From the Atlantic Monthly:
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You are supposed to know who is Jewish, but you are also supposed to not know who is Jewish. Got that?
Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, explains:
It's become clear to me that the Fox commentator Glenn Beck has something of a Jewish problem. Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.)
... This is a post about Beck's recent naming of nine people -- eight of them Jews -- as enemies of America and humanity. He calls these people prime contributors to the -- wait for it -- "era of the big lie." The eight Jews are Sigmund Freud; Edward Bernays, the founder of public relations, and a nephew of Freud's (which Beck discloses as if this had previously been a secret); Soros, of course; Cass Sunstein, now of the White House; the former labor leader Andy Stern; Walter Lippman, who is no longer here to defend himself; Frances Fox Piven, who Beck believes is "sowing the seeds" of revolution; and, of all people, Edward Rendell.
It is fair to ask if Beck knows that these people are Jewish (It is not widely-known that Rendell is Jewish, I think).
But, of course, who doesn't know that Frances Fox Piven is Jewish?
Look, I can't recall ever seeing Glenn Beck on TV (I don't have cable), but I can take some guesses about his knowledge based on my own level of knowledge in the later 1990s. At that point, I would have been sure Freud was Jewish, but would have been reduced to sheer guessing about the seven others (most of whom I'd heard of at that point: I don't recall ever wondering whether Francis Fox Piven or her late husband Richard Cloward were Jewish. It just didn't come up.)
Extremely ethnocentric Jews like Jeffrey Goldberg (born in Brooklyn, he joined the Israeli Defense Force after graduating from the Ivy League) vastly overestimate how much gentiles pay attention to the Is-he-a-Jew? questions that obsess them. Further, the media has done a really good job of persuading the average American that even noticing the ethnic patterns that personally preoccupy leading members of the media like Goldberg is a mark of lack of gentility, so most of them don't.
As Joel Stein pointed out in the LA Times in 2008 on the dumbing down of America:
Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten.
Goldberg continues:
... That said, Beck has not crossed a certain line, by identifying his targets openly as Jewish. Nevertheless, this, to me, is a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Beck is speaking to a certain constituency, and the thought has now crossed my mind that this constituency understands the clear implications of what Beck is saying.
My modest suggestion to those Jews who fear the building of mosques in American cities is that they look elsewhere for threats that seem to be gathering against them.
The Establishment media freakout over the last two weeks about the fans of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sarah Palin reveals how many leading figures in the press regard average Americans with atavistic dread and rage as The Other.
Guys, grow up and get over it. Fight the feeling. It's immature and unseemly, and just because nobody is allowed to point it out in polite society doesn't make it less so.
Guys, grow up and get over it. Fight the feeling. It's immature and unseemly, and just because nobody is allowed to point it out in polite society doesn't make it less so.
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127 comments:
"Even noticing the ethnic patterns that personally preoccupy leading members of the media like Goldberg is a mark of lack of gentility, so most of them don't."
Gentiles with a lack of gentility? Hmm.
"Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.)..": dat's a bum rap on Einstein. It wasn't his fault that Relativity was endlessly dumbed down and distorted for the dimwitted.
I often wonder about the Jews of the HBD-sphere.
They always seem surprised that a way of thinking based around little to no out-group empathy wouldn't accept them into the fold as it were.
I do admire the relentless efforts of Scotch-Irish/Jewish posters like Whiskey to show us that American Jews are just pawns of the WASP SWPL mafia.
More Doublethink: To say racist things is bad. To genteely (sorry) avoid saying them is 'dog whistling'. Also bad.
Gilbert Pinfold.
I don't think what Beck knows matters to Beck very much (he is in my opinion apt to do anything that's a draw), so I don't see why it should matter to anyone else. I'd be interested to see what you think of him, having watched one of his shows, Steve.
Did it ever occur to Jews that most people vilified by NY Times are white gentile conservatives?
Did it ever occur to Jews that most people vilified by Neocons are Muslims and Chinese?
And how do you like those Hollywood movies where most villains and even urban street thugs are white?
Oh, the kvetching, the endless kvetching. This guy using his imagination and twisted logic to fulfill his (collective) victim complex.
"Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews..."
Notice how he writes as though there is ONLY ONE modernity, that of the Jews. It's like Jews saying there is ONLY ONE God and all other gods are false idols.
So, the only true modernity is one pushed by liberal and leftist Jews. If you reject Jewish modernity, then you are a caveman who rejects all of modernity.
If you reject Cass Sunstein, you must be anti-modern and a medievalist.
It's like hogging all of morality, as if you to say, 'if you don't agree with MY definition of morality, you are against all morality and thereby evil.'
Goldberg has the age-old Jewish problem of narcissism, arrogance, and contempt for opposing views.
Jeffrey Goldberg seems to be engaging in some of that Rube Goldbergian thinking you have rightfully chided American Jews for. I don't read his blog regularly, but I've read enough of his work, I think, to understand how how he comes to his deluded mindset.
1) He has written about getting bullied as school kid for being a Jew (I'm going to guess here that he was bullied by whites, because blacks without exposure to a lot of whites aren't too good at telling different white ethnic groups apart).
2) That experience drives him to become a hardcore Zionist and volunteer for the IDF. Let's stop to note the logical disconnect here: it's not as if the IDF has a unit responsible for defending Jewish American schlubs from bullies.
3) The IDF is so impressed with Goldberg's fearsome intellect that it assigns him to babysit Arab prisoners. Seeing Arab Muslims up close Goldberg realizes that, "hey, these guys are human beings too". He expands that trite revelation into a book. Maybe his fellow IDFers start to remind him a little of those bullies back in Brooklyn
4) Back in America, as a journalist/pundit, he interacts with smart, secular Muslim pundits occasionally. More evidence that these guys aren't so bad.
5) Now we come to Glenn Beck. He doesn't interact with anyone like him. Having lived in Brooklyn, New England, and Israel, Goldberg apparently knows less about American Christians in flyover land (Beck's audience) than he does about Muslims. He doesn't realize that, as you suggested in this post, they aren't anywhere near as obsessed with Jews as, say, some iSteve readers (to the extent they do think about Jews, most flyover country Christians are philosemitic - and some are more pro-Israel than jaded Goldberg himself). If Beck were in the business of antisemitic dog whistling (which he isn't), his audience wouldn't even hear it. As you wrote, they don't know or care that most of the names Beck mentioned there are Jews.
6) From the excerpt you quoted, it's not clear that Goldberg knows that Beck has raved to his audience about the contributions of other intellectuals who happen to have been Jews (the Austrian school economist Ludwig von Mises, for example). Should that be considered a philosemitic dog whistle?
That Goldberg is more afraid of a Mormon (Beck) than Muslims makes me wonder how many Jews (or others, for that matter) have a realistic understanding of the threat of Islam. On the one hand, you have (or had) neocons who acted as if Muslims represented an existential military threat. Our own Whiskey is in this camp (neocons can be Scots-Irish too!). On the other hand, you have liberal Jews like Bloomberg, Goldberg, and the author of that essay about the Tuscon shooting, who are more worried about possible man-bites-dog terrorism from white Christians.
A realistic appreciation of the threat of Islam would be to realize that Muslims haven't been an existential military threat to the West for hundreds of years, but nevertheless pose real threats of terrorism, and are about the worst type of immigrants any country would want.
{Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas}
Which of these is not like the others?
This extremely pertinent essay came up in the comments section over at Alt Right. How the Intellectuals Took Over By David Gerlernter:
http://web.archive.org/web/19980423180121/commentarymagazine.com/9703/gelernter.html
"Extremely ethnocentric Jews like Jeffrey Goldberg..."
Well, yes. Of course an extremely ethnocentric Jew is going to have a terribly skewed view of things and is likely to level the charge of antisemite at the drop of a name.
A Jew who is not extremely ethnocentric is not the paranoid vituperative monster that many if not most of the commenters on this thread will make him out to be simply because he's a Jew. He's just a Jew. No horns. Really.
Could Palin's religious ethnicity explain the hostility of the chattering class?
Are we allowed to ask that?
The reality in America of 2011 is, you can't attack ANY elites--intellectual, financial, medical, media, academic, and so on--without simultaneously attacking a disproportionate number of Jews. Guys like Goldberg refuse to admit that Jews have long since been the elite group in the U.S.
Your word doublethink, Steve, is spot-on.
I follow politics and didn't know Ed Rendell was Jewish.
Damn, it seems big city Jewish folk just don't understand that we country folk and suburbanites don't have many Jewish neighbors. (Like none.)
Leftists invented categories like "dog whistling" and "concern trolling" in order to dismiss troublesome arguments without actually countering them. Once you've identified a speaker as a bad man with secret bad motives, you don't have to bother proving he's substantively mistaken.
I watched Beck's show on Bernays and co, then I went upstairs to talk to my wife about it, and said, roughly:
Me:
"Beck just named an entirely Jewish group of people as controlling the minds of America."
She:
"That just makes me hate him more."
Me:
"I'm not sure he knows they're Jewish. Beck loves Israel - he loves Jewish people."
What is 'dangerous' about Beck's message though is that he keeps telling his viewers to *read for themselves*, to *think for themselves*. I am 100% certain that Beck is not anti-Jewish, he's anti-Leftist. But lots of smart Jewish people believe that Beck's message, if taken seriously by his viewers, does seriously threaten the American Leitkultur.
Glenn Beck is the only prominent figure in American public life who "gets it".
[I'm filing guys like Steve, Spengler, the Derb, and Charles Murray as being more on the fringe of public discourse rather than being public figures of prominence with any mass media name recognition.]
Beck understands that the nihilism of The Left poses for us not a civilizational war but rather a war between the very existence of civilization and what Whiskey just called the incipient "catastrophic Dark Ages times".
And no, I'm not being melodramatic [and neither is Glenn Beck].
Was Woodrow Wilson Jewish? He's Beck's bete noir.
It's funny how it turns out to be Beck's fault that most of the intellectual heavyweights who've pushed society leftward turn out to be Jewish. It reminds me of the way civil rights leaders rage about how many black men are in prison. Wouldn't that be something the rest of us might more justifiably be angry about?
Einstein is a red herring. As for Marx, Freud, and Boas -- why aren't they considered embarrassing among Jews, the way that Boss Tweed is among the Scotch-Irish?
And if this dope wants to score sarcasm points, he needs something newer than " -- wait for it -- " By now that pair of verbal underwear has five years worth of skid marks and the elastic band wearing off.
Because if he didn't know they were Jewish he is a closet anti-Semite for not knowing and if he did know, then he is another Mel Gibson, which of course means he is a out of the closet anti-Semite for finding out that they were Jewish. That sounds suspiciously like a circular argument to me, personally I never even heard of Stern and Fox Piven and didn't know that Lippmann or Ed Rendell were Jewish.
If Beck were anti-Semitic, wouldn't he have had people on his list like I don't know Karl Marx, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, as well as the previously mentioned Sigmund Freud who most educated people know are Jewish or could tell by name or image were Jewish? The only thing I know about Glenn Beck is that he is the Oprah Winfrey of conservative talk show hosts, which means very emotional and prone to crying.
Most Americans are oblivious to the fact that Jews play a disproportionate role in academia, the media, and the Democratic Party. As people become more aware that the Republican party must rely primarily on white votes to win elections, will they also realize that this "Sailer strategy" will also increasingly pit Gentiles against Jews?
"and the thought has now crossed my mind"
Well, that settles it. QED.
Unfortunately, anti-Semites are clever enough not to come right out and say that they hate Jews and/or Jews need to be eliminated from society.
Instead they do things which are kind of suspicious, for example David Duke supporting one non-white group which just happens to be butting heads with Israel.
So if somebody makes an enemies list of 9 people (some of whom are pretty obscure) and 8 just happen to be Jewish, it's a bit suspicious.
That said, I'm willing to give Beck the benefit of the doubt based on other comments he has made.
The phrase "X has a jewish problem" is a jewish dog whistle. It means "attack/destroy/silence X".
Glenn Beck's Jewish Problem
Does the Fox host realize that the majority of his "enemies of America" are Jewish?
Goldberg realizes the majority of enemies of America are jewish. He blames the guy who doesn't realize.
many leading figures in the press regard average Americans with atavistic dread and rage as The Other.
That is so true. It's part and parcel of their "IQ is meaningless" / "I'm so glad I'm not a moron like Joe Sixpack" hypocrisy.
Ed Rendell is an odd choice, there are so many others more deserving.
As long as the deceased are included, how about Howard Zinn? He's still an enemy because his history book is still the most popular college history text, still brainwashing students. And yes, hes was Jewish.
What's really funny is Beck is crazy about MLK, whose social ideology and views were a culmination of all those Jewish thinkers, albeit with soul.
So Greenberg is calling out Beck for suspicion, yet we have here an American citizen who, after college, went to a foreign country and served in their military, instead of our own, then returned. Where does his loyalty lie? Clearly not to the United States of America - that is obvious and beyond dispute, loyal Americans don't serve foreign governments, they serve their own. Yet I bet Greenberg would accuse me of anti-Semitism over that. If you are a Jew, you are entitled to double loyalties, but anyone who notices is a bigot. And anyone who doesn't notice, like Beck, is also a bigot.
To Beck: Lippmann needs to be removed from the list for having written penetrating passages on eastern European Jewish nouveaux riches in New York in the 1920s. For that alone, he deserves kudos.
To Goldberg: Wow. Get a life.
Jews did not invent Modernity. That was mostly the Anglo-Scots with a few Germans involved.
Second, most Americans (sadly for Goldberg) LIKE Jews: Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louise-Dreyfuss, Adam Sandler are all very popular, as is their particular brand of Jewish Americana humor.
Glenn Beck, I am sure, likes Jews. He probably (along with Sarah Palin) likes Israel a whole lot more than most American SWPL Jews like Goldberg.
Beck is a Mormon (like my cousins). Mormons like Jews (and very much Israel). Palin famously as Governor before McCain picked her had an Israeli flag on her desk. Not to court the Jewish vote (negligible in Alaska) but the Evangelical vote (which likes and supports Jews against their enemy: Muslims).
" He has written about getting bullied as school kid for being a Jew "
Just a guess, but I'd bet the bullying wasn't for being Jewish, per se, but for being nerdy or for not being rough and tumble boyish.
Let me add, the vast majority of founders of Modernism, including Darwin, Nietzsche, Yeats, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, Proust, Stravinsky, Picasso, Joseph Conrad, Salvador Dali, and so on are not Jews.
Marxism at least belongs as much to Friedrich Engels, not a Jew.
First, Bill O'Reilly. Now, Glenn Beck. Who's next? Hannity? Looks like a lot of people have something against Fox News.
Seriously, this is funny because O'Reilly, Beck, and the whole Fox crew are super pro-Israel, pro-Jewish and are solidly in the neoconservative camp. It's a network of Whiskeys. Murdoch himself is very pro-Israel too.
Let me add, the vast majority of founders of Modernism,.....Pound, .... Salvador Dali, and so on are not Jews.
Read up their politics, sweetheart.
How about this: do leftist Jews realize how much of their agenda is a critique of gentile culture?
The Fox Piven quotes that Beck was complaining about were things like: "[Tea Party/older whites/GOPs] are now whiter they are *all* white and are also more comfortable economically...the American population is darkening...they are upset at the [loss of] norms they grew up with...when there was a steeple in every town..."
She was critiquing middle America for being exclusively white gentile, for being richer than nonwhites, and for missing Christianity.
I do admire the relentless efforts of Scotch-Irish/Jewish posters like Whiskey to show us that American Jews are just pawns of the WASP SWPL mafia.
Actually the so-called "Scotch-Irish" are just Scots who settled in Ireland for a couple of generations before moving to America and so have no real Irish ancestry. Therefore the term "Scotch-Irish" creates a false distinction between this group and other Scots.
From the Atlantic Monthly: "Further, most of these people on Beck's 'big lie' list are already the targets of straightforward attacks in the dark, anti-Semitic corners of the Web, so an extended Google search, in some cases, would show that much of the opposition to some of these people is motivated by anti-Semitism."
It never occurs to Goldberg that maybe the anti-Semitism is motivated by opposition to these individuals and others of their ilk say and do.
I grew up in an area with a lot of Jews. My best friend was Jewish. My first boyfriend was Jewish. My mother refused to take us to non-Jewish doctors because she firmly believed that Jews were brighter and more compassionate than Gentiles. I grew up believing Jews were superior to Gentiles.
It was only in adulthood when I saw that Jews featured prominently in the creation, maintenance or support of nearly every policy I loathed that I began to feel otherwise. I don't like anybody on the left, not because they are Jews or blacks or hispanics, etc. but purely and simply because they are leftists. And I really don't like leftists make domestic and foreign policy for our country.
But I am sure Goldberg would never believe that.
Beck gushes over Israel and is a big fan of a lot of major Jewish libertarians. It just goes to show that you can't appease leftist Jews by going out of your way to praise "good ones" or even by praising Jews as Jews a la Murray, Gilder, etc.
The reason is probably that they still see attacks on leftist modernity as attacks on them. Saying you like the good ones or that you still think Jews are swell on the whole doesn't mean much if your agenda is to reverse leftist/multiculti modernity.
Basically it's saying, "I love you guys, you've done great stuff, some of you in particular I idolize, and I promise we won't hurt you any more....but that's enough, back to the shtetl."
I am going to suppose Whiskey's views on China is about as fallible as his views on Modernity.
Broadly claiming for example, that its a mere Anglophone development is inaccurate. The Anglophone world more or less is noted for literature and philosophy in the 20th century.
The Weimar Republic was perhaps the greatest advance in modernity in history, more or less its culminating and likely end. Of course you can't define the Weimar without the significance of Jewish intellectuals(among these are the Frankfurt school).
It is furthermore rooted in the continental tradition of Germany, likely starting from the vastly influential Hegel.
Aside from that, I do love a good discussion on mainstream significant cultural developments, as rarely as I see it in the comments here.
Darwin didn't "found" Modernism. Uncovering universal and eternal truths is in many ways the opposite of the Modernist project. In that sense no scientist is a Modernist.
Why is the fact that Goldberg serving in the IDF means hes still an ardent ethnocentrist?
Howard Zinn after all, was an airforce bomber who later came to speak out against the US.
Aside from all this, Germanic names tend to stand out as being Jewish, so it's not inaccurate to base these claims on the fact that they are Jewish.
Lippmann and Bernays, Chomsky has written significantly about. Mostly it concerns their role in developing and shaping early propaganda. I don't see anything wrong in calling them out. I do see some idiocy in calling out Freud, Stern and Sunstein. Hardly anything damaging or inherently "evil".
Personally, I think it is less a case of Beck having a problem with Jews and more a case of Jews regularly inventing bad, dumb and/or destructive ideas (e.g. Marx, Freud and Franz Boas).
A realistic appreciation of the threat of Islam would be to realize that Muslims haven't been an existential military threat to the West for hundreds of years, but nevertheless pose real threats of terrorism, and are about the worst type of immigrants any country would want.-
You'd think a guy who was in the IDF might know a bit about who Israel fought more than a few times...The Papal States didn't send the Swiss Guard over to blow up the Sbarros pizza place either.
"So if somebody makes an enemies list of 9 people (some of whom are pretty obscure) and 8 just happen to be Jewish, it's a bit suspicious."
You're worried about that? Seriously, who kills Jews whenever they can, fly planes into buildings, blow up things and shout "Allahu Akbar" as they unload on military personnel who they could get close to because they wore a uniform?
I couldn't get past his impressive boast that "Jews largely invented modernity". It would be more accurate to say that Germans largely invented modernity. Of the four individuals that he named, all of whom were German Jews, only Freud and Marx can be accurately described as inventors of modernity. Add the ethnic Germans Kant, Martin Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, Engels (who was as important as Marx and smarter), Max Weber, and Wilhelm Humboldt, who invented the modern research university, then you have a list of individuals whose impact on the West was truly intellectually transformative. Of course, a modern German with Mr. Goldberg's level of ethnic chauvinism is unimaginable.
"What's really funny is Beck is crazy about MLK, whose social ideology and views were a culmination of all those Jewish thinkers, albeit with soul."
Is Beck really being sincere or playing a subversive game? Maybe he knows he's gonna get in hot water for naming names, so he schmoozes about MLK and Israel to fend off his critics. It's good insurance. I mean how can he be 'racist' or 'antisemitic' if he loves MLK and Israel?
One thing at a time.
"I couldn't get past his impressive boast that 'Jews largely invented modernity'. It would be more accurate to say that Germans largely invented modernity."
To guys like him, constructive or supportive modernity isn't true modernity. Only subversive modernity defined by Jews is true modernity.
So, modernity with family values isn't modernity; only pro-'gay marriage' modernity is true modernity.
For the modern right, modernity is an extension and realization of Western cultural advancement. For the modern left--heavily Jewish--modernity is essentially a rejection of Western heritage, an exposure of it sickness, evil, and pathology.
lol @ jews more or less invented modernity. no they didn't.
also goldberg's choices were weird. freud and marx? freud was wrong about everything. every one of his ideas was discredited long ago and totally eradicated from serious psychology. marx's ideas just lead to a lot of bad stuff that people have mostly given up on. boas, i haven't heard anything good about him. can't speak with any authority though i get the feeling he was one of those "there is no such thing as race (when we're talking about europeans)" kind of guys. perhaps he was the pioneer of this kind of thinking, in which case, bravo mr goldberg, you HAVE identified a leading jewish mind of the past 100 years.
there were definitely plenty of important jewish guys who could have been mentioned instead, who actually were important contributors to year 2011 society. einstein was his only good pick.
> A Jew who is not extremely ethnocentric is not the paranoid vituperative monster that many if not most of the commenters on this thread will make him out to be simply because he's a Jew. He's just a Jew. No horns. Really.
Agreed. Honestly, it's the excellent in mind and vigor who have most of the agency and responsibility in matters of thinking, seeing, concluding. Most of the rest just follow, largely. The more talented you are, the more responsible for your acts.
Freud is in many ways a great conservative figure (although he is anti-religious and modernist). Read "Freud: The Mind of a Moralist", by the great Jewish cultural conservative Phillip Rieff. Very few people today have any feel for Freud as an actual thinker. You can get a feel for the tone of his thought by looking at the Freudian analyst figures in 1960s novels -- they are uniformly authoritarian and homophobic, as the original Freud would be considered today.
And it's a huge and dangerous fallacy of sentimental conservatives that modernity is "invented" and can be banished by somehow exiling the human carriers of it from society. Modernity is a fact rooted in the objective social conditions created by the industrial revolution. It doesn't cease to exist because you deny it. When you try to impose pre-modern ideologies by force onto modern societies you get fascism.
Of the four individuals that he named, all of whom were German Jews, only Freud and Marx can be accurately described as inventors of modernity. Add the ethnic Germans Kant, Martin Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, Engels (who was as important as Marx and smarter), Max Weber, and Wilhelm Humboldt, who invented the modern research university, then you have a list of individuals whose impact on the West was truly intellectually transformative.
I prefer theorists of modernity to "inventors" of modernity, for the reasons in my last post, but the above is completely true.
"Whiskey said...
Let me add, the vast majority of founders of Modernism, including Darwin, Nietzsche, Yeats, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, Proust, Stravinsky, Picasso, Joseph Conrad, Salvador Dali, and so on are not Jews."
Well, yes, of course. Goldberg's list of modern innovators is strange given that it contains so many people (Freud, Boas, Sunnstein, and Piven) whose ideas have proven to be wrong, sinister, parasitic, hostile to western civilization, or all of the above. Einstein doesn't belong in that list, as he discovered things that were true, and of great value. The others on his list were purveyors of crap.
Does anyone outside of Woody Allen movies take Freud seriously anymore?
"Marxism at least belongs as much to Friedrich Engels, not a Jew."
Yes, that's why we often call it "Engelism". Engels was to Marx what Colmes was to Hannity.
"Just a guess, but I'd bet the bullying wasn't for being Jewish, per se, but for being nerdy or for not being rough and tumble boyish."
Not according to Goldberg:
Then I woke up, ate a bowl of Rice Krispies, and walked to school—the Howard T. Herber Middle School—where a sixth-grade pogromist named Patrick Harrington and his Cossack associates pitched pennies at me in a game sometimes known as “Bend the Jew,” which ended, inevitably, with me being jumped for refusing to pick up the aforementioned pennies, and also for killing Jesus. It is in part because of young Mr. Harrington and his lieutenants that I would later join the Israeli army
"You're worried about that"
Not particularly. But it doesn't change the fact some folks are anti-Semites.
Second Whiskey. Look at any university course on the 'Early Modern' for example, and you'll find it starting sometime around 1600 -- if not before. Newton, Hume, Smith, DesCartes. These were the inventors of modernity.
Jews did, however, have a large hand in inventing post-modernity.
Isn't Glenn Beck a huge philosemite?
Isn't The Atlantic bleeding cash?
Aren't my questions clever?
"The Establishment media freakout over the last two weeks about the fans of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sarah Palin reveals how much many leading figures in the press regard average Americans with atavistic dread and rage as The Other."
It's not just the media who regard average Americans this way; judging by their own words, it's many of our political leaders, too.
They really do not want us to do anything but shut up and pay our taxes.
Jeffrey Goldberg (born in Brooklyn, he joined the Israeli Defense Force after graduating from the Ivy League)
How exactly does one retain American citizenship after doing this?
Among most Jews I know--and I know a lot--almost everyone watches Fox and Beck. In the future turmoil, the innocent Jews will suffer because they are white and because they are Jews.
Most of the underlings in Jewish organizations don't support their bosses' agenda, but what can they do? Open questioning would lead to a loss of the job, and in this economy, it might mean permanent unemployment.
Regular Jews have a Jewish problem, too, in their leaders. And we don't even have many places to voice our opinions.
8 out of 9 sounds pretty high. Can someone go to Wikipedia and check Goldberg's figures?
Freud invented modernity? If modernity means self promotion irrespective of truth I guess he hits it dead on.
Is this what passes for articles in the Atlantic Monthly these days - Jew counting? Can they do the board of the Federal Reserve next?
Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.)
Hmmm.
(Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.)
"Modernity" is into the red. -2. 1 for 4. Had a losing season. F-.
"Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.) "
One of these names (Einstein) is not like the others. Einstein did actual science; what Marx, Freud, and Boas did was pseudo-scientific Jewish political/cultural/personality cults masquerading as science.
Jeffrey Goldberg (born in Brooklyn, he joined the Israeli Defense Force after graduating from the Ivy League)
How exactly does one retain American citizenship after doing this?
It probably has something to do with this Supreme Court decision even though the guy involved was not fighting. He just participated in a foreign election and the Court ruled Congress could not strip his citizenship.
"Most of the underlings in Jewish organizations don't support their bosses' agenda, but what can they do? Open questioning would lead to a loss of the job, and in this economy, it might mean permanent unemployment. "
Actually most every opinion poll and survey of voting patterns shows that ordinary Jews are liberal, left-wing, and support their "bosses' agenda" to the hilt. They also give their money and time to these organizations.
Nice try, but no one actually familiar with Jews and Jewish organizations should be fooled by this. Jews who object to the behavior of Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders can withhold their time, money, participation, and votes; some do, but most do not.
Jewish organizations and leaders represent the actual preferences of Jews to an overwhelming degree. Loud counter-examples (Michael "Savage" Weiner, JPFO, etc) get a lot of attention, but they are a minority.
" I can't imagine how Beck, who sounds like the epitome of the clueless goyishe kopf, is supposed to know."
Okay fine. SEVEN out of nine!
That's still way out of proportion to Jews' 3% share of the population. If you are criticizing influential leftists and more than 3% of your subjects are Jewish, you have a Jewish problem.
If, like Beck, you are criticizing nine influential leftists, you should have about 0 Jews on your list. Once you get around to critiquing your 33rd or so leftist it's probably okay to throw a Jew in there, at 100 you can have 3 etc. To reach Beck's 7 or 8 you need to criticize somewhere between 200 or 300 major left-wing influences on modernity.
It's funny how it turns out to be Beck's fault that most of the intellectual heavyweights who've pushed society leftward turn out to be Jewish.
Lol. Pithy response of the year.
It reminds me of the way civil rights leaders rage about how many black men are in prison. Wouldn't that be something the rest of us might more justifiably be angry about?
I'm pretty sure that kind of analogy is anti-Semitic.
As for Marx, Freud, and Boas -- why aren't they considered embarrassing among Jews, the way that Boss Tweed is among the Scotch-Irish?
Because Jews are soooo white and quintessentially-SWPL that they...never do ethnic guilt. Ever. Except this kind.
Because if he didn't know they were Jewish he is a closet anti-Semite for not knowing and if he did know, then he is another Mel Gibson, which of course means he is a out of the closet anti-Semite for finding out that they were Jewish. That sounds suspiciously like a circular argument to me, personally I never even heard of Stern and Fox Piven and didn't know that Lippmann or Ed Rendell were Jewish.
Nah, no need for all that. He already explained it - if Beck doesn't know they're Jewish, then Beck's an anti-Semite by hatin' on the essence of Jewishness (modernity & sugar & spice & everything nice), and doesn't even know he's an anti-Semite.
So if somebody makes an enemies list of 9 people (some of whom are pretty obscure) and 8 just happen to be Jewish, it's a bit suspicious.
Heh...
What's really funny is Beck is crazy about MLK, whose social ideology and views were a culmination of all those Jewish thinkers, albeit with soul
Makes for an excellent strategy, though.
GhostfaceCracka
Nice handle.
Seriously, this is funny because O'Reilly, Beck, and the whole Fox crew are super pro-Israel, pro-Jewish and are solidly in the neoconservative camp.
And nothing short of a firing & blacklisting is going to change that, so no biggie, they can bash these guys over the head as long as they like.
Among most Jews I know--and I know a lot--almost everyone watches Fox and Beck. In the future turmoil, the innocent Jews will suffer because they are white and because they are Jews.
This is nothing new. It's the pattern. It's so old, and so well-established, that I take it as part of Jewish identity. To the extent it is not, there must be some mechanism suppressing it, because it's galactically obvious.
Most of the underlings in Jewish organizations don't support their bosses' agenda, but what can they do? Open questioning would lead to a loss of the job, and in this economy, it might mean permanent unemployment.
Regular Jews have a Jewish problem, too, in their leaders. And we don't even have many places to voice our opinions.
Played a false note there, didja? I know, it happens to the best of us. And you state up front you aren't a big-timer.
This is the year 2011. The Intarwebz have been big for some time now.
Wait, wait, I know. The regular Jews are shy. They don't know how to express themselves. They're all shrinking violets. A bit slow? Like Mexicans at basketball...
Is this what passes for articles in the Atlantic Monthly these days - Jew counting? Can they do the board of the Federal Reserve next?
Don't give him any ideas. Next he'll be suing whoever does the hiring down there for anti-Semitism, or "advancing ancient anti-Semitic tropes" or somesuch.
"Is it good for the Jews?" is the most consistent facet of Jewish identity that I can summon.
Wait a minute. Beck had Freud on his list, not an American. I guess Soros too. And he's really talking about what's wrong with the whole world today, not just this country. So we're actually working on a global scale here and the 3% figure is no longer operative.
Wikipedia says that the State Dept says that Jews are about 0.235% of the world pop., or about 1 in 425 I think. It also says that the World Jewish Population Survey has it at 1 in 457. So never mind what I said in my last, now embarrassing, comment. In order to nonantisemitically criticize a single influential leftist who is Jewish you need to be criticizing somewhere between 425 and 457 influential leftists.*
To get to Beck's 7 or 8 you ought to be criticizing somewhere in the ballpark of 2,900-3,600** influential left-wingers. You can choose from the whole world now so it really shouldn't be hard to do this without being antisemitic about it.
* Wikipedia's numbers from State and the survey are from early last decade, so the global Jewish share is probably even lower now. Probably should make it 500+ to be safe.
**Cf the last footnote, it may be prudent to go well over 4,000.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the sub-prime disaster - and the ultimate beneficiaries thereof.
Steve has done a great job in educating those who want to know that feckless 'minorities' simply refused to pay the money they borrowed, but the fact that the identities of those on top of the tree who creamed off the lion's share of the vast loot and are doing very well thankyou, is largely unknown by Joe Sixpack, currently living off food stamps and sleeping in his car.
Of course, if this revelation was ever made common currency the repercussions on the fat cats could turn very nasty indeed.
Regular Jews have a Jewish problem, too, in their leaders. And we don't even have many places to voice our opinions.
Contra anon above, I too have met several Jews who swear by Fox News, but tell me they can't mention this to other Jews due to fears of persecution.
Perhaps it's time for some secret symbol (fish taken, sorry) to identify safe spaces to voice opinions...
"Wait, wait, I know. The regular Jews are shy. They don't know how to express themselves. They're all shrinking violets."
Svigor,
Of the Jews you personally interact with on the Interwebs (here, for example), what percentage of them seem like lefties? What percentage of them would you say accuse Glen Beck of being an antisemite?
It is in part because of young Mr. Harrington and his lieutenants that I would later join the Israeli army
Where I am sure that he fought many people with names like Patrick Harrington.
Anon:
"Actually most every opinion poll and survey of voting patterns shows that ordinary Jews are liberal, left-wing, and support their "bosses' agenda" to the hilt. They also give their money and time to these organizations. "
No, not exactly - polling shows that US Jews are to the Left of white non-Jews, but not to the extent of fully supporting the positions of the Jewish elites. Eg the poll which showed that most US Jews supported the Arizona immigration-enforcement law, even though no Jewish or Jewish-led political organisation did so.
Jews are somewhat to the left of mainstream America. The Jewish leadership class is well to the left of most Jews. This is the same pattern as with eg Hispanics. And white gentiles' leadership class is well to the left of their own views, too.
“As people become more aware that the Republican party must rely primarily on white votes to win elections, will they also realize that this "Sailer strategy" will also increasingly pit Gentiles against Jews?”
Yeah, exactly. Conservatism means pitting white gentiles against Jews, so it’s antisemitic whether conservatives know it or not.
I don’t like it either, but you can’t make the interests of white gentiles judeo-friendly just by saying “I wish you guys would just agree with us so that we didn’t have to feel so judeophobic.” They’re not going to agree; at best they’e going to explain politely that that you are being antisemtic whether you mean to be or not.
"How exactly does one retain American citizenship after doing this?"
There's no blanket rule against serving in foreign militaries and there are plenty of examples of Americans have done so.
"Just a guess, but I'd bet the bullying wasn't for being Jewish, per se, but for being nerdy or for not being rough and tumble boyish."
Yeah, it's funny how you never hear people like Ben Roethlisberger complain about getting bullied for being Jewish.
My theory is that Goldberg didn't have anything else interesting to write about, and was facing a distressingly blank word processor screen till he suddenly had a flash of inspiration and found his topic. And that's probably as deep as it goes. Beck and Fox News are acceptable targets, so anything he says about them will probably sound fine to his editors and readers, so weak arguments that don't really hold up on examination are just fine.
"I grew up in an area with a lot of Jews. My best friend was Jewish. My first boyfriend was Jewish. My mother refused to take us to non-Jewish doctors because she firmly believed that Jews were brighter and more compassionate than Gentiles. I grew up believing Jews were superior to Gentiles."
ANTISEMITE!
"Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.)"
True. But should you really expect a conservative guy to not have a problem with Marx, Freud and Boas, at least?
This also shows the ethnic privilige in public discourse. A Jew is allowed to say that "Jews invented modernity" - or that Jews own the media, or that Jews had a leading part in bringing down South African apartheid, and so forth - but if a gentile mentions such things he is seen as an antisemite.
I'm not sure if Glenn Beck is so clueless. He seems to have quite paleoconservative opinions, and any intellectually honest paleo will notice the Jewish things. It is impossibly to understand the world today if you do not know not much about Jewish influence.
Fred,
Back in Europe all the Jewish organisations have been heavily involved in supporting Muslim immigration - just like Jews have been supporting Mexican immigration to the US - and they are oh, so worried about the rising 'intolerance' here. Some Jews are questioning Muslim immigration, sure, but they still believe that Europe ought to stop being European.
You do not have to hate Jews to know these things. This is just the facts. Jewish special interest groups and Jewish intellectuals and Jewish media has got an agenda.
I did not know Lippmann was Jewish. But I am not surprised. Controlling public opinion, eh?
Fred, you hit it:
"The Jewish leadership class is well to the left of most Jews. This is the same pattern as with eg Hispanics. And white gentiles' leadership class is well to the left of their own views, too."
In other words, our leaders, do whatever is necessary to maintain their commanding positions at the expense of their own constituency.
Anti-Semitism: the belief by non-Jews that Jews can be criticized like anyone else.
All the rest of this (poor wittle Jews are afraid of speaking up against their leaders; poor wittle Jews will be the first to suffer, poor victimized Jews don't have horns, etc. ad nauseam) is the usual sound and fury signifying business as usual. Methinks they doth protest too much.
It probably has something to do with this Supreme Court decision even though the guy involved was not fighting. He just participated in a foreign election and the Court ruled Congress could not strip his citizenship.
yet another example of jews pursuing their own interests at the expense of everyone else it weakens our national sovereignty but 'its good for jews'
"Garland said...
Okay fine. SEVEN out of nine!
That's still way out of proportion to Jews' 3% share of the population. If you are criticizing influential leftists and more than 3% of your subjects are Jewish, you have a Jewish problem.
If, like Beck, you are criticizing nine influential leftists, you should have about 0 Jews on your list. Once you get around to critiquing your 33rd or so leftist it's probably okay to throw a Jew in there, at 100 you can have 3 etc. To reach Beck's 7 or 8 you need to criticize somewhere between 200 or 300 major left-wing influences on modernity."
Or, alternatively, out of 100 US Senators, one might expect 3 jews, rather than 11. Or out of 9 supreme court justices, one might expect 0, rather than 3. Sounds like a case of disparate impact to me. Someone should inform Morris Dees.
>Why is the fact that Goldberg serving in the IDF means hes still an ardent ethnocentrist? Howard Zinn after all, was an airforce bomber who later came to speak out against the US.<
False comparison. Goldberg hasn't spoken out against Israel, and the article that he wrote (discussed in this post) is strikingly ethnocentric: Left crit is an attack on My People!
>I do see some idiocy in calling out Freud [...]. Hardly anything damaging or inherently "evil".<
Wow. You got some learning to do. The evil and destructiveness of Freudianism is well-known in the broader culture today, among those who've heard of Freud, and this has been so for a while. Random example:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/4fy3s6n
It isn't the 1940s any longer.
>if somebody makes an enemies list of 9 people (some of whom are pretty obscure) and 8 just happen to be Jewish, it's a bit suspicious<
Well, if the list is accurate and its members are indeed criminals or liars, it would make me a bit suspicious of Jews. Are we anti-Italian if we oppose the Mafia?
>Read up their politics, sweetheart<
Indeed. Outside Weimar, Moderism was associated with Fascism. Read up on all the Modernist movements in painting from about 1900 to the start of WWI, for example. Ezra Pound was among the seminal figures in "modern" English literature, having midwifed T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, and others, and during WW2 worked for Mussolini in Italy. (His trial for treason never went ahead, partly because Hemingway and others interceded. Pound then won, deservedly, the Library of Congress's Bollingen prize for his latest book of poetry. This Bolligen Prize contest was promptlykilled by Congressman Jacob K. Javits, an Anglo-Saxon whose people signed the Constitution, as a rebuke to the alien Pound.)
>What percentage of them would you say accuse Glen Beck of being an antisemite?<
99.99%, you can bet your last dollar on it. This will become apparent to everyone after Goldberg's meme takes off even just a little, if it does.
(And it will get help; seems to be part of a coordinated campaign:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/4n2j358
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2flktk2
etc.)
Personally, I can't stand the stuttering, lachrymose, goofy Beck, who's just another neocon publicity hound, but he seems to have all the right people's panties in wads, so I give him some points.
"What is 'dangerous' about Beck's message though is that he keeps telling his viewers to *read for themselves*, to *think for themselves*."
Right. Because if after reading and thinking for themselves, they decided to do something about what they'd read and thought (like giving the Dems a "shellacking"), it would be so much worse than if the leftists kept on running things.
To get to Beck's 7 or 8 you ought to be criticizing somewhere in the ballpark of 2,900-3,600** influential left-wingers. You can choose from the whole world now so it really shouldn't be hard to do this without being antisemitic about it.
It really shouldn't be hard to discuss jewish overrepresentation without pretending it doesn't exist.
Franz Boas, Freud, modern? more like post modern.
I think of Descartes and Kepler as the sorts who invented modernity. Their stuff actually worked.
Post modern = post reason
The reason is probably that they still see attacks on leftist modernity as attacks on them. Saying you like the good ones or that you still think Jews are swell on the whole doesn't mean much if your agenda is to reverse leftist/multiculti modernity.
Basically it's saying, "I love you guys, you've done great stuff, some of you in particular I idolize, and I promise we won't hurt you any more....but that's enough, back to the shtetl."
So, you’re saying that if one is opposed to “leftist/multiculti modernity,” then one is saying, “that's enough, back to the shtetl”? Those are the only alternatives?
For the modern right, modernity is an extension and realization of Western cultural advancement. For the modern left--heavily Jewish--modernity is essentially a rejection of Western heritage, an exposure of it sickness, evil, and pathology.
Very good, and compare to:
And it's a huge and dangerous fallacy of sentimental conservatives that modernity is "invented" and can be banished by somehow exiling the human carriers of it from society. Modernity is a fact rooted in the objective social conditions created by the industrial revolution. It doesn't cease to exist because you deny it. When you try to impose pre-modern ideologies by force onto modern societies you get fascism.
But some of us are NOT trying “to impose pre-modern ideologies. And the Left has been the side trying to force ideologies on the West in the post 1945 era. Please don’t imply that all your opponents are Fascists, in the manner of US Rep. Steve Cohen.
Instead, I suggest that 20th century Modernism was a false step into the future, which may be supplanted by a new and better Modernism in the 21st century. Leftist Modernism is as obsolete as 19th century Victorian clothing fashions, or 20th century Abstract Expressionist painting, or Brutalist architecture.
“ Modernity is a fact rooted in the objective social conditions created by the industrial revolution.
But that kind industrial era – the era of, for example, Detroit being the center of car manufacturing and the UAW being a necessary socio-economic formation – that era is gone, part of the bygone 20th century.
. It doesn't cease to exist because you deny it.
20th century Left Modernism may not continue to exist merely because you are nostalgic and sentimental about the days when a Leftist intelligentsia set the tone for all of America.
"Well, if the list is accurate and its members are indeed criminals or liars, it would make me a bit suspicious of Jews. Are we anti-Italian if we oppose the Mafia?"
Possibly. If somebody created a list of the 10 worst American criminals of the last 20 years, and all of them happened to be Italian-Americans, I would guess that person's choices were probably informed by an anti-Italian bias.
Even if those 10 people really were big time criminals.
"Yeah, it's funny how you never hear people like Ben Roethlisberger complain about getting bullied for being Jewish."
Jewish logic: Since some big dumb Polack bullied me as a child, I must bully ALL AMERICANS through the media.
Kylie:
"Right. Because if after reading and thinking for themselves, they decided to do something about what they'd read and thought (like giving the Dems a "shellacking"), it would be so much worse than if the leftists kept on running things."
It would be bad for the Leftists, ie 'dangerous' to them. Obviously I myself am in favour of people doing some reading and finding out more about how the world works. And not just Internet sources - eg I only knew that Bill Lind's analysis of 'cultural Marxism' was correct, and not a loony conspiracy theory, because I happened to have previously read a bunch of 1980s Critical Legal Theory - stuff which didn't make much sense until Lind provided the rosetta stone.
"It would be bad for the Leftists, ie 'dangerous' to them [if people did more reading and thinking for themselves]."
It already is, as the recent "shellacking" and the backlash against conservative rhetoric have shown.
"Obviously I myself am in favour of people doing some reading and finding out more about how the world works."
Sorry, no; though I read and reread your comment, that wasn't obvious to me.
FWIW, not a Beck fan myself. I watched his show daily for several months before I just couldn't take anymore. He does a good job of connecting the dots (i.e., Van Jones, Anita Dunn) with current events that fly under the radar of most of us. Beyond that, he strikes me as too much of a loose cannon.
Svigor,
Of the Jews you personally interact with on the Interwebs (here, for example), what percentage of them seem like lefties? What percentage of them would you say accuse Glen Beck of being an antisemite?
I don't know. I'll stipulate and say "not many."
As for how many are okay with superior rights for Jews, and inferior rights for Euros, I'd say, all of them.
So roughly 100% of Jews are anti-Euro.
Kylie on Beck:
"Beyond that, he strikes me as too much of a loose cannon."
I like that about him - I never know exactly where he's going to go, or how much he knows, or what he's up to. I think it's that not-knowing that drives Goldberg crazy.
"Lots of Palestinians were bullied by Jews. Why don't Jews stand up for those people?"
You mean like these guys? - Jews for Justice for Palestinians.
@ David
Is that a joke about Jacob Koppel Javits being an Anglo-Saxon? His family must have come over on the same ship as Whiskey's "Born Fighting" ancestors.
"Yeah, it's funny how you never hear people like Ben Roethlisberger complain about getting bullied for being Jewish."
From Wikipedia:
His surname "Roethlisberger" (Swiss-German spelling: Röthlisberger) is of Swiss origin with roots in the village of Geissbuehl Lauperswil, Switzerland.[164][165] He is a spokesman for Swiss Roots, a campaign intended to help Americans of Swiss origin reconnect with their Swiss ancestral heritage.[166] In May 2006, Roethlisberger and his family traveled to Switzerland for a week.
Are you sure Roethlisberger is Jewish???
Wow - Komment Kontrol locked this thread down hard.
I think I was an oh-fer on this one.
"Kylie on Beck:
'Beyond that, he strikes me as too much of a loose cannon.'
Simon on Kylie on Beck: I like that about him - I never know exactly where he's going to go, or how much he knows, or what he's up to. I think it's that not-knowing that drives Goldberg crazy."
Yes, and if you really are in London, you can afford to like it. But from my vantage point here in the US, I can see him going completely off the rails and inspiring some right-wing nut to do something disastrous to right-wing causes. I don't like that one bit.
There's something evangelistic about him that makes me very uneasy. On a personal level, I think he's cute as a bug. But as a public figure, he scares me. I see the light of the fanatic in his cute baby blues.
"I don't know. I'll stipulate and say "not many.""
The lefty, anti-Glenn Beck Jews must be too shy to engage with you online, I guess.
"Are you sure Roethlisberger is Jewish???"
Some fools forget that about 15% of this country is of Germanic ancestry, and a Germanic-sounding last name often indicates that an American is of German (or Swiss-German) ancestry, and not of Jewish ancestry. I never looked into it, but Roethlisberger never set off my Jewdar (Aaron Rodgers did, and it turns out he recently discovered he has some Jewish ancestry).
Yes, and if you really are in London, you can afford to like it. But from my vantage point here in the US, I can see him going completely off the rails and inspiring some right-wing nut to do something disastrous to right-wing causes. I don't like that one bit.-
Great thinking, Paul Krugman.
Yes, and if you really are in London, you can afford to like it. But from my vantage point here in the US, I can see him going completely off the rails and inspiring some right-wing nut to do something disastrous to right-wing causes. I don't like that one bit.-
Great thinking, Paul Krugman.
"'Kylie on Beck: But from my vantage point here in the US, I can see him going completely off the rails and inspiring some right-wing nut to do something disastrous to right-wing causes. I don't like that one bit."
Great thinking, Paul Krugman."
Since you're obviously not able to make crucial distinctions and can only see superficial and misleading similarities, let me clarify that for you.
Krugman talks about the right-wing as though it has already declared open season on everyone else. From his recent NYT editorial, "Climate of Hate":
"...right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence...there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials...One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate...If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning."
Krugman's "Climate of Hate".
He uses a broad brush to smear the right, referring to the "rising tide" of extremism and the "growing potential for violence". And even though he admits the AZ shooter was a mental case, he insists the atrocity can't be considered an isolated event and may be "just the beginning" in this "climate of hate" created by the right.
By contrast, I'm saying a right-wing nut--not an entire army of armed right-wing haters--might be inspired by needlessly inflammatory rhetoric to commit an ideologically motivated crime and further, that isolated event would give the left ammunition it would use to the fullest.
Of the two scenarios, mine is far more likely to occur, far more grounded in probabilities. Krugman is just fear-mongering.
And yes, I think Beck's reported use of the phrase "Enemies of Humanity" is the sort of needlessly imflammatory language the right should avoid in any public forum.
But I'm glad you were able to jump to a conclusion, even if it was the wrong one. I suspect you don't get much mental exercise otherwise.
Kylie:
"Yes, and if you really are in London, you can afford to like it. But from my vantage point here in the US, I can see him going completely off the rails and inspiring some right-wing nut to do something disastrous to right-wing causes. I don't like that one bit."
I am in London, so I get to watch Beck at 10pm every night on Fox News before going to bed!
If you've watched Beck regularly you should know he would never do or say anything to actually incite violence, that's the Blood Libel. :)
Kylie:
"There's something evangelistic about him that makes me very uneasy. On a personal level, I think he's cute as a bug. But as a public figure, he scares me. I see the light of the fanatic in his cute baby blues."
If he's a fanatic, he's a fanatical Mormon, with the zeal of the convert. I suspect he's looking to help Jon Huntsman Jnr in his 2012 Presidential run. I also suspect that Mormons will eventually take the leadership of what's left of Anglo-America, but it's probably too early for that as yet. Certainly Mitt Romney got a chilly reception, but a Mormon with a more populist touch might do better.
" I can see him going completely off the rails and inspiring some right-wing nut to do something disastrous to right-wing causes."
I posit that there are no right-wing or left-wing nuts, but simply nuts. One thing or another may cause them to snap. Proximate causes are lurking everywhere and shutting down free speech and messy democratic process in order to keep the insane in balance is tyrannic.
Whiskey said...
"Let me add, the vast majority of founders of Modernism, including Darwin, Nietzsche, Yeats, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, Proust, Stravinsky, Picasso, Joseph Conrad, Salvador Dali, and so on are not Jews."
Yes, but Eliot was.
Svigor said...
"Is it good for the Jews?" is the most consistent facet of Jewish identity that I can summon."
But are they good judges of that question? You sometimes wonder.
There's something evangelistic about him that makes me very uneasy.
"Something evangelistic about him" = code for "Christian."
In a recent poll, vast majority of Jews said their main sense of Jewishness derives from the Holocaust. Suppose it hadn't had happened. How would Jews see themselves and what would be our attitude toward 'antisemitism'?
Take this observation from SALOME OF THE TENEMENTS by Anzai Yezierska(about a Jewish clothes designer):
"The Jew in him measured her. The rapacious greed of his race for money, power, leaped up in his dark eyes..."
In her book BREAD GIVERS, Jews are portrayed as petty, dishonest, arrogant, oppressive, etc. The ray of hope comes from leaving the Jewish world and entering the one created by clean and dignfied wasps.
And this was from a woman with leftist leanings.
Or consider Irene Nemirovsky.
http://www.thenation.com/article/love-ruins
She wrote about Jews as self-deprecatingly as wasps write about themselves.
And many Jews back then weren't bothered by people like Nemirovsky and even agreed with some 'antisemtic' stuff said by gentiles--like wasps agree with some bad stuff said about wasps.
I think the Holocaust changed everything. If it hadn't had happened, we could be speaking of Jews as we do of French, Muslims, Chinese, Wasps, etc. And Jews would be much less sensitive.
Of course, it was less the Holocaust than how it was sacralized by western elites, but it was a major event, a horror among horrors.
Ben Roethlisberger Jewish?!?! C'mon, ya'll are pushing it more than a little bit.
Push back from your computers,have a cold beer and some warm matzoh ball soup on a cold winter day. Sheesh.
Stewardess: Would you like something to read?
Woman: Do you have anything light?
Stewardess: How about this leaflet, "Famous Jewish Sports Legends?"
@ David
Is that a joke about Jacob Koppel Javits being an Anglo-Saxon? His family must have come over on the same ship as Whiskey's "Born Fighting" ancestors.
Christ, is there a team working on the sarcasm gene?
The lefty, anti-Glenn Beck Jews must be too shy to engage with you online, I guess.
See! That's what I'm talking about. We cannot allow a shy Jew gap!
Ben Roethlisberger Jewish?!?! C'mon, ya'll are pushing it more than a little bit.
Who TF is this "ya'll" you're referring to?
If Jews want to pass, assimilate, whatever, they need to start hatin' on themselves, and give their rivals a rest.
SWPL or "proud and defensive of your ethnicity."
Pick one.
"...shutting down free speech and messy democratic process in order to keep the insane in balance is tyrannic."
Agreed. Which is why I don't advocate it. What I do advocate is cutting back on needlessly inflammatory rhetoric. To repeat, I don't watch Beck so I didn't hear him talking about enemies of America and humanity but that's the kind of thing I mean. I can hear that on the left any time. I'd like to think the right can make its points without that kind of demogogic blustering.
Apparently, you are confusing censorship imposed from without (to which I am opposed) with self-censoring (which I advocate).
"Kylie on Beck: 'There's something evangelistic about him that makes me very uneasy.'
'Something evangelistic about him' = code for 'Christian.'"
Maybe in your world. Not in mine. If I meant "Christian", I would have said "Christian". I meant "evangelistic" in its secondary definition of "militant or crusading zeal".
Merriam-Webster definition of "evangelistic".
Maybe in your world. Not in mine. If I meant "Christian", I would have said "Christian". I meant "evangelistic" in its secondary definition of "militant or crusading zeal".
What's wrong with militant or crusading zeal? Is languid gentility supposed to get us to the righteous city on the hill?
I get it. You're still talking in code.
Evangelistic zeal = Crusading against Saracens in the old-school, actual sense = war in Eyerack.
Christians = war mongers.
Kylie wrote, "Apparently, you are confusing censorship imposed from without (to which I am opposed) with self-censoring (which I advocate)."
Each of us has a different idea and tolerance level of what is acceptable in public debate. What I had heard from the left during 2008 election shocked me with its vulgar vitriol and fire-burning hate. Nevertheless, you are advocating that conservatives self-censor in the face of this ever-escalating verbal abuse and stripping of our equal rights.
You want the conservatives to take the higher ground, the noble way of pursed lips, stoical silence and heroic control of body language, facial expressions, and words.
So, let’s say Beck heeds your call and tames his passion. Would he still be Glenn Beck or a neutered lapdog? But wait! He is, practically, the only form of TV entertainment left for a conservative. The other 399 channels, even the children's channels, show 24x7 propaganda. It's so nauseating that I even stopped trying to find something palatable to watch.
Beck is my soap opera, History Channel, Judge Judy, SNL, and Rome wrapped in one.
But beyond sheer entertainment, he is telling the audience about people and events they would've never heard of or thought of as connected.
A conspiracy need not exist for the actions of individuals to lead to a result consistent with a conspiracy hypothesis. It makes little difference, if totalitarianism arrives conspiratorially, as a result of concerted efforts of a group, or as a result of spontaneous, separate efforts of individuals that make up the same group.
From the many signs I can't help but notice that we are inching ever so close to becoming the subjects of the Soviet Union of the United States. For regular folk, the silent majority, the freedom of speech is shrinking while for the public-servant class the right to obfuscate the truth grows. Soon, we might not have a choice in the matter of self-censorship. We’ll have to shut up to preserve our lives and livelihood.
While always relying on patterns might get one to swim with a black swan, denying the patterns is more dangerous.
The golden mean in pattern recognition would be ideal for survival and well-being. But, alas, sometimes, this can't be achieved within a single individual and is achieved within a group. Some see more, some see less. And that's why Beck is important.
In a recent poll, vast majority of Jews said their main sense of Jewishness derives from the Holocaust.
Which reminds us that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is an egregious violation of the literal terms of the Establishment Clause and that Holocaust education in schools is an egregious violation of the Establishment Clause as expanded by the courts.
Teaching about the Holocaust is like teaching about the Crucifixion and Resurrection -- it's 100% illegal.
I've never heard Beck rant about "enemies of humanity". He warns against the elites who want to control the minds of the mass*, but he doesn't call them "enemies". Unlike Obama, who did call them enemies for opposing illegal Hispanic immigration.
*Except when they're controlling the minds of the mass in a pro-black-civil-rights direction.
Anon:
"Of course, it was less the Holocaust than how it was sacralized by western elites, but it was a major event, a horror among horrors."
Yes - the Christian Armenians suffered a similar genocide at the hands of the Turks and Kurds, but it hasn't been sacralised so it doesn't seem central to the identity of modern Armenians. The sacralisation of the Holocaust dates from around the late 1960s; between the late '40s and the '60s it was not nearly as central to Jewish identity. And the sacralisation occurred first in the USA, almost entirely among gentiles and Jews who had not direct experience of it. It may have been more a reaction to the 1967 Six Day War's demonstration of Jewish strength, than traditional assumptions of Jewish vulnerability.
Kylie: There's something evangelistic about him that makes me very uneasy.
Vintage: Beck is my soap opera, History Channel, Judge Judy, SNL, and Rome wrapped in one.
Hear, hear.
PS: "To evangelize" means, literally, to bring the good news.
Beck isn't bringing any good news.
He's bringing the bad news that there is [and has been, for more than a century now] an extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily well-coordinated effort underway to destroy both this country and what little remains of Western Civilization.
PPS: In searching for a good link to the etymology of "evangelical", I came to discover that the new & improved merriam-webster.com no longer includes etymological notes.
We certainly wouldn't want the world to know where all those crazy old words came from, now would we?
I. WILL. TYPE. SLOWLY. FOR. YOU. SVIGOR:
Ben Roethlisberger = Not a Jew
You are finding Jewish boogeymen where there aren't any.
On the subject of Jewish bogeymen, it's interesting to take a look at Google auto-suggest.
If you type in "Klaus Fuchs," the first search which pops up is "Klaus Fuchs Jewish" So it seems a lot of people are very interested in whether Klaus Fuchs was Jewish or not.
Similarly, "Mike Nifong Jewish" seems to be a popular search.
I. WILL. TYPE. SLOWLY. FOR. YOU. SVIGOR:
Ben Roethlisberger = Not a Jew
You are finding Jewish boogeymen where there aren't any.
I'll type at regular speed for you: I don't know WTF you're on about. You're finding gentile boogeymen where there aren't any.
(Maybe I should have separated my question about Roethlisberger (one dude SEEMINGLY SUGGESTING his German surname might make some think he's Jewish does not a "y'all" make) from my comment about Jewish identity & assimilation, but they ARE separate paragraphs for cryin' out loud)
sabril said
>If somebody created a list of the 10 worst American criminals of the last 20 years, and all of them happened to be Italian-Americans, I would guess that person's choices were probably informed by an anti-Italian bias.<
First, Beck's list was 8/10. Your hypothetical is 10/10. Not the same.
Second, your assumption is that any given trait must be randomly distributed.
According to this assumption, if blacks nationwide (for example) are stopped by traffic cops more than 12% of the time, then this constitutes evidence that the police are "probably informed by an anti-black bias." Whereas in fact it would be evidence of no such thing.
Is your argument a case of "HBD for thine but not for mine," sabril?
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