The university's library is always giving aways old books. Yesterday I took five old history books, among them Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of The West), written in 1918. It is not what I imagined. It is full of spiritual bullshit, about wakeful states and so. He writes that only the White race has mechanical abilities. He is wrong and an idiot.
52 comments:
Spengler was too much of a free thinker to unreservedly endorse Hitler (though he voted for him) , but his mystical racial ideas contributed to the the Nazi climate. There is nothing magical about white Europeans.
K
"There is nothing magical about white Europeans."
... unless they are also Jews.
-s.n.
There's nothing magical about Jews either, s.n. We aren't so special.
I disagree. Don't we often read, here and elsewhere, that Jews are intellectually superior to gentiles, in the aggregate, and thus also tend to be more moral, have longer time horizons, be less barbaric, wash more, not get drunk...? Think back to the Jewish scholar and the Polish peasant ca. 1900. Was there nothing "more special" about the Jew?
Well, perhaps I'm wrong.
-s.n.
Even if the average Ashkenazi IQ is higher, there are so many more Gentile whites and Asians that there will still be more of them at the high IQ ranges than there will be Jews, just not as many as the population imbalance would suggest. More moral, I wouldn't bet on. Jews are people like everyone else.
So...no one is special? We are all just people? That doesn't make any sense.
Individuals are special on the basis of their gifts - intelligence, strength, beauty. One's ethnic group may offer some prognostication of what measure of those traits one will possess, but it's probably not as useful for that as assessment of an individual's immediate family. Otherwise, the cultures of different groups can be assessed. Here, I think traditional Judaism is lacking. But it still has not prevented the rise of intelligence.
Spengler is a genius! Read Spengler and understand history and culture.
I do not think that the Jews (tm) are superior in terms of intellect (if you average the Ashkenazim with everyone else,) applied morality, etc.
I do think that the Jews have a unique historical mission. Idolatry (the good, old-fashioned pyramids and human sacrifice kind, not the fag-Goth kind) disappeared from the Mediterranean basin as a result of the Jewish kingdom showing the neighbors the way. We brought monotheism to the world. I don't think our mission is over yet. I can't responsibly speculate on any mystical ways in which this purpose is uniquely reflected in our spiritual makeup.
I will say, however, that the constant striving for a greater purpose and inability to be satisfied with the status quo (football on TV, a cold beer, tits on the internet, the corner office at work) is widespread among us, and I don't see it as common among the rest of the world. Even the more intelligent goyim en masse seem to lack this drive and intellectual curiosity, inability to sit still, etc. The general aspiration seems to be a bigger tv, colder beer, bigger tits on the internet, etc. There have been exceptional periods, of course-flowerings like Golden Age Greece, the Rennaisance, the Industrial Revolution-but they seem to burn out in a couple of centuries. Only the Jews are eternally spiritually restless.
When Goebbles said "When I hear the word kultur, I reach for my gun", he was thinking of Oswald Spengler.
"I will say, however, that the constant striving for a greater purpose and inability to be satisfied with the status quo (football on TV, a cold beer, tits on the internet, the corner office at work) is widespread among us, and I don't see it as common among the rest of the world. Even the more intelligent goyim en masse seem to lack this drive and intellectual curiosity, inability to sit still, etc. The general aspiration seems to be a bigger tv, colder beer, bigger tits on the internet, etc."
I noticed this myself. For the intelligent and educated ones is not "tits on the intrnet" but still a sort of oriental acceptance of faith and the way things work.
Trying to give an opinion leads me to thinking about usefulness of being restless. Going towards peaks of power and influence is not necessarily a good thing. It leads to resentments and well if things go wrong to hatred.
So in a long term perspective minding your own business might be the wisest choice.
"When Goebbles said "When I hear the word kultur, I reach for my gun", he was thinking of Oswald Spengler."
Yes he was. But it was too late already. If you make such references you are corrupted.
I couldn't read it myself. Too much psycho-spiritual-bubble whatever.
I'd rather look at a population social evolution : Urbanised educated females don't breed much.
So you get a older risk averse population. Less of anything, mainly vitality. If an old people breeds it becomes youthful.
In 20 years we will have an old and mature chinese civilisation. Because well chinese are going to be old. Now they are quite young.
etc etc
Anyway I agree with J. An idiot.
Kultur is a symptom of social evolution which in a historic perspective is called decadence.
If you got to that point you are as a society a walking dead.
In a strange twisted way the guy with the gun was right. Kultur was the problem for his society.
No one knows who you are, J, and no on will. Spengler is going to be read for thousands of years.
"No one knows who you are, J, and no on will. Spengler is going to be read for thousands of years."
Yeap.
Because " it is full of spiritual bullshit, about wakeful states and so. He writes that only the White race has mechanical abilities.".
People like fantasy. Especially apocalyptic one.
"I do think that the Jews have a unique historical mission. Idolatry (the good, old-fashioned pyramids and human sacrifice kind, not the fag-Goth kind) disappeared from the Mediterranean basin as a result of the Jewish kingdom showing the neighbors the way. We brought monotheism to the world."
With all due respect, Judaism did nothing of the kind. Paganism was still the dominant religious force in the Near East at the time of Constantine. Likewise, St. Athanasius was persecuted for preaching against it in Egypt. Just by looking at the calendar, it is obvious that Christianity was solely responsible for the destruction of paganism in the Near East and Europe. No Judaism, no Christianity, of course.
I believe it was Wyschogrod who said that conversion to Judaism was a miracle and miracles by their nature are rare, and indeed, the mystical presence of the soul at Sinai to consent to the covenant suggests birth into the wrong family, etc.; quite a mess. I imagine that's why no one complains that Orthodox Jews are always going door to door asking if you have five minutes to speka with them about the life of Moses...
-s.n.
Spengler was German wasn't he? It is impossible to read these Germans - they are hands down the least elegant, least clear, most muddled writers in the world, with a handful of exceptions like Heine, Goethe, Nietzsche. In the practical and theoretical sciences the Germans were brilliant, but in terms of culture and elegance and clarity they were just a disaster.
Peter Watson suggests that the Third Enlightenment was German, and that today we all "think German", the influence of German culture has been so great in the past 100 years. It makes sense, and explains so much about the intellectual muddle of the academy, and the fondness for mystical mumbo jumbo that has taken the place of elegant clarity!
When one contrasts the elegance, clarity, pithiness, and wit of the English and French intellectual tradition - something they strived hard to discipline themselves to and build up - with the ham-fisted, clumsy, mystical mumbo jumbo of the Germans, you see what we have lost. Even when German writers have good points it is expressed so clumsily it is a pain to read.
S.N.-
1. The real, good, hardcore idolatry disappeared from the Mediterranean basin right around the same time as prophecy disappeared from Israel. So, somewhere right before the Second Temple period started. The paganism of the Romans and Greeks was weak sauce-no mass child sacrifices, no pyramids, very tongue in cheek. Sorry.
2. Conversion to Judaism was much easier and more widespread in Talmudic times and probably before that. See: the Book of Ruth, the end of Megillat Esther, Hillel's explanation of the conversion procedure, the large amount of Roman converts at the beginning of the first millenium CE, and so on.
3. Of course, no Judaism->no Christianity or Islam. But it goes deeper than that. Every second that a monotheistic state existed in Israel and Judah was an existential challenge to the idolatrous cults around. Idolatry and monotheism are fundamentally incompatible. Either one or the other must go. We see which one went.
B-
So your claim is not that Judaism ended polytheism, but rather that the mere existence of a Jewish state (a fact of which the vast majority of Idolators couldn't possibly even have been aware) posed an "existential challenge" to "hardcore idolatry." This invisible radiation of monotheism, so to speak, ensured that, around 900 years after the foundation of the Second Temple, polytheism would be ended by members of a more recently-arising monotheistic religion.
Well, maybe. This seems more like a philosophical opinion than like a proven proposition in history. In any case, while the polytheists might have calmed down ca. 500 BC, they did not actually relinquish their polytheistic beliefs, and denigrating those could still be bad for you, as Socrates and Alcibiades found out; the Greeks also seemed to have taken their "mysteries" very seriously. Romans like Seneca might well have laughed at the rude and barbaric polytheistic ceremonies, but these were meaningful both to countrymen and to the founders of the Republic, whose pietas was seriously intended despite their comparative lack of human sacrifices and pyramids.
Your views apparently distinguish between the "magic" of Judaism, which was the Jews' mission to the world to destroy paganism, and the sense in which "magic" is intended in this thread, referring to the evident belief among many Jews of both the left and right that Jews are "special." If we grant that entire peoples can have God-given missions - a dangerous belief, in some hands - there is no reason to believe that carrying out such a mission would have the permanent consequence of bestowing a superior, more vivacious character upon the minds of that people's physical descendants.
To the contrary, most of the Jews that I at least find the most interesting - Heifetz, Lasker, Neumann, Erdos, Canetti, Gilels, Mahler, Rothko - were men with little or no connection to religious Judaism. The great Yiddish novelists, for instance Chaim Grade, were largely men from traditionalist upbringings who had lost their faith. Judaism never quite recovered from its confrontation with modernity. The Haskalah seems to have permanently divided secular from religious Judaism; observant Jews turned inward, irreligious Jews are Jews only ethnically, and those who tried to forge a third way are forgotten. Where is Ethical Culture today? It's the only religious movement in history to turn into a private school.
As far as tits on the Internet are concerned, it is news to me at least that Jews aren't interested in material things, preferring the higher life of the mind. If anything, religious Jews seem quite a bit more opulent that assimilated secular Jews, and quite a bit less interested in philosophy, the sciences, history, or indeed much of anything.
OT: Just heard that Zvi Zeitlin died this morning. Sad day for music in America. I had lessons with him in another life. Also, I wrote the unsigned comment directly above.
-s.n.
S.N.
Of course the nations around the Mediterranean basin were aware of the existence of Israel. There were massive maritime trade networks running from Lebanon to Spain and beyond. It is foolish to think that nations linked to the Eastern Mediterranean by these networks could have been ignorant of current events.
The official ideology of idolatry took a long time to rot out and collapse, and it was dangerous to cross it for a long time after its heart had stopped beating. Still, the fact that the progressive youth of Athens led by Alcibiades thought that taking a hammer to the peckers of the statues of the gods would be funny tells me that it was dead by this point. And why did it die? You tell me. The other alternative, of course, is spelled out in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but I don't buy it.
I don't get your distinction between Judaism and Jews-in my view, it's about as relevant as the distinction between an iPhone and iOS. What I do distinguish between is the part of our mission which is complete and the part which is yet to be completed.
The Haskalah is nothing new or unique. There have always been Hellenizers, conversos, what have you. Yechezkel talked about the futility of the Jews' desire to be like the other nations. The Haskalah is just this desire applied to Western Progressivism. Its failure is typical and predictable, but not indicative of anything vis-a-vis actual Judaism and its future.
Your last paragraph indicates that you don't understand what I'm saying, since you are distorting my argument by saying that irreligious Jews are more curious than religious ones. That is really a non sequitur.
B,
"Of course the nations around the Mediterranean basin were aware of the existence of Israel."
Who's distorting whose argument? The relevant quote is "a fact of which the vast majority of idolators couldn't possibly even have been aware," an assertion I stand by since the vast majority of Semitic pagans were illiterate peasants who never traveled more than a few miles from home. "Trade networks running to Spain" don't do anything to change the lives of farmers in Lower Egypt or Mesopotamia. As you'll note from Prof. J.'s latest post, even today, rural Anatolians are so backward that many have apparently never tasted milk, much less been influenced by the Second Temple to give up worshiping forest gods and spitting to ward off the evil eye.
"Still, the fact that the progressive youth of Athens led by Alcibiades thought that taking a hammer to the peckers of the statues of the gods would be funny tells me that it was dead by this point."
Thanks to the Second Temple and the influence of the Jews, of course.
"I don't get your distinction between Judaism and Jews-in my view, it's about as relevant as the distinction between an iPhone and iOS... you are distorting my argument by saying that irreligious Jews are more curious than religious ones."
If apostates and unbelievers can carry out a mission, the mission may be providentially ordained, but it cannot have arisen from religious conviction. Your claim was that Jews have a special mission to humanity; apparently this mission consisted partly of destroying paganism, and partly of a certain innate curiosity and aspiration beyond cold beer and tits on the internet.
Accepting your terms, even if this curiosity were to be the mission of the Jewish race, it could not be the mission of the Jewish religion, since, as we have established, the most religious Jews are the most incurious and inverted. As secular Israelis complain, the Haredim all have 50 kids and don't know how to be managers or engineers.
If Judaism is what makes Jews "special," as you claim they are, it's a strange paradox that the most religious ones are also the least special. And if the fundamental distinction between Jews and gentiles is a restless curiosity, it is strange that the least religious Jews are the ones most similar to the gentiles in their incuriousness.
From my POV, there really is such a thing as a characteristic Jewish energy and curiousness. However, this trait is only expressed in cultural milieus created by others. The gentiles invented chess and raised it to a high art; the Jews took it to the next level, creating the modern game. The gentiles invented tonal harmony, the instruments, and composed the music; the Jews wrote the coda to the form (Mahler) and became the greatest masters of the instruments. The gentiles invented science and modern math; once released from the ghetto and the Pale, secular (but not religious) Jews first mastered the existing corpus and then produced so many great discoveries and techniques that a list would consume more pixels than the internet holds. But this isn't just a Jewish story; it's the story of Jewish engagement with gentile culture. As against those towering monuments, the achievements of strictly Jewish culture are pretty unimpressive.
To me, this is the story of a complicated, painful, tragic relationship, not the story of a divine mission to enlighten subhumans and degenerates.
-s.n.
*"introverted" for "inverted" above
Old school idolatry was a governmental institution, run by societal elites with a large-scale infrastructure (see: pyramids, ziggurats, etc.) The peasants were irrelevant, the passive recipients of trends and information coming from the top. The social elites of the Mediterranean basis could not have been unaware of Israel, the Temple, etc. The book of Maccabees, for instance, casually mentions trade routes to the Greek islands, a Spartan diplomatic mission, etc. Maritime technologies and routes had hardly changed from the time of David to the time of the Maccabees.
The mission (the operating system) requires certain characteristics of the people executing it (the hardware.) One of these characteristics is this spiritual drive and restlessness.
If we look at Psalms, we can see that this mission involves interaction with the other nations.
I don't believe that the current state of Orthodoxy is optimal, if that answers your objections. Things are, as it were, on hold until the Third Temple is built, or at least until concrete steps towards its construction begin to be taken (the creation of a Sanhedrin, for one.)
Parenthetically, the Haredim and Chasidim I know (in America) include a fair amount of programmers and other highly skilled individuals employed in intellectual pursuits.
BTW, nobody said anything about subhumans and degenerates-are you projecting?
There is never going to be a messianic age or Third Temple, B. Things among the Orthodox are going to be "on hold" and therefore rather imperfect, essentially for as long as the Orthdox are around. And don't fall into the trap of Jewish chauvinism. When one learns from a Jewish source that ancient Judean dignitaries went on a foreign embassy, we learn little about how the foreigners they visited viewed them. The preponderance of evidence indicates that Jews were not highly regarded in the Greco-Roman world. Given that they spent more time under conquest than independent even before the Greeks and Romans, it is likely the Assyrians and Babylonians had a similarly low opinion. Jews can be influential in the recent past without having been a great force in antiquity.
1. Never say never. 200 years ago there was never going to be another Jewish state.
2. I recommend you actually read the salient part in Maccabees before telling me what it says. You may be surprised.
s.n I very much like what you are saying and find it very true, but consider that it is just the Jews who flourished only in contact with others.
One might say that this is nothing less than characteristic of white Europeans (and perhaps by extension the human race?). Aryans on their own did nothing much, but suddenly fused with native stock and placed at a maritime cultural crossroads, we have ancient Greeks. People forget that the Greeks stood at a cultural crossroads and drew heavily on Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures, which they regarded as much more ancient and impressive than their own, until they learned from them.
Of course, the Northern Europeans did nothing on their own, but only after rediscovering ancient Greece and Rome, and indeed under the tutelage of a foreign religion derived from the Jews. The European cultures least exposed to the "other" - the Scands, etc, were the least impressive.
So perhaps what you say about the Jews - which strikes me as utterly correct - is something about the human race?
B, if you are referring to the favorable Roman-Jewish treaty described in Maccabees, there is no external source to verify its existence. Scholars who argue for its veracity point to the fact that treaties signed between Rome and other polities were similar, in which case it would tell us little about how the Romans viewed the Jews.
I am referring to the Spartan correspondence.
Since independent sources have repeatedly verified the historical accuracy of canon long after historians had dismissed it (for instance, Joshua's altar,) I assume canon is accurate until proven otherwise.
I go with S. N.'s version. 3rd Temple too mystical for my tastes. PETA would never allow the sacrifices. Would send hidden cameras into the Holy of Holies and the tape would play on the BBC. I don't see how restoring the Sanhedrin would fundamentally change anything - most Jews wouldn't care what 71 old guys with beards told them to do.
Most Orthodox expecting the Moschiach to show up 1st and their job is just to wait for him to show up, maybe speed the coming with mitzvot, pray that their rebbe (living or dead) is the one who will turn out to be the Moschiach, but basically it is a "Waiting for Godot" kind of religion where you spend all your energy waiting for a guy who is not going to show up.
What is interesting to me is that somehow religious Ashkenazim hold within themselves the hidden seeds of greatness - all the bearded grandfathers and great grandfathers (and sometime fathers) of Freud and Einstein and Teller, Mahler, etc., etc. shokling in shul had the potential to spawn greatness even if they themselves were as absorbed in circular pilpul as their modern descendants. It is not by accident that Kafka writes about a metamorphosis. I don't see the same potential energy in Christian religious fanatics, who seem capable of giving birth to only more fanatics. When the Amish cast aside their cult (as a few do) they disappear into blue collar white America, they don't invent 12 tone music or create the hydrogen bomb.
K
It is an open question as to whether there will be sacrifices in the Temple. Regardless, in any world where the Temple has been rebuilt, the opinions of PETA and the class they represent don't matter. In fact, this class has to be overcome in order to rebuild it. So this is kind of like saying that man will never go to space because the Inquisition will not permit it.
The opinions of most of the Orthodox don't matter-truth is not subject to democracy. There is a stream of thought which has always existed which suggests that the Temple will come into existence the same exact way in which its predecessors did, and will not descend from the heavens. When this stream of thought picks up enough steam, it will get built.
As far as your objection to the Sanhedrin, it is pure nonsense. Most Jews in America care about what 9 old people tell them what to do. Israel has its Bagatz. There is nothing mystical about this mechanism, and very little involving explicit consensus. Since I personally believe that Torah is a much better system of principles than "constitutional law" (meaning, effectively, whatever the Supreme Court happens to decide it means this week,) it stands to reason that I'd want a legal body operating on the former rather than the latter.
I'm not sure I would want to live under Biblical law any more than I'd want to live under Shariah - stoning for punishment, etc.
K
A Sanhedrin that put one person to death in 7 years was considered cruel, according to the Gemara.
Further, we have people raped by gang members for punishment ("oh, we didn't mean for that to happen-who could have predicted it?"). For stupid shit, drug possession, etc. There were no jails in Biblical law.
Anonymous:
"Of course, the Northern Europeans did nothing on their own, but only after rediscovering ancient Greece and Rome, and indeed under the tutelage of a foreign religion derived from the Jews. The European cultures least exposed to the "other" - the Scands, etc, were the least impressive.
"So perhaps what you say about the Jews - which strikes me as utterly correct - is something about the human race?"
I agree; a culture must strike a balance while circulating trade and ideas. It can neither become so closed that it stagnates and turns all of its energies into internal status-mongering, nor so open that its brains fall out.
Cultures also have to accept that survival entails change. Cultures that try to remain the same wind up as hollow mockeries of the past - living museums who mindlessly repeat dead forms. Spengler has a great deal to say about this, by the way.
B:
"Old school idolatry was a governmental institution, run by societal elites with a large-scale infrastructure (see: pyramids, ziggurats, etc.) The peasants were irrelevant, the passive recipients of trends and information coming from the top..."
It's not at all clear to me that this is an accurate portrayal of religion in the Ancient Near East, either in terms of rituals or of the beliefs of the common people. (Since the common people continued to practice polytheism for almost 1000 years after the foundation of the Second Temple, and indeed for several hundred more years after its destruction, surely their beliefs and practices are at least somewhat relevant here.)
I admit I am not a scholar of ancient religions, but my understanding was that Egyptians of the dynastic period didn't practice human sacrifice at all, nor did the Babylonians prior to their conquest by the Assyrians (which was only a few hundred years prior to the foundation of the Second Temple.) The Philistines were much nastier, of course, but then it was Rome rather than the Jews that put down the priests of Moloch in Carthage. As for Rome and Greece, there is shadowy evidence that in their precivilized periods, they occasionally killed royalty, as the myth of Iphegenia echoes -- but then, if that is to be held against them, mustn't we hold Jephtha against the Jews?
It's certainly true that a particular system wound down during a time-frame roughly coincident with the emergence of Jewish temple monotheism from the collection of Yahwistic cults once found among the ancestors of the Hebrews. On the other hand, if your claim is that this was because the mere existence of monotheism among the Jews (as opposed to other monotheists - Akhenaten, certain Hindus, certain tribesmen in Central Asia, etc.) was the Providential means of bringing this about... well, I want proof.
-s.n.
"A Sanhedrin that put one person to death in 7 years was considered cruel, according to the Gemara."
B,
The ultra-Orthodox fanatics of antiquity, the Zealots, killed many. Granted, this was not the act of the Sanhedrin, but it is naive to assume that the murderous impulses of the religious fanatics will be able to completely controlled by any religious body. Moreover, for a Sanhedrin to come to power, the impulses of the religious fanatics will have to be given more free reign. My suspicion is that if the ultra-Orthodox ever gain that much power in Israel, they will destroy it much as their Zealot ancestors did.
Anonymous:
"The ultra-Orthodox fanatics of antiquity, the Zealots, killed many. Granted, this was not the act of the Sanhedrin, but it is naive to assume that the murderous impulses of the religious fanatics will be able to completely controlled by any religious body."
I agree, and moreover, it is hardly fair to compare the cruelties of an existing system to the imagined benignity of a nonexistent system. In the imagination, all kinds of fantastic things can work.
-s.n.
"I couldn't read it myself. Too much psycho-spiritual-bubble whatever."
I am forcing myself to read it but common sense rebels against the stupidities he writes. For example he writes that some guilds develope mystical power aura like the smiths, and later become a race, like...Abyssinian Falashas.
Kever Benjamin happens to be full of Falashas and no one is a smith but subsistance peasants (here they work as street sweepers). They were never a trade guild.
In phantastic flight of imagination, Sprengler then compares them to magic religions like the Chinese ... bla bla bla.
People always view other cultures thru the lens of their own. In a highly organized society full of skilled artisans like Germany, it was hard to conceive of a society consisting mainly of disorganized peasants without skills.
The other possibility is that at some point after Spengler and before you met them, the smithing skills of the Falashas became obsolete, just like the Indonesian blacksmiths beloved by Obama's mother. A shovel that is stamped out by an automated press in a fraction of a second takes all day to be crafted by an artisan. Even if you value the artisan's time at pennies per hour, he cannot compete with factory made goods brought in from elsewhere. One shipping container of shovels from China displaces a whole army of village smiths.
These goods penetrate the remotest places - Naipaul writes about seeing beetle grubs (a favorite African food) being sold from Polish made enameled steel bowls and how the workers in the factory could not imagine what their bowls would be holding. Nowadays these bowls are stainless steel and from India or China - I have purchased large (if somewhat thin) stainless bowls for $1 - no village potter can compete.
K
K,
And for this reason, the future for ordinary people is to be displaced from productive, self-actualizing work and to be reduced to government poverty and uselessness. Only the small elite defined by parameters of intellectual brilliance, elite personal connections or hereditary wealth will exist on a higher plane. And J wants to see an increased population live like this? A whole society of slums?
I meant "government-subsidized poverty" in the post at 5:42 PM above.
The Industrial Revolution happened a long time ago. In the West, shovels have been made in factories for 150+ years. Contra Marx, the Western proleteriat was not pauperized.
Anonymous at 8:55 PM,
But with advanced robot technology and artificial intelligence, the pace of automation is again quickening, and its impact is widening beyond factory work to knowledge work.
Spengler imagines things. Guilds never gave rise to races. Falashas are not racially different from other Ethiopians. Spengler makes no sense.
In India the castes were divided along occupational lines and there was supposed to be no intermarriage. Nevertheless everyone ended up looking more or less the same (including the Indian Jews).
Guilds might not give rise to races, but they can be associated with endogamous castes.
As for Indians all looking more or less the same-this is not so. Compare a Northern Brahmin to a Bhil to someone from the Northeast.
There are definitely regional differences (the further south you go, the darker the people get) but the theoretical caste differences (darker = lower caste) is not a perfect correlation - there are high caste individuals who are darker than low caste.
K
There are blond Jews with blue eyes and potato-looking noses, too. Does this invalidate a Jewish phenotype?
Among Hindus, the differences manifest themselves in much more than skin tone.
Even for blond-haird, blue-eyed Jews, there are anthropometric traits that would tend to distinguish them from Northern European gentiles. There is more to a face than hair color and eye color.
On Cyrus McCormick's grave, it says that he made bread cheap. this refers to Mccormick's reaper, a machine which more efficiently harvested crops. than harvesting by hand. this meant they could be harvested more quickly. before the weather ruined them. Millions, of all backgrounds, have been saved from starvation. Louis Pasteur developed a cure for rabies, a disease that killed people and animals for thousands of years. Still used today. He wasn't even a doctor. He also developed the technique of "pasteurization" of milk. How many lives has he saved? Thomas Edison-in his laboratory- invented, what was it? One invention a week? Most people invent nothing their entire lives. The "unimpressive' Scandinavians colonized greenland, and newfoundland, a thousand years ago. Theyn were explorers, and established trade networks. Iceland has the world's highest literacy rate. Celts in Britain built better chariots than the romans. I'm of mostly irish descent. my I.Q. is 130; maANY OF MY SIBLINGS HAVE HIGHER THAN THAT. mY FAMILY PRODUCED 2 DOCTORS(ONE DID RESEARCH MENTIONED AT A CONFERENCE IN hELSINKI. My youngest sister was a Summa cum laude in economics. One of her kids could write when he was 2 years old. At 3, he knew money orders could be used to buy things.
I've read, Mr. Water Engineer, that your country gets 19 inches of rainfall a year. That ground water is being depleted because of use ; that it imports water from Turkey. Any country that imports water is in a worse situation than having to import food, or oil. A Paletinian state, if it ever happened, would be in a similar unviable situation. Perhaps both Israelis and Arabs could call it New Jersey With 19" Of Rainfall. All joking aside, adequate water supplies are necessary for any country's viability. At the most basic level. To suceed(in avoiding collapse), Middle eastern societies must address this problem. America is reachng the point where it will not be able to sign about a hundred foreign aid-foreign welfare- checks anymore. You can't continue to tax 300 million people, and what businesses remain, to play welfare office, and social worker to an entire planet. Santa Claus(Uncle Sam)will not be coming down the chimney to fill anybody's stockings for much longer. Let's hope jolly old Santa(Uncle Sam) doesn't collapse economically. All the kiddies of the world will have to get off of Santa's lap, and fill their stockings by themselves. If anyone doubts this, walk down the aisles of a store in America, and read the labels. Count how many say "Made in India", "Made in China", etc. What the countries of the Middle East(and other water challenged areas ie. Australia, Chile,the American southwest) need is a solar powered water desalinization system capable of supplying enough water for all needs, including enough for agricultural self-sufficiency. At the height of their civilization, the Arabs worked on algebra, and alchemy(turning lead into gold). Even if they suceeded in turning lead ito gold, what's the point? It would loose much of its' value. Compared to McCormick's reaper, Pasteur's cure for rabies, Edison's light bulb, the cell phone is a silly toy. Much intellectual, scientific, financial resources in the Middle East has gone into weapons research ie. nuclear weapons. Any country which "nukes" its next door neighbor, next door enemy, has probably finished itself. Given the fact that enemies are so close together, nuclear radiation would inevitably blow back on the "victor". At the very least, the "winner's" health care system would collapse from the health problems it would "enjoy" as the bitter fruit of its' "victory". The great leader, great military and political "genius" responsible for such a dubious "victory" might die from cancer. Next year, his/her people could name their deformed babies in honor of their "brilliant" leader. This should be obvious even to a reasonably intelligent 12 year old. The top scientific priority for any Middle Eastern society which wishes to stay in business is a system of solar powered desalinazation sufficint to provide enough water for all its' needs. The United States is obviously not going to be able to give these countries water,
To Anonymous above: We are not importing water from Turkey. Israel is self sufficient in water and is donating water to the Kingdom of Jordan and to the Palestinians in Gaza. We can produce all the drinking water we need and we have no desire to depend on American good will in this or any other aspect.
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