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The Judean People’s Front, the Blogosphere, and Jewcy

Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held … Read More

By / November 28, 2007

Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held positions with which most Jewcers would not agree. Our would-be comrade commissars proclaim that O'Neill must be exiled from Jewcy.

Michael Kinsley says that the digital age is a propitious time to be a cranky libertarian, but it's also springtime for leftist factionalism. On the web, every clique can sanctify its own luminoso blogrollo, forever excommunicating deviationists for doctrinal unorthodoxies, past affiliations, refusals to pronounce some shibboleth of our corner of the internet.

Not here. Take the stultifying provincialism of left politics, amplify it with the Circle Jerk culture of the blogosphere, and you have something of a Jewcy nightmare: a hothouse of unchallenged ideology and lazy self-congratulation that looks like everything Jewcy was born to combat. Neither the Jewish community nor the left need help making themselves sclerotic, conformist, or irrelevant. The promise of the internet, for us, is its capacity to smash those tendencies, rather than reinforce them.

This isn't just about this specific issue: about Brendan O'Neill, the RCP, Living Marxist, or the Oxford Union debate. It's about what breadth of views can be accommodated in Jewcy, and who gets to contribute. We agree that there are borders to the pale, and some people are beyond those borders. But we're also aware of all the barriers that stand in the way of productive communication between people with well-entrenched and opposing positions: a reluctance or flat-out unwillingness to process evidence contradictory to one’s own point of view, an application of nearly impossible standards of evidence for opposing points but a knee-jerk acceptance of supporting points, a presumption of one's own intellectual bravery and integrity and an assumption that the opposition is weak or foolish or venal or lazy, et cetera. These, too, are things we want to overcome, rather than reinforce.

So defining Jewcy's boundaries will be an ongoing process. We'll discuss them. But we won't define them by pronouncing takfir on anyone who joined an organization with which Jewcy itself would not wish to partner.

Meanwhile, Kvetcher, nee David Kelsey, has taken Jewcy to task for our handling of the Oxford Union kerfuffle.

Jewcy chose a symbol of November 9th Society to represent the debate, even though the November 9th Society is a hardline neo-Nazi party that is quite critical of the British National Party for being mere "conservatives on steroids." That Jewcy chose their logo (replete with swastika, of course) to represent Nick Griffin is as risible as it is shrill.

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  • Recursive Prophet

    I read your post Max, and even signed on to the Jewcy group on Facebook. Very rarely go there though. My advice?  Pentamnemonics. Google it. I think Hoefstader summed up our mental-overload dilemma best. Hope this is helpful.  ;-)

    “How can you figure out if you are sane? …
    Once you begin to question your own sanity, you get trapped in an
    ever-tighter vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies, though the process
    is by no means inevitable. Everyone knows that the insane interpret the
    world via their own peculiarly consistent logic; how can you tell if
    your own logic is "peculiar' or not, given that you have only your own
    logic to judge itself? I don't see any answer. I am reminded of Gödel's
    second theorem, which implies that the only versions of formal number
    theory which assert their own consistency are inconsistent.

    The other metaphorical analogue to Gödel's Theorem which I find
    provocative suggests that ultimately, we cannot understand our own
    mind/brains … Just as we cannot see our faces with our own eyes, is
    it not inconceivable to expect that we cannot mirror our complete
    mental structures in the symbols which carry them out? All the
    limitative theorems of mathematics and the theory of computation
    suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has
    reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it
    guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally.” (Hoefstader)

  • Joey Kurtzman

    Heh, yes, fair enough. We're trying to find the right balance, clearly that's a work in progress.

  • MaxKohanzad

    my brain is becoming a peice of mush – Jewcy is just too big for me to get my little head around – all these bloody big words – all this American pollitical references – all this stuff – is just driving me mad, and i'm never too far away from – some mild form of mental break down at the best of times. I've posted something to this effect on Jewcy's Facebook group – but no one has as yet – commented.

    I just can't be bothered reading anything anymore – give me back my TV!!! – if i want to read – i'll take a holiday to France and read on the way.

     

  • Recursive Prophet

    I'm starting to think data overload is becoming a significant problem and not just for we seniors. So many pathways of perception competing for our wetware to download.

    One recurring thought I've had lately is that the Ashkenazim cognoscenti focus way too much on the ultra-radical right, except when it comes to Israel. Where was the outcry at its involvement with the Contras in Nicaragua, when the Jewish state first began totally aligning its interest with Reagan and the military industrial complex here? Similar alliances worldwide paint a grim picture. This needs to be addressed by Jews in this country, for any critique from outside will be branded anti-semitic. (another ironic entomological devolution)

    Given what I perceive as the overwhelming domination of intellectual thought in the U.S. and Europe by this one small tribe, its actually surprising there isn't more enmity. History is replete with advanced minorities being persecuted by less developed majorities-and vice-versa. If the elite elect ignore the moats in their own world views, they hasten the process of alienation against their advantage.

    I believe Israel suffers from the same conundrum as the U.S.; a disproportionate influence of religious fundamentalists. There is a divide there quite similar to here. Bush has done a great job of shifting public opinion throughout the world, something I had expected Reagan to achieve. Let the Neo-Nazis hang themselves, and focus on gaining some form of consensus with those who can read and learn. We don't have nearly enough time to waste chasing SS phantoms.

    Hard decisions await, and far too much of the online dialectic is just sophistry. Overpopulation in a world of declining resources is the overriding issue, and forms the base of everything from the Law of Return to India's refusal to negotiate Kashmir. More brain cells die than are created starting at about 19-at the latest. Al had his revelation on the train on his way to work at 22. Godel saw that mathematics was incomplete in his early twenties. Tick tock, Daniel, David, and Joey. Lead the way while you can. Soon enough the trivial will become your default domain.

  • DK

    Joey, your wrote,

    "When the People's Front of Judea denounces the Judean People's Front as
    lackeys for Rome, don't believe them."

    You don't have to believe their propaganda. But there may still be real differences. Just as there are serious differences between socialists and communists. So too there are serious differences between fascists and neo-Nazis. 

    "Nick Griffin, though, seems to fit the bill."

     He did years ago. But he does not appear to fit that exact bill any longer. People change. Even people we may still not like or approve of. They may not become fully repentant liberals, but they very well might modify their views in discernible ways. Griffin has moved much closer to a race realist focus, and away from a white nationalist one. I am not saying there are no ties, or there are no sympathies, or that none of his members are the real thing. Never the less…there has been a serious change in his focus, and therefore, of the BNP. And the fact that you and others have to reach well before 2005 for proof of his so-called Nazism is proof of this.