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Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
Could we maybe have a few days' break from people repeating their theory that everything bad that has ever happened is due to the Jews? Oh no, I stubbed my toe, those damn Jewish elites! It's worse than incorrect - it's boring.
@coffee_enjoyer provides a source. It may be boring, but in this case it doesn't seem to be incorrect.
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
I get that. I do think it merits discussion, however.
To take a brief tangent into UK politics, the previous leader of the opposition party was a man called Jeremy Corbyn. He was plausibly antisemitic, having literally shared a platform with Hamas. His party was definitely antisemitic, and produced nasty stories about bullying of Jewish members on a regular basis. He was also very far left. I wasn't a fan.
So when a lot of newspapers started publishing articles along the lines of "as a Jew, I'm very upset that the new Prime Minister may be a genuine antisemite" I was very sympathetic. But eventually it got to the point where literally 25% to 50% of the columnists I read on a regular basis had written "as a Jew" articles and the discrepancy between that number and the proportion of Jews in the population at large (275k / 66,000k = 0.4%) started getting big enough that it made me uncomfortable.
In short, I think it's fairly clear that Jews are highly overrepresented in the media at the very least. They also seem to be overrepresented in finance and positions of power generally. I think that that imbalance is a genuine, legitimate problem for society. Especially when you compound it with a (well-founded) persecution complex based on the events of the Holocaust and prior pogroms. It seems to me that it leads to an escalatory spiral where influence is exerted to stop people from discussing the use of that influence, leading to spiralling paranoia on both sides. So I'm reluctant to condemn all discussion of secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation because I think Western civilisation has a right to know if it's being manipulated and I think that Jews ultimately benefit from having the disproportionate influence some of them seem to wield out in the open.
Where it ends up, I don't know. Ideally I would like to see some kind of disclosure and recusement requirements. People (not just Israelis) with foreign ties or ethnic sympathies should be required to recuse themselves under certain circumstances, the way that I am not allowed to interview my friends if they apply to my company. I have no idea how you would turn that into a coherent system though.
Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
The Catholics on the Supreme Court are sort of a conspiracy as well, right? My understanding was that the Federal Society pushes them as being reliably anti-progressive due to the abortion issue. And some people do Notice.
Never knew that. They did disproportionately well in GB for a long time.
The case of Indians is also complicated: for example, until recently England, Scotland and Ireland were all run by Indian heads of state and that seems somewhat dubious as well.
Agree completely. What concerns me is when bringing up Jewish representation at all becomes defined as Jew-hatred in and of itself.
Humza Yousaf (whom I assume you were referring to in the case of Scotland) has Pakistani heritage.
By dubious, do you mean the fact that these heads of state come from immigrant families or something more nefarious?
Thanks for the correction, my mistake. By dubious, I mostly mean the former. I doubt there is anything particularly nefarious going on beyond a certain amount of ingroup preference, but the overrepresentation of minorities in the leadership of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales bothers me. I think that people should in general be ruled by somebody of their own heritage and culture, and specifically that Britain is the ancestral home of the British peoples and should be run by and for indigenous Brits. Assuming that the overrepresentation is because of culture and IQ, I don't think that we should be importing people who tend to end up ruling over us at greatly disproportionate rates.
It may be just a temporary moment, but the vast number of major cities that now have Muslim mayors suggest it isn't. I am happy to have guests, but not to import a new ruling class.
(As usual, it's easier to find tendentious factchecks on Google than the original data, so I've just included those).
https://fullfact.org/news/muslims-uk-viral-poster-factchecked/
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/immigrants-not-ruling-britain-ireland-london-contrary-claims-2024-03-28/
I think it is also fair to see which immigrants come to london to be treated as londe oners, as opposed to immigrants who wish londoners to treat them as migrants deserving entitlements.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FstMoM-spJU&pp=ygUeZ29vZG5lc3MgZ3JhY2lvdXMgbWUgcm9iaW5zb25z
Given the chance, some migrants would wish to remove themselves from the cultures they left behind, save for food. That they often give up midway and revert to cultural kins is a function of task difficulty on both ends of the equation rather than lack of desire. Sunak and Sajid Javid and the rotterdam mayor can make a reasonable claim to wanting to be part of the new society they found themselves in, compared to the islamists that refuse to even learn english.
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