2rafa
3d ago
No, because I think in that case you’d also have to consider the downstream effects of all Jewish innovations in technology, science, medicine, engineering and other sectors of the economy, which would make it too difficult to calculate.
The Irish and Welsh have aggressively tried language revival for decades to little avail. Billions spent on little-watched TV and other media in those languages, extremely regular classes for all grades in schools starting from a young age, all official documentation, forms, street signs etc in Welsh/Irish.
All it does is create a small middle class of true believer left-nationalists (common in Europe see Scotland or Catalonia) who subsist of taxpayer funding and are paid to act as a kind of living museum.
It only worked in Israel because at that time even most educated Arab and Shtetl Jews did not speak English as a common language, so they could pick their (re)invented language. If most early migrants to Israel had spoken English or Yiddish, one of them would have become the language. Actually, if the later wave of 70s to 90s Soviet migrants had moved to Israel in 48 the de facto official language would have been Yiddish.
2rafa
4d ago
A January 2020 survey regarding Orthodox political views from the Nishma Research institute found that 53% of Modern Orthodox Jews identify as Democrat, liberal, progressive or left-leaning compared to 37% who describe themselves as Republican, conservative, right-leaning or libertarian.
They do skew Democratic, although the reason for this given by the head of the polling company is:
As a possible explanation for the overall leftward lean of the Modern Orthodox, Trencher pointed to additional 2015 polling data from the Pew Research Institute that found roughly 40% of the subset’s members to be ba’alei teshuva — those who adopt a fully observant lifestyle after having been raised not religious...When [those ba’alei teshuva] are asked if there’s anything that they do hang on to [once they start leading a more religious lifestyle], they say ‘liberal political views,'” Trencher said.
It's likely that as the born Modern Orthodox population expands significantly those politics will shift over time. There have also been some questions about Nishma's data on some Orthodox forums. There's other stuff like:
NEW YORK — An overwhelming percentage of Orthodox Jews in the United States plan to cast their ballots for President Donald Trump come November, according to a poll published Wednesday...The survey from the community’s Ami Magazine found that a whopping 83 percent of Orthodox Jews said they will vote for Trump, compared to just 13% who said they’d support the Democratic Party’s nominee, Joe Biden. Four percent of respondents are undecided, with just 20 days remaining until the election
Ami leans Chareidi but isn't exclusively so. It's a mixed bag, as the poll shows many people who call themselves Modern Orthodox are liberal Jews who were hooked by Chabad and started being religious later in life. They're not suddenly going to drop all their progressive politics because they become more faithful with age. But certainly it is true that being more religious is by far the single biggest predictor of conservative politics among Jews (as it is among whites and hispanics in many cases for that matter afaik).
2rafa
4d ago
I do sometimes wonder what the total Jewish balance of funds regarding US public finances is. If you count all tax contributions including capital gains, income taxes and so on, subtract all welfare and other spending (including aid to Israel), is it positive or negative? I suspect it is still positive in the long term, but I can see that being incorrect.
2rafa
6d ago
Would this change things?
I suppose that depends on whether you consider the defining cause of the loss of white tribal identity to be those
anthropologists and social scientists
rather than something that precedes them.
What does Shia LaBeouf tell us, who has a much larger cultural influence?
I don’t think it tells us anything, but historically Jews converting to Christianity has been much more common than Christians converting to Judaism.
2rafa
2d ago
If he’s making $20m in a month I can’t see what’s so pressing about avoiding his kid’s birth.
2rafa
2d ago
Well I have no intention of voting for Biden in November, so I’m well aware of that choice. I just think that’s the reality of the American political system and why a genuine dealmaker (not merely an insider like Biden, although I’ve been surprised at what he’s done despite his incompetence and senility) is the ideal candidate for either party.
2rafa
4d ago
From 2019:
In the 2017 election, 67% of Jewish voters backed the Tories and 11% supported Labour, according to figures supplied by JPR. A poll this autumn suggested that Jewish support for Labour in next week’s election could fall to 6%.
The first and as yet only Jewish Prime Minister was Disraeli in the 1860s and 1870s.
2rafa
1hr ago
Marjorie Taylor Greene
The biography From Prostitute To President: An American Tale will be worth it.
Great post. The simple truth is that unless…
- Trump wins
- The GOP get a trifecta with a very comfortable senate majority
- They abolish the filibuster
- Trump is suddenly hugely more competent at wrangling Congress
…there will be no better deal than this one. That is to say that even if Trump wins, the chance of a better border control bill is minimal at best. If this hill had passed under Trump, he would have signed it. Of course it wouldn’t, because there’s no way Democrats would vote for it in that case.
There is no way this isn’t a mega black pill. But the ultimate black pill is that it’s really all about Trump. There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago. The fact that Trump was personally able to kill this bill is testament to the extent to which service to his personal whims and (perceived) self-interest are now the sole metric by which congressional Republicans are and wish to be judged.
There is no plan, and if there is, Trump doesn’t even seem committed to following it. Sure, I’ll still vote for him, that’s the reality of a two-party system. But no Trump voter should be under any illusions that his second term won’t be him attempting some (likely unsuccessful) crusade against those he believes have wronged him (personally) while behind the scenes very little changes.
“Buh buh buh this doesn’t deport 10/12/15 million illegals”. Yeah, and neither will anything that Donald Trump can, let alone will, accomplish in office. Moreover, if by some stroke of luck this bill had passed and Trump won and decided to become competent, it would afford him MORE power to reduce inflows and impose ZERO meaningful restrictions on additional actions by the president or congress to increase deportations.
Moreover, 50,000 additional immigration visas a year is nothing compared to the current numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, so focusing on this was especially retarded.
Few things make me seethe more than what happened with this bill. As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters. It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends. Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time. Every single measure that reduces total inflows must pass. Unless, apparently, it might make it a little harder for Donald Trump to win the presidency and accomplish nothing, again.
2rafa
3d ago
I mention this last point as its been surfaced by the retirees I've spoken to about why they chose to move there, repeatedly, without prompting.
Surely there are ‘virtually no Jews’ in the vast majority of the US. What were their negative experiences with Jewish people if you asked?
why you and other ostensible progressive organizations do not seem to care about their enclave or crime
In NY state and in NJ it’s often secular Jews at the forefront of anti-Haredi policies. Every charity and organization designed to ‘deconvert’ (essentially deradicalize) Chareidim is funded by secular Jews, in many cases literally by George Soros. Consider that this is in marked contrast to, say, Islamist deradicalization efforts, which in the West are pretty much entirely funded by non-Muslims. It’s secular Jews who are most aggressive about lobbying the Israeli government to take away more privileges from the ultra orthodox too. In Haredi circles there are extremely common ‘conspiracy’ theories that secular Jews (who among other things they low key blame for the Holocaust) are trying to destroy their communities, both in the US and in Israel.
One of the reasons the ultra-orthodox have shifted so aggressively to the GOP in recent decades is precisely because the NY and NJ Democratic coalitions, which have a lot of senior Jewish politicians and leaders, have a fundamental contempt for them and their way of life, view them the way elite white northeastern Episcopalian progressives view Southern redneck trailer trash. They in turn spread this attitude to their Italian, Hispanic and black associates, which is why the most common complaint in Brooklyn 770 circles is that wealthy secular Jews said and did very little when eg. black people were attacking the black hats. Recently they’ve accused secular Jews of coming after the ultra-Orthodox by targeting the landlords/slumlords who finance a lot of the community.
2rafa
4d ago
With the exception of the very poor and very rich (which even most highly intelligent and conscientious people will never be), income and tfr aren't really correlated much among secular Westerners.
2rafa
4d ago
Yes, like @hydroacetylene said, when the yeshivot were in Eastern Europe back in the day a family might send only their most intellectually gifted son (out of many) to them. Adult study in a full time kollel (for married men) was even more rare, it’s largely an invention of the last 75 years. Previously yeshiva students would graduate, become rabbis, and then marry and have children and become the religious figures in their communities. The idea of a large population of married men who were not community rabbis but who studied all day and were paid for it is modern.
Modern abundance, not just welfare but even the ease with which, say, one very rich Hasid can fund a thousand students indefinitely is a failure state of modernity. Most people don’t want to live off welfare because it provides a much lower quality of life than working, especially if you’re an intelligent people. But if you think Torah study is the highest calling in life then you can override that impulse.
2rafa
2d ago
I wonder if Massachusetts has anti-political discrimination laws on the books like California. Could be they were advised by their lawyers that the conservative legal activists were circling (eg. that a rejected candidate for an academic position might be a plaintiff).
2rafa
2d ago
You mean the thing he did at the very end of his presidency which might well be struck down by his own Supreme Court anyway?
2rafa
4d ago
I agree that many figures in all radical movements (almost certainly including Fuentes) have some kind of relationship with law enforcement / intelligence, because the FBI/CIA can ruin the life of pretty much anyone if they want to. I doubt he’s consciously repeating what they want him to though. It’s more that he’s at a dead end, he can’t become respectable again like Hanania, he isn’t funny enough to go back to being a cool edgy comedian like Hyde, if he moderates on any position his base will call him cucked and abandon him.
2rafa
3d ago
I think a Biden victory would see a linear decline along the current trajectory of extreme wokeness being less cool (note this is very different from the grander arc of liberalism).
Trump could go either way. The DEI zealots might become only more enraged and zealous, and those on the left who don’t like Biden will be quickly stirred up if Trump actually gives people like Rufo some amount of political power and attempts even a small amount of Project 2025 stuff. Trump is a controversial guy and most powerful people in America don’t like him, that can’t be dismissed.
But there is another possibility, which is that 2016-2021 sucked all the political energy out of the system, especially on the left, such that the whole thing just kind of crumbles ideologically. Again, not the grander arc of liberalism, which will continue, but a crisis of conscience, as happened to the left after Reagan and Thatcher won and the postwar corporatist consensus crumbled.
I think a lot of it will depend on the specifics of the election, whether it’s a landslide either way, conduct of both parties during the transition period, and on Trump’s rhetoric. As weird as it sounds, I don’t think it’s impossible that he leaves office at the end of his second term having accomplished almost nothing and yet being more liked, or at least more tolerated, than when he got in in 2016.
What type of school did you attend?
A private hippie school, then prep school. Somewhere people who grew up in Manhattan private school circles would have heard of, but not like Dalton or Trinity. My school was coed; both my brother and sister went to single-sex schools, for no particular reason.
Some people are interested in demographics. The school was perhaps 5% black, 5% visibly Latino (hard to tell, could have been more), 30% Asian (two thirds east, one third south, a couple of southeast here and there) and 60% white, including Arabs. Of the whites, maybe half were Jewish or half-Jewish and most of the rest were Italian, mixed-white (like, Brazilian mom, Swiss dad, or blonde mom from the Midwest and Italian dad, that kind of thing). Perhaps 10% of the student body, maybe a little less, were the predominantly but not entirely white kids of European or Canadian expats in NYC. I had more Catholic background friends from before prep school and from our local neighbourhood, but wealthy people who have those backgrounds in NYC tended, in my experience, to prefer to send their children to the Catholic private schools even though they were personally largely secular (I don’t think any remained or became religious). There were some WASPs of the regatta sort, but not many; again in my experience most of the very old family WASPish people I grew up around knew what schools they were sending their kids to from birth, and it wasn’t ours. A lot of those people I knew as a kid went to tier-1 schools or to boarding school.
The school was relatively academic. Probably not as much as my dad would have liked. College admissions stats were mostly impressive except for the occasional off year, but again more like tier-2 than tier-1 of Manhattan prep schools. Because the demographics of the school were less old money than some other Manhattan prep schools there was less of an Ivy at all costs bias for the smartest kids, so people went all over the country, except for those of us who stayed in the city, of course. There were some super rich kids, and some poorer kids (in truth middle class), but most parents were upper middle class by general standards, including mine for the majority of my time there until maybe the last year.
How were your relationships with teachers and peers?
Pretty good. Friend groups formed at fell apart pretty quickly. As in every school there were social hierarchies, but bullying was relatively rare and the school was very tough on it when it happened. I remember my teachers being nice, kind people who with a few exceptions mostly cared. Classes were always full of a lot of intellectual debate among the ~30% of people who cared. We had many clubs and activities, ran mock presidential debates and elections, played sports semi-locally, boring normal high school stuff. I was extremely successful in one activity, participated in a few others. If you wanted to do something weird or different that few or no other kids did they would help you find whatever league/organization/etc you needed in the city, or would have a relationship with other prep schools where you could do it.
The salacious stuff happened, people (a small minority of people) started doing coke in school bathrooms when we were maybe 14 or 15, threw huge parties when their parents were away on weeknights, sometimes stuff would go down and the teachers would try to figure out what happened. The Euro expats were always the most into that because their parents often seemed to leave them for long periods.
I started high school at the zenith of Gossip Girl’s popularity, and while that was based loosely on Brearley/Collegiate there were definitely a lot of people at our school who felt that should be their life and wanted to LARP as if it was. The reality was much more lame since the vast majority of us really did have parents who cared, but there were moments that stick with me like an indoor pool party where we probably drank $50,000 of someone’s parents’ vintage champagne, finding (bad) clubs only happy to let dumb rich kids in to spend thousands of dollars on bottle service with suspicious fake IDs and so on.
Sexually it was pretty prudish for a liberal elite school. I wonder if this was already zillennial sexual conservatism beginning in earnest but I remember my ex-hippie parents being mildly surprised that all three of their children waited until they were in long term relationships in their senior year or in college. (Yes, this was a topic of conversation in our household; if you’ve ever watched Easy A, my parents are Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in that movie, they watched it and agree.) There were a couple of hot teachers in their twenties who were known for hitting up former female students after they graduated, I remember that not seeming a big deal to me at the time, but again it didn’t happen to anyone in my social circle.
How involved were your parents?
Not hugely involved? They came to parent teacher meetings two or three times a year (whenever they happened). They had an additional meeting when I started applying to college, then one more that also had me in it. That was pretty much it. There were some helicopter moms who could be found in the lobby every other day waiting to speak to one teacher or another, but I don’t think it did them much good.
I wish my parents had been slightly more involved because I was very shy and unconfident but could probably have made a valiant-if-unlikely attempt at HYPS (never applied) if really pushed, but I got into a very good college anyway and it hasn’t damaged my life in any way.
2rafa
4d ago
People in Jeff's circles who aren't begging for handouts acknowledge pretty openly that he was a scumbag for what he did. He and his duck-faced new woman are viciously mocked by everyone from the well-educated inhabitants of elite tech and political circles to the literal tabloid press that made fun of him for his 'alive girl' texts and delights in publishing pictures of the couple where they look awful.
Being one of the richest people in the world is always going to attract a baseline level of respect from the majority of the people who surround you, since a pittance from you is enough to set them and their descendants up for generations. Still, I'd hesitate to say that Jeff came out of it better than Mackenzie. You also don't acknowledge that she didn't demand her fair share, she didn't care enough to and settled for much less. She could have demanded (and would have been granted) both more equity and voting shares in Amazon if she wanted them.
2rafa
2d ago
Recently found out that Zuck’s kids are named Maxima, August and Aurelia. The LARP is real.
2rafa
2d ago
Some good writing this month. I enjoyed @coffee_enjoyer and @FiveHourMarathon’s brief discussion of the Amish Question. There’s a risk when discussing isolated and backward tribes that one projects the way that we do today onto hunter gatherers in the Amazon or the Sentinelese, where we assume that we were like them instead of acknowledging that they - for not having settled, for not having advanced - are the unusual ones and so may not tell us as much about our ancestors as we think. Similarly, the Amish aren’t necessarily a fair or accurate example of most traditional civilizations in many ways, or of what ‘we’ could be if we attempted to restore some of those institutions.
A second issue is the peculiarity of the group. I think it unambiguously true that the Amish probably are happier and have higher QOL than most modern westerners, but the degree to which this is the product of trad-ness is hard to measure. Consider those Mennonites who stayed in the Alps and assimilated into normal mountain Swiss society. Today they live in one of the richest and highest functioning countries on earth, a place bus drivers make a hundred thousand dollars a year, where the median household wealth is among (possibly the) highest in the world. A clean and exceptionally safe country, an ordered country, a place in which one’s neighbors will indeed send the police to tell you to stop playing music after 9.30pm. A place where the recycling is always sorted (God help you if it isn’t). Possibly, alongside Denmark (which has its disadvantages) the final remaining civilized country in the West.
It is hard to compare the Amish with their assimilated cousins in Switzerland because Swiss statistics are muddied by lower performing French and Italians (and others). But a lot of the ‘Amish QOL advantage’ might just be HBD.
2rafa
4d ago
Even in 2015 the Tories won the Jewish vote 50-29, and that was when the Labour candidate for Prime Minister was Jewish.
Jews voted more for Labour in the mid-20th century because many were poor recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and voting at that time in England was still very class-and-region based.
Sure, but that isn’t no understanding of free expression, it’s just a different one. For most of the history of the US states had various laws banning various kinds of speech, so did the federal government during the wars. Absolute free speech is a 20th century interpretation of the first amendment.
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