Another Incident in Portland

[dreng3]

Hey mister Nazi, listen here.
Soviets categorized Jews as an ethnicity in the USSR. Soviet passports had no mention of religion.
Can you please stop protecting racism against Jews?

In light of my post stating that I am vehemently against discrimination I cannot construe your calling me a nazi as anything but a personal attack and an insult, in hopes of keeping with the common etiquette of the forum I will refuse to address it beyond stating that I am no such thing.

Perhaps the soviets did sorted them as an ethnicity, but as Agema so accurately pointed out, that does not actually mean that they are considered a separate race, it merely implies a shared origin or background.

And besides, I think the viewpoint that jews are a unified race might be more harmful than the statement that they are not.

 

[Iron]

In light of my post stating that I am vehemently against discrimination I cannot construe your calling me a nazi as anything but a personal attack and an insult, in hopes of keeping with the common etiquette of the forum I will refuse to address it beyond stating that I am no such thing.

Perhaps the soviets did sorted them as an ethnicity, but as Agema so accurately pointed out, that does not actually mean that they are considered a separate race, it merely implies a shared origin or background.

And besides, I think the viewpoint that jews are a unified race might be more harmful than the statement that they are not.

You're defending racism against jews.

 

[dreng3]

Ethnicity is not the same as race. It refers to a sort of grouping which may include race, but also culture, nationality, etc. It is reasonable to say Jewish is an ethnicity.

Otherwise, race works as normal. Got a "pure" Jewish grandparent? Maybe you're Jewish then, even if the other three-quarters of your ancestry isn't. If those other three-quarters are black people, you'll probably be a black Jew. If the were white, you'll be a white Jew. What's tricky here? This is pretty uncontroversial for how race works. There's no such thing as a pure race. We're all mongrels.

A peculiarity of the english language that I was not aware of, where I'm from ethnicity is almost exclusively used to refer to racial or national origin. Since that is the case I do retract my statement on jews not being an ethnic group, though I stand by my statement that jews are not a unified homogeneous race.

 

[dreng3]

You're defending racism against jews.

You are claiming that I make statements and/or hold opinions that I do not. I'd prefer if you not make such claims as I not only find them deeply offensive, they also detract from your credibility and prevents us from having any form of constructive debate.

I am arguing that there is no jewish race. Offer me evidence to the contrary. I am not requesting evidence that the soviets treated jews as being of a unified race, I am requesting proof that the jewish people are so racially homogenous that they can be said to constitute a single race.

Once we have established whether the jewish people constitute a singular race we can reason whether or not one can be racist against jews as a whole (I am not questioning whether or not you can be racist to the individual member of the jewish ethnic group, there is plenty of evidence that one can).

My debate with you lies solely in the claim of jews being a race, not whether or not the Soviet Union treated them as such.

 

[Revnak]

You are claiming that I make statements and/or hold opinions that I do not. I'd prefer if you not make such claims as I not only find them deeply offensive, they also detract from your credibility and prevents us from having any form of constructive debate.

I am arguing that there is no jewish race. Offer me evidence to the contrary. I am not requesting evidence that the soviets treated jews as being of a unified race, I am requesting proof that the jewish people are so racially homogenous that they can be said to constitute a single race.

Once we have established whether the jewish people constitute a singular race we can reason whether or not one can be racist against jews as a whole (I am not questioning whether or not you can be racist to the individual member of the jewish ethnic group, there is plenty of evidence that one can).

My debate with you lies solely in the claim of jews being a race, not whether or not the Soviet Union treated them as such.

There is no race but what is defined as a race for the purposes of perpetuating liberal national identity. Jacobin Fraternalism is the death drive of the west.

 

[Iron]

You are claiming that I make statements and/or hold opinions that I do not. I'd prefer if you not make such claims as I not only find them deeply offensive, they also detract from your credibility and prevents us from having any form of constructive debate.

I am arguing that there is no jewish race. Offer me evidence to the contrary. I am not requesting evidence that the soviets treated jews as being of a unified race, I am requesting proof that the jewish people are so racially homogenous that they can be said to constitute a single race.

Once we have established whether the jewish people constitute a singular race we can reason whether or not one can be racist against jews as a whole (I am not questioning whether or not you can be racist to the individual member of the jewish ethnic group, there is plenty of evidence that one can).

My debate with you lies solely in the claim of jews being a race, not whether or not the Soviet Union treated them as such.

It isn't.
We were discussing Jews in the USSR and you used this nazi argument that it isn't racist because jews aren't a race. Therefore, the scope of the discussion is within jews in the USSR.

Racial antisemitism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You are losing the purpose of this discussion.

 

[Iron]

There is no race but what is defined as a race for the purposes of perpetuating liberal national identity. Jacobin Fraternalism is the death drive of the west.

Holy shit the Communists were Jacobins?

 

[Revnak]

Holy shit the Communists were Jacobins?

Holy shit I don’t care

 

[Iron]

Holy shit I don’t care

of course you don't care about real life, that's essentially how you can keep your opinions

 

[Revnak]

of course you don't care about real life, that's essentially how you can keep your opinions

Iron you really are just fucking lazy with this shit, must be the Palestinians you gotta justify genociding. Probably takes up most of your time.

 

[Iron]

Iron you really are just fucking lazy with this shit, must be the Palestinians you gotta justify genociding. Probably takes up most of your time.

What are palestinians? I never heard of them

 

[Revnak]

What are palestinians? I never heard of them

Lol

 

[dreng3]

There is no race but what is defined as a race for the purposes of perpetuating liberal national identity. Jacobin Fraternalism is the death drive of the west.

That makes it an even more obvious conclusion that the jews neither are nor were a race. While I think there is merit in considering whether or not race is a positive or negative construct, or even one that has merit, is worthwhile (I certainly fall on the side of race not being a worthwhile construct) race is such an ingrained concept in modern life that it is hard to do away with it or avoid addressing it.

It isn't.
We were discussing Jews in the USSR and you used this nazi argument that it isn't racist because jews aren't a race. Therefore, the scope of the discussion is within jews in the USSR.

Racial antisemitism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You are losing the purpose of this discussion.

Yet again I find myself face to face with a wikipedia citation, I do not approve and I honestly believe that you can do better.
Also, I did not, originally, make the claim that soviet discrimination against jews was not racism, that claim was made in post 261. I addressed your wrongful claim from post 262 that jews are a race.

And I feel that I must reiterate, in the vain hope that you will understand, While the jewish people are not a homogenous race and as such cannot be discriminated against in the form of racism, the jewish people have still been discriminated against massively and such discrimination is wholly unacceptable.

At this point it is semantic argument, I have already stated that the jewish people can, and should, be considered an ethnic group, but not one where the shared background is race. I will wholly accept that the Soviet Union discriminated against the jewish people in a horrible fashion and that said discrimination probably did apply to access to education.

 

[Agema]

Perhaps the soviets did sorted them as an ethnicity, but as Agema so accurately pointed out, that does not actually mean that they are considered a separate race, it merely implies a shared origin or background.

"Race" is a cultural construction.

If we really tried to pin down what race was from a biological perspective, it would be... very challenging, to say the least. What we conventionally mean by "race" is people who look similar, where skin colour plays an unusually large role. In the USA, if you had a black grandparent and four white grandparents, you probably look more stereotpyically white than black, but you'll be called black. For no other reason than cultural US norms, really. That's to illustrate how kind of stupid and arbitrary it can be. And within any one race, like "white people", there is staggering diversity - even in skin colour, really. Lily white Scandinavians, olive Mediterranean, etc.

So when we consider that we could define race by other means, other genes, etc. (there are 30,000 genes, after all, and only a very small proportion of them govern skin colour), why not "Jewish"? We could here take the similar idea of "bloodline", which is not so tied to looks. And we would expect very considerable diversity of Jews, just like there is in any other "race". Although in practice most Jews are still (by genetic analyses) quite similar to the other populations of the Levant, which is a testament to the fact that they bred with each other so much rather than the Europeans or whoever else they lived amongst all those centuries. Although to be fair, a large reason for that interbreeding was probably that they were massively discriminated against and exogenous marriage thus deeply unfavoured by Jews or gentile. That said, I suspect a lot of Jews did marry exogenously, but also converted, their bloodlines subsumed into the general milieu and culture/religion abandoned.

 

[dreng3]

"Race" is a cultural construction.

If we really tried to pin down what race was from a biological perspective, it would be... very challenging, to say the least. What we conventionally mean by "race" is people who look similar, where skin colour plays an unusually large role. In the USA, if you had a black grandparent and four white grandparents, you probably look more stereotpyically white than black, but you'll be called black. For no other reason than cultural US norms, really. That's to illustrate how kind of stupid and arbitrary it can be. And within any one race, like "white people", there is staggering diversity - even in skin colour, really. Lily white Scandinavians, olive Mediterranean, etc.

So when we consider that we could define race by other means, other genes, etc. (there are 30,000 genes, after all, and only a very small proportion of them govern skin colour), why not "Jewish"? We could here take the similar idea of "bloodline", which is not so tied to looks. And we would expect very considerable diversity of Jews, just like there is in any other "race". Although in practice most Jews are still (by genetic analyses) quite similar to the other populations of the Levant, which is a testament to the fact that they bred with each other so much rather than the Europeans or whoever else they lived amongst all those centuries. Although to be fair, a large reason for that interbreeding was probably that they were massively discriminated against and exogenous marriage thus deeply unfavoured by Jews or gentile. That said, I suspect a lot of Jews did marry exogenously, but also converted, their bloodlines subsumed into the general milieu and culture/religion abandoned.

Right, at present race is largely a matter of phenotype, as opposed to deeper genetic or cultural similarity. It might have been useful to easily categorize people by appearance a long time ago, when strangers and people with different looks were uncommon. At least in such a situation it could be considered a defence mechanism since unknown=threat. But I'm veering dangerously close to evolutionary psychology here.

Even within the levantine jews there are significant differences, take the ashkenazi jews for example, those of that particular lineage tend to be particularly susceptible to certain medical conditions, a susceptibility that is not widely shared across the jewish people. And of course it is also questionable whether or not the jewish people can be categorized as a homogenous group based on genetics if there is another group that shares a large part of those genes without being part of the jewish ethnic group.

Generally categorizing people seem a difficult task in the modern world, at least from anything but a direct ancestor/descendant relationship. Anything cultural, religious, or linguistic seems so fluid that such categorized would need countless subcategories and side categories.

 

[Agema]

Generally categorizing people seem a difficult task in the modern world, at least from anything but a direct ancestor/descendant relationship. Anything cultural, religious, or linguistic seems so fluid that such categorized would need countless subcategories and side categories.

It sure is a difficult task. But if we are going to categorise people in ways and call it "race", there's no particular reason not to do so with Jews, because it makes as much sense as anything else (even though that might be not a lot of sense).

 

[Silvanus]

Did I? Read the the next sentence, it makes sense.

But... the next sentence is just you claiming something else, again without providing any support or basis.

I don't think it's a smoking gun. In fact, I think that nothing short of Stalin gobsmacking you with his limp hand and sending you off to mine uranium in Butugychag to die of exposure would make you think ill of the USSR.

There are always valid explanations. It's "counter-revolutionaries", "traitors", "corruption", etc. but never communism.

"Make me think ill of the USSR", okay. Because, lemme guess, you think I'm a communist Because I disagreed with you about some nonsense?

We weren't even talking about whether the USSR was good or not. In case you forgot (which seems to be the case) we were talking about an explanation for why Satinavian-- who has first-hand experience, which you don't-- didn't encounter the quotas you were talking about. You provided one possible explanation and provided a fifty-year-old article to support it.

It's a valid point to point out how woefully inadequate that is as evidence on that point.

 

[dreng3]

It sure is a difficult task. But if we are going to categorise people in ways and call it "race", there's no particular reason not to do so with Jews, because it makes as much sense as anything else (even though that might be not a lot of sense).

Personally I think cultural systems would be a more meaningful way of differentiating, more complex but decidedly less invasive (unless we genetically test everyone everywhere)

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Personally I think cultural systems would be a more meaningful way of differentiating, more complex but decidedly less invasive (unless we genetically test everyone everywhere)

Arguably that's even worse. Just using the US as an example, look at all the different cultures all over it.

 

[Iron]

But... the next sentence is just you claiming something else, again without providing any support or basis.



"Make me think ill of the USSR", okay. Because, lemme guess, you think I'm a communist Because I disagreed with you about some nonsense?

We weren't even talking about whether the USSR was good or not. In case you forgot (which seems to be the case) we were talking about an explanation for why Satinavian-- who has first-hand experience, which you don't-- didn't encounter the quotas you were talking about. You provided one possible explanation and provided a fifty-year-old article to support it.

It's a valid point to point out how woefully inadequate that is as evidence on that point.

It's not my problem you can't read the link I sent you and finish it, or that you have an issue with how old it is. I'd get a moratorium on all old sources, and only ask for sources from 5 years ago, then. It's not my problem journalists are not inclined to write about this, or that they are too lazy to translate Russian text.
They're too busy screecapping a Trump tweet and talking about it.

I don't think USSR lovers are all communists, no.

Satiavian has a first hand experience not in the USSR. Next.