France and Germany Agree to Block Facebook's Libra

Just to revisit my original comment you are referring to:

>Yeah it is very peculiar how the British elites was able to establish the Mandate for Palestine to give Jewish people their own state but haven't been able to establish something giving British people their own state even after it was explicitly requested.

I am referring to the state of Israel here, though I don't have a disagreement with Israel's existence nor with the Jewish people themselves in whole or in part, instead I am criticizing that the British elites do seem to have the ability to give a people their own state (as they did in the example of Israel here) however they are reluctant to extend that same work towards the British people. So here my discussion of Israel and Jewish people is not an objection to them in whole or part, but rather an example of what can be accomplished, so as to acknowledge but stave off some arguments that throw Brexit up as if it were somehow not possible. In hindsight, I see how the explanation I gave here would have more effectively prevented any interpretation of animosity, so thank you for making that thought clear.

>I admit I would not have the same reaction against another person criticizing “white people” as a class. But I believe I am justified in that because whiteness is not an ethnicity, it is the practice of denial of ethnicity. That makes it a specific institution not a group of people.

I think I agree about what whiteness is but for different reasons, mainly because the only concrete definition of "whiteness" that I can surmise from how "white people" are treated is "white people are the only unprotected class in law and are the only ethnic group of people ineligible for any race or ethnic protections or ethnic/racially based government programs, academic opportunities, or civil rights protections". Whiteness is imposed on to "white people" by society who say that they can not apply for any protection or benefit based on their white status while all other race or ethnic groups can.

>I am vulnerable also to accusations of hypocrisy because I sometimes criticize men as a class. Maybe that should be out of bounds, (probably is out of bounds on HN) as men are clearly a real biological group and not a concept.

>However, masculinity (as opposed to manhood) is not a biological reality, it is a system of identity constructed to hold childbearing women in a sex class (i.e. submitting to control of their bodies). So to the extent that men identify with masculinity as opposed to just having a penis and some hormones, I would say we are also open to being attacked as a class, and lose our protected status as an actual “tribe” of people.

I think you've brought this up as an example of talking about people in groups and how some groups can lose protected status even if membership in that group is determined biologically. While I agree that there are biological reasons that women and men sometimes need different accommodations in both private and public institutions, if some group is being declared unworthy of "protected status" then I am weary of what you mean by that.

>Although as a side note, I do suspect that when masculinity was originally invented it was quite possibly an identity constructed for the protection of men as an actual ethnographic class of underserved people. Pregnancy does confer actual power and patriarchy I suspect was invented to counterbalance that. However I don’t believe it functions that way today.

That's an interesting analysis, clearly a Marxian perspective in how you tally up what attributes give who power and how social institutions can be counterweights to that power. However if you historically look at the founding of major institutions the fundamental units are the families/communities counterbalancing the power of other families/communities, not sexes counterbalancing each other. Democrats vs Republicans, Labor Union vs Management, Army vs Army, State vs State, Religious institution vs Vice, Religious Institution vs State, Religious Institution vs rival Religious Institution, Academy vs Ignorance, Media viewpoint vs Media viewpoint, etc. etc. etc. The logistics to even support the idea of men and women wandering freely such as stable and safe states plus enough economic opportunity for men and women to wander around freely independently from the families and communities they grew up in is a fairly recent and I think still tenuous phenomenon.

>I suppose you could argue that Jewishness has crossed that rubicon but I don’t see how you could credibly do without getting into holocaust denial which I would also put in the bad faith category.

I don't think Jews should lose any "protected status", instead I am usually point out that Jews are showing us what is possible for a community to accomplish and other groups should be able to follow the same roadmap.

>Serious apologies to any Jewish people reading this who may feel by engaging these questions I am being blasé about the threat of antisemitism. I really don’t want to do that, but I also want to hold a hand out for people who are having a hard time understanding the reasoning behind the rules of liberal discourse.

Why do you feel you should apologize to the Jews for engaging in the free discourse of your ideas? Do you feel they may enact retribution on you? Do you feel the same about other groups like the men you discussed before?

In my opinion both completely reasonable reactions to Facebook attempting to set up a private currency.

With digital goods such restrictions aren't nearly as big of an issue. You can trade (semi-)anonymously with very little fear of getting caught. You can easily disguise your country of origin and even hold the money off shore, all of which would have required a lot of capital to setup with actual gold in the 1930s.