Modernity is when everyone becomes urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually complex, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling castes for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernity, in other words, is when everyone becomes a Jew.
Yuru Slezkine, The Jewish Century
The English translation is atrocious, so if you can read in the original Russian do that instead. I had to edit this quote to make it readable because the translation is so poor.
Clarissa's Blog 
I usually don’t read books about Jews or Jewish history, but this one sounds interesting. Is it really good and even worth buying this book for, if I don’t find online?
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I’ll keep writing about it and posting quotes, and then you’ll be able to decide. I only just started but I’m reading it in Russian, so it will be fast.
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It is very interesting to be reading this right after Paul Kingsnorth who is completely opposed to modernity.
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So… what do these people eat, when nobody grows food?
-ethyl
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Growing food moves from the most important occupation to a marginal one.
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With modern technology, only two percent of Americans work in agriculture. With only this we also produce a massive food surplus.
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Exactly. The separation of human beings from the process of growing their own food (and increasingly not only making it but even bringing it to their own homes) has deep spiritual connotations that are discussed way too rarely. We have taken ourselves out of the natural cycles and both our bodies and our minds feel it. Whether this is good or bad is an issue we can discuss but that it’s real and significant is undeniable.
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Yes, quality matters.
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Yes, and we produce some of the lowest-quality food anywhere. I appreciate that we have a surplus and nobody starves, but you’d think with all that surplus labor and resources freed up… we could at least make high-quality food available?
-ethyl
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Terrible quality food, for sure. And a growing medical apparatus to compensate. And a growing list of disability services often to compensate for the same problem. Like people who are so obese they have to move on scooters.
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The quality of Canadian food may be a slightly better, but relatively few people still know how to cook properly. Some grasp that beef should be no more than medium rare, but so should venison, as well as the breasts of most flying birds. And almost nobody knows enough to brown a turkey breast side up then finish the bird breast side down to keep it moist. A long lost Oatmeal Savage secret for you Kid, as we approach Easter ;-D
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OK, now I’m really hungry. And all I have at home are extremely healthy kotlety I made for N because he was having a medical procedure. They are very, very healthy and equally sad. They look sad, they taste sad, they are just sad.
The procedure went great and he’s fine. So my efforts paid off.
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It’s so annoying. These people produce one or two illiterate dopamine junkies with a flat subjectivity of a platypus but are telling us that they are extremely exhausted from the parenting that consists of providing screens and takeout pizza. One would think they are slaving over homeschooling classical reading curricula and cooking healthy meals from scratch all day.
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What did you do? I only had that once by a girlfriend with a Ukrainian grandmother. It was just a high quality meatloaf ;-D
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Instead of frying, as usual, I vapor cooked it. The result looks pale and menacingly healthy.
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For safety reasons, flightless birds like commercially grown turkey and chicken should be cooked to 165-180°F. The latter, higher temperature somewhat tenderizes the thighs. And speaking of safety ;-D
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😆😆😆
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I read this post after the one about a mercurial society. You are right. It is original. Thank you for translating that quote and making it more intelligible.
Ol.
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\\ The English translation is atrocious, so if you can read in the original Russian do that instead.
In several places on Internet, it’s mentioned that this book was originally written in English and then translated into Russian.
Since the author is a professor in USA writing in English makes more sense.
His “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution” was published by
Princeton University Press in 2017, so must’ve been originally written in English too.
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Maybe that’s why the English version is so bad. The author might not know the language well enough to write clearly.
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The 20th century was definitely the Jewish century is SA.
https://aish.com/the-jews-of-johannesburg-south-africas-thriving-jewish-community/
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See? Slezkine’s theory is working.
His theory even explains the Palestinian Nayib Bukele’s success in El Salvador 20 years before Bukele came to power. And people claim that social sciences have no predictive power.
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We also have more than our fair share of psychos. The original bomb them back to the stone age was a Rhodesian.
https://samilhistory.com/2022/10/07/bomber-harris-bugle/
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What would the Slezkine interpretation of Bukele be?
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Bukele is from a small nomadic community of tradesmen outsiders. Slezkine says that these are the most successful people in many societies and gives a list of such groups that is a mile long. Fascinating stuff.
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