Salon: ‘Faced with Donald Trump and David Friedman, Jews must resist the toxic allure of tribalism’

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

The essence of Judaism and of Jewish identity is tribalism. Jews are a tribe. They are an extended family partly in-bed (to use Steve Sailer’s definition of a race).

As a convert to Orthodox Judaism, let me tell you that Jewish life largely runs on genetic relatedness. A typical Jew, when he meets with fellow Jews, has a sense of a connection that goes back thousands of years.

The more genetically related people are, the more likely they are to get along. Genetic relatedness is not the only thing that bonds people, but it is a powerful force, probably the most powerful.

A person with few if any Jewish genes is going to have a tough time of connecting in Jewish life. As far as I know, I have no Jewish ancestors, and though I have managed to connect in Jewish life according to my merits, I recognize the challenge all round of bonding with people who have different genes from me.

Salon essay:

My late mother was a shiksa — tall, strawberry blonde and Midwestern — and that’s often enough for other Jews to disown and dismiss me: “Oh, so you’re not actually Jewish.” No matter that my father sought refuge from Soviet anti-Semitism, first in Israel and then in America, or that his immediate family fled the Nazi invasion on cattle trains leaving Odessa. Never mind that my mother insisted on sending me to crunchy Jewish summer camp every year, and prepared a beautiful seder. Forget that it was my father, not my mother, who talked me out of a bat mitzvah ceremony.

The sad irony is that what matters to far too many of my fellow Jews is the “purity” of my blood. I cannot be married or buried as a Jew in Israel, for example, because those institutions are under the control of an Orthodox rabbinate to whom I’m irrelevant, at best. My only option to avoid discrimination is a full-blown conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Other options, including Reform Judaism, agnosticism and even atheism, are reserved for purebreds.

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The Male Need To Rank

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

An anonymous commenter observes at Steve Sailer’s site:

I make up a lot of music playlists on Youtube, and my stats say men are about twice as interested in music than women, no matter what type of music it is. Even when the musician is gay, more men are still willing to listen to him than women. On average, men are more fanatical about their hobbies than women, and they like to delve more deeply.

Someone once said that this trait comes from the male sense of hierarchy, and that when a man walks into a room, he’ll rank all women by looks and all the men by pecking order, and this is an instinctive reflex. If he’s an artist himself, he immediately asks, ‘Is this guy better than me or is he worse?’ If he doesn’t create himself but is still interested in music, he immediately starts scanning the entire field and ranking all the talent. If he likes literature, he has to rank all the writers by importance, and this is one reason why women complain that all the literary critics are male.

Men are such compulsive rankers than of course they have to lay down the law about why certain books are more important than others. It practically kills them not to. They’ll thrash around like dying fish if you tell them everything is only subjective opinion. They think it’s an outrage if you don’t clearly establish who is great and why. Men think society doesn’t work right unless you establish clear hierarchies of brains and talent, and thus indicate what you need to pay attention to and what deserves to be ignored, and I can’t quarrel with that. It’s plain to me that the trait has both a genetic basis and a Darwinian advantage, because it helped primitive human society advance into the modern era and pass on the gains of each new generation, building on top of the previous one.

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Jews Should Be Fighting the Far Left, Not the ‘Alt-Right’

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Joshua Seidel writes for the Forward:

Liberal Journalists have had a tough couple of months. Liberal Jewish journalists? Even tougher. Nothing seemed to work this year. Trump was the worst person ever to run for President, they said. The mainstream media and Hollywood pulled out all the stops. Celebrity videos, polemics by noted thinkers like George Takei and Lena Dunham, CNN panelists; they all tried to tell us Trump hates women, Jews, Black people, and the Constitution.

To no avail.

Perhaps nothing stings so much as “defections” from trusted minority groups. Some in the Jewish community are engaged in furious reprisals against fellow Jews who dared support the “Orange Fuhrer”. Ivanka Trump was harassed on an airplane, Jared Kushner’s Judaism was questioned. I knew my turn was coming, and indeed, enter Jamie Kirchick (not really a “liberal”, but very anti-Trump) and his recent Daily Beast piece, “The Jews Begging to Join the Alt-Right”, targeting myself and fellow contributors to our website “The Jewish Alternative”.

Despite Kirchick’s title, the “alt right” doesn’t constitute something one can “join”. There’s no organized alt-right political party, no organization that can lay complete claim to the title. There’s just people, who have come to their political conclusions in the same manner that Kirchick has. Some of them hate Jews. My fellow contributors and I are Jewish, and therefore, they hate us. It’s really that simple. We may share some political positions with these anti-Semites, we may agree on some issues, but we are not the same thing, not in the same “group”, and never will be. Kirchick’s semantic games, repeated so many times by the media (all alt-right are Nazis, alt-right supports Trump, therefore Trump = Nazi) failed to influence the election or shut yours truly up.

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‘As Brexit and the rise of Trump have already shown, we are living in an age of miracles.’

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Towards the end of his oped, he mentions how important high skilled immigrants like medical doctors are. I live in a town the SF bay area, where a majority of Docs are from India.

The original idea behind allowing immigration of medical professionals was to infill poorly serviced rural areas. Somehow this too went off the rails, and was gamed by those who could effortlessly outmaneuver the system.

No the solution is to curtail ALL immigration, not just low skilled, until the system fixed.

* I hope Stephen Miller, who’s heading up the inaugural address preparation, will draw on the moral basis for national sovereignty presented in this essay. I’ve never seen the case made in a more compelling and concise way. It’s by Mark Amstutz, a political science professor at Wheaton College.

National sovereignty encourages solidarity, subsidiarity, and stewardship. “The communitarian view reminds us that human beings achieve their full humanity through social interaction in specific communities. We are ennobled by our sense of belonging within families, neighborhoods, and nations.”

* This is a good start. Others should begin to undermine the glowing U.S. Immigration narrative that has arisen in popular culture because it’s the reason that otherwise reasonable people are failing to see and appreciate the current problems. The survivorship bias (successful immigrants had families, so their great-grandchildren view immigration as an unmitigated good) needs to be tempered with stories of failed immigrants who returned home or lie alone and anonymous in potter’s fields. It’s a halo effect that has to be destroyed before we can talk about immigration and the national interest more openly.

I took every opportunity during political discussions between Thanksgiving and Christmas when talk about “how divided we are” arose to point out the near historical high level of foreign born in the U.S. and the propensity for children of most recent immigrants to retain their parents’ cultures and languages (and speak English fluently at a much diminished degree).

* I am in biotech and my wife is in dentistry in the Bay Area. Both of these industries have a tremendous imbalance of labor supply and demand fueled by legal immigration. And we’re not exactly uneducated bumpkins I have a PhD and she has a DDS.

* Carlos Slim, the owner of the NYT, has gotten rich from exploiting Mexican laborers living in the United States. This impacts what the NYT says about illegal and legal immigration. Also, the NYT’s writers and editors want more Latino immigrants because they’ll vote for the Democrats.

* Tom Cotton says he wants to reduce legal immigration in total while increasing highly skilled immigration? I say the only answer is a complete moratorium on all immigration combined with the immediate deportation of all illegal alien invaders.

Cotton seems to be playing some kind of bait-and-switch game. Cotton just wants a huge jump in the number of H-1B visa entrants into the United States. Cotton will fail to deliver reductions to legal immigration while massively increasing H-1B visa admissions.

Cotton should start a few brawls with Republicans and Democrats to make his case sound more honest. Cotton should challenge Richard Trumka and Martin O’Malley to a debate on immigration. After that Cotton could debate Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham.

Mass immigration increases income inequality. Mass immigration lowers wages. Mass immigration increases housing costs.

Immigration reductions will boost wages. Immigration reductions will lessen housing costs. Immigration reductions will make family formation more affordable.

* I am American and was visiting a friend in Canada. She pulled strings to get me in with her OB due to a pressing medical situation. Nice guy. I couldn’t place his accent and asked my friend. He was South African. Canada had a program where you practiced X number of years in an underserved area and you got to immigrate. He spent a number of years up in the Yukon, I believe, before he was free to move and work where he liked.

* Hallelujah! It’s about damn time somebody applied the law of supply and demand to the labor markets. White people can’t compete against hordes of Third Worlders for whom $7 an hour is a fortune.

* I rarely see women as hot as Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates working at McDonald’s. It’s mostly ugly Mexican and ugly Central American chicks.

The attractive female fast food employees work at Chick Fil-A.

* I met a dean of a Chicago area medical school last year who remarked that the US has a chronic shortage of doctors on purpose, contrived by the American Medical Association in order to keep the practice of medicine a highly paying profession.

* The AMA limits the number of U.S. medical school seats but does nothing to prevent foreign doctors from flooding in to meet demand? Something doesn’t add up. I don’t buy that the US market for medicine can somehow be bifurcated, with supply of foreign docs having no effect on the demand and price of domestic ones. How is that possible? Even if it were, why not just train US docs for the “lower-tier” market?

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Is Trump Pro-Israel?

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Luke Ford

I think Donald Trump sees Jews and the Jewish state primarily in terms of what is good for him and his country. When Jews are useful, he uses them. When blacks are useful, he uses them. I don’t think Trump is sentimental about Jews or Israel. I expect Trump will act in his self-interest and I hope in America’s interest.

Trump knows that he does not need all Jews on his side, he just needs to keep some powerful Jews on his side, and if that means siding with Israel at times, he’ll do that.

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