It’s described all over mainstream media as the North Carolina Anti-LGBT Law – intentionally creating a picture of old-time Southern bigotry, conjuring up images of signs in North Carolina establishments that bar people from entrance or deny them the right to be served. Journalistic flourish at its best.
The truth is that the matter under immediate dispute is that North Carolina had the chutzpa, as contended by homosexual/transgender lobbying organs, to insist that only men, being defined as human beings with male physiology, be allowed to enter men’s restrooms, and vice versa for physiological women being allowed to enter only women’s restrooms. People who are transsexual and claim to really be the opposite gender than their natural bodies may indicate allege that the North Carolina law is discriminatory, as it prevents physiological men who self-identify as women from using women’s restrooms, and the reverse.
We are not speaking here about people who have necessarily undergone sex surgery and now have anatomies of the opposite gender of their birth, which is itself a complex situation; rather, we speak even about people who are physically fully male, but who have elected to be registered as female and are certified to have undergone therapy for such, by dint of their self-perception and belief that they are really female. The US government, with the support of homosexual/transgender lobbying organizations, argues in its lawsuit against North Carolina that to require these biological men to use men’s restrooms rather than women’s restrooms is a fundamental form of illegal discrimination and that abolishing the North Carolina law “is part of the ongoing civil rights struggle”. (More use of Old Southern bigotry images, of course.)
Never mind the great discomfort as well as the feelings of invasion of privacy and breach of modesty that women will experience when biological men who self-identify as women enter the ladies’ room. And never mind that a male-looking person who enters the ladies’ room with the claim that he self-identifies as a woman may in truth actually be a “real” male, believe it or not, desirous to spend time in the ladies’ room to satisfy his male curiosities and interests. Somehow, these very real concerns become annoying secondary details when the agenda of the transgender/homosexual lobbyists and their political allies is on the move.
The Talmudic Sages tell us that the legal system in Sodom was topsy-turvy, such that those who were the object of offense were penalized, and those causing the offense were awarded. To turn public protocol on its head and impose upon people policies which violate their rights to basic privacy and security, for an elusive cause that until recently never raised its head and is not recognized by many in the first place, is utterly mind-boggling and shocking.
Although many in the American public may not care to hear about how the assault on the North Carolina law is an affront to Biblical values, one would expect that common sense and public safety would at least be taken into consideration – but alas, that was too much to hope for.
Why does this all matter to those of us who do not live in North Carolina and who do not anticipate encountering biological men in the ladies’ room and vice versa within our own communities? It matters greatly, as it illustrates ever so acutely both the deterioration of the most basic Biblical values throughout Western society, as well as the fact that the fringe left, in pursuit of its agenda, is totally oblivious to arguments of reason and even safety.
If only traditional Judaism would lower its standards, become more open minded, there would be a Jewish renaissance. That is the assertion of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, in a recent article in the Jewish Week. He points to what he calls “open Orthodoxy” as proof that a shift is underway. He believes that if this movement continues to grow it will create a new Jewish middle.
American Jewish life is already experiencing a fundamental realignment. There is a new Jewish middle and it’s not Greenberg’s brand of an orthodoxy that has lowered classical standards of Halachic observance, pushed time honored principles of belief to the edge, and some would argue beyond it. That new Jewish middle is Chabad, and, as they say, the proof is in the numbers.
Today in North America there are more Chabad Centers than either Reform or Conservative Temples. And while many liberal congregations are consolidating and merging, Chabad is booming and building. Evolving in cities and towns across the US, from living rooms, to storefronts, and eventually impressive centers, filled with Jews of all backgrounds. This shift is happening without compromising core values of Halacha and belief. If you walk into a Chabad Center in Bozeman or Boston, you will only find Chalav Yisroel on the table. The Mechiza will be the proper height, and there is no initiative to institute “Partnership Minyanim.”
The recent demographic survey, by the very non-orthodox Jewish Federation of Greater Miami, reveals remarkable statistics on Chabad involvement. These numbers are indicators of the restructuring of the American Jewish community already underway. In Miami 27% of local Jews are active in Chabad, among Jews 35 and younger the number skyrockets to 47%. What is most intriguing is that only 20% of those who attend Chabad self-identify as Orthodox. The Jewish middle is clearly shifting, and while tiny numbers may gravitate to Greenberg’s new brand of orthodoxy, the numbers are infinitesimal in relation to Chabad. By choosing Chabad the new generation is boarding a train headed towards observance instead of away. For some it may move at a slow pace, for others more rapid, but the direction is a new one for many Jews.
Posted inChabad|Comments Off on The Realignment of American Jewry
Gentrification means a neighborhood is becoming more white.
Steve Sailer writes: … blacks acquired a number of close-in neighborhoods — Harlem, most of Washington DC, the south lakefront of Chicago, a huge swathe of Los Angeles between the beach and downtown, etc. — and then held onto them longer than would have happened if they had been less violent. Black crime allowed blacks to afford otherwise desirable urban neighborhoods for longer than less violent groups, who got economically or ethnically cleansed from their neighborhoods with little muss or fuss.
Slowly, especially in New York City, crime has been brought under better control, which means no part of Manhattan will stay a slum.
The Obama Administration, going back to its Chicago roots, has close financial ties to urban real estate interests, such as the Pritzkers. The very first conversation between the young Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright in Dreams from My Fathers: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a discussion of the spiritual adviser’s secretary’s plan to move to the suburbs and why Wright opposes that. (Wright eventually retired to a 10,000 sq. ft. house in a golf course development in a highly white suburb).
So, the Obama Administration has paid particular attention to greasing the skids under urban blacks so they won’t face any resistance to their abandoning all the potentially valuable real estate they occupy and moving to less fashionable locations. For example, the Obama Administration has been at war with Dubuque, Iowa over its resistance to Chicago plans to relocate Chicago’s poor, violent blacks to Dubuque. Obviously, the liberal Democrats running Chicago are liberal Democrats so they can’t be racist in their desire to pawn their troublesome Chicago blacks off on the small city losers of Dubuque, who are no doubt vicious racists, just look at them.
COMMENTS:
* Obama is making America great again. LA, Chicago, DC, and all of Manhattan will become amazing cities. These cities will become many more times more amazing then they are now and project the image of a hyper dynamic and hip American urban elite to the rest of the world.
Only Obama and Democrats can make this happen. Talking about it openly will only slow down the process. Are you against this amazing revitalization of American cities and America’s image abroad? If you aren’t then you should keep quiet.
* I was teaching a developmental psychology class. The university had chosen a text by Belsky. It described a 1993 experiment (Moving to Opportunity) in which Blacks were randomly placed into two groups and either left in urban centrers or moved to suburbs. Those who were moved to suburbs got into more trouble than those who stayed.
Belsky blamed the White folks in the suburbs for the Blacks behaviour (see link above). I asked my students two questions: 1) should the people in the suburbs be warned about the risks of the experiment that was being done to them, and 2) if they thought White people should be blamed for the behaviour of Black people.
The Federal government is importing Micronesians into Hawaii. This is the result of a law passed after the Bikini atoll H bomb experiments in the 1950s. This second experiment, the moving of Micronesians to Hawaii, will double heath care costs for the state this year according to HMSA and has resulted in students entering schools in Hawaii unable to read English or understand calendars.
The APA requires that individuals involved in social science experiments be informed of the risks involve beforehand and give informed consent.
My question to you is – Did the Federal government warn the people involved about the risks of participating in the three experiment above? Did those people give informed consent?
Who should be held responsible?
* Why isn’t the Obama Administration required to conduct a massive Environmental Impact Statement analysis of its plan to print up 5 million Get Out of Jail Free cards for illegal aliens?
* I am somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand, there are certainly people on the left who understand that creating highly desirable urban neighborhoods often means finding a reason to get rid of all the NAMs dragging down values in areas that naturally should be great real estate…and some of them are OK with developers making a fortune off of it, reckoning the tax revenue generated by increased property values or returning previously tax-exempt property to the rolls can be used to help the noble NAMs, but preferably somewhere many miles away.
On the other hand, I feel like there are even more who subscribe to the “white people are magic” theory by which vibrant diversity needs to be placed in close proximity to them to absorb their personal habits, educational achievement, economic success and so on through some kind of osmosis even though all right-thinking people also understand they are stodgy racist oppressors who are responsible for all the shortcomings in NAM lives across the country.
Maybe an alternate theory is that the progressives know full well that an influx of lower income NAMs into conservative suburbs and exurbs will destroy those communities and alter the political calculus for the House as middle class whites disperse and their voting power is diluted. It’s political and cultural warfare carried out in the name of social justice.
Among ethnic groups, blacks have the lowest birthrate citywide, 12.7 per 1000, and abort 55 percent of pregnancies.
Ultra-orthodox Jews in Borough Park have the highest, 27.9 per 1000. (Zero abortions?)
Most mothers are poor and/or immigrant but teen pregnancies have plummeted.
* As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, there is no “correct” amount of time American ethnic groups are “supposed” to stay in one location or another. And what “cleansing”? Whites moved out for a number of reasons- not simply black crime. Other key factors include the destruction of numerous lower class white neighborhoods by “urban renewal”- though that destruction was a lot less than that wreaked on black areas, the wide expansion of numerous new highways that facilitated white movement to suburbs, and the simple pressure of black dollars that outbid white dollars for property. As Sowell has shown, whites were in numerous places outbid by blacks who wanted and needed more living space. The blacks paid higher prices for older, less attractive housing stock in many cases- older stock that some whites were eager to unload on them for a profit.
And blacks themselves have been pushed out of numerous neighborhoods in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and 1990s without much “muss or fuss.” They have also been SPECIFICALLY victims of direct “ethnic cleansing” by Hispanic gangs.
* Agreed- the poor, particularly the black poor will always get shafted more. But many conservatives have been anything BUT willing to put all the cards on the table and engage in open debate where housing is concerned, maintaining a propaganda barrage about how housing discrimination is a minor problem that does not need much government scrutiny, when in fact, it still remains a major problem for African Americans. Conservatives have also used several deceptive covering methods to sidetrack open debate- such as making statistics “disappear.”
As one scholar shows for example -quote- “At a time when the number of housing discrimination complaints filed with HUD doubled, the Reagan Justice Department neglected nearly every serious complaint… The administration also used the Paperwork Reduction Act as an excuse to stop HUD from gathering data on the racial identities of participants in its housing programs.21 By refusing to gather data on true discrimination, the Reagan administration strengthened resistance to fair-housing laws to the point of encouraging outright refusal to obey them.” Reagan appointees also sharply slashed federal funding for subsidized housing – reducing it some 80% between 1981 and 1985 (–Lipsitz 2007, The Possessive Investment..)
* I live four blocks from a ten lane freeway and, contra Jane Jacobs, it’s not so bad. The side of the residential street that backs up against the freeway is slummier than the other side of the street, but that’s about the full extent of the blight caused by the freeway: half a block.
Posted inBlacks, New York|Comments Off on Blacks & Gentrification
I never ate pizza until the summer of 1980, when I was 14 and we were eating out. I loved it. It was regarded as a naughty dish by my parents because it was too rich. We never had pizza at home.
* Well, they had to re-make “Roots” since OJ was in the original; he did a predictably bad job but at one point he had to show off his running, and he did that. It sort of reminded me of “Dirty Dozen” which had Jim Brown in it, he got to do his thing at the very end of the movie where he did a bunch of juke moves running down the top of the bunker tossing grenades into the air shafts. Maybe they should try that at the NFL Combine.
Actually, the snark implied in the comment,”that we may never stop needing reminders of whose lives matter,” is somewhat surprising to see in the NY Times. Is the author a transperson of some kind with a wild hair up somewhere?
* Along with all other European-American groups, Italians were accepted into American everyday life before WWII. (In late 1920′s, talkie cinema Chico Marx’s introduced millions to his delightfully fractured faux-Italian accent.) Until the Second World War, U.S. urban neighborhoods, and even rural regions, remained intensively mono-ethnic.
Until the Second World War endogamy within one’s ethnic parish or neighborhood was the rule. Intermarriage among second generation European-American ethnic groups didn’t take off until during, but mostly after, the Second World War, whose labor demands and mass-conscription/enlistment military transfers were marked by unprecedented domestic travel & relocation, which served as a giant continental mixer of European-American ethnic groups and their various cuisines, musical traditions & styles, religious & social customs.
(The one thing the Irish lacked utterly was a cuisine, any cuisine at all – the ancient joke being:
Q. What’s a seven course Irish dinner?)
A. A boiled potato and a six-pack.)
The melting pot vision, encouraged until 1965 from the top down by and in every institution, was an enormous success in acclimating all sorts of European-American ethnic groups to one another and blending second and third generation European-Americans into unique and successful Americanism – unlike today’s identity politics-based, fractious nonsense of multiculturalism rejected and scorned the old, successful wisdom and turned away from, to use an apt term, the overarching Protestant-secular-Enlightenment ethic that had prevailed from the time of the Revolutionary War.
* My parents made me watch Roots when it came out in 1977 and I was 8. I lived in Arcadia, CA at the time where I quite literally never once saw a black person. I believed EVERYTHING I saw in the show.
Having lived in less idyllic places since then, I’m definitely not going to let me kids watch Roots, even if they somehow wanted to (my oldest is 6 so it’s not an issue yet).
BTW, Derbyshire’s famous “The Talk” isn’t that practical when you factor in the potential trouble your kids can get into for saying the wrong thing. I haven’t figured out what the heck to say about black issues, just to steer my kids as much as possible into the right crowd and interests.
* Is there any authoritative place where one can easily determine if there has been a single year in the last 40 or so in which there wasn’t some slavery or civil-rights themed TV or film(or I guess musical album, like Beyonce’s newest flaming bag of dog poop) that got hyped by the cultural elites so that we didn’t actually forget about this stuff in the previous 12 months?
Every now and then there is something like The Color Purple or Precious that isn’t ham-fistedly pounding audiences with the standard “whites=bad oppressors, blacks=noble people who would have done great things absent Euro colonialism and slavery”, but overall it’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
* Still, they were fascists and they did some not very nice things during the war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_war_crimes
but for some reason nobody blamed them. In any WWII movie, the Italians always come off as incompetent rather than evil like the Germans.
A lot of this had to do with the Cold War and keeping the Italian Communist Party out of power – after the war the Americans had no interest in pursuing fascist war crimes.
* Kevin MacDonald would point out that Jews have historically tried to make tactical alliances with other minority groups against the majority. The very heavy Jewish manipulation and promotion of the Sacco and Vanzetti case would be an excellent example.
The Sacco and Vanzetti was an attempt to stir up anti establishment sentiments among Italian immigrants. It was largely a failure.
However, the Sacco and Vanzetti saga was a major landmark in the founding of both the ACLU and the American Communist Party. Actually through numerous nationwide Sacco and Vanzetti defence clubs and rallies the ACP was able to recruit lots of members and dupes. However, Sacco and Vanzetti was manly highly successful in radicalizing lots of Eastern European Jews and making in roads among the liberal WASP establishment, not Italian immigrants.
A notable example, Alger Hiss was a protege’ of Felix Frankfurter, himself a true believer in Sacco and Vanzetti, and one among many Communist recruits who was a member of a Sacco and Vanzetti defence organization.
Instead of joining the left, remember by the mid 1920s many Italian Immigrants were at least a bit sympathetic towards Mussolini if for no other reason than Il Duce’s tough stance against the Mafia.
As far as pizza and Italian food in general is concerned it was popular among urban college kids as early as the 1920s. Remember Warren Beatty’s character in “Splendor in the Grass” is introduced to pizza while at college. My Sicilian grandparents were friends with a family that started pizzerias serving students from the University of Cincinnati and Xavier in the 1920s before the depression hit. The pizza craze took off from where it started once the economy improved in the 1940s.
In general Italian assimilation was largely a function of them joining trade unions along with dominating many small business like restaurants, barber shops, beauty salons, produce, convenience stores, dry cleaning, plumbing…. Other Americans had a hard time not knowing, or doing business with, them.
* I experience this phenomena with a lot of ethnic food that I have tried. Authentic Mexican food is quite plain, thin plain bread with meat or beans. A lot of authentic Chinese food is quite plain as well, such as items with meat which have been boiled in water to the point where they lose all the meat’s original taste. Or food which has been spiced to the point where it tastes like you’re eating battery acid.
The city I was living in until a few years ago, I noticed that there was a Chinese restaurant that seemed to be getting most of the Chinese food business in town- it was packed every time I went there, while the other Chinese restaurants were sparsely populated when I went to them. Turns out that my Chinese friends were avoiding the popular one, but liked some of the others, because the popular one had “Americanized” Chinese food, not authentic Chinese food. The same probably holds for Mexican food as well. Look at the sheer amount of business done by Taco Bell, Chipotle, and Moes vs. the authentic Mexican restaurant on the edge of your town.
It may surprise you, but hang out with some Chinese people enough, and you’ll come to find that a number of Chinese restaurants in the US actually have separate menus in Chinese for dishes that Chinese like but aren’t popular enough with Americans to be on a regular menu.
I get a chuckle out of thinking about how the liberal yuppie with his nose held high in the air, flaunting his superiority through his great love of the superior exotic food from the far reaches of the earth he gets at his favorite restaurant, almost certainly has been chowing down on an artificial version of his dish specially concocted to appeal to his American palate.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
