June 7, 2017 Jews are not nihilists Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Jews are not nihilists

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Audacious Epigone: On their most recent podcast, Kevins Grace and Steel asserted, in the context of a long discussion on George Soros, that Jews are particularly nihilistic.

If so, they sure are diligent, deliberate, and effortful in attaining meaningless worldly success. Come to think of it, Kefka’s character was based in large part on Soros!

The percentage who “strongly disagree” with the statement “In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose”, by religious identification (n = 3,756):

Generally belief in God and nihilism are inversely correlated but irreligious Jews are less nihilistic than religious goys are. So the GSS results are in line with that assertion.

COMMENTS:

* And that’s why Jews are so overwhelmingly represented in idealistic/outright utopian social/political movements. “Humanism” is mostly disdained by real conservatives, and hell, in the most gentile friendly wing of Leftism (Gaia), there is often animosity towards people for taking a dump on nature.

Gentiles are more likely to believe in limits to human ability and understanding; as is now depressingly obvious, cucks for the last 30-40 years have driven from influence grouchy paleos who believe that liberal elite driven intervention in both domestic and foreign affairs is bound to fail due to it’s ignorance of human nature and potential.

The highest IQ people (e.g., Jews), especially the most verbally oriented ones (e.g., Jews) are better at fooling themselves and the a lot of other people that one should be dedicated to the goal of “getting involved” so as to feel better about their sense of purpose in life.

I would think that proles and less verbally oriented groups don’t hear as much utopian blather so they’re more concerned with the nuts and bolts of day to day survival than they are with lofty socio-political goals. In other words, paying bills and not having my car or house get broken into are more important than gaining social status by spouting the most Marxist feel good crap possible.

And go figure, modern Protestants have cucked hard for Jews and also have been heavily involved in Neo-Conjobs. Prots are more involved in paranoid culture regarding good works to be done so that one can be saved in the Second Coming than are Catholics and of course, non-believers. Jews consider high social status among liberal elites to be their savior.

Derbyshire said some years back that conservatives started to falter when they ran from their pessimistic streak, making them susceptible to the kind of naive dreaming that should stick with the liberals where it belongs.

Attributing these problems to a knowing Jewish conspiracy to crap on everything is not something I necessarily agree with. I think the uniquely pernicious Jewish skill set of high IQ and high verbal orientation allows them to weave dense webs of pollyanna sophistry regarding human potential. And, as is often pointed out, if Jews really understood what they were doing, then they sure as hell would not want Muslims anywhere near them. Yet they insist on flooding Jew friendly Western countries with ethnic groups who detest Jews.

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What Drowning Looks Like

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments: A video of what real drowning looks like: link to a finnish newspaper.

A five year old boy is drowning in a swimming pool next to numerous people and nobody notices while literally touching him. Fortunately the boy who was lifeless at the end was saved. Very disturbing to watch, but also important to see what it really looks like. Not sure if still worth it. It’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.

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Rehabbing Nietszche

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: In recent decades, the reputation of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has been largely rehabilitated despite the unfortunate events of 1933-1945. (In contrast, Francis Galton is today widely considered to be a progenitor of the Holocaust.)

Nietzsche’s popularity with the Nazis has been widely blamed upon mendacious editing by his sister and her anti-Semitic husband after the philosopher’s mental breakdown in 1888. In Nietzsche’s defense it is often pointed out that while perhaps he didn’t much like Jews (other than Spinoza), he really hated anti-Semites.

I think Nietzsche is respectable again today for several reasons:

First, he truly was super smart with lots of brilliant ideas.

Second, with his proto-Tom Wolfe prose style, he’s extremely readable for a German philosopher (think Kant, Hegel, Heidegger; Marx, a snarky bastard, throws in a lot of fun sarcasm in his prose but is still a pedant).

Third, Nietzsche’s thought is seen as corrosive of Christianity, so he is on Team Good. (To be precise, however, Nietzsche’s objection to Christianity was not that some Christians had owned slaves, but that a lot of Christians had been slaves. Christianity, to Nietzsche, was a contemptible “slave morality.”)

COMMENTS:

* His anti-semitism or lackthereof is neither here nor there regarding Nietzsche’s popularity. Do you know how many Big Names despised Jews? Or blacks, or gays, or the protected group du jour? Like all of them.

Just recently, they started publicizing the fact that Mencken was anti-semitic. Not sure why, but he wasn’t unpersoned as a result. He’s still semi-respectable, because he’s useful against Christianity and the booboosie. Martin Luther is a name you can bring up in polite conversation, though not far back people were writing books tracing the Holocaust back to him. Wagner is always coming in and out of acceptability.

They’re always holding back, pushing forward, taking away and putting back again the stigmata of anti-semitism at their convenience. It hardly matters whether Nietzsche really was anti-semitic or not, either. Because they could just say he was, and what’s the difference? It worked for a damn long time, if only by implication.

* Nietzsche was a masterful aphorist, and that works well with the masses because you don’t have to be smart to get them. Most people aren’t very smart, and don’t have time for high-falutin’ philosophy. You can read them a few at a time while you take a whiz.

For the intellectual, Nietzsche is deadly clever, and he has longer works with extended arguments. He’s not a very consistent thinker, especially not at range, I don’t think. But smart people like inconsistency, too. And if they’re lazy, like most people are, their minds can drift a few times per page without losing the plot.

* Nietzsche is rubbish. It’s just another variation on the oldest false religion in the world (“you will be like God, determining for yourself good and evil”).

What Moses said was effective because people believed it came from God. Same for Jesus. Same for Mohamet with respect to Allah.

The notion that one should simply ‘man up’ and be a superman and simply posit values you like and impose them as you are able fails, because unless people believe these actually come from God (or the gods or a supernatural dimension) they simply aren’t very effective. They are just assertions from some dude who claims to be a superdude. They can be imposed only at the point of a spear or by bribing people to follow them.

Atheistic existentialism is a con game. The idea that in the abyss is nothing, but yet by staring into it it will eventually supply you with some set of lifeforce values, is just nonsense.

Atheistic existentialism as a concept simply cannot sustain civilization. And no one would sacrifice his life to preserve such a society. You would have to fall back on tribalism or racialism or nationalism or crudely indoctrinated hatred of an enemy or just threatening people with death in order to motivate people to fight to defend it. Remember how the Soviets had to fall back on Russian nationalism.

There are basic principles that most of our contemporary intellectuals are in deep denial of.

First, ‘Science’ is incapable of supplying values. Science has nothing to offer in the way of prescribing standards of human behavior. What science can do, is tell you how to more effectively further a given set of values. Science can tell you what the most effective way is to gas the Jews; it cannot tell you whether it is right or wrong to gas the Jews.

Second, naturalism is a failure scientifically. The postulated naturalistic mechanism of random mutation and natural selection has failed and no one has been able to rescue it. It’s been a semantic shell game at least since Gould came up with ‘punctuated equilibrium’ if not before. It is incapable of supplying enough information. Information is the critical failure. Its defenders are con men who are grossly misleading their students and the public as to the information deficit in their postulated mechanisms. And it’s not just the Cambrian explosion. There is a vast operation not directly perceptible to our limited capabilities of perceiving reality around us that is mediating an incredible amount of information into life forms on a continuing basis.

These people selling naturalism and following it up with atheistic materialism are peddling a pack of lies.

Nietzsche would have been happy as a clam at an ancient Greek homosexual orgy and everything on top of that was just an elaborate rationalization for why he should feel justified in doing so.

* Nietzsche’s writing is a pleasure in small doses. But his books [are] a chore after the first few pages.

* He’s a bit like Emerson in that regard. Of course, Emerson is a much more extreme case. I can only take him a paragraph at a time.

Interesting to note that Nietzsche liked Emerson a lot; he said that reading him always cheered him up when he was depressed.

* Nietzche wasn’t considered a Nazi until Heidegger started writing about him, and we all know Heidegger was such an evil Nazi he even bedded and defiled his Jewish student, Hannah Arendt, who went on to have a measure of success as a philosopher herself. His early association with Wagner didn’t help either. Because we all know Hitler liked Wagner and that’s all we need to know.
But seriously, Nietzche hated both Christians and Jews, and most of humanity. He was the original misanthrope. He also hated Prussian militarism and Prussian “Junkers” and no doubt would have despised Nazis as vulgarians and plebeians, had he lived long enough to meet them.
Having no formal training in philosophy but rather in classical philosophy and being a great natural writer, his philosophical style revolutionized a field that was unreadable and possibly worthless at that point under the obscure and onanist brand of Hegelianism of his time.
You could say his greatest influences were Spinoza, Darwin, Lucretius and Carlyle.
Although he didn’t create a philosophical system, Nietzche left behind a rich legacy in thoughtful and enjoyable essays and in the form a long prose poem, his Zarathustra.
“Also sprach Zarathustra” was considered inocuous enough that copies of the book were lent to German war prisoners after the Reich was defeated, without a second thought. I own one such copy, bought many years after the war in a second – hand bookstore in West-Berlin, stamped by the Allied occupation forces.

* There is a Midsomer Murders episode that is very down on Galton. One suspect mentions he is a Galton fan, and at first the detective is all “Galton! Discoverer of fingerprints! Great guy!” But then he starts reading up on Galton and finds out about the eugenics stuff, and by the end he’s theatrically throwing his Galton book in the trash. And (spoiler alert) the Galton fan turns out to be the murderer, for creepy Galton inspired reasons, no less.

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Nietzsche and Illness

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: My impression is that one connection between Nietzsche and Hitler was a common German fear of being poisoned, whether by miasmas, bad food, or mixed blood. For example, my Germanophone Swiss grandfather moved from Oak Park, IL to Altadena, CA in 1929 because he was a health food nut and in SoCal he could grow a lot of his own food in his garden. The proto-hippie Nature Boy movement in Southern California in the 1940s started out among long-haired sandal wearers hanging out at a German couple’s health food store in West Hollywood.

Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times: “Race-poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of Hitler’s youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of many in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The thing about Nietzsche is that whenever he talks about Jews what he really means is the Apostle Paul. Jacob Taubes in my mind correctly points out just how envious Nietzsche was of Paul, who Nietzsche conceived of as having polemically targeted and ultimately ideologically destroyed the Roman Empire.

* Three ideas:

1. A lot of Nietzsche’s philosophy is wish-fulfillment. He wished he could have been a healthy, dashing adventurer. Instead, he was sickly his entire life, and he was meek, shy, obsequious, and utterly resentful of how strong-willed men like Richard Wagner strode all over him.

Old ladies loved keeping Nieztsche as company, because he was so sweet and polite. Meanwhile, he was writing febrile tomes about the destruction of contemporary morality and its replacement with something grander, seething with rage at countless people he’s known his life.

2. The late 19th century was an especially bad time for public health. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for air quality and environmental protection as we know it didn’t exist. Meanwhile, modern medicine was only gradually coming about, so all the old diseases of the past were rampant in big, crowded cities.

The British found, during the Boer War, that most of their citizenry was physically unable to participate in war. That’s when they understood it was time for better public health measures.

3. A lot of Nieztsche’s ideas sound crankish, but he, like his model Schopenhauer, were grappling with problems from a naturalistic worldview in its infancy. The modern methods we have for devising and testing ideas weren’t around, so they came up with numerous ideas without having the means to test them without just bloviating about them.

* Lots of biographies of notable men before 1940 note they were sick for long portions of their youth, usually with no specificity.

* Regular left liberals are high in B5 Openness, low in B5 Conscientiousness subfactor Orderliness, and are high in B5 Agreeableness subfactor Compassion.

Left Authoritarians are low in B5 Openness, high in B5 Conscientiousness subfactor Orderliness, high in B5 Agreeableness subfactor Compassion, as well as being low in IQ and high in B5 Neuroticism.

Orderliness is what is associated with high disgust sensitivity (as well as religiousness). It typically predicts right wing and authoritarian politics.

Left Wing Authoritarians seem to be very good at pushing ordinary left liberals’ Compassion button.

* The US has been since the 1960s or so, a country that promotes meritocracy. We are dedicated to giving scholarships to the underpriviledged, as well as allowing students with high SAT scores but who do not come from established and wealthy WASP families places in college. This means students coming up from the traditional lower classes are able to form connections and gain power. Many of these people are very ambitious and hard driving, and when you get enough of them gathered together, you get some strange social phenomenon.

It never seems to occur to anybody that if you give opportunities to a lot of people in the lower classes, you end up with a bunch of people at or near the top of society with all the emotional baggage of the lower classes. People are lower class not just because they don’t have money, but because they’re very disfunctional. They’re psychologically messed up and prone to mental illnesses and abberant and self-defeating behaviors. They were often raised by messed-up parents, and they can’t get over their disastrous upbringing. Many of them have lousy genes and poisonous personalities. They are often insanely jealous of anyone who had it easier. They don’t get over their psychological problems. Promote enough of these people up the social ladder and you get an entire caste of messed-up people who think the same way. They can be totally destructive to the health of a society if there are enough of them and if they are given too much power.

Think of a peasant village filled with petty resentments; jealousy of everyone else’s money, looks, brains, cool, or social connections; stupid and petty quarrels; and gossip that is constantly aimed at bringing others down whom they hate and resent (notice the resemblance to what’s being directed at Trump and his administration via the constant harping on the Russian thing?). Now make all these peasants into the aristocratic class that rules over you. You’ve got liberals in a nutshell.

It never seems to occur to anyone that scholarships and opportunities should ONLY be given to students not just with good grades, but who pass a test indicating good psychological health and emotional adjustment. There are reasons why people who are emotionally confident and privileged end up running society. They do a better job of it. They don’t get bogged down in stupid crap, and they don’t try to destroy other people because they’re jealous of those people, and they don’t have a paranoid mentally that thinks everyone is out to get them, thus causing them to hunt down and squash every speck of opposition, either ideological (notice our SJWers trying to totally control all media and public discourse,) or personal (you say anything out of line they’ll try to get you fired).

People born to privilege are confident instead of insecure, and they tend to think everyone below them likes and admires them. They usually believe in leaving people alone to live their lives as they see fit (which leads to a philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism and libertarianism), and which is the opposite of the paranoid and resentful mentality. Their confidence makes them believe that it’s normal to let everyone air their views instead of having them crushed, and this leads to greater consensus and the creation of democratic governments.

If you raise up hard-driving men from the lower classes who have a lot of emotional baggage , you can get a Joseph Stalin or a Chairman Mao, who spend their lives trying to destroy the upper classes and middle classes, because they see both as their personal oppressors, and who they’re exceedingly jealous of and angry at, and they’ll destroy anyone else who annoys them for any reason. Liberals, (and men like Stalin and Mao) never recognize their own emotional unfitness to rule. They don’t have the insight to understand that their emotional baggage makes them tyrants, not small-d democrats.

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When Saul Steinberg Tried To Take Over Chemical Bank

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

In 1969, Saul Steinberg bought just under 5% of Chemical Bank. After a few drinks, he boasted in a Washington bar that he was going to take a controlling interest in the bank. Somebody overheard him and the next day, Saul got a call from Attorney General John Mitchell who told him to stop buying Chemical Bank stock. Saul told him to fuck off. Saul bought more Chemical Bank and got another call from Mitchell who told him to sell all of his Chemical stock because the Nixon administration didn’t want Jews owning banks. Saul told him to fuck off.

Saul then gets a call from President Richard Nixon who told him that all of his loans were frozen and no American bank would lend him any money. Saul quickly found out that was true. Only Canadian banks would lend to him for the next few years. He gave up on his dream of taking control of an American bank.

In 1984, Disney was the only major studio not controlled by Jews. Saul Steinberg mounts a takeover attempt and the goyim at Disney were outraged and bribed him to bugger off. So then Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and tribe take over the studio and make it great again.

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In Heaven’s Name: The Battle For Reb Noach’s Legacy

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Gary Rosenblatt writes:

While Rabbi Weinberg was beloved for his warmth, teaching and many other skills, strong management of the fast-growing operation was not one of them, according to several people involved with the organization. He worked closely with a small group of loyal associates, whom he trusted, including Rabbi Rabinowitz, a former student of Rabbi Weinberg, and perhaps his closest aide. When Rabbi Weinberg died in 2009, confusion reigned in efforts to understand and disentangle elements of the financial operation, which had grown to the tens of millions of dollars. It includes an advisory board of governors, a board of directors and an amutah (an Israeli nonprofit), and the disorganization went on for years, observers said.

“Aish HaTorah was the car and Rav Noach was the engine,” said Rabbi Burg, who was brought on to professionalize the operation as the group’s director general in June 2015. “When Reb Noach died, the engine fell out and the car kept on going.”

Rabbi Burg, who was given high marks for his work with the Orthodox Union, its teen program, NCSY, and later as head of the New York branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, set about establishing best practices regarding transparency in the Aish HaTorah network. He hired financial executives who confirmed long-simmering suspicions that Aish International’s operation was deeply problematic. Seeking to increase transparency within the organization about a year before Rabbi Burg was hired, Rabbi Hershel Lutch, then-chief operating officer of Aish International, presented a financial report at an Aish HaTorah board of governors meeting. According to several in attendance, the report was the first clear disclosure to members concerning the financial relationship between Aish International and Aish HaTorah. Until that point, the board hadn’t realized that Aish International was not working exclusievely on behalf of Aish Ha Torah.

“We were trying to peel back the layers” of the operation, said Louis Mayberg. “But it was opaque. It became clear to me that Rabbi Rabinowitz was being intentionally misleading.”

Most of the donors came to believe that going back as far as 10 years, there were major discrepancies between the funds raised by Rabbi Rabinowitz in North America, and the amount of those funds that reached Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem.

Lutch resigned from Aish International to work directly for Rabbi Burg as COO-North America for Aish HaTorah, having concluded that Rabbi Rabinowitz was not representing Aish HaTorah’s true interests.

Rabbi Burg told Rabbi Rabinowitz he could no longer operate solo as a fundraiser. He stressed that financial transparency was being instituted and that Rabbi Rabinowitz would be accountable for all funds raised. As for Rabbi Rabinowitz’s claim that he was owed more than $800,000 in commissions, Rabbi Burg told him the donors first wanted to see bank and financial statements for Aish International and a breakdown of charitable donations made to Aish International going back to 2007.

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‘Free To Be Me’ And Other Stupid Educational Trends

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Luke Ford

I wasn’t wise enough to understand what was going on at the time, but when I was in grade school, I often had the sense that we were guinea pigs in various vacuous feel-good feminine experiments. The one I hated most was against competition. My teachers were mainly women and they were more interested in nurturing than competing, but only with my competitive fires burning did I do well in school. Without competition, I couldn’t be bothered to put in much effort.

Also, we never had any military history courses. That would have excited me and most blokes I knew.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* My classmates and I had it drilled into our heads that we could be or do whatever we wanted if only we set our minds to it. This stuff goes back to the 70s, what with “Free to Be” and the like.

Most of the smarter kids knew it was BS, but a lot of people took it to heart. I’ve heard a lot of really unintelligent people forcefully assert that if you believe something enough it will happen. The few times I tried to correct them I was angrily shouted down.

That’s what’s really at the root of this self-esteem panacea: magical thinking. Your positive thoughts are supposed to bring about positive changes in your life.

I often quiz my children about what kind of stuff their teachers are telling them, and when I detect any of this garbage I explain why it’s wrong. Telling kids lies to boost self-esteem is more harmful than telling them uncomfortable truths.

I’m pretty sure transsexualism never would have been taken seriously without this anti-intellectual trend that came out of the 60s.

Whatever the case, it’s probably futile to fight magical thinking because it seems to be hardwired. That being the case, it’s better channeled into something harmless or constructive, like prayer or ritual. I’ve recognized it in myself, and while I consciously realize it’s false, sometimes the easiest course is just to observe the taboo, superstition or whatever it may be. An example would be thinking about something bad happening to one of my kids. I try hard not to, because doing so gives me a dreadful feeling that something bad will happen to them, even though I know that my thoughts will not have any effect, and might even help me prepare for the worst.

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Michael Oren: ‘Israel’s 1967 Victory Is Something to Celebrate’

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Luke Ford

For whom is it something to celebrate? For those who support the Jewish state. For those who want to destroy the Jewish state, it is something to mourn.

Different groups have different interests. What is good for the Jews is often bad for non-Jews such as Arabs and Muslims.

Michael Oren writes in the New York Times: “This year, Israelis are also celebrating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration because it formalized the international community’s recognition of a Jewish nation and our 3,000-year attachment to our homeland. But the Palestinians are mourning it — their leaders have even called on Britain to apologize. Today, as in 1917, they view Jews not as a people with rights to a national homeland but as a religious group and, throughout much of Islamic history, an inferior one at that.”

Every religious group regards other religions as inferior.

Oren: “Despite persistent Arab rejection of Jewish identity, the Zionist leadership recognized that the Palestinian Arabs were a people with sovereign rights.”

Land is a scarce resource. There are competing groups with competing claims for the land of Israel. Any Arab or Muslim who accepts Jewish claims to the land of Israel is a cuck. A proud Arab or Muslim would rather die than accept a booming Jewish state in their midst. If peace prevailed, Israel would even more dramatically excel its Arab neighbors who have an average IQ of around 85 (while Israel’s is near 100). The shame would be unbearable for the Arabs (or for any other people in their position). They’d rather die than cease trying to destroy those who excel them.

Steve Sailer writes:

My guess is that before the Six-Day War, a lot of American Jews didn’t emotionally invest that heavily in Israel, figuring it could be wiped out. Once it had proven immensely victorious, they became huge fans.
Similarly, I started reading the sports pages in 1965 when I was six. The upcoming UCLA – USC football game matching eventual Heisman Trophy winners Gary Beban and Mike Garrett was a big deal at the time. I can recall listening in with perfect neutrality, not having made up my mind which of these two odd acronyms to root for. When I tuned in on the my transistor radio in the second half, USC was up 16-6. But Beban threw two long bombs for touchdowns and UCLA won. This was very exciting and I became a UCLA fan (which paid off in basketball but not in football).
The Six-Day War gave the more conservative American Jews something to be excited about. Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan came up with a plan to make clear to pro-Israel American Jews that Israel’s success would be linked to America’ success in the Cold War.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I grew up with security guards outside synagogue every Saturday. On festivals there were police too. I never really thought about it, but for my bar mitzvah we invited a lot of non-Jewish family friends and they told us how weird it was to have security guards outside a house of worship. I guess they don’t think that now.

After the Sabra and Shatila massacre, security was bumped up in British synagogues. My mother remarked to someone that the community was feeling at risk. She responded (or so my mother tells me), that ‘of course you have to expect that, unfortunately’. My mother replied that since the massacre was carried out by a Christian militia with no direct Israeli participation then it would make as much sense for some angry chap to attack a church. Her friend found the very thought incomprehensible. I guess she doesn’t now.

It’s almost like spending decades rewarding angry Middle Easterners for terrorism incentivises them to do it more, but liberals and dolt rightists know that can’t possibly be true.

* Mentioning the USS Liberty is useful because anyone who does outs himself as an anti-Semite. There is nothing to be gained by rehashing this incident otherwise. Casualties from “friendly fire” are unfortunately very common in the fog of war. Just the other day the London cops shot a bystander in the head in the course of killing the terrorists. They should not have needed 50 shots to kill 3 terrorists but once the adrenaline starts pumping people don’t think clearly. It’s very easy to be an armchair general.

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WP: ‘Harvard withdraws 10 acceptances for ‘offensive’ memes in private group chat’

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Luke Ford

I am glad to see a fellow Jew sticking up for free speech.

Law professor Erica Goldberg blogs:

According to the Harvard Crimson, Harvard has revoked the acceptances of at least ten students admitted to the Class of 2021. These prospective students formed a private Facebook group chat to exchange offensive memes. They mocked child abuse, made racist jokes, and endeavored to deride all of the stances that we, academics and students, promote and hold hear. These students behaved immaturely and offensively. What Harvard did in response was much worse.

Have you ever played Cards Against Humanity? It’s an unabashedly irreverent game whose purpose is to be as cleverly offensive as possible. The game uses cards to create inappropriate associations, on topics we are generally not socially permitted to mock – such as AIDS, the Holocaust, and dead babies. Even many good liberals love the game, precisely because the humor is so wrong, so contrary to our values. There is something appealing about the freedom to be irreverent and dark.

A major appeal of irreverence is its assertion of independence over strong social norms. Strong, prevailing social norms can feel oppressive at times, even if they are good norms, and the rebellion of breaking social taboos demonstrates that we can still think for ourselves. Joking also eases tension around difficult topics, issues that have become polarized, or events that our culture depicts only in black and white. I take the Holocaust extremely seriously, and feel great anger at how the world watched the Jews of Europe get exterminated. But I can enjoy a Holocaust joke in the right setting. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The idea that some topics are above humor is misguided. Humor is inherently subversive. By ferreting out the members of this private chat group, requiring that they present to Harvard every meme sent over the chat, and revoking their acceptances, Harvard has proven that there is an oppressive force to transgress.

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75% of black California boys don’t meet state reading standards

Posted on June 4, 2017 by Luke Ford

Los Angeles Daily News:

Across ethnicities and economic status, girls outperform boys on English in standardized tests
Three of four African-American boys in California classrooms failed to meet reading and writing standards on the most recent round of testing, according to data obtained from the state Department of Education and analyzed by CALmatters.
More than half of black boys scored in the lowest category on the English portion of the test, trailing their female counterparts. The disparity reflects a stubbornly persistent gender gap in reading and writing scores that stretches across ethnic groups.

Literacy Rates By Race

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