For antisemites, wherever bad things happen you can find a Jew, and that proves that Jews were behind it. The tragic and inconvenient thing is that if you look hard enough you can often—by no means always—find some Jews involved in bad things. But you can also find them involved in good things—that just doesn’t count. Sometimes, when you can’t find some convenient Jews people just make up Jewish involvement.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/the-ka-ching-theory-of-truth/
This is a very lazy manipulation of the sort that the left loves and the right should avoid.
Take violent crime. Of course, not all black people are violent criminals. The overwhelming majority of black people are law-abiding and peaceful. But it’s also true that black people are over-represented among violent criminals. We aren’t allowed to mention this clearly observable fact of reality because we are told it’s offensive to the law-abiding and peaceful black people. Confusing over-representation with blanket condemnation gets us to a place where we have to pretend that reality doesn’t exist.
The same manipulative trick undergirds the quoted article by Jonah Goldberg. Jewish people are massively over-represented among the fanatical far left. This doesn’t mean that all Jews are far left. I’m not. Goldberg isn’t. But compared with the Jewish share of the population, the presence of Jewish people among the far-left groups is really striking. Why shouldn’t we talk about it? And why shouldn’t we talk about the over-representation of black people in violent crime?
Screeching “anti-semite” at everybody who notices that 80% of the people at their workplace with BLM stickers and land acknowledgements have last names like Haimovitz is akin to calling people racist for noticing violent crime statistics.
Clearly, there’s something that makes far-left ideology attractive to an outsize number of Jewish people. I would like to be able calmly to discuss what that is.
The terror of generalizations about shared traits stems from the idea that everybody is a unique individual and can’t possibly have any characteristics that one hasn’t freely chosen.
This idea is utterly stupid, though. There is a million of things about us that we haven’t chosen. We are a product of genetics, upbringing, history, ethnicity, sex, race, culture and other things. And if we want to have choice and control, we need to recognize that such factors have a gigantic limiting presence. We have to know what those limits are and how much we can modify them. No, you can’t quit being a woman and become a man. But you can decide to be a non-traditional, stereotype-buckling woman and enjoy yourself massively. No, you can’t sprout a second head but you can understand the reasons why certain ideas appeal to the head you already have.
Women are massively over-represented among people who endlessly bitch about their spouses on social media. Massively. I’m a woman who’d rather chew her leg off than post a weepy video with complaints about my husband on TikTok. But I’m not blind. I can observe and state openly that almost all such posters are female. The overwhelming majority of women on the planet don’t do such stuff. But those who do are almost all women. Most dogs aren’t poodles but all poodles are dogs. Why is this so hard to comprehend?
I just can’t take it if we are now going to start embracing the fear of over-representation on the right.
Clarissa's Blog 
A rare case of true human dignity (in Russian) in former FSU:
Случай в Таджикистане
По поводу так называемой “пропаганды гомосексуализма” и последнего российского закона об оной: вы ведь читали мою серию рассказов “Голое Солнце” про юность в Таджикистане, я всё грожусь написать вторую часть. Так вот: писал один черновик ещё в прошлом году, утратил на бывшей работе, может, восстановлю, может и не нужно, может дополню как-то. Но там в центре рассказа реальная история, в университете произошла, сейчас хочу поделиться к месту.
https://paszekpielawski.livejournal.com/2972108.html
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Latest news:
// Arab World for Research & Development (AWRAD) surveyed 668 residents of the West Bank (WB) and Gaza Strip. The results of the survey can be summarized in a few words – we want war and support terror.
59% fully support the invasion of southern Israel on October 7 and another 15.7% partially support. In the West Bank, the degree of support is higher (68%, 15%) than in the Gaza Strip (46.6%, 17%).
Of all the options for solving the Palestinian problem, 74.7% choose “A Palestinian state from Jordan to sea,” that is, the destruction of Israel. The “two states for two peoples” formula is supported by only 17% of Palestinians.
Of all the political forces, the most positive attitude is towards “Islamic Jihad” (60%); Hamas is in the second place (48%).
72% believe that the Palestinians will win the current war, and 95.8% are confident that they will never forgive the Israelis for what they did during the hostilities.
79% of respondents expected that the end of the war will lead to the release of all Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails.
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More typical Clarissa: cogent, clear, and useful.
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Good eye, Clarissa.
I was wondering whether being a philologist might help in recognising obfuscation and manipulation since one is trained to look at things in detail before making any hypothesis, and then to look at the big picture to see if the hypothesis fits. But then I told myself, no, that wouldn’t help. The Nazi officer charged with the spoliation of the library of Rome’s Jewish Community – one of Europe’s richest and oldest such libraries – was a Professor of Semitic Philology.
No, one just needs intellectual honesty and integrity, and the courage to call things by their name.
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I’ll further strengthen this claim: the Third Reich was fuelled by Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric, but it was supported with much more strength by the economics of Hjalmar Schacht and the juridical philosophy of Carl Schmitt.
And this is why Leo Strauss in his lectures on Maimonides drew attention to “texts within texts” (sorry, Clarissa) not as a means to obfuscate and to destroy knowledge through millions of little “paper cuts”, but instead as a means of hiding information from all but those already attuned and aware enough to receive it in good faith.
If you will begin to see Strauss, Spinoza, and so forth as the savers of structured knowledge from the barbarian hordes of the thinking as well as the unthinking, the structures of the opposing groups make more sense.
This is a commonplace blind spot for academics in general, BTW.
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“Confusing over-representation with blanket condemnation gets us to a place where we have to pretend that reality doesn’t exist”
AKA Sailer’s “war on noticing”…. there’s lots of things I like and admire in traditional African American culture and a fair amount that I don’t…. in the last 8 years or so the idea has repeatedly been made that the (I though minority) things I don’t like (indifference to Black on Black crime or any other crime committed by Blacks, glorification of pimps and other criminals, excuse making for various failures, use of violence to settle disputes, disregard for any rules of public decorum) are the absolute holy essence of the African American experience and unless you celebrate them you’re a member of the Klan….
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Heh. Even my father, who is a to-the-bones Vietnamophile, loves the culture of entrepreneurship, the poetry, the music, the efficiency, the food, the pragmatism… he would have loved to add a Viet daughter-in-law to the family. But even with all that adulation, warned us in no uncertain terms to stay away from Viet men, even the first-gens who’d been born stateside. “In another generation they’ll be totally American– but right now they still belong to a culture where it’s OK to hit women, and new wives are slaves of their mothers-in-law. You don’t want to get involved in that.”
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“We aren’t allowed to mention this clearly observable fact of reality because we are told it’s offensive to the law-abiding and peaceful [of a group] … Confusing over-representation with blanket condemnation gets us to a place where we have to pretend that reality doesn’t exist.”
And this evaporates when viewed through the prism of “self-policing” and its failings.
It works like this: those in the majority will look askance from certain matters and not bring them up as long as your group will self-police.
Thus begins a period under which that group can get away with violence performed by a minority of its members by being held to a “community standard” which is conveniently not enforced.
The majority, seeing that this compact is not being lived up to, eventually decides that this over-representation deserves a blanket condemnation because this state of “separate but equalness” helped create the specific distribution of problems that people outside the group keep noticing.
Had the group genuinely “self-policed”, this wouldn’t be an issue as the numbers of problems over time would trend with the majority or better, effectively disappearing.
Other forms of this include situations in which a group may take advantage in other ways, especially in economic ways, in which they arbitrage a lifestyle funded by the majority.
Do these groups take the hint, give up their special status as well as “self-policing”, or do they push it so hard that everyone outside the group finally notices?
Usually it plays out the latter way, after which a blanket condemnation summarily appears as a natural tendency to push back.
It’s possible some people misunderstood what was meant or implied by genocide being a part of the business or economic cycle, so let’s deal with that now.
The Jewish people of Israel have been dealing with this collapse of “self-policing” over a long period.
They are dealing with a group that was trusted with “self-policing” and failed at it, and very recently Israel’s response has been to bulldoze the dysfunctional and illegitimate organisations terrorising them literally into the ground.
The group terrorising them could have sought integration and better relations, but instead sought outside help to keep their status quo, which turned their most notable political organisation into an excuse making engine for criminal and terrorist activity.
They may yet be led away from this state of affairs.
But it’s actually the Jewish people that are more at risk of genocide than these remnants of previous failed attempts to leverage special privileges with the threat of violence.
Apparently violence doesn’t taste as good when that’s your own blood filling up your mouth.
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