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.

I just found out that one of the Central Park rapists from 1989 was elected a Councilman in NYC last week.

He ran with the same party that has spent years screeching about Trump’s pussy comments. Apparently, whatever Trump said in the famous tape is a lot worse than an actual gang rape that put a woman into a coma.

There’s an important lesson in SBF’s story. And that lesson has to do with boundaries.

The world we live in puts up fewer and fewer boundaries for us. There are fewer external boundaries than at any previous time in history. We can have any kind of sex life, for instance, and nobody cares. We can wear whatever we want or cover ourselves with piercings and tattoos according to our individual judgment. We can go on social media and gush out emotions. There are no externally imposed dietary boundaries. And so on and on.

The only boundaries we have are self-imposed. Nobody is coming to tell us to stop wasting time, money, energy, breath, etc. It’s up to us to build boundaries and defend them. Those few who get it and boundary up severely will be OK. The rest will be screwed.

Sam Bankman-Fried made an outrageous amount of money in a very short time and with minimal effort. He could have had a really nice life. But instead he lost everything and is going to jail. And the only reason is that he knew nothing about boundaries. He hemorrhaged money so fast it was impossible to cover the losses. Nobody ever told him about self-discipline, self-control, self-imposed routines and limits. Reading about his absolutely insane spending, I felt like surrounding myself with sofa cushions on all sides. The torrential gushing of this individual is uncomfortable to hear about, let alone imagine.

Different people will construct their boundaries out of different materials. The important thing is to do it. Find a structure to keep yourself in check and avoid becoming a human geyser like the poor, confused SBF.

To be clear, I’m incapable of understanding Bankman-Fried’s financial machinations and can’t pass judgment on their legality. I say he’s a poor excuse for a human because of his personal qualities, not his business decisions. He’s a guy who has an excellent brain for math. That’s all he is. He’s extraordinarily uneducated and just downright stupid in everything else. Yet he’s never been able to comprehend his limitations. He decided that his gift for math gives him the right to judge what’s good and what’s bad and refashion the world with his money.

Bankman-Fried has no humility, no desire to learn, and no self-awareness. Somebody referred to him in the comments to my previous post as “a financial narcissist”. That’s exactly what he is. A huffy, pouty narcissist who is unable to notice anything beyond his permanently wounded fee-fees.

It’s scary to observe these man-children with pots of money who, instead of just running their social media companies, launching rockets or selling crypto, start meddling in politics, buying elections, and refashioning society to make their extreme sexual and personal dysfunction stand out less.

What lies at fault here is our messed up understanding of intelligence. We don’t see the difference between hardware and software. Bankman-Fried has superior hardware that he got as a fluke of nature or a gift from God. But he never bothered to download any software onto his outstanding hardware. As a result, his brain produced defective results.

There are things that I have in common with Bankman-Fried, and that demonstrates that even people from different galaxies can find common ground.

For instance, he always played video games or worked on documents while speaking with people in Zoom or getting interviewed for live TV. Michael Lewis interprets this as meaning that Bankman-Fried was incapable of maintaining contact with other people. Like he was an almost non-verbal autistic who immediately switched off whenever people spoke to him.

But that’s not how it works. I don’t play videogames or work on documents during Zoom conversations to avoid hearing people. To the contrary, I do it because I want to hear. My brain is very busy and if I don’t occupy it, I’ll get distracted and miss everything the person on the other side of the screen is saying.

Lewis is simply projecting his own incapacity to maintain several open and active channels in his brain on Bankman-Fried.

Inside the dust jacket of the book about Sam Bankman-Fried, there is the organization chart of his businesses. It’s so funny, it’s like an illustration to an article about group IQ distributions. Top ten rows are all Asian names. Then some Anglo names appear with an odd Italian cropping up. And some Hispanics on the very bottom. And, unsurprisingly, a Jewish guy on top of it all.

People get freaked out about IQ but it’s silly because IQ doesn’t guarantee happiness. Mine is clearly much lower than Bankman-Fried’s. Some of the statistics games he played I can’t even comprehend, let alone play. But when I read the letters he exchanged with his girlfriend, God, those poor bastards were pathetic. Bankman-Fried was clinically miserable. Completely incapable of enjoying anything. My life is a fountain of joy compared to those of all these woke geniuses with their IQs, boatloads of money, and “polyamorous child-free socially conscious lifestyles”.

There’s always at least one Orthodox Jewish passenger on the NYC-Montreal flight. Today we had a young couple with a baby. The other passengers were going out of their way to be kind and solicitous to them. A couple of people came up to bump fists with the husband. A young guy ran to Starbucks to buy bottles of water for the young family. A warm, kind feeling surrounded these Jewish passengers.

Everybody who is remotely capable of it knows what’s right.

It’s very true that it is important always to hear the other side. I was convinced that nothing would ever persuade me to feel compassion towards Sam Bankman-Fried, a woke billionaire and a fraudster. But Michael Lewis shares some anecdotes about Bankman-Fried’s childhood in his book Going Infinite, and it becomes clear that the man’s psychological dysfunction was carefully manufactured by his far-left hippie professor parents.

One story shows how Bankman-Fried’s parents, who were too busy to parent, convinced the poor boy that the reason why he was deprived of birthday celebrations, family outings, and friends was because he didn’t want them. Another anecdote features an essay written by a 12-year-old Bankman-Fried where the miserable kid tries to argue away his disgust with abortion to please his woke mommy. At the age of 12, an opinion about abortion doesn’t have much to do with abortion per se. It’s much more about the child’s right to exist outside of the mom’s will. In his essay, a pre-teen Bankman-Fried arrives at a conclusion that even though abortion is murder, it should be ok to commit that murder if it’s convenient to the mother. You don’t have to be Freud to figure out what the boy was actually trying to say and who was the addressee of his essay.

Of course, Bankman-Fried is completely responsible for his actions as an adult. He’s a piece of shit human, and that’s 100% on him. But I can’t avoid feeling a stab of pity for a boy who, at the age of six, was begging his mother to give him permission to enjoy an amusement park and at 12 was still begging for permission to enjoy his own life.

In Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite, there’s this great (and completely true) story about a mega powerful Wall Street firm that used extremely effective statistical calculations to guess the result of the 2016 election. They knew before anybody else that Donald Trump would win the presidency. Statistics worked! Algorithms worked!

But then the human factor came into play. The fancy Wall Street guys detested Trump. (Obviously). So they assumed that his win would tank the market. They bet heavily on that, making gigantic trades on what was, in fact, simply their irrational emotional response to Trump.

They ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars. All those algorithms, all the data, the calculations. The supposedly autistic, unemotional MIT physicists hired to be traders. The absolutely correct information about the Trump win obtained scientifically hours before anybody else in the world. All sacrificed for an irrational, childish dislike rooted in herd mentality.

So for those Wall Street fellows, the day after the election was not only emotionally devastating but financially crushing. They bet on their fee-fees and lost. It was the largest single loss in the company’s history but the CEOs didn’t punish the traders. They understood and shared the wounded feelings that had caused the mistake.

This is just absolutely hilarious. 🦬 🦬 🦬

These are the same people who have been supercilious towards the MAGAs. And no, it’s not just a TikTok phenomenon. This is a wide-spread belief system on the left.