The Great Bike Lanes War of Williamsburg has been raging since at least 2009. Hot girls on bikes ride through Hasidic communities flaunting their blasphemously saucy legs and ungodly cleavage. The Hasidim retaliated by painting over the bike lanes and the hipsters fought back by painting them on again. The Hasidim got the city involved and the hipsters fought back by having a topless bicycle parade. When Mayor Bloomberg told the Hasidim to get with the program, they pointed out that it’s almost election time and they hold a huge sway over who gets elected. The bike lanes were gone the next day.
That doesn’t mean the beef isn’t still on. Just last week a female friend sent me this video of a van full of Hasidim attacking a cyclist for riding through their neighborhood.
We didn’t have this kind of conflict in Montreal. Up there the Hasidim just make the most delicious bagels in the universe and leave everybody alone. Maybe women in New York are just sexier?
3. THEY CAN’T TOUCH WOMEN
I’m not bananas about menstrual blood, but my experience has been that most women wash their hands after inserting a tampon. If a woman wants to give a Hasidic guy change at his photography store, she has to kind of lob it at his hand. This isn’t usually a problem because Hasidim have developed almost freakishly good catching skills.
One of the more amusing side effects of this rule is when newbies accidentally touch them. I’ve seen girls pull back their arm and apologize before realizing, “Wait, why am I apologizing for violating your stupid rule?”
On the less amusing side, we have their total incompatibility with the modern world. While working at a high-tech firm’s marketing department, a colleague of mine and his female coworker were asked to conduct a job interview with a Hasid. Now, I don’t know if you’ve been out there in the real world but the vast majority of clients accepting your bids are women. Sure, the top brass is male but they don’t sully themselves with the day-to-day. I’m told we live in a patriarchy but all me and my peers see are cougars and if we don’t make them happy, we’re out of a job (yes, that has included sex).
Anyhoo, during the interview the female coworker puts out her hand and the Hasid yanks it back while apologizing for this ancient law. They continued with the interview knowing there is no way in Hades they could hire this guy. How are you supposed to schmooze a nation of cougars when you can’t even shake their hands? Of course, they couldn’t say any of this so they made up some excuse not to hire him and vowed to never tell a soul about this, except me, years later, anonymously.
4. THEY CAN’T TOUCH WHORES?
I wouldn’t believe this if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. When I first moved to Williamsburg, it was known more for crackheads than hipsters and I could see the most disgusting whores I’d ever seen from my office window. They didn’t even try. They’d have on one Ugg boot and a slipper and a sideways baseball hat that had puke on it and they’d write odes to state-confiscated children in our hallway that said, “Mami misses you my angels. Come home soon.”
Usually, the only people desperate enough to do business with these Ladies of the Day were truckers finishing a 40-hour drive and Hasidic Jews. The latter group would pull up in a minivan and the junkie hobgoblin would topple in to perform blowjobs half a block away. Ew.
I asked an Orthodox Jewess what this was all about and she said some of them don’t see goyim as human so it was about as sinful as using a blow-up doll. I still don’t get how that doesn’t constitute touching. Maybe if women wore condoms on their hands, they could do more business in the Hasidic community?
5. THEY MIGHT POSSIBLY HAVE A MINOR PROBLEM WITH INBREEDING
I know a guy who works at Mount Sinai and he told me the genetics-treatment center contains a wildly disproportionate number of Hasidic Jews. In fact, they have their own Genetics Disease Center. This may have to do with marrying close to one’s family. Or it may not. You know what? I’m just going to drop this and move on.
6. THEY TAKE STUFF OUT OF YOUR SHOPPING CART
I’ve heard the upper-class Hasidim resent the ones in my neighborhood and see them as trash. I’ve also heard the ones in Brooklyn turn their noses up at the ones upstate where I also live. They do seem weirder in the country. Such a formal style of dress and such a rigid culture don’t seem compatible with nature. A bear even ate one of them. The locals don’t seem particularly fond of them, either, and I’m told it’s because the Hasidic community doesn’t pay their fair share of tax. Residents of upstate New York are big on “What can the state do for me?” which doesn’t jibe with organized religion though it does jibe heavily with my libertarian beliefs, so I’m going to call this more wonderful than weird.
The Home Depot in Monticello, NY is always packed with Hasidim and one of them went up to a female friend of mine, took something out of her shopping cart, and put it in his. When she said, “Oh, hell no” and put it back in hers, he looked like he just heard a ghost say, “Oh, hell no” and then saw the object float from his cart back into an abandoned one.
7. HERPES IS A THING
There have been stories of Hasidic women getting herpes from the prostitutes their husbands frequent—AAAWKWAARD. This trend becomes disturbing when babies are involved.
Brit milah is a Jewish circumcision practice that involves a mohel putting his mouth over the baby’s bleeding penis afterward and sucking the blood. I have heard a lot of pedophile jokes about Catholic priests, but this ripe arena for comedy remains untouched (except for one episode of Freak Show written by two hilarious Jews, David Cross and Jon Benjamin). If the mohel has herpes, he’s likely to give it to the baby and since 2000 this has happened more than a dozen times, including one baby who died from it. Health chiefs in New York are now pushing to have the mohel use a tube to avoid spreading the STD, but there’s no word on how well that’s going…
9. ONE OF THEM IS NAMED LEMON JUICE
There was an infuriating case in the news last year where a Hasidic counselor was convicted of 59 counts of sexual abuse. Fellow Hasidim harassed his victims and took pictures of a 17-year-old girl he had forced to reenact sex acts. When confronted with charges of obstructing justice, one of his supporters said, “Even if it’s true, he shouldn’t go to jail. A Jew doesn’t belong in jail.”
It would be unfair to say the rest of the Hasidic community didn’t despise this guy and rejoice when he was sentenced to 103 years. There’s an entire website devoted to hating him and it was created by a member of his family. However, one of the guys harassing the victims is named Lemon Juice and I haven’t heard anyone criticize that.
Growing up as a Seventh-Day Adventist, telling the truth was ridiculously important. If you got a reputation for lying, you were finished. You were lost. You were dead.
The Christian commitment to truth went to extreme lengths. For instance, if you were hiding Jews in your basement from the Nazis and the Nazis stopped by and asked you if you were hiding Jews, you weren’t supposed to lie about it and no, you weren’t supposed to tell the Nazis where the Jews were hiding either, but oh Lord have mercy on us sinners and pray for us in our hour of need.
In the Christian view, lying destroys the soul, even when in the opinion of some theologians, it is morally necessary.
When I discovered Judaism, and found out that lying was positively encouraged in some instances, such as when the goyim were seeking to kill you, I regarded it as a more sophisticated and superior ethical system to the polyester Adventism I knew. I loved that Judaism seemed more based in reality. It was a code to live by rather than die by.
Then, over time, I began to see certain advantages to the extreme Christian commitment to truth. If the Adventist I knew bought a car, he reported the exact price he paid to the DMV or he would have to look at himself in the mirror every day and see a lying cheat staring back. Certain Jews I met (such as Germans and Litvaks) had similar standards, but other Jewish groups did not exhibit the same scruples.
As an Adventist, you reported honestly to your insurance company where you lived while if you were ethnic, it seemed, you were more flexible. If you could save money by giving a false address for your car insurance, you did it.
As a Seventh-Day Adventist and you sold something, you felt a moral obligation to be truthful about its defects. I noticed that ethnic groups didn’t feel this same compulsion quite as often as the people I grew up around.
I went to Seventh-Day Adventist schools and there were classmates who cheated, but they were rarely proud of it. It was not considered cool to game the system. It was not considered to cheat on taxes or customs or in business. It was the mark of low character, you were a moral leper. Unclean! Unclean!
I often take my Seventh-Day Adventist customs into my life in Los Angeles and I’m mocked for being archaic. “That might fly in Seventh-Day Adventist land,” my friends will say, “but that’s not how we do things in Hollywood.”
I notice with some of my new friends, if you need to get something done, you get it done by any means necessary. If you need to make up names and email addresses for a petition, you make them up if necessary. That would be regarded as just not cricket in my Anglo upbringing.
I’d go to events with Jewish friends and be appalled when they’d suggest that just one of us buy a ticket (for, say, a Dennis Prager lecture on morality, yes, we did this once at Valley Beth Shalom, I bought the ticket but then, oy, I’m so ashamed) and then open the back door so the rest could get in for free. As a Seventh-Day Adventist, you don’t tell the conductor that you are 12 when you are 13 to get a cheaper ticket. What’s the big deal? Lying is thought to be corrupting. When you get in the habit of lying over small things, you’ll be more likely to do it over big things, and the more you do it, the more it rots your soul.
From a Christian perspective, there is one universal morality. There is one standard for how you treat people. For other groups, there is a dual morality. There is one standard for how you treat your in-group and a lower standard for how you treat outsiders.
When I came to UCLA in 1988 and met Jews for the first time, I was fascinated. They seem to have such animal spirits and intense community and strong family lives. I was very impressed. Anglo life, by comparison, seemed dull and tame.
I got some Asian girlfriends. I loved the way Asians studied hard, worked hard, and respected authority. I love their strong family structure. I was, however, disappointed in their ethics. If they could get away with cheating, they did. If they could get away with stealing, they did. They didn’t have the same universal morality as the Adventists. Asians viewed Americans as naive.
My Chinese girlfriend told me about how she stole money from her family and I was appalled, even though she used it to fly to see me and to pay for our long-distance phone calls.
Asian morality, Jewish morality, ethnic morality, Mediterranean morality, tribal morality, seemed pretty similar. Anglo morality (belief in one universal standard for how you treat people and great importance given to doing the moral thing) was the outlier.
I’ve noticed that in Judaism, truth has an instrumental value. If you can achieve a Torah end by telling untruth, in many instances that is allowed and even encouraged. See Marc Shapiro’s book, Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History.
Different groups of Jews have different standards. Jews are a high IQ group and they get arrested at a lower rate than the non-Jews around them. By and large, Jews are good neighbors. When Jews become doctors, lawyers and dentists, they are not known for inferior work and inferior ethics.
I was watching this Seinfeld episode tonight from season five:
Jerry’s girlfriend, Meryl (Courteney Cox), poses as his wife so she can share his 25% dry cleaning discount. In fact, Jerry is having fun with the idea of having a wife, even if it’s just to start a sentence. George urinates in the shower while at the health club and fears he may be reported to management. Elaine gets mixed signals from Greg, a prospective boyfriend in whom she is interested. As it turns out, the man Elaine has her eye on is the same person who caught George urinating in the shower.
Jerry eventually cheats on his “wife” with another woman in order to give her the discount. Meanwhile, Kramer is losing sleep because Jerry took his quilt to the cleaner, taking advantage of the discount. Kramer goes to get a tan to impress his girlfriend’s family, and ends up falling asleep on the tanning bed.
As it happens, Greg wants to date a female gym instructor and not Elaine. Then he discovers Elaine is friends with George. The episode ends with Kramer meeting his girlfriend’s family, who are black, and Kramer being horribly tanned to the extent that he appears to be in blackface. The girlfriend’s father then angrily says, “I thought you said you was bringing a white boy home! I don’t see a white boy! I see a damn fool!”
I am unaware of the lead characters explicitly identifying as Jewish but they are all obviously Jewish except Kramer. The things they do just wouldn’t fly in an Anglo community. You wouldn’t tell the dry cleaner, for instance, that you were married, just to get a 25% discount.
I don’t think I have seen one Seinfeld episode where the main characters could conceivably be Seventh-Day Adventist. They are way too unethical, duplicitous, selfish and hedonistic. You try to pull that stuff in a Seventh-Day Adventist community and you’d be pulled aside and told to shape up or ship out. Your interlocutor would get a very serious face, stare into your eyes, and with an expression of great pain say, “You need a closer walk with the Lord, my friend.”
To Jewish eyes, Adventists seem like regimented children, all fake, naive, ignorant, and overly nice. To Adventist eyes, Jews seem rude, crude, unethical, lustful, beastly, haggling, and duplicitous. Adventists seem like simple folks to outsiders, Jews seem like anything but.
The matter of fact ways that the Seinfeld characters pursue what they want without regard to ethics is hilarious, but if I were the ruler of a country, I would not want such people. If I had a high-trust society, these people would be parasites. They would take advantage of the naive. They would corrupt the less intelligent with cheap alcohol, cheap loans, cheap porn, cheap TV, cheap goods, cheap standards and as a result, society would go to hell.
I can’t think of anything less Seventh-Day Adventist than recreational sex while for many of my new friends, that’s the greatest thing ever. As a Seventh-Day Adventist, pre-marital sex was a very big sin. Most Orthodox Jews are virgins when they marry, but overall, even Orthodox Jews seem more at ease than Protestants with the natural passions such as lust, envy, and honor-seeking. Protestants keep a tight check on animal spirits.
Pre-marital sex is a huge sin in conservative Christianity. In Orthodox Judaism, it is not necessarily any more serious than breaking the Sabbath or eating non-kosher food.
Why don’t WASPs go to orgies? Too many thank-you notes.
Orthodox Judaism is a more difficult and demanding way of life than Seventh-Day Adventism. There is no comparison. Adventism is easy street when compared observance of Torah law, but there are ways I realize now that Adventism is more demanding, such as with the truth.
The big sins in conservative Christianity are sexual. The biggest sin in Jewish life is making the tribe look bad.
White guilt means being too ethnocentric, notes Steve Sailer. Jewish guilt means not being ethnocentric enough.
Overall, Orthodox Judaism has more stringent rules for behavior than Seventh-Day Adventism (the average IQ of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews is around 110 and for white Adventists about 100), but in the way the religion is practiced by fallible people, things are more complicated. There is plenty we can each learn from the other and there are generalizable patterns for how Adventists and Jews behave. We don’t put identical stress on the same sins.
In Jewish life, “sin” is not the obsession it is in Christianity. I don’t recall many Jews I’ve known who were racked by guilt over their sins while that was common among the Adventists I knew.
When I was an Adventist, if the boss asked you if you had plenty to keep you busy, you were expected to answer honestly. In much of the Jewish life I’ve known, you are not expected to answer honestly. If you are surfing the net and the boss asks you what you are doing and you say, “Filing!”, and you have some paper in your hand to be filed, it is cool as long as you can get away with it, and if occasionally you told the truth, then there was shock and congratulations. In large swatches of Jewish life, from the secular to the Orthodox, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.
Leading a Jewish life is very expensive and if you have to cut a few ethical corners to make ends meet and to pay for yeshiva tuition for your kids, it’s not so bad (though certain sects of Judaism are strict about ethics, such as the Modern Orthodox, and Jews of Western European origins, particularly those from England and Germany tend to be particularly ethical, upstanding and polite).
On the other hand, if you couldn’t achieve without cutting corners in Adventism, then you made peace with your lack of achievement and you stored up treasure in heaven (though plenty of Jews have the same attitude, just not the Sammy Glicks).
Jews tend to be more blunt and intense than gentiles. They tend to be more direct and challenging. Being a nice person is an important value in Protestantism. In Judaism, it is just one value in a constellation of values. Part of the reason that goyim may think of Jews as immoral is that Jews are simply more open, direct and honest about their motivations and what they want and what they have done. As a Seventh-Day Adventist, I learned to hide anything unseemly.
I’ve always been a lazy sort looking to take the easy way out. When school got too hard, such as in Chemistry class, I cheated. I’ve rarely put much effort into my work unless I was getting the attention I craved. I thought converting to Judaism would cure my moral shortcomings. With a few exceptions, it did nothing of the sort.
When I was a Seventh-Day Adventist, I usually took the path of least resistance and tried to get away with everything I could without risking too much tension. I carried that pattern into my Judaism.
When I hired a company to investigate Google’s claim of malicious code on Lukeford.net, they found my site was clean. Google simply hated a Lukeford.net blog post using a Wikipedia entry that contained a few sentences about rape hoaxes. They shut down my site from its search engine on August 18 because of hate facts. I didn’t fit the narrative they’re feeding the world.
I get it. They hate us. They want to replace us. Dissident voices must be destroyed.
Google and the other tech giants are at war with Donald Trump and his supporters. They want to replace us with foreigners who will be meek and work cheaply and not threaten the oligarchs. Similarly, Wall Street is donating to Hillary $99 for every dollar it sends Donald Trump. Goldman Sachs had banned its employees from donating to Trump but encourages donating to Hillary.
Finance, tech and media giants will do everything they think they can get away with to stop Donald J. Trump without committing suicide. When Trump is elected president, I hope he destroys them.
You’ll notice that Google doodles rarely if ever celebrate white Christian America. They celebrate Caesar Chavez and Martin Luther King and the Coalition of the Fringe.
The internet giants are working together to give you approved news.
What could possibly go wrong?
Washington (AFP) – Facebook, Twitter and news organizations including Agence France-Presse have joined a coalition of media and technology groups seeking to filter out online misinformation and improve news quality on social networks.
First Draft News, which is backed by Google, announced Tuesday that some 20 news organizations will be part of its partner network to share information on best practices for journalism in the online age.
Jenni Sargent, managing director of First Draft, said the partner network will help advance the organization’s goal of improving news online and on social networks.
“Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organizations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source,” she said in a blog post.
“We are not going to solve these problems overnight, but we’re certainly not going to solve them as individual organizations.”
Sargent said the coalition will develop training programs and “a collaborative verification platform,” as well as a voluntary code of practice for online news.
“We live in a time when trust and truth are issues that all newsrooms, and increasingly the social platforms themselves, are facing,” she said.
“Each partner is committed to sharing knowledge, developing policies and devising training in how journalists use the social web to find and report news.”
The announcement comes amid concerns over the growing role of social networks, especially Facebook, in delivering and filtering news, and sometimes allowing hoaxes and misinformation to proliferate.
The partner network includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, CNN, ABC News of Australia, ProPublica, AFP, The Telegraph, France Info, Breaking News, Le Monde’s Les Decodeurs, International Business Times UK, Eurovision News Exchange and Al Jazeera Media Network.
Other organizations in the network include Amnesty International, European Journalism Centre, American Press Institute, International Fact Checking Network and Duke Reporters’ Lab.”
Daily Caller: For a journalist actually interested in seeking the truth, there are plenty of questions to ask Brock. In a legal fight that the press has conveniently ignored, Brock’s former long-time live-in boyfriend William Grey (whom Brock has thanked in several of his books) threatened to go to the IRS with damaging information about how Brock was running his Media Matters empire. What did Brock do? He paid Grey $850,000 to keep quiet. Brock reportedly had to sell his home in Rehoboth, Delaware to come up with the money. This certainly seems to indicate that Brock was terrified about what the authorities would uncover.
If Brock were merely a private citizen, this would simply be a matter between Grey and himself. But Brock is working closely with the Clinton campaign and using his organizations like Media Matters to go after her opponents. If Grey has evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Media Matters and Brock, that has a bearing on larger issues and becomes newsworthy. Why hasn’t the press been interested in this? Brock should follow his own standards of transparency by releasing his records.
Also of interest would be Brock’s role in the purchase and illegal use of guns in the District of Columbia and elsewhere. As previously reported in the Daily Caller, Brock had a bodyguard, Haydn Price-Morris, carry a loaded gun in the District of Columbia. The Daily Caller reported that “multiple firearms used to protect the Media Matters founder were purchased with Brock’s blessing — and apparently with the group’s money.” This is astonishing under any circumstances, but particularly because Brock is so closely aligned with Hillary Clinton, who is strongly in favor of strict gun control laws. Apparently those stricter rules on guns don’t apply to her loyal partisans. Brock should come clean on his role in this story, release all his gun purchase records and reveal whether Media Matters funds were used to purchase firearms. They could start by getting the real story from the bodyguard involved.
I worked closely with Brock when he wrote his book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, published in 1996. Brock himself has written in his 2002 memoirs that he believes this was an honest book, and still does today. Seduction contains damning evidence against both Hillary and Bill, but you would never know that from the recent coverage of the book by the New York Times (which called it “flattering”) and others. Many of Brock’s conclusions about Hillary are anything but “flattering” – in fact, they are downright disturbing, as these easily-verifiable highlights demonstrate.
Hillary believes that the ends justify the means and that “legal and ethical strictures and standards of accountability” do not apply to her (p. 415);
Bill’s serial womanizing had instilled in Hillary “a contempt for the democratic process itself” (p. 276-77);
Hillary’s bad faith “Trojan horse efforts” on health care reform “would reveal not just surprisingly poor judgment on her part but character flaws of a particularly dangerous and self-destructive sort” (p. 330), and she “employed means that were questionable in a democracy” (p. 346);
She lied about whether she represented a client before the state when her husband was Governor (p. 265);
She was willing to use the Department of Justice to achieve political ends (p. 312);
Her hand-picked White House attorneys stonewalled investigations, acted like “mob lawyers, ” and their conduct was a “serious infringement of the public trust” (p. 397);
The Clinton campaign’s use of a thug private eye to intimidate potential witnesses showed that Hillary “was willing to countenance intimidation of women to cover up Bill’s peccadilloes.” (p. 274)
Brock also provided extensive evidence showing that when he was governor of Arkansas, Hillary’s husband ran a vast corrupt administration where he showered favors on and “greased the wheels of government” for supporters such as Jim McDougal and Dan Lasater (pp. 195-213). Brock finds Bill – who would remain an important figure in his wife’s White House – to be a person without any integrity or strength of character (p. 234), and calls him “perhaps the weakest chief executive since Warren Harding.” (p. 289) Brock asserts that “[W]hen a fundamentally weak person like Bill relies on a ‘moral compass’ that itself becomes askew, the results can be tragic…Bill relied on someone who believed she was simply too good to do wrong.” (p. 417)
