Tabletmag: ‘Eagles Fans, the NFL’s Most Notorious, Have an Important Spiritual Lesson to Teach Us – We need a little rowdy tribalism’

Posted on February 8, 2018 by Luke Ford

I think this is the first time I’ve liked anything Liel Liebovitz had to say.

He writes:

Why would anyone put up with this behavior, let alone revel in it? Why tolerate such boorishness, inflected as it is with violence and disdainful of all that is kind and beautiful in the world? There’s a good reason, I think, and it has more to do with theology than it does with athletics.

Aptly enough, I first stumbled upon this bit of religious insight in Jerusalem. I’m a fan of the city’s local soccer team, Beitar, and I was attending a game one day when the God of Vengeance soured on his hometown boys. Beitar lost, and the fans set out on a nearby mall, seeking revenge. Happening on a McDonald’s, they attempted arson, pouring their wrath on the Chicken McNuggets before the law swooped in and had the hooligans arrested.

Observing these men, my fellow fans, I felt a strange sort of pride that troubled me. Even though I could never partake in their shenanigans, and would, under any other circumstances, denounce them as vile little vandals, I was gratified to see them senselessly express their disappointment by behaving like a gaggle of Visigoths with clubs in their hands and pillage on their minds. In their own idiotic way, I understood, they were pledging their allegiance to their tribe. It didn’t matter much that their tribe revolved around something as trivial as soccer, or that their way of expressing themselves involved light eruptions of asocial behavior. What mattered is that these men wanted to belong.

And wanting to belong, these days, is a problem.

These days, you’re likely to be told that the only collective you can join without care or concern is the biggest one possible, that of the human race. Globalists are welcome, praised for their humanity, celebrated for their universal worldview that insists that all peoples and places and cultures are, at heart, the same. But say that you have an affinity for your nation, say, or for the particulars of your religion, and suspicions arise: Are you some sort of separatist? And isn’t your preference really a way to mask feelings of supremacy? Because isn’t belonging really about choosing, and choosing really about hierarchy, and hierarchy really about discrimination?

If Jews can teach the world that tribalism and nationalism are often good, they will be a light unto the nations.

Dennis Dale blogs:

Wanting to belong is only truly a problem for white Westerners. The author of this piece Liel Liebowitz has not only an exception from the compulsion to self-atomize, but the responsibility to resist it, as a Jew. Even the most secular Jew living outside of Israel can take his ethnic identity–a genetic and cultural lineage going back thousands of years–as such a normative given he doesn’t even see it. White Americans used to have this. The critique of “white privilege” is just the pathologizing of the normative values any nation is necessarily based on.

The tribalism of soccer hooligans and American normals is meaningless, except as another degenerate wasteful release of energy. From the elites’ perspective, having nationalist tendencies subsumed in sportsball enthusiasm, whether by design or happy accident, is a Good Thing.

Recently someone tweeted a photo of an impressive parade of German men turned out to support their soccer team, while their women are raped and seduced at home by men with a deeper sort of tribalism.

Nonetheless, Liebowitz is on to something, and perhaps even comfortable secular Jews are starting to worry about the post-national wonderland that awaits.

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Jewish Success In South Africa

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

De Beers was long controlled by the Oppenheimer family, which got into a public feud with the Guptas a year ago.

In general, it’s not a good idea to get on the wrong side of somebody named Oppenheimer. As Hindus, the Guptas should have been familiar with the most famous thing anybody named Oppenheimer ever said: Quoting Vishnu, atomic-bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer (probably not a close relation to the South African Oppenheimers, but still…) proclaimed, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The Jewish role in South Africa’s “white monopoly capital” is not insignificant (nor likely irrelevant to Mr. Segal’s point of view). Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the Jews:

But Jews had always been involved in precious stones (especially diamonds) and bullion, and they played a notable part both in the South African deep-level mines and in the financial system which raised the capital to sink them. Such men as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, Louis Cohen, Lionel Phillips, Julius Wehrner, Solly Joel, Adolf Goertz, George Albu and Abe Bailey turned South Africa into the world’s largest and richest mining economy.

The South African Jewish Report estimated in 2016 that Jews still make up 26 percent of the 250 richest people in South Africa, despite constituting only 0.14 percent of the population.

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TabletMag: HOW JEWS SHOULD DEAL WITH GENTILES – According to this week’s ‘Daf Yomi’ Talmud study, as little as possible

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Luke Ford

Adam Kirsch writes:

The nominal subject of Tractate Avoda Zara is idol worship, one of the worst sins in Judaism. But as Daf Yomi readers complete our third week of studying this tractate, it is becoming clear that the real concerns of the rabbis are much broader than idolatry. In effect, they are aiming to regulate all of Jews’ relationships with non-Jews. Nowhere, perhaps, is the gulf between the Talmudic worldview and the experience of modern American Jews more evident than here. American Jews live in a world that, while certainly not free of anti-Semitism, is marked by a historically unprecedented openness and trust between Jews and non-Jews. After all, this is a country where President Barack Obama, a Christian, hosted an annual Passover Seder in the White House…

Such stories tend to suggest that the safest course for Jews was to avoid gentiles altogether, and Tractate Avoda Zara clearly uses idol worship as an excuse to separate the Jews from the pagan world that surrounded them. It is not just heresy the rabbis want to stamp out—indeed, actual idol worship seems to be the least of their worries—but excessive intimacy of any kind. We saw earlier that Jews could not do business with gentiles near their festival days, nor sell them items that might be used in pagan rituals. The mishna in Avoda Zara 14b goes further: a Jew should not sell gentiles large livestock because they will be used to violate the Shabbat prohibition on labor.

More troublingly, Jews should not leave small animals alone with gentiles, or entrust their sheep to gentile shepherds, because they are likely to use them to commit bestiality—a law that speaks volumes about the rabbis’ estimation of pagan morals. In addition, a Jew should not entrust his child to a gentile teacher “to teach him to read books or to teach him a craft.” It is not entirely clear whether this prohibition, too, stems from sexual fears, or whether it has more to do with the chance that the teacher will lead the child into apostasy. Broadly speaking, “one may not seclude oneself with gentiles,” since the assumption is that they will try to do a Jew harm.

Other prohibitions are meant to discourage social intercourse with gentiles. Jews may not go to places of amusement, such as circuses, theaters, and stadiums, for two reasons: not only are pagan sacrifices performed there, but they are what the Bible calls “the seat of the scornful,” homes of levity and frivolity. Any time spent there is time lost to Torah study. Moreover, Jews should not praise gentiles, especially women; according to Rav, “it is prohibited for a person to say: How beautiful is this gentile woman!”

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The JQ in the GOP

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Luke Ford

David Cole is not able to point out where Paul Nehlen is wrong so he just calls him “obsessed”.

Whenever I encounter that word flung as an accusation, I suspect the accuser has no factual or logical basis to attack someone, so they go for a cheap psychological put down.

People have called me obsessed for decades. I think I’m diligent about topics that interest me. Who’s to decide between obsession and diligence?

I’ve been following Nehlen with interests the past few weeks. I don’t see any anti-Jewish animus from him. I simply see a guy who notices patterns and calls a spade a spade. He hasn’t done anything to reduce my admiration and my friends on the Jewish Alt Right feel similarly.

David Cole writes: “Nehlen is obsessed with Jews. Everyone who criticizes him gets attacked for being a Jew or a lackey of Jews. Just a few days ago, Nehlen tweeted out an “enemies list” to prove that “the Jews” are out to get him (he included the email addresses and, in some cases, phone numbers of the people on the list). He’s also tweeted photos of Jews with the Star of David stamped above their foreheads.”

I didn’t find any useful insights in this Cole column. YMMV.

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NYT: What Trump’s Speech Says About His Mental Fitness

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Luke Ford

John McWhorter writes:

However, the distinction between public and private speech is key here, so I am unconvinced that his current speech patterns can be analyzed as evidence of dementia. Instead, they’re characteristics of casual speech as it has always existed.

It is easy to forget how much casual speech in general differs from writing. We tend to imagine our speech is tidier than it often is. The complete sentences and logical throughlines of writing are a stylization of speech, rather than a mirror image…

The younger Mr. Trump, albeit as self-obsessed as now, was not yet a rock star, and he had a businessman’s normal inclination to present himself in as polished a manner as possible in public settings. Especially as someone who grew up in the 1950s, when old-school standards of oratory were still part of the warp and woof of American linguistic culture, Mr. Trump instinctually talked “up” when the cameras were rolling. To him, cloaking his speech in its Sunday best would have been part of, as it were, being a gentleman.

However, for him this would always have been more stunt than essence. Since he is someone who neither reads nor reflects, his linguistic comfort zone has always been the unadorned.

At a certain point, Mr. Trump became the man who felt – and was comfortable saying publicly – that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and retain his supporters’ allegiance. Someone with that mind-set, especially a sybaritic person unaccustomed to sustained effort, has no impetus to speak in a way unnatural to him in public.

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