Re: Kevin MacDonald reviews Slezkine's _The Jewish Century_
Michael Zeleny
> MacDonald's name has come up recently in r.a.b., and Slezkine's book
> has apparently been something of a literary event, so I thought
> MacDonald's review might be of interest. An abridged version of the
> review is at VDARE.COM, a site dedicated to immigration and the
> national question:
>
> http://www.vdare.com/misc/051105_macdonald_stalin.htm
>
> That web page includes, at the bottom, a link to the unabridged, more
> detailed review which appears in a non-peer-reviewed right-wing
> journal.
>
> This is the first seriously critical review of Slezkine's book that
> I've seen, and the first to suggest that Slezkine was insufficiently
> critical, too "apologetic" to the Jews. Other reviews have been, as
> MacDonald points out, "rapturous". I still haven't read _The Jewish
> Century_; has anyone else here read it, or any of MacDonald's books
> either?
>
> MacDonald is so far the only person I've seen arguing against the
> recent trend represented by Slezkine, if two books (Slezkine's and Amy
> Chua's _World on Fire_) could be considered a trend. That trend is to
> look at the history of Jews and anti-Semitism not sui generis, but
> rather in the context of the histories of similar groups -- Overseas
> Chinese, Lebanese, etc.: "Mercurian" as opposed to "Apollonian"
> peoples (Slezkine) or "market-dominant minorities" (Chua). While
> MacDonald has an afterword on the Overseas Chinese in one of his books
> on Jews, in this review he emphasizes aspects by which Jews *differ*
> from these other minority groups. For instance, Jews, unlike the
> Overseas Chinese, became not just an elite but a "hostile elite".
>
> MacDonald's criticism is fairly detailed for an article in a popular
> forum, but I guess the main point of his review is expressed in this
> sentence:
>
> By proposing the basically spurious Mercurian/Apollonian contrast,
> Slezkine obscures the plain fact that Jewish history in the period
> he discusses constitutes a spectacularly, arguably uniquely,
> successful case of what I have described as an ethnocentric group
> competitive strategy in action.
>
> MacDonald seems to make some good points against Slezkine, as far as I
> can tell without having read Slezkine's book. I do have some
> criticism of MacDonald's criticism, but this post is already too long
> so I'll drop it unless there's some interest in this topic.
Herewith two representative quotations:
"But the fact is that in most of Western Europe Jews were expelled in
the Middle Ages. And, as a result, when modernization occurred, it was
accomplished with an indigenous middle class. Perhaps the Christian
taxpayers of England made a good investment in their own future when
they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of £116,346 in return
for expelling 2000 Jews in 1290. If, as in Eastern Europe, Jews had
won the economic competition in most of these professions, there might
not have been a non-Jewish middle class in England."
To explore MacDonald's point, Holland has not only failed to expel its
own Jews, but also welcomed Jews expelled from other states.
Consequently, there is no non-Jewish middle class in Holland. Not.
"Slezkine's main point is that the most important factor for
understanding the history of the 20th century is the rise of the Jews
in the West and the Middle East, and their rise and decline in Russia.
I think he is absolutely right about this.
If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became
an elite in all these areas, they became a hostile elite-hostile to
the traditional people and cultures of all three areas they came to
dominate."
MacDonald operates with a finely attenuated notion of hostility. It
would be one thing to point out that Jews tend to be adverse to such
interests of traditional people and cultures as might involve their
assimilation, expulsion, segregation, and extermination. To infer their
constitutional hostility to the master race from these undisputable
facts, requires positing its fundamental and legitimate interest in
resisting the very presence of alien peoples and heterodox cultures in
its midst. This presumption is emblematic of pseudoscientific political
agenda sustained by the author and his host VDARE.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Sy Grass
"Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1132864308....@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>>MacDonald operates with a finely attenuated notion of hostility. It
would be one thing to point out that Jews tend to be adverse to such
interests of traditional people and cultures as might involve their
assimilation, expulsion, segregation, and extermination. To infer their
constitutional hostility to the master race from these undisputable
facts, requires positing its fundamental and legitimate interest in
resisting the very presence of alien peoples and heterodox cultures in
its midst. This presumption is emblematic of pseudoscientific political
agenda sustained by the author and his host VDARE.<<
There is one presumption in all this that needs to be addressed: Given that
there has been and continues to be an hostile Jewish domination of the
Euro-American bourgeois class, okay, so what? Why shouldn't a civilized
free-market economy be ruled by those most suited to rule it, which is to
say the wisest guys of that society?
In the same way that the world of physics has been ruled by the wisest man
of all time, the Jew Einstein, so has it been in the world of economics with
the Jew, Greenspan. So shall this wise dominance continue under leadership
of the new Jew on the economic block, Bernanke.
Jews, ever since the Roman holocaust of Hadrian, have been tried by a fire,
and tempered to a hardness of action in this world by a heat that very few
Gentiles have ever known. Without the economic chutzpah rendered to the
Mafia by wiseguys the likes of Meyer Lansky and Jake Guzik, that
organization would never have amounted to even so much as a social club like
the Sons of Italy.
Capitalism, in order for it to come into being at all, must absolutely have
at its germinating essence, the hostile, war-like intent to exact
recompense, a pound of flesh, a bit of 'profit' from the pocket of another.
There is nothing kind or sweet about buying a pair of socks for fifty cents
and selling them for a dollar. You cannot harbor a soft or giving,
brotherly/sisterly attitude toward the objects of your business. You are in
it to take them for so much as is wise and legal.
But you can't even get started in the theatre of such a profit-motivated
market culture if you feel overly kindhearted toward your mark in that
marketplace. You must have a certain sense that by so much as you are going
to take him for, precisely so much as that, he had coming to him, if for no
other reason, because you know that down in his heart of hearts, he hates
your holy of holies and irrationally supposes to recognize it as Golgotha.
Jews were a blessing to the rise of Western capitalism which came about in
our civilization with a vigor seen nowhere else in the world, where Jews
have not settled or where they have but have not been permitted to thrive
under imposition of Islamic taxes and restrictions. So why should we not end
by concluding that a certain amount of inter-ethnic hostility or
ethnocentrism is healthy, natural and necessary toward what is best and most
rational in a prosperous evolution of civilization?
And did not Plato, that great seer, long ago, via his *Republic* make it
quite logically clear that philosophers should rule over humanity--and have
you ever known a Jew who was not a philosopher?
I swear I have never met the like.
So, today it's the Jews, tomorrow, God willing, the Gypsies. And if there
should come a day when the Gentiles should be so blessed as to be cursed to
learn such a healthy hardness by trial of oppression's fire, then--well,
what do we say?
"Every dog must have his day." --Jesus Christ (in virtual reply to the
Gentile woman who desired to receive of his favors) . . .
--
Matt 15:21-28
Behold, a Canaanite woman came . . . and cried, saying,
"Have mercy on me, Lord, you son of David!
My daughter is severely demonized!"
* * *
But he answered, "I wasn't sent to anyone but the lost sheep of the house of
Israel."
But she came and worshiped him, saying, "Lord, help me."
But he answered,
"It is not appropriate to take the children's bread and throw it to the
dogs."
But she said, "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs
which fall from their masters' table."
Then Jesus answered her,
"Woman, great is your faith! Be it done to you even as you desire."
--
John http://www.mackiemesser.zoomshare.com/0.html
"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror,
murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love; they had five hundred
years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo
clock." -- Harry Lime to Holly Martins, via Graham Greene and Orson Welles
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not
sure about the former." Albert Einstein
--
.............................................................
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ROBERT The Satanist With The Skeleton Hand
"Sy Grass" <dadd...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:4386298d$0$20254$8826...@news.atlantisnews.com...
Told Ya! You have the magic touch my dear, dear friend! You're as
entertaining and witty as all get out!
Hey Sy, I had some harsh stuff to say about your fiction. Couldn't see a
skeric of humour in it is all.
In the next two weeks I'm beginning my zany crazy Sci-Fi novel for the
14-15-16 year old market; I need to pull my finger out. Wanna collaborate? I
can pay for Ivor to edit it a chapter at a time. Don't matter if you don't.
In any case, I would be grateful if you could look at the first few pages
when I start, which I can email you. (I mean, look at Terry Pratchet! He
won't be winning the Booker any time soon!) It will be junk prose and
everything 'cause I'm a lousy writer. It's got to be a funny page-turner.
That and nothing else. :-)
Cheers, you
--
ROB
www.xeper.org
ROBERT The Satanist With The Skeleton Hand
"ROBERT The Satanist With The Skeleton Hand" <tride...@optusnet.com.au>
wrote in message news:4387ded4$0$25852$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au...
I understand you are the Soveriegn Jew and you prefer to fly to your heights
with your own silver tipped wings.
I'm in it for the self-actualization and the laughter and the money. No one
would understand the want of money angle better than a Jew :-)
--
ROB
Alan Meyer
century, all the old racist bullshit continues to circulate and
be taken seriously.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone understood that Germans,
Poles, Italians, Gypsies, Russians, Cossacks,
Egyptians, Americans, Canadians, Japanes, Chinese,
Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and any
other group you can name is composed of people who
are fundamentally the same?
It is true that different European subcultures evolved in
somewhat different directions. It is false that the people
who compose those subcultures are inherently different
from each other. It is also false that the culture of the 13th
century English was like the culture of the 20th century
English, or that the culture of 13th century Jews was the
same as that of 20th century Jews, or that the culture of 20th
century French Jews was the same as that of 20th
century Russian Jews.
Please grow up and stop looking for evil Jews under the
bed or Jewish geniuses directing your country's affairs.
Alan
smw
The Other wrote:
....
>
> The other answer is that MacDonald seems to be talking at least as
> much about cultural and political domination as economic domination.
Could you elaborate on "cultural domination"?
Alan Meyer
"The Other" <ot...@other.invalid> wrote in message news:lyek53l...@circe.aeaea...
> "Alan Meyer" <ame...@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> Please grow up and stop looking for evil Jews under the bed or
>> Jewish geniuses directing your country's affairs.
>
> country's affairs.
I hope you also don't think there are any hiding under your bed.
smw
The Other wrote:
> Sure. Our correspondent Alan Meyer gave an amusing example in a
> recent post to this very thread:
[...]
I meant Jewish cultural domination during feudal times. Anything come to
mind?
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Herewith two representative quotations:
>>
>> "But the fact is that in most of Western Europe Jews were expelled
>> in the Middle Ages. And, as a result, when modernization occurred,
>> it was accomplished with an indigenous middle class. Perhaps the
>> Christian taxpayers of England made a good investment in their own
>> future when they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of
>> £116,346 in return for expelling 2000 Jews in 1290. If, as in
>> Eastern Europe, Jews had won the economic competition in most of
>> these professions, there might not have been a non-Jewish middle
>> class in England."
>>
>> To explore MacDonald's point, Holland has not only failed to expel
>> its own Jews, but also welcomed Jews expelled from other states.
>> Consequently, there is no non-Jewish middle class in Holland. Not.
> Which may be why MacDonald said "PERHAPS the Christian taxpayers of
> England made a good investment" and "IF...Jews had won the economic
> competition...there MIGHT not have been a non-Jewish middle class".
> In Holland there arose a significant non-Jewish middle class; in
> Eastern European countries with significant Jewish populations there
> didn't, because the gentiles were unable to compete successfully with
> the Jews. (I'm assuming your and MacDonald's factual claims to be
> true.)
In the immortal words of Wayne Campbell, and monkeys might fly out of
my butt. MacDonald offers no historical analysis to substantiate his
idiotic parallel between the actual situation of Jews in the agrarian
societies of Eastern Europe and their counterfactual situation in the
commercial societies of the West. Then again, the tedium of accounting
for dumb facts would have distracted him from buttressing highbrow
bigotry with vulgar Darwinism.
ObBook: Hillel Levine, Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and Its
Jews in the Early Modern Period
>> "Slezkine's main point is that the most important factor for
>> understanding the history of the 20th century is the rise of the
>> Jews in the West and the Middle East, and their rise and decline in
>> Russia. I think he is absolutely right about this. If there is any
>> lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became an elite in
>> all these areas, they became a hostile elite-hostile to the
>> traditional people and cultures of all three areas they came to
>> dominate."
>>
>> MacDonald operates with a finely attenuated notion of hostility. It
>> would be one thing to point out that Jews tend to be adverse to such
>> interests of traditional people and cultures as might involve their
>> assimilation, expulsion, segregation, and extermination. To infer
>> their constitutional hostility to the master race from these
>> undisputable facts, requires positing its fundamental and legitimate
>> interest in resisting the very presence of alien peoples and
>> heterodox cultures in its midst.
> The "fundamental and legitimate interest" is especially strong in
> resisting *hostile* alien peoples and cultures in its midst. That's
> pretty much the topic of his book _Separation and Its Discontents_ I
> think, if you replace "legitimate" by "rational". (I haven't read any
> of MacDonald's books.) As you read in the review, MacDonald (unlike
> Slezkine and Chua) draws a sharp distinction between diaspora Jews and
> overseas Chinese, two minorities which are similar in many respects
> but not in the "hostility" to the dominant culture.
>
> Regarding MacDonald's description of the Jews as a "hostile" minority
> in the USSR, Germany, and the US, I've seen much more polemical
> language than that used in respected history writing. Given the
> actions of the Jewish-dominated Soviet secret police, and the specific
> motivations of many of the Jewish members, I don't think the word
> "hostile" is out of line. MacDonald also documents the hostility (or
> whatever you want to call it) of some influential Jewish intellectuals
> and their followers -- a small minority of all Jews, he emphasizes --
> in his book _The Culture of Critique_.
A former college classmate is now standing before a fellow MOT judge,
accused of aiding and abetting the biggest tax fraud in U.S. history.
The rulings in his case, mirroring Irving Kaufman in United States v.
Rosenberg, tend to undermine the presumption that Jewish law enforcers
would somehow focus their hostility in the service of the Elders of
Zion. To the contrary, the operating attitude is at least as likely to
embody the timeless principle articulated to Mel Brooks by Zero Mostel:
"With kikes like you on the loose, who needs Hitler?"
>> This presumption is emblematic of pseudoscientific political agenda
>> sustained by the author and his host VDARE.
> Considering that MacDonald dedicated an entire book, _Separation and
> Its Discontents_, to establishing that "presumption", I think you
> should read the book or a representative sampling thereof before
> dismissing it.
>
> It's also a mistake to attribute MacDonald's political agenda to VDARE
> in general. Except for Sam Francis, who died recently, I don't think
> there are any VDARE contributors who have endorsed his work. Some
> have criticized his work and his political agenda.
I read enough of MacDonald's noisome drivel to recognize it as such.
His confabulation of a successful Jewish "group evolutionary strategy"
in the diaspora, which in fact redounds therein to natural population
decrease, is way beneath serious criticism, though apparently all too
fit for touting in support of your personal immigration agenda.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> The Other <ot...@other.invalid> writes:
>> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Herewith two representative quotations:
>>>
>>> "But the fact is that in most of Western Europe Jews were expelled
>>> in the Middle Ages. And, as a result, when modernization occurred,
>>> it was accomplished with an indigenous middle class. Perhaps the
>>> Christian taxpayers of England made a good investment in their own
>>> future when they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of
>>> £116,346 in return for expelling 2000 Jews in 1290. If, as in
>>> Eastern Europe, Jews had won the economic competition in most of
>>> these professions, there might not have been a non-Jewish middle
>>> class in England."
>>>
>>> To explore MacDonald's point, Holland has not only failed to expel
>>> its own Jews, but also welcomed Jews expelled from other states.
>>> Consequently, there is no non-Jewish middle class in Holland. Not.
> In my other reply I neglected to mention the main point, which is that
> you overlooked the context of MacDonald's remark. He was criticizing
> Slezkine's statement that (if I remember correctly) Jews brought
> skills in commerce and so on to Eastern Europe which enabled the
> creation of a middle class, implying that Jewish immigration was at
> least in that respect a good thing. MacDonald raised what seems to me
> a valid point that if the Jews hadn't come, an indigenous middle class
> would likely have arisen instead. Hence his aside on the expulsion of
> the Jews from England and specifically his remark that there MIGHT not
> have been a non-Jewish middle class in England IF the Jews had been
> allowed to remain and had won economically. The main point though was
> neither England nor Holland, but Slezkine on Eastern Europe.
Your notion of validity is cut from the same cloth as a Young Pioneer
ditty of my childhood, wishing for a machine gun to aid Spartacus in
resisting Crassus' legions. For numerous historical reasons, early
modern Polish society repudiated commercial pursuits as unseemly for
Christians. This development created an economic opportunity for Jews
otherwise debarred from their stake in a feudal agrarian economy. The
West had no shortage of gentile traders encouraged by local custom and
circumstance. MacDonald's willful neglect of this factual disparity is
as telling as your oblivious craving for his droppings.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Sy Grass
"The Other" <ot...@other.invalid> wrote in message
> Two answers. First of all, according to MacDonald, Jews often engaged
> in business practices which were considered ruthless or unfair by the
> gentile community and which would be seen that way by most of us as
> well.
And what is this, from one more castrato libertarian choirboy, screeching
the latest chorus from "Springtime for Hitler"?
Of course, "most of us" in the non-business classes of the goy community
have forever regarded any robust practice of the profit-motive in trade as
"ruthless" and "unfair"--what else?
You speak of "two answers"? Well now you get two for tea, and another
answer from me to you, as to the irrational postmodern opinion of
neo-liberalism that Israel would be "wrong", "immoral" and/or "greedy" to
annex all the territory she has taken in trade, fair and square, for all
those many thousands of gallons of Israeli blood spent fending off
aggression upon those pre-1967 borders. Eh? you say? You look around, you
scratch your butt! What is making my eyes roll in my head, you ask?
But you see how the fact that Israel is totally justified to do that is so
far above the head of your squishy, pampered ideals that you just can't get
it. No, you will never get it, not until you have lived and experienced the
hard truths, the tough facts of life that make you learn it. You cannot
think with your head what must be experienced in life, in your heart, and
with your guts, in order that it should be understood. And that is why you
liberals and/or libertarians, or silver-spoonfed Republicans can only whine
on and on about what seems so "unfair" and "ruthless" to your soft and
sheltered sensibilities.
But even so, envision, if you dare, an analogy to the international scene
from the lawless American Wild West: Your next-door neighbor knocks down
that fence between your ranches and comes storming over with all his
bald-headed, floppy-butt Hippy-Hoppy buddies (pardon the reverse
anachronism), saying that he needs pay no attention to those fence-posted
metes and bounds that have been duly recorded as your homestead claim at the
county seat.
So now, what are you going to do when there is no sheriff to come for you,
and no allied neighbors to your armed support while that dirty son of a
bitch and his bloody buddies start roping your cattle, lynching your dogs
and raping your canaries? What are you going to do--just chase him back
behind that fence-line and call it a "truce"--leave it at that?
What kind of man are you? Eh? While all your parrots and parakeets are on
their backs kicking and your collie is strangled dead and dangling from a
branch in the old oak tree?
Why, you are just going to tip-toe right out there through the tulips to tie
a schtupping yellow ribbon to that collie's tail to remember all your losses
by--aren't you?
The hell you say! Rather, and quite to the contrary, like a good mensch of
an Israeli Sabra, like any proper, true-blooded man of the earth, you are
going to see that barbarian cur *pay* for all the mayhem he has wreaked upon
your lawn, aren't you?
Yes, you are. What else, seeing that there is no authority of law for it
but your own, and that flimsy notorized claim stamped by the County
Recorder--and not a damned thing else to back it--do you not then put your
fence back up a good goddam ten feet into his property to serve as a
monument to his miserly merde, to remind him of what more it's bound to get
him next time he tries any dirty business like that of disrespecting your
claim?
Well, if you don't, then the life of that friendly, cuddly ol' collie of
yours, didn't amount to diddly squat to you. Because you are saying, "Come
over and rape my guppies and goldfish any time you like." That's exactly
what you're saying to him by doing no more than pushing him back over that
old 1967 line, to leave all his holdings intact, while all your
fresh-killed children are smoking in their graves?
You make the sons of bitches pay, and that's the meaning of "fair trade".
There is no other.
<ot...@other.invalid> wrote in message news:lybr07l...@circe.aeaea...
Nor any schtinking . . .
> Changed Newsgroups header.
Either!
Don't mess with my headers, or I'll mess with yours.
--
JP http://www.mackiemesser.zoomshare.com/0.html
"You can't reason a man out of something that he didn't reason his way
into." Jonathan Swift
Sy Grass
"ROBERT The Satanist With The Skeleton Hand" <tride...@optusnet.com.au>
wrote in message news:4387ded4$0$25852$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au...
Oh, thank you, my dear! Thus we do as Rasputin and the Russians did at the
turn of the former century--they always went around calling one another, "my
dear", men, women, what-have-you. It was very stylish, and should be
reestablished. The "friend" thing though is holy, and not to be treated
lightly, not by the Russians or anybody; it's a trust, written in blood that
stands the test, every trial, and it is the only thing on earth worth having
for a person's hope. So, a friend in hope is a whole lot hipper than no hope
at all.
>
> Hey Sy, I had some harsh stuff to say about your fiction.
Yes, you did. But in view of this . . .
> Told Ya! You have the magic touch my dear, dear friend! You're as
> entertaining and witty as all get out!
What--am I going to harbor a grudge?
> Couldn't see a skeric of humour in it is all.
Oh, well . . .
> In the next two weeks I'm beginning my zany crazy Sci-Fi novel for the
> 14-15-16 year old market; I need to pull my finger out. Wanna collaborate?
Don't usually, my dear. But if somebody liked, for example, that silly ass,
totally juvenile "Frankenstein" thing I started, I might get a kick out of
seeing them take the project over, as I would continue to provide some of
the plot and character details that are still in mind but not as yet
committed to paper.
Otherwise, just now I've got this send-up on the "hard-boiled" detective
genre I've been whacking away at; a noir romance of sorts, and while it's
not exactly the return of S. Martin's "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", by the
same token, it's not so serious as to be exactly the Raymond Chandler
either, even if it is fondly mentored by it.
I sent about 40 pages off under title of "Aunt Mussolini" to the Chicago
Tribune as a short story entry to the Nelson Algren contest--but they gave
the prize to somebody else. So clearly, they did not find it to be in the
least way funny. And I don't doubt but that they probably took and
forwarded it to the F.B.I. as the ravings of some seriously misogynistic
pseudo-Jewish lunatic who needs to be stopped before he licks a stamp,
again.
> I can pay for Ivor to edit it a chapter at a time. Don't matter if you
> don't. In any case, I would be grateful if you could look at the first few
> pages when I start, which I can email you.
By all means, proceed at your own risk. ;-)
My email is jpd...@hotmail.com
> (I mean, look at Terry Pratchet! He won't be winning the Booker any time
> soon!) It will be junk prose and everything 'cause I'm a lousy writer.
> It's got to be a funny page-turner. That and nothing else. :-)
>
> Cheers, you
>
> --
> ROB
> www.xeper.org
Right back atcha!
--
JP David http://www.virtualtourist.com/m/520b8/
"I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at
heart." Anne Frank
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> Your notion of validity is cut from the same cloth as a Young
>> Pioneer ditty of my childhood, wishing for a machine gun to aid
>> Spartacus in resisting Crassus' legions. For numerous historical
>> reasons, early modern Polish society repudiated commercial pursuits
>> as unseemly for Christians. This development created an economic
>> opportunity for Jews otherwise debarred from their stake in a feudal
>> agrarian economy. The West had no shortage of gentile traders
>> encouraged by local custom and circumstance. MacDonald's willful
>> neglect of this factual disparity is as telling as your oblivious
>> craving for his droppings.
> Of course he doesn't neglect that claim. See the unabridged review,
> starting at the last paragraph on p. 67.
>
> Moreover, Slezkine pictures the middlemen as specializing in
> "certain dangerous, marvelous, and distasteful" (p. 9), but
> nevertheless indispensable, pursuits (p. 36) -- a formulation that
> carries a grain of truth, as in places where natives were
> prohibited from loaning money at interest. ... [Jews'] role went
> far beyond performing tasks deemed inappropriate for the natives
> for religious reasons; rather they were often tasks at which
> natives would be relatively less ruthless in exploiting their
> fellows. This was especially the case in Eastern Europe, where
> economic arrangements such as tax farming, estate management, and
> monopolies on retail liquor distribution lasted far longer than in
> the West.
>
> MacDonald then quotes a paragraph from Davies, _God's Playground: A
> History of Poland_, which seems to partly substantiate his claim.
>
> Contrary to your accusations, I've got nothing invested in MacDonald's
> historical claims being correct. I put a fair amount of trust in
> argument from authority, and apparently MacDonald's books haven't been
> well regarded by historians (though it's often hard to separate their
> ad hominem attacks from considered evaluation of his work). Therefore
> I take anything he says about history with more than a grain of salt.
> But sometimes even bad historians can raise valid points and dig up
> some interesting history.
You are ignoring the part concerning the West having no shortage of
gentile traders encouraged by local custom and circumstance. Now refer
back to MacDonald's speculation concerning the merits of expelling Jews
from Britain.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> In the immortal words of Wayne Campbell, and monkeys might fly out
>> of my butt. MacDonald offers no historical analysis to substantiate
>> his idiotic parallel between the actual situation of Jews in the
>> agrarian societies of Eastern Europe and their counterfactual
>> situation in the commercial societies of the West. Then again, the
>> tedium of accounting for dumb facts would have distracted him from
>> buttressing highbrow bigotry with vulgar Darwinism.
> OK, this is the only substantive comment you made in your whole post,
> and sure enough you're talking out your butt. Did you check the
> unabridged review that's referenced at the bottom of the abridged
> version? MacDonald has an endnote (Note 14) which cites Chapter 5 of
> his book _A People That Shall Dwell Alone_ and the Introduction to the
> paperback edition of his _Separation and Its Discontents_. Did you go
> and read MacDonald's analysis he cited in these sources before letting
> loose your monkeys?
I read the Preface to the latest edition of MacDonald's Separation and
Its Discontents, available via Amazon search. Nothing therein evinces a
scintilla of historical insight relevant to the contrast I drew above.
To return the favor, have you consulted the Levine book that I cited in
reference to the cultural singularity of Poland bearing upon its unique
accommodation of its Jews?
> On the "vulgar Darwinism", I haven't come across any Darwinismin
> little I've read by MacDonald, if Darwinism refers to evolution by
> natural selection. I think the evolution he talks about is mostly
> cultural evolution, and that his one claim of biological evolution (in
> intelligence) is through eugenics, i.e., selective breeding. Not that
> I believe him or anything, but that part at least isn't Darwinism.
>
> He also insists, contrary to claims made by some who haven't read his
> books, that his arguments do not depend at all on the validity of
> group selection, so it's hard to see where the Darwinism would come
> in. Again, I haven't read his books either, so I'm not saying it
> isn't there. I'm just asking you for specific examples.
Examples of what? I am not arguing either for or against the validity
of group selection, in whatever relevance it might bear to MacDonald's
flights of fancy. The points remaiin, that the analogy between his
counterfactual Jew-infested Britain and Holland, and its disparity from
the agrarian Poland, suffice to rebut his conjecture of the hostile
role played by the Jews in the West. Not to belabor the dishonesty of
your substitution of rationality for legitimacy in discussing the
interests of gentile nations with respect to the presence of Jew in
their midst. Finally, you are failing to explain the sense whereby on
any construal of Jewish "group evolutionary strategy" in the diaspora
it may be deemed a success, in view of its preponderantly redounding
therein to natural population decrease. What exactly is at stake in
this competition, if not reproductive fitness?
ObRationalist: Gustave Le Bon
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Sy Grass
> You are ignoring the part concerning the West having no shortage of
> gentile traders encouraged by local custom and circumstance.
Of course he's ignoring it, as only such a bunch of counter-intuitive,
self-deprecatory Jewish whining of suck-up to the goyim should always be
ignored--just as you are choosing to ignore a distinction between mere
'trade' after a primitive goyischer fashion, and a fully realized
Jewish-inspired capitalism.
When are you going to get it, Zeleny, that all this hyper-intellectualized,
Ivory-Towered academic dialectic of yours is just a lot of fiddling while
Rome burns?
Observe this again, until you get it:
"You can't reason a man out of something that he didn't reason his way
into." Jonathan Swift
Reason with these people all you like, analyze and intellectualize till
you're all out of breath and blue in the face--they have an emotional
investment in Jew-hatred that will always find some antithesis to your every
thesis. And because as any half-assed student of Kant's antinomies ought
damned well to know, their position is apt to look just so sound as yours
because that is just the way it works due to the flaws in the nature of
human reason itself. Or are you still failing to get that?
Always your big mistake is letting your adversary set the terms of the
debate--don't you know better than that by now? Don't you see how that sucks
you into his dirty database, for you even so much as to begin to entertain
any part of MacDonald's, or this Other's Jew-baiting swine swill?
Let me explain something to you, Mr. Hotshot from Harvard, that any ordinary
corn-fed post-graduate from the University of Minnesota School of Sociology
knows a damn-sight better than any bourgeois Ivy League whiz kid of
east-coast privilege and that is this: you must learn to recognize the
*irrational* presumptions underlying the position of the particular
bourgeois asshole you are talking to--and what is that in the instant case,
but the view that Jews are ruthless and unscrupulous in the marketplace.
But how can you be so bereft of simple Jewish moxy as to accept any such
underlying irrational presumption that there is something *wrong* with being
ruthless in the marketplace? I'll tell you: you don't know the marketplace!
You don't know that it is ruthless by nature or it is no marketplace at all.
You don't know that it is not "unscrupulous" to be ruthless, to be hard into
the bargain. As is so typical of leftist Harvard Jews whose ruthlessly
hardworking forbears made Harvard possible for them, you have the utterly
astonishing conceit to be ashamed of the chutzpah that put your ass there in
the first place!
You don't want to feel anathematized and ostracized, set apart from the goy
community as anything special, chosen or different because you fear that
those decided ethnic and cultural differences are the reason for every
pogrom of persecution against Jews, that the perception of those differences
are what stigmatizes you.
Dead wrong! The lack of the guts to take credit for those differences and to
push them right back into the face of the Other with glee of great gusto,
*that* is what comes back to persecute you, because that is the only kind of
chutzpah all men respect. Rather, you sit there beating your breast and
tearing your shirt accepting upon your head the nasty irrational ashes of
their dirty, stinking presumptions. In doing that, you get your ass up to
argue against them on their turf, in terms of their argument, "kicking
against the pricks," as the Jew, Saul of Tarsus was wont to put it.
Now, I'm going to show, once again, how a graduate of the University of
Minnesota goes about doing this without all the high tuition talk--the
lecture is free, Zeleny, no charge of tuition so sit the fuck up good and
straight, and this time, pay attention . . .
<edited, cut, slash and burned, and otherwise replanted, as interpolated,
for a greater nourishment of understanding>
"Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1132864308....@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>>MacDonald operates with a finely attenuated notion of hostility. It
would be one thing to point out that Jews tend to be adverse to such
interests of traditional people and cultures as might involve their
assimilation, expulsion, segregation, and extermination. To infer their
constitutional hostility to the master race from these undisputable
facts, requires positing its fundamental and legitimate interest in
resisting the very presence of alien peoples and heterodox cultures in
its midst. This presumption is emblematic of pseudoscientific political
agenda sustained by the author and his host VDARE.<<
There is one presumption in all this that needs be addressed: Given--and I
say *given*-- that there has been and continues to be some kind of hostile
Jewish domination of the Euro-American bourgeois class--okay? Is that the
way it is? Then I say, So what!
<snip for brevity>
Capitalism, in order for it to have come into being at all, must absolutely
contain at its germinating essence, the motivating factor of an hostile,
war-like intent to exact that pound of flesh, that sweet recompense of
Shylock's meat, that 'profit' from the pocket of another. And that is the
zesty lust of the hunt that is so natural to man, once he has learned to
remember the taste for it--and that's the part you don't get.
Indeed, most men don't, most wind up working for the men and women who do
get it, or they are the sons and daughters of those Market Warriors; coddled
by the riches come of it, they are spared the hardscrabble task of learning
to do business, thrive and prosper in the world by it, and so like you,
Zeleny, you misunderstand it, you live in shame of it, you go to Harvard to
embrace the mentality of the Leftist robbers and brigands who think
everything should come easy, for free, and oh so very nicely, "to each
according to his need, from each according to his ability."
But there is nothing kind or sweet about the tough as nails reality of the
human marketplace, which is just the same old hominid culture of the African
jungle from whence now we come forth buying a pair of socks for fifty cents
and selling them for a dollar, in a sublimated market culture of the same
old jungle thing. You cannot harbor a soft or giving, brotherly attitude
toward the objects of your business. You are in it to take them for so much
as is wise and legal. If you're not sporting enough to learn the love of
that, you can only live in an ignorant state of patrician or proletarian
distaste for it, never appreciating it for the gloriously human, perfectly
natural sport of sublimated warfare it is.
But how does a capitalistic culture of sublimated tribal raiding get started
in the first place? How does man get over his all too primitive tribal
instinct for giving, sharing, being kind to his brother, for picking the
nits off the Other's hide and eating them? It's quite simple, if we may
take a look at the experience of the Jews.
They came in among the Nations, (the *goyim*) as strangers in strange lands;
they came being despised as alien, and yet necessity inspired them with the
will to survive, despite being denied any ownership of land, and equal
footing of citizenship within the dominant societies they entered. It is
only natural and manly that the Jew should take a great deal of umbrage
about that, and by that learn a way to return that hostility, eye for eye,
and robbed pocket for robbed pocket, and to do it so well, unlike the
Gypsies, that it worked within the already established mores of that
culture's marketplace.
Before the Jews came, trading was just "Indian giving", it was all strictly
'even Stephen', what any farmer and tinsmith would regard as being a "fair
trade" in bags of barley for a kettle, between them. But that would not
work for a pariah people like the Gypsies or the Jews. For those peoples
there could be no "even Stephen", no fair trade between a farmer and a
wandering Jew weaver or Gypsy tinker because that Farmer, or the village
smith always had the advantage of property, of landed title over the pariah
and so there was always the matter of that rent for the Jew, or the lack of
any place to lay his head for the Gypsy, so that was always there to make
every trade between Jew/Gypsy and Gentile *unfair* at the git-go.
So what does a good Gypsy do? He steals the gadje's chickens while he's
fixing the bastard's kettles or telling their fortunes, and MORE POWER TO
THEM! But the Jew found another way to rob those goy/gadje bastards and do
it so well, that there was no law to prevent it--that Jew didn't know how to
tell fortunes, that was against his religion so he had to get smart, and
learn about gold, investment, interest on loans, currency and banking.
So you can't even get started in the theatre of a profit-motivated market
culture if you feel overly kindhearted toward your mark in that marketplace.
You have to take a percentage of profit to compensate for that rent those
goys take from you at one hundred percent! You must have a certain sense
that by so much as you are going to take that miserly goy for, precisely by
so much as that, he has it coming to him, in spades, because you know that
down in his heart of hearts, he hates or fears your Holy of Holies to
despise it as Golgotha, the place where his god was crucified, or so he is
so willfully ignorant of the record to think.
So Jews were a blessing to the rise of a profit-motivated Western capitalism
which went beyond mere trade of Indian-giving or much worse, feudal
extorsion--and the marvelous culture of "Jewing" a person down, of bartering
for profit (on the one side or the other) was born. It came about in our
civilization with a vigor seen nowhere else in the world. Beyond Europe in
places where Jews had never settled, or in the Levant where they toiled
under oppression of Islamic taxes and restrictions, all across the board
nothing even close in appearance to European capitalism, to the rise of a
bourgeois class has even yet been seen to come into being.
The West has none but the Jews to thank for this prosperity, and it's high
time these ungrateful goyischer riders on the Yiddish coat-tail began to
appreciate it, and even higher time that Jews like this silverspoon fed,
ivory-towered Zeleny, became proud of it!
Michael Siemon
The Other <ot...@other.invalid> wrote:
...
> I'm not saying MacDonald is right. All I'm saying is that he's aware
> of your argument, and he addresses it.
"Addresses" it as in weaseling/special-pleading? That's what you
seem to suggest...
Alan Meyer
Being of Jewish extraction myself, I have followed this
discussion in the hopes of learning some good techniques I can
use to capitalize on my heritage and get rich or powerful. Can
you introduce me to some Polish nobles whom I can assist to
exploit their peasants and thereby make some dough on the side?
Is there a way I can use my ancestry to become a media moghul?
Unfortunately, I don't know a great many other Jews. Most of
the people I work with are gentiles. Do you think if I told my
boss I am Jewish that he will arrange for us to change places
so that I can be the boss and tell him what work to do? Or
would it be better for me to become his assistant and ask him
about ways to exploit the other workers for him?
Perhaps my mistake was that I never managed to get myself
expelled from England or Spain. Maybe if I had done that, and
gone east to Poland, or at least to Holland, I'd be rich today
(always assuming of course that I found a way to avoid being
killed and to get my money out in time, and that I managed to
be among the thousands of Jews that got rich while avoiding the
millions that were poor.)
I hope you won't think I'm treating Mr. MacDonald's ideas too
lightly. I'm trying to understand them as best I can.
It could be that my problem is that my father had blue eyes.
It may be that there is just enough north European blood in my
veins to keep me from being rich. But I don't think he is my
only problem. Some of my dark haired brown eyed ancestors came
from Poland and Lithuania, but they happened to be very poor,
coming over here in steerage. I'm sure that they must have
somehow been defective Jews since they came from the shtetl and
never seemed to have made it into the Polish middle class.
Sigh ...
Life can be so confusing. I did all the right things. I was
circumcised. I went to Hebrew school and got bar mitzvahed. I
even managed to get insulted and assaulted by Jew haters upon
occasion. But somehow all the benefits seem to have passed me
by.
What a disappointment!
Arindam Banerjee
> Jewish-inspired capitalism.
I thought one Jew named Karl Marx was responsible for something quite
the opposite.
Sy Grass
"Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:1133338078.1...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
He was indeed, but his being a "Marxist", would not seem to have stopped him
from trying to make a perfectly kosher heap of Jewish profit on book
sales--or would one be mistaken so to suppose?
Did he give his books away at cost?
In any case, remember what Aristotle had to say concerning the categories of
logic as to confusing "a horse" with the substance of Horse, or which would
be to say, "a Jew" with the substance of being Jewish. Whereas the one, "a
horse" will admit of many an accidental attribute, such as "whiteness" or
"three legs" or "bob-tailed"; the other, Horse as *substance* is concerned
only with the essential attributes or the *essence* of Horse which is here
to distinguish it from Dog or Cat.
The fact that the Jew, Marx happened to make of himself a communist had
nothing essentially to do with the substance of his being Jewish, as neither
would it have had essentially to do with some other Jew being a capitalist
because the underlying substance giving rise to both accidents of choice is
the essential Jewish drive to survive in any case, in spite of all gentile
resistance of restriction, ostracism, stigma and persecution.
Howsoever "a Jew" will choose to grapple with that which is against his
substance in the essential drive to survive, that will be accidental while
the fact of that drive is essential. One Jew will strive to violently
overthrow and oppress the dominant class which oppresses him, while the
other Jew will work nonviolently to become part of and essential to that
dominant class by excelling at it's own game.
In any case, it is worth noting that Jews have been at the foundation and
the formation of both mutually exclusive economic engines of Western
civilization, the one of which ruled in its realm for well over half a
century, to put a few men in space, while seeking to enslave all the rest
over half the world before it failed, and the other which in ever-cycling
form from stricture of oligarchy, nepotism and feudalism to liberty of
laissez-faire, has ruled from the beginning to prevail, as it would seem
through succeeding cycles of the same, right on to the end.
--
JP http://www.mackiemesser.zoomshare.com/0.html
"Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast." --Lord Wilmot (2nd Earl of
Rochester)
G*rd*n
> ...
> Life can be so confusing. I did all the right things. I was
> circumcised. I went to Hebrew school and got bar mitzvahed. I
> even managed to get insulted and assaulted by Jew haters upon
> occasion. But somehow all the benefits seem to have passed me
> by.
A Jewish friend of mine has offered me ten per cent off the
top if I can cut him in on the Conspiracy at some reasonably
high level, like say ten million a year. Do you want to get
in on the deal? Cutting in two Jews shouldn't be much
harder than one.
Arindam Banerjee
Sy Grass wrote:
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
> news:1133338078.1...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> >, and a fully realized
> >> Jewish-inspired capitalism.
> >
> > I thought one Jew named Karl Marx was responsible for something quite
> > the opposite.
>
> He was indeed, but his being a "Marxist", would not seem to have stopped him
> from trying to make a perfectly kosher heap of Jewish profit on book
> sales--or would one be mistaken so to suppose?
This reminds me of a cartoon where Mrs Marx doing the laundry mutters
that she would like to get her hands on some of that Das Kapital.
> Did he give his books away at cost?
Who in his senses would pay to read that stuff? Um, I did, but I am
the only one I know. But the books I bought were not sold for profit;
the Soviet publishers were charging very less for them.
> In any case, remember what Aristotle had to say concerning the categories of
> logic as to confusing "a horse" with the substance of Horse, or which would
> be to say, "a Jew" with the substance of being Jewish. Whereas the one, "a
> horse" will admit of many an accidental attribute, such as "whiteness" or
> "three legs" or "bob-tailed"; the other, Horse as *substance* is concerned
> only with the essential attributes or the *essence* of Horse which is here
> to distinguish it from Dog or Cat.
Or Mule, that being rather more difficult.
> The fact that the Jew, Marx happened to make of himself a communist
No, he lived a bourgeois life off his friend Engels. He turned many
others into communists.
had
> nothing essentially to do with the substance of his being Jewish, as neither
> would it have had essentially to do with some other Jew being a capitalist
> because the underlying substance giving rise to both accidents of choice is
> the essential Jewish drive to survive in any case, in spite of all gentile
> resistance of restriction, ostracism, stigma and persecution.
Seeing that all the existing non-Jews (and there are so many of them)
have had ancestors who have shown exactly the same traits on the grand
time-scaled average (otherwise they would not have been surviving
today) I don't know why being a Jew should be that special in the
survival reckonings.
> Howsoever "a Jew" will choose to grapple with that which is against his
> substance in the essential drive to survive, that will be accidental while
> the fact of that drive is essential. One Jew will strive to violently
> overthrow and oppress the dominant class which oppresses him, while the
> other Jew will work nonviolently to become part of and essential to that
> dominant class by excelling at it's own game.
If there are dominant classes they are always up against, then surely
they must display an inevitable aura of inferiority?
> In any case, it is worth noting that Jews have been at the foundation and
> the formation of both mutually exclusive economic engines of Western
> civilization, the one of which ruled in its realm for well over half a
> century, to put a few men in space, while seeking to enslave all the rest
> over half the world before it failed,
Are you talking about the USSR here? Now, that was India's ally, and
for a couple of years I was brought up in a Soviet commune of which my
father was the executive manager. That was in the 60s. The impression
I got then was that they were the ones helping poor colonised and
enslaved people everywhere with modern technology that would make them
stand up on their feet one day. Yes, there was great rejoicing in our
commune when Valentina Tereshkova was put into space.
> and the other which in ever-cycling
> form from stricture of oligarchy, nepotism and feudalism to liberty of
> laissez-faire, has ruled from the beginning to prevail, as it would seem
> through succeeding cycles of the same, right on to the end.
Hmm, these guys do know how to look after themselves, no doubt!
Michael Zeleny
> No, I wasn't ignoring it. MacDonald never denies the obvious fact
> that England had a potential middle class. What he's claiming is that
> Eastern Europe also had such a potential, although he agrees there's
> some truth to the bit about culture and religion barring Christians
> from some professions.
>
> Get it? I'll spell it out for you: MacDonald's argument is that both
> England and -- contrary to what you and others argue -- Poland had
> potential indigenous middle classes, but the Poles still got
> out-competed by the Jews. The English didn't have to compete with the
> Jews, because they expelled them first; but if they hadn't done that,
> they might have lost the competition just as the Poles did (or, I'll
> add, they might not have lost, as you say the Dutch did not). Having
> plenty of gentile traders, professionals etc. is not sufficient to
> develop a gentile middle class under competition with Jewish traders
> and professionals.
>
> I'm not saying MacDonald is right. All I'm saying is that he's aware
> of your argument, and he addresses it.
I understand what you are saying. The trouble is that you have no
evidence to support it. Levine brings forth primary sources in
accounting for specific historical reasons for Jews preempting the
emergence of a gentile middle class in Poland. The secondary sources
employed by MacDonald, such as Davies and Subtelny, do nothing to
undermine this explanation. If you have any information that would
serve to this end, feel free to cite it.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>>> MacDonald has an endnote (Note 14) which cites Chapter 5 of his
>>> book _A People That Shall Dwell Alone_ and the Introduction to the
>>> paperback edition of his _Separation and Its Discontents_. Did
>>> you go and read MacDonald's analysis he cited in these sources
>>> before letting loose your monkeys?
>> I read the Preface to the latest edition of MacDonald's Separation
>> and Its Discontents, available via Amazon search. Nothing therein
>> evinces a scintilla of historical insight relevant to the contrast I
>> drew above.
> Translation: No you didn't; you were just talking out your ass.
> MacDonald's own summary of Chapter 5 of his first book includes the
> following:
>
> ...separate sections are then devoted to Jewish/gentile resource
> and reproductive competition in a wide range of economic
> activities in Spain prior to the Inquisition, in EARLY MODERN
> POLAND, and in Europe and America following Jewish Emancipation.
>
> I haven't read it either so I can't comment on it, but you denied that
> the analysis even exists, without even bothering to look in the places
> to which MacDonald himself refers you.
>
> As I've been saying, there are problems with MacDonald's scholarship.
> From this URL, it looks like he uses selective quoting and similar
> stuff to support his claims:
>
> http://www.h-net.org/~antis/papers/dl/macdonald_schatz_01.html
>
> This is a reason to be extra careful when reading his stuff, but it's
> not an excuse to ignore it.
No excuses are needed to ignore conclusions that run counter to
evidence. I denied that the analysis exists in the texts that you chose
to cite. I also deny that such analysis can exist anywhere. The facts
of the matter indicate social disparities that undermine counterfactual
speculation that, but for the historical fact of their expulsion from
Britain, Jews might have prevented the emergence of an (ethnically and
religiously) indigenous middle class, just as they arguably have done
in Poland. As I pointed out, the problem with this speculation is
twofold. Whereas the Polish culture is historically agrarian and
strongly adverse to the commercial ethos, nothing of the sort obtains
in Britain. On the other hand, MacDonald fails to consider the analogy
better warranted by cultural affinities, between the likely fate of
Jews allowed to remain in Britain, and their actual conditions in
Holland. Persecuted in, and expelled from the Low Countries on a
regular basis throughout the early modern period, Jews were welcomed
there after being expelled from Spain in 1492. But similarly to the
Britons, the Dutch population did not shie away from engaging in
commerce. Consequently, until the Holocaust, gentiles coexisted with
Jews within the Dutch middle class.
This is not a novel objection, q.v. Steven Pinker: "The argument, as
presented in the summaries, fail two basic tests of scientific
credibility: a control group (in this case, other minority ethnic
groups), and a comparison with alternative hypotheses (such as Thomas
Sowell's convincing analysis of "middlemen minorities" such as the
Jews, presented in his magisterial study of migration, race, conquest,
and culture)." http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/slatedialog.html
>> To return the favor, have you consulted the Levine book that I cited
>> in reference to the cultural singularity of Poland bearing upon its
>> unique accommodation of its Jews?
> No, but I'll be sure to do so before I criticize its contents.
>
> Regarding this "accommodation", the question is, accommodation by
> whom? It's an important question, given the claim that Jews in Poland
> helped the Polish upper class exploit the lower classes. See the
> paragraph from Davies quoted in MacDonald's unabridged review. You
> can't just lump all the Poles together here.
I did no such thing. In fact, as I pointed out elsewhere, it is
unfortunate to see Poles stereotyped as antisemites. When legal
disabilities of religious minorities were the European norm, Polish
aristocrats got on well with Jews, employing Jewish managers for their
estates. Conversely, the Polish peasants, whose dealings with authority
were often mediated by Jews, came to loathe these alien interlopers in
their midst. Traditional tolerance persisted among the cultural elite
well into the XXth century, with xenophobic nationalism receiving its
principal support from the booboisie eager to confabulate the glories
of Sarmatian bloodlines. By contrast, when government policies in the
1930s compelled Jewish university students to occupy a designated area
in classrooms, inspiring them to protest by remaining on their feet
during lectures, well-bred Polish teachers were seen following the lead
of Tadeusz Kotarbinski in abandoning the rostrum and delivering their
lectures from the Jewish ghetto designated in the hall. To this day,
Eastern European antisemitism endures as a reliable marker of class.
Scratch a bigot, find a yokel. This is as true for Jews as it is for
Poles.
>> Examples of what?
> I asked for examples of MacDonald's "Darwinism" (I assume meaning
> natural selection), vulgar or otherwise.
"I have noted several times that the human mind was not designed to
seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals."
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/newtimes.html
In other words, MacDonald helps himself to Darwinian explanations early
on in the game. In all fairness, this analysis might just as well
reflect the premisses of creationism. On the other hand, since
MacDonald argues for the role of self-deception in the Jewish "group
evolutionary strategies", he cannot be construing them as conscious
stratagems conditioned by and transparent to reason:
"Reflecting self-deception and negative perceptions of the outgroup,
Jewish intellectuals have held on to the idea of the Jew as outsider
and underdog long after Jews had achieved vastly disproportionate
success in America."
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/newtimes.html
"In the case of anti-Semitism there is no expectation that specific
anti-Semitic beliefs will be accurate, but from the standpoint of
evolutionary theory, these beliefs may be eminently adaptive in
promoting evolutionary goals. Similarly, truth is not a requirement
for the effectiveness of the rationalizations, apologia, and
self-deceptions so so central to maintaining positive images of the
Jewish ingroup throughout history."
--SaID, p. 16
Having controverted psychoanalysis and Marxism as fallacious
pseudoscientific examples of Jewish "group evolutionary strategies",
MacDonald cannot rely on their postulation of subconscious processes or
false consciousness to explain their mechanisms. He also disclaims the
relevance of evolutionary aetiology to the function that he purports to
establish:
"Of course, one could also propose that these phenomena are not an
evolutionary adaptation but a maladaptive consequence of other evolved
mechanisms confronting a novel environment. In any case, whether this
type of collective behavior is the result of natural selection for
group behavior is irrelevant to the fact that these phenomena are of
considerable importance in understanding many historical instances of
anti-Semitism; the mechanism is important independent of its putative
status as a biological adaptation."
--SaID, p.24
But between the language of design impinging upon mental function, and
its liability to self-deception inexplicable by social or psychological
forces analyzed by Marx and Freud, what but natural selection could
account for this end result? In his speculations about the benefits of
Jewish expulsion from gentile lands, MacDonald has demonstrated the
ahistorical nature of his argument. He has expressly ruled out the
available psychoanalytic and socioeconomic explanations of the alleged
strategies. Thus his disclaimers of commitment to natural selection
conjoined with his asseveration of unconscious execution of "group
evolutionary strategies" leave no alternatives short of postulating
intelligent design as the vehicle that conduces the human mind not to
seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals.
>> The points remaiin, that the analogy between his counterfactual
>> Jew-infested Britain and Holland, and its disparity from the
>> agrarian Poland, suffice to rebut his conjecture of the hostile role
>> played by the Jews in the West.
> Non sequitur.
My point precisely. The evidence adduced by MacDonald cannot support
his imputation of hostility.
>> Not to belabor the dishonesty of your substitution of rationality
>> for legitimacy in discussing the interests of gentile nations with
>> respect to the presence of Jew in their midst.
> I honestly tried to distinguish between the two explicitly. As far as
> I know, MacDonald talks about rationality but not legitimacy.
Rationality in action is a matter of coordinating means and ends. As I
have pointed out, MacDonald would have to address legitimacy in order
to impute hostility to its opponents. Deriving generic Jewish hostility
to the host nation from positions adverse to specific policies aimed at
promoting marginalization, discrimination, and assimilation, let alone
forcing concentration, deportation, and extermination, is sheer
demagoguery.
>> Finally, you are failing to explain the sense whereby on any
>> construal of Jewish "group evolutionary strategy" in the diaspora it
>> may be deemed a success, in view of its preponderantly redounding
>> therein to natural population decrease. What exactly is at stake in
>> this competition, if not reproductive fitness?
> Why should success be defined only as reproductive fitness? (And if
> it were, wouldn't it be measured relative to the gentile groups with
> which Jews are competing?) Why not also define success as wealth,
> power, status...the usual? Actually, MacDonald refers to "resource
> and reproductive competition".
>
> I've been trying to tell you, this isn't Darwinism, OK?
>
> Not Darwinism.
>
> Not Darwinism.
>
> Not Darwinism.
>
> Not Darwinism.
This is tiresome. You have every right to play a public intellectual
wannabe, provided that you understand that your pose exposes you to
enhanced scrutiny of second-hand arguments in the service of unstated
motives. As I pointed out earlier, both you and Steve Sailer expose
yourselves to well-earned ridicule every time you venture conclusions
beyond journalistic competence. If you are unequipped to discuss
history and philosophy, stay out of their domains or rest content in
being branded a fuckwit.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/larvatus/23766.html
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) writes:
>> "Alan Meyer" <ame...@yahoo.com>:
>>> ... But somehow all the benefits seem to have passed me by.
>> A Jewish friend of mine has offered me ten per cent off the
>> top if I can cut him in on the Conspiracy at some reasonably
>> high level, like say ten million a year. Do you want to get
>> in on the deal? Cutting in two Jews shouldn't be much
>> harder than one.
> See, there's an example right there: a yiddishe kopf. According to
> Slezkine and also MacDonald, a yiddishe kopf is especially beneficial
> in our modern society. (Slezkine's book is titled _The Jewish
> Century_, remember?) And to think, your Jewish friend doesn't even
> acknowledge his benefits. Ingrate.
>
> Sorry for taking your joke too seriously -- I mean, gosh, it's still
> funny the hundredth time you hear it and all that. But it's strange
> that you, G*rd*n, would laugh at the idea that there are benefits.
> You always seem to be pointing out that economic classes have
> interests, that classes often work towards their interests, and that
> this leads to class conflict. But it seems that you don't accept that
> approach with ethnies, or at least not with one particular ethnie --
> as if it's all just conspiracies and the socialism of fools.
Is there no limit to the depth of stupidity you are willing to plumb
in order to allege clandestine kike agenda? Since class membership is
predicated upon the capacity to satisfy economic interests, it depends
on strategic choices between competition and collaboration in their
furtherance. By contrast, nothing of the sort obtains in regard to the
serial accidents of birth that comprise the basis of ethnicity.
What is it about Zero Mostel or Irving Kaufman that might conceivably
be better served by cozening Mel Brooks or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg,
than consigning them to ridicule or execution?
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
>>> Sorry for taking your joke too seriously -- I mean, gosh, it's
>>> still funny the hundredth time you hear it and all that. But it's
>>> strange that you, G*rd*n, would laugh at the idea that there are
>>> benefits. You always seem to be pointing out that economic
>>> classes have interests, that classes often work towards their
>>> interests, and that this leads to class conflict. But it seems
>>> that you don't accept that approach with ethnies, or at least not
>>> with one particular ethnie -- as if it's all just conspiracies and
>>> the socialism of fools.
>> Is there no limit to the depth of stupidity you are willing to plumb
>> in order to allege clandestine kike agenda? Since class membership
>> is predicated upon the capacity to satisfy economic interests, it
>> depends on strategic choices between competition and collaboration
>> in their furtherance. By contrast, nothing of the sort obtains in
>> regard to the serial accidents of birth that comprise the basis of
>> ethnicity.
> Hmm...either I can't understand this paragraph, or it's amazingly
> obviously wrong. How about African-Americans? Are you denying that
> they have ethnic interests, that they often work towards their
> interests, and that this leads to ethnic conflict? There must be a
> misunderstanding here.
>
> Of course Jewish ethnicity is a lot less rigid than you suggest, but
> that's beside the main point.
Collective bargaining is always subject to individual actors' choice
between cooperation and defection. As suggested above, the difference
between class and ethnicity is in the congruence of the criteria for
class membership with the capacity to satisfy economic interests. This
enables defection from social class. Whereas Groucho Marx used to
recall an old acquaintance, Otto Kahn, who walked down Fifth Avenue
with a deformed friend. "You know," said Kahn, "I used to be a Jew."
His friend responded, "Really? I used to be a hunchback."
This cuts both ways. Just as socioeconomic interests cannot suffice to
change the ethnicities of their subjects, so there is nothing in their
ethnicities to determine their interests. But for an accident of birth,
Ernst Kantorowitz would have made an excellent Nazi.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> This is not a novel objection, q.v. Steven Pinker: "The argument, as
>> presented in the summaries, fail two basic tests of scientific
>> credibility: a control group (in this case, other minority ethnic
>> groups), and a comparison with alternative hypotheses (such as
>> Thomas Sowell's convincing analysis of "middlemen minorities" such
>> as the Jews, presented in his magisterial study of migration, race,
>> conquest, and culture)."
>> http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/slatedialog.html
> It's kinda funny that in our argument about books neither of us has
> read, you bring in the opinion of an authority who also has never read
> any of the books.
I never read Faurisson, either. Something tells me that neither has
Chomsky. Nonetheless, each of us is entitled to our disparate yet
mutually compatible conclusions on the basis of the summaries.
> That said, I agree with the criticism, especially the part about
> alternative hypotheses in general. (But not in particular: Sowell's
> other "middlemen minorities" -- a.k.a. "Mercurians" (Slezkine) a.k.a.
> "market-dominant minorities" (Chua) -- are exactly what MacDonald
> *contrasted* the Jews with in his review of Slezkine's book! I still
> think MacDonald made a good point.)
>
> Regarding comparative groups, it is a problem, but if MacDonald did
> nothing more than establish that the Jews do what he alleges, even if
> other groups do it too, it would still be significant.
>
> You're right that it's not a novel objection. Remember, I've also
> said all along there are real problems with MacDonald's methodology.
What exactly would it mean for the Jews to do what MacDonald alleges?
How could his allegations of their nefarious doings be falsified? I
understand the sine qua non of any such falsification, that it be
administered by a gentile. But can you identify a sufficient condition
for refuting his drivel?
>>> I asked for examples of MacDonald's "Darwinism" (I assume meaning
>>> natural selection), vulgar or otherwise.
>> "I have noted several times that the human mind was not designed to
>> seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals."
>> http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/newtimes.html
>>
>> In other words, MacDonald helps himself to Darwinian explanations early
>> on in the game. In all fairness, this analysis might just as well
>> reflect the premisses of creationism. On the other hand, since
>> MacDonald argues for the role of self-deception in the Jewish "group
>> evolutionary strategies", he cannot be construing them as conscious
>> stratagems conditioned by and transparent to reason:
> No, you're right that the self-deception thing is definitely
> Darwinism. It's evolutionary psychology boilerplate. But it's
> tangential to the study of Jews, because as far as I know MacDonald
> never suggested any Darwinian evolution of self-deception -- or of
> anything else either! -- since the beginning of Jewish history 3500
> years ago. The quote below from _Separation and Its Discontents_ is
> perfectly correct.
He leaned in her direction, glaring. "I believe in a new kind of
jesus," he said, "one that can't waste his blood redeeming people with
it, because he's all man and ain't got any God in him. My church is the
Church Without Christ!"
-- Wise Blood
>> "Reflecting self-deception and negative perceptions of the outgroup,
>> Jewish intellectuals have held on to the idea of the Jew as outsider
>> and underdog long after Jews had achieved vastly disproportionate
>> success in America."
>> http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/newtimes.html
> If I remember correctly, this was MacDonald quoting or paraphrasing a
> Jewish historian. I don't see what it's got to do with Darwinism;
> everybody agrees that there's such a thing as self-deception, right?
Funny that you should mention MacDonald "quoting or paraphrasing a
Jewish historian". The referenced work, Edward S. Shapiro: A Time for
Healing: American Jewry since World War II, states: "Although their
collective occupational and income profile surpassed that of
Anglo-Saxon Episcopalians and Presbyterians, it was easier for American
Jews to continue believing that they had more in common with blacks and
Hispanics." In MacDonald's hands, this translates into Jews achieving
"vastly disproportionate success in America". What exactly is the
proportion presumed in this hyperbole?
As for the existence of self-deception, it is hardly a matter of
universal agreement.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/larvatus/61390.html
>> "In the case of anti-Semitism there is no expectation that specific
>> anti-Semitic beliefs will be accurate, but from the standpoint of
>> evolutionary theory, these beliefs may be eminently adaptive in
>> promoting evolutionary goals. Similarly, truth is not a requirement
>> for the effectiveness of the rationalizations, apologia, and
>> self-deceptions so so central to maintaining positive images of the
>> Jewish ingroup throughout history." --SaID, p. 16
> No reason to believe that "evolutionary" refers here to Darwinism,
> i.e., natural selection. I think MacDonald has said that he's mostly
> talking about cultural evolution, "experiments in living" and all
> that. Again, if he is talking about natural selection, then it all
> occurred before the beginning of Jewish history, and so is only of
> marginal interest.
What exactly do you take to be of central interest?
>> He also disclaims the relevance of evolutionary aetiology to the
>> function that he purports to establish:
>>
>> "Of course, one could also propose that these phenomena are not an
>> evolutionary adaptation but a maladaptive consequence of other
>> evolved mechanisms confronting a novel environment. In any case,
>> whether this type of collective behavior is the result of natural
>> selection for group behavior is irrelevant to the fact that these
>> phenomena are of considerable importance in understanding many
>> historical instances of anti-Semitism; the mechanism is important
>> independent of its putative status as a biological adaptation."
>> --SaID, p.24
> Exactly!!!
The mechanism is conspicuous by its absence. MacDonald makes no attempt
to identify the forces responsible for the patterns that he designates
as evidencing Jewish hostility to the gentiles.
>> But between the language of design impinging upon mental function, and
>> its liability to self-deception inexplicable by social or psychological
>> forces analyzed by Marx and Freud, what but natural selection could
>> account for this end result?
> Oh, how about, gosh, maybe just what MacDonald himself suggested in
> the paragraph you quoted? "A maladaptive consequence of other evolved
> mechanisms confronting a novel environment"? Basically what early
> evolutionists called "correlates of growth" and what Steven Jay Gould
> called "spandrels".
And that would make it anything other than vulgar Darwinism?
>>> I honestly tried to distinguish between the two explicitly. As
>>> far as I know, MacDonald talks about rationality but not
>>> legitimacy.
>> Rationality in action is a matter of coordinating means and ends. As
>> I have pointed out, MacDonald would have to address legitimacy in
>> order to impute hostility to its opponents.
> OK, you mean something different by the word "hostile" then.
Something different from what you mean thereby, to be sure.
>> Deriving generic Jewish hostility to the host nation from positions
>> adverse to specific policies aimed at promoting marginalization,
>> discrimination, and assimilation, let alone forcing concentration,
>> deportation, and extermination, is sheer demagoguery.
> Hey, that's a pretty polemical description of those "specific
> policies". Inaccurate, too. But OK, let's not call it hostility to
> the host nation. Call it hostility to the host nation's interests.
No thanks. First you owe me an explanation of national interests that
transcend the boundaries circumscribed by the U.S. Constitution.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
>>> Hmm...either I can't understand this paragraph, or it's amazingly
>>> obviously wrong. How about African-Americans? Are you denying
>>> that they have ethnic interests, that they often work towards
>>> their interests, and that this leads to ethnic conflict? There
>>> must be a misunderstanding here.
>>>
>>> Of course Jewish ethnicity is a lot less rigid than you suggest,
>>> but that's beside the main point.
>> Collective bargaining is always subject to individual actors' choice
>> between cooperation and defection. As suggested above, the
>> difference between class and ethnicity is in the congruence of the
>> criteria for class membership with the capacity to satisfy economic
>> interests. This enables defection from social class. Whereas
>> Groucho Marx used to recall an old acquaintance, Otto Kahn, who
>> walked down Fifth Avenue with a deformed friend. "You know," sa
>> Kahn, "I used to be a Jew." His friend responded, "Really? I used
>> to be a hunchback."
> Since you ignored the specific question and just spewed out more
> truisms about cooperation and defection, I'll ask the question once
> again: How about African-Americans? Are you denying that they have
> ethnic interests, that they often work towards their interests, and
> that this leads to ethnic conflict? Get up out of your Theory Chair
> and take a look out your window.
You tell me, Aaron. How does your imputation of ethnic interests go
beyond a hifalutin way of pigeonholing people as niggers or kikes?
>> This cuts both ways. Just as socioeconomic interests cannot suffice
>> to change the ethnicities of their subjects, so there is nothing in
>> their ethnicities to determine their interests.
> That's just beyond stupid. Nothing's "determined", but don't you
> think African-Americans have ethnic interests regarding, say,
> affirmative action? Or regarding slavery in the 19th century?
Please identify the spectrum of ethnic interests involved between an
African slavetrader striking a deal with a Dutch captain on the Ivory
Coast in 1619. Please do likewise for the Jews trading African slaves
in Surinam in 1707 and their tribesmen causing a long-lasting scandal
with the Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, financing the war
against Napoleon in 1814, rallying forth the Red Army in 1917, serving
as chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1952, causing Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg to be executed for treason in 1953, and marching on
Washington with Martin Luther King in 1963. Please account for specific
historical circumstances and individual motives relevant to each ethnic
interest in each instance of its operation in human affairs.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
>>> Regarding comparative groups, it is a problem, but if MacDonald
>>> did nothing more than establish that the Jews do what he alleges,
>>> even if other groups do it too, it would still be significant.
>>>
>>> You're right that it's not a novel objection. Remember, I've also
>>> said all along there are real problems with MacDonald's
>>> methodology.
>> What exactly would it mean for the Jews to do what MacDonald
>> alleges? How could his allegations of their nefarious doings be
>> falsified? I understand the sine qua non of any such falsification,
>> that it be administered by a gentile. But can you identify a
>> sufficient condition for refuting his drivel?
> Depends which claim you mean, but sure, if you mean falsification at
> the level of historiography and not at the level of, say, physics. To
> take just one of MacDonald's claims: suppose you did an adoption study
> and found that there was no genetic influence on the higher IQ of
> Ashkenazim. That would falsify MacDonald's claim that high Ashkenazi
> IQ is a biological product of eugenics.
Please address the question that I asked instead of the one you would
rather answer. How does the attribution of high Ashkenazi IQ support
the theory of nefarious Jewish doings?
>>> No reason to believe that "evolutionary" refers here to Darwinism,
>>> i.e., natural selection. I think MacDonald has said that he's
>>> mostly talking about cultural evolution, "experiments in living"
>>> and all that. Again, if he is talking about natural selection,
>>> then it all occurred before the beginning of Jewish history, and
>>> so is only of marginal interest.
>> What exactly do you take to be of central interest?
> Putative cases of Jewish competitive group strategy, for instance.
>
> The details of evolution that took place hundreds of thousands of
> years ago are of no interest to the alleged (non-Darwinian) evolution
> of Jewish group strategy.
You are persisting with explanations on the level of monkeys possibly
flying out of people's butts. Historians are not interested in the
study of social strategies that emerge through inexplicable means to be
executed by individuals unconscious of their parts therein. And as you
admit, biologists are not interested in evolutionary speculations
unsupported by studies of natural selection over the proper time scale.
This leaves you and MacDonald with the task of touting a conspiracy
theory bereft of amusing publicity hooks that captivate the audience of
the Protocols. You have your work cut out for you.
>> The mechanism is conspicuous by its absence. MacDonald makes no
>> attempt to identify the forces responsible for the patterns that he
>> designates as evidencing Jewish hostility to the gentiles.
> If you're right (and I've learned to be skeptical when you tell me
> what MacDonald *doesn't* say), then that would be an interesting
> question for further study, wouldn't it? That's assuming that one
> accepts the existence of Jewish hostility to host nations -- and
> please note that's to nations, _goyim_ in the biblical sense of the
> word, not to "gentiles" in the current sense of that word.
Why should one accept anything of the sort?
>>> Oh, how about, gosh, maybe just what MacDonald himself suggested
>>> in the paragraph you quoted? "A maladaptive consequence of other
>>> evolved mechanisms confronting a novel environment"? Basically
>>> what early evolutionists called "correlates of growth" and what
>>> Steven Jay Gould called "spandrels".
>> And that would make it anything other than vulgar Darwinism?
> Yes. That's explicitly putting it *outside* of vulgar Darwinism, by
> putting it in the category of mental mechanisms that did not evolve by
> natural selection.
You are confused about standard terminology. As a matter of
indisputable and undisputed record, Galton developed eugenics as vulgar
Darwinism. As far as I can interpret his referenced works, MacDonald
relies on similar derivations for his "evolutionary psychology".
>>>> Rationality in action is a matter of coordinating means and
>>>> ends. As I have pointed out, MacDonald would have to address
>>>> legitimacy in order to impute hostility to its opponents.
>>> OK, you mean something different by the word "hostile" then.
>> Something different from what you mean thereby, to be sure.
> Hey, it's even right there in the etymology: _hostis_. Go read _The
> Concept of the Political_ by an anti-Semite named Carl
> Schmitt. That'll set you straight.
That might be the case only if I chose to follow Schmitt into
tendentious cherry-picking of sound bites from Plato. See, to the
contrary, the analysis that he chooses to overlook, in the Phaedo at
66c-d:
καὶ γὰρ πολέμους καὶ στάσεις καὶ
μάχας οὐδὲν ἄλλο παρέχει ἢ τὸ σῶμα
καὶ αἱ τούτου ἐπιθυμίαι. διὰ γὰρ
τὴν τῶν χρημάτων κτῆσιν πάντες οἱ
πόλεμοι γίγνονται, τὰ δὲ χρήματα
ἀναγκαζόμεθα κτᾶσθαι διὰ τὸ σῶμα,
δουλεύοντες τῇ τούτου θεραπείᾳ.
The body and its desires are the only cause of wars and factions and
battles; for all wars arise for the sake of gaining money, and we are
compelled to gain money for the sake of the body. We are slaves to its
service. (Translated by Harold North Fowler.)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/larvatus/61657.html
>>>> Deriving generic Jewish hostility to the host nation from
>>>> positions adverse to specific policies aimed at promoting
>>>> marginalization, discrimination, and assimilation, let alone
>>>> forcing concentration, deportation, and extermination, is sheer
>>>> demagoguery.
>>> Hey, that's a pretty polemical description of those "specific
>>> policies". Inaccurate, too. But OK, let's not call it hostility
>>> to the host nation. Call it hostility to the host nation's
>>> interests.
>> No thanks. First you owe me an explanation of national interests
>> that transcend the boundaries circumscribed by the
>> U.S. Constitution.
> Hell, first somebody owes you an explanation of "nation". There's no
> nation even mentioned in the US Constitution.
Try "We the People".
> I'll give you an example of a national interest though: existence.
I do not share your faith in the explanatory force of abstract
ostension.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
>>> That's just beyond stupid. Nothing's "determined", but don't you
>>> think African-Americans have ethnic interests regarding, say,
>>> affirmative action? Or regarding slavery in the 19th century?
>> Please identify the spectrum of ethnic interests involved between an
>> African slavetrader striking a deal with a Dutch captain on the
>> Ivory Coast in 1619.
> So what's the slave trader's name?
>
> Do you need to hear the standard disclaimer, that these are
> generalizations, and they don't apply to every individual or subgroup
> in the group? You're indulging in what I'd call the Capitalism of
> Fools, the foolish dismissal of group-level analysis on the grounds
> that every individual has his own unique interests. Denying an
> African-American interest in ending slavery because some
> African-Americans profited from it is especially egregious.
You are engaging in sophistry. Supposing for the sake of argument that
all African-Americans, and only they, were subject to enslavement, and
comprised a distinct and specific ethnicity, does nothing to establish
the ethnically African-American nature of any specific interest in
ending slavery. The interest in ending slavery is neither more nor less
that a universal human interest. Moral and political wrongs taint their
perpetrators at least commensurably with any injury that they inflict
upon their victims. See on this Socrates' discussion with Callicles in
the Gorgias. Conversely, bestowing social preferences and financial
reparations predicated upon ethnicity and other factors disconnected
from personal merits and specific entitlements to legal remedies for
wrongdoing, tends to corrupt their recipients to the extent that they
are privileged thereby. It is especially stupid to ignore the existence
and content of a real debate regarding "affirmative action", cutting
across the community boundaries of its potential beneficiaries.
>> Please do likewise for the Jews trading African slaves in Surinam in
>> 1707 and their tribesmen causing a long-lasting scandal with the
>> Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, financing the war against
>> Napoleon in 1814, rallying forth the Red Army in 1917, serving as
>> chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1952, causing Ethel and
>> Julius Rosenberg to be executed for treason in 1953, and marching on
>> Washington with Martin Luther King in 1963. Please account for
>> specific historical circumstances and individual motives relevant to
>> each ethnic interest in each instance of its operation in human
>> affairs.
> I thought the civil rights movement was a well-known example of Jews
> acting in accord with perceived Jewish interests, or at the least not
> against their perceived interests.
>
> Regarding your examples of apparent defection from group strategy, no
> one ever suggested that defection was never rational, only that the
> net benefit of defection is often low relative to the net benefit of
> cooperation. Jews are like other ethnies in that many individuals
> have worked against group interests, like your African-American slave
> trader. See above, the Capitalism of Fools.
>
> Oh, and for the Red Army and the Bolshevik revolution, see Yuri
> Slezkine, _The Jewish Century_. You may be interested to know that
> Kevin MacDonald recently reviewed the book.
Imputing "perceived interests" does nothing to support the claim that
such perception has any basis in reality. Neither you nor MacDonald
have done anything of the sort. To the contrary, you are touting an
account admittedly restricted to a litany of subjectively perceived
patterns of "group strategies" short of accounting for any possible
aetiology thereof or dynamic factors operating therein. On this
deliberately non-explanatory level, you are far less credible than the
purveyors of antisemitic conspiracy theories boasting the advantage of
postulating clandestine collusions responsible for the tendencies and
trends they purport to find in the history of their suspects.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Arindam Banerjee
> the vehemence with which you and others deny the existence of these
> strategies -- of *any* Jewish group strategies -- I'd think it would
> be interesting if one could show their existence, even if the
> mechanisms were unknown.
The greatest Arindam-haters on Usenet are all bandarJews, who try to
project Arindam as some sort of a Nazi, from his Bengali-Hindu
background. This is easily seen from the Google archives, especially
from the responses to my proofs that Einstein's ideas on relativity are
rubbish. One could think there is a conspiracy going around, but I do
not subscribe to this. For their are many others who are not Jews, who
still cannot bring themselves to supporting me wholeheartedly. And it
is only logical that Einstein as a Jew should get Jewish support.
The real problem with Jews (mostly decent, intelligent, hard-working
people) is that they do not tackle their bandarJews strongly enough.
Far too much misplaced loyalty, they show. They have paid a heavy
price for this lack.
Michael Zeleny
> Is estate management included in "commerce" that Christians would have
> looked down on? I didn't think it was, but I haven't read Levine or
> any other history of that period. That's why I thought Davies was
> relevant. Sorry to keep asking, but did you follow MacDonald's
> reference to Chapter 5 of _A People That Shall Dwell Alone_? It seems
> that if you're saying he doesn't address something, you should check
> all his references.
On the relevant pp. 121-123 of the referenced publication, MacDonald
conspicuously fails to consider specific cultural factors impinging on
the competitive advantage of Jews in Poland, on the model proposed by
Levine in the book I cited earlier.
> To tell the truth, there's not much less interesting to me than the
> history of Jews in early modern Poland.
And yet your lack of interest and want of learning haven't stopped you
from commenting on the matter entirely determined by the subject of
your avowedly willful ignorance.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
>>> Depends which claim you mean, but sure, if you mean falsification
>>> at the level of historiography and not at the level of, say,
>>> physics. To take just one of MacDonald's claims: suppose you did
>>> an adoption study and found that there was no genetic influence on
>>> the higher IQ of Ashkenazim. That would falsify MacDonald's claim
>>> that high Ashkenazi IQ is a biological product of eugenics.
>> Please address the question that I asked instead of the one you
>> would rather answer. How does the attribution of high Ashkenazi IQ
>> support the theory of nefarious Jewish doings?
> My mistake, I didn't read your question carefully. OK, nefarious
> doings. That could be falsified if, for instance, you discovered some
> diaries of Franz Boas in which he agonized over the fact that his
> anthropological approach was Bad for the Jews, but decided to pursue
> it nevertheless in the interest of Truth. And similarly for his
> Jewish followers, and for other Jews such as Freud and his followers,
> the Partisan Review crowd, etc. I'm exaggerating of course, but more
> realistically, if you found evidence implying that these people
> thought that their theories or agendas were Bad for the Jews then that
> would falsify a large part of the "nefarious doings".
>
> I'm referring to MacDonald's _The Culture of Critique_, which critics
> seem to agree is both the weakest-argued of his books on Jews and the
> most "anti-Semitic". (For the record, MacDonald denies that he's
> anti-Semitic, but that seems to be mostly a matter of semantics.)
"I argue that Jews, and especially those who strongly identify as Jews,
would be relatively prone to self-deception by ignoring or
rationalizing negative information about themselves and their ingroup."
--SaiD, p. ix
Seeing that MacDonald has identified self-deception as belonging in the
bag of Jewish tricks, why would your hypothetical evidence implying
that the theorists and leaders of hostile Jewish evolutionary
strategies thought that their theories or agenda were Bad for the Jews,
falsify anything whatsoever? Surely it is just as possible to deceive
oneself out of guilt, as it is to do so out of ambition.
This is the problem with attempting to discern and account for patterns
in observable effects in the absence of a sound theoretical basis of
hypotheses explaining their causes. Just as MacDonald's methodology
runs afoul of any conceivable scientific basis in evolutionary biology,
so his narrative fails to exhibit the nominal degree of rigor expected
from analysis in the humanities. In a word, its reasoning is bogus.
>>> Putative cases of Jewish competitive group strategy, for instance.
>>>
>>> The details of evolution that took place hundreds of thousands of
>>> years ago are of no interest to the alleged (non-Darwinian)
>>> evolution of Jewish group strategy.
>> You are persisting with explanations on the level of monkeys
>> possibly flying out of people's butts. Historians are not interested
>> in the study of social strategies that emerge through inexplicable
>> means to be executed by individuals unconscious of their parts
>> therein.
> First of all, many of the individuals *were* allegedly conscious of
> their parts therein. Freud, Boas, and others were allegedly conscious
> that their work was Good for the Jews. So there's nothing too
> mysterious there.
>
> I don't know what things historians are interested in, but considering
> the vehemence with which you and others deny the existence of these
> strategies -- of *any* Jewish group strategies -- I'd think it would
> be interesting if one could show their existence, even if the
> mechanisms were unknown.
It is patently insufficient in your defense of MacDonald's imputation
of Jewish hostility to the gentiles, to allege that Freud, Boas, and
others were "conscious that their work was Good for the Jews". Having
stood proxy for, and performed as the paradigmatic example of, the
totality of social pariahs within Christian (and occasionally, Moslem)
nations, the Jews make for an adequate metonym in representing
unmerited victimhood. What you would have to show is that MacDonald's
Jewish villains conspired or contrived to work against legitimate
interests of the gentiles. Please note that the emphasis on legitimacy
is meant to rule out the scenario entitling every gentile to his
benefit in systematic discrimination against Jews in college admission
and employment and his share of punitive taxes levied upon the Jews in
order to curtail their preternatural economic effectiveness:
"Because ethnic groups have differing talents and abilities and
differing parenting styles, variable criteria for qualifying and
retaining jobs would be required depending on ethnic group membership.
Moreover, achieving parity between Jews and other ethnic groups would
entail a high level of discrimination against individual Jews for
admission to universities or access to employment opportunities and
even entail a large taxation on Jews to counter the Jewish advantage in
the possession of wealth, since at present Jews are vastly
over-represented among the wealthy and the successful in the United
States. This would especially be the case if Jews were distinguished as
a separate ethnic group from gentile European Americans. Indeed, the
final evolution of many of the New York Intellectuals from Stalinism
was to become neoconservatives who have been eloquent opponents of
affirmative action and quota mechanisms for distributing resources."
--The Culture of Critique
>> And as you admit, biologists are not interested in evolutionary
>> speculations unsupported by studies of natural selection over the
>> proper time scale. This leaves you and MacDonald with the task of
>> touting a conspiracy theory bereft of amusing publicity hooks that
>> captivate the audience of the Protocols. You have your work cut out
>> for you.
> So you call the hypothesis of a group strategy a "conspiracy theory".
> There it is again, the Capitalism of Fools.
I argue towards my conclusion by ruling out the available alternatives.
You support your politics with a glib epithet. I am happy to rely on
our readers in allotting relative credibility to our claims.
>>> Yes. That's explicitly putting it *outside* of vulgar Darwinism,
>>> by putting it in the category of mental mechanisms that did not
>>> evolve by natural selection.
>> You are confused about standard terminology. As a matter of
>> indisputable and undisputed record, Galton developed eugenics as
>> vulgar Darwinism. As far as I can interpret his referenced works,
>> MacDonald relies on similar derivations for his "evolutionary
>> psychology".
> I didn't know that "vulgar Darwinism" meant eugenics, but anyway, you
> also seem to be a bit confused here. MacDonald is not talking about
> adaptive traits here, he's talking about possibly "maladaptive"
> phenomena which are side effects ("consequences") of evolved
> mechanisms. Get it? Traits that were not selected for either
> naturally or artificially. In any case, his point is that it doesn't
> matter whether they were selected for or not, what matters is that
> they're there.
>
> You're right that MacDonald believes that other traits such as high
> intelligence evolved (through eugenics), but that's not what he's
> talking about in that paragraph.
You are missing the point of my objection. The only available
alternative to the rational investigation of social dynamics is the
postulation of magical thinking.
>>> Hey, it's even right there in the etymology: _hostis_. Go read
>>> _The Concept of the Political_ by an anti-Semite named Carl
>>> Schmitt. That'll set you straight.
>> That might be the case only if I chose to follow Schmitt into
>> tendentious cherry-picking of sound bites from Plato. See, to the
>> contrary, the analysis that he chooses to overlook, in the Phaedo at
>> 66c-d:
>>
>> The body and its desires are the only cause of wars and factions and
>> battles; for all wars arise for the sake of gaining money, and we
>> are compelled to gain money for the sake of the body. We are slaves
>> to its service. (Translated by Harold North Fowler.)
> Well then that Plato guy was pretty uninformed, wasn't he?
Are you seriously asking for a contest of credibility pitting Carl
Schmitt and Kevin MacDonald against Plato and Aristotle? In any event,
my point is that Schmitt's attempt to ground his Nazi apologetics in
Plato is based on a willful misreading out of context.
>>> Hell, first somebody owes you an explanation of "nation". There's
>>> no nation even mentioned in the US Constitution.
>> Try "We the People".
> That's _demos_, not _ethnos_. For a contemporary description of an
> _ethnos_, which is what MacDonald obviously means by "nation", see the
> Federalist No. 2:
>
> With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence
> has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united
> people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the
> same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same
> principles of government, very similar in their manners and
> customs....
>
> This country and this people seem to have been made for each
> other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that
> an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren,
> united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split
> into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
Actually, We the People comprises the δῆμος as represented by
the popular assembly that serves as the stage for protests against
unfair taxation in the Republic 8.565b. It also contains several
γένη partaking therein as per the Republic 8.565a. Finally, it
construes itself as a unitary γένος, a subject of ius gentium
entering into treaties with its compeers under the authority of
Articles VI and VII. The classical use of ἔθνος regards it as
a collection of γένη, as per the Timaeus 19d-e. Its emergence
as a potential political subject is a consequence of the French
Revolution. As you correctly observe, this anachronistic usage
cannot be accounted for by the U.S. Constitution. Needless to
say, this failure does nothing to support your postulation of
ethnic interests.
But you knew all that already, just as you knew that being descended
from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, or professing the
same religion is expressly repudiated by the Constitutional principles
as criteria that must be satisfied by individuals for belonging to the
American people.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
>>> Do you need to hear the standard disclaimer, that these are
>>> generalizations, and they don't apply to every individual or
>>> subgroup in the group? You're indulging in what I'd call the
>>> Capitalism of Fools, the foolish dismissal of group-level analysis
>>> on the grounds that every individual has his own unique interests.
>>> Denying an African-American interest in ending slavery because
>>> some African-Americans profited from it is especially egregious.
>> You are engaging in sophistry. Supposing for the sake of argument
>> that all African-Americans, and only they, were subject to
>> enslavement, and comprised a distinct and specific ethnicity, does
>> nothing to establish the ethnically African-American nature of any
>> specific interest in ending slavery. The interest in ending slavery
>> is neither more nor less that a universal human interest. Moral and
>> political wrongs taint their perpetrators at least commensurably
>> with any injury that they inflict upon their victims. See on this
>> Socrates' discussion with Callicles in the Gorgias.
> Um, are you serious? Anyway, no thanks.
Suit yourself.
>> Conversely, bestowing social preferences and financial reparations
>> predicated upon ethnicity and other factors disconnected from
>> personal merits and specific entitlements to legal remedies for
>> wrongdoing, tends to corrupt their recipients to the extent that
>> they are privileged thereby. It is especially stupid to ignore the
>> existence and content of a real debate regarding "affirmative
>> action", cutting across the community boundaries of its potential
>> beneficiaries.
> Of course there's a debate and there are principles. I'm just
> pointing out the glaringly obvious existence of ethnic interests, the
> crossing of ethnic boundaries notwithstanding. According to your
> economic-but-not-ethnic-interests view, working-class
> European-Americans and working-class African-Americans have about the
> same interests on the issue of affirmative action.
>
> Anyway, thanks for clarifying that your objection isn't to a theory of
> Jewish group strategy per se, but to the existence of any ethnic group
> strategy.
I am not in a position to object to a notion that I cannot begin to
understand. You seem to be referring to interests that attach to no
particular individual or corporate agent. As far as I can tell, they
fail to correlate with rights or responsibilities, and go unrecognized
under civil and common law. Neither observation nor introspection
instructs me on the manner whereby my actions are guided, influenced,
shaped, or motivated by any conceivable notions of Good for Jews, Good
for Russians, Good for Russian Jews, or Good for Jewish Russians.
Maybe you can help me out here. I suffer from a long-standing sexual
preference for Chinese women. In exercising this preference as much and
as often as I can, am I acting in accordance with, contrary to, or
irrespectively of, my ethnic interests? Am I realising Ethnic Treachery
by withholding my seed from Jewish women, Russian women, Russian-Jewish
women, or Jewish Russian women? Or am I serving the interests of my
Ashkenazi ethnos by creative outcrossing with differently provenanced
presumptive possessors of a higher-than-average IQ?
>>> I thought the civil rights movement was a well-known example of Jews
>>> acting in accord with perceived Jewish interests, or at the least not
>>> against their perceived interests.
>>>
>>> Regarding your examples of apparent defection from group strategy, no
>>> one ever suggested that defection was never rational, only that the
>>> net benefit of defection is often low relative to the net benefit of
>>> cooperation. Jews are like other ethnies in that many individuals
>>> have worked against group interests, like your African-American slave
>>> trader. See above, the Capitalism of Fools.
>>>
>>> Oh, and for the Red Army and the Bolshevik revolution, see Yuri
>>> Slezkine, _The Jewish Century_. You may be interested to know that
>>> Kevin MacDonald recently reviewed the book.
>> Imputing "perceived interests" does nothing to support the claim
>> that such perception has any basis in reality.
> Quite right. MacDonald's theory depends on the interests being real.
> I'm skeptical about the persistence of these strategies over
> millennia, so my view only implies Jewish group strategy in accord
> with perceived interests.
>
> I mentioned perceived interests regarding the civil rights movement,
> but it's also been seriously argued that in that case the Jewish
> interests were real. That is, Jewish participation in the Negro civil
> rights movement benefited Jewish Americans as a group, at least up
> through the Civil Rights Act of 1965 or whenever it was.
Can you recommend an authoritative real-time resource for coordinating
my individual choices with my ethnic interests?
>> Neither you nor MacDonald have done anything of the sort.
> MacDonald has certainly attempted to establish that the Jewish
> interests are real, whether you think he was successful or not. As
> for me, I think for instance there's a real Jewish interest in the
> Nazis not coming to power. Other examples are less clear cut, but the
> question is moot because you deny even the theoretical *possibility*
> of Jewish group interests.
I always try to be open to new ideas, particularly if they are
advertised as redounding to my benefit. Here is another concern: can
you recommend a reliable procedure for calculating and collecting my
rightful part of collective entitlements that you have postulated?
Alternatively, if you claim that I have already benefitted from their
unwitting collection, could you instruct me on the proper way of
accounting for the blessings thusly realized?
>> To the contrary, you are touting an account admittedly restricted to
>> a litany of subjectively perceived patterns of "group strategies"
>> short of accounting for any possible aetiology thereof or dynamic
>> factors operating therein. On this deliberately non-explanatory
>> level, you are far less credible than the purveyors of antisemitic
>> conspiracy theories boasting the advantage of postulating
>> clandestine collusions responsible for the tendencies and trends
>> they purport to find in the history of their suspects.
> I told you one putative mechanism: some Jewish intellectuals formulate
> and promulgate theories which they consciously believe will be Good
> for the Jews. How mysterious is that?
Surely this is not enough to postulate mechanism on the nomological
order of the needs for security and approval, let alone food, drink,
and shelter. For starters, you owe us an aetiological account that does
not collapse into a Just So Story.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Arindam Banerjee
The Other wrote:
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> writes:
>
> > The real problem with Jews (mostly decent, intelligent, hard-working
> > people) is that they do not tackle their bandarJews strongly enough.
>
> intelligent, hard-working people.
No doubt. I had our family doctor in mind when I made that statement.
But they do have the likes of so many I could name in their midst. Not
that that makes them any different from any other group! What is truly
remarkable about Jews - what sets them apart - is that they take
literacy very seriously; and so, have historically made detailed
records of their deeds, myths, etc on material.
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> I am not in a position to object to a notion that I cannot begin to
>> understand. You seem to be referring to interests that attach to no
>> particular individual or corporate agent. As far as I can tell, they
>> fail to correlate with rights or responsibilities, and go
>> unrecognized under civil and common law.
> They sometimes do correlate with positive rights (say, affirmative
> action) and responsibilities (say, to wear a yellow magen david on
> one's clothing). That's all beside the point, though. The concepts
> of nation and ethnie (as used here) and of national and ethnic
> interests do not depend on any notion of politics or state. I think
> the more intelligent one is, the harder it is to understand that.
Positive rights and responsibilities cannot correlate causally with
real interests. Besides, the right to benefit from affirmative action
is rapidly catching up in popularity with the responsibility to wear a
yellow magen david on one's clothing. As for your inverse correlation
between intelligence and understanding, it is unlikely to explain my
difficulties with your notions. In your Capitalism of Fools, I own
foolishness. It's capitalism that brings out the social retard in me.
>> Neither observation nor introspection instructs me on the manner
>> whereby my actions are guided, influenced, shaped, or motivated by
>> any conceivable notions of Good for Jews, Good for Russians, Good
>> for Russian Jews, or Good for Jewish Russians.
> Maybe your own actions aren't influenced by those notions then.
> Enforcement of cooperation is a lot weaker than it has been at times.
> But the fact that there was a glitch in your own socialization process
> doesn't say much about Jews as a group. Also, if a lot of Jews who,
> like you, deny any such influence, tended (statistically) to toe the
> Jewish line on issues like Israel etc., then their denial would be
> suspect.
Suspect, schmuspect. Give me an explanatory hypothesis, either one
postulating ethnic interests as socially primitive, reducible only to
biological needs, or one explaining them in the terms of individual
interests.
>> Maybe you can help me out here. I suffer from a long-standing sexual
>> preference for Chinese women.
> Finally you have made a reasonable declaration. My only admonition is
> to not forget the other Asian babes, and also those Polynesian girls.
> We must remember that diversity is not *all* bad.
I like Chinese. It's a blessing and a curse.
>> In exercising this preference as much and as often as I can, am I
>> acting in accordance with, contrary to, or irrespectively of, my
>> ethnic interests? Am I realising Ethnic Treachery by withholding my
>> seed from Jewish women, Russian women, Russian-Jewish women, or
>> Jewish Russian women?
> As the old Jewish proverb says, "Shiksas are for practice".
I dislike using people for practice.
>> Or am I serving the interests of my Ashkenazi ethnos by creative
>> outcrossing with differently provenanced presumptive possessors of a
>> higher-than-average IQ?
> There is in fact scientific evidence for heterosis in IQ.
You are being non-responsive.
>> Can you recommend an authoritative real-time resource for
>> coordinating my individual choices with my ethnic interests?
> Your local rabbi. That's what he's there for.
I have no use for pariah religiosity.
>> I always try to be open to new ideas, particularly if they are
>> advertised as redounding to my benefit. Here is another concern: can
>> you recommend a reliable procedure for calculating and collecting my
>> rightful part of collective entitlements that you have postulated?
> No, you won't find many algorithms in the social sciences.
Not even in the social science of balancing your checkbook?
>> Alternatively, if you claim that I have already benefitted from
>> their unwitting collection, could you instruct me on the proper way
>> of accounting for the blessings thusly realized?
> Sure: try a little harder on the observation and introspection. What
> country are you a citizen of? If the US, then which description is
> currently more common: "a people descended from the same ancestors,
> speaking the same language, professing the same religion" and a "band
> of brethren" (Federalist No. 2); or a "nation of immigrants"?
My naturalization curriculum claimed that this country got started by
immigrants off the Mayflower. Silly them.
> Didn't you once say you went to Harvard? Were there still Jewish
> quotas then?
Not that I know of. But we were reputed to have Asian quotas. Not a
hospitable environment for getting my daily Mandarin fix.
> I'm not saying it's easy to discern the degree to which these putative
> benefits were *caused* by Jewish influence. There's an interesting
> disagreement on that between Kevin MacDonald and Paul Gottfried --
> interesting, partly because their politics are pretty similar.
I muchly prefer the politics of Gilbert Gottfried. Is there a Jewish
national interest in telling The Aristocrats?
>>> I told you one putative mechanism: some Jewish intellectuals
>>> formulate and promulgate theories which they consciously believe
>>> will be Good for the Jews. How mysterious is that?
>> Surely this is not enough to postulate mechanism on the nomological
>> order of the needs for security and approval, let alone food, drink,
>> and shelter. For starters, you owe us an aetiological account that
>> does not collapse into a Just So Story.
> I don't understand your question. An ethnic strategy isn't solely
> responsible for putting food on the table. It might just help provide
> food that's a little tastier.
You would rather eat gefilte fish than pike quenelles?
> Like I said, I'm skeptical of the claim that the Jewish group
> strategies evolved over millennia, though I don't rule that out. But
> I don't see why you have to identify how some strategy got started,
> provided you know it *could* have gotten started. It's been argued
> long before MacDonald that the commandments regarding kashrut are part
> of an effective group strategy, but who knows how they first came
> about?
>
> For another example, hypotheses to explain high Jewish intelligence
> include founder effect, eugenics, and natural selection. As long as
> one or more of these is possible, it's possible that Jews have smarter
> genes. The point is that you could detect a genetic effect (if there
> is one) using behavior genetics methods alone, without knowing
> anything about the etiology. Analogously, you don't need to know
> etiology to show a group strategy (if there is one).
This part does not sound right, since theories are notoriously
underdetermined by observational data.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
>>> Also, if a lot of Jews who, like you, deny any such influence,
>>> tended (statistically) to toe the Jewish line on issues like
>>> Israel etc., then their denial would be suspect.
>> Suspect, schmuspect. Give me an explanatory hypothesis, either one
>> postulating ethnic interests as socially primitive, reducible only
>> to biological needs, or one explaining them in the terms of
>> individual interests.
> Well you didn't give me any good choices, did you? As I keep saying,
> you don't have to know the mechanism to know that something exists.
> But I think it's mostly just the usual group strategy thing, like
> barn-raising (to take a simple example): cooperation is beneficial
> provided many members cooperate to some degree or another; hence
> social pressures, incentives etc. in favor of cooperation and against
> defection. I guess that's closer to your "individual interests", but
> a genetic basis for ethnocentric group strategy (not just Jewish) is
> certainly plausible as well, so I wouldn't rule it out.
The choices you get are in keeping with the scientific claims you make.
There is nothing scientific in observation unsupported by explanation.
The best conceivable venue for your impressionism is a museum gallery,
not a university department.
>>>> Can you recommend an authoritative real-time resource for
>>>> coordinating my individual choices with my ethnic interests?
>>> Your local rabbi. That's what he's there for.
>> I have no use for pariah religiosity.
> That's fine, but the fact remains that the Jewish religion is largely
> dedicated to the interests of the nation of Israel, and a rabbi's main
> job has traditionally been to help Jewish individuals coordinate their
> actions with Jewish ethnic interests as expressed in halakhah.
Nothing in your facts supports the arrogation of moral or social, let
alone scientific authority to the Jewish religion. Bearing that in
mind, would you care to try answering the question as I asked it,
rather than as you see it fit for your tribal misconstrual?
>>> Sure: try a little harder on the observation and introspection.
>>> What country are you a citizen of? If the US, then which
>>> description is currently more common: "a people descended from the
>>> same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same
>>> religion" and a "band of brethren" (Federalist No. 2); or a
>>> "nation of immigrants"?
>> My naturalization curriculum claimed that this country got started by
>> immigrants off the Mayflower. Silly them.
> "Immigrants"? No, your curriculum wasn't silly, just corrupt. The
> Pilgrims didn't come to America in order to join American Indian
> society. The correct term is "settler" or "colonist".
Point taken. Then what is do you make of the settlers whose pedestrian
ancestors traversed the Bering Strait, in their political relation to
their seafaring successors? More generally, what does your analysis
make of all subsequent settlers in their political relation to all of
their predecessors? At which point do the entrenched settlers acquire
their authority to exclude new arrivals from following their precedent
of settlement at will?
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> I've actually thought about that question pretty much, but I still
> don't have a good answer. It depends largely on how settled the
> settlers have become, but also on more than that. It's hard for me to
> be more specific. The Indians certainly had that authority in
> America, as did the Arabs in 19th- and early-20th-century Palestine.
> But the Jews in 20th-century Jewish-settled Palestine? At what point
> did they get that authority, if ever? I could attempt a specific
> answer, but it would have to be filed under "Self-Deception, Jewish".
>
> So what's your answer? Are you aware of any good answers? I really
> like Camus's declaration about the pied-noir, "I love justice, but I
> love my mother more."
I have no good answer. As I argued several years ago, it is possible
to contrast the ethics of autonomy with the ethics of patrimony that
recognizes the collective claim to ancestral entitlements even as it
assumes collective guilt by parity of reasoning. Then you would have
Jews and Moslems duking it out over the Temple Mount, on the basis of
their conflicting accounts of celestial inheritance. But the American
settlers incur the additional burden of having to manufacture their
ideology of a City upon a Hill and its consequential Manifest Destiny,
out of whole cloth. And you are unlikely to get your ethnic interests
vouchsafed this way, without a great deal of confabulation concerning
the lost tribes and the Khazar legacy.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/msg/a127dbd267653bda?dmode=source&hl=en
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> ... As I argued several years ago, it is possible to contrast the
>> ethics of autonomy with the ethics of patrimony that recognizes the
>> collective claim to ancestral entitlements even as it assumes
>> collective guilt by parity of reasoning.
> Sure, and there are also ethics of patrimony where you inherit
> entitlements but not guilt. In some cultures, ours for instance, you
> can inherit your father's house yet not inherit liability for the
> crimes he committed -- even his stealing the house. Extended by
> analogy to homelands, positive rights, etc.
Please cite the statutes and precedents legitimizing inheritance of
stolen goods.
>> Then you would have Jews and Moslems duking it out over the Temple
>> Mount, on the basis of their conflicting accounts of celestial
>> inheritance. But the American settlers incur the additional burden
>> of having to manufacture their ideology of a City upon a Hill and
>> its consequential Manifest Destiny, out of whole cloth. And you are
>> unlikely to get your ethnic interests vouchsafed this way, without a
>> great deal of confabulation concerning the lost tribes and the
>> Khazar legacy.
> But that's not what we were talking about at all, is it? Two
> settlement enterprises: Europeans in America and Zionists in
> Palestine. Assuming that both "settlements" were illegitimate at the
> start but are legitimate now -- that's more or less how I see it,
> anyway -- at what point did they become legitimate? Recognizing of
> course that legitimacy is a fuzzy concept.
>
> Settlement ideologies seem irrelevant here, because by assumption,
> the ideologies could not justify either settlement at the start.
You are conflating two disparate scenarios. European settlers of North
America duked it out with their predecessors under ius gentium. They
appear to have been initially within their right under its provisions,
at least to the extent that the Indian nations had failed to establish
sovereignty over the continent in its entirety. Whereas the legitimacy
of Zionists settling in Palestine was chartered by a third party under
the Balfour Declaration. At any rate, I don't see any basis for the
sort of legitimizing transition that you discern in either instance.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
smw
The Other wrote:
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>
>>The Other wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Sure, and there are also ethics of patrimony where you inherit
>>>entitlements but not guilt. In some cultures, ours for instance,
>>>you can inherit your father's house yet not inherit liability for
>>>the crimes he committed -- even his stealing the house. Extended
>>>by analogy to homelands, positive rights, etc.
>>
>>Please cite the statutes and precedents legitimizing inheritance of
>>stolen goods.
>
>
> 1. Note that my example was stronger than needed to refute your
> "parity of reasoning" which you used to deduce collective guilt
> from collective inheritance. You can inherit your father's
> *legitimate* property without inheriting guilt for his crimes.
> I only needed this strong an example for my last sentence: the
> analogy with homelands.
>
> 2. I thought you can't sue for property taken from your father
> on the grounds that you *would* have inherited it. So if my father
> stole your father's house and bequeathed it to me, and both fathers
> are now dead, then the house is mine and you have no case.
>
> 3. If I'm wrong on point 2, then OK, instead of the father say it's
> the great-grandfather who stole the house. That's a closer analogy
> to what I'm talking about anyway, a statute of limitations on
> stolen homelands.
Thinking like a Swiss banker, I see.
David O'Bedlam
[...]
> there has been and continues to be an hostile Jewish domination of the
> Euro-American bourgeois class
In the United States? Bullshit. There's no such thing even in the New York
Times Book Review.
In general, there has been and continues to be hostile domination by white
Protestants of western European ancestry who were (and to a large degree
are still) based in the northeastern sector of the country. Ever heard of
Bill Gates, whose family -- like Dubya's -- comes from New England?
As for you Daddio, with Jews like you who needs Nazis? I say you're
secretly a Stormfronter or maybe a Black Muslim out to discredit Jews
by pretending to be one in order to give them a bad name.
--
"Some think it's noise, I think it's pretty."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) 2005 by 'TheDavid^TM' | David, P.O. Box 21403, Louisville, KY 40221
David O'Bedlam
> > Matt 15:21-28
> I've always thought that the Canaanite woman was the most "Jewish"
> character in the Gospels. Definitely more "Jewish" than was Jesus in
> this exchange.
Please explicate and elaborate about "Jewish"? And, separate question
perhaps, what might "Canaanite" have meant circa 14 AD/CE?
D.
Bill Tuthill
>
>> > Matt 15:21-28
>
>> I've always thought that the Canaanite woman was the most "Jewish"
>> character in the Gospels. Definitely more "Jewish" than was Jesus in
>> this exchange.
>
> Please explicate and elaborate about "Jewish"? And, separate question
> perhaps, what might "Canaanite" have meant circa 14 AD/CE?
Insofar as the book of Matthew was written as propaganda to convert Jews
to belief in Christ (later called Christianity), this parable makes it seem
that Jesus came to teach Jews, not non-Jews such as this Canaanite woman.
However after she professes belief, and presents a very good argument
about crumbs, he heals her daughter anyway.
Jesus: "It is not meet to take the children's bread, and cast it to dogs."
Canaanite woman: "Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall
from their masters' table."
[Dogs = Gentiles / crumbs = the Word / masters = Jewish people]
fla...@verizon.net
On 22-Dec-2005, David O'Bedlam <thed...@shell.rawbw.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Nov 2005, Sy Grass wrote:
> [...]
>
> > there has been and continues to be an hostile Jewish domination of the
> > Euro-American bourgeois class
>
> In the United States? Bullshit. There's no such thing even in the New York
> Times Book Review.
>
> In general, there has been and continues to be hostile domination by white
> Protestants of western European ancestry who were (and to a large degree
> are still) based in the northeastern sector of the country.
Facts mean nothing to sickos like this, but thanks for pointing them out,
anway.
Ever heard of
> Bill Gates, whose family -- like Dubya's -- comes from New England?
>
> As for you Daddio, with Jews like you who needs Nazis? I say you're
> secretly a Stormfronter or maybe a Black Muslim out to discredit Jews
> by pretending to be one in order to give them a bad name.
Got it in one.
Susan
Little Mojo Inside
> the Jewish religion is largely dedicated to the interests of
> the nation of Israel
By that last phrase do you mean "the Jewish people" or "the
nation-state of Israel"?
That is, do you think the neo-Nazis and Hamas-types are correct
to identify all Jews everywhere as de facto Israelis? This is
important because as you know the fact of required service in
the IDF and reserve status thereafter means every Israeli of
military age" can be regarded as a soldier, so identifying
"Jew" and "Israeli" implies that that every Jew of "military
age" anywhere in the world could be an "enemy combatant" to
Israel's enemies. That is, it sounds to me that you've just
conceded that it's perfectly okay for Hamas to blow up not
only a disco in Tel Aviv but a synagogue in Brooklyn or a
Starbucks in Scarsdale. They would use the same "logic" the
Bushites use, even "justifying" the deaths of any old women
and babies who happened to be there with shit like "It's an
unfortunate fact that those cowardly Zionists employ human
shields, and it's the Jews' fault for allowing them to."
How does painting a bullseye on every Jew between 18-60 differ
from requiring Jews to wear pointy hats or yellow stars? And
given anti-semites' penchant for violence, should I consider
going only to places where there probably won't be many Jews?
If enough Jews broadcast things that sound like "It's okay to
blow us up anyplace you find us!" the danger to bystanders
thereby increases. Please keep in mind that anti-semites
are by and large not extremely rational and brilliant people:
it would not surprise me if after Starbuck's gets suicide-
bombed Al-Jazeera reported on a communique saying "We don't
see why you're upset with us, the Jews themselves said it
was acceptable to them!"
This subject bugs me so because unnecessary (as I see it) and
potentially fatal polarization makes it hard to be a non-Jewish
anti-anti-semite. Would you want to stand very close to me if I
declared myself Fair Game to thousands of murderous loonies?
Concernedly,
D.
David O'Bedlam
> Little Mojo Inside <thedavid> writes:
> > The Other wrote:
> >
> > > the Jewish religion is largely dedicated to the interests of the
> > > nation of Israel
> >
> > By that last phrase do you mean "the Jewish people" or "the
> > nation-state of Israel"?
>
I was afraid so.
> > That is, do you think the neo-Nazis and Hamas-types are correct to
> > identify all Jews everywhere as de facto Israelis?
> Almost all Jews everywhere support the existence of the state of
> Israel, so I guess if you see it as an old-fashioned war between two
> peoples,
*I* don't see it that way. I see it as a neo-colonial struggle in a
particular area, with both sides having external backup. Without world-
wide mass communication (news, phones, etc.) it would not be a world-
wide problem -- and it would've been over already one way or another.
> then it makes sense for Hamas and other terrorists to hurt the Jews as
> much as they can.
So you do think it "makes sense" for Hamas to blow up everybody in a
Stabuck's in a Jewish neighborhood. Dammit Aaron, I hope plenty of Jews --
and anti-semites -- don't see it that way. Maybe if "'am yisra'el" and
the Muslim ummah (and/or Arab nation, whatever) could go off to another
continent or even another planet to fight it out, of course leaving behind
those Jews and Muslims/Arabs who don't support the war, then I'd have no
problem with it. But I suppose I could "cynically" be relieved by the fact
that there are so few Jews in Louisville, KY, and those are concentrated
way out in the East End suburbs where it takes so long to get on this
town's crappy bus system that I seldom bother to go there: the chances of
a terrorist blowing me up along with a bunch of Jews are even slimmer than
in NYC or even Baltimore.
I hope your use of the conditional "if" means you're not committed to that
view. I would not be pleased if you were blown up having tea in Tel Aviv,
nor do I endorse that kind of hard-hearted fanaticism. (I'm an anarcho-
communist hippie-type who grew up watching Star Trek re-runs, you know.)
> I think it's a waste of time to think about Hamas's rationalizations
> though, because they're obviously self-contradictory and they don't
> correspond with the group's actions.
I think that in serious issues with serious implications like this, people
should consider the effects of their actions -- and words that "justify"
actions by themselves and others -- on bystanders, even if their own lives
and the lives of "their kind" mean nothing to them. This might be just an
intellectual exercise to you, but we're talking about 'murderous loonies.'
By the way, do you view a Jewish 18 year old in Buenos Aires who has not
at least tried to report for service in the IDF as a "draft dodger"? I'd
think you'd have to by the War Of Peoples paradigm.
(Oh, Mr. The Other, I've not crossposted this to soc.culture.jewish
because you didn't; if anybody there argues with me I'll see what they
do. Crossposting to my own vanity newgroup helps me keep track, though.)
As for my views, I'll quote Zeleny: "Just as socioeconomic interests
cannot suffice to change the ethnicities of their subjects, so there is
nothing in their ethnicities to determine their interests. But for an
accident of birth, Ernst Kantorowitz would have made an excellent Nazi."
David O'Bedlam
> but you could certainly... put in a different conclude that the US
> should be given back to the Indians.
Right, it should. Or at least it should be a place where its aboriginal
inhabitants aren't routinely shat upon.
I'm all for "wetbacks" too: those Mexicans are but Spanish-speaking
"natives". E.g., the Mohawks replenished their numbers by adoption and
"conversion" so often for so long that I grin at the idea of anybody
being "full-blooded Mohawk", and if more people backed the Shawnee
Prophet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenskwatawa> it wouldn't matter
that their particular "tribes" weren't from around here.
(Does that make me a "lumper" too?)
David O'Bedlam
> > On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, The Other wrote:
> >
> > > > Matt 15:21-28
> >
> > > I've always thought that the Canaanite woman was the most "Jewish"
> > > character in the Gospels. Definitely more "Jewish" than was Jesus in
> > > this exchange.
> >
> > Please explicate and elaborate about "Jewish"?
>
> a position of weakness.
Ah, so Nietzsche was right about that?
> Hell, you oughta know what I meant, you're the most Jewish poster in
> this newsgroup.
I'll take that as a compliment, thought I'm not sure what you could mean
by my particular "position of weakness".
> > And, separate question perhaps, what might "Canaanite" have meant
> > circa 14 AD/CE?
>
> I don't know, but I think in other Gospels she's described as
> Syro-Phoenician. Jesus comes across as pretty WASPy in this exchange.
Certainly very stingy. And I've met plenty of Jews who were generous with
me anyway; hell, if you consider Trotskyism to be Jewish then several have
even offered to cut me in.
David
[...]
> To tell the truth, there's not much less interesting to me than the
> history of Jews in early modern Poland.
Funny, I find it fascinating, though I'm not sure what "Early Modern" is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland
(How do you feel about the history of the West Virginia hillbillies? Wanna
trade "ethic studies" subjects?)
D.
--
"You'd better understand that you're alone, a long way from home."
...................................................................
(C) 2005 TheDavid^TM | David, P.O. Box 21403, Louisville, KY 40221
John W. Kennedy
> On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, The Other wrote:
> [...]
>
>> To tell the truth, there's not much less interesting to me than the
>> history of Jews in early modern Poland.
>
> Funny, I find it fascinating, though I'm not sure what "Early Modern" is.
In general, "Early Modern" means "after Middle, before Present-Day".
Shakespeare writes "Early Modern English".
--
John W. Kennedy
"But now is a new thing which is very old--
that the rich make themselves richer and not poorer,
which is the true Gospel, for the poor's sake."
-- Charles Williams. "Judgement at Chelmsford"
David
[...]
> Finally, you are failing to explain the sense whereby on any construal
> of Jewish "group evolutionary strategy" in the diaspora it may be deemed
> a success, in view of its preponderantly redounding therein to natural
> population decrease. What exactly is at stake in this competition, if
> not reproductive fitness?
Ever read _1984_, specifically the "excerpts" from Goldstein's book and
O'Brian's comments to Winston as he's torturing him? There's a Wikipedia
entry on that: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstein%27s_book>.
Even if one doesn't believe (as I don't) that any elite would forgo other
pleasures for the sake of power and sadism (no caviar and pretty boys?),
it's in the interests of an elite to keep its membership small so that
those who are around will get more of what goes around. That's the nature
of an Elite anyway: how can it be truly l33t if every A0h3ll3r can do it?
(You're a smart guy, surely you knew this "principle.")
Michael Zeleny
>>> Sure, and there are also ethics of patrimony where you inherit
>>> entitlements but not guilt. In some cultures, ours for instance,
>>> you can inherit your father's house yet not inherit liability for
>>> the crimes he committed -- even his stealing the house. Extended
>>> by analogy to homelands, positive rights, etc.
>> Please cite the statutes and precedents legitimizing inheritance of
>> stolen goods.
> 1. Note that my example was stronger than needed to refute your
> "parity of reasoning" which you used to deduce collective guilt
> from collective inheritance. You can inherit your father's
> *legitimate* property without inheriting guilt for his crimes.
> I only needed this strong an example for my last sentence: the
> analogy with homelands.
>
> 2. I thought you can't sue for property taken from your father
> on the grounds that you *would* have inherited it. So if my father
> stole your father's house and bequeathed it to me, and both fathers
> are now dead, then the house is mine and you have no case.
>
> 3. If I'm wrong on point 2, then OK, instead of the father say it's
> the great-grandfather who stole the house. That's a closer analogy
> to what I'm talking about anyway, a statute of limitations on
> stolen homelands.
Collective guilt arises at the point of warranting the ethics of
patrimony. One way or another, you must come to terms with original
sin. Short of that, any collective claim to ancestral entitlements
assumes collective responsibility for their stewardship and collective
guilt for their misuse. Thus my parity of reasoning withstands your
handwaved counterexamples.
The statute of limitations tends to get tolled pending adjudication
after the claim has been asserted. Claims for stolen patrimony never
cease to be asserted. To invoke your favorite turn, in matters of law
you are talking out of your ass. Once again, I am asking for statutes
and precedents legitimizing inheritance of stolen goods. While your
uninformed speculation may be of interest to your psychiatrist, if
fails to address the issue between us.
>>> But that's not what we were talking about at all, is it? Two
>>> settlement enterprises: Europeans in America and Zionists in
>>> Palestine. Assuming that both "settlements" were illegitimate at
>>> the start but are legitimate now -- that's more or less how I see
>>> it, anyway -- at what point did they become legitimate?
>>> Recognizing of course that legitimacy is a fuzzy concept.
>>>
>>> Settlement ideologies seem irrelevant here, because by assumption,
>>> the ideologies could not justify either settlement at the start.
>> You are conflating two disparate scenarios. European settlers of
>> North America duked it out with their predecessors under ius
>> gentium. They appear to have been initially within their right under
>> its provisions, at least to the extent that the Indian nations had
>> failed to establish sovereignty over the continent in its
>> entirety. Whereas the legitimacy of Zionists settling in Palestine
>> was chartered by a third party under the Balfour Declaration. At any
>> rate, I don't see any basis for the sort of legitimizing transition
>> that you discern in either instance.
> I thought we were talking about moral, not legal, legitimacy. The
> British may have had the legal right to hand over part of Palestine to
> the Zionists, but it wasn't morally right. Likewise the European
> settlers might have had the legal right to grab land from the Indians,
> but that wasn't morally right either.
>
> At the start, these settlements were not morally OK. We probably
> agree that their existence is morally OK now. Again, when did that
> change? With the Zionists in Palestine, did it change before or after
> 1948?
The state has plenty of leeway to revoke and grant land titles in
accordance with public interest, pursuant to the doctrines of eminent
domain. Accordingly, similar evidentiary requirements apply to your
ladylike moral concerns. Please cite specific arguments that establish
your denial of moral legitimacy to lawful settlement.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> David O'Bedlam <thed...@shell.rawbw.com> writes:
> [...]
>> As for my views, I'll quote Zeleny: "Just as socioeconomic interests
>> cannot suffice to change the ethnicities of their subjects, so there
>> is nothing in their ethnicities to determine their interests. But
>> for an accident of birth, Ernst Kantorowitz would have made an
>> excellent Nazi."
> That was just Zeleny talking out his ass again. In context, Zeleny
> was denying that there are Jewish interests at all, not even a Jewish
> interest in the Nazis being defeated. The capitalism of fools.
To extend this notion into your domain of the capitalism of sages, the
conjectural Jewish interest in the Nazis being defeated stops short of
wishing their defeat to forestall the extermination of a number of Jews
sufficient to guilt the gentiles into granting an autonomous statehood
and a perpetual land title to the survivors, except in so far as this
consequence might conduce to yet another cycle of Jewish victimization,
emigration, deportation, concentration, and extermination. In other
words, it is a peculiar kind of group interest that fails to correlate
with any metric of advantage for every single member thereof.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> David O'Bedlam <thed...@shell.rawbw.com> writes:
> [...]
>> As for my views, I'll quote Zeleny: "Just as socioeconomic interests
>> cannot suffice to change the ethnicities of their subjects, so there
>> is nothing in their ethnicities to determine their interests. But
>> for an accident of birth, Ernst Kantorowitz would have made an
>> excellent Nazi."
> That was just Zeleny talking out his ass again. In context, Zeleny
Alan Meyer
<... It will be hard to say what he wrote in six days ...>
One of the fascinating aspects of this thread is that
"The Other" (of whom we can only say for sure that he
is not "The One") has set his X-No-Archive flag to
ensure that his postings are deleted from the Google
archive. So he will be known six days from each posting,
and forever after, only by those parts of his posts which
have been quoted by his respondents, if any.
You might wish to reconsider the effects of that Mr.
The Other. Do you want to be known only for what others
say about or against you with all of your positive arguments
deleted?
And do you really want to be known only as "The Other"?
And what could possibly be the point of both no-archiving
your postings and posting anonymously? Wouldn't
posting anonymously be quite enough to dissociate your
name from your ideas? Why also silence yourself?
It's possible that you've answered these questions
already, but if so, I'm afraid that more than six days
have passed and your answers have fallen into the
great bit bucket.
Regards,
Alan
David
> The Other wrote:
> > David O'Bedlam <thed...@shell.rawbw.com> writes:
>
> > [...]
>
> >> As for my views, I'll quote Zeleny: "Just as socioeconomic interests
> >> cannot suffice to change the ethnicities of their subjects, so there
> >> is nothing in their ethnicities to determine their interests. But
> >> for an accident of birth, Ernst Kantorowitz would have made an
> >> excellent Nazi."
>
> > That was just Zeleny talking out his ass again. In context, Zeleny
> > was denying that there are Jewish interests at all, not even a Jewish
> > interest in the Nazis being defeated. The capitalism of fools.
>
> To extend this notion into your domain of the capitalism of sages, the
> conjectural Jewish interest in the Nazis being defeated stops short of
> wishing their defeat to forestall the extermination of a number of Jews
> sufficient to guilt the gentiles into granting an autonomous statehood
> and a perpetual land title to the survivors, except in so far as this
> consequence might conduce to yet another cycle of Jewish victimization,
> emigration, deportation, concentration, and extermination.
Substitute "Zionist" for "Jewish" and admit that a considerable number of
Jews, such as some "religious fanatics" and some "political oddballs", are
anti-Zionist or at least non-Zionist, and I'll agree with you: that does
in fact seem like it was the Zionist Statehood strategy. That and blowing
up British government employees (the King David Hotel bombing was like the
Oklahoma City thing a decade ago), screwing the Palestinians in sharp land
deals and then gunning down those Arabs who didn't run fast enough (e.g.,
Deir Yassin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin). Sucked, didn't it?
> In other words, it is a peculiar kind of group interest that fails to
> correlate with any metric of advantage for every single member thereof.
Oh but isn't the nature of every group interest, at least these days? Some
must be sacrificed (or sacrifice themselves) so that others (usually those
with more power and/or money) can benefit. Think of the many Aryans the
Nazis wasted in pursuit of their "Noble Cause" and of all those Soviets
Ol' Uncle Joe failed to benefit (to say the least). For that matter how
many New Orleans dwellers, to consider "those sharing a floodplain" a
group, wound up getting much out of their investments of time and energy?
Being part of a Group sucks; the only thing worse is being a "lone wolf"
everybody hates.
Anyway, one thing I can say for the Zionists is they've managed to kill
fewer people than the Stalinists, though it is a curious metric of worth
to praise a shortfall of murder.
D.
--
"You'd better understand that you're alone, a long way from home."
...................................................................
(C) 2005 TheDavid^TM | David, P.O. Box 21403, Louisville, KY 40221
David
[...]
> gunning down those Arabs who didn't run fast enough (e.g., Deir Yassin,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin).
Sorry. I meant the massacre not the town in happened near.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
"Next year in Al-Quds!"*
D.
* Relax, I'm making a goofy joke. Personally I think Jerusalem should be
ruled by the Armenian Patriarch.
David O'Bedlam
> I thought the real problem with Jews is that they're mostly decent,
> intelligent, hard-working people.
You'd like them to be something else? If so, what?
D.
--
"Some think it's noise, I think it's pretty."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) 2005 by 'TheDavid^TM' | David, P.O. Box 21403, Louisville, KY 40221
Sy Grass
"David" <thed...@shell.rawbw.com> wrote in message
news:Pine.LNX.4.58.05...@troll.weezl.org...
> That and blowing
> up British government employees (the King David Hotel bombing was like the
Nothing like it, you sleep-walking goddam einsatzgruppen loving piss-drunk
dweeb in sheep-shit pseudo-lib clothing; not on your putrid uncircumcised
putz are they in the least way the same, and never mind the fact, as
recorded in any history of the IRGUN or biography of Menachem Begin (ISBN
0394528263, for one) that it was not a bomb but British arrogance which made
that operation so deadly, seeing as how Begin had agreed with LEHI (the
"Stern Gang" to such sabotage strictly on the proviso that the British
authority be warned some 20 minutes in advance of the explosion. Face
facts! They made the phone call and the conceited Limey bastards blew it
off.
That's right, because their limp and smelly goy prejudices, being quite the
same as yours, would not permit them to conceive the possibility that those
Jews, being just a bunch of dirty Jews, despised 'race' that they are, could
possibly be *serious*, so serious as to take the arrogance upon themselves
such as to think that the White Paper was anything to be that pissed off
about, simply because it came in so very, very handy in aiding Hitler's
program of extermination.
> screwing the Palestinians in sharp land
> deals . . .
Something like that shady operation in New York when your esteemed goyischer
Dutch fore-fathers bought Manhattan off the Mohawks for twenty bucks worth
of prime Virginia burley and bright? Something that "sharp"?
> and then gunning down those Arabs who didn't run fast enough (e.g.,
> Deir Yassin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin). Sucked, didn't it?
Just been reading Michael Oren ( http://tinyurl.com/cmxej ) in his book
covering that massacre, and the other at Qibya. Here's what your slimy
prejudices don't allow you to get: those actions were done strictly and
solely in necessary just retribution for similar and worse massacres
brought upon the Jewish settlers, as had been going on in Judea, not just
since the 1920s but ever since the beginning of the Islamic invasions circa
the 9th Century into that native Hebrew land, God damn your eyes! You seem
to forget, as does every other doctrinaire fundamentalist neo-lib or Muslim
(and there is no such thing as a non-fundamentalist Muslim) that there was
no such thing as "Islam" when the land of the Jews around Jerusalem came to
be named *Judea*. You jacklipped, slick-boot jerk who has no right to the
name, "David".
You come around slitting the throats of my women and children, I'm going to
do the job three-fold to yours at Deir Yassin. Just get that, and get it
good, eye for eye-wise.
No Jew should ever make apology for either the King David or Deir Yassin.
And this has been your EYE FOR EYE reply, that it might rip that stinky
foreskin of delusion away from your eyes, Goy Boy.
--
JP David http://www.mackiemesser.zoomshare.com/0.html
--
JP David http://www.virtualtourist.com/m/520b8/
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting
to improve the world." Anne Frank
--
.............................................................
> Posted thru AtlantisNews - Explore EVERY Newsgroup <
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> Access the Most Content * No Limits * Best Service <
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> Collective guilt arises at the point of warranting the ethics of
>> patrimony. One way or another, you must come to terms with original
>> sin.
> That's easy: no such thing. (Wait, didn't Elvis Costello say that?)
Le premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s'avisa de dire: _Ceci est
à moi_, et trouva des gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai
fondateur de la société civile. Que de crimes, de guerres, de
meurtres, que de misères et d'horreurs n'eût point épargnés au
genre humain celui qui, arrachant les pieux ou comblant le fossé,
eût crié à ses semblables: Gardez-vous d'écouter cet imposteur;
vous êtes perdus, si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que
la terre n'est à personne. Mais il y a grande apparence, qu'alors les
choses en étaient déjà venues au point de ne pouvoir plus durer
comme elles étaient; car cette idée de propriété, dépendant de
beaucoup d'idées antérieures qui n'ont pu naître que successivement,
ne se forma pas tout d'un coup dans l'esprit humain. Il fallut faire
bien des progrès, acquérir bien de l'industrie et des lumières, les
transmettre et les augmenter d'âge en âge, avant que d'arriver à ce
dernier terme de l'état de nature. Reprenons donc les choses de plus
haut et tâchons de rassembler sous un seul point de vue cette lente
succession d'événements et de connaissances, dans leur ordre le plus
naturel.
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de
l'inégalité parmi les hommes
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, conceived of
saying: _This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe it,
was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, and
murders, how many misfortunes and horrors might not have been spared to
mankind by him who, by pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditch,
would have cried to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor;
you are undone if you forget that the fruits belong to all, and the
earth itself to no one." But there is a great likelihood that by that
time things had already come to the point of no longer being fit to
continue as they were; for this idea of property, depending on many
prior ideas that could only have emerged successively, did not form all
at once in the human mind. It required the making of considerable
progress, the acquisition of considerable industry and knowledge, and
their transmission and accrual from age to age, before arriving at this
last point of the state of nature. Let us then consider things from a
greater remove, and endeavor to gather under a single point of view
that slow succession of events and discoveries in their most natural
order.
If you don't like Augustine, there remains Jean-Jacques in his most
natural order.
>> Short of that, any collective claim to ancestral entitlements
>> assumes collective responsibility for their stewardship and
>> collective guilt for their misuse. Thus my parity of reasoning
>> withstands your handwaved counterexamples.
> I think you're right, but their stewardship is not necessarily
> something owed to the ancestors. As Silke observed, I'm talking about
> a common "ethic of patrimony" (as you called it), a secular liberal
> one. Here's Thomas Paine from _The Rights of Man_, Part 1, "Being an
> Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution". In this
> paragraph Paine is arguing against Burke's idea of the nation.
>
> Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all
> cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity
> and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most
> ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in
> man; neither has any generation a property in the generations
> which are to follow. ... Every generation is, and must be,
> competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is
> the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When
> man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and
> having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world,
> he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its
> governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how
> administered.
>
> Obviously I'm not saying I like this "ethic of patrimony". I've
> already explained why I think Paine was wrong -- using the family
> analogy.
>
> Now here's where you do have a point: Paine is denying any
> responsibility to the dead, but not to the unborn. You could say that
> a generation is collectively responsible not to the preceding
> generations, but to the following ones. Only a nihilistic "ethic of
> patrimony" would deny that. But no collective responsibility to those
> who bequeathed the homeland.
You are just repeating your dogma at this point. Commutative justice
requires that every bequest be vouchsafed by a legitimate title held by
the testator, and accounted for by the transaction costs borne by his
legatees. Given the reality of such titles being challenged well in
advance of, and long after, their arrogation by the testator, the
transaction costs of his legatees are bound to accrue and persist
forever. This is your secular basis for the original sin inhering in
the ethic of patrimony.
>> The state has plenty of leeway to revoke and grant land titles in
>> accordance with public interest, pursuant to the doctrines of
>> eminent domain. Accordingly, similar evidentiary requirements apply
>> to your ladylike moral concerns. Please cite specific arguments that
>> establish your denial of moral legitimacy to lawful settlement.
> I thought it's obvious: colonial law has traditionally been written by
> the colonialists. Why would you even expect the law to be moral?
For all reasons comprising the White Man's burden, king Leopold
notwithstanding.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> To extend this notion into your domain of the capitalism of sages,
>> the conjectural Jewish interest in the Nazis being defeated stops
>> short of wishing their defeat to forestall the extermination of a
>> number of Jews sufficient to guilt the gentiles into granting an
>> autonomous statehood and a perpetual land title to the survivors,
>> except in so far as this consequence might conduce to yet another
>> cycle of Jewish victimization, emigration, deportation,
>> concentration, and extermination.
> That's a totally separate issue. You're mixing two issues here:
> whether it *was* in fact in the Jewish interest (a contingency), or...
As opposed to every other kind of historical contingency underwriting
the doctrine of perverse effects? Thus far you have failed to identify
any basis for distinguishing the causal mechanisms of guilt from the
causal mechanisms of retribution and expiation.
>> In other words, it is a peculiar kind of group interest that fails
>> to correlate with any metric of advantage for every single member
>> thereof.
> No, that is not "in other words". It's a different issue, and as it
> happens this one is the real issue under discussion: whether there
> *is* such a thing as an ethnic group interest.
>
> So that's your objection, then, nothing but semantics?! If one single
> individual will be worse off under a strategy of universal cooperation
> -- which will always be the case in a non-trivial group strategy where
> there's an individual payoff for defection -- then you object to the
> label "group interest"? Fine, call it something else then. Call it a
> common interest, I don't know. Or a quasi-group-interest. Whatever.
> Sheesh.
I object to the label because it fails to identify anything in nature.
Tell us how your theoretical construction of ethnic group interests
enables more reliable predictions or more persuasive explanations in
contrast to the economic or political analyses made in terms reducible
to individual interests. Your argument to date is indistinguishable
from a masochistic endorsement of political incorrectness painfully
familiar from Ernst Kantorowitz.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael Zeleny
> "Michael Zeleny" <larv...@gmail.com> writes:
>> To extend this notion into your domain of the capitalism of sages,
>> the conjectural Jewish interest in the Nazis being defeated stops
>> short of wishing their defeat to forestall the extermination of a
>> number of Jews sufficient to guilt the gentiles into granting an
>> autonomous statehood and a perpetual land title to the survivors,
>> except in so far as this consequence might conduce to yet another
>> cycle of Jewish victimization, emigration, deportation,
>> concentration, and extermination.
> That's a totally separate issue. You're mixing two issues here:
> whether it *was* in fact in the Jewish interest (a contingency), or...
As opposed to every other kind of historical contingency underwriting
the doctrine of perverse effects? Thus far you have failed to identify
any basis for distinguishing the causal mechanisms of guilt from the
causal mechanisms of retribution and expiation.
>> In other words, it is a peculiar kind of group interest that fails
>> to correlate with any metric of advantage for every single member
>> thereof.
> No, that is not "in other words". It's a different issue, and as it
Lewis Mammel
Michael Zeleny wrote:
> The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, conceived of
> saying: _This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe it,
> was the true founder of civil society.
Isn't this a ridiculous miscomprehension of our history? Many
animals asserts rights of territory. The blackbird is notably
vociferous in doing so. Are we any simpler ?
Michael Zeleny
I quoted Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the origin and the foundations of
inequality among men, expecting the familiarity of this discourse to
bear out my point about its postulation of a secular counterpart to the
original sin in societies that endorse and maintain the transmission of
perpetually contested property titles between generations. I doubt that
such circumstances arise in the societies of lower animals, but if you
think otherwise, by all means feel free to make your case.
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
smw
Lewis Mammel wrote:
ObBook: _Nomos of the Earth_
Lewis Mammel
When I read that the first time, I read it as _Nomos of the North_
and I thought you were making some kind of convoluted joke on
_Nanuk of the North_ . Honest to God.
It's somewhat of a relief to find it's an actual book, and apparently
a rather pedestrian one at that, having seen the table of contents
online. For surely we can anticipate the essential content of a book
with a chapter entitled, "The advent of Eurocentrism" .
The entry for "nomos" in Liddell and Scott is interesting.
The first meaning is a cow pasture, hence an alloted place,
hence anything assigned, as usage, a custom, law ordinance;
but first a cow pasture - property.
HAPPY NEW YEAR !
Lew Mammel, Jr.