free response box for race/ethnicity; I think it would capture some things not here.
Hating your neighbours makes sense, the Nazi classification system was based on hating 1/3 of your neighbours, seeing another 1/3 as equals and the other 1/3 as bad but not that bad, while having very strong views on people thousands of miles away.
On racial classifications you can use modern cluster PCA charts if you need to identify groups for organ donations comparability etc
"the Nazis viewed Chinese and Japanese as their equals"
Eh, no, not really. That was a backtrack by Hitler to help facilitate the German relationship with the GMD in China and then later the Japanese. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler explicitly described the Japanese as a "culture bearing," but *not* "culture creating" race -- meaning they were capable of preserving "culture" that was bestowed upon them, but not generating major advancements in science, technology, art, etc. (The hierarchy in Hitler's telling from highest to lowest being "culture creating," "culture bearing," and "culture destroying.")
The Nazi foreign ministry had to finesse that later on, which is how you get references to "little brown supermen" and such, but I think it's very safe to say that Nazi ideologists like Rosenberg and Goebbels did not actually consider any East Asian populations to be the equals of those ethnicities they classified as "Aryan" (which included high caste Indians and a number of other ethnic groups that many 21st Century Americans would say weren't "white").
Nazis today admire Putin, whereas I'm fairly certain Putin despises Hitler.
Putin lost two brothers in the Siege of Leningrad.
I don't really feel Nazis and modern neo-Nazis share that much apart from conspiratorial anti-semitism. An American far right teen posting memes isn't likely to be upset about WW1 or be an ardent German irrendist in Alsace or Poland and they have completely different definitions of race.
Is Putin that old?!
They might have been children not soldiers when they died at Leningrad. It was a brutal war for Soviet citizens of all ages.
Maybe they were his much older brothers or half-brothers who died before he was born?
One brother was born 12 years before him and died aged 2 in the siege, I am not sure exactly when his eldest brother died but it was in childhood. They were full brothers.
Putin was born in like 1950.
Many Americans don’t know how brutal WW2 was for Russians. Look at the fatalities by country. Russians don’t like Nazi’s.
I wouldn't be surprised if it went the other way too, gives the long history of racism between the Chinese and Japanese (and Korean).
"Somehow modern Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers have written Slav-hatred out of Nazi political philosophy."
Some years ago I decided to explore the stormfront forum, and this really struck me. There were a lot of people proudly sharing their Slavic heritage! I spent a while digging and eventually found a thread where someone asked how other users reconciled their acceptance of Slavs, their support for Hitler, and Hitler's thoughts about Slavs. Responses initially tried to hand wave the problem away, but the original poster really pushed back --- providing a lot of direct quotes from Hitler and refusing to have the contradiction ignored. After a lot of argument, the final response seemed to be roughly that, yes, Hitler was anti-Slav --- at least initially. However, he soften his anti-Slav stance over time (I'm not convinced this was true, but people did argue this, and perhaps there's some truth to it?), and Hitler had indeed gotten it wrong.
It seems that Nazis have really expanded the tent to include all white people. As crazy as it sounds, they may even be opening the door to Jews slightly. To quote Dylann Roof in his manifesto: "I am of the opinion that the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the jewish identity, then they wouldnt cause much of a problem." This absolutely isn't a common opinion among white supremacists (Roof notes as much), but it's also not unheard of, which I think is kind of nuts.
I swear this parallels the mentality behind the tariffs.
No, they don’t. They range from viewing the Nazis as better than the Soviets (a la Patton’s “we may have been fighting the wrong side all along”) to viewing that fight as not England’s business and certainly not worth wiping out ~500K British people, along with much of the national wealth and the Empire over. A “let the two evil superpowers fight” sort of view.
It's this quote by Harry Truman, minus the last clause:
"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
To the extent that there is any single iota of sanity in this crap, it’s that the Nazis’ feet of clay were wildly heavier than the Soviets’, so it’s vaguely possible to envision a world in which the Germans win out on the Continent only to implode by the end of the 1960’s, leaving the world to the United States and co to remake in her favored image.
It doesn’t seem to enter into the revisionists’ thinking that the much more insane Germans might have taken everyone with them in the collapse, nor that the US would have had little more luck in the 1960’s of this world than it did in the 1990’s in our world at the whole “remaking” thing.
I grant your premise, but it only strengthens the argument that Britain really screwed up. Britain’s long term foreign policy is the European balance of power. Allowing Russia and Germany savage each other and subsidizing whoever was losing would have been a fine strategy.
Except Britain's only interest wasn't balancing power. It's hard get your head into it from today's vantage point, but a lot of people in Britain genuinely saw themselves and their Empire as a force for good in the world, bringing light to dark places. Rudyard Kipling is cringe today, but wasn't always, nor William Wilburforce, compared to their contemporaries rather than compared to today. Many British were genuinely appalled by King Leopold's actions in the Congo , for example. Of course, reality is messy, and motivations often a mix of altruism, averice, and ambition. But that doesn't mean good motives don't exist and actually affect behavior.
And of course the “jewel in the crown” of India (& Burma & Ceylon) was all but lost by the end of the thirties.
not obvious that’s true.
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about (on this and many other issues). Even a fairly simple reading of the situation would inform you that by around 1920 independence was inevitable, and the only question was when and how (eg a violent uprising such as Algeria or a peaceful resolution as what happened). Indian nationalism (setting aside the ML, which had similar demands though smaller) had developed and take root to the point where the populace wasn’t willing to countenance a lack of self-rule (literally swarajya), so the only way for the Raj to remain in the empire was to give it equal representation - which would turn it into “India plus some random islands in northwest Europe” which the British wouldn’t countenance.
independence can take different forms. contrast canadian and us independence from britain.
If you observe the British public’s reaction to Amritsar… yes, it is.
But the Raj hung on throughout the inter war period. It gradually assimilated Indians into the civil service. Indians composed half to the civil service by world war two.
Eventually, there might have been an Indian viceroy.
I admit that Britain had a very real sense of national honor, which compelled to to go to war over the political status of Danzig. However, taking principled and violent stands based upon honor when one lacks the means to accomplish one’s goals is generally called suicide.
Well, we won in the end didn't we? Ok that involved a bet on the USA joining the war. But it was a bet that proved correct!
And I'm not sure that I really buy the idea that WWII *caused* the downfall of the British empire. It might have accelerated it, but most of the trends that caused it were happening before WWII.
The Indian National Congress was becoming a powerful force in the subcontinent. With the jewel gone, the justification for some other colonies starts to look weaker. And India was far from the only country where native elites (often educated in the European metropole) were creating popular nationalist movements.
Similarly at home, mass democracy and the rise of Labour meant that governments were more likely to see social welfare at home as a more important use of funds rather than defending colonies.
America would still eventually be economically and militarily dominant and unlikely to simply accept Britain's empire and impediments to its own economic interests.
Overall, WWII benefited Britain - I don't think the benign, peaceful and pro-free trade climate that proliferated post-WWII is likely after a Nazi-Soviet scorched-earth war.
In 1939, no one expected the type of blitzkrieg victory the Germans got in 1940. Everyone assumed the French army would acquit itself well.
They didn't fear losing to Germany, but rather a repeat of the horrific bloodletting of WWI.
the worst nazi apologists were the french right in 1939-40, but they couldn’t be wished away. watch la regle de jeux and you’ll see this lampooned even before the war began
Sure, but this doesn't seem germane to my point. The collapse of the French army was a complete shock.
I'd take exactly the opposite perspective. Where Britain really messed up is submitting meekly over Czechoslovakia the previous year and not being willing to go to war with the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and France fully on board and Mussolini distancing himself from Hitler. It's only after Munich that collective security fell apart and Stalin started looking for new arrangements. Nazi Germany would have been surrounded. It would have been a much shorter and easier war, with no Holocaust, and tens of millions of Europeans would have lived.
How would Britain refusing to go to war with Nazi Germany, or striking a peace deal with the Nazis after the fall of France, have made it more likely that Russia and Germany would fight? If anything, Britain's decision to continue the war with the Nazis hastened the Nazi-Soviet war, since Hitler's big, dumb strategic idea in 1941 was that the British were clinging to the hope of American and/or Soviet entry into the war, and if the Germans could knock out the Soviets quickly, the British would finally be forced to the table.
When Napoleon defeated one opponent, he moved on to the next. Ditto Alexander. That’s was conquerors do. Also, Stalin had his own ambitions in eastern Europe which made a German Russian war inevitable.
To clarify my comment here: if 'what conquerors do' is 'move on to the next opponent' then I think we can be skeptical that Britain could have sat on the sidelines smugly enjoying the destruction of Europe without fear, regardless of the morality.
hitler was less of an existential threat to britain than napoleon because his navy was way too small. villeneuve brought more ships and many more guns to trafalger than nelson.
Germany had plenty of ship-building capacity and a powerful airforce. If they'd been left in control of Europe for any length of time, Blohm and Voss would have been churning out Bismarck-class battleships and bigger, and there'd be Focke-Wulf and Messerschmitt fighters and Junkers and Dornier bombers crawling all over the Channel.
And the British were well aware of the threat of German naval shipbuilding capacity. They'd only just barely built enough battleships to outbuild a Germany that didn't control Austria or Czechoslovakia or Poland in 1905-1914.
British shipbuilding after the Depression was weaker, while Germany, with the conquests it was adding, was stronger. Britain was rightly concerned that it couldn't sustain the naval dominance if Germany was allowed to spend a few years in peaceful control of Europe.
Germany could - and did - inflict a large amount of damage on Britain without posing an 'existential threat'.
Never mind all that destroying Britain's cities from the air and starving them via naval blockade.
That doesn't answer my question. You characterization of the British "screwing up" makes sense only if you can point to Britain's decision to go to war with the Nazis in 1939, and keep fighting in 1940, as somehow delaying a war between the Nazis and the Soviets. And there's just no reason to think that's the case; Stalin was very much aware of how the capitalist powers like Britain and France could benefit from the Soviets solving the Nazi problem for them, and was very much committed to not doing so (hence the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and his "pull their chestnuts from the fire" speech). The evidence is pretty overwhelming that British policy actually hastened the Nazi-Soviet war by goading Hitler into his idiotic "beat the British by crushing the Soviets" strategy.
But could Russia have savaged Germany? The USSR was highly dependent on US supplies to sustain its fight against Hitler. Are you assuming that would have occurred? And if so, why? We barely helped Great Britain when we were still legally neutral in the war.
Napoleon took Moscow and still regretted making war on Russia. Retreat beyond the urals was always an option. In any event, Germany would not have emerged stronger.
I suspect Hitler would have been fine with the USSR retreating behind the Urals. Holding the European part of the USSR was enough for him. And Japan almost certainly would have entered the war and taken vast chunks of the Asian USSR.
How that would not have made Germany stronger is a curious conclusion to draw from this alternative history.
britain would have been more able to resist with france intact and could have armed while the totalitarians killed one another
Why would France have been intact? In what scenario does Germany not totally defeat France?
And what does Britain "arming" mean? They're going to invade the Continent and defeat Germany by themselves?
Honestly incredible that you write this article which is both morally, intellectually, and pragmatically correct, and still some of the first comments are WELL AKSHUALLY WE NEED TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT RACIAL DIFFERENCES OTHERWISE BLAH BLAH BLAH and also GEE BRITAIN REALLY BLUNDERED BY DEFENDING POLAND BECAUSE AKSHUALLY
I'm not going to pretend to be nice to this person. I don't care how enlightened "I'm just being up ideas I cannot believe you'd be this irrational I'm just trying to talk sense" you are trying to be.
You know the story about goat fuckers? The guy who gets mad because he fucks a goat as a joke and no one likes the joke and just remembers him as a goat fucker? Articulating race science and parroting Nazi talking points on why it would have been better AKSHUALLY to have aligned with the fucking Nazis against the Soviets makes you a goat fucker. And also it's incorrect. No I won't debate you on this. Fuck off.
Comments like this are the reason we got a Republican party headed by Trump instead of Mitt Romney.
There are great arguments against "race realism": John from FL's downthread response to Abbot is a terrific example, and succinct.
Your comment makes it look like there aren't any actual arguments against it. It makes liberals look like babies that can't handle disagreement, like a high-school clique that thinks everyone else will do anything to join them: it projects intellectual entitlement combined with social superiority and emotional immaturity.
I disagree that the Republican Party abandoning norms has anything to do with talking in disgusted terms about racists. We were disgusted by racists in the 90s, too, but Pat Buchanan didn’t take over the Republican Party.
No, I'm disgusted by racists too. The problem is continuously expanding boundaries of what counts as *-ism while also turning up the emotional temperature, engaging in embarrassing acts of moral exhibitionism and enlisting others in a crusade to ostracize someone.
There was plenty of that going on in the 90s, but it was mostly the religious right.
I think the scene in 12 Angry Men where the other 11 characters all turn their backs on the racist is effective and not contemptible, and I see this reaction to Abbott as parallel to that.
Let me take another stab at this: communities have norms and they are going to do their thing. If that thing involves expelling members from society instead of trying to persuade or rehabilitate them, the community should not be surprised when the expelled members band together, radicalize, and act in concert.
Okay so my 12 Angry Men analogy was a good one! In that scene, a character is arguing for the accused’s guilt based on his ethnic background. Rather than arguing the point, the other 11 jurors turn their back on the racist, leaving him to sputter on hatefully until he runs out of steam, at which point a character says “now shut your mouth, and don’t open it again.”
Obviously the fact that it’s presented as good in a movie doesn’t mean it’s actually good. My point is that even at that time there was not a norm in favor of “debate everyone, exclude no one.” And I think the idea that such exclusion kicked way up at some point and that led Trump to take over the Republican Party is underdeveloped. I think the simpler narrative is that Dennis Duffy Republicans—“socially conservative, economically liberal”—were a huge Republican constituency but didn’t have an avatar in Romney/Jeb Bush’s Republican Party, and Trump was that for them.
This is not just directed at you, but in general I would like to see people play the “this is why Trump won” card much less in these comments. It strikes me as solipsistic, frankly. Blog comment fighting is not very consequential!
I haven't read 12 Angry Men in decades, so I can't weigh in on whether or not their behavior is contemptible, but it sounds like a weak analogy that doesn't fit the situation here very well.
Fair enough (I was thinking of the movie btw). I’m really unclear about what you’re saying the link is between being mean to David Abbott and Trump taking over the Republican Party (wasn’t that decided in the GOP primary? Were a lot of voters refugees from liberal blog comments?) so maybe that led me to make a poor analogy.
People are welcome to read books about the fundamental instability and unviability of Nazi political economy if they want, but I do think the strongest, shortest argument against the Nazis is what we did to Dresden.
This sounds like a strange gnostic macho witticism. Do I understand you correctly?
You could call it witticism except that I'm a very impulsive, angry person who tends to act on these kinds of impulses when someone actually puts up swastikas around me.
Ken White will always be celebrated for his excellent Rule Of Goats.
The joke is much older than Ken White's use of it. I heard it from some laborers on a construction site in 1979, lamenting that they could not call themselves "bricklayers," even though they had performed the act. It was old even then.
Did it specifically mention goats and fucking back then?
"...specifically mention goats and fucking...."
Using those very words.
In that case, I shall invoke a Simpsons Did It: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Violence_Died
"Okay, maybe my dad did steal Itchy, but so what? Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing the Honeymooners, we wouldn't have the Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sgt. Bilko, they'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney. Your honor, you take away our right to steal ideas, where are they gonna come from?"
Use the block button. Be at peace 🧘
I hate the idea of blocking people, but it's a million times better than the OP.
I have blocked one person. Well, two people. Well, sometimes it's two people sharing one account, but sometimes it's just one of the two people commenting...
Let's just say this is an account for whom "he/she/they" is literally the most apt set of pronouns. Like many individuals who use "he/she/they" as pronouns, he/she/they is/are completely insufferable. I think they've popped up here once, but mostly they're on Jesse Singal's substack, where he/she/they basically aggressively demand(s) that people personally apologize for wokeness driving him/her/them out of the Democratic Party, usually while invoking one or more of his/her/their their 14 (or so) grandchildren.
He/she/they suck(s), is what I'm trying to say, and I am losing precisely nothing by blocking him/her/them.
I understand. I'm sure I will get to that point some day, and I'd block an outright spam account in a heartbeat.
For what it's worth, you're right - the account you're talking about rarely pops up here (though IIRC, they had a pretty solid presence for about a week in the runup to the election).
Yeah, I sympathize with the desire to hear all viewpoints. But you can't have freedom of speech without also having freedom to not listen. (Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach)
I agree 100%, I just think it's a tragic self-own.
Also Substack's implementation makes it especially egregious, since not only does it hide the other person from you, it hides you *and all your respondents* from the other person..
you are ignorant of manners and history in equal measure. stop your tent shrinking
I’m sure a tent without the tiny subset of “parochial lawyers with weird sexual hangups” would fare just fine
i have very few sexual hang ups. perhaps that is the issue
Glad you saw this
Believe it or not, I actually think the last two weeks of tariff insanity actually ties in to your post today. Because the market volatility we’re seeing is an extraordinary window into the worldview of way too many investors, Wall Street GOP donors and quite frankly “Normies” at large. Namely; large, large swaths of people just didn’t believe, 10 years later, that Trump is as bad as Progressives and Never Trumpers say he is. It’s how you can get people who would normally never vote for someone who has bragged about sexual assault or been convicted of a sex crime to ignore the same stuff with Trump. It’s how you can get supposedly sophisticated finance guys to vote for someone who over and over again espouses the stupidest economic policies this side of Peronism.
And it’s how you can get voters who normally would reject Pat Buchanan style bigotry and antisemitism to vote for someone who believes in Pat Buchanan style bigotry or at least empowers those who do.
So that begs the question. How do you end up with this dynamic. I think it’s in part the power of right wing media; specifically the fact that right wing media considers it its job to be cheerleaders for GOP and conservatism and media mostly consumed by democrats consider it more more important to be “balanced”. Think it’s in part of actual conservative takeover of various social media organs and news sources. And I think (an underrated one) too many elected politicians and media think their personal social lives would be more disrupted by super progressives than by super right wingers.
And yet all of what I lay out above, while I think true and has contributed to our current dynamic….feels still inadequate. How is it, even now, large segments of the investors class still doesn’t quite “believe” that Trump is this clueless about trade for example (hence the wild swings upward on merest hint Trump might back off. Call it the “come on, no way he really is this bad” bet)?
I think you are correct in this analysis and this explains 80%+ of the situation. But I think Little-Boy-Cried-Wolfism on the part of the American left concerning prior Republican presidential candidates/Presidents plays an important role too. I mean you can still find people in *2025* explaining that Reagan was a fascist!
But the Republicans were generally wolves. Reagan's legacy can be debated. Bush the Elder was truly a good man and at least a not bad President. Nixon was heinous in some real ways: interfering with the Vietnam peace process thereby quite possibly extending the war for his own political gains, and then committed crimes in office for the same venal reasons. Bush I, notwithstanding that in contrast to the current guy he looks like a model of good humanity, did start an unnecessary war on terrible or made up grounds plus authorized widespread spying on Americans, and of course there's Trump.
I'm very willing to agree that various Republican Presidents were *bad*, whether just measured relative to Democratic policy objectives (e.g., George H.W. Bush) or objectively (e.g., George W. Bush). What I'm referring to is the catastrophism that many people on the left broadcast about them. If you want to say, "Reagan was bad because he cut social welfare spending," that's a 100% legitimate line of criticism if you think social welfare spending shouldn't be cut! I'm talking about the people literally saying stuff in the 1980s like, "Reagan will end democracy in America," and then who've continued to act even after he left office as though Reagan governed as some sort of blood-soaked tyrant.
"plus authorized widespread spying on Americans"
If Obama had treated Snowden differently I'd be more in agreement here, but Obama seems to have kept this stuff up.
(That is, I really didn't like this under W., but it doesn't seem unique to Republicans)
> Nixon was heinous in some real ways
Price controls!
Not what I was thinking, but sure.
I have been listening to Republicans tell me Dems are going to take away our guns for decades. There seems to be more crying wolf on the other side
(1) I made no claim about who cries wolf more? The relevant point is that in 2016 numerous people almost certainly tuned out warnings about Trump's authoritarian leanings because they've also heard that said about every preceding Republican candidate for decades.
(2) There was absolutely a strong contingent in the Democratic party for decades that favored massively greater restrictions on private gun ownership. (Dianne Feinstein was infamous for this and she wasn't some backbench state house member.) While Democrats have moved away from that in the past 20 years or so, that's very clearly in large part because polling showed they kept losing voters over the issue!
My sense is that there is a broad idea that Trump will cut taxes and not do much else and they’re fine with that. They think the system is strong enough to stop Trump if he goes too far.
Except he's demonstrably shown he's trying to do more than just cut taxes even before this latest tariffs insanity?
I mean I will say, the fact that the dollar has plummeted and the 10-year sky rocketed is a blaring (And scary) signal that enough investors have gotten the message that Trump is dangerously unhinged and that even if various Wall St. titans and insiders have convinced him to at least somewhat back off a bit, that there's clearly less restraint on this man than the first term and that he's clearly a crazy person. Basically, (and I"ve read a version of this recently), there's a "Mad King" premium now being priced in to Treasury debt which is scary AF.
And yet today, the market is booming on the news there is tariff exceptions announced. The nature of these exceptions should actually move the market in the opposite direction. It's clearly a corrupt bargain with Apple; talk about a terrible signal regarding how economic policy will be conducted going forward. Second, it still means the tariffs in place are utterly illogical as they are. Based on the morning shows yesterday it's extremely clear that none of the economic advisors around Trump actually know what the message is supposed to be or the purpose or even what's going to happen next. And oh yeah, it's just a 90 day pause, are we doing this dance again in July?
Like at a certain point, there's just a delusion going on.
I said before and I'm going to start saying this over and over again. A huge reason that conmen succeed is that most people don't think they can be conned. They think they're too smart or sophisticated to be conned. And maybe more important, most people when conned will feel too much pride to admit they've been taken. I think it explains a lot, I mean a lot of why so many people refuse to see what's in front of their face when it comes to Trump.
" And maybe more important, most people when conned will feel too much pride to admit they've been taken."
I agree that this is probably the more important one. Admitting (even to yourself) that you've been conned/made a potentially bad decision is hard.
Any outs like "well this ended up poorly but it was still the correct decision based on available information" will tend to be taken. (And that out isn't necessarily _wrong_, you can bet 1:1 on something that is actually 90% likely and still lose 10% of the time)
The one person I know personally who significantly changed against Trump based on his character/behavior did so a few months _before_ the 2020 election, and then got to feel enormously vindicated by what he did afterwards.
I think you are right about this. But I also feel that there is a sort of "Let's all look after ourselves and we'll be fine" aspect. A lot of people want to be rich, glorify being rich, and think Trump will be more likely to make them richer, and the rest will take care of itself. They don't actually care about the overall economy, just whether they can take more money home and live better personally.
" media mostly consumed by democrats consider it more more important to be “balanced”"
ROFL
That right there is why you got the rise of ring wing media. The belief that more traditional media was balanced instead of the big time democrat cheer leaders they have been,
JVL had a great breakdown of John Burn-Murdoch's World Values Survey metadata analysis. It may have been primarily the well-bankrolled Fox News Culture Wars Engine, but since roughly 1998 (the Lewinsky scandal and Clinton's impeachment trial?) the US Right's values and worldview have morphed into something adjacent to Turkey and Russia, and wholly alien to conservatism in other rich democracies. Unfortunately paywalled: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/new-data-republican-voters-want-authoritarianism?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
What is weird is all the non-MAGA people that voted for him. It was not only "US right".
To me: World War II revisionism basically gives away the game. You can castigate the Allies if you want (and many of those attacks have fair points): the British Empire, and especially the Churchillian defense of it: was bad. The United States was not just problematic on race: it was failing badly, and FDR's treatment of Japanese Americans was downright appalling. The Soviet Union has countless terrible atrocities attributable to it. But you know what? The Allies were the good guys and no amount of cold water changes that, and the blunt reason is Hitler (and to shocking degrees so were the Italians and Japanese). They had to be stopped. The US & Britain promised not to take any land after the war, and they stuck to that pledge. Say what you will about the UN: but the Pax Americana/Cold War era post WWII has been among the most peaceful and prosperous in world history.
If you want to argue against THAT outcome: you better have a DAMN good argument and bluntly the idea that "Britain should have just left Hitler in Poland and Eastern/Central Europe" is so downright loony and outrageous that I am STILL furious I listened to Darryl Cooper's arguments and it's been MONTHS. The fact Donald Trump's coalition includes a LOT of morons like that is telling.
I agree strongly, and allied behavior post-WWII is a great point. Even strategically useful stuff they could have kept (e.g. Minamitorishima, Greenland) was returned.
This is a great piece, and it really emphasizes how appalling it is that the mainstream organs of the American Jewish community are allying themselves with these people in order to deport op-ed writers.
As a Jewish American who is definitely right of center when it comes to Israel/Palestine I to fully agree. I'm not sure how many truly mainstream American Jewish organizations are out that are are actively attempting to deport anyone who opposes Israel but there are definitely several "Stop Anti-semitism" social media pages that have gone full fascist in this regard. For example, @ "Stop_Antisemitism" is not only actively targeting foreign students who have spoken out against Israel but is also actively appealing to Pam Bondi to go after Ms. Rachel, the JEWISH children's entertainer, not for supporting for Hamas but for being Pro-Palestine. I don't personally agree with her politics but going after Ms. Rachel for a perfectly normal political view that more than half the world agrees with is not going to win the hearts and minds of people at large. If anything, these targeted attacks by Jewish organizations will only feed anti-semitic stereotypes that "Jews" control the levers of power. These actions are just totally misguided and will inevitably hurt Jews in the long run.
Which mainstream Jewish organizations support Trump? Which ones, specifically, support the deportation of that op-ed writer? Do you think that *most* of the Jewish mainstream organizations voiced support for the deportation of the op-ed writer?
Well, the ADL put out a public statement supporting the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. And a public statement defending Elon Musk when he made a nazi salute.
To think the ADL is a right-wing organization is kind of ridiculous, in my view. They spent a long time studiously focusing exclusively on right-wing antisemitism and on other liberal causes that have nothing to do with Jews. Grinblatt walked back his naive support of what Trump was doing, and if you've listened to him talk about the "Nazi salute," he's not a guy who's soft on Nazis.
https://jewishinsider.com/2025/04/adl-jonathan-greenblatt-trump-deportation-campaign-antisemitism/
Anyway, organizations like the American Jewish Congress have been against the deportations, and your original claim was that the Jewish mainstream supported the deportation of the op-ed writer. Where's your evidence for that?
I agree that the ADL has not traditionally been a right wing organization; they are a mainstream organization. And they have been terrible on Trump and his approach.
No one said they’re a right wing organization. They said they are supporting Trumpian fascism, which doesn’t require being right wing.
jewbelong.org bought a billboard that I have to stare at every day that says "Radicals ruin America." Looking at it on "Liberation Day" really made me feel like I'm living in an Orwell book. For added irony, the subway station it overlooks was built in 1984.
I'm just impressed a subway station was built within a calendar year.
Construction lasted 1978-1984
This one, which I’ve actually seen on the highway, genuinely shocked me: https://www.instagram.com/jewbelong/p/C6wCIwhrfVn/?hl=en
Who’s advocating for deporting op-ed writers?
Stephen Miller, Canary Mission, should I go on?
That's astonishing. (Not that I know who Canary Mission is.) Did he tweet that?
The Trump administration arrested and is trying to deport Reyna Ozturk for writing an oped about Israel. If you don't think that Stephen Miller is involved in high profile Trump administration immigration enforcement decisions I don't know what to tell you.
“…deport Reyna Ozturk for writing an oped about Israel”
Is that what they said?
Yes
On this topic I think the book Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is essential reading. I think it's fair to say that we turned a blind eye to just how bad Stalin and the Soviets were, as is unfortunately not so unusual with allies of convenience. None of that is any sort of rehabilitation of Hitler.
To me this has always been an obvious danger of the push towards an overly identity based view of the world. It assumes an identity politics for me and not for thee is something that can be sustained. Now we are seeing the online edgelords wonder if maybe they don't actually agree with their sad little jokes, and of course they have an audience in parts of maybe the dumbest and absolutely most extremely online administration ever.
Big picture I think it's worth getting back to the view of America as an idea, where the principles and philosophies that underpin the country are available to everyone. From that perspective historical failures to live up to those ideas and their correction can be understood as a matter of great progress (as they are). Yes you give up the ability to go on and on about America being a permanently, structurally racist sham but in exchange you get to stand on firm ground when you say no to jackasses proposing going backwards to an uglier past.
You can't get away from identity in politics, as long as there are humans in politics. The question is what identity is elevated to primacy -- is it an exclusionary, ancestry-based identity, or an inclusive, open, values-based identity, such as that of American citizen?
That book was great, and depressing.
Yarvin: Well aCshUaLly!
What do people see in this charlatan? It's mind-boggling. I think maybe the biggest factor helping to expand the ranks of the new, reactionary hard right is their massive *gullibility* flowing from the fact that they're very poorly read, especially in history.
I'm blog-brained enough to remember when this guy called himself Mencius Moldbug, and even back then he clearly struck me as unremarkable.
Totally. Again, the gullibility makes one an easy mark for that which is transgressive. I think to a lot of people his schtick (and that of many like him) comes across as brave! bold! edgy! and so on—he's a courageous utterer of Truths Forbidden by the Establishment ("The Cathedral" I believe is what he calls it). But yes, "unremarkable" is a good word to describe it. I might go with "dreary."
I would say (1) most of what he writes is just incomprehensible; this list of quotes is just insane: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin. So yes, how he's popular makes no sense.
(2) He does do this one-weird-trick where he says FDR was super successful (Okay, check) -> FDR was a "dictator CEO" (Seems wrong) -> the US needs a "dictator CEO" President (WTF). The trick though is he starts with FDR to say ... look, FDR was a Dem., I'm just an objective observer here. I think also the idea of a "dictator CEO" is probably just really popular with maniacal strivers (i.e., JD Vance).
In retrospect a culture obsessed with "anti-heroes" was destined to fall in love with Hitler the second that all the men who watched their brothers die at his hands were gone from the world.
I know that this is Slow Boring and the slow boring of hard boards is not about new age feel-gooderies about the righteousness of "our" position compared to the degeneracy of "their" position.
But if you'll indulge me, this, like the Cory Booker piece from last week, put tears in my eyes.
Some commenters take issue with the Cory Booker piece, or with the filibuster itself as being ineffectual, and that's fine. But I am having a hard time keeping an even keel and I really need something to hold onto these days, and celebrating the light (Booker's filibuster) while declaring that the darkness (right-wing hubristic triumphalism with regards to the "righteousness" of racial and ethnic stereotyping) is, indeed, darkness helps.
Two small additional observations:
One: Nathan Cofnas is a clown; read his essays and it's basically glorified teenage emo angst. I was going to respond to something he wrote on another "heterodox" (read: really into racial hierarchies and IQ) Substack, and my pitch to the newsletter editor was that Cofnas's piece was "literally the funniest thing I've read in months."
Two: It is true that Cooper et al.'s revisionism is more about the present than the past. They're more interested in taking down a pillar of liberal global order than doing anti-Semitism. It is, to be clear, anti-Semitic, but it's not the original intent.
Patriotism is good, actually. During the Iraq war (and maybe before, I'm too young), we all decided that patriotism was the same thing as endorsing the actions of the current administration. (citation: Green Day.) That was a bad idea. That feeling where someone talking about freedom brings a tear to your eye is what holds a democracy together, and without it we're just 300 million people shouting at each other.
To be fair, the Iraq War made patriotism hard because the very concept was so politicized. It's not unlike how more recently it became very hard to endorse "equality" (a generally very good thing) because its meaning was so warped by a certain very loud and momentarily influential movement.
But more to the point...yeah. These declarations are also good because they help hold me to a democracy that I don't currently live in. It's tough - very tough - sometimes to feel like the US is a place I want to have any connection to anymore. So I'm glad MY is able to sometimes bring me back to my senses.
(I mean, I probably won't come back, but because my career is elsewhere, not out of resentment).
I’m happy I have no idea who Nathan Cofnas is
I will not do harm to your happiness by explaining, but he's mentioned and linked in the article so you can take a look (or not).
I get it.
I am disappointed in two things: 1) that my totally-awesome-bare-my-soul comment has sunk to the bottom of the pile - but I can deal with that, I'm (ostensibly) a big boy; but I cannot countenance 2) that no one, in this comments section that should know better, picked up on "new age feel goodery."
I've had to block David Abbott for his outright Nazi apologism. The mute feature in substack appears not to work, as I discovered I'd had him muted for some time and I was still seeing all his comments.
Wut? I disagree with David Abbott on a lot of things, but I haven’t seen him do Nazi apologist, what fresh hell is this?
Funny, I was blocked *BY* David Abbott, for what reason I know not. Which is not the greatest loss (for me) in the world, to be sure, but it does deprive me of anything down thread of his remarks. Apparently there was interesting reply by John fr Fl. Sigh.
https://substack.com/@johnfromfl/note/c-108645040
And if that doesn't work:
https://i.ibb.co/cMjRmN7/image.png
Gen Z specifically seems obsessed with race talk. It’s not really skull measuring stuff but it’s just a little weird to me. I think part of it is the academic scorn and censorship about any discussion around genetics, heritability, and race. The other part is just young people wanting to be edgy and freak out older people.
Seems like there are better things to focus on but I think it’s going to be a fixture of cultural debate for the foreseeable future.
Agreed, this seems downstream of the reaction to cancel culture. If you're not allowed to point out biological differences between sexes, why not see what's up with race science? But as Matt points out here, it's really important that that stuff is taboo.
Any topic around IQ and race/country of origin is so tired at this point and not worth informing public policy.
Something I'd like to better understand is whether people think that taboo should be around discussions of race and genetics or race and culture or both? Because I see them as two wholly different issues. Cultural explanations can be quite powerful, while genetic ones usually are not. And I feel like ignoring cultural explanations leaves the door open for racial explanations from people who don't care about these taboos.
In contrast to cultural explanations, economic ones are always welcome on the left, which I feel is basically tied to politics.
On the left cultural explanations are usually dismissed as victim blaming. There’s some truth there, as anyone who lived through conservative Urban Decay Discourse in the 80s can attest, but that critique is often taken too far.
Yeah, a basic element of political discourse since at least the 60s, has been the left saying various things are due to economics and the right saying it's more about culture, with the preferred solutions for each faction following from their arguments.
I think a lot of people don't make the distinction, though. A few months ago Scott Alexander posted a pro-race-realism essay with the premise that Africans have an average IQ of 90 instead of 100. Lots of "therefore black culture is degenerate because they're all borderline retarded" followed in the discussion.
Fwiw - I found that essay and skimmed the comments. I expected to see some comments like that, but I don't think I saw a single one. I'm sure there was somewhere, but that doesn't seem to be the vibe of that place.
In any case - I agree that many people don't necessarily make that distinction, but we could also say that many others do, and among people in, say, Academia, or Policy discussions, I'd think the vast majority are capable of making the distinction, and would if it was encouraged.
I agree but I don't think saying "look this is taboo we shouldn't discuss it" is going to fix it. At this point I think we have to be willing to engage with it in constructive ways.
With respect, not wanting to engage with scientific reality because you are afraid of how it might be misused is not going to be a particularly defensible position in the future, especially as genetic science improves. Any number of scientists have written books to try and break this to the left. Matt's desire for willful ignorance will not hold. And the idea that race/country of origin somehow does NOT play in public policy now is risible. Disparate impact is very race/ethnicity based, and has led (my opinion) to a dumbing down of public employees in search of some sort of balance. IF you accept there are broad differences in group IQ -- which seems pretty clear based on decades of research -- the theory that racism is behind all the outcomes loses quite a bit of steam. There are other arguments against disparate impact, but that one is clearly influencing the debate. If you want to stop that you need to actually engage on the science. Blank slatism is not going to cut it.
It's hard to stop people from noticing. Refusing to consider there may be genetic reasons for outcomes in humans as groups is not going away. Especially as the U.S. economy more and more rewards IQ. Which, if you look at economic outcomes, it already does.
This does not mean you engage in racism against individuals, or treat anyone as though they are better or worse than you based on perceived physiognomy. I don't look at my East Asian friends and think "geez, they are smarter than me" based on group averages. Because broad group generalizations are not useful when dealing with individuals. But when looking at broad outcomes, pretending there is no there there will not be sustainable, especially when the default of so many on the left is "it must be racism."
There is quite a bit more to a person than their IQ, and immense variations within groups, and all kinds of other qualifications. But there is plenty of science, it's only getting better, and it will influence public policy. Do we allow gene editing for embryos to increase the share of positive (to the parents) traits? To raise intelligence, height, pick a skin color and eye color? If not, why not? Do we use race (or populations, or whatever word feels right) in medicine? Yes. Much like gender, it plays a role. Enough.
I can't help but feel like they're the ones who grew up with no direct human connections to WWII.
My great grandfather got my grandfather out of a speeding ticket by telling the cop he shot down three planes in WW2. He didn’t. He just was a boat mechanic.
My father worked with a guy who was getting crap from a customs and border guy at the Berlin airport and he said “I apologize. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Berlin, but that was more of a flyover.” The crap stopped right with that clever line.
True but it cuts in multiple ways. My grandfather was an NCO in the infantry and was in 6 or 7 landings in the Pacific (he later fought in Korea as well). It is hard for me to describe how tough this guy was, and I'm just not sure they make them like him anymore. I can tell you the things he said about the Japanese were.... not consistent with modern sensibilities. His reaction to my mother buying a Toyota Camry in the 80s is the stuff of family legend. That said his sense of patriotism was second to none and it's hard for me to see him getting on board with the implicit anti-Americanism of the modern right or any sort of apologia for our WW2 adversaries.
There does feel like some sort of moral decline in our society and decline in character. It makes me think of Socrates whole myth of peoples based on different metals.
The character stuff is hard because the "greatest generation" was on-average horrible racists and terrible misogynists. So yes, my grandfather fought the Nazis in Poland but he also had terrible views on like 15 other things and I wouldn't characterize his marriage as "loving". Tough as nails though. Far tougher than me on even my best days.
EDIT: We've also shamed beating our kids out of our culture in like just two generations. This is a tremendous accomplishment. When I hear people in their 70s talk about *their* childhoods ... holy smokes, it's like a war zone.
Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I grew up in a time when a lot of my grandads generation served in ww2. I remember my grandad telling me about his cousin that was shot down over Italy. Nazi hating was a family affair that was engrained from early on.
There’s a lot of race talk among progressives too. Racial and gender identity is considered a core part of identity and perhaps the most important part of one’s identity.
That’s a good point. “I learned it from you friendo” says Gen z.
Not just race talk but all sorts of Nazi stuff. For example, calling people and things “filth”. At some point in the recent past, the Nazis became cool for edgy thirteen year olds and we’ll be dealing with the fallout for a while.
I've been seeing the adjective "degenerate" used a hell of a lot more than I would like.
Gamblers be like "hey we reclaimed that word for us, it's ours now!!!!".
It’s a very parsimonious way to describe some of the nihilistic antisocial behavior you see from people. I never thought of its Nazi association until now, and that alone gives me pause in using the term, but many cities have a “degen” subreddit where there is an authentic celebration of depraved behavior. I don’t think the posters on those subs are being ironic, and I’m not sure what else to call it.
I'm just replying to you almost at random, as I've seen a lot of people make similar comments. And my question is one of genuine curiosity, and not based on pushback or disbelief.
So here goes: Where are you guys seeing this stuff? Because I'm personally not exposed to it. I don't spend any time on X or Facebook, but I do read Youtube and Reddit comments, and I can't recall noticing any difference? So I'm wondering if I'm missing it, not noticing it, or just what's the explanation?
Twitter can feel like a Nuremberg rally at times, at least if one makes the mistake of clicking on the wrong kind of tweet (which immediately makes the algorithm think you've got a swastika tattoo). The "for you" feed is the offender. I mostly stay off it in favor of the "following" feed.
People say that Twitter is a hellhole and I'm trying to figure out the dynamic here. There are about 10 people I read on Twitter (such as Matt). I read their tweets and never never look at the comments. I pay no attention to "For you" or "following."
Is there a benefit to doing these other things that balances the crap that you apparently then get exposed to? If not, why look at that stuff? Why not just limit yourself to the postings of smart people you respect?
For Youtube I use a chrome extension called Unhook which limits my feed to subscribed channels. I love it!
Hey, I used it in this very thread! To describe the President, though, in the sense that Jimmy uses it here. I do accept that words themselves can be weaponised and lose descriptive or clarifying power.
So many Watermelon Brownshirts hold a very ‘blood and soil’ view of politics. It is deeply disturbing.
Sorry that I asked this somewhere else and I'm repeating my own comment, but where are you seeing this? I don't doubt you're noticing it and I'm not trying to argue or disbelieve, but it's just something I have not personally been exposed to so I'm curious.
I also said this somewhere else, but your comment is part of why Matt's quote today: "I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions." struck me as untenable, at least with respect to cultural determinants.
If "we", I guess meaning the polite Left, are unwilling to answer questions that humans are naturally curious about, then someone else will whether that's the new Right or China or whomever.
Again I'm more thinking about this from a cultural angle, and less from a genetic one, because culture likely plays a much bigger role than genes in explaining why outcomes can be different between ethnicities in the US. But culture is also often taboo to discuss.
It's bubbled up through reddit dungeons into more mainstream discussions, same in discord chat, it certainly comes up in young conservative circles a lot these days but it isn't limited to them.
A lot of it isn't pro nazi or anything but it is more of a "huh, they say we can't talk about this, why? are any of these observations about race and genetics true?"
It's not only a reaction to Kendi but the denial of any true difference between the sexes in liberal circles, if the people are telling you race chat is taboo but denying human biology isn't, how can they trust you? what else are the biological wrong think people lying to you about?
“I have not looked into it, and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy living in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate to preoccupy oneself with such questions.”
At least Matt has the integrity to admit that he’s sticking his head in the sand. I’ll say the quiet part out loud. There are significant racial and ethnic differences in both physical and cognitive ability. These differences will make racial gaps in achievement difficult to eliminate. We can only have professional basketball teams that look like America by excluding meritorious black players and choosing under qualified whites. We can only have elite science departments and research outfits that look like America by excluding qualified Asians. Hiding from the truth is rarely a great strategy.
The problem with population-level statistics is that there is no population-level solution to ameliorate differences. And the more one looks at and engages in those population-level differences, the more one gets sucked into the idea that immutable characteristics from birth actually matter at the individual level, and they do not. And the idea of population-level interventions leads to very, very bad places.
Therefore, I agree with Matt that it is unseemly and inappropriate to spend much time with those who want to "preoccupy oneself with such questions", yourself included.
I think we don’t talk enough about countries who try proportional representation through hard quotas and how much of a fucking failure it is (eg India and South Africa).
I do believe that underrepresentation of certain groups in the US in knowledge professions is a product of structural racism unconnected to actual ability. I also believe that almost any attempt to administratively correct that underrepresentation through some sort of quota or quota like system has done harm to the organization imposing the administrative remedy.
I don't think that this is entirely correct. I hire people for the top of the top of knowledge professionals (Analog IC Design). We would love to hire an occasional girl or some (non-Chinese/Indian) diversity. Obviously, at this level, everything adds up. You have to be exceptionally bright and have had exceptional opportunity. One of the two won't cut it. Communication skills and ability to ace an 8-10 hour interview both pay off as well. I don't see structural racism as being a significant factor, at least in my neck of the woods.
To me a lot of our issues are with this fixation on the most elite of the elite areas, which is what leads to the kind of crude balancing games that are now probably illegal in light of SFFA v. UNC or if not are almost certain to soon become illegal given the composition of SCOTUS. To me the clear solution is to aim efforts at raising the floor on quality of life with mundane stuff like making sure every citizen no matter who they are has health insurance and basic nutrition is available to everyone via public schools and that sort of thing. Preventing people in the most precarious of situations from falling through the cracks is more defensible on virtually every metric than going insane trying to engineer demographic balance in the STEM pipeline or trying to make the number of CEOs in the country mirror the racial balance of the national population.
Strong agree with the addition that actually helping to make the STEM pipeline more available to disadvantaged groups that, while unlikely to have many top achievers, will nonetheless have some, is the right thing to do for those individuals, their families, and the country as a whole.
Agree 100%, making sure rungs on the ladder are accessible even from unlikely places is completely consistent with the liberal project. It's also a worthwhile investment in developing our own human capital.
I think we’re at a point where we’re dealing with the human capital implications of long gone structural racism more than structural racism itself.
We’re also at the point where the cures in terms of quotas are worse than the disease, and while it doesn’t sound like you have to deal with it, some others of us have (and a subset of those people have had a lot of trouble when pushing back on it). I’m in academia though, and financial consulting before that, and I think those are particularly vulnerable to having some “soft” pressures to diversify, high risk from hiring the wrong person, and administrative pressure to tell you neither of the previous things are true.
Structural racism is definitely a thing. Almost every freedman began 1865 illiterate and penniless. That has multigenerational consequences.
If we are going to call things that happened decades ago, "structural racism," then it is impossible to end "structural racism." I thought the point of the term was to encompass all of the present decisions (and systems) being made without obvious racial intent that nonetheless perpetuate disadvantage.
it is impossible to end structural racism without upheaval
Upheaval being a time machine? Is this intended as refutation?
And even in the US, the creation of majority minority districts opened the door to a pack and crack form of gerrymandering.
If the respectable consensus included your premise that “there is no population level solution to ameliorate differences,” I would embrace it. It does not. Too much effort goes into measuring and attempting to remediate racial gaps. As long as that continues, I will not abandon the sharpest tool for pushing back.
Wait, what is "the sharpest tool for pushing back"?
group level differences explain much of group level gaps
The obvious solution to that is to have objective standards and fairness. The reason Kendi promoted anti-racism is because he knows that the end result will be worse than it is now if companies and institutions were to adopt those practices.
You're such a pitiful festering pustule. Stop trying to drag this filth into this comment section every single day. Don't you have a real life to live? I'm so sick of seeing you insidiously sneak racist garbage into here.
substituting name calling for argument betrays your ignorance
Ah yes, we’re so utterly defeated by your argument “but black people *are* good at basketball”.
It must be weird to want to be “the racist one” in a group.
i will pursue the truth where it leads. this isn’t the place to unpack iq science, but it’s pretty damn clear.
The psychology of someone who reads this article and says “ah, someone’s playing my song” is not hard to guess, and it’s not “dogged pursuer of truth”.
Some ideas don't deserve thoughtful responses.
learn manners and civil discourse
No, you are a total parasite and a loser. You come in here every day, posting at exactly 6:00 am when the story drops, and it is always some snivelingly, superficially polite post that is transparently trying to smuggle in some odious, evil idea like this one. Every time I read a comment and am viscerally repelled by it, it always ends up being you. I am sick of your posting here, I am sick of your disgusting politics, I am sick of your mediocre intellect that thinks you are being subtle or clever in what you are doing, and I am sick of having to tolerate what is obviously the product of a deep pitiful loneliness. Go make some friends in the real world and maybe you'll feel less compelled to spread this garbage here.
Substack provides a "block" button, which I believe will hide an individual's contributions from your feed.
Thanks for this, actually. I had tried to block this guy several times, but I guess you can only block someone by going to their profile, so I hadn't realized it was possible.
Just noting that I'm monitering this thread. Not banning anyone, but please do block someone if you're annoyed by them.
you are a priggish idiot with no manners and a limited intellect
Admit that you deserve to be insulted. And let’s see if you manage proper capitalization in your response. When McDonough sends us its people…
i’ll capitalize my top level posts and those worth the effort. your incivility deserves no more than a moment of my time
you are disgustingly threatened that the truth might not comport with your naive worldview. look at the dissonance on display
Go outside and touch grass man. It’s a comment on Substack lol
The problem with your position is that this “truth” was also asserted as the reason that blacks in the post Civil War period were starving—certainly couldn’t be the fact that Southern Whites were resisting reconstruction and even basic emancipation and, with the aid of President Johnson, ensuring they remained subservient gang laborers working under the lash through illusory and coercive “contracts” and systematic extra judicial violence. Nope, must be that the negro isn’t fit for independence!
Which goes to Matt’s point that you need two scoops of “let’s be really careful and delicate here” whenever approaching this stuff so you don’t end up justifying Nazis or Jim Crow—not an area to go boldly forth.
It may be true that population level differences in IQ (or height) help explain perceived racial gaps in various elite settings, but if you are not at least a little nervous around this topic you end up throwing off a big “let the blacks play basketball while the Asians code—it’s natural” vibe and people will be rightfully suspicious that you are trying to smuggle racial hierarchy in through the back door rather than just acknowledging the reality of pipelines when gauging racial gaps in various fields and not tilting at windmills etc.
The better way is “judge everyone as an individual, try very hard not to stereotype and feel bad when you do, and address transfer payments and the provision of public goods on their merits rather than veering off into anti-racism”.
I agree with your “two scoops of caution” formulation, and I hope you’ll see my phrasing here was more circumspect than usual. However, it is impossible to discuss racial gaps sensibly without incorporating this issue. To the extent progressives seek to reduce racial gaps, they need to confront facts that render reducing them difficult or impossible.
Jim Crow was not founded on IQ science. It was an effort to enforce racial domination. There was no effort to extend opportunity to intelligent blacks. W.E.B. Du Bois was brilliant, but Jim Crow made it impossible for him to live in the South.
Also, racial inequality after the civil war was overdetermined. Freedmen were illiterate and penniless. Knowledge and financial capital are both crucial to running a successful farm or really any business. Without extreme social engineering, racial gaps were inevitable.
You need to get some bigger scoops my man! You clearly did not avoid your comment pattern matching to "I'm a racist, and here are my racist beliefs"--as you can tell by your reception. If this issue is important to you, which it seems to be, you need to be bending over backwards to avoid coming across the wrong way, not proudly "saying the quiet part out loud" as a bold teller of forbidden truths! I could steelman your position (which I disagree with).
Also, these are epistemic scoops, not just presentation scoops. As an analogy, racism is booze and we are all alcoholics. "Removing standardized testing to combat racism seems dumb" is, like, rum cake. "Population level differences mean that "a racial gap exists" is a poor proxy for "something is unfair here" and we need better heuristics" is like a glass of wine with dinner--perfectly fine...but you miiiiiiight just finish that bottle (and then another!), as you are primed to do. Maybe don't drink at all (like Matt) or, if you do, be very careful. Most of the people who post on this stuff, like that Cofnas guy, have become drunks. You walk around with your "#1 Wine Fan" shirt on, and people will rightly wonder!
if you knew more of my career, you would know i fought against racial quotas that denied blacks equal representation on henry county juries. it hurt my career considerably and i lost. i’ll finish the bottle occasionally and then go for a bracing jog the next morning.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=16607998054200633279&q=UAP+and+green+and+fair+cross+section&hl=en&as_sdt=4,11
It’s not incumbent on me or anyone else to know your career or anything else about you when reading your posts, and you shouldn’t assume people will read it with basic charity, let alone that kind of knowledge. Your posts need to speak for themselves and they are evidently saying something you do not intend.
You are free to disregard my advice, I am just an internet stranger, but I think it would help you. Have a good one.
It's both true that culturally/geographically segregated populations develope distinct statistical distributions of heritable traits and that racial and ethnic categorizations are fundamentally bunk. They don't tell you anything useful about what traits any individual has inherited and they disappear basically immediately when the causal segregation ends. In a healthy society we're all mutts.
I’m not sure what you mean about differences “disappearing basically immediately when the casual segregation ends.”
If you mean that groups will interbreed and average out any allele differences, well, on a scale of many millennia that is true but I sure don’t think that’s “immediate“ except maybe in the geological sense. The Indo-Aryan invasion of India was around 3500 years ago and you still have significantly more steppe ancestry in the higher castes.
If you mean that group differences go away in the ordinary short term once formal discrimination ends… I’m not trying to make a “gotcha” here but can you give me a single example of this? US racial segregation ended ~60 years ago, and I would not say that the gaps have closed. Various countries have tried affirmative action schemes, of both the “help the previously hated downtrodden group” variety (India, the US, China for some non-Han) and the “help the majority against the Sinister Successful Minority variety” (Malaysia against Chinese people, various African countries against Indian or white groups, arguably US universities against Jews in the 1900s and against Asians today), and as far as I know all of these gaps still exist.
I suppose immediate is a somewhat weird word choice when the scale is generations. The point is that one or two generations of reproduction outside of ones segregated ethnic group effectively eliminates whatever racially correlated inferences one might try to make about those offspring. It takes a single step to homogenize away a huge amount of what one might try to classify as a "racial" genetic clustering.
for voluntary interbreeding to occur, status has to be roughly equal in the first place. very few people choose yo reproduce with others of vastly higher or lower status
Of course, class is highly relevant to group sorting, "race" is a quasi mystical refuge of low status tribalism.
And yet we can decide not to exclude meritorious black basketball players or qualified Asian scientists without preoccupying ourselves with questions about why the racial balances in these endeavors are different.
Why do you think otherwise?
Actually a strong policy of “we are not going to obsess over racial difference” might be help prevent the policies you oppose! Both the “IQ noticers” and the “anti racists” are pretty obsessed with race and racial conflict. “Keep your racial opinions to yourself and extend a helping hand to whoever needs it, regardless of race or creed” is exactly what you want!
Universal love for the win and I’m not being ironic.
curiosity, especially about things that are visually obvious, is a strong human impulse and not one that is easily suppressed
It seems to me the solution in light of being a multiracial, multicultural society is to focus on being as rigorously objective as possible about individuals.
I agree. Just like Democrats should focus on abundance rather then identity, However, when the subject of group differences comes up, you have to have a strategy, and tent shrinking is a poor one.
How certain are you of this? What is your estimate of the probability that you're wrong about it?
How certain should we have to be about racial genetic differences in intelligence before we make policy on the basis of that assumption? It seems like the risk of wronging people in this way is something we should be very careful to avoid.
How good are your sources of evidence on this? Have you considered their biases? Steve Sailer and Emil Kirkegaard don't seem to me like good people who just accidentally stumbled onto some inconvenient facts.
Have you considered counter-arguments like this one, which looks pretty persuasive to me? https://reasonwithoutrestraint.com/quantifying-the-genetic-component-of-the-black-white-iq-gap/
I'm not attacking your character here. Nor do I think it's been scientifically proven that you're wrong. There are plenty of dogmatic progressives who won't even entertain the possibility that science hasn't 100% proven you're wrong already. These people are making a dumb mistake. But what about people like David Reich or Paige Harden, who would grant that it's possible but would argue that the total evidence is so confounded that it's pretty much useless? The quality of the data in behavioral genetics and social science more broadly isn't all that great.
We already know that it's possible for non-genetic factors to create massive disparities in cognitively demanding fields. Look at the underrepresentation of men in developmental psychology, or of Asians in Romance language scholarship.
Don't you think you might be wrong? If we're being honest, isn't there a very strong possibility that you're wrong?
If you want me to describe my confidence, you have to be more specific. I am 99% confident I am wrong about something.
I am 95% confident that if you gave every white person and every black person in the US an IQ test, whites would have a higher average. That could be the effect of class or culture or genetic.
I am 99% confident that enough of the 43 million plus blacks in the US are really smart for there to be a high human capital black political and cognitive elite.
I am 95% confident there is a tremendous amount of genetic variation within Africa. Just as there are plenty of African nations which don’t produce good basketball players (anywhere with a low average height) there are certainly places in Africa that have more smart people than other places.
This all would be about as interesting as other genetic issues if we weren’t being force fed the idea “there are no group IQ differences” or “any group IQ differences must be the product of economic and social differences.”
Finally, in policy terms, I’m happy to say “individual ability is the only relevant thing and we won’t worry about racial gaps.”. I will do this when a majority of other progressives stop worrying about racial gaps, so don’t hold your breath.
This sounds more subtle than a lot of "HBD" thinking that's out there. But I would insist that when it comes to the question of whether there's a genetic tendency toward significantly higher intelligence among white people vs black people, the evidence is weak enough that one's probability should be well under 50%, and not much different from one's probability that a genetic advantage exists going the opposite direction.
I think attention should be paid to gaps, because of the high likelihood that they have problematic environmental causes. But the idea that gaps can be improved by affirmative action starting at age 18 or later is ludicrous in my opinion, so I'd tend to agree that a lot of progressives are full of shit when it comes to this sort of thing.
given that iq is not purely genetic and owes a great deal to education and nutrition, i would be suprised if average iqs between the races were equal. if the only difference between the races were that blacks are more likely to be exposed to lead as children and drugs/alcohol as fetuses, that would be enough to create a racial iq gap
I'd also guess that they probably don't all have the exact same intelligence genes, that's not in any tension with anything I said above.
there is tremendous biodiversity among africans. to use a sports example, kenyans sprint worse than europeans and nigerians run the marathon worse than europeans or east african highlanders. there’s more diversity among africans than among europeans. writing a person off intellectually because they are black is vile racism. having a weak, bayesian prior you are willing to update is sophistication.
I think MY has the better position here. Genetics and race are very complex issues and we’ve seen the bad effects historically of basing policy on supposedly even consensus science (that then gets overturned). You can still argue against affirmative action. MY does.
Good G-d, man, have you *NO* decency?
why is genocide against jews worse than against ukrainians? are you a racist?
i have enormous decency and compassion
I laughed at this. “Don’t call Kamala Harris a whore” was too heavy a lift for you.
i never said she accepted cash payment, i said she used her body to advance her career. if you can’t see that you are blind
You used the word either way.
i called her behavior whorish and stand by my truthful statement. she wasn’t exactly eager to talk about it, maybe she thought the feminists would agree with me
she did so well with young men. y’all didn’t see that coming and now we have trump. stop tent shrinking
No sir. You do not.
political correctness has dulled your intellect to the point you cannot discern truth
All wisdom flees from you, and your mind is cursed with folly. You are a sad, sad man. I pity you. Good day.
ditto
I'll never forget how you were like "you know what, people with mental handicaps aren't worth an education or extra services to help them live in society, they should be warehoused until their early deaths." Top-level decency and compassion, that.
i never said that
No, you called keeping disabled people alive an “aesthetic preference.”
keeping disabled people alive is an aesthetic preference. i stand by that