LAT: Why the Expo Line to Santa Monica marks a rare kind of progress in American cities

How happy will residents of Santa Monica be when their city is inundated with residents of South-Central?

These questions don’t get addressed in all the media coverage of LA’s light rail extension to the coast.

Christopher Hawthorne writes:

The 1.5-billion second leg of the Expo Line, which opened Friday from Culver City to Santa Monica, adds seven light-rail stations and more than six miles of track to the growing Los Angeles County transit network. That’s on top of the six stations and 11.5 miles that came on line when the Gold Line extension, connecting Pasadena with Azusa, opened in March.

In the immediate context of L.A.’s attempts to turn its public-transit network from national punch line to something that increasingly resembles a mature system, 13 new Metro stations in less than three months qualifies as a pretty dramatic upgrade. (New York City has added exactly one subway station over the last 25 years, the Bay Area’s BART system fewer than a dozen stations over the last four decades.) The investment county voters made in approving the Measure R sales-tax hike in 2008 is showing dividends for the first time — and suggesting some progress in chipping away at the dominance of the car.

But if you step back and take a longer historical view, one that acknowledges that Los Angeles didn’t just exist but in many ways fundamentally shaped and defined itself before the rise of the freeway system, the new rail routes begin to take on a different character. Their arrival is part of a larger restoration, an attempt to dust off and build on a long-buried transit history that makes up much of the basic DNA of L.A. urbanism. That effort, for all its incompleteness and halting progress over the last three decades, is by the standards of American urban history unprecedented in scope.

Posted in Los Angeles, Santa Monica | Comments Off on LAT: Why the Expo Line to Santa Monica marks a rare kind of progress in American cities

Does The Bible Favor Diversity?

Chaim Amalek writes:
What is the Torah’s position on diversity? It seems not to favor it, given all the prohibitions on mixing different crops in one field or cross-breeding cattle (Leviticus 19:19). And then there is this, from Joshua 10:
Southern Cities Conquered
28 That day Joshua took Makkedah. He put the city and its king to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it. He left no survivors. And he did to the king of Makkedah as he had done to the king of Jericho.
29 Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Makkedah to Libnah and attacked it.
30 The LORD also gave that city and its king into Israel’s hand. The city and everyone in it Joshua put to the sword. He left no survivors there. And he did to its king as he had done to the king of Jericho.
31 Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Libnah to Lachish; he took up positions against it and attacked it.
32 The LORD gave Lachish into Israel’s hands, and Joshua took it on the second day. The city and everyone in it he put to the sword, just as he had done to Libnah.
33 Meanwhile, Horam king of Gezer had come up to help Lachish, but Joshua defeated him and his army—until no survivors were left.
34 Then Joshua and all Israel with him moved on from Lachish to Eglon; they took up positions against it and attacked it.
35 They captured it that same day and put it to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it, just as they had done to Lachish.
36 Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron and attacked it.
37 They took the city and put it to the sword, together with its king, its villages and everyone in it. They left no survivors. Just as at Eglon, they totally destroyed it and everyone in it.
38 Then Joshua and all Israel with him turned around and attacked Debir.
39 They took the city, its king and its villages, and put them to the sword. Everyone in it they totally destroyed. They left no survivors. They did to Debir and its king as they had done to Libnah and its king and to Hebron.
40 So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.
—————-So what we see here is that Joshua did not embrace diversity as a source of strength, but rather as something to be blotted out. Similarly, when one species of ant takes over territory from another species of ant, it wipes them out entirely. Is this God’s plan for humanity?

* I still can’t reconcile the basic biblical commandment not to add or subtract from the Torah with the rabbi’s prohibition on eating chicken and cheese. I get the whole fence around the torah thing, but that is most exactly literally adding to the torah what it does not have
Also, even in the wilderness, God explicitly tells the Jews to keep Passover for seven days. Not eight. Seven. Even in the wilderness. It must really anger God to see these rabbis ignoring His will and turning it into an eight day holiday.
No wonder there is so much mixed dancing in the world
The Quran has much criticism of the Jews for adding endlessly to what the Torah teaches. And I think some of that criticism is valid.

* What happens to Yidden when they go Hollywood, and support the Hollywood agenda against God? Deuteronomy 28 spells it out:
15 However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you:
16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.
18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.
19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.
20 The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him.
21 The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess.
22 The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish.
23 The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron.
24 The LORD will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.
25 The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.
26 Your carcasses will be food for all the birds and the wild animals, and there will be no one to frighten them away.
27 The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured.
28 The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind.
29 At midday you will grope about like a blind person in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.
30 You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and rape her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.
31 Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them.
32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand.
33 A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days.
34 The sights you see will drive you mad.
35 The LORD will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.
36 The LORD will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your ancestors. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone.
37 You will become a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the LORD will drive you.
38 You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it.
39 You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them.
40 You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off.
41 You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity.
42 Swarms of locusts will take over all your trees and the crops of your land.
43 The foreigners who reside among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower.
44 They will lend to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, but you will be the tail.
45 All these curses will come on you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the LORD your God and observe the commands and decrees he gave you.
46 They will be a sign and a wonder to you and your descendants forever.
47 Because you did not serve the LORD your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity,
48 therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the LORD sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.
49 The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand,
50 a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young.
51 They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or olive oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined.
52 They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the LORD your God is giving you.
53 Because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD your God has given you.
54 Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children,
55 and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities.
56 The most gentle and sensitive woman among you—so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot—will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter
57 the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For in her dire need she intends to eat them secretly because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of your cities.
58 If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name—the LORD your God—
59 the LORD will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses.
60 He will bring on you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you.
61 The LORD will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed.
62 You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the LORD your God.
63 Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.
64 Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known.
65 Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.
66 You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.
67 In the morning you will say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening, “If only it were morning!”—because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.
68 The LORD will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.

* Roman Catholic Goyim – BEHOLD YOUR POPE! Listen to his words! Gape with amazement at how such a man as this could be leading Christendom! Scroll down on the link for English language translation.

* Today’s Quranic verse comes from Surah 29:
29:46 And dispute ye not with the People of the Book, except with means better (than mere disputation), unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong (and injury): but say, “We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you; Our Allah and your Allah is one; and it is to Him we bow (in Islam).”

* Tons of interesting stuff in Deuteronomy, much of it antithetical to free market fetishists.

* Hot chicks won in battle. What to do with them. From Deuteronomy 21. Likely this was an improvement over prevailing practices of that time:
Marrying a Captive Woman
10 When you go to war against your enemies and the LORD your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives,
11 if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife.
12 Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails
13 and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife.
14 If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.

* We need this rule. From Deuteronomy 19:
Witnesses
15 One witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime or offense they may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.
16 If a malicious witness takes the stand to accuse someone of a crime,
17 the two people involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the LORD before the priests and the judges who are in office at the time.
18 The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against a fellow Israelite,
19 then do to the false witness as that witness intended to do to the other party. You must purge the evil from among you.
———————
[Thus, if, for example, a woman is found to have falsely accused a man of rape, she should be sentenced to serve a like amount of time in a similar setting.]
20 The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you.
21 Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

* Deuteronomics. Most definitely not in accord with Reaganomics.
From Deuteronomy 15:
The Year for Canceling Debts
1 At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.
2 This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the LORD’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed.
3 You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you.

* Torah Says: Do Not Worship Ayn Rand or the Free Market!
Deuteronomy Chapter 13:
1 If a prophet [e.g., Ayn Rand], or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder,
2 and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” [e.g., free markets and open borders]
3 you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. . . .
5 That prophet or dreamer must be put to death for inciting rebellion against the LORD your God . . . . You must purge the evil from among you. [This is what Donald Trump is doing to the conservative establishment.]

* Today’s Quranic verses. From Surah 24:
26. Women impure are for men impure, and men impure for women impure and women of purity are for men of purity, and men of purity are for women of purity: these are not affected by what people say: for them there is forgiveness, and a provision honourable.
And here is a very different translation of the same verse (Sahih International version):
Evil words are for evil men, and evil men are [subjected] to evil words. And good words are for good men, and good men are [an object] of good words. Those [good people] are declared innocent of what the slanderers say. For them is forgiveness and noble provision.

* What about the children? Won’t anyone think of the children? From Deuteronomy, chapter 3:
3 So the LORD our God also gave into our hands Og king of Bashan and all his army. We struck them down, leaving no survivors.
4 At that time we took all his cities. There was not one of the sixty cities that we did not take from them—the whole region of Argob, Og’s kingdom in Bashan.
5 All these cities were fortified with high walls and with gates and bars, and there were also a great many unwalled villages.
6 We completely destroyed them, as we had done with Sihon king of Heshbon, destroying every city—men, women and children.
7 But all the livestock and the plunder from their cities we carried off for ourselves.

* What should a Torah Jew do when learning Torah makes him increasingly skeptical that it is the word of God? Should he stop, and switch to more secular pursuits? Or should he explore other religions? Asking for a friend.

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IQ Differences By Sex

REPORT: The conventional wisdom about sex differences in IQ is that males and females have the same average IQ. The conventional wisdom also stipulates that males are more variable than females, meaning that there are more mentally deficient and gifted males than females.

Presented here is information from two good papers on sex differences in IQ that disagree yet end up having the same conclusion with regard to the high extreme of IQs. Additionally, data from Mensa Canada is given that agrees with both those papers on that point.

Before continuing, it might be prudent to tackle one of the first objections that will be raised to a finding that the sexes are not equal in terms of IQ: that IQ tests are biased. Test bias is an intricate subject, and if you are interested in the details, the book Bias in Mental Testing by Arthur R. Jensen is suggested. (He started out believing that IQ tests were biased and through careful research ended up concluding that they generally were not).

Let it suffice to point out the analogy of height differences: Men are taller on average than women. If one does not like the situation, one cannot seriously accuse the height-measuring device of being biased. Many people have been influenced by anti-IQ reporting in the media, and politically correct writings by authors such as Stephen J. Gould to think that if IQ tests show an inequality it is obvious evidence that they are biased. There are ways of measuring test bias and merely showing that there is a difference between groups is not enough.

WISC-R

The paper that supports the conventional wisdom is Jensen, A. R., & Reynolds, C. R. (1983). It finds that females have a 101.41 mean IQ with a 13.55 standard deviation versus males that have a 103.08 mean IQ with a 14.54 standard deviation. You may want to read the IQ Basics page first if you are unfamiliar with IQ and standard deviations. By just looking at those figures, it seems to corroborate the conventional wisdom that has been known for decades: the average IQs are about the same and males are a bit more variable. However, if the summary data is used to generate a graph, a different picture emerges…

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* …while the *average* IQs of White women and White men are the same, 100, the *ranges* are not.

The IQ Bell curve “tails” are fatter for men. In other words, most women’s scores cluster near 100, forming a very narrow and tall curve; but at the highest and lowest IQ levels, there are far more men, meaning the male curve is much broader and thicker. Ergo, there are more retarded White men than White women, but there are also more *geniuses* among White men than White women.

So, at professional levels, those few White women capable of landing those sorts of positions, (even with the Affirmative Action boost), ARE outnumbered and outclassed by smarter White men. Since professional women have to compete (and do so poorly) against all these smart(er) men, of COURSE they hate them. Donald Trump is the perfect symbol for these careerist, dried up, barren harpies, of all they envy and loathe.

(And *I’m* a smart White woman who is a fan of Trump!)

* Men outnumber women at the left and right ends of the IQ bell curve. Most of the brightest minds belong to men, as do most of the dullest.

Men are more logical than women. We’re more willing (and able) to break away from the herd, think outside the box and come up with new ideas. We’re more creative. Our curiosity about the world is deeper (and purer). Our need to understand how things work and why things are is stronger.

(Most men, like most women, are mindless followers. But the folks who are not mindless followers are mostly men. )

Girls are more obedient than boys. They’re more tolerant of boredom. They accept more readily the idea that something should be done because an authority figure wants it done. Thus, they grow up to become good worker drones – loyal, hard-working cogs.

(When I was in school, I was always struck by the fact that the girls in study groups focused all of their energy on memorizing passages from the textbook. They had no interest in synthesizing new information by analyzing its connections to what they already knew, or exploring its wider implications and deeper ramifications. They seemed to think that learning was nothing more than a cognitive binge-and-purge operation: stuff an umpteen number of factoids in your head and then spit them out on command. To me, that was boring beyond belief.)

But they tend to fall apart when they have to deal with situations where split-second decisions must be made based on constantly-changing information. Most women don’t have the capacity to form what the military calls total situational awareness, where you know not only where everything around you is right now, but where it’s been and where it might be going. Thus, they make bad leaders, especially in war.

(Keep in mind that I’m talking about generalities. When I say, “Men are taller than women,” don’t come back with, “I read an article about a 6’10″ fashion model from Germany! There are lots of women who are taller than men!” That kind of argument is so … girly.)

* Yeah, I think the differences in curiosity between men and women are more important than any differences in IQ at the extreme ends of the bell curve.

Many girls are curious about the world in their early adolescence, but they lose it as they mature. I saw this happen to my friends and sister (unbiased POV because I’m a woman too). A lot of women just become extremely focused on personal relationships and their own emotional lives. The more unstable their relationship situation, the less curiosity they have.

I’m an 8th grade teacher and I notice how students act too. When we did a unit on world religions the boys were totally enthralled and really enjoyed asking me further questions about the tenets of Buddhism, Judaism, etc. Only one of the girls (the most attractive one in the class, don’t know whether it was coincidental or not) was interested in the same way. The rest of the girls just wanted their grade and to complete the worksheets and project “correctly.” Girls are generally more well-behaved than the boys but get snippy/anxious if I am unwilling to lead them to the right answer.

* Men and women do not on average score the same on various subsections of IQ tests. Ergo whether they have the same “IQ” or not is going to be a matter of weighting. If you weight mathematical, spatial and analytical highly then men are clearly smarter. (And there are several IQ tests that show a consistent male advantage. They have more subtests that men do well on.) You could arguably get the same result for women, if you heavily weight plain vanilla verbal–reading comprehension. Pick what you value.

Secondly, most of the IQ testing and quasi-IQ testing that’s done comes from school kids. For instance the big-kahuna, the SAT is done on 16 or newbie 17 year olds. At that age, the females are young *women*. They are adult women–if you ones. They are sexually mature and have stopped growing. Many stopped growing and reached their adult height *years* previously. In contrast the males are … well … boys. Yes, they can make babies, but many of them have not even stopped growing. They are in no sense physically “mature” like the girls. Most of them won’t be equivalently mature to a 16 or 17 year old girl until they are in their first year or two of college–at least 18, more like 19 or 20. Both the girls and the boys will–excepting the terrible college PC crap–be “wising up” the next few years. But only the boys will still be actually physically growing, maturing their brain and actually getting smarter.

I confess I don’t have a link, but I’ve definitely read that some studies suggest the SAT slightly overpredicts female adult IQ relative to male IQ.

Thirdly, Whiskey’s writing was sloppy, but I don’t think he was trying to imply anything the huge white-black IQ gap for men and women, but rather a skills gap. This is certainly true.

It’s just a bone obvious fact that men continue to do pretty much all the material productive labor that *needs* doing. Women do quite a bit of clerical paper pushing, and routine service work–waitress, checkout clerk, maid–but otherwise matter chiefly in traditional female “helping professions”–teaching and nursing. If all the women in the country did not show up for work tomorrow we men would have to hustle to workaround some missing women service workers (slight backup at Starbucks this morning!), dive into some clerical work, and get some guys over the schools to monitor the kiddies. But the only critical hit I can see would be in the hospitals where, jump-into-the-breach guys would not have necessary nursing skills. We couldn’t immediately handle the patient load and would lose some folks (which is tolerable with sane triage … we don’t need to patch up that gangbanger or that old geezer). In contrast if *men* did not show up for work tomorrow … the world would end. We’d be living in the dark ages–literally–almost immediately. Civilization would end.

That’s the skills gap and why there is a “pay gap” that scum like Hillary yap on and on about endlessly without describing honestly.

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Black Woman Asks In The New York Times: Is Egg Freezing Only for White Women?

By RENIQUA ALLEN
I want to have a kid someday, but I’m afraid of the stigma of single motherhood.”

Because as we all know, blacks are terribly afraid to have children out of wedlock. After all, only 72% of black kids are born out of wedlock.

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Immigration Restriction Breaking Through The Overton Window

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Breaking through as an immigration restrictionist is difficult art that requires a delicate balance – if you’re too racialist like the BNP the elites and media will crush you, if you’re too socialist like Marine Le Pen and you will do quite well but will struggle to pull in the middle classes, if you’re economically right-wing like Pauline Hanson and you will scare off low-income whites, and if you’re too socially conservative like Buchanan and you will get bogged down in the culture wars.

So far Trump managed to battle through without alienating any of the key groups that an immigration restrictionist needs to win over to get into power.

* Every time I have to press “1″ for English, I agree with this, and apparently so have many millions of people.

* Trump is a master troll. Even going back to his meatspace sock puppetry, he has enjoyed trolling people for fun and profit. When the media clutches pearls, he doubles down and trolls some more. Examples are too many to list, but perhaps the most epic was the taco bowl tweet:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/728297587418247168

He triggers. They gasp. He loves hispanics! But… he wants to build a wall! They hate him! But… they have nothing. Simultaneously, he hawks his own product. Genius! And… it’s simultaneously an unconfirmed dig at Jeb! And he just sits there with that shit eating troll-face grin. Double genius!

You can tell the women out there who buy into the PC orthodoxy are thinking, “You can’t say that!”. Then they laugh. Then they get a little tingly, because they know they are dealing with an alpha.

Humor is one of the best methods to deconstruct. It has been (((used))) to break down basically everything about our society, and now Trump is using it like a wrecking ball to destroy the prevailing orthodoxy.

* There’s a radio talk show host in SF, Ronn Owens, been there for 40 years. He mentioned how when he interviews a liberal politician, the lib will list all the do gooder laws and positions he supports, but never be able to speak about actually meeting and working with the people in these programs. Like Sanders.

The conservatives, will be able to go on at length about actually getting in the trenches trying to find out what works and what doesn’t….

* Too soon to declare victory. If Trump loses in November then it will all be for naught. Even if he wins, he has to get his proposals thru Congress. He’s done the impossible so far and threaded the needle with Republican primary voters (if not the pundit class who have declared him Hitler anyway), but it’s an all or nothing contest so unless he crosses the finish line first, it means nothing.

* The late Lee Atwater, a tough and effective campaign manager for Bush 41 against Dukakis, believed a candidate has to focus on at most 2 or 3 issues. He showed Dukakis weak on patriotism, playing up his crusade to eliminate loyalty oaths in Massachusetts, weak on defense (this caused Dukakis to take the famous tank ride), and weak on crime (Dukakis program of prison furloughs for violent felons was played up in the Willie Horton story).

Trump has a similar short list of issues, not a long portfolio that panders to dozens of interest groups.

* I’m amazed at how much importance the pundits attach to “policy.” Hey, Mr. Nixon, America needs to know exactly how you are going to handle the Quemoy and Matsu crisis?

I recall some of Obama’s policies. He was the candidate who opposed gay marriage and whose healthcare plan wasn’t going to be mandatory, in contrast to Hillary’s.

* I was recently reading about the origins of the Sri Lankan civil war. For the most part, it was unreadable despite being filled with epic violence. Too many unpronounceable names and I couldn’t remember which one was on what side – worse than a Russian novel. But one thing caught my eye – the war actually started over affirmative action for college admissions that was being imposed by the socialist government. When you meddle in this kind of stuff, you are playing with fire. This point seems to be completely lost on American “democratic socialists” like Hillary and Bernie (Hillary is one too, she just hides it better than Bernie). They think that they can boil the frog gradually, but it doesn’t always work. If you turn up the flame a little too quickly, the frog may notice before it is boiled to death.

* As Trump himself said: the big breakthrough for him was the TV show. It acted as a giant supply of rocket fuel for every single other activity in his life.

Also this breakthrough made his rivals go crazy. Especially the Jewish ones. And the quasi-Jews like Geraldo.

Just wait until Trump’s Wash DC Old Post Office development opens with gorgeous Ivanka cutting the ribbon and then shortly thereafter he’s in the Oval Office and business is BOOMING. Those rooms are going to be sold out for the foreseeable future.

* I think his general election pivot in the last few weeks has been masterful. I’m not sure how much of this is due to Mannafort or just Trump’s instincts. One example, which is often overlooked, is his deliberate unwillingness to comment on the transgender bathroom issue. Looking at the polls in NC, they clearly show the public is divided almost evenly on HB2 so he wisely chose to take a relatively neutral stance on the issue. Now, the Obama administration looks like a bunch of crazed cultural Marxists who want to erase the concept of gender while Trump is reaping the benefits of the backlash to this without having boxed himself in as a social con obsessed with the culture war.

It’s really impressive.

I know that a lot of the folks on the right like Douthat, etc, argue that it’s all a “con” and he doesn’t mean anything he promises to anybody. But most of us would rather he win the general election than stand on principle between now and November. He’s already locked in the social cons and immigration restrictionists. It would be suicidal to keep pandering to them and alienate the undecided.

* Trump’s reversals, as they are perceived and pointed out by the commentariat, seem to me mostly to be the product of his tendency to speak off the cuff, often “thinking out loud.” The position papers on his campaign website haven’t changed, but no one pays attention to them – just to the latest sound bite on TV.

Professional politicians don’t do what Trump does. They, too, have their position papers, but they also have memorized talking points, carefully phrased and focus-group tested, which they recite almost as mechanically as a recorded telephone menu. American politicians generally aren’t good impromptu speakers, and when confronted by some unexpected twist in the discussion, they often can do nothing but repeat themselves (as Marco Rubio did in one of the debates).

Trump’s lack of message discipline drives the pundits to distraction, because they are unaccustomed to it. They marvel at how Trump’s supporters stick with him despite his apparent reversals, and suppose it must be because they are uncritical and stupid. Actually it may be that they are refreshed to hear, for once, a candidate who speaks impromptu in language resembling 21st-century conversational demotic American rather than Beltway speechwriterese.

Whether their judgment about him be right or wrong, Trump has won their trust on the big issues of immigration, trade, and generally managing the United States in the interests of American citizens rather than foreigners. They know that the media have the habit of tearing whatever he might say from its context in order to present it as unflatteringly as possible, and are prepared to cut him some slack on the alleged or apparent inconsistency between a snippet of what he said this week and an extract of what he said a month ago.

* The NYT women Trump hit piece was written by a woman & a homosexual. That’s all you need to know about its potential to resonate with the masses.

Camille Paglia made this observation and scoffed at the supposedly devastating hit piece. CNN ran a segment this morning purporting to show Trump flip flopping on guns during a Larry King show 17 years ago. All he said is that he’d prefer there were no guns but bad people have them so citizens should have them too. This evidently was anti-gun.

* Yeah, the reaction to that tweet was nuts. Young Andrew Kaczinsky at Buzzfeed tweeted his scoop that the taco bowls weren’t actually at the Trump Tower Grill but at the Trump Tower Cafe (like it matters at all).

* Trump had game before the concept of a PUA existed. And this is true of anyone who has been able to consistently attract attractive women say, in the 1980s or earlier – they figured this stuff out themselves. So-called game gurus did not invent anything, they discovered it, or rediscovered it and gave it a name that has stuck. E.g. Women have shit tested from time immemorial, it’s just that this now has a name.

Alpha is what alpha does, and Trump attracts 10s like bees to honey. Go back and look at the women he has either married or banged over the last 30 years. Are any of them even plain to the extent of being 7s or 8s? And when they come up to him, he acts naturally and doesn’t freeze up like a lot of us would. He hasn’t exhibited any sort of crisis of confidence in this election process like a Perot, and won’t either because that’s not who he is. He passes shit test after shit test. Dude is alpha as f***.

And I use alpha to mean whoever the guy is who attracts attractive women. Whoever does this is alpha, and the more they can do this, the more alpha they are. Many alphas are happily married, having attracted their attractive mate. If we rate men on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness (taking into account money, humor, intellect, height, attitude, athleticism, looks, not in that order – the things that women are drawn to), realize that the bottom percentiles only date their hand and never marry. Most of the above average guys will be married by their thirties and almost certainly by their forties.

I am less Whiskey in making this a binary thing. As for the beta concept, it is less interesting to me. In any group of males, a leader will emerge through the pecking order process, something common with lots of mammalian males, and even chickens. It makes sense, because biology can’t prescribe who will be a leader because it doesn’t know who will be in a given group, but it can prescribe a competition to be leader and the winner of that competition in any group will be leader. A small group will have a sergeant, a large group will have a general. (Yes, I know that military leadership is selected, but leaders do emerge within the structure, whether in officers or enlisted men, and whoever has rank in whatever group it is will be the leader.)

So in that context, someone who is only capable of leading a small group will defer to another more capable leader, generally, or will not be recognized as such by the larger group. In terms of alpha, this makes them less alpha, but not necessarily a beta. I guess I find the beta concept less interesting, because I see how the human interactions actually work. Put a group of stupid losers together, and a leader will still emerge. Put a group of what Whiskey would term betas together, and a leader will emerge from these so-called betas. Men naturally form heirarchies, and do so well. Always women in groups will complain about office politics and act cattily towards each other. Men will generally fall into line. We need to do so, to work together in armies and in civilian life.

Women are attracted to leaders, period. In larger groups, the upper echelon are also attractive to them. In terms of attracting women, there is significant overlap between the leadership alpha continuum and the studliness alpha continuum. However, the studliness alpha continuum leans more towards looks, height, money, humor, not necessarily in that order. However, alpha leaders by definition have confidence, intelligence, carriage, persuasiveness… and often also have height, money, humor, athleticism, even looks. So considerable overlap. And studying either form of alphaship will have spillover effects into the other form.

Some of this stuff is illustrated in Trump vs Jeb. Jeb is a lesser leadership alpha (still a governer, but would be a nobody without the Bush name, networks and money), and in terms of studliness alpha, a non-entity. Jeb is strangely like William Hurt, a character actor in a leading man’s body.

Anyway, Trump is now beating Hillary in the polls. He has less of a problem with women (married or otherwise) than Hillary has with men. And he only has a problem with women in my view to the extent that the media makes it a problem. In actual fact, it is Hillary and Bill who are really anti-women, and they are really unwise to the extent that they make this an issue – they are leading with their chin.

* Silver is very methodical about figuring the odds under the assumption of no paradigm shift. The 2012 general election played out very much like the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections, so he did an excellent job of forecasting state by state results. The 2016 primary election on the GOP side was a repudiation of the of the reigning system, so the recent rules stopped working.

* I don’t think Trump will sell out on Immigration. What’s his upside and downside? His upside is that he gets a few nice articles for a week in the NYT, and Paul Ryan says something nice about him for five minutes. The downside is that he loses his entire base of support and faces at worst Dem led impeachment threats with … what the might forces of the GOPe for cover?

For better or worse, Nate Silver completely missed the central issue of immigration — it destroys Social Security and Medicare. The foundation of the American welfare state that almost EVERY working American depends on. Trump alone has understood this and made this argument — take in the Third World, lose Social Security and Medicare. Deport illegals, more money for Medicare and Social Security.

As Steve points out, every Casino Indian tribe kicks out as many members as possible. Trump is simply that dynamic writ in the US.

As for professional women, well of course they hate hate hate Trump. They always would. The REASON the GOPe is what it is, is professional White women. They all hate hate hate their beta male husbands, mostly surfed on Affirmative Action and eat up diversity because they are junior members, have limited if non existent skills compared to White men and hate hate hate White men in general for that reason (the way Blacks hate hate hate Jews for higher IQ/skills), and support Open Borders, anti-White preferences, gay everything, etc.

Matriarchies are always depraved and debauched, and favor outsider men against their own. Romney (who gave up his Third Party Run effort), the rest of the GOPe are what they are because of their personal circumstances. They have spent their entire lives placating angry, hateful wives who feel they could have done better, in some cases (Mitch Daniels) actively cheating/abandoning. Trump is the opposite — women have to keep HIM happy, as he has and will trade up to a newer, younger, hotter, model.

We will see how a scorched earth campaign goes. Trump is not a placating Mitch Daniels desperate to win back his cheating wife. He’s already unleashed the rape charge on Bill Clinton, with Hillary as the Camile Cosby enabler of the attacks on the victims character. Hillary is a walking indictment of the Democratic Party, as this was the best they could do: an angry, entitled woman widely perceived as lesbian and man-hating who went all in for identity politics.

And critically, offers no goodies. No free stuff. Just more anti-White guy stuff (which again, professional White women eat up — they all figure they’re super geniuses and should be running everything save that icky White guy who once awkwardly asked them for coffee in an elevator).

Trump is running on saving Social Security and Medicare by kicking illegals out and stopping them from coming in. Hillary is running on the opposite plus anti-White guy identity politics. We will see which is the most effective campaign.

* Anti-immigration was a $1,000 bill laying on the floor that every single other candidate veered away from and refused to pick up. If everyone else is too afraid of touching the issue, then picking up the issue as your central theme does come with risk because all of the signals in that political environment, the consensus opinion, is that this is a divisive issue which won’t lead the candidate to political success.

So what you dismiss so easily was actually a pretty bold gambit based either on Trump’s principles, or accurate insight into the mood of America or calculated opportunism. Same with his Muslim policy, which regularly polls at between 65% to 85% support, far above Trump’s support, and which every single other candidate condemned. They’re all completely willing to take a hand’s off approach to Muslim immigration and allow their population to keep growing in America despite the problems we see around the world in all societies as Muslim proportion of population grows.

* Sanders pushes for free college, but without any blacks in America, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights Act, Griggs vs. Duke Power wouldn’t have come up, disparate impact would be seen as a key plot point in a dystopian science fiction story, credentialism wouldn’t be a thing, and so there would not be a crisis of kids going into debt in order to qualify for a job at Starbucks.

* How would she campaign to win against Trump? I am kind of drawing a blank, because she has largely made her bed at this point. She has campaigned to the right of Bernie, so would struggle to go “old left” in order to win enough of the white male vote. And by enabling the immivasion, she divides up the bennies among too many people. This is not 2008. Hillary either goes full retard and loses; or unconvincingly, walks back her pro-immigration and anti-white male identity politics. And probably still loses.

* The whole “alpha” – “beta” thing as it’s used by the PUAs is misleading AFAIC. When I worked at a big ad agency, there was a low-ranking copywriter and a low-ranking art director, both of whom got some fabulous looking women. All the rest of us were impressed by that, of course, but neither was really respected as a man among men. They just had a weird talent. To me being an alpha is more about being able to dominate other men than being able to seduce women.

* There are relative “losers” who can pick up women. Often there is some ability that they have outside of work. Maybe they are funny, or good at conversation, or good at sport, or good looking, or good at music, or can build things (women like provider type guys) or several of those things. However, have you ever known a leader or high achiever, in some sort of local club, fraternity, elected office, business, law, art, music, whatever… who can’t score an above average looking woman or wife? Usually leadership alpha implies studliness alpha. (Kissinger was never in the running for People’s Sexiest Man Alive.) The converse is less true.

One thing to consider is that males often find it hard to judge attractiveness of other males. But if there was a guy with an attractive woman and who is not rolling in money who you were asking “What on earth does she see in him?”, often other women will rate him as attractive. Google “Sexiest Man Alive”. There is hardly a man’s man amongst them. Exceptions to the rule are Connery, maybe Channing Tatum, Mel Gibson, Denzel, and… Nick Nolte WTF?

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Facebook Censors Conservative Lauren Southern for Mentioning Censorship

News: We wish this wasn’t true – but it looks like Mark Zuckerberg’s message hasn’t got through to Facebook’s employees. Conservative activist and Donald Trump supporter Lauren Southern was just kicked off the site for a totally inoffensive post noting its censorship of another conservative.

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Blame It On The Goyim

“. . . emphasizing Gentile persecution as the root cause of Jewish
“degradation.” This ideology . . . was shared in one form or another, by all the ideologists of nineteenth-century Jewry: Reform
Jews and Zionists, assimilationists and socialists, Bundists and
Communists—all became virtuosos of ethnic suffering. . . . The
point is that these Diaspora groups were uninterested in actual
history; they were apologists, ideologists, prefabricating a past in order to answer embarrassing questions, to outfit a new identity, and to ground a claim to equal treatment in the modern world.” J. M. Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 177.

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Tomorrowland

Remember when the future was going to be awesome?

This movie starts off with the World Fair in 1964. That was the year before the United States began opening up immigration. From Canada to England to New Zealand and Australia and Germany and France, the West has allowed itself to get filled up with immigrants and now very few people in the West are optimistic about the future anymore.

I wonder if there might be a connection?

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What Does O.J. Simpson Have To Teach Us?

Steve Sailer writes:

Black violent crime against whites is a huge statistical phenomenon that we aren’t supposed to recognize as even a Thing. Orwell’s “crimestop” — i.e., “protective stupidity” — shuts down our cognitive processes before we can figure out what the real message of OJ’s life is.

Here’s the real message of O.J.’s life: During the second half of the 20th Century, white Americans became extraordinarily favorably disposed toward black Americans, but blacks kept letting whites down.

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American Judaism’s Most Pressing Concerns Today

1. Jews losing their Jewish identity.
2. Intermarriage with non-Jews.

Many nationalists have similar objectives for their people.

I could take most famous nationalist texts, be they Japanese or Tibetan or Jewish or white, and by just changing the terms for the good guys, these texts would read the same.

Every people sees itself as the center of the universe fulfilling a transcendent destiny.

An important purpose of Jewish law is to separate Jews from non-Jews. The kosher laws limit the ability of Jews to socialize with non-Jews. If you can’t drink with non-Jews, you are less likely to sleep with them and you are more likely to preserve the genes and culture of your own people.

Other groups also wish to preserve their genes and culture:

Japanese nationalism is the nationalism that asserts that the Japanese are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of the Japanese. It encompasses a broad range of ideas and sentiments harbored by the Japanese people over the last two centuries regarding their native country, its cultural nature, political form and historical destiny.

Every nationalism has a victimology. It stokes anger against the other. Every nationalism contains the capacity for genocide.

For black nationalists, whites and Jews are the enemy. For white nationalists, Jews are the enemy. For Jewish nationalists, the bad guys are variously aryans or nordics or arabs or Muslims.

Most forms of gentile racial, religious and national pride contain some hostility to Jews, just as when Jews become stronger in their Jewish identity, they are more likely to hold negative views of non-Jews.

The most basic form of social organization is us vs them.

Review below by Richard E. Sherwin (Bar Ilan University, Israel)

David G. Goodman, Masanori Miyazawa. Jews in the Japanese Mind: the History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype. New York: The Free Press, 1995. xi + 360 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-02-912482-6.

Published on H-Antisemitism (March, 1998)

I find this a good and important book, clearly written and argued, interesting both in its details and in its implications for current theories of antisemitism. Professor Goodman presents a complex pattern of relationships between Japanese allosemitism and traditional Japanese xenophobias, a good part of which is based on the admirably thorough historical research of Professor Masanori Miyazawa of Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto.[1] The book traces the chronology of Japanese antisemitism, its development, impact on Japanese culture, and present status. I list chapter titles below to help the readers of this review follow the book’s chronology, and to free me from the task of summarizing the details or the cast of characters involved in developing Japanese antisemitism. The book requires and deserves careful study. What follows is not strictly speaking a book review. While I try to do justice to Goodman’s work, I am also conveying some of my own thoughts, hunches, and speculations suggested by a reading of his text. No doubt, I hypothesize more freely here than a more formal review might permit.

The Chapters are:

I. What the Japanese Think of Jews and Why Anyone Should Care (p. 1)

II. Momotaro as Antisemite: The Cultural Roots of Japanese Images of Jews (p. 16)

III. God’s Chosen People: Jews in Japanese Christian Theology (p. 37)

IV. The Protocols of Ultranationalism: The Rise of Antisemitism Between the Wars (p. 76)

V. Jews as the Enemy: The Function of Antisemitism in Wartime Japan (p. 106)

VI. Identification and Denial: The Uses of the Jews in the Postwar Period (p. 135)

VII. “The Socialism of Fools”: Left-Wing Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism (p. 183)

VIII. Signal Failure: Recrudescent Antisemitism and Japan’s “Spiritual Condition” (p. 220)

IX. Japan’s Jewish Problem: Implications in a Multicultural World (p. 252)

The goals of Jews in the Japanese Mind are as follows (pp. 14-15):

1. “(T)o describe and trace the development of Japanese ideas about Jews, to explain the twin phenomena of antisemitism and philosemitism in a country that has practically no Jewish population.”

2. “(T)o show how Japanese ideas about Jews, which are relatively insignificant taken in isolation, relate to and reflect the major intellectual and political currents of their time.”

3. “(T)o explore the political and intellectual implications of Japanese ideas about Jews for our understanding of the quality and potential of contemporary Japanese culture.”

At least the first two goals are nicely realized. My reservations about the success of the third do not in any way diminish the book’s achievements, and its far-reaching implications for current theories of antisemitism are even more important, I think, than Goodman claims.

Chapter 1 is full of absorbing details, interesting as sociology in themselves and presented I presume to convince us that antisemitism DOES exist significantly in Japan. Here is a striking example. Between 1937 and 1962 Jews ranked consistently low among the least attractive or desirable humans to marry. During the 1930s, Jews fought it out with superior Africans and inferior Russians near the bottom of twelve ethnic groups. In 1946 Jews were deemed inferior to Russians and superior to Africans and Koreans. In 1962, the Chinese had replaced the Russians as number nine, but Jews were still number ten, Africans number eleven, and Koreans number twelve.

However shocking this might seem to Jewish readers, it was not all that unusual. Charles Stember (in Jews in the Mind of America, New York, 1966) reports the Gallup Poll answers from 1936-1945 to the question: who are the most dangerous to American democratic traditions and values? Jews were ranked first except for 1942 when the Japanese displaced them, presumably the result of Pearl Harbor. After the Holocaust, Jews either ceased being number one, or the question became too embarrassing to ask, publicly.

But not in Japan. Perhaps, at least one reason the Jews did not win greater Japanese approval after the Holocaust was that, following Hiroshima, the Japanese had already constructed a myth that made them the true innocent victims of World War II, a role they were unwilling to give up to six million Jews. According to Goodman, the acme of Japanese sympathy for and with Jews was reached and passed in the mid 1960s; so there was sympathy, but of a strange sort. It was displaced onto figures like the dejudaized Anne Frank who was further metamorphosed into an image of the Japanese themselves.

On the positive side of the allosemitic coin, meanwhile, some Japanese–innocently or otherwise–were identifying themselves as “Jews” or “Jewish,” in the image of hustling successful businessmen, modern and international; or in the Christian theological image of G-d’s chosen people, perhaps in the Japanese tradition Goodman cites of propitiating, tolerating, and imitating the powers of foreign demons. (I ignore the few Japanese men of honor, memory, courage, and decency who fought these currents of displacement, erasure, and cooptation, that is, against the policies and fashions that led to success in their culture. Goodman tells their stories well, details the prices they paid, and concedes that they did not succeed in changing antisemitism much.)

Chapter 1 thus presents the paradox of a deeply allosemitic country, with not many more than a thousand Jews. Unlike many European countries, Japan does not even have a history of a once significant Jewish presence. This by itself, I would think, supports Gavin Langmuir’s theory–which Goodman cites–that antisemitism seems based entirely on hearsay and fantasy.

Chapters 2 through 4 present an historical survey and analysis of the origins of Japanese antisemitism as a powerful demonology. Antisemitism allowed the Japanese to displace the frustration at being unable to isolate themselves from foreign influence. Forcibly members of an international network of commerce, politics, culture, and ideology, they feel their identity, their very survival as a nation, to be threatened. Influences undermining the comfortable aspects of a homogeneous society, or their mythos of it, so vital to their sense of well-being, rendered the Japanese vulnerable to antisemitic myth.

Japanese concern over the “health” (read unity, optimism, satisfaction) of their culture began before the foreigners arrived. Goodman shows that as early as 1825 (I suspect but cannot prove, even earlier) there are texts prophesying the occupation and destruction of Japan and its culture by “foreign occult” groups. After Commodore Perry coerced the opening of Japan to the West, and the modern world, this foreign cult was identified with Christianity as the enemy. Soon afterwards, in a very subtle alteration with what I consider multiple benefits to Japan, the target became Jews and Judaism.

Goodman does not say this, but I infer it, correctly I hope, from the facts and the gist of his argument. First, it was advantageous for pure nationalist xenophobes that there were no Jews in Japan. They could hate them as much as they wanted, malign them to their hearts’ content; their Christian teachers, occupiers, and models would have found little to object to in this, in as much as it imitated widely accepted Christian views of the matter. Apparently, the alien Christians did not realize that “Jews” really signified “all foreign devils,” including themselves. It is even possible that the Japanese themselves were not consciously aware of the equation. No matter. Now they could at once hate Christians and the West, the modern World, and yet dress it in a Jew-hatred acceptable to the West itself. (I find this hypothesis helpful in explaining the curious fact Goodman records concerning the disinterest Japanese antisemites have so far shown in allying themselves with various worldwide antisemitic organizations.)

A second component of the mythology for the Japanese students of Christian missionaries (largely American and mostly Evangelical Protestants in the modern era) involved a not uncommon redefinition of themselves as “Jews.” As with some American Christians, the Japanese converts thought of themselves as the “real” Jews, part of the continually rediscovered ten lost tribes of Israel, or as possessors of a truer tradition than modern Talmudic Jews. This, too, was acceptable to their Christian mentors. Thus, even though imported into Japanese culture, the complex relationship between Christians and Jews, the loves, hates, and competitions, were all present in the development of antisemitism in Japan.

Given the absence of real Jews, this emotional platform could sustain any number of scenarios, most filled with inner conflicts and logical contradictions. Xenophobia, nationalism, and opportunism combined with traditional ethnic ideology to reinforce a strong pre-Christian belief in the Japanese as a chosen, holy people living in a promised land, created for them by their own deities. Meanwhile, a universal imperialistic, Western Christian world and industrial technology lay ready to be appropriated and mastered. Fortunately, indeed, a specific holy/unholy people, “the Jews,” also stood ready to take the blame for all the difficulties, frictions, and dislocations involved in this transformation of traditional Japan. Naturally, inhabiting such a cosmic drama as this, the Japanese have shown no signs of being interested in, or much influenced by, living Jews or Judaism, at home or abroad. Nor, given the popular practice of invoking conspiracy theory and “hidden powers” to explain their own history, was there much pressure for the Japanese to find proof that a small and shadowy group of Jews provided the puppet-masters of all Western governments.

This indifference further suggests the need for Albert Lindemann’s theories, as recently discussed in Esau’s Tears, to be tested against a situation that appears to contradict them. What seems a perfect laboratory example of demonological epidemiology in our species, age, and clime, may turn out to be just another exception that keeps on proving the rule. An actual Jewish contribution or non-contribution to Japanese antisemitism may yet be discovered, but it is certainly difficult to find in Goodman’s book.

To my mind the most significant paradox that Goodman’s book raises is the use and non-use the Japanese have made of their antisemitism. Japanese antisemitism, he argues in Chapter 4, has historically been used against the Japanese themselves, to crush domestic dissent in the name of national unity of belief at times of crisis (World War II, disturbing fluctuations in the Yen, and other economic and political uncertainties). Like other nationalistic antisemitisms, it blames the Jews for every economic, political, and cultural discomfort. International Jews, pulling the strings of Western governments, banks, communications, and industry, are out to destroy Japan. This is the usual paranoia, readily observable in the West.

What is unique about Japanese antisemitism, however, is that unlike most other nationalistic xenophobic antisemitisms it apparently–and very illogically–has NOT been used against living Jews. This failure to harm actual Jews is even stranger given that the particulars of Japanese ideological antisemitism entered Japan during the Manchukuo Occupation. It was then that the Japanese came into contact with the most successful contribution of White Russians to humanity, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the literary fraud that encouraged Eastern European pogroms and Western European indifference to the Nazi persecution of Jews.

Chapter 5 treats the domestic use of antisemitism during World War II as a means of thought control. In the process, the book describes one of the rarest, most strikingly decent behaviors by a government that must nonetheless be thought of as antisemitic. The Japanese government and army ignored the German example and Nazi pressure, choosing instead, as Goodman points out, to protect some 25,000 Jewish refugees in Kobe and later Shanghai (thereby giving refuge to a greater number than Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India combined).

Goodman refuses to romanticize this episode, arguing that the rescue was done from political pragmatism, self-interest, and, to my mind, a “reverse-English” peculiar to Japanese outlooks. Apparently the Japanese thought that if the Jews were really running the world behind the scenes, it was politic to behave decently to them. But the book may not give the Japanese enough credit in this case. There is always a gap between theory and practice, it seems, bridgeable only by acts of will. And the Japanese, in this case, willed decently.

Chapters 5 and 6 detail the use of antisemitism at home to repress dissent against extreme nationalism, and after the war to allow the Japanese to ignore the Jews while supplanting them in their own mythological history as the real innocent victims of the war, particularly of its nuclear conclusion.

(A more personal aside here: it is not clear to me just what the Japanese would have done had there been no Holocaust to co-opt, no Hiroshima to blur the horror and their responsibility for Asian suffering. Why is there so little anti-Japanism, considering the well-documented horrors of the war? What little anti-Japanese feeling exists is clearly a result of economic preeminence. Why, in contrast, is there so much antisemitism despite a much less obvious contribution by Jews to their own or other people’s suffering?)

The last chapter on “Japan’s Jewish Problem: Implications in a Multicultural World” is less persuasive than the rest of the book. In part this may be the result of my own failings in matters of arithmetic. Be that as it may, I cannot assess the actual proportionate influence of antisemitism on the general attitudes or behavior of literate Japanese adults. Just how worrisome is it today and for the future? Part of the problem is, of course, the difficulty of predicting future behavior on the basis of history or even on current beliefs (as revealed in public opinion polls).

But the urgency of Goodman’s appeal in his concluding chapters for changed behavior on the part of the Japanese government and leaders depends heavily on just such a clear estimation, as does the plangency of the book’s last chapter. The importance accorded to Goodman’s plea depends on whether or not the reader shares his assessment of the dangers of Japanese antisemitism. His assumption that a change will necessarily benefit Japanese national interests is also problematic. I, for one, do not disbelieve the accuracy of Goodman’s picture and interpretation in chapters 7 and 8 of Japanese postwar hypocrisy toward Jews, particularly its fashionable dabbling in anti-Zionism as a transparent ploy meant to protect economic interests. But in all fairness, I just don’t think Japanese postwar antisemitism as applied to Jews and Israel was or is significantly different from that of France, England, Russia, Canada, or others. If anything, it seems less harmful.

And it does not follow necessarily that using antisemitism for controlling domestic dissent must harm Japan any more than it has harmed Europe or the Americas. It does not follow therefore that diminishing such antisemitism is in the interest of any government whose primary interest is remaining in power: that is, all of them. The change of policy would certainly be desirable to Jews, but is it as pressing a need for Japan as Goodman urges on the reader? Historically, at least, the only instance where government antisemitism could have been deadly was the moment when the Japanese, for whatever selfish or self-deluded reasons, behaved demonstrably more morally towards Jews than most other nations at the time.

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