* That is not to say that early passages may not exist in the History; it is inconceivable that Thucydides did not take notes or that he failed to use them when he wrote his final work. It is merely to say that the work which we have should not be regarded as an agglomeration of passages written at widely different times and imperfectly blended together by reason of the author’s premature death, but rather as composed primarily at one time with the help of earlier notes and, if broken at the end, incomplete
perhaps in several places, yet possessing after all the unity which might be expected to result from a period of more or less sustained composition.
* The problem of the speeches is old and persistent. Opinions range from one extreme, that they are fictions completely invented by Thucydides, to the other, that they are close to verbatim reports of what the speakers said. The truth is clearly in between, but I am persuaded that it is far closer to the latter view.
* We are told, indeed, that, in composing his speeches, the historian kept as closely as possible to “the overall purport or purpose of what was actually said,” written in such a way as to coincide with his opinion of what the several speakers would most likely have presented to their hearers as being “what the situation required.” The reference to his own opinion represents a limiting factor in one way, as his reference to the “overall purport or purpose of what was actually said” is a limiting factor
in another way. Thus when the procedure has been applied, the reader will know something at least of what was actually said. Thucydides limits his knowledge in terms of the difficulty Cor even impossibility) of remembering precisely what was said.
* The Peloponnesian War was not fought by individual Greek states but by two great coalitions, the Peloponnesian League and the
Athenian Empire. In some important ways the two were similar, each providing an example of what has been called an “Alliance Under a Hegemon.”
Posted inGreece|Comments Off on New History of the Peloponnesian War By Donald Kagan
Inaccuracy: The concept of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not feasible and is outdated. Instead, there should be one state, a “bi-national” state that would be comprised of Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip that would protect the respective Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian identities and interests of its citizens.
Response
The proposal of a bi-national state, or a “one-state solution,” is nothing less than an indirect attempt to bring about an end to the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.
The State of Israel was established out of the nationalist aspirations of the Jewish people and an international recognition of the rights of Jews to a homeland following millennia of persecution. While a Jewish state, Israel’s founding principles guarantee equal treatment and protection for all its citizens’ – regardless of religion, ethnicity or color.
A bi-national state, in principle and in practice, would mean the ideological end of the Jewish State of Israel and lead to the forsaking of Jewish nationalism and identity, along with its special status as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution.
Furthermore, bi-nationalism is unworkable given current realities and historic animosities. With historically high birth rates among the Palestinians, and a possible influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living around the world, Jews would quickly be a minority within a bi-national state, thus likely ending any semblance of equal representation and protections. In this situation, the Jewish population would be increasingly politically – and potentially physically – vulnerable.
It is unrealistic and unacceptable to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory.
Moreover, as Israeli analyst Yossi Klein-Halevi has argued, “the notion that Palestinians and Jews, who can’t even negotiate a two-state solution, could coexist in one happy state is so ludicrous that only the naive or the malicious would fall for it.”
Within certain intellectual circles the call for a bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state has gained traction. While couching their arguments in terms of egalitarianism and justice, proponents of a bi-national state are predominantly harsh critics of Israel, and use this proposal as a vehicle to further their advocacy against an independent Jewish state.
Some nationalist Israelis also call for a “one-state solution” whereby Israel would annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip and create one state incorporating this entire territory. Such a concept is equally unacceptable as Israel would then have to sacrifice its status as both a Jewish and democratic state. Were Israel to absorb these territories and make the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip full citizens of Israel, demographic realities would lead to the effective end of a Jewish State of Israel. Should Israel annex these territories yet deny the non-Jewish residents full citizenship, Israel would no longer be a democratic state. Either choice is inimical to Israel’s founding ideology.
Any just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be based on two states, living side by side in peace and security.
Posted inADL, Nationalism|Comments Off on ADL Says Jewish Nationalism Is Inviolable
FWIW, I think the media ought to be judicious in broadcasting racially inflammatory videos. But if they’re going to show them, they should include ones like this, as B-on-W violence is 10x more common than W-on-B. https://t.co/st69RF456q
Look at these absolute morons jumping on a police car, assaulting cops, and then crying like babies when they get tackled and cuffed. They really think they have the actual right to do whatever they want with no consequence. Insane. Arrest them all.
David Samuels, who normally publishes great work, fails to advance the Kevin MacDonald story one inch. What a waste. A day after publication, nobody but me has written about this story (except for a few mentions on Twitter).
Samuels writes: “Rural Oregon has many of the same problems as any American inner city, except it is overwhelmingly inhabited by people with white skin.” He provides no evidence for this assertion. How on earth does rural Oregon resemble American inner cities? By which metrics?
Medford averages fewer than a murder a year. That’s hardly inner-city levels. What’s the crime rate in rural Oregon? What’s the percentage of felons there? What’s the average education level? What’s the average IQ level? What’s the out of wedlock birth rate? Is it close to inner city life or not? Or is Samuels just lying? The evidence says he’s lying.
He seems to hate the goyim and that may motivate his bizarre lies about rural Oregon. Report: “According to SafeWise, Oregon is well below the national rates for both property and violent crime. The national crime rate is 4.49 incidents per 1,000 people. Oregon has an average of 1.43 incidents per 1,000 people. The city with the lowest violent crime rate was Monmouth, which ranked the third-safest on the list.”
Oregon is 85% white and 2% black. According to Wikipedia, “As of 2015, Oregon ranks as the 17th highest in median household income at $60,834.” That’s hardly an inner-city rate of household income.
Steve Sailer tweeted out this interview: “David Samuels is a pretty great interviewer: e.g., his interview of Edward Luttwak. Samuels managed to get Matthew Weiner of “Mad Men” to sound off embarrassingly on how oppressed he had been by Gentile Privilege growing up in luxurious Hancock Park.”
DissidentJ responds: “What parts of the interview did you find most interesting? What did Samuels elicit from KMac that was particularly notable?”
Sailer: “I haven’t read it. I’ve read lots of other Samuels articles. He’s a unique voice.”
Kevin MacDonald is a retired professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach who has authored seven books about evolutionary theory and child development. MacDonald, who currently lives in Medford, Oregon, but is thinking about moving to Maine, is best known for a trilogy of books published between 1994 and 1998—A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and Its Discontents, and The Culture of Critique. In those books, he proposed that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy that allows Jews to out-compete rival social groups. The specifics of the Jewish strategy on American soil, MacDonald wrote, include encouraging mass immigration and promoting cultural relativism and multiculturalism—which he describes as ideological tools that Jews use to fracture the organic cohesion of their white Christian host culture. MacDonald’s theories and writing inspired the slogan “the Jews will not replace us” which energized the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
There are plenty of people who might argue that giving a platform to MacDonald, who speaks in soft, scholarly cadences but has shown little compunction about embracing Holocaust deniers and people who actively promote race-based violence between the so-called “white” race and others, is a stupid and dangerous exercise. How many more people have to die like George Floyd in Minneapolis, or the Charlottesville anti-racist demonstrator Heather Heyer, who was struck by a car driven by James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old white supremacist from Ohio, a group that fears being replaced by Jews, to prove that Kevin MacDonald’s words can kill people? So why not ban them?
Part of the answer can be found in Medford, which is a midsize city about two hours from Portland by plane. The surrounding vineyards and fantastic pear and peach orchards also provide a hospitable growing climate for marijuana, which is fast becoming the state’s largest cash crop, and provide a measure of employment to the city’s floating population of Oxycontin and methamphetamine addicts. Spend a day here, and it is not hard to see why Kevin MacDonald’s obsessions appear to be gaining traction among both white supremacists and some elements of the progressive left, among privileged urban whites as well as the urban poor.
Rural Oregon has many of the same problems as any American inner city, except it is overwhelmingly inhabited by people with white skin. Their problem isn’t police violence or structural racism but a more general collapse of the bonds that hold families and communities together, under the pressure of a new high-tech form of serfdom, with a class of extremely wealthy techno-oligarchs at the top and broad masses of dependents below. It is less frightening to imagine that some sinister person or group—the Jews, or white people, or black people, or Donald Trump, or Barack Obama—is responsible for the disempowerment of broad swathes of America than it is to accept the idea that our lives are being irrevocably reordered by machines.
As a reporter who has spent the past 25 years going back and forth between the lower and higher ends of the American class structure, from dog tracks and trailer parks to yacht clubs and the White House, I have encountered no shortage of racists and anti-Semites in all of these places. Yet I have found little evidence that their hatreds were the product of reading or hearing the wrong words—or that the censorship, shunning, or deplatforming of people, whether guilty or innocent of the sins they are charged with, makes even the slightest impact on what can best be understood as the social-emotional-psychological manifestations of the technologically driven reordering of the American class structure.
The solution that activists in the present moment propose, under a variety of names and rationales, is censorship—which seems to be a very effective way of identifying marginal and often disturbed purveyors of hateful manias as rebels and prophets, whose voices are so powerful that they must be silenced. The more powerfully such marginal views are repressed, the more power they seem to exert on the imaginations of their supporters, and the more power must be handed over from individuals to techno-monopolies, government surveillance agencies, and elite bureaucracies whose job it is to discipline and punish. As the lines between hateful or simply clumsy or inconvenient or unpopular ideas become progressively more difficult for even well-intentioned people to discern, and more and more people are identified as carriers of unacceptable thought, the wider social tolerance for dissenting opinions collapses, along with the entire rights-based structure that has made the progressive expansion of freedoms in America possible.
In a society divided between racists and anti-racists, openly irrational, hateful ideas are elevated to the center of public discourse. Which is, of course, exactly what people like Kevin MacDonald want.
Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory that draws its strength in part from the root operating systems of Abrahamic culture and epistemology. In healthy societies, it generally lies dormant. When societies start to disintegrate, the virus finds room to spread, and take over. It rots people’s brains just as surely as syphilis does, by substituting a fixed, obsessive, progressively degenerative fantasy world centered around “the Jews” for the world of observable causes and effects. Arguing with anti-Semites is like arguing with crackheads or schizophrenics; if you don’t see the invisible worms crawling on their skin, they will show you a row of Ziploc baggies on the window sill and say that the worms are also in there.
What strikes me as useful, therefore, isn’t to ban anti-Semites and racists, or to attempt to argue them out of their symptoms. Rather, it is simply to know what they sound like. It was in this spirit that I agreed to meet Kevin MacDonald in Medford for a beer.
What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation, which was conducted in a hotel lobby and then a nearby bar, throughout the course of an afternoon, when it was still normal to get on an airplane. When we were done talking, MacDonald drove me to the airport, which was kind of him. On the way there, we talked about how beautiful the summers are on the coast of Maine, and how lonely the winters can be there. In the end, I wanted to help him. But I have no idea how.
Here’s an excerpt of the interview:
What does that term “racial realist” mean?
Well, it means that I do believe there are race differences in things like IQ. The black students have more problems with acting out in class and discipline. They don’t achieve well academically, and they’re not going to.
Huh. Well, I don’t know about that. Many of the teachers that I was close to, who really taught me stuff, like how to write, were black.
Teachers where?
In school. In college. In graduate school at Princeton. They were black scholars, writers, academics. They taught me how to do the things I do now. None of them seemed to have low IQs, as far as I could tell. In fact, I’d say the exact opposite.
Now, I was the first American citizen in my family, and I lived in a lower-middle-income housing project in Brooklyn in the 1970s. So black people were the first real Americans that I knew. They knew the music, they knew the ropes. My first little girlfriend was black. She was really cute.
Well, I grew up in the ’60s, you know, and I got totally into jazz, I play jazz piano, and I love it, and I think it’s beautiful.
Right, but how can you say all that other stuff, then? Obviously if you listen to the great creators in that genre of music, whether you’re talking about Louis Armstrong creating jazz, or Duke Ellington, or Thelonious Monk, or Charlie Parker, you can’t look at those people and be like they lack—what? IQ points? A genetic ability to process complexity?
Charlie Parker lacked that ability? He was what, slow?
No, I don’t. Charlie Parker was—I mean, he was a genius, yes.
You played that music. It’s like a musical IQ test. So it’s hard for me to listen to you, as a person who appreciates music, like I do, and plays jazz piano, and even understand what you are trying to say.
The problem is, you know, you’ve got this black underclass and there’s been a bifurcation where the black middle class has moved out, basically, and they leave these people and they are … I don’t see what can be done about it. And it’s a problem for America because, as you said, they are as American as anybody.
They’re more culturally American than I am. They’re core Americans.
So we have to deal with that problem, but we have to deal with it in a realistic way. And realize that there are a lot of really talented black people who are creative and incredible, but, you know, there’s a problem. The black community is a problem. Big problem.
Every community has problems. Look at all the white meth-heads and Oxycontin addicts you have wandering around up here.
I know, but this is endemic, this is biologically related. IQ is so important in modern life. I mean you just can’t build a society with any kind of sophistication. You’ve got these people who can’t be educated, basically. And you’ve got an economy that’s based on high tech and computers. What are these people going to do? And they’re crime-prone.
Have you ever visited Israel?
They have a great immigration policy. Africans come in, and they throw them out, or they make life miserable for them. And many of our people, and I’ll write it—have held Israel as a model for what we should do.
But I’ve never been to Israel.
It’s very crime-prone, but it’s a great country. And when you look at the people there, one of the striking things is that, if you use your idea of race as a dominant category, it’s the ultimate multiracial society. The dominant skin tone there is an olive, coffee-colored tone, maybe, because they all intermarry, you know, and have lots of babies.
Miss Israel is Ethiopian. Really gorgeous. Very smart, too.
If there’d be an IQ test, they’re probably around 70 or worse.
Huh. I took a class in college with Richard Herrnstein, the author of The Bell Curve. Now, Herrnstein’s arguments in that book, which you seem to agree with then, are the opposite of what you identify as Jewish arguments. So how does that book by a Jew, who is now generally reviled, support the idea of a plot by Jewish intellectuals to repress the truth about group IQ?
[Laughs.] Look, it is legitimate for black writers and thinkers to see a book like The Bell Curve, and immediately have historical trauma awakened in them. Just as it’s legitimate for Jews to hear people talking about a Jewish lobby that controls the government of the United States and feel that they’re flashing back—because these are root traumas, right? They happen to people—in the Jewish case, they happened to people’s parents and grandparents. In the black case, people’s great-grandparents. It’s because their ethnic pride is being hurt. But I have to look at the reality and I think it’s overwhelming.
Is it pride, or is it a legitimate fear, rooted in history and personal experience? Like, “I get a bad feeling when you talk about gassing Jews because my grandparents were gassed to death.” Or, “your talk about low group IQ reminds me of a time when my recent ancestors were owned and sold like livestock.”
Yeah. I understand. I understand it. It’s just that you have to understand our interests too, right? I mean, the fact is our interests are being compromised by the idea that there are no racial differences.
Because, every time something goes wrong, every time blacks don’t do well, “Well, it’s because the white race did this or that.” We are blamed for every failure of blacks as a group. It’s not fair; it’s not real. So people need to understand our point of view too.
I spent a bunch of time at Cold Harbor Laboratory a few years ago, interviewing James Watson—
This is before he did his heresy on black IQ?
No. It was afterwards. Watson posed a problem for people because they wanted to exile him for his various idiocies and quirks. At the same time, he discovered DNA, so it was always possible that he could maybe also cure cancer – so you don’t really want to send him to a re-education camp.
Watson’s big fixation was that he loved to talk about group traits. He told me, “You’re an Ashkenazi Jew from Russia, David, and so you’re among the smartest group of people in the world.” To which I answered, “My uncle Myron used to have a saying about the Jews. He said, ‘They’re the smartest dumb people in the world.’”
The dumbest people in the world?
The smartest dumb people in the world. Which is how I feel about Jews. I mean, is there is a difference in group IQ between Ashkenazi Jews and other groups of people? Statistically, yes. But that’s also true of a bunch of other population groups throughout the world, like Nigerians from whatever tribe it is that moves to Long Island and gets perfect SAT scores.
Jews were the first real advocates of blacks in America, the NAACP, the whole thing was basically a Jewish organization. In the ’60s, you know, you had black nationalists who were anti-Jewish to some extent. And there was a history of blacks not liking Jews, you know. But the Jewish community was definitely a vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement. It was pushed by the organized Jewish community, which was extremely powerful.
Man, I wish I could take you on a tour of the shabby offices that make up this world of the all-powerful Jewish organizations like the ADL and the Bnai Brith. Even the phrase “organized Jewish community” itself is funny to me. Those people couldn’t organize their way out of a paper bag.
It doesn’t seem organized to you?
No.
You don’t think Jews have that much influence or power in America?
No….
I meet many Jews who can’t stand the ADL. Nor does the ADL have any particular means of disciplining people who disagree with their political positions.
But they have power.
Compared to the American Association of Trial Lawyers or ATT? They don’t have much power.
All the ADL does with their tiny amount of influence is, in effect, decide what can be discussed publicly. Social media companies such as Youtube claim they consult with a wide range of experts, but in the end, they simply legislate most of the ADL’s agenda.
Who were these amazing black professors David had? What did they teach him? What was so special about it? What was the special gnosis they conveyed?
David Samuels says about blacks: “They’re more culturally American than I am. They’re core Americans.”
Really? He really thinks that or is he just trying to troll? It’s absurd to argue that blacks are the core Americans. On what basis would he make that claim? That they have made disproportionate contributions to jazz? Blacks certainly don’t feel like core Americans. That’s why black nationalism is so appealing to many blacks, precisely because they do not feel as American as they feel black (just like some American Jews feel far more Jewish than American). The black civil rights movement developed out of a widespread feeling among blacks that were not counted as real Americans with equal rights.
It is wildly irrational to expect minorities to feel the same level of patriotism as the majority.
Miss Israel is not Ethiopian. That happened seven years ago. From Wikipedia: “Yityish “Titi” Aynaw (Hebrew: טיטי איינאו; Amharic: ይታይሽ አየነው; born 23 June 1991) is an Israeli model, television personality, and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss Israel 2013. She is the first Ethiopian Jew and black Israeli to win the contest.[1][2] As Miss Israel, Aynaw represented Israel at the Miss Universe 2013 competition, although she did not place.”
I have no idea if she is “very smart.” On what basis would Samuels argue that? A cursory Google search on her name does not include any evidence that she is “very smart.” It seems like special pleading by Samuels to say she’s “really gorgeous” and “very smart.” Why would anyone think otherwise of a Miss Israel winner?
Blacks don’t need special pleading. They have a proud history of accomplishment. They have made disproportionate contributions in many fields from writing to pop culture to sports to rhetoric.
Is Samuels arguing that Ethiopian Jews have successfully integrated into Israel? That is absurd. From Wikipedia: “Due to the oral nature of rural living in Ethiopia, illiteracy was very common (according to one estimate, 90% among adults aged 37 and above)… Due to the lack of work qualifications, high unemployment is widespread: In 2005, the unemployment rate was 65% amongst those over the age of 45… the average rate of educated people amongst the Beta Israel community is still smaller than that of the general Jewish youth, and this factor delays the emergence of a larger middle-class group of Ethiopian origin in the Israeli society. Despite this, in 2005, 3000 students graduated of higher education institutions, and 1,500 others graduated at the university.[24] Nevertheless, even the academic graduates often experience trouble finding a job… Low educational attainment, modest standards of living, and the occasionally isolated places of residence may explain the development of delinquency among the Beta Israel youth: In 2005, its rate was three times higher than the rate of the other Israeli youth… A study published in 2012 found that members of the Beta Israel community earn 30%-40% less than Arab citizens of Israel, who are themselves considered as an under-privileged group.”
This 2018 Jerusalem Post article indicates Israel is not looking eager to bring in more Ethiopians. “Will Ethiopian aliya be delayed yet again? Yacimovich: Racism is why Ethiopians immigration is happening so gradually.”
Shmuel Rosner writes: “Ethiopian Israelis are poorer than other Israelis, they are less educated, they are overrepresented in jails, they often feel alienated from Israel’s larger society. Many of them live in problematic neighbourhoods. They study in problematic schools, or are sent to dead-end educational programs. A vicious cycle is at play for many of them. Parents who cannot guide their offspring. Offspring that are tempted by criminal elements. Schools that see no future for these kids, who have no resources with which to overcome the many obstacles they face. A police that have all the statistics with which to prove that suspecting a young Ethiopian walking in the street at night is actually sensible. So every Ethiopian becomes a suspect. Because of his skin color he is easily identified, and harassed. Then he becomes even more alienated.”
New York Times: “The Israeli correction authorities do not provide ethnic or racial breakdowns of prisoners, but Ethiopian activists recently told a parliamentary committee that about 30 percent of the juveniles in Israeli prisons were of Ethiopian descent. A government official who asked not to be named to discuss a politically sensitive topic said the figure was actually about 15 percent to 20 percent. Yet that is still disproportionately high considering that Ethiopian-Israelis make up less than 2 percent of the country’s population of about 8 million…”
LOS ANGELES TIMES: “Just over half live below the poverty line. They are underrepresented in public service and overrepresented in jail. Forty percent of those held in the Ofek prison — a jail for minors — are of Ethiopian extraction, far above their 2% representation in Israeli society.”
Richard Lynn writes in his book, The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement:
Jewish children scored much higher than the other three groups on verbal ability, about the same as the Chinese on reasoning and numerical abilities, but below the Chinese on spatial ability. It appears, therefore, that the European Jews have particularly strong verbal ability and somewhat less strong reasoning and numerical abilities, but their spatial ability is not nearly so good, not only compared with Oriental Jews but also with other racial groups, namely, Chinese, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans. This pattern of European Jewish abilities confirms the theory that these abilities evolved because they found a niche in Europe as money-lenders and tax farmers, for which verbal, reasoning, and numerical abilities were required, and were excluded from the craft occupations for which spatial ability is required…
The Ethiopian Jews in Israel have all the characteristics of a low IQ population. They are a social problem and “make up one of Israel’s poorest communities” (Clayton, 2000, p. 12).
“Many are not equipped with sufficient language, professional and social skills for Israeli society. There is a large proportion of Ethiopians living in relative poverty, and many do not or cannot improve themselves; the number of high school drop-outs as well as crime figures among the young are rising significantly…. In the 1990s, Ethiopian youth gangs made their appearance, terrorizing shopkeepers and neighborhoods.”
Ethiopian Jews identify with an “aggressive and semi-criminal African-American youth culture” and have become “a kind of ethnic underclass” (Abbink, 2002, p. 13).
A report on the social problems of the Ethiopian immigrants has been issued by the Brookdale Institute (2004) based on a survey of about 15,000 Ethiopians in eight Israeli cities. The principal findings were: (1) In 2004, Ethiopians accounted for 4.1 percent (933 of 22,839) of juvenile crimes—double the proportion of Ethiopians in Israel’s youth population. (2) Each Ethiopian immigrant costs the taxpayers about $100,000 over the course of his or her lifetime. (3) Thirty percent of the Ethiopian family units are single-parent families compared with nine percent for Israel (Lazin, 2002). (4) Ethiopian Israelis have a school dropout rate of six percent, compared to four percent among the general Jewish population. (5) At age 17, some 25 percent of Ethiopians in 2002 were not in schools under the auspices of the Ministry of Education compared to about 15 percent of all 17 year-old Israeli youth. (This statistic is based on data from the Ministry of Education on the number of Ethiopian students in school and on estimates from the Central Bureau of Statistics on the size of the age cohorts.)
(6) Poor school achievement: according to the national achievement tests of the Ministry of Education in 2002, some 75-80 percent of the Ethiopian children in fifth and eighth grades were below the national average in English, Science, Mathematics, and Hebrew. A national study was conducted in 2000 for the Ministry of Education on achievements of Ethiopian children in fifth, eighth, and 11th grades. It found that the average achievement scores in Mathematics and Hebrew of Ethiopian children are 60-70 percent of the average of all Jewish children in the fifth grade and declined to 40-60 percent of the average in the 11th grade. Data from the national evaluation survey of 2003 found that the average scores of Ethiopian children aged three in language and basic concepts were some 70 percent of the scores of all Israeli children. At ages five, six, and eight, the average scores of Ethiopian children in language skills were 62 percent, 56 percent, and 43 percent of the average scores of Israeli children, respectively. In mathematics, the scores of Ethiopian children at ages five, six, and eight were 65 percent, 60 percent, and 39 percent of the average scores.
(7) High School Matriculation Exams: Ethiopians do poorly in the matriculation exams taken at the end of high school, which are the basis for acceptance to higher education. Table 11.18 shows pass rates for 2003 for Ethiopian and for all Israeli 17-year-olds for the matriculation pass rate (Level 1) and the higher-level pass rate (Level 2) required for university entry. Thirty-one percent of Ethiopians achieved a Level 1 pass compared with 52 percent of all Israeli students, while 13 percent of Ethiopians achieved a Level 2 pass compared with 45 percent of all Israeli students.
The authors of the report comment: “These findings reinforce the need for a greater effort to enhance the educational achievement of Ethiopian Israelis and reduce the educational gaps. At the same time the findings also point to an opportunity. They reveal that there is a large group who has successfully passed the matriculation exams, yet not at the level that meets university requirements. There is a high probability that with extra assistance they can take this significant additional step ahead.”
(8) Employment rates: in 2003, about 45 percent of Ethiopian men age 18-64 were employed. This is a decline from 54 percent in 1995-1996. This decline reflects the growing difficulties that unskilled workers have experienced in Israel in the last decade. Among women of the same ages, there was an increase in employment from 24 percent in 1995-1996 to 32 percent in 2003. This reflects a significant increase in the number of women looking for work, which is particularly influenced by their length of stay in Israel. Indeed, along with the increase in those employed, there was a significant increase in the percentage of Ethiopian women who were looking for work but still unemployed. The authors of the report comment: “There is a serious concern that the immigrants may develop a reliance on public assistance rather than becoming integrated into the labor force.”
(9) Family structure and size: some 60 percent of Ethiopian families have five or more children (ages 0-18); 20 percent of families with children are single parent; a large percentage of single-parent families have three or more children.
(10) Hebrew proficiency: about 45 percent of Ethiopian parents are unable to hold a simple conversation in Hebrew, and most (about 75 percent) are unable to read or write simple Hebrew. This is true even of a large proportion of those who have been in the country for a relatively long time.
(11) Demographic status: some measures obtained in a 1995 survey of the socioeconomic status of Ethiopians compared with all Israelis are summarized in Table 11.19. Rows 1 through 4 show the low levels of education of the Ethiopians. Row 5 shows the higher percentage of single-parent families (18 percent compared with 10 percent). Row 6 shows that 41 percent of Ethiopian children were being raised in families without an earner and were therefore dependent on welfare support, compared with only nine percent of all Israeli children.
(12) Delinquency: the most reliable data on the delinquency rate of Ethiopian children are for 1996, when a police file was opened for 2.6 percent of Ethiopian children, as opposed to 1.4 percent of non-Ethiopians. It was found that Ethiopian children become delinquent at an earlier age and have more offences on average than do non-Ethiopian offenders.
(13) Military service: the report notes, “the serious problems of Ethiopian families impact on Army service…and about 25 percent do not complete their Army service.” (It does not give the corresponding figure for all Israelis.) The authors of the report conclude:
“There are a number of worrying trends among Ethiopian youth. The special characteristics and challenges facing Ethiopian families place many of them in risk situations. About half the families are known to the social service departments and receive assistance for a variety of needs, ranging from household equipment to help with difficulties in the functioning of the family. Because of the difficulties facing the families, the percentage of Ethiopian children known to the social services is three times the percentage found in the general population, reaching a third of all Ethiopian children. In light of the special difficulties faced by the immigrants from Ethiopia, Israel adopted a strategy of affirmative action and from the beginning provided special assistance beyond that available to other immigrants. This is consistent with the overall framework of differential assistance to immigrant groups within absorption policy in Israel.”
The authors of the report fail to note the low IQ of the Ethiopian immigrants and that this goes a long way toward explaining the social problems of poor educational attainment, high unemployment, single motherhood, and high rates of crime. There is considerable reluctance to acknowledge, or even mention, the low IQs of Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Girma Berhanu is an Ethiopian working at Goteborg University in Sweden who has attempted to analyze why the Ethiopian Jews do poorly at school. He contends that the problem is that “Ethiopian students are in a state of identity crisis as they grapple with two cultural systems and structures of meaning which confuse their sense of direction.
“In the process, meaningfully propelled learning dispositions and an affectively driven urge to achieve scholastic excellence deteriorate. Thus, the lagging academic performance of these children is partly caused by the school system, which has little knowledge of the way these children and their parents feel and think in terms of identity, belongingness and negotiation of meaning. It is not that Ethiopian students are unmotivated; they work hard to achieve excellence. It is more that the process of learning a new code of behavior, values and school culture is taking place rapidly without the original culture’s active participation as a basic link and a vehicle for further learning.” (Berhanu, 2005, p. 51)
The Ethiopian Jews have several of the characteristics of the Black underclass in the United States and Britain, including low average IQs, poor educational attainment, and high rates of unemployment, single motherhood, crime, and HIV infection (Pollack, 1993). The Ethiopian Jews have become ghettoized because many white Jews prefer not to live in communities with a large number of black Jews (Lavin, 2000)…
It has not proved possible to find anyone of any distinction produced by the Ethiopian Jews.
An estimated 125,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel, but while they are supposed to be full citizens with equal rights, their community has continued to face widespread discrimination and socio-economic difficulties, according to its leaders.
A recent decision – as reported by local media – by 120 homeowners not to sell or rent their apartments to Israeli-Ethiopian families has brought discrimination against Ethiopian Jews in Israel back into the spotlight.
Lack of awareness and skills also makes Ethiopian Israelis easy to employ on lower-than-average pay. They are often desperate to find a job and willing to work under difficult circumstances.
“Ethiopians are an easy catch for manpower agencies,” Wyler said. “They are allowed to hire employees for up to a year without providing social security under Israeli law, so they fire them after 11 months, just to re-employ them again afterwards.”
…About 52 percent of Ethiopian-Israeli families live below the poverty line, compared to 16 percent among the general Jewish Israeli population. According to the Brookdale Institute for Applied Social Research, only 65 percent of Ethiopian Israelis were employed compared to 74 among the general Jewish population in 2010.
“In the area of employment, the gap between Ethiopians and other Jews has narrowed significantly,” institute director Jack Habib said. But about 60 percent of all Ethiopian families are still in a welfare programme, partly due to juvenile delinquency which is four times higher than the Israeli average, and domestic violence, which is estimated to be 2.5 times higher than the average…
In 2008, a report by the Israeli state comptroller and judge Micha Lindenstrauss found that about 20 percent of Ethiopian Israeli children do not go to school. Drug abuse among the youth is widespread, and crime rates are much higher than among the overall Jewish Israeli society.
These conditions have remained largely unchanged since the report was issued more than three years ago.
Stupidity can be found among all races and peoples, even among Jews. For example, in “Operation Moses” the State of Israel airlifted most of the Ethiopian “Jewish” community to Israel. This was followed up, several years later, with “Operation Solomon“. The end result was, of course, a new black underclass within Israel.
Personally, I have nothing against Ethiopians; the few I have known were friendly and refined people. Many Ethiopian women also happen to be quite attractive (in my opinion); this is due to a generous amount of Eurasian ancestry among the peoples of the Horn of Africa. Mathilda writes:
Anyway, the gist of these collected DNA studies is that Ethiopians are about 40% Caucasian, and are genetically a little more closely related to Mediterranean Caucasian groups like Berbers and Arabs than Western Africans, as is shown by this twig map. The actual amount of admixture varies from one group to another, but 40% is the average of all these samples.
This is all fine and well. Unfortunately, it does not help the Ethiopians when it comes to average I.Q. My opinion is that the Caucasian migrations Mathilda speaks of took place before the increase in non-Negro I.Q.’s. According to Richard Fuerle, in “Erectus Walks Amongst Us“, there are actually selective pressures in Africa that work against high I.Q. Either way, today’s Ethiopians rank among the lowest in the world for average I.Q. According to Richard Lynn, in his book “I.Q. and the Wealth of Nations“, Ethiopia has an average I.Q. of only 63.
While it is possible that the so-called Jews of Ethiopia boast higher I.Q.’s than the gentile population, I am not aware of any such studies. Even if this is the case, and even accounting for the inevitable increase in their I.Q. due to better education, healthcare and nutrition in Israel, it is still hard to imagine them being able to compete with the Jewish citizens of Israel, whose average I.Q. is 94 (according to Lynn – and accounting for the large non-European population there).
Juvenile delinquency is growing even among children as young as 8 or 9 years old. A woman who runs a program in Beersheva to try to help children in elementary school reports that children are remaining at the malls until all hours, ditching school on a semi-regular basis, and often getting involved in petty crime. She describes this as a pattern that is spreading very quickly and involves 300 children under the age of 14 in Beersheva alone. There are also Ethiopian youth gangs in many of the cities where there is a concentration of immigrants such as Rehovot, Rishon LeZion, Netanya, Beer Sheva, Hadera etc., as well as in Tel Aviv. In neighborhoods with a high concentration of Ethiopian immigrants, we have encountered Israeli criminals actively recruiting Ethiopian youths into drug sales and other criminal activities…
… of nine schools with high concentrations of Ethiopians, there are major gaps in achievement between the Ethiopian-Israeli children and the native Israelis in all the important subjects. In another recent study of six schools, 50% of the Operation Solomon children and 48% of the children whose families came 12 years ago in Operation Moses or before (that means they were probably born here) were judged by their teachers as below their class level in reading comprehension. In comparison, 23% of the native Israeli, non- Ethiopian children were so judged by the teachers. In math, 56% of the Operation Solomon immigrant children and 51% of the Operation Moses children were seen as below class level, as opposed to 21% of the “regular” Israeli children.
Dan writes: “I don’t think Israelis are going out of their way to discriminate against the Ethiopians. They are just involved in their own life’s struggles and don’t have the time or patience to help the newer olim integrate into society. Other immigrant groups didn’t receive such coddling either. They were just expected to integrate by themselves, like the Yemenites, who also came from a primitive culture, yet found a way to blend in. Perhaps if they were exposed to the religious environment of Israel, rather than just the secular, they would not be seeking to adopt an identity they don’t really understand and is antithetical to the Jewish values that drew their parents to Israel in the first place.”
JERUSALEM – Batya Tadela, a 16-year-old Ethiopian immigrant to Israel, used to be hurt and insulted when people called her “kushi,” a Hebrew word commonly used to refer to blacks.
But now, like many young Ethiopian immigrants weathering tough times, Tadela has found an unlikely source of solace, pride and identity: America’s black culture.
The fact that most of these Ethiopian teenagers have never visited the United States or even met a black American doesn’t prevent them from embracing rap music and hip-hop fashion, along with sometimes misguided stereotypes gleaned from MTV, movies and news reports.
“All the Ethiopians try to imitate the (American) blacks,” said Tadela, who emigrated from the Gondar region of Ethiopia seven years ago and lives near Tel Aviv.
Not-so-promising land
For centuries, Ethiopian Jews dreamed of reaching Israel. Much of the 65,000-member community here arrived in 1985 and 1991 through a series of dramatic airlifts. Thousands of others perished trekking through brutal conditions in the Sudan desert on the way to airlift departure points.
But for many Ethiopians, Israel has proved something less than a promised land. As a group, they remain at the bottommost rung of the country’s economic and educational ladder, still struggling to find social, religious and cultural acceptance. In addition, Ethiopian traditions of indirect communication and quiet respect are often drowned in the din of Israel’s competitive, in-your-face mainstream culture.
Nineteen-year-old Or Masrak uses a good chunk of her pay as a drugstore clerk to dance at a rap-and-reggae nightclub in Tel Aviv.
No feelings of rejection
“When we listen to black music, we don’t have to feel rejected,” she shouted over the pounding beat. “Here, we come together and learn to stand up for our rights.”
While overt racial discrimination is relatively rare, many Ethiopians feel the sting of what they see as Israeli disdain for them as newcomers from a primitive country.
Because many parents can’t provide their children with school supplies or a quiet place to study, some teens attend state-run boarding schools attended by Israeli youngsters from troubled homes. In some neighborhood grade schools, there is de facto segregation that Ethiopians feel has meant a lower standard of education.
The Ethiopians’ high-school dropout rate exceeds 17 percent, or more than double the national average, the Education Ministry says.
Young Ethiopians’ attraction to black American culture worries Ethiopian community elders, who fear teens are distancing themselves from their own traditions.
“To be Ethiopian is not `in,’ ” said Shula Mula, an activist at the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews. “But to be Michael Jackson is to be admired by Israelis.”
Media nurtures black stereotype
Most Ethiopian teenagers are familiar only with stereotypical depictions of black life in the United States: either the despair of drugs and crime or the glamour of sports and music stardom.
For most, this infatuation manifests itself in ardently following black American music and fashion. For a few, it takes the form of hard-edged racial rhetoric.
“I don’t talk to whites,” said a 16-year-old in baggy jeans and sneakers who calls himself Tupac after the slain American rapper Tupac Shakur.
“It’s a form of protest,” Ethiopian lawmaker Addisu Masala said of teens who identify with American blacks. “When a child feels that he’s not wanted here, he looks for an alternative identity.”
Younger Ethiopians see in black American culture a vibrant energy and a chance for success against the odds.
“When I see American movies that show a lot of blacks succeeding, it makes me feel good,” said Shmuel Batla, a 22-year-old cook. “If he can succeed, so can I.”
From The Forward: “…Bene Israel of India nor Ethiopian Jews. Genetic tests show that both groups are converts, contradicting their founding myths.”
Between 1984 and 1991, Israel achieved a public-relations coup by importing tens of thousands of Ethiopians who claimed to be Jews. Over the last decade, however, Israel has been taking direct action to limit its black citizens’ fertility.
Originally, Israel had banned immigration by the various sub-Saharan African tribes that claim some kind of hazy Jewish heritage, arguing that they aren’t real Jews. (Recent DNA studies suggest that Ethiopian Jews are only tenuously related to other Jews. These communities probably had a limited number of Jewish ancestors, travelers who married into the much larger local populations.)
In the fevered post-1967 ideological climate, however, Zionism was denounced around the world as racism, as the latest manifestation of white colonialism. The Jewish state hit upon the PR masterstroke of embracing its Ethiopian aspirants.
This didn’t mollify the Arabs, but the symbolism pleased a more important audience: American Jews concerned about Israel appearing racist. Unsurprisingly, this living proof that you could be Israeli and black proved immensely popular with American Jews, who showered Israel’s small community of Ethiopians with $600 million in donations.
Also unsurprisingly, the Ethiopians have proved increasingly less popular with their Israeli neighbors, who have come to view them and their children as backward and crime-prone…
In Israel, Ethiopian women have said on camera that Israeli immigration officials told them that they wouldn’t be allowed into the country without taking Depo-Provera shots. They claim to have been subsequently browbeaten into staying on the contraceptive. One study found that Ethiopian women account for 57 percent of all Israel’s Depo-Provera prescriptions.
In December, an Israeli news show recorded an Israeli nurse telling an Ethiopian immigrant that the injections are given “primarily to Ethiopian women because they forget, they don’t understand, and it’s hard to explain to them, so it’s best that they receive a shot once every three months…basically they don’t understand anything.”
Anonymous writes: “The Ethiopian “Jews” are not Jews at all. That is a scam and everyone knows it. US liberal Jews forced them on Israel. The problems with them are not stopping. There are 5000 Ethiopians in the IDF, a very small percentage, but 11% of all persons in jail in the IDF are Ethiopian. Whether you think this is due to the army or the Ethiopians depends on whether you are a US or Israeli Jew. Israel has received millions of immigrants and some from very primitive countries, but none like this before.”
Here‘s an English translation of the rebbe’s 1984 letter:
By the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson
– as published in Kfar Chabad Magazine, Volume 1079, 5 Shevat 5764 (January 28, 2004) Page 35.
[The letter the Rebbe was responding to can be read here: Part 1; Part 2.]
Baruch HaShem
12 Shevat 5744 [Monday, January 16, 1984]
Brooklyn, NY
Mr. Shmarya Rosenberg1
S. Paul, MN 55116
Shalom u’Bracha! 2
Your special delivery registered letter with enclosures dated 7 Kislev [Sunday, November 13, 1983 — two months before the Rebbe wrote this letter] was received in it’s proper time. You are raising several questions beginning with a question that is related to a complicated problem of Jewish law (“Halakha”). As is well-known and widely publicized, it is outside the scope of my duties to render Jewish legal decisions (“paskin shailot”). I can only suggest that your question be addressed to a qualified rabbinical body, like Agudat HaRabbonim. 3
Aside from this, I am surprised by the wording of your letter because I do not remember receiving any letter from you in the past. 4
Your attitude appears presumptuous and unbecoming. You demand to know why Chabad-Lubavitch representatives (“shluchim”) are not doing anything or are not doing enough, related to this problem that you are very concerned with. Not only this, but your letter is tasteless and illogical, because your questions would be no more logical if you asked a physician why he is not actively involved in a matter related to engineering.
You should know that Chabad-Lubavitch representatives (“shluchim”) have a specific mission assigned to them, which is to spread Judaism in the communities designated to them. Congressional resolutions and the like are not part of those duties that are planned for them.5, 6
Furthermore, there is very little — if anything — they can achieve in the area that interests you most. Therefore, to divert their minds and to turn their energies and their time to something not related to their mission will be wasteful and diversionary to the work that they already do superbly and with full devotion.
Equally, your claims regarding scholarships and other projects you mention in your letter are not logical and they do not fit in with the activities and duties of Chabad-Lubavitch institutions of representatives (“shluchim”).7
The impression received from your letter is that you are probably not familiar with the correct way to achieve success for the cause you are so eager to work for.
In light of the above mentioned, and because you have begun your letter with B”H [an abbreviation for Baruch HaShem, Blessed is God], it is absolutely correct for me to ask you two questions related to this matter:
1. Remember the law (“din kadima”) that the needs of the poor of your own city come first. Did all the Jews in your city receive adequate necessities to cover their Jewish [i.e., spiritual] needs? If not, why not?
2. What have you done and what are you currently doing — are you doing all you can? — to convince and encourage the Jews in your community — men, women and children — to live their lives as truly devoted Jews, Jews devoted to the Torah and its laws, fulfilling the daily mitzvot and acting as Jews? If not, why not?
Of course, there are many differences between your questions and mine. In fact, an operation to benefit the Jews of your community (along with it having precedence in Jewish law, “din kadima”) can be carried out without the necessity of assistance from the American Congress and without the approval of any foreign government. Furthermore, such an operation would undoubtedly be successful — it depends only on you and your willingness and determination to carry out such an urgent action. 8 Surely there is no need to explain to you the conditions in America — including in your state and in your city — that so very many Jews — men, women and young children — are carried away on the stream of assimilation, influenced by foreign surroundings that leads to intermarriage, etc. So many of them are lost to our people day-after-day, and, according to our sages, even the soul of one Jew is regarded as an entire world, and certainly it is so with regard to the rescue of so many of our brothers [from assimilation].
I must say that the purpose of my letter to you is not to argue with you or even to give you mussar (“moral guidance”) because I do not know you. Your letter is one of very many letters I receive and your letter does not fit in with any of them. It occurs to me that perhaps it is providential (“hashgakha pratit”), and that this gives me the opportunity to bring to your attention the fact that the many Jews nearby you have important needs and that an effort must be made to reach and save them — they have the priority, the first claim on Jews like you.
May G-d give you the correct answers to answer my questions, not for my self-indulgence but for the sake of our brethren (“acheynu b’nai yisrael”), especially the younger generation in your city, assuming that you are a resident there for at least a few years or perhaps were born there.
With The Respect That Is Fitting (“B’Kavod HaRoy”),
[Signed]
P.S. I would like to respectfully ask you as an additional question related to this matter: In what way can it be helpful to this issue (that you are so angry about) for you to be well-informed on what I do or do not do to benefit it?
Posted inADL, Blacks, David Samuels, Israel, Kevin MacDonald|Comments Off on Tabletmag: American Racist: A Q&A with Kevin MacDonald, the country’s most influential white identitarian ideologue
Economics has a history of discrimination and, in some cases, outright racism. George Stigler, a Nobel laureate and an early leader of the American Economic Association, criticized the civil rights movement in 1962 and wrote that African-Americans’ disadvantages in the labor market stemmed in part from their “inferiority as a worker.”
“Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers’ competition,” he wrote.
Few scholars today would use such language. But the ideas persist: Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers.
Posted inEconomics|Comments Off on Economics Is Racist
Graphic video: Watch the moment a toppled Confederate soldier statue falls on a rioter, injuring him severely. This happened tonight in Portsmouth, Va. All the statues around the monument were beheaded before this accident. #BlackLivesMatterpic.twitter.com/yv5j45Fd7j
Black lady screams at white liberals blocking the street
"You racist white liberals do this sh*t every f****** four years. We’re tired of it…F*** you, you dumb b*tch. You’re not here for me. You’re here because you’re dumb as f***” pic.twitter.com/PW8BYCWk5G
DO YOU KNOW THEM? The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office is asking for help identifying approximately 200 looters who broke into a Tampa Walmart and stole more than $100,000 worth of merchandise. DETAILS: https://t.co/p0nEI0LwPbpic.twitter.com/lxKFhDTodM
* Trump’s upper middle class blue state tax increase caused a complete meltdown of the GOP in Southern California.
OC’s congressional delegation went from 4-2 GOP to 0-6 Dem from 2016 to 2018.
San Diego is going from a GOP mayor to not even having a GOP candidate because the top-2 primary was won by two Dems, though both are pro-biz moderates. The same is happening to a GOP seat in the county board of supervisors, which was for a long time all GOP.
Last year in Mayor Falconer’s old district a GOP incumbent was defeated by a corrupt lesbian doctor who was sued by an insurance company for a false disability claim. She claimed to be so disabled she couldn’t work, but then ran for public office!
I agree the local police are underpaid. Starting salaries are half what they are in the bay area.
The bright side is the GOP is surviving still in the suburbs, and the new crop of Dems like Bry and Gloria are woke in word but conservative in deed. The reactionary NIMBY element is strong, as their base are still older white and asian homeowners.
* The Woke choke hold on information available to the public has got to be the single biggest problem in our nation today. My Google News feed is all non-news Narrative propaganda from CNN, USA Today, and NYT about NASCAR banning confederate flags, Trump refusing to rename military bases, and attempts to restart the discredited Covid hoax.
Meanwhile, totally blacked out by the MSM, a designated domestic terrorist group has seized control of a large chunk of Seattle and declared an “Autonomous Zone,” like some kind of ISIS Caliphate. They are armed and extorting money from the residents, while the police cower and retreat like the Iraqi army at Mosul.
How in God’s name is that not headline news! Will all this insanity finally wake up the normies to the utter corruption and dishonesty of the media?
* For some reason Orange County, 3.2 million people, 2% black, has been heavily targeted for protests. I think we had 30 going on in various cities on Saturday. Huntington and Newport Beach seem to be a favorite targets so maybe Newsom put us on a hit list. Things seemed to have calmed down the last few days, though. Maybe the 90 degree heat has deterred people or the kids got too many blisters from all their marches. Orange County juries tend to side with cops so not sure what the organizers thought they’d accomplish after their defund the police position came out. What they did accomplish is make a lot more people even more determined to vote any Democrat on the ballot out of office in the upcoming election.
* I think a lot of [the apologizers] are just normal middle-class Americans who do not know what they are up against.
Ever been in that situation in the grocery store when you almost collide with another cart, you are pretty sure that it was the other guy’s fault, but you still say “Sorry”?
Normal middle-class behavior tries to smooth over social interaction. If the other guy smiles and says, “Oh hey, I’m sorry,” then he is middle-class, too. Middle-class people (of all races) are future-oriented: they avoid minor social mishaps so they can focus on important things.
I.e., normal middle-class people are not concerned about “micro-aggressions.” They start off assuming the other guy is a person of good will.
And so they are disarmed when they have to deal with people who do not have good will for their fellow man.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Gravity Is Racist
* The French Revolution… unleashed what Clausewitz would later call the “passions of the people.” Now the energy of the nation’s inhabitants—especially their willingness to support and sacrifice for the war effort—became a critical element of its ability to wage war, as well as the manner. “Looking at the situation in this conventional manner,” Clausewitz wrote about the French Revolution’s alteration of the nature and practice of European warfare, “people at first expected to have to deal only with a seriously weakened French army; but in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty millions [sic], all of whom considered themselves to be citizens.” This distinction is critical,
as the people of the other European states were subjects—not citizens—which gave them less of a vested interest in the affairs of their ruling state, and sometimes even its very survival. Clausewitz continued: “The people became a participant in war; instead of governments and armies as heretofore, the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance.” “War,” he wrote, “untrammeled by any conventional restraints, had broken loose in all its elemental fury. This was due to the peoples’ new share in these great affairs of state; and their participation, in turn, resulted partly from the impact that the Revolution had on the internal conditions of every state and partly from the danger that France posed to everyone.” The French Revolution intensified warfare by unleashing the passion of the people so long contained by governments that had sought only limited aims. The impact of the French Revolution upon Europe in this era and upon Clausewitz was profound, and proved the critical catalytic event for his theories on warfare.42
* armies also increased nearly exponentially in size, reaching a scale almost impossible to maintain under the old system.
* “Those who have never been through a serious defeat will naturally find it hard to form a vivid and thus altogether true picture of it: abstract concepts of this or that minor loss will never match the reality of a major defeat . . . . When one is losing, the first thing that strikes one’s imagination, and indeed one’s intellect, is the melting away of numbers. This is followed by a loss of ground, which almost always happens, and can even happen to the attacker if he is out of luck. Next comes the break-up of the original line of battle, the confusion of units, and the dangers inherent in the retreat, which, with rare
exceptions, are always present to some degree. Then comes the retreat itself, usually begun in darkness, or at any rate continued through the night. Once that begins, you have to leave stragglers and a mass of exhausted men behind; among them generally the bravest—those who have ventured out farthest or held out longest. The feeling of having been defeated, which on the field of
battle had struck only the senior officers, now runs through the ranks down to the very privates. It is aggravated by the horrible necessity of having to abandon to the enemy so many worthy comrades, whom one had come to appreciate especially in the heat of battle. Worse still is the growing loss of confidence in the high command, which is held more or less responsible by every subordinate for his own wasted efforts. What is worse, the sense of being beaten is not a mere nightmare that may pass: it has become a palpable fact that the enemy is stronger. It is a fact for which the reasons may have lain too deep to be predictable at the outset, but it emerges clearly and convincingly in the end. One may have been aware of it all along, but for the lack of more solid alternatives this awareness was countered by one’s trust in chance, good luck, Providence, and in one’s own audacity and courage. All this has now turned out to have been insufficient, and one is harshly and inexorably confronted by the terrible truth.”
* Whether or not Clausewitz shared the Christian believer’s faith in Jesus Christ is something for which he left little definitive evidence. A French biographer of Clausewitz doubted he had faith in a personal God…
* Marie was in every way Clausewitz’s intellectual equal, and, one could argue, a better writer.
* “Tactics organizes the army in combat such a way as to employ it appropriately for the purpose of obtaining a victory, while
strategy does the same thing in war in order to make the best use of the individual engagements.”
* “Since war is no longer decided by a single battle as in barbarous nations, the Art of War is divided into two parts distinguished from one another by purpose and means. The first is the art of fighting. (Tactics). The second part of the Art is to combine several individual battles into a whole (for the purpose of the campaign, the war). (Strategy). The distinction between offensive and defensive war applies to both elements, and extends even into politics. The defense can thus be tactical, strategic, political.”
* “War is the manifest use of violence against others in order to force them to conform to our will, in other words it is the use of the available means applied to the aim of the war. The theory of the art of war is the science of the use of available means for the aim of the war.”
* “The conduct of war resembles the workings of an intricate machine with tremendous friction, so that combinations which are easily planned on paper can be executed only with great effort.”
* He also told her about the Jews he encountered, commenting upon their “incomprehensible German,” and the fact that they married so young that they would be grandmothers in their thirties. What followed was a description that, in the light of more recent German history, is deeply troubling: “Filthy German Jews, who teem like vermin in filth and misery, are the country’s patricians. A thousand times I have thought, if only fire would destroy this entire crop, so this impenetrable filth would be transformed
by the cleaning flame neatly into ashes. That I have always found a salutary notion.”27
* For Napoleon, strategy boiled down to massing an overwhelming force against the Russian armies, defeating them—as quickly as possible—and then forcing a peace upon Alexander. He planned for a short war and believed he could break the Russians in a matter of weeks by fighting the necessary battles close to the frontier.
* He believed Kutusov had to choose between saving Moscow or the army and made the right choice, as a second battle would have
likely meant a total Russian defeat. Kutusov preserved the Russian army. Because he did, the war went on.
* All of his youth Clausewitz dreamed of distinguishing himself on the battlefield in a manner that would set him apart from other men—a dream that never came true. The most important military achievement of his life was his action at Tauroggen, an action fought with words, not with his sword. And it is because of his words that we remember him today.
* In 1804 Clausewitz had written in Strategie that “if Bonaparte should ever reach Poland, he would be easier to defeat than in Italy, and in Russia I would consider his defeat to be a foregone conclusion.”
* “Bonaparte is as tough as a Jew and just as shameless.”
* First, consider each side’s political aim; then evaluate the strength of the enemy and compare the character and abilities of its government and people against one’s own; and finally, examine the political inclinations of other states and the effect of the struggle upon them.
* “War can be of two kinds, in the sense that either the objective is to overthrow the enemy to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please; or merely to occupy some of his frontier-districts so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations.”
* “All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”
* Along with “chance” and “intelligence,” another factor that makes absolute war an impossibility is “friction,” which has come up earlier. Friction is “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” In other words, friction is essentially any difficulty that can arise. Clausewitz insists that it cannot “be reduced to a few points,” and that it “brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.” The weather provides an example: fog can prevent an enemy from being seen, the effects of which then ripple over the combatants. Fear is also a form of friction. When someone is trying to kill you, it can affect the efficient performance of the task at hand.54
What can overcome all of the problems of friction? To Clausewitz there is only one thing: “combat experience.” “If one has never experienced war,” he writes, “one cannot understand in what the difficulties constantly mentioned really consist, nor why a commander should need any brilliance and exceptional ability. Everything looks simple.” And indeed, he cautions, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”55 Also important in his enumeration of external forces is interaction with the enemy. To Clausewitz, war was an interactive process, and fighting something alive, organic. This is one of the contentions distinguishing his thought from many other military theorists. He points out that the enemy will not be static; they will react. This reaction will then cause a counteraction.
Rather than being an “exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter,” the will in war is directed at “an animate object that reacts.” The results of this can also sometimes push the combatants to extremes.56 How does one deal with these forces? Clausewitz emphasizes good staff work, experience, and, as we shall see, genius.
* “War is thus more than a mere chameleon, because it changes its nature to some extent in each concrete case. It is also, however, when it is regarded as a whole and in relation to the tendencies that dominate within it, a fascinating trinity—composed of: (1) primordial violence, hatred, enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; (2) the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and (3) its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.”
* “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
* “It is easier to hold ground than take it. It follows that defense is easier than attack, assuming both sides have equal
means. Just what is it that makes preservation and protection so much easier? It is the fact that time which is allowed to pass unused, accumulates to the credit of the defender. He reaps where he did not sow.”
* “One must keep the dominant characteristics of both belligerents in mind. Out of these characteristics a certain center of gravity develops, the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all our energies should be directed.”
* The key, therefore, is determining what an enemy’s center of gravity is. It is often the army, but this is not true in every case. For small dependent states, it is generally their ally’s army. In alliances, the center of gravity is found in “the community of interests,” and in popular revolts it will be found in public opinion and the temperament of the leadership. In states subject to “domestic strife,” Clausewitz notes, “the center of gravity is generally the capital.” When this center is determined, Clausewitz writes, it is “the point on which your efforts must converge.” As always, however, Clausewitz offers an exception: “The principle of aiming everything at the enemy’s center of gravity admits of only one exception, that is, when
secondary operations look exceptionally rewarding. But we repeat that only decisive superiority can justify diverting strength without risking too much in the principal theater.” The difficulty, of course, lies in identifying these various centers and their relative importance. Clausewitz brands this “a major act of strategic judgment.”
* Generally, however, in On War, Clausewitz defines tactics (Taktik) and strategy (Strategie) in relation to each other: “tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war.” “Tactics,” he said, “are chiefly based on fire power.” Clausewitz believes that strategy is harder than tactics because you have more time to act and thus more time to doubt. Also, in tactics you can see what is going on, in strategy you have to guess. “The best strategy,” Clausewitz argues,” is always to be very strong; first in general, and then at the decisive point. Apart from the effort needed to create military strength, which does not always emanate from the general, there is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated. No force, for example, should ever be detached from the main body unless the need is definite and urgent.” He also writes that “strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war. The strategist must therefore define an aim for the entire operational side of the war that will be in accordance with its purpose. In other words, he will draft the plan of the war . . . shape the individual campaigns and, within these, decide on the individual engagements.”
* After one has defined the enemy’s center of gravity, Clausewitz tells us how to proceed: “The first principle is that the ultimate substance of enemy strength must be traced back to the fewest possible sources, and ideally to one alone.” From here, “the attack on these sources must be compressed into the fewest possible actions—again, ideally, into one. Finally, all minor actions must be subordinated as much as possible. In short the first principle is: act with the utmost concentration.” After
concentration, Clausewitz suggests the second most important principle is speed.
* Not only must the largest possible force be employed, but all available forces should be utilized simultaneously.
* In the nineteenth century Clausewitz was generally viewed as a historian, not a theorist, partially because seven of the ten volumes of his collected works contain historical treatises. On War occupies only the first three volumes. Today, this view is
reversed.
* Philosophy professor W. B. Gallie writes: “If, as has been said, the idea of a literate general defeats the Anglo-Saxon imagination, what can we hope to make of the Prussian officer who was to become the world’s first—and, as it may turn out, also its last—philosopher of war?”
* “The probability of direct confrontation increases with the aggressiveness of the enemy. So, rather than try to outbid
the enemy with complicated schemes, one should, on the contrary, try to outdo him in simplicity.”
* No one remembers Frederick William III, the king he served for most of his life. Only historians and specialists remember his mentors and friends Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The fame Clausewitz hoped to win for himself—with sword in hand—he won with his pen.
Posted inWar|Comments Off on Clausewitz: His Life and Work
* The riots pretty much heralded the end of the lockdown so they presume asset prices and stocks went as low as they were going to and are buying back the dip.
* Most wealthy people I know have decided that the Covid 19 plague has ended. The theory goes that people learned how not to get it or hardened at risk populations against the virus. I will just say I know some very wealthy people who are betting it all on the country being more or less back to normal within a few weeks.
* 1) Companies are going to be more work-from-home for their white collar staff. Not exclusively, of course, but you’ll get people WFH 3-4 days a week. This will enable companies to reduce the amounts they spend on office space, although this is years down the roads. Office space is usually a multi-year lease, and companies need to get better at figuring out how to support people at home when their PC speakers don’t work or whatever, and will also want to track their workers’ more on their PCs at home. But companies will be able to get rid of a lot of the excess cost, and will probably be able to operate with fewer employees as well.
2) There’s going to be less business travel. People realize you don’t really need to jump on a plane, go to a business meeting, and then stay a night, and fly back home. A zoom meeting is basically free. This applies to internal meetings and meetings with customers / potential customers. There’ll still be some of this, of course, but I think companies are seeing it’s not always necessary. This will help companies save more money. These savings will continue to be realized because few people are going to want to fly 2-3 hours in a metal tube before there’s a cure for the virus. Industry conferences will probably eventually make a comeback though, so people can all network in one place.
3) There’s going to be a mass exodus from the cities among the professional class. Backyards, baby. Particularly if people don’t have to commute more than 1-2 days a week and can work from home the rest of the time. Restaurants in downtown Philly, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta, and so on are going to have a hard time.
* Also has anyone looked into if the per capita death rate might also be correlated with the percentage of poorly paid and motivated foreign staff in nursing homes. In my experience the people who own and operate nursing homes tend to be spivs.
* Small businesses don’t issue stock. The rioting destroyed mainly small businesses. Rioting in cities doesn’t affect the stock market because with the small businesses gone, the big national chains that have issued stock can now get the customers that used to patronize those small businesses. Riots are an overall gain for big national chains.
Secondly, riots are old hat to the stock market. The stock market knows how to trade a riot. Investors were waiting to see how much damage the pandemic was going to cause, and now they have an idea where to put their money.
* The Fed has created a completely artificial market by 1) imposing a zero-interest rate (or near-zero) policy since 2009, which means you can’t make any interest by putting your money in the bank, so you’re incentivized to put it into equities, and 2) Congress has artificially incentivized people to put their money in the market by creating deferrals in the tax code such as Roths and 401(k)s.
* 1. The economic fundamentals remain strong. Corona was just a short term event.
2. Had governments not replied properly with lots of liquidity, this could have led to a longer term economic downturn. But the liquidity will help to bridge the pause in the economy caused by Corona.
3. There will be disruption to the economy, but only certain segments. You might even be able to credibly argue that the disruption will result in a more efficient distribution of capital, which would help the economy and equity markets. For example, retailers like JC Penney were doomed, it was just a matter of when. Corona could be the nail in the coffin that accelerates the growth of companies like Amazon, etc.
* There’s only 3,500 public traded companies in the US (20 years ago it was 7000). These 3500 companies don’t reflect the majority of employment of labor in the United States.
If anything, the trend towards digitization (e-commerce, work from home, data analysis on the cloud, etc) is accelerating the trend toward big companies becoming more efficient and profitable.
The covid analysis accelerated this trend by 5-10 years than it would’ve happend. No way could a CEO or CFO have told his employees to test out working from home. Now that the cat is out of bag, all the trends benefit large companies. The only ones that have suffered are travel, leisure, entertainment companies but they are now getting better (a little too fast, maybe will fall back down);
The end result is that the large public corporations, especially technology, medical tech, healthcare, and to a degree industrial companies are not dependent on the low wage workforce that works in the mom and pop stores all over america. This includes a significant black and Latino and white population. Could be 50-70% of the US population…
* The destruction from the black rioting has been relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t affected production or distribution of goods and services on the US and the cost is orders of magnitude below the Corona stimulus.
* Sanctuary cities created housing shortages. I know of one guy in particular who owns, last I checked, 10 rental properties. He only rents to illegals. He charges lower than market rents, and allows as many tenants per unit as the tenants can stuff into them, should they choose. In return, they don’t ask for repairs. It’s agreed upon that they will fix anything that isn’t major themselves. They do the yard work. He visits all these properties once or twice a year. Totaled, he’s taking around 45 units off the general market by renting this way.
* “calling the police when your house is broken into comes from a place of privilege.”
Well, Wittgenstein would point out that she is technically correct: if you have stuff in your house that is valuable enough to be worth stealing (hence the burglary), then you have a pronounced value-differential relative to the thieves; hence your home, where the phone call is originating from, is literally a place of privilege.
Now you know why nobody ever made Wittgenstein the chief of police.
* We need to talk about the original sin of boomer cuckservatism: giving in to the civil rights movement.
As someone who of came of age around the time of 9/11 it was shocking for me to discover the “civil rights” movement was evil bullshit. Nobody on the right ever said that. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and anyone “conservative” at the WSJ or NYT loudly proclaimed how they loved MLK and how evil Southerners were for Jim Crow laws. Someone might say Pat Buchanan gave some pushback but I am too young for his ’92 campaign. By the time I was old enough to remember anyone “conservative” enough to offer even mild criticism of MLK had been banished to the fringes which I later did discover (obviously).
Evil? My mother grew up working class in the urban deep south. She was completely safe in her not rich neighborhood and got to attend 100% white schools. That’s not evil. That’s making the correct policies for your people.
The people who came to the South to dismantle our democratically erected institutions–including Jim Crow–are evil people who hate us and want us to suffer. It is outrageous I grew up around boomers who *saw this happen*–the destruction of Detroit, the Paris of the Midwest–and just shrugged their shoulders and said the “civil rights” people were right.
How on Earth could a soi-disant conservative literally see this happen and give in to these nasty thugs? When I was growing up Detroit was already gone. But boomer conservatives saw it happen! They saw the civil rights thugs were wrong. Proof by demonstration. Detroit was great and then it was awful. That’s the end of the argument. One might hypothesize that the civil rights thugs have a point but then we got the evidence: they were not.
So why did every Republican and conservative commentator I grew up act like this was all a good thing and we were the bad guys?
You can’t win an argument if you concede you’re wrong from the start. Why shouldn’t they keep putting the boot on our necks when we told them they were justified?
* Dating is tough in ‘Man Diego.’
Too many fit guys out at the clubs. Big male presence from the military too.
Ratios are horrendous. Too many dudes.
San Diego women look half as good as LA, but have twice the attitude.
As a guy, expect to date down.
Minneapolis has better ratios.
* Why has San Diego pretty much always been much nicer and safer than Los Angeles? Do the bad Mexicans skip SD and just head straight to LA?
* Tucker’s opening monologues have become night after night impressively brilliant and courageous.
* But I also must compliment Nancy Pelosi. Genuflecting on knees of her age is no mean feat!
* She needed help to get up. There’s video of it.
It’s also funny that the execrable Jerry Nadler didn’t kneel — the fat slob would never be able to — yet even standing he was about the same height as those kneeling.
The Dem party really is the party of freaks, degenerates and psychopaths.
* I’ve seen both Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich acknowledge Pelosi’s skill and effectiveness as House Speaker.
She’s sort of intolerable to me to watch (as are many politicians), but apparently she’s still got her chops.
* I was skimming journalist Lara Logan’s Twitter feed and she is pretty much full on deplorable. Have her politics always been like this? Or did her assault in Egypt or something else red pill her?
* the blowhard do-nothing President can be re-elected
* The iSteve black-pillers love to describe Trump this way. Yes, Trump , with little support from his party and relentless, traitorous subversion from the opposition, has not done as much as we would like. At the same time, has actually accomplished a good deal that a conservative should like–you should be able to think of at least ten significant things. If can’t acknowledge that, I believe you just want to wallow in your black-pilledness.
* New York and Washington are both bad places for ordinary men to find women. Too much competition from Alpha Males in finance and government, respectively. Boston is supposedly a good choice, as all the academic institutions in the area attract many women.
For a woman looking for men, San Francisco is an excellent choice, but only if she’s willing to accept males (high tech types) who usually aren’t masculine but have a lot of money.
WILD: Attorney for MN Police Officer says unreleased body camera footage shows George Floyd saying “I can’t breathe” while he was inside the Squad Car
Attorney General Keith Ellison is refusing to release the body camera footage pic.twitter.com/hKj0TA7EjF
— american nationalist (@NationalistTV) June 9, 2020
While allowing massive protests in the streets, @NYCMayor Bill de Blasio selectively enforced "social distancing" and kicked Hasidic children out of a neighborhood park.
"Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect … Our legislators abandoned us. The press is vilifying us. It's disgusting."pic.twitter.com/iI3eN0VVgO
Black people periodically go through boom eras when white people can’t seem to get enough of them, such as in the late 1960s and then in the late 1980s-early 1990s. But blacks then overplay their hand and step on the wrong toes, usually Jewish ones. Black anti-Semitism launched neo-conservatism in the late 1960s (along with Israel’s victory in 1967) (see Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic for how Leonard Bernstein’s fundraising party for the Black Panthers foundered upon Jewish resentment of Black Power shakedowns of their shopkeeper relatives). Black anti-Semitism later brought a media backlash against the Spike Lee-gangsta rap-Minister Farrakhan era 30 years ago.
Now, one of the founders of gangsta rap, movie star Ice Cube of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” fame, who used Black Muslim’s Fruit of Islam bodyguards to battle the Easy-E/Jerry Heller axis’s employment of Rabbi Kahane’s Jewish Defense Force, is airing out his resentments of Jews again:
This mural was known as Freedom for Humanity. Only two of the six old-time financiers depicted are Jewish (Lord Rothschild and Paul Warburg) but the general style is pretty Weimar/Nazi-ish. It was painted by a white guy pal of Shepherd Fairey (of blue-red Obama poster fame) who calls himself Mear One.
But if the Bernsteins thought their main problem at this point was a bad press, they were wrong. A controversy they were apparently oblivious of suddenly erupted around them. Namely, the bitterness between Jews and blacks over an issue that had been building for three years, ever since Black Power became important. The first inkling the Bernsteins had was when they started getting hate mail, some of it apparently from Jews of the Queens-Brooklyn Jewish Defense League variety. Then the League’s national chairman, Rabbi Meir Kahane, blasted Lenny publicly for joining a “trend in liberal and intellectual circles to lionize the Black Panthers . . . We defend the right of blacks to form defense groups, but they’ve gone beyond this to a group which hates other people. That’s not nationalism, that’s Naziism. And if Bernstein and other such intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.”
The Jewish Defense League had been formed in 1968 for the specific purpose of defending Jews in low-rent neighborhoods, many of which are black. But even many wealthier and more cultivated Jews, who look at the Defense League as somewhat extremist, Low Rent and gauche, agreed essentially with the point Kahane was making. One of the ironies of the history of the Jews in America was that their long championship of black civil liberties had begun to backfire so badly in the late 1960s. As Seymour Lipset has put it, “The integrationist movement was largely an alliance between Negroes and Jews (who, to a considerable extent, actually dominated it). Many of the interracial civil-rights organizations have been led and financed by whites, and the majority of their white members have been Jews. Insofar as a Negro effort emerged to break loose from involvement with whites,from domination of the civil-rights struggle by white liberals, it meant concretely a break with Jews, for they were the whites who were active in these movements. The Black Nationalist leadership had to push whites (Jews) ‘out of the way,’ and to stop white (Jewish) ‘interference’ in order to get whites (Jews) ‘off their backs.’”
Meanwhile, Black Power groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers were voicing support for the Arabs against Israel. This sometimes looked like a mere matter of black nationalism; after all, Egypt was a part of Africa, and black nationalist literature sometimes seemed to identify the Arabs as blacks fighting the white Israelis. Or else it looked like merely a commitment to world socialism; the Soviet Union and China supported the Arabs against the imperialist tools, the Israelis. But many Jewish leaders regarded the anti-Zionist stances of groups like the Panthers as a veiled American-brand anti-Semitism, tied up with such less theoretical matters as extortion, robbery and mayhem by blacks against Jews in ghetto areas. They cited things like the August 30, 1969, issue of Black Panther, which carried an article entitled “Zionism (Kosher Nationalism) + Imperialism = Fascism” and spoke of “the fascist pigs.” The June, 1967, issue of another Panther publication, Black Power, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said:
Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon, Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,
Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread
Their filthy women tricked our men into bed
So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .
In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side
Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified.
* Jews have survived as a people and will continue to do so. Others who disparage them ought to look at their own people and ask if they also can likely make that claim, and, if not, perhaps first get their own house in order.
Israel is, in essence-translated into English-based on a simple concept: We must secure the existence of Jewish people and the future of Jewish children. They seem, for all their flaws and eccentricities and the occasional outrage, to be succeeding at that.
* I think Steve is referring to Podhoretz Sr.’s notorious 1963 article “My Negro Problem & Ours”, were he famously alluded to his ‘insane rage’ at Black antisemitism. While one can dispute its significance, it’s not crazy to consider it one of the earliest manifestations of neo-conservatism. I seem to recall the teachers strike of 1968 and the concomitant rift between Blacks and Jews as being an epiphany for some neo-conservatives as well.
* CrossFit CEO Gregg Glassman was just canned (or will be shortly) for irreverence to the cult of St. Floyd. The gist of his sinning Tweet or Instagram or whatever was calling the current riots FLOYD-19 in a play on the claim that racism is a public health crisis.
In related news, the head of the NYT Op-Ed department was liquidated after a mutiny of Fragile-American staff over his decision to publish a hum-drum GOPe, muh law-and-order Tom Cotton opinion piece.
Jewsish tradition has a notable streak of irreverence and backtalk toward the divine; I think it therefore likely, more than anti-Zionism, that the stifling, revival tent-style of cow-eyed conformity required by the Great Awokening is what will turn off Jewish people . I can imagine a based, 13 year old Stephen Miller wannabe out there hand-crafting his I own black “I can’t joke!” facemasks in a suburban basement somewhere.
* Blacks pulled rank, and showed who’s boss among the “oppressed.” What’s more interesting is how blacks will react to the multitudinous hordes of white ” allies” who are busy out-hystericizing their black idols. I expect the blacks will sharply put them in their place soon – and then what will those “whiggers” do, who have staked their entire identity on rejection of the “bad guys” in history, their brother whites?
* Whites legally requesting a parade permit is racist. Blacks looting injuring killing and committing arson is virtuous and admirable. We’ve been told that since the 1964 Watts riots What else is new?
* Trannies include that subset of drug-addicted prostitutes, who are disproportionately black.
Homosexuals, at least since the end of “fruit patrols” in the distant past, have long been friendly with law enforcement. Natural allies in gentrification. Female police would barely exist without a heavy lesbian contingent. And gay men are always going to be well-disposed to clean-cut fit men in uniform.
* A lot of gays in Europe are beginning to realize that mass Muslim immigration is going to mean that they will get it in the neck sooner or later. Like Jews, they will never get above 2% of the population so they opt to try to turn the demographics into a plurality to where no one group, including the indigenous population can dominate. But mass immigration brings other problems and that strategy turns out to spoil a good thing. Worse, they end up being seen for being the traitors they are and lose the good will of the majority of the population earning them worst of both worlds.
Being the stupid party, the Republicans will probably end up taking these refugees in from the Democratic coalition only to be rewarded with betrayal and a knife in the back. The old white liberals that run the Democratic party are through. In fact, I don’t see how Biden can hang on for even this election cycle. Perhaps if he kisses the feet of Negroes every day they will tolerate him for a while but eventually they will want more free shit then he can give them and he will have to walk the plank.
In a Machiavellian sense, Gays have been wise not to split their vote and they have picked their side. They don’t get caught up on infighting or dilute their vote which gives them power but it also subjects them to catastrophic failure if things go wrong. In the Prince, Machiavelli wrote that a small country between two much larger ones will not benefit by being neutral. Neither of the larger countries will respect their neutrality and when that country is inevitably occupied, it won’t receive any mercy from the victor or the loser. There is no reason for the right to try and help the splinter groups on the left or accommodate them. They will be fleeing from the Democrats soon enough and will just be happy not to have been made into a bar of soap.
* This sort of bullying of gay organizers from blacks has been a long time coming, I started noticing it a few years ago when black lives matters groups would randomly interrupt gay pride parades and demand that the police not be allowed to march. Of course the spineless twits who have assumed leadership in most LGBTXENU organizations bowed down to their demands. Well, they made their bed and now they get to lie in it. They should’ve put their foot down and told them to F off, gays are supposed to be one of the protected sacred groups, they had a shot at standing their ground and making sure their turf was respected. Too late now, the negroes smelled blood and now they have an excuse to really express how much they are disgusted by us in a socially acceptable way. Bye bye dumb parade.
* Gay men have lost most of their “protected status”, using anti-gay slurs and making jokes about gays hardly gets a reaction in comparison to the meltdown insulting blacks would cause. Gays are just perceived as too white to often too middle class to warrant much benefit from political correctness.
If parents don't actively intervene, white children may transform their normal human instinct for classification into racism. Here's how parents can stop that from happening.https://t.co/1CSd2ukamc
* The most ‘red-pilled’ people I’ve ever met were from Brussels. Even young liberal women from upper middle class backgrounds. I’d never considered it but they’re genuinely scared in a city like that. She told me a story of once getting trapped in a cinema when some arabs went riot outside. She was 17 at the time. She and her friends were terrified about what might happen if they’d stepped outside before the police broke it up.
To put this in perspective, I did not lead her into this conversation, such lines with people you don’t know are dangerous. She told me, despite it being highly likely from my background that I’d be horrified at her ‘racism’.
* Circa 1988 when the anti-nuclear/anti-military/anti-US protests in Europe were running out of steam, there was a news photo from, I think, West Germany that showed how riot police had contained a bunch of protesters and then compressed them into a human square about 100′ on a side. As I remember it, the police were holding the perimeter with just a single thin black line of riot troops, while the surplus officers who were no longer in contact with the protesters just chatted and smoked amiably on the sidelines.
It was a very arresting and comic image, because it had so many themes going on at once:
• the extreme efficiency of German/Euro law enforcement
• the strong German will to Order: not only were the protesters contained, they were contained in a dense, perfect square
• the bored look on the faces of the disengaged, lounging officers: yeah, just another at the office…
• the dogged idealism of the protesters, who were still holding their signs and shouting their slogans even as their highly contained circumstance made the whole exercise absurd, to which the protesters seemed oblivious
• the visual implication that whatever complaint it was the protesters had, it was a spent force
• the casual way life continued as normal around the human square, even as the unkempt protesters continued their disorder within the square, which spoke to the way that in crowded Europe, orderly Europeans compartmentalize, contain and bypass disorder
* If you’re an ally of a movement whose premises defame your people, your country, and your history those on the business end of that defamation have no obligation to give you the benefit of the doubt.
UPDATE:The ‘protester’ who threatened to burn down🔥 the diamond district of New York City on live TV is an attorney with connections to Nigerian diamonds and other hooligans in New York City. Israel Burns is Attorney in NewYork with Affinity for Obama🤬🤬 https://t.co/22vKDuJjx0
* The opening sentence of the NY Post article you linked is highly misleading.
Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community registered its outrage over the racially charged police-custody death of George Floyd Sunday,
The very next paragraph begins,
More than 200 demonstrators, nearly all of them Orthodox Jews,
Even if the total number of demonstrators were double that, i.e. 400, it would still be but a minuscule fraction of Brooklyn’s total Orthodox Jewish population. Said population, like Orthodox Jewry in general, is actually composed of many different and even quite distinct communities. There is much fractionation and multiple layers of subsets.
Note that in the photos of the demonstrators that accompany the article, one can clearly see women dressed in a manner that flagrantly violates even the most lenient of the standards of modesty that vary across the Orthodox spectrum. While one can find such individuals who are affiliated with a synagogue that is at least nominally Orthodox, in lifestyle and outlook they are actually closer to non-Orthodox Jews than to serious, devout, rigorously Orthodox Jews.
How is this pandering Democrats draping themselves in the Kente cloth not defined as cultural appropriation by every single standard of the modern left? pic.twitter.com/XBgrllaKHf
NASCAR President:"Black people and all people of color have suffered in our country and it has taken us far too long to hear their demands for change… The time is now to listen." I don't know what's going to happen either—but let's stop last-war analyses. It's not 1968 or 2014. https://t.co/nqyQCUwAQQ
REAL FACTS MATTER! I was filming as BLM protested a police station in San Francisco. They asked if anyone else wanted to speak. I had to. I had to drop some facts. I was so nervous but I tried to bring some perspective and ease tensions! 🙏🏼💙🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/ohiLY0FBsy
— 🇺🇸Maggie VandenBerghe 🇺🇸 (@FogCityMidge) June 8, 2020
Posted inBlacks, Jews|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Will Black Anti-Semitism Once Again Short-Circuit the Latest Peak Black Moment?
* We like our signal-callers handsome. The quarterback may not have existed before Camp and his contemporaries descended upon the Massasoit House 135 years ago, but his brainchild has since evolved into the most glamorous position in all of sports (North American jurisdiction, at least).
The storied lineage spans from Broadway Joe Namath to Joe Montana and Dan Marino to Brett Favre to Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Russell Wilson. The polarizing, short-lived cult of Tim Tebow? Even his biggest detractors must concede: not the worst-looking guy. As we write this, the attractiveness of Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury is an Internet meme. (Hot Kliff Kingsbury Flirts with Moms of Recruits.) Naturally, Hot Kliff Kingsbury is a former college quarterback.*1
Pop culture has cemented this image. Name a leading man (Burt Reynolds, Kurt Russell, Warren Beatty, Keanu Reeves, Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx) and odds are good he has played the role of a quarterback. There are examples of the reverse, too. Before he was Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, Mark Harmon was a quarterback at UCLA.
In fact, the allure of being an alluring QB can be enough to motivate a position change. Brad Grayson—father of Garrett Grayson, a Saints rookie as we write this—described his son’s decision several years ago to switch from running back to quarterback as a calculated one. “Gotta consider the ladies,” explained the elder Grayson with a smile.
The inevitable question, then: Why are quarterbacks so damned good-looking?
As he tends to do, radio host Colin Cowherd offers a theory that is based less on specific research studies and more on the effort to play provocateur. Cowherd reckons that quarterbacks are good-looking because of natural selection. As he once put it, “When boys growing up are picking teams and positions, they always pick a good-looking kid to be quarterback. They never pick an ugly kid. That…sets up the pattern.” In other words, the best-looking kids in the schoolyard are selected for the glamour position. They are put on a “quarterback track,” and by the time they begin playing organized football, they are experienced at the position. It’s akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
* researchers found that the more symmetrical a QB’s face was, the more money he made.
* VAN GILDER, the economist, nailed it when she said, “Socially, we’ve been trained to think that the quarterback is the most beautiful person on the team.”
* Quarterbacks are likely groomed for the job. Except this isn’t based on the perceptions of their attractiveness; it’s based on perceptions of leadership. When we, collectively, talk about how good-looking QBs are, we are probably, thanks in no small part to the halo effect, conflating looks with leadership.
* 1. We always think we’re the center of attention. We’re convinced that every slight variation in our appearance or performance is immediately noted by everyone around us. Researchers have dubbed this the spotlight effect, and it’s the reason many of us spent junior high convinced that that cafeteria table full of kids breaking up in laughter was doing so at our expense—that they must have noticed that giant pimple on our nose, our latest bad hair day, or the ridiculous new pants Mom made us wear. Even when, in fact, no one was actually paying us much attention at all.
In one clever study, researchers at Cornell put participating students in the unenviable position of reexperiencing those adolescent insecurities. Each subject was forced to march into a group of peers wearing something embarrassing: in this case a T-shirt with a gaudy Barry Manilow photo (as if there were any other kind) splashed across the front. The student then had to sit and complete a written survey while surrounded by conventionally clad peers. Afterward, the Manilow wearers were asked how many people around them had noticed what they had on. They wildly overestimated how noticeable and memorable the embarrassing shirt had been.
As the researchers concluded, “People tend to believe that the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it really does.” Welterweight boxers and tyrannical rulers aren’t the only ones who think the world revolves around them. Most of us do—it’s a consequence of spending much of our day engaged in internal conversation but lacking insight into the monologues everyone else is producing.
2. We think we’re more powerful than we are. We regularly succumb to the illusion of control, overconfident in the role we play in outcomes around us.
* We can’t help but see ourselves as the center of attention and as masters of our own fates, despite rational evidence to the contrary. These and a variety of other egocentric biases help us stay optimistic even when the going gets tough. In fact, some psychologists argue that illusions like these are essential components of mental health—that looking at life without such ego-friendly lenses is a recipe for despondency.
In much the same way, the athlete’s belief that “no one respects me” plays an adaptive psychological role. That’s why it persists: A false narrative must serve a function in order to perpetuate itself.
* I’m not as good as people say I am; our opponents are much better than you think they are—is another false narrative that serves a clear psychological function. Several functions, in fact. For one, it’s a close cousin of “nobody respects us” as a motivational ploy that competitors use to keep themselves sharp and that coaches employ to maintain their players’ focus. As Nadal explained, it’s a way to make sure you don’t drop your guard.
* THE false narrative told well is an invaluable tool for motivation and ego protection. It can help us ward off complacency as well as pressure. It can preempt disappointment and magnify success. The trick is figuring out for each scenario the right combination of psychological ingredients to produce the desired outcome.
* The better we get at a task, the worse we often become at articulating what we’re doing. So it is that the Great Ones are often beset by what is sometimes called the curse of expertise: They struggle to communicate what has always come naturally to them.
* human nature is surprisingly state-dependent. That is, depending on the circumstances, we think and act like very different people. (Or, to invoke the title of Sam’s previous book, Situations Matter.) For example, we operate in a “hot state” of mind (and body) when we’re angry, hungry, in pain, or generally aroused. Other times we’re in a “cold state.” Our thought processes and behavioral tendencies vary dramatically from one state to the other, often in ways that we don’t fully appreciate. Cold-state self has a hard time predicting how hot-state self will react, and vice versa.
* “Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was. Moreover, it is not just that people make wrong predictions about themselves—their predictions are wrong by a wide margin.”
* Asked what he would have been if not a soccer player, the British striker Peter Crouch paused for a moment. Then he replied memorably, “A virgin.” Jason Giambi, the baseball slugger, had a slightly less decorous take on the considerable overlap between sex and sports. While playing for the Oakland A’s, he wore a T-shirt underneath his No. 16 jersey that bore this bit of (horn)doggerel: Party Like a Rock Star. Hammer Like a Porn Star. Rake Like an All-Star. When Wilt Chamberlain famously boasted of having slept with 20,000 women, it triggered a round of guffaws—as well as a memorable Saturday Night Live sketch starring M.C. Hammer. (“I remember Cheryl. Number 13,906. But in my heart she was number 2,078. Cheryl was so full of life, love, and laughter.”)
* In 2012 [Timothy Olson] wrote a post for the site irunfar.com titled “My Path to Contentment: From Addict to Awakened Ultrarunner.” In it he told his deeply confessional story with bracing candor: “Running was my lifesaver. I first started back running to detox, clean out my body and pass that fun, pee-in-a-cup drug test. I ran to forget, I ran for peace, I ran because it was all I could do and it healed me. Running helped me look inside myself, forgive myself, trust myself, and learn from my past. Running let out all sorts of emotions; I found myself crying, laughing, screaming and puking through this road of recovery.”
* Spend only a few moments online going down the endurance-sports rabbit hole, and it’s hard not to be struck by the high incidence of recovering addicts. Blake Anderson of Chico, California, is a star on the Ironman triathlon circuit. He also speaks about his past, starting with experimentation with marijuana that led to experimentation with cocaine, which led to full-blown drug and alcohol addiction. He didn’t connect with a formal recovery program, but as he told his local newspaper, he found a different path to sobriety. He says, “My meetings are every time I lace up my running shoes; every time I clip my cleats into the pedals on my bike; every time I crush those laps in the pool.”
Rich Roll was a former college swimmer and a successful litigator at a prominent law firm in southern California—until he developed what he calls “a mean case of alcoholism.” His days began with a vodka tonic in the shower. “What started out as all fun and games,” he writes on his website, “morphed into scenes out of Leaving Las Vegas.” Why does he have a website? Because, after spending 100 days in an Oregon treatment center, he became one of the top endurance-sports athletes. A veteran of the Ultraman (a three-day event on the Big Island of Hawaii consisting of a 10K ocean swim, a bike ride of more than 260 miles, and a double-marathon run), he was named one of the “25 Fittest Men in the World” by Men’s Fitness…
It doesn’t take a licensed psychologist to suggest that many ultrarunners seem to be swapping one addiction for another (albeit far healthier) one. Here’s Timothy Olson’s take: “I’ll use this as an addiction instead of that wasn’t my [conscious] thought process, but subconsciously it felt good. I’d go for a big run and I’d come back feeling pretty damn high. It was natural. It was a good thing.”
* Confronted with tragic or painful events, we humans often cope well. Really well. Within days, even hours, of trauma, we can regain our equilibrium and baseline function. Grief is not always the paralyzing force it’s built up to be.
When we encounter an emotionally turbulent event such as a death in the family, a primitive set of brain and hormonal responses is activated. We get a surge of cortisol, the stress hormone. This can be disorienting; after a rush of cortisol, people describe a feeling akin to an altered state of consciousness, as the brain/body system kicks into emergency mode. This feeling subsides after a few hours, however, allowing us to continue with life as we know it fairly quickly. “There’s that emergency response state, and then it’s kind of done and we can think clearly again,” explains George Bonanno, a Columbia University professor who specializes in trauma and grief. “Durability is the norm, not the exception.”
How so? Bonanno has proposed and found evidence of four distinct trajectories of response in the wake of a potentially traumatic event (chart, below). There’s chronic distress, an immediately high level of dysfunction that never really goes away. There’s delayed reaction, whereby an individual initially experiences only a moderate level of grief and disruption but then gets worse rather than better as time goes by. There’s recovery, the gradual process of working through acute distress, in the “let nature run its course” manner. And, finally, there’s resilience, the absence of major symptoms or dysfunction. Those first three types of response—chronic, delayed, and recovery? None is as common as resilience. In fact, resilience is more common than the other three types combined. In the typical bereavement case, research indicates that no more than 15 percent of people experience chronically elevated states of grief that disrupt regular functioning.
* the vast majority of New York City residents showed no symptoms of trauma in the months after the [9-11] attacks. Even among those who lost loved ones, rates of resilience were high.
* Grief doesn’t move in a straight line or arc. It comes and goes. It oscillates. During bereavement it’s actually quite normal for people to smile or laugh as they talk about their loved one. In fact, this is one of the main reasons for the high rate of resilience: Grief usually isn’t static or relentless. If it were, it wouldn’t be as tolerable. Here’s Bonanno again: “Fluctuation is adaptive because it allows us to engage in contrasting activities. We can’t inhale and exhale at the same time, so we breathe in cycles.” So it is with grief. “We can’t reflect on the reality of a loss and engage with the world around us at the same time,” he writes. “So we do that in cycles too.”
* In one study, college students in dating relationships were asked to imagine how they would feel two months after the relationship ended. Their predictions overshot the mark dramatically: They thought they’d be far more miserable than they really would be. Which we know because the researchers compared their emotional forecasts to the reported happiness levels of other college students whose relationships had ended months earlier.
* The same goes for positive life events. That old yarn about people who win the lottery being no happier than the rest of us? It’s usually tied to a 1978 study of 22 lottery winners, who reported happiness levels that were no greater than those of a control group (and who rated a variety of ordinary daily activities as less pleasurable than did the comparison group). Recent research tells a more complicated story: Lottery winners are at least a bit happier than the rest of us, and people with higher incomes typically report better mood than those who make less, but the differences are much smaller than you’d expect. Even with a positive event such as winning money, we return to emotional equilibrium much sooner than conventional wisdom suggests. “Winning the lottery is a happy event,” writes Daniel Kahneman, author and Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist. “But the elation does not last.”
That even our intuitions about what makes us happy are flawed is a sobering realization. After all, so many of the choices we make—what neighborhood to live in, whom to marry—are largely based on such assumptions. Similarly disconcerting is the idea that even the greatest of life’s spikes in happiness can be short-lived.
* The brain works backward from the finish line, calculating—and recalibrating on the fly—how hard to let the body work, depending on how much more work remains to be done.
* If you don’t know the finish line, you can’t allocate the physical resources to do the job effectively.
* “You hear about these teams of programmers…who end up pulling, say, five all-nighters in a row in order to get a new piece of software to ship on time. It’s knowing that the software has to ship on a certain date that allows them to draw on these previously unimagined reservoirs of effort, capacity, and talent.” On a regular basis, seemingly ordinary people pull off feats like these—it’s just that Al Michaels isn’t there to do the play-by-play.
* goals are powerful in small doses but have been dangerously overprescribed. In a paper titled “Goals Gone Wild” (that’s right, even academics have a sense of humor), researchers identify a litany of problematic side effects when organizations become too goal-happy. For example, goals narrow your focus and can promote risk-taking and even unethical behavior. The auto executive concerned about hitting a release date might overlook safety-test results in the rush to get a car to market.
* Our general sense of morality is, in a word, flexible. One of the clearest examples is that we cut ourselves a great deal of slack when evaluating our own morally ambiguous behavior.
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