2rafa
4hr ago
Depends on the economy, but I’d say they can if it holds. Racial hostility in America today doesn’t seem worse than it was at the low point of the 90s, between the LA riots and the OJ trial. President Newsom can spout Bill Clinton 2.0 talking points (he has no ideological principles anyway) about unity etc.
2rafa
4hr 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.
2rafa
5hr ago
By roided I don’t just mean bodybuilder physique, I also mean the distended stomach, like what Joe Rogan has which people say is a result of steroid use. Muscles help but they’re not a significant factor as long as he’s neither skinny fat nor actual fat. Henry Cavill is hot because he’s tall and has a great face, if he had the physique of a runner or something it would make minimal difference, that was my point.
2rafa
7hr ago
That’s partially because women are more neurotic and partially because they’re competing for men. Men can be pretty harsh on each other and themselves if they’re neurotic and insecure about attracting women, see incel forums obsessing over shoulder to hip ratios and canthal tilt and jawline mewing and cheekbones.
Like men, women often misjudge what the other sex is attracted to (for example most men prefer women who have thicker hourglass bodies, like Sydney Sweeney or Christina Hendricks, to rail thin models, and most women prefer a guy with lower bf% to a roided beefcake type), but I don’t think most women are delusional enough to think a 20 year old skinny tall blue-eyed blonde woman unattractive to men.
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
9hr 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?
Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire Guma Aguiar, the billionaire Kushners, the billionaire Lev Leviev, the billionaire Ron Perelman, the billionaire Tevfik Arif, the billionaire Israel Englander
Englander is Orthodox and attended yeshiva in Crown Heights growing up. Kaplan donates primarily to zionist causes and tiger conservation charities, I couldn't find much about very large contributions to chareidim but will assume you have done more research here than me. Aguiar was an Evangelical Christian of Jewish descent who became (with his formerly gentile wife) a revert/baal t'shuva to ultra-orthodox Judaism under Tovia Singer, for whom that's a life calling. He then seemed to steal a bunch of money from his uncle, Kaplan, and then used it to fund a rabbi with wacky views about the age of the earth in the hope that he would one day proclaim Aguiar to be the biblical messiah. Personally I don't consider that to be a standard story of secular Jewry funding the ultra-orthodox, but I digress. The Kushners are Orthodox and long have been. Leviev was born an (Orthodox) Bukharan Jew and remains Orthodox. Perelman was born to a conservative family but became Orthodox, writing "as soon as I got married, we kept a kosher house, we became much more observant. We moved to New York shortly thereafter and joined an Orthodox synagogue". Arif is not Jewish at all, though his business partner is.
So not one of the examples you cite (except, possibly, Kaplan with the weird messiah nephew, and I strongly doubt someone that invested in minutiae of the Israeli rabbinate around the issue of the age of the earth isn't religious) is, in fact, a secular Jew.
Both are also visibly happier living in the US
Ed Miliband doesn't live in the US, he's still an MP! He will likely be energy minister when Labour wins.
this is consistent with my experience of my school/university social circle where secular Jews who had the opportunity mostly moved to the US.
I would put it differently. Secular American Jews often retain some aspects of their particular ethnic identity because we don't live in a society with as much of a monoculture as the UK. The same was historically true of other groups in the diverse East Coast cities, like the Irish and Italians.
Secular British Jews assimilate very rapidly (even though the overall intermarriage rate is lower because of the higher level of Orthodoxy as you note). Those great Anglo-Jewish families of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Rothschilds, the Goldsmiths and so on, are pretty much entirely gentile now - the younger Rothschilds were raised and baptised in the CofE. Even the 20th century secular Jews of more recent shtetl heritage assimilate quickly - look at how quickly Gerald Ronson's and Philip Green's (who himself married a gentile iirc) children have deserted the faith. And Ronson is a committed Jew! He donates to charities, sat on the board of various things and so on. But even then, it wasn't enough.
There is almost a kind of standard assimilatory narrative for British Jews who make some money. The parents send them to Eton or Harrow or Cheltenham and then Oxbridge, they do well in the city (perhaps in a Jewish firm, perhaps not) or in the arts or something else, then they marry a gentile Sloane Ranger (or a male aristo in the case of the women). In two generations, any residual Jewishness is a family memory, they celebrate Christmas, they have essentially fully assimilated into the British upper-middle or upper class.
The same happened in a different way with working class secular Jews, who largely joined the white exodus out of East London and headed toward Essex. Those who remained religious still exist in large numbers in places like Gants Hill, but many who weren't had within one generation fully assimilated into normal southeastern working class English culture. An example of that is Katie Price's family, or even Stacey Solomon's to some degree. The secular Jewish intellectual culture that exists in the US doesn't exist in Britain. Jews who stay Jewish are overwhelmingly Orthodox, those who don't become English very quickly.
2rafa
11hr ago
Consider the 30 year old single mother on a dating app looking for a real man to support her - Judeo-Christian values would say something like 'man up, we're all equal in God, love your neighbour's children as yourself' whereas traditional values would probably scold you for being on Tinder in the first place and exclude the woman from polite society
Traditional morality has no prohibition on marrying a single mother, and indeed encourages it. Mohammed himself (at least according to the Sunnis) married first a woman who had had children by two previous husbands, and married several other widows with many children between them. Remarriage was historically much more common because of widowhood; it's likely that fewer men have a wife with prior children today than at any previous time in history.
Even if we say that the single mother was not widowed and merely divorced, Muhammad and ancient Christians and Jews also married divorced women, and again this was religiously satisfactory in most cases and (in Islam especially) considered an auspicious act for one's chances in the afterlife. Indeed in Judaism, the only man who must marry a virgin is the singular High Priest, and even then only if he marries once in office, rather than before it.
Even if we go one step further and say that our single mother is neither widow nor divorcee but actual whore in the biblical sense, it is unclear how bad this is. Prostitutes being forgiven, even exalted, feature heavily in the New Testament and the Quran and Hadiths. Except for the prohibition for Kohanim, and a line in the Quran about how a 'fornicator' must marry a 'fornicatress' (which if anything is a limit on male promiscuity, but is widely interpreted by scholars as not applying literally for some reason). The only additional Christian prohibition I'm aware of is that if she was married and was divorced for something that was not adultery, she would not be able to remarry.
If you define conservatism as Judeo-Christian values, mass migration, globalization, regime change abroad and so on... then sure, US Jews, British Jews are conservative. George Soros is nearly a conservative, albeit insufficiently supportive of police and dangerously opposed to Israel. If you define conservatism differently, conserving national identity and demographics, conserving national industries, conserving traditional values... then they're absolutely not conservative.
Possibly, but then only a very small percentage of even the native population would be considered 'conservative'. Since there are only two major parties in FPTP systems, the only information we have is about whether some population tends to vote for the more or less leftist one.
2rafa
12hr ago
Short of the kind of extreme plastic surgery that exists only in movies, he can't leave the life. I'm not defending him, and in any case he directly wishes me harm, hates me, and is an asshole. But I think he's realized his only option in life (other than subsisting off the most menial labor jobs anyone can get and hoping his coworkers never recognize him) is this from now on. It's clear he has some kind of relationship with intelligence since he can somehow still travel and use bank accounts, I presume he's feeding them stuff about other people in his movement, possibly about violent threats or people he thinks may be capable of political violence. That's usually a trade-off these people take.
2rafa
12hr ago
Secular Jews may want some of the Haredim to become more secular, but by and large they are allied politically, culturally, and religiously with them, and do zero to combat their corruption. Meanwhile, Chabad houses are becoming the center of religious life for non-orthodox Jews in America.
Who do you think funds efforts like this (given an extensive write-up by a Jewish journalist for NPR), where non-Haredi Jewish journalists are hired to dig up stories on political and financial corruption, sexual abuse and so on in that community, founded by an ex-Haredi guy who hates them?
Moster says the stories on the Shtetl website aim to present what's often missing in the Haredi press: stories about contentious issues such as corruption, white-collar crime and sexual abuse. One recent Shtetl feature details how Haredi Jews took over a village in the Catskills by claiming it was the primary residence of Jews who spend most of their time living in Brooklyn. Another, written by Hakimi, describes a series of anonymous ads for a family court judicial candidate in one of the Haredi towns in the suburbs north of New York City.
I see how secular Jews (not just leftist or even progressive ones) talk about the ultra-orthodox. Many advocate Xinjiang-level re-education, completely unironically. They hate them, especially those that live near or alongside them. In New Jersey, the reality of state politics and the fact that the Democrats don't have a supermajority means that the ultra-orthodox can ally with the state GOP to stymie legislative measures against them.
Okay, so are you referring to the slumlords that have gotten away with corruption / discrimination so far? What helped them get away with it for so long?
NYC slumlords have always gotten away with it, the occasional lawsuit etc excepted, especially when it comes to simply having poor conditions rather than discriminating based on race. All these guys were sued dozens of times, pursued by the city. Again, that's true for all slumlords historically, including the many, many gentile ones. The aggressive pursuit now is arguably because the largely progressive Jewish donors who funded Bragg's DA campaign care about it a great deal.
That’s again not true. Their secular advocacy groups made it a national news story. There were statements made by every politician. Their politicians secured them more security grants.
The ADL lobbies harder about a swastika on an elite university campus than they do about dozens of attacks by black people on Jews in NYC. The biggest complaint is typically that they don't even, uh, 'name' the perpetrators, so to speak.
2rafa
17hr 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.
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
18hr ago
Language definitely creates a strong barrier to departure although most Haredi communities still teach their children passable English. Not to any kind of secular world standard, but they still speak it better than plenty of first-gen immigrants who do fine in the lower levels of the economy.
Yeah, there was a recent interview with Trump about a lot of this stuff and he seemed pretty uncommitted. If you read this the author is entirely hysterical, but the substance is thin. A lot of what Trump appears to promise is actually him just repeating and agreeing with the question he’s being fed; “oh, Mr President, are you sure you’re really going to deport all 12 million illegals and put them in deportation camps and use the military?” “Yeah, sure, we gotta do it, sure”. KellyAnne Conway, that avatar of competence, says earnestly that he’s going to move a lot faster this time. We shall see. I think much of Trump’s personal attention will be devoted to trying (and likely failing) to prosecute people he believes have wronged him. So it really depends on his advisors.
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