* We can’t tell Jewish jokes because “It is funnier to punch up, as the old saying goes.”
The large number of Christians in Indiana and Arkansas who had their religious freedom law overturned by Marc Benioff will be surprised, as will any Protestant with a case before the US Supreme Court.
* As most Jews have become more secular and assimilated, negative stereotypes about Jews have been perpetuated by some Jews as a (bizarre) means of maintaining cultural identity. That may sound crazy, but check out this YouTube campaign from several years ago by a Jewish organization in Philadelphia.
* Jewish jokes are not necessarily offensive or at least they should not be. But joking about emulating an event where millions of people were slaughtered like cattle is offensive and reason enough for Comedy Central to tell this guy to take a walk. The joke was not even close to being funny which only makes it seem that much more offensive.
Consider if a white comedian told a joke about black people dying on slave ships. They would not have hesitated to fire him in less than a minute of reflection. And Those murders happened hundreds of years ago rather than within many living peoples lifetimes.
Joking about Jewish parsimony or Jewish women refusing to perform certain types of sexual favors should be accepted as healthy ribbing. Some of these jokes can be amusing and should not be banned by the politically correct police.
Other white ethnic groups are allowed to take ribbing as well.
I am really bothered by people calling the joke about fat girls as “misogynist.” That screams of politically correct thought police. We’re not allowed to acknowledge that there are some women who are overweight that like to believe they are God’s gift to the Earth? That is a crime against womanhood?
* The tweet in question is: “Almost bumped a Jewish kid crossing the road. He didn’t look b4 crossing but I still would hav felt so bad in my german car!”
That tweet no more “makes light of the Holocaust” than any Black comedian talking about being nervous in the Deep South makes light of slavery. The idea that Germans are predisposed to violence towards Jews, and that Jews are nervous about that (sometimes incorrectly) has been a staple of Western comics since the 1950′s: not least being featured in virtually every Woody Allen and/or Jewish comedy routine I have ever seen. Even classic modern films (e.g., Big Lebowski) make reference to the potential for German-Jewish animus.
I will grant you that only in the past 15 years or so can one see portrayals of Germans in American culture who are not automatically anti-Semites or warmongers, but that says more about prejudicial stereotypes about Germans than Jews or the Holocaust.
* And Jews are really, really weak. Why, did you know that Jews comprise only 17.46 of the 2013 FORBES World’s Billionaire’s List? Even worse, they only comprise 34.75 of the names in the 2012 FORBES 400 richest Americans list.
Elite Jews have been following an anti-European Christian strategy for a long time now. They are comfortable with it. It feels good. It’s got inertia on its side. It’s going to take something really massive for them to change direction now.
* But the Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Michelle van Loon is a convert to Christianity, albeit an unusual one. She can hardly claim to speak for anyone but herself, and she is not a dumb Jew who hasn’t clued in to the Muslim menace–she isn’t Jewish. In fact, the real question is: why is it in the interest of billionaires to keep spewing out this multicultural agitation and convoluted drivel?
* “It is funnier to punch up, as the old saying goes, than to punch down,” Page writes. “Deflating the pompous and powerful can be hilarious. Ridiculing the weak is just sad.”
Does this mean that it is no longer acceptable for Jewish comedians to make fun of white Christians who live in trailer parks in Appalachia? Or are white Appalachians considered to be among the pompous and powerful?
* Telling a joke about Jews by anyone other than Jews has always been fraught with danger, and was only successfully performed by masters of comedic delivery (witness Louis C.K. below). Since it’s all about delivery, trying it on Twitter is an incredibly bad idea.
I agree that there we’re witnessing a knee-jerk reaction right now by secular liberal Jews who are choosing to double down on traditional ideas (oh the irony) of everybody everywhere waiting with pitchforks to form pogroms out of some uncontrollable sickness with absolutely no predictability. This is much more palatable than thinking rationally about the consequences of mass immigration.
Back when Louis C.K. was younger and edgier, he walked very close to precipice:
Now he’s much more nuanced, but the genius of his comedy is that he can take a story in so many directions that the listener is amused at the controversial subject, while not being able to pinpoint if he’s poking fun of Jewish media hegemony (Schindler’s List on every channel, all the time), or stoking Jewish feelings of righteousness as the ultimate oppressed group (the “Goodbye Jew” story must be real, so Spielberg reservedly fit it in the movie).
* Can anyone imagine a Gentile getting away with making a biting satire of the social scene in Manhattan’s Upper West Side? Neither can I. The Royal Tenenbaums is as close as it comes and that’s too quirky and defanged to count.
* If I ever had my idea for a cartoon come to fruition, one of the characters would be a Mizrahi immigrant from Israel who absolutely loathes Ashkenazis. For example, he puts on a production of “Merchant of Venice” where the bad guy’s name is changed to Shylockstein and in the end instead of forcibly being converted to Christianity he is forced to change to using the Sephardic right.
Granted, very few people would get the joke, but Big Bang Theory is popular, and I would wager that a lot of the jokes on that fly over the heads of people not interested in science.
* But Trevor Noah is one-quarter Jewish (on his mother’s side — maybe his mother’s mother?) and Lena Dunham’s mother is Jewish, which makes her Jewish according to Jewish custom. And Lena Dunham has said that she identifies as Jewish (or half-Jewish, at least) so her unfunny bit about Jewish boyfriends is probably something she knows from experience. If these are our anti-Semites, Lenny Bruce must have been a Nazi.
My dad was one-quarter Norwegian, the rest English and Scots-Irish. Being Norwegian was more meaningful in Wisconsin, so he identified as a Norwegian-American. He used to tell Ole and Lena (not Dunham) jokes and refer to himself deprecatingly as “just a dumb Norwegian” (this despite Norway ranking #1 in Blue-Eyed Privilege). Who knew that, all along, my dad was a raving anti-Norskite?
* In defense of Jewish women, it is my personal experience that they have no aversion to that fairly standard sexual practice most men love more than the grand finale. It masters (mistresses?), however, are Japanese women, especially those from 30 up.
* Jews are White too. And that’s why Dieudonne M’bala M’bala and Trevor Noah are punching down. At the White people they hate the most (high IQ Ashkenazi) but rest assured the rest of us Whites will get it too.
Of course jokes by Noah and M’bala M’bala about high IQ Whites are not funny. As bi-racial or Black African they have the power (no jokes about say, Africans proclivity for Child Sacrifice or eating Pygmies or Albinos). After all, the fact that Africans regularly butcher and eat albinos and pygmies to get “magic powers” ought to be worth some (no pun intended) black/gallows humor. If you want to go dark and edgy, well there it is.
Not to mention the child sacrifice as African business.
Power is all about who you can make jokes about. Jews are irrevocably White and thus jokes can be made endlessly about THEM by Blacks. No jokes can be made about say, Africans regrettable belief in magic, ritual human sacrifice, and cannibalism. Just as it is against the law, literally, to make jokes about the Thai Royal Family in Thailand. Even the British Royal family is the stuff of constant spoof in Britain, tell a joke about Black people and you get arrested. Heck, have a Black Sambo doll in your window and you get arrested. Yes this actually happened.
As Steve noted, Obama is pretty funny. Henpecked, his mother in law lives with him in the White House, his wife is notably shrewish, his daughters are into thug rappers (one of whom is named no kidding “Joey Bada$$ yes with the dollar signs) and Valerie Jarrett is the obvious fantasy Black Mom figure he’s always wanted. Obama is a Harvard Grad who wants to be a legit thug like Jay-Z whom he hangs out with but is hampered by his love of Golf and Mom Jeans. He’s hilarious. But no one dares make fun of him because as a Black man he has all the power.
PS the people who really, really like Hitler are octogenarian White guys like Jean Le Pen (but obviously not his daughter who is purging him) … and Dieudonne M’bala M’bala who are united in their real dislike of Jews and their liking of Hitler.
* Lena Dunham must be a piece of work. She’s about 80 lbs or so overweight, at least, fairly ugly, with an abrasive personality, ugly tats making her even more ugly, and she’s surprised her actual rock star boyfriend is looking elsewhere? So she figures the best way to keep him is … insult him?
Rather than lose that 80 lbs, remove those tats, act more feminine, and get plastic surgery?
This attitude, by fat women who ought to be grateful they have a man at all, is fairly typical. I’ve seen it many times. It does not sadly seem to be confined to any regional, ethnic, or occupational group.
* Is America so devoid of comedic talent that Comedy central had to import yet one more Third Worlder to do the work that Americans just aren’t allowed to do?
* Telling holocaust jokes shouldn’t be illegal, but that doesn’t mean companies should let their brand be associated with that kind of humor.
* * Exactly how oppressed have Jews been in America?
Not oppressed at all. They’ve historically been very privileged.
Back when the New York Stock Exchange was created by the signing of the Buttonwood agreement in 1792, 5 of 24 signatories were Jewish. This was at a time when less than 0.05 percent of Americans were Jewish.
Not only were Jews not excluded from the establishment back in the 1960s (Barry Goldwater was the first Jewish man on a presidential ticket), they weren’t excluded back in the 1700s either.
Here’s a quote from President George Washington:
May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.
The reason it seems like anti-semitism was pervasive in the past was because anti-black sentiment was pervasive in the past. So it seems logical to think that if Americans kept blacks out of the establishment, they behaved similarly towards Jews. The reality is that not only were Jews welcomed in, Jews were historically respected (and even mildly feared) by white gentile elites.
When Jews socialized apart from white gentiles and had their own country clubs, that was NOT because white gentiles didn’t want to socialize with Jews. It was because Jews didn’t want to socialize with gentiles. Jews have historically been very clash and often viewed socialization as a path to assimilation and intermarriage, which they feared. Eastern European Jews were historically excluded from fancier German Jewish clubs though. So when you hear stories about Jews being excluded from clubs, it was a question of Eastern Europeans being discriminated against by Germans. Not gentiles against Jews. As Steve Sailer has pointed out, Jews historically were big on eating, but didn’t care much for drinking or gold ,which were two interests of gentiles. So that’s why Eastern Euro Jews wanted to join German Jewish clubs.
As for General Grant’s order to excluded Jewish merchants from the North-South border, that order came because Jewish merchants were helping to evade the blockade of the South. That order was immediately rescinded. When he ran for president after the civil war, Grant apologized profusely to Jews. He even went on to run what many saw as the most pro-Jewish administration in the history of America. So even this incident of “anti-semitism” was actually a common sense policy that was controversial due to mid 1800s political correctness towards Jews.
It’s pretty shameful for Jews to even bring up that incident. You would think they’d feel ashamed that their community was involved in undermining the war effort against the Confederacy, but no. They’re not ashamed. It’s gentiles who are supposed to feel ashamed for trying to win the civil war.
Jews may be one of the least discriminated groups in the history of America. If you read American history, it’s striking how little anti-Jewish discrimination you’d find.
* Jerrod Carmichael does a braver job of joking about sensitive topics (such as rape and domestic abuse) than Louis C.K. does about the Holocaust there, IMO. I’ve mentioned this guy here before, but now his recent HBO standup special is available free on YouTube.
He starts his rape joke at about 50 minutes in. There’s also a bit about abused women, that I think comes later.
* I wonder if this plays into the “market dominant minority” theory that Steve’s written about in the past?
To wit, approximately 95% of all Jewish jokes I’ve ever heard in my life came from Jews. The other (approximately) 5% were essentially backhanded German jokes. Jews are disproportionately represented amongst comedians and comedy writers. A substantial proportion of any Jewish comedian’s routine (or sit-com) involves pointing out the humorous idiosyncrasies of growing up Jewish. Jackie Mason–>Philip Roth–>Gary Chandling–>Jerry Seinfeld–>Larry David–>Judd Apatow–>Jeff Ross/Sarah Silverman–>”The Goldbergs”. Yes, there are dozens of data points before, after and in between.
Perhaps the Jewish minority is attempting to keep dominating that particular comedy market? This closing of ranks may explain why half and quarter Jews like Dunham and Noah have suddenly had their carte blanche, for lack of a better term, revoked.
* “If Jewish people were truly integrated into American culture, those trusty toxic stereotypes would be fading.”
I like these Chomsky-style lies. She does not come out and say, explicitly, that “toxic stereotypes” about Jews are not fading. Her sentence makes no sense without that “fact,” though. It’s a kind of lying by encouraging your audience to adopt a question’s false predicate. Is there a technical name for this particular type of lying? It, and relatives, are the main rhetorical techniques in “Distortions at Fourth Hand” and in the relevant sections of *Political Economy of Human Rights* where Chomsky uses them to deny the Cambodian genocide.
One of the things that makes this technique so fun is the spergsplosions it causes in a certain type of leftoid. They start out by telling you “the Cambodian genocide didn’t happen” or “Americans hold toxic stereotypes about Jews.” Asked for evidence, they produce texts with this kind of lying in them. When you point them to actual evidence that, say, the Cambodian genocide did occur or that “toxic stereotypes” about Jews are rare and rapidly fading in America, they then switch to claiming that Chomsky/Van Loon aren’t liars because they never explicitly said what, five minutes before, they were congratulating the authors for having shown them.
Obviously, the “toxic stereotypes” about Jews have been very rapidly fading from American society. Most Americans don’t even know that the Jews control Hollywood or that they control the pornography industry or that Israel is a major buyer on the human trafficking market or that Jews are the middlemen in much of the international human trafficking market or that the “Russian mafia” is Jewish.
* It’s just a big coincidence that explicit hatred of Christianity and enthusiastic embrace of deviance happened at the exact moment that Jews established control of the cultural institutions of the US.
No, post-Christians are really to blame. Even though post-Christians have been the movers and shakers in the US power elite ever since Thomas Jefferson and his Weird Mason Posse took over the place. Some how, some way, the people to blame have to have “Christian” or “Puritan” in their name.
* Q: Why do Jewish men have to be circumcised?
A: Because a Jewish woman won’t touch anything that’s not at least 20% off.
Not to worry: I’m writing from my Safe Place of privilege as a member of that oppressed minority, American Jews.
* I love it when the weak, oppressed comedian Sacha Baron Cohen ridicules the pompous, powerful peasants of Kazahkstan.
* It is fairly standard for Jewish girls to get a nosejob as a birthday present during their teenage years. It’s often euphemistically referred to as getting surgery for a “deviated septum”.
* A writer you haven’t yet mentioned in connection with this trend, but who’s worth keeping an eye on, is David Auerbach, Slate’s technology columnist, who became an SJW target for pointing out that when journalists responded to Gamergate by unanimously declaring that “gamers must die,” they were pretty much proving the gamers’ point.
He’s an old-fashioned left-wing literary mandarin in the Susan Sontag mold (in addition to writing for Slate, he publishes essays on polysyllabic European modernists in highbrow journals.) Watching him interact with SJWs in his writing and tweets, one gets the sense of a very smart guy becoming increasingly exasperated with nominal allies who are several standard deviations dumber than he is. The kind of nuanced theoretical distinctions you can get away with in an Ivy League seminar might as well be heresy to the lumpenintelligentsia who took a freshman sociology lecture at State U and are baying for blood.
* To really understand Jews you need to spend a couple of summers working at one of their summer camps – when their guard is down. I did that in the early 80s and came away knowing that they hunt as a pack and when their racial interests are at stake then it’s all-out-war.
* And the irony of course, is that Eastern European Jews faced some of their biggest discrimination from other Jews, namely, the German Jews who had been here for much longer and were on their way to near full assimilation. Some of the derogatory terms used toward Jews originated from German Jews, by the way as Thomas Sowell among others have written.
Jews also played a major role on the side of the Confederacy.
Here’s the question that’s seldom ever allowed to be answered. If Jews have had an Antebellum presence (and they have) how exactly did they earn their money in the South prior to the Civil War?
There was only one main way to earn tons of wealth in the pre-Civil War South as the entire economy centered around slavery in one form or another.
It isn’t as if they were getting rich simply because they had opened general store chains across the South during this time.
* As Steve Sailer wrote several times, the US is a big country and some bad things are bound to happen in it. I’m sure there must be cases of black people being killed by white people because racism. What’s amazing is that so often they can’t seem to find even one case, and for one reason or another they keep pressing the few cases where the white defendant turns out to be obviously innocent and acting in self-defense and the black ‘victim’ turns out to have been a habitual criminal.
I have no difficulty believing that finally this one case is one where the black victim really is a victim and the cop really is a (racist?) killer. I think the picture might get different after a while. For example the cop seems to have been extremely stupid if he thought after Ferguson that he could get away with shooting a black guy in the back without reason, and especially planting evidence. Either he’s really that stupid (well, there must be some really stupid people out of hundred-and-whatever million whites in America) or there’s something to the story which we are not told nor shown (but what could it be?), in any event I have no difficulty believing that there might be at least one case where finally the MSM gets at least the ground facts right, namely that it was murder.
* If you slug a cop or try to combat them they’ll kill you. That’s the rules of the game. They just say the standard ‘in fear for their life’ line, used over and over again. Cops are more robotic these days; in the old days they would just beat you up. Why I don’t know, perhaps it’s the militarization of everything, the hiring process picking a colder personality, violent video games influencing the attitudes of youth, who can tell. Cops will go ballistic when provoked and it doesn’t take much.
* The Confederate flag’s original design was changed due to fear of offending Jews.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-politically-correct-origin-of-the-confederate-battle-flag/
Benjamin P. Judah was the Confederate Secretary of State.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_P._Benjamin
Lehman Brothers was founded by Southern Jews and was actively involved in the slave trade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman_Brothers
* I am a little puzzled that the distinction isn’t made at the outset between
1. anti-Semitic Jewish jokes of the kind which would not have been invented by Jews;
2. Great jokes invented by Jews which have Jewish characters in them and Jewish themed or flavoured behaviour as in the marvellous one I heard privately from a non-Jewish comedian rewarding me for one almost as good which has a Talmudic scholar in a train from Odessa to Moscow when a difficult-to-acquire permit was needed for a Jew to make the journey wondering about the young man who has just got in at a station near a Jewish district. He thinks and thinks in words the joke relates but the first speech is:
Young Man: Would you mind if I opened the window?
Talmudic Scholar: Not at all, Dr. Kovacs.
YM (astonished): How did you know my name?
TS; Oh it was obvious!
and, perhaps
3. Jews’ Jewish jokes which make fun of some Jewish stereotypes which may include those which Jews don’t necessarily think fair to Jews but know that other people tend to apply. Told by a gentile these would, unless very clever, come across as anti-Semitic.
An example and illustration of the stereotypes of Jewish meanness with money/avarice etc being used by Jews comes to mind as a memory of my (gentile) daughter on the phone with a Jewish school friend who wanted her to come to some event which would require her to get some money from me. I hear “I think Dad will say it’s too expensive” followed by giggling. I asked her what the giggle was about.
“Oh Sarah said to tell you not to be so Jewish”. I was wondering if it could be two way. The answer I guess is that it can be if friendship or trust is strong. But I would still imagine myself being careful, as in “You really do have trouble with meeting the Jewish stereotype don’t you Sam” as another bottle of vintage champagne was opened after the tennis game. Or maybe “We are going to have to rely on your Jewish genes if we’re to make any money out of this fund raiser!” (To put that in context I raised a laugh at a gentile friend’s birthday party when I recalled earlier days when he could be relied on to spend as little as possible on food to make sure our organisation’s fundraising event made a profit).
So Steve, what about turning your pen, not only to the distinctions and nuance but also to the trouble gentiles can sense when about to tell great, category 2. Jewish jokes to Jews?
Is it that the Jews to whom one is speaking, not being close buddies, may be struck by their own srereotype of gentiles telling Jewish jokes? Are they anticipating a category 1 or 3 version? Or are they saying to themselves that they are about to hear from this otherwise pleasant civilised-seeming person something which shows that he really doesn’t get it (perhaps e.g. that a Jew wouldn’t see the joke in the way he does or wouldn’t tell it in the same circumstances)?
And how does all this differ from other ethnic jokes. BTW Steve, to which country/ethnicity do you attach the classic one with the punchline “And all because I **** one lousy goat!”?
* While channel-surfing recently, I came across Woody Allen’s “Hannah and her Sisters”. In that movie, Allen tries to convert to Catholocism, and they showed him coming home and taking a bunch of items out of a bag: a bible, a picture of Jesus, some rosary beads, a jar of mayonaise and a loaf of wonderbread. The implied snide jab at gentiles is pretty obvious, although why catholocism should be equated with bland food is unclear to me. France and Italy are (or at least were) catholic countries, and their cuisines have a well-deserved reputation for greatness. And when I think of appetizing food, a kosher deli is not the first place that comes to mind (gefiltefish, anyone?).
As usual, the media will pretend that American culture is on a par with what could be found in Der Sturmer and Der Voelkische Beobachter, and that it is simply rife with crude anti-semitic slurs, while casually retailing anti-gentile propaganda.
