This week’s Torah portion is Va’eira (Exodus 6:2–9:35).
* If being America First is anti-Semitic, then all nationalists outside of Israel must become anti-Semitic. If Jews lead resistance to Trump, America’s president, does this make them anti-American? If Jews find Trump’s call for national unity “chilling”, then they are against national unity. If identity politics are anti-American, then who has led the charge for identity politics?
* All the expressions of “Jesus” in the inauguration prayers may predict a return of confidence to the goy. Not saying “Jesus” to avoid offending Jews and other groups shows a lack of confidence.
* Ex. 5:1 shows that the Elders have melted away. It is only Moshe and Aaron, just like Trump almost by himself mounted a hostile takeover of American politics.
* Do you believe in free will?
* “Servant” and “slave” are the same word in Hebrew. “Jews don’t want to serve anybody,” says Dennis Prager. They don’t want to be waiters and servants.
* It seems like a third of CNN’s online staff don’t have typical American names.
* When did you come to love Donald J. Trump? For me, it was his Friday rally in Mobile, Alabama in August of 2015 when he talked about the power of genes.
* The parashah begins with God revealing himself to Moshe. How real do you want God to be in your life? Do you want God in all aspects of your life? There’s a Jewish ideal that you think about God during sex. I heard a 12-step teaching that if you masturbate, you should only think about God. Is each of us ready to leave the Egypt of our addictions? How free do you want to be?
* Torah makes no room for practice of religion outside of Judaism in the Holy Land.
* The battle between the Hebrews and the Egyptians reminds me of modern conflicts between the two groups.
Waled, an Arab, writes:
According to IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Arab populations have a mean IQ of approximately 85. Donald Templer of Alliant International University replicated this finding. This places Arabs about a full standard deviation’s distance away from European populations, who have a mean IQ of 100, and two standard deviations away from the Ashkenazi Jewish population, who have an average IQ of about 115.
It is worth noting that an IQ of 85 or lower used to be regarded as mentally retarded by cognitive scientists until this threshold was shifted down to 75 in the 1960s. There is general agreement, however, that anybody with an IQ within the range of 80 can possibly be categorized as mentally retarded.
Applying these statistics, Egypt, which was historically Israel’s chief adversary up until the late 1970s, had a 1967 population where somewhere between 33-50% of its individuals could be categorized as mentally retarded by European standards. This cognitive deficit is reflected by the extreme poverty that characterizes Egypt today (GDP per capita $3,314 per year), its political instability, and the decisiveness with which its people were defeated on the battlefield by the Israelis in multiple wars.
Does this imply that the Egyptian nation can be characterized as “retarded”? No. What it does imply, however, is that the talent pool available to Egypt from which it could cultivate strategists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers has been extremely limited throughout its modern history. It also implies that Egypt has had to deal with dysgenic problems related to low intelligence that Israel does not have to face, such as aforementioned elements of poverty, civil war, sedition, and decreased competitiveness in the world economy…
In 1967, there were roughly 1.6 million Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. This is a population whose IQ is about 115. Assuming that IQ distribution in the Ashkenazi population can be modeled after a typical Caucasian bell curve, this would suggest that roughly 15% of their population is “gifted” by European standards, implied by an IQ score of 130 or above.
This relatively high degree of intelligence explains the prosperity and stability which Israel possesses within its borders. Israel is one of the technological capitals of the world–Intel develops their chips there, and some of the world’s best aviation and military technology has been developed and manufactured by Israelis in Israel. On the battlefield, the best their adversaries have managed to affect against their military machine is stalemate, and the Jews have repeatedly embarrassed and humiliated the Arabs throughout the course of their short history.
Why IQ Matters
Perhaps it goes without saying that, if you want a sophisticated military with advanced technology and hundreds of thousands of personnel at your disposal, you need smart people to design, manage, and coordinate it. Modern militaries have an extremely high number of variables to account for–picture all of the troops, tanks, watercraft, fighter jets, supply trains, communications networks, and maintenance logistics that need to be accounted for. Then factor in the extreme pressure that military leaders are under in existential wars like the one fought by the Arabs and Israelis in 1967. The responsibilities are absolutely massive and the room for error is extremely small.
Furthermore, air forces–the crux of modern military superiority– require very intelligent personnel to operate effectively. The US air force, for example, requires its fighter pilots to have an IQ that is between one and two standard deviations above the average population. The people actually building the aircraft are essentially geniuses…
If we stack up every country involved in the 1967 war by total population, then count the number of intellectually “gifted” (IQ greater than or equal to 130), individuals in the population, we observe:
Egypt
Total population: 33 million
Gifted population: 33,000
Syria
Total population: 5,760,000
Gifted population: 5,760
Jordan
Total population: 1,278,000
Gifted population: 1,278
Israel
Ashkenazi population: 1,700,000
Gifted Ashkenazi population: 255,000
So, in other words, the total gifted population in Israel in 1967 was more than six times the number of that in all of its Arab adversaries’ countries combined. This qualitative difference in intelligence has translated to an overwhelming advantage for Israel, and the Arabs would do well to learn this lesson.
* Punishment is collective. The Hebrews suffer as a people. The Egyptians suffer as a people. If your group contains those who do immense harm, such as terrorists, your whole group will suffer. Only in Protestant countries are people seen first as individuals rather than as members of groups.
* Goy: Just why would God harden pharaoh’s heart and make them go through all the plagues? Why not just change pharaoh’s heart right away? Pretty abstract, but this section is close to incomprehensible to me… like what the heck is God? Also 8:25-27… hm. Seems shady.
* “Harden” means “strengthen” in the Hebrew. I guess this means that Pharoah would have felt more empathy without God’s intervention and let the Hebrews go. A “hard heart” was apparently not natural for the Pharoah.
God wanted the world to see His strength. I wonder if that word spread? Because we don’t have independent sources attesting to that.
As a Jew reading Exodus, it really does remind one of the Holocaust. I’m not sure a goy would catch that parallel. Hitler said he would go down as the hardest man in history. Perhaps he lost WWII by being too soft, not wiping out the British army at Dunkirk and not driving on Moscow in August of 1941. To get things done, all of us in our lives harden our hearts at times. I wonder if Stalin’s heart had been softer, would he have won WWII?
To do ethnic cleansing, you have to have a hard heart. Without ethnic cleansing, empires get overwhelmed by genes different from those who built the empire. To practice eugenics and stop stupid people from breeding, or to stop people from reproducing who don’t have the genes you want for your civilization, you have to have a hard heart. The alternative is that stupid and criminally inclined people reproduce more rapidly and drive out the sturdy genes.
* Hating the “other” invariably means you love your own kind. What does it mean to love your people if you don’t hate its enemies? How can I say I love you without also saying that I hate those who want to harm you?
* It was weird seeing Rabbi Marvin Hier give the benediction at the Inauguaration because much of what he stands for is the opposite of what Trump stands for.
* The Ten Plagues are all aimed at demeaning separate Egyptian gods. This idea that you should never demean other religions is foreign to Torah. The battle of the Torah is to demonstrate the supremacy of God over nature.
* Ex. 7:1. Moshe is made a master over Pharoah. Every person, every group wants mastery. It would be a strange person or strange group who only wants to serve others.
* Goy: “Talk about Obama saying Israel can’t be both Jewish & Democratic. So maybe America can’t be white & democratic. But Israel will choose “Jewish” before democratic. Maybe we should too.”
* The doxxing of Millenial Woes and Mike Enoch. In general, the more integrated your life, the better. In general, positive visibility is essential to a prosperous life. Hiding and biting result in poverty and death.
* The three assaults on Richard Spencer.
* Can Jews be part of the Alt Right? Purity spiralling and virtue signalling on the Alt Right.
New York Times:
Mr. Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right and describes himself as an “identitarian,” was punched in the head on Inauguration Day by a person clad in black as he was being interviewed by a journalist. At the time of the attack, Mr. Spencer was explaining the meaning of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon figure adopted as a mascot by the alt-right, a racist, far-right fringe movement that is anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist. Video of the attack shows Mr. Spencer reeling to one side under the force of the blow and his attacker darting through a crowd after landing the punch.
A bystander who chased the attacker later posted a video on YouTube of his encounter with the man. The assailant can be heard telling a friend that the man filming them is “mad at me because I hit Richard Spencer.” (The bystander who made the video does not appear to be a supporter of Mr. Spencer and disparagingly refers to the activist in the clip as “a neo-Nazi.”)
Mr. Spencer’s video was recorded from what he described as “a safe space.” He said he thought the attack happened, in part, because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“There was an actual anti-fascist rally going on, and I walked into it,” he said. Margarita Mikhaylova, a spokeswoman for the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, said on Friday afternoon that Mr. Spencer had not filed a police report.
Video of the attack quickly inspired a flood of jokes and memes online, some of which set the punch to songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, was one of many who posted a comment.
There was little substantive debate online about the ethics of punching Mr. Spencer. Twitter is not a place where minds are often changed, and the supporters and opponents of the sucker punch were unmoved by one another’s quips.
Opponents of the punch tended to say that violence had no place in political debate. Supporters tended to say the punch was funny, and more than a few compared Mr. Spencer’s attacker to famous Nazi punchers from pop culture, like Indiana Jones and Captain America.
