I once worked with a gentleman named Dave Pfaff who claimed that all observable phenomena can be attributed to Mass Hysteria. Or Hallucinogenic Drugs. Or Magic. Or Space Aliens.
Dave was a very smart man. Both of his children scored perfect 1600 on the SAT. Those apples did not fall very far from the tree.
The problem with those universal answers is that they give us no answer for why/when the phenomena does NOT happen. It is like claiming di-Hydrogen Oxide causes all disease because it is found in every tumor, every lesion and infection. Blaming a molecule that is ubiquitous does not leave us with a usable theory because it gives us no (as in zero) predictive capability. All flesh has measurable amounts of di-Hydrogen Oxide in it.
Blame the Jews. It is always the Jews
Yes, I am aware of the jelly-bean (or M&M) argument. Would you feed your child from a bag of jelly-beans if you knew one of them was poisoned?
But the primary problem with "Blame the Jews" is that "the proof" is always done after-the-fact. It is not a testable-hypothesis that is proposed a priori, it is a witch-hunt performed a posteriori. And if they dig deeply enough, they can always find a Jew. It is finding water (di-Hydrogen Oxide) in the cells of every tumor during the post-mortem.
The fact that you can point to some evil people who are also Jewish is a distraction rather than a cogent argument. You can find evil people of every persuasion if you swing a butterfly net that is large enough. A better argument would be if you tested random samples and could state with a high degree of certainty that a significantly higher percentage of Group A was evil than in Group B.
I suppose you can make some of the same arguments with regard to Drag Queens in elementary schools. That will sort itself out over time. Parents are asking why we NEED librarians if they have so much spare time that they can organize these events. For that matter, why do we need to pay for education out of public funds if they are going to indoctrinate our children in secular religions?
The other consideration with LGBT types is that unlike Jewish people, they MUST recruit to sustain their numbers and political clout. Orthodox Jews are one of the very few demographics that have greater-than-equilibrium rates of reproduction in First World economies.
To my friends who are Jewish
Please do not be offended if this seems like a lukewarm defense of the Jewish people.
This is Joe-the-Engineer walking around the antisemitic fortress and pointing out where the foundation is cheesy. I am presenting arguments that might persuade some of the residents of the fortress to abandon it. And if they don't abandon it, perhaps they will appreciate the soft-spots in their position and be less aggressive in their attacks.
(This post was motivated by Space Alien UFOs suddenly being in the news)
Thing is, we KNOW that some of (in fact, many of) the Trans people are indeed pedophiles. Anyone who wants to talk Sex to children has an issue.
ReplyDeleteAre they all bad? No, Are many? Yes. Should they be kept from children without supervision? Yes. So should anyone who supports their behavior and lifestyle. Sorry, but that is where they do the most "recruiting".
What adults do is between them. What they do with children is another issue.
The only thing that a third-grade kid should know about sex is that the other sex has cooties.
DeleteAnybody who pushes for more than that has a personal agenda that is probably not in the child's best interest, or in society's best interest.
I brought up the Trans/Drag issue because it is "a thing" now and some readers might jump on the superficial similarities and suggest I am a hypocrite.
"The only thing that a third-grade kid should know about sex is that the other sex has cooties."
DeleteHeh. Okay, that's BRILLIANT, Joe. I'm gonna be stealing that one for my own use going forward for sure. :D
I lived for a time on a road that had several summer camps. Among them was a Hasidic camp, and Orthodox Religious Retreat and a Seven Stars (had to have the tattoo to belong) It was a bout 2 miles from my house to the far end. I would run that 3 to 4 times a week. One afternoon I was walking with the kids and was greeted by a man at the Orthodox camp, I was a bit surprised. We struck up a conversation among the topics was Semites. His stance was that most Jews are not Semites at all or very little, himself included. Semites are from a region in what is now part of Iraq and most of the American and European Jews are from Eastern Europe or Iberian. It was a part of a larger ranging conversation, but that part has stuck with me for the past 30 years or so.
ReplyDeleteThe ones I have all met personally were/are wonderful people, kind, generous, funny, successful.
ReplyDeleteHeard a comment once in one of those 'noticing' threads... how come they've been persecuted and kicked out everywhere they go? Can't they make nice with anybody?
Lol! Didn't have a rebuttal then, still don't now.
I'm a product of the Mel Brooks generation (a wonderfully creative and funny jew!)
Kinda like all mass murders have guns so people that have guns need to be disarmed.......same point, same defective logic. ---ken
ReplyDeleteVoltaire wrote in a letter over 250 years ago:
ReplyDelete"They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their
hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with
blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if
these people would not some day become deadly to the human race." (Lettres de Memmius a Ciceron, 1771)
This before Zionism, before WW1, WW2, before atomic spies, before the Bolsheviks, before Ukraine and before Epstein.
If you look, you can find equally rabid books insisting that space aliens colonized the earth and continue to be our puppet masters.
ReplyDeleteOne author does not make something fact.
That disproportionate distribution model shows up with another demographic and crime statistics.
ReplyDeleteYet speaking of such anomalies is verboten!? Odd, no? I mean its not like the statistics were skewed by manipulating data collection techniques ala climate change... its just something that popped up in the math when crunching numbers (over and over again), and one can't but help notice standard deviations of such magnitude.
Someone has to explain to me how noticing statistical anomalies racist?! Its my understanding that is the very definition of statistics - the study of numbers.
Thus was the germination of "The Noticing" last year.
And once you start noticing, you can't help but continue to notice. Our man Mel gibson said it best...
And truly thats the rub here... its not an outlying example, e.g. one book/author, but hundreds if not thousands of data points all collecting around the same area. Every. Single. Time. The "Guess the race" running joke about crime stories punches the same buttons. As a society our norms (errr... the people promulgating and promoting our 'norms') have decided that pointing these things out should not happen in polite society. Fair enough, but that doesn't make them any less real?
Ignore reality at your own peril. The inability to grasp reality has been the source of many great downfalls. It appears to be our fate as well.
As a Jew I think your point is a fair one. People ignore the base rate fallacy and other related cognitive biases and claim to be "noticing", when they've done 0 comparison against other groups/subgroups or adjustments for things like socioeconomic status.
ReplyDeleteGen pop literacy in the 1920s was around 25%. Jewish literacy is (and was back then) nearly universal, if you can learn to read, you did. This was a huge advantage as the economy transformed over the last 100 years. Often even the most poor Jews would have been expected to read 2-3 languages by age 8-10 (local, Hebrew and Yiddish). Even if they never continued school, that's still a huge economic leg up in a society where reading is 25% of the population, but every job beyond first run requires it.
Here's a story about the Besht who died in 1772. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1025328/jewish/The-Fat-Jew.htm
"The man turned out to be a simple and ignorant Jew—it was doubted that he was literate enough to even read the prayers properly or master a few verses of Chumash. [Chumash meaning a bible printed in a book form]"
Here's an apocryphal story from the mid 1700s, where the base expectation is that reading and being able to discuss the written word is expected of everyone, and not doing so is only found in the most incredibly ignorant. This is a very different society from many others, and (IMO) probably explains almost the entire elevated socio-economic status of my fellows.
Another aspect is many Ashkenazi Jews (Jews from Eastern Europe/Central Europe/Germany) have a strong cultural preference for city dwelling (why is complicated, but the preference is there (not in me)). Most of the economic gains from the last 100 years went to city dwellers first, then trickled out (factory jobs/unions/pensions).
Take near total literacy from the get-go of the Industrial Revolution + mostly living in cities and suburbs (as they formed), and you have a group that's going to seem over-represented in income and similar measures.
Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers makes the point that the main surge in Jewish population into the United States was very favorable for what you describe. The schools in New York City were first-rate in the 1930s and 40s while there was a drop in the number of children. The ratio of teachers-to-students increased and that is when the Jewish kids went through.
DeleteHe also echos your argument that since Jews were prohibited from owning land in Europe, they could not be farmers. They were forced into in-town professions. Given the pogroms they gravitated toward high-value, portable professions like gold-smithing, jewelry making and banking.
They carried that acumen with numbers and skills in assessing value with them when they came here.
I used to think like you Joe. I stood with Isreal, Jews were our friends, anyone that said otherwise was either a hater, or an idiot, or both.
ReplyDeleteI have many faults and numerous psychological problems…but my super power is the ability to self correct and learn. I can dispense with any notion or preconceived stance or cherished views, subject them to vigorous fact checking…and ruthlessly discard them if they don’t hold up. Nor do I care if people are offended when I do so. I don’t do it out of malice, I do it in the name of critical thought.
When you fact check don’t rely on obviously biased sources. Jewish narratives collapse when you ask legit questions and use legit methods to get answers. Who owns your mass media? Who owns the porn industry? Who are these judges making terrible, self destructive rulings? Who are the leaders of the gun grabbing movement? Who are the ones driving the assault on the First Amendment rights? Where does the money come from to finance anti white legislation? How many Jews were killed in Auswich? Where are the bodies? How long would it take to cremate over one million bodies with only four ovens? Who are the prominent people in the grooming movement in public schools? A pattern emerges…but you have to be willing to put the time in to fact check, and disregard popular narratives to see it. I still marvel at the scope of it.
These people have historically been driven out of very country they ever settled in. God spent the first part of the Bible being driven bonkers by them and He was guilty of antisemitism and a few genocides too.
These people are not our friends.
THE MAN, Filthie nails it. The noticing is just finally being publicized, because it was suppressed forever. You can only deny the obvious for so long. Pogroms don't just happen, they are caused.
DeleteLove your blog, your writing and your general out look. Don't block your open mindedness when studying the "Joo question".
With regard to pogroms: If Christians were prohibited from making loans and Jews were kept out of most other professions, is it safe to assume that most people who ran into bad-luck found themselves owing money to Jews?
DeleteIs it also possible that some of those people might be the lords, barons and nobles who had a fondness for dice and race-horses and a very limited grasp of statistics?
So if the lord of the manor decided he could erase his debts by encouraging the serfs to wipe out the Jews...would he?
With regard to Israel: The State of Israel does not represent "Jews" any more than the Bush and Clinton families represent the United States. They maybe do in a very narrow-splinter kind-of-way...but not in the totality.
And to sweep up the droppings on the floor: Do people who engage in what might be called Antisemitism violate "Thou shall not bear false witness"?
As children we are taught "that means don't tell lies" but it is really much larger than that. To "bear false witness" is to present as evidence (i.e. attest to be true) statements that you do not have actual, first-hand knowledge of.
If you read over at Glen's blog "Eaton Rapids Joe is a blithering idiot" and then repeated "Glen F wrote that ERJ is a blithering idiot" that is accurate. But if you said "Eaton Rapids Joe is a blithering idiot" based only on what you read over at Glen's blog, then you would be a false witness. Not because I am not a blithering idiot but because you are presenting as evidence something that you do not have first-hand evidence of.
So sly inuendo that starts out "...well of COURSE it was the Joos..." is probably bearing false-witness.
I will readily own the whole false-witness thing is my hang-up. Nobody else needs to conform to it. It is just how I am wired.
I wouldn’t say you’re stupid, Joe.
DeleteWell you could say Hitler* just wanted to conduct that apriori study.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was training new and young employees I always told them "If I can't get along with you and you can't get along with me it is hard to prove who is the problem. But when you also can't get along with Sue and Sue can't get along with you, and you can't get along with Jim and Jim can't get along with you, . . . It starts becoming clear who is the problem.
Now imagine that for 35 centuries every culture and people you interact with hates your guts. That is 1700 generations. And nobody amongst this small group has seriously proposed, much less considered that it might be the one group and not Every Single Other Civilization that is the "problem" and might consider changing some of their ways?
* I know, I said Hitler first, so I lose the argument.
Every
DeleteSingle
Time
Which only shows that once you are turned into a scapegoat, it's hard to get the blithering idiots to stop scapegoating you.
DeleteYou could stop the behaviour that caused the scapegoating? Or do you suggest that sprung out of thin air organically, over thousands of years and has never died out, ever, regardless of political or religious situation in their host country?
DeleteAs my kids grew from childhood to young adults, all sorts of lifes issues came along too. Stereotypes and biases were a good one, having moved from the WNY to ETN, we were victimized a time or two (my daughters 5th grade teacher told her and only her to write a paper on Antebellum).
I taught them what I had learned: Stereotypes exist for a reason - wasn't just a one-off. Those are biases, and should be discounted. When your biases turn into recognizeable patterns, it becomes a stereotype and you have actionable information, but you should still judge each individual by their own merit. Just because you had one mean teacher in 5th grade doesn't mean they all will be mean.
I think you have the cart before the horse, Sir. It didn't become a stereotype of its own volition. The fact that the steroetype even exists is prima facia evidence society has noticed a pattern of behaviour over THOUSANDS OF YEARS, and attached a stereotype to it.
Be the change you want to see. I didn't generate the pattern, I just pucked up on it.
The behavior that started the scapegoating was self-sustaining ... doing better, being smarter, valuing education.
DeleteYou didn't just "pick up on it." You bought into it because of your own failings and their successes and you really wanted a scapegoat..
The stereotype was there before I was born, I'm not that old. I never needed to scapegoat a group of people for any reason?
DeleteI am personally agnostic to the inference of stereotypes because I judge individuals; but I do my best to observe the lesson all the same.
Think of it this way... would you go jogging on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd at 11pm? Slap your iPhone on an external arm band, plug in those earbuds and knock out a 5k?
Of course you would.
If you never needed a scapegoat, why are you using one?
DeleteYour analogy is beyond idiotic. We are all stupider for having read it. Please, tell us what you have "observed" in how the Jewish people have wronged you.
I've observed a lot of very ignorant hateful people trying to pick a fight with folks from an earlier version of our own religion (Christianity is based on Judaism), when those people are clearly great potential allies in a world that wants to exterminate us all. The fact that our ancestors tried to exterminate theirs (Spanish Inquisition and Nazi Germany as two easy examples) and they did not retaliate speaks volumes.
Maybe you've just surrounded yourself with other assholes at work because they think like you do?
DeleteThere are always exceptions to the rule. But there's still the rule.
ReplyDeleteAnd what rule is that, pray tell?
DeleteHey, guys: Can you pinch it off? I double-dog dare ya.
ReplyDelete