It appears that a year ago, when I was thinking about Obama, I was right: he is the son of his Third-World World-Bank appropriate-technology ideology mother (no insult intended!), who will naturally gravitate toward the Palestinians. This is happening before our eyes: the American government is "angry" with obstinate Israel and openly siding with the "peace-loving" Palestinians. Israel's chief aim, which is to organize a worldwide coalition lead by America to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons, is failing. Obama instead of leading the world to avoid the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable Muslim ayatollahs, is kowtowing to those perfumed Arab sheikhs.
There is always the Republican Party. Its leaders attacked the Obama administration with unusually harsh language, charging it with an "irresponsible” position against an ally, Israel. "In an effort to ingratiate our country with the Arab world, this administration has shown a troubling eagerness to undercut our allies and friends,” said the GOP’s only Jewish Republican Congressman, Eric Cantor of Virginia. He went so far as to say that the dispute "jeopardizes America's national security."
18 comments:
J, when you used the phrase "boy of his third-world World-Bank appropriate-technology ideology mother," did you realize that "black boy" is a common insult in the hood (the American black ghetto)? If you meant to insult Pres. Obama, "boy" is appropriate. If you did not mean to insult Pres. Obama, "son" would be the appropriate term. Also, on March 15, 2010 CE, you posted on the FeministX blog, "You may have misunderstood the form. The idea is that you can decide what race you are, like what movies you like." This is a good humorous observation, but if Ray Kurzweil's hypothesis of the Technological Singulariy is true, in a few decades you might be able to literally choose your own race, age, and who knows what else. Do you think the Singularity is dreck?
Doggytwit,
Please, J is not a native English speaker. English is maybe his 4th fluent language after Hungarian, Spanish and Hebrew (you might forget this because he is so good). When you are fluent in all the grammatical and politically correct nuances of Hungarian, please write back to J in that language without committing any faux pas.
Even if his usage was intentional - so what? What ever happened to free speech? Who appointed you the speech police? Everything that Orwell predicted in 1984 is coming true and more.
As for Kurzweil, when in fact you can actually select your own race, etc. and this is not just speculation, please get back to us. Personally I doubt this will be possible since your DNA blueprint is contained in every single cell of your body. You might be able to select race at the point of conception but after that, I would bet we will be stuck with it for many centuries to come. Until then, J's hypothesis holds.
K
J,
Keep in mind that perfumed Arab sheikhs (and smelly ones too) are no more happy than Israel to see Iran with nuclear weapons.
Obama is behaving exactly as predicted by you and many others. Yet the rubes in the Democrat party are shocked, shocked that he is turning out this way. This is what the Jews get for being taken "for granted" by the Democrats - once you are a solid block (like the blacks) the party no longer has to do anything for you and puts its efforts at the margins where they believe it will help them (either in fundraising or in votes or with foreign policy) - they will have your support regardless. Now in the case of the Jews I think Obama is sorely mistaken (with respect to fundraising if not votes (and Jewish fundraising is a lot more significant than votes - as a voting block Jews are 2% but they account for perhaps 1/2 of the Democrat parties $) and if he keeps this up, he can forget about being a 2 term president. Hillary would like nothing better than to stab Obama in the back and take the nomination in 2012.
The Palestinians as usual are their own worst enemies - naming squares in honor of mass murderers of civilians, rioting over a synagogue that they destroyed in 1948 - these are the kind of issues that get zero sympathy in the US. Even the Obamaites that love the 3rd world are at best embarrassed by such behavior and have to grit their teeth and pretend not to notice in public, but they notice.
K
K, I don't care if J insults Obama — I was just curious if that "boy" was a deliberate insult. I am curious about J's outlook (and your outlook). I think it is usually a bad idea to insult opponents, enemies, or competitors — but sometimes it helps. "Kill Japs! Kill Japs!" said Admiral Bull Halsey – it probably helped morale at the time.
I think Obama is far less relevant than Muslim demographics and global developments in science in technology. I hope that J was joking when he indicated that Warren Buffett is the world's greatest living genius. K, who do you think is the world's greatest living genius? I strongly believe that at least 5 of the world's top 10 living geniuses are Jews. I nominate Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten, Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Wolfram. If the Singularity is 200 or 300 years away (or never happens), then I think that Israel & the USA have a severe long-term Muslim problem. Also, political correctness hampers us from discussing ethnic & religious matters in a realistic way.
Doggytwit,
I really have not made a study of the greatest living geniuses and have no opinion as to specific individuals. All of those you name are certainly good candidates although I'm not sure of what methodology you could use to rank geniuses? I would be fairly confident to say that of those who are American, you could expect, as a statistical matter, 25% to 30% of them to be Jewish as I have outlined previously. Out of the very small sample of the top 10, 5 would not be outside of the realm of possibility. I think if you broadened the group to 100 or 500, you would come closer to the statistical expectation. Again, this is almost a statistical artifact of Ashkenazi Jews (the predominant American type) having a group mean of around 1 SD above the general population - once you establish the relative means, the percentiles at the say 160+ level where geniuses are found follow as a natural consequence (just as on the other end it cannot be otherwise that there are almost no black scientific geniuses). I can also confidently predict that the next generation of geniuses will include far more East Asians and some South Asians as well.
K
K, thanks for your reply. If 25-30 % of the American Nobel prize winners are Ashkenazi Jews, then my guess is that of the top 10 % of the American Nobel prize winners, maybe 50 - 60 % might be Ashkenazi Jews. Do you think that would be a good guess?
However, at the very top, maybe 70% would be Jews? As a theoretical physicist in the 20th century, did Einstein have a close rival?
The genetics of IQ is political dynamite, to say the least. Consider 2 hypotheses:
(1) Low IQ strongly correlates with a tendency to violence.
(2) Low IQ strongly correlates with a tendency to believe in religious fundamentalism.
Clearly, people with Down's syndrome are non-violent. Clearly, many of the most non-violent people are religious fundamentalists. But if the 2 hypotheses are true, then in terms of street crime, political violence, and demographics are Israel, the USA, and the rest of the world in a bad trend? The world can use more East Asian and South Asian geniuses, but what about the masses of medium-to-low IQ people?
There is not the Republican Party.
It was voted out by a coalition of anti-Protestant ethnics who arrogantly believed they could run not only the US but the world. 'Ruin' yes, but not 'run'.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and with a vengeance.
Even when the Republicans come back, there will not be America since it will take a generation to get us out of the debt that the Neocons so recklessly ran up during the Bush years, and which Obama and his advisors even more recklessly increased.
All of this has been engineered by a so-called intellectual elite who cannot accept the unpalatable reality that, in the final analysis, the security of Israel rests absolutely and utterly with WASP America, that Western Civilization is the only type worth having, and that as traditional WASPs do, so does the West.
Anon.
Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten, Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Wolfram
Gell-Mann - Joyce devotee with a mastery of eight languages yet named the quarks like a catatonic, up, down, charm and came up with that gem of a schoolboy analogy, the Eight Fold Way.
Steven Weinberg - the universe serves no purpose, we aint going nowhere nohow, it has no other point than to allow me to sell sadsack books.
Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is here, I am already living the La Dolce Vita, with pliant robots serving my every need. This is why I am not looking for a job.
Stephen Wolfram - for every problem to be solved, every question one has on origins, mechanism, or purpose always assume a cellular automata.
Geniuses the lot of them.
-- cellular automaton ---
Doggytwit,
I really don't have an answer for you - I don't know how you distinguish between Nobel winners and top and "very top" Nobel winners. What methodology would you suggest? I do know that if there were no Jews, modern science would not be where it is today, without a doubt. If on the other hand, all the blacks and Arabs were swallowed by the sea, the world of science would not even notice a ripple.
K
Thanks for the comment. I never intended to disrespect President Obama, I never imagined that "mother's boy" could be interpreted in such a way, and I corrected the wrongly worded expression. I do accept corrections and appreciate them.
As it is known, Obama spent his formative years with her mother in Indonesia and other developing countries, where she worked with the World Bank and the Ford Fundation on village technologies.
Ivan, thanks for your comment. I think I would also nominate Sydney Brenner. I have learned a lot from reading the aphorisms of Einstein, some of Brenner's essays, and Crick's book "What Mad Pursuit." Could you (or J or K) nominate more candidates?
Consider 2 hypotheses:
(1) If 100 million Chinese converted to Judaism and moved to Israel it would be marvelous for Israel.
(2) If 100 million black Africans converted to Judaism and moved to Israel it would be disastrous for Israel.
(3) One Yo-Yo Ma might be worth a frighteningly large number of black Africans and white Europeans.
Am I being an ignorant bigot here?
K, I think the way to approach average Nobel prize winner (NPW) versus top NPW versus very top NPW would be to ask Nobel prize winners, Fields medalists, and similar selected groups to suggest methodologies. Voting by NPWs would seem a logical approach. How could we say to ethnic group B that science strongly suggests that your group is, on average, genetically inferior in intellect to ethnic group A? Wouldn't that seem to make us war mongers and hate mongers? Thomas Jefferson said, "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just." Should I say that I tremble for my planet when I remember that IQ is highly heritable? I think the USA needs Israel for a simple reason: Jewish brainpower.
There are probably far fewer really bright Ashkenazim in Israel than there are in the USA; I think that Israeli brain power, admirable as it may be, is dispensable for the USA as long as it can access its own Jews back home.
However, something is gradually staring to dawn on me; the attitude of American Ashkenazim to Israel is not a simple matter to understand, and is I think quite conflicted. Partly, there is a guilt thing, as there usually is between those who only talk the talk versus those who actually walk the walk. And I suspect that not all American Jews are that keen to actually go to Israel; I get invited there as an expert quite often, and I cannot imagine there aren't Jewish Americans as, or more competent than I am but who decline to go; in fact I know this is the case.
The point of this rambling diatribe is that America would not be smart to get physically involved in Gaza/the West Bank, as their actions would inevitably enrage both sides in this lose-lose conflict. Importantly, it would antagonize American Jews back home, who are already feeling guilty enough and who would come under immense pressure from Israel to manipulate US politics in such a way as to get US troops withdrawn.
This could get very messy and unpleasant, and might result in the reduction of Jewish loyalty to the USA. Since the US does benefit from Jewish brain power, there could be highly negative consequences of all this.
I think Bush's policy of apparent benign neglect is much more intelligent.
Anon.
How could we say to ethnic group B that science strongly suggests that your group is, on average, genetically inferior in intellect to ethnic group A?
I think this has been said many times already in numerous scientific papers - as with "global warming" (but with the politics reversed) there are some people who are simply not interested in believing the scientific evidence if it goes against their ideological beliefs. Others (Lysenko) simply invent a pseudo-science to confirm their political views. Even if you accept the science, there is the political question of what is to be done in response - should you accept the reality or work to do the impossible - make the dumb equal to the smart, change the temperature of the planet, etc. Humans have throughout history taken on "impossible" goals - send a man to the moon, build a wall across all of China, etc. so we don't always know when thing are REALLY impossible.
K
"The point of this rambling diatribe is that America would not be smart to get physically involved in Gaza/the West Bank, as their actions would inevitably enrage both sides in this lose-lose conflict."
AFAIK, despite Petraeus's desire to enlarge his sphere of influence, there are no plans whatsoever to send US troops to Israel. Rather the "plan" is for the US to strongarm Israel into a deal with the Palestinians to give them all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Obama can exert all the pressure he can still muster (which is declining every day) but Israel will not sell out its fundamental interests so that the Arabs will love the US (and even if it did, the Arabs would still hate the West anyway). In Arab eyes, according to the "strong horse" theory, any accommodation is seen as weakness so Obama's kowtowing has worsened, not strengthened the US hand in the region. "Kumbaya" politics only works in Obama's fevered leftist dreams.
K
J - I never imagined that "mother's boy" could be interpreted in such a way...
OTOH, "mama's boy" is a common phrase. OTOH, in the racist past in the American South, full grown black men were sometimes called "boy" to their face as a mark of their low status and in lieu of calling them by their names, so it is a common taboo in the US never to refer to a black man as "boy" in any context (though it is natural that you might not be aware of this nuance). On the third hand (Jews need at least 3) there has been a recent trend among Obama supporters to consider any description of him to be "racist code" (and therefore those who utter these descriptions are closet racists and despicable) - if Obama is referred to as "thin" this is somehow a veiled reference to his race, if he is called "articulate", ditto, etc. (of course only if done by his opponents - his supporters are assumed not to be racist, so for them a cigar is just a cigar).
K
Obama is not from American slave stock: He is son of a Luo (Nilotic) intellectual and an American communist Ph.D. in Development Economy. He made his carreer as community organizer, what was formerly called an agitprop agent or in Israel, a neighborhood activist. It is strange to see how since the Bandung anticolonialist congress, colonial powers like Great Britain and the US have adopted Third World ideology.
In American terms, everyone (even Obama himself) agrees that Obama is "black" meaning of the same race as the American slave descendants, notwithstanding that he has no common ancestry with them (at least on his black side - since most American blacks have some white blood Obama surely has black "cousins" on his mother's side).
K
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