2rafa
12hr ago
Are there really that many Ashkenazi converts to tradcath? There have always been a trickle (for centuries now) but I didn’t think it was particularly common. Actually since the 80s converting to megachurch Evangelical Christianity has been more common, I remember reading that a number of movie directors and producers of Evangelical Christian movies were Jewish converts some years ago.
Apparently in 2005 around 20% of Americans who identified themselves as having been raised Jewish now identified as Christians.
2rafa
12hr ago
Very default quotable figure across a diverse range of scenes including BAPism/RSP/Dimes Square/nrx/silicon valley edgy/le atheism/neocon, it’s not too surprising.
2rafa
13hr ago
Because YouTube is the default search engine for video and the only competitor is literally Google.
2rafa
15hr ago
I don’t think this is banworthy (and to anyone reading I didn’t report it), it was just a little weird.
2rafa
17hr ago
I mean it does, police brutality accusations against black cops (see that Baltimore case) can still result in civil unrest but it’s to a much lesser degree than if the cops are white.
2rafa
18hr ago
You almost never hear very old people regret having children. I think that’s the only evidence needed.
2rafa
18hr ago
It seems more likely that a lot of young men are insecure and want to ‘last longer’ (or lower refractory period etc) and so use the drug even though they don’t have ED. Similarly if there was a drug that increased dick size one would expect that many average and above endowed men would still take it just because.
2rafa
18hr ago
When Amy Wax claimed that her father was unduly too critical towards Christians, that wasn't self hateful.
Sure, I agree with this.
2rafa
1d ago
“Secret” is doing a lot in the OP. In any case, Sailer and BAP have very different views on most of these issues, Sailer is largely a form of civic nationalist, BAP has an incoherent kind of gay misogynist LARP more focused on contempt for women than other groups. Neither attempted to ‘hide’ their Jewishness, Costin wore an IDF t-shirt in college and posted his DNA test results and is open about it, Sailer is adopted but has speculated his birth father (iirc) could have been Jewish on several occasions over the last 20-30 years. In either case I don’t think that Jews shouldn’t participate on the right or in these spaces because some people might deploy related evopsych arguments in favor of antisemitism. As MacDonald and others show, they would do this anyway.
The logic of your argument is exactly what led to a lot of Jewish academics being unwilling to believe the obvious evidence for a lot of this stuff in the mid-20th century, not because they were nefarious manipulators trying to destroy European civilization but often because they didn’t want to be ‘on the side of’ people who justified antisemitism which they were personally afraid of. That doesn’t stop scientific enquiry, though, and the truth is the first duty of the principled researcher, wherever it leads.
It reminds me of ‘tradwife regret’ discourse (see Lauren Southern recently) and associated schadenfreude. But that doesn’t mean modern western gender relations are good, let alone optimal. It certainly doesn’t “disprove” women being socially conservative because hurr durr leopards ate her face lol, girlboss discourse is back because one person tried the hashtag tradlife and it wasn’t all that fun. There’s the famous cautionary tale of Ettore Ovazza, loyal Jewish Italian fascist, shot by the Germans in 1943. Did leopards eat his face? Perhaps, but no moreso than anyone destroyed by a twisted version of a belief system they once supported, and that is a very large number of people. I’m not going to become a leftist just because there are antisemites and misogynists on the right.
2rafa
1d ago
Politically, there are wards (each ward elects councillors to the borough government), but the borough (as ‘local council’) is the smallest non-ceremonial unit of local government in the UK. There are neighborhoods of course.
2rafa
1d ago
all say something so implausible like Jewish contributions to 20th century intellectual movements were motivated by their intense desire to assimilate to White American Protestant values.
How implausible is this actually?
For several thousand years Jews lived in a relative state of internal exile in dozens of host societies that spanned almost the entirety of the old world, from Portugal to India. In those societies they performed a variety of functions. At times they were treated well, at others poorly. In some cases and at some times they became influential and respected figures, in others they were reviled, expelled or killed. Through much of this period assimilation was relatively rare. The Jews kept their customs, and often moved rather than assimilated. They did not - the occasional cult aside - attempt to resettle (let alone conquer) their ancestral homeland, and instead believed that it would be delivered to them by providence during or after the coming of their messiah. They were embittered, in many cases, by their treatment at the hands of gentile populations, but this almost never spurred them to take up arms; the religious perspective, in most of these cases, was that this treatment was a test and/or punishment of God.
While there were Jewish figures of note in this era, as Murray notes in Human Accomplishment Jews were not hugely overrepresented in intellectual achievements for the vast majority of this period. What intellectual talent the Jewish race possessed, if any, was locked away in rabbinical studies, in interpretation of the Talmud, or in activities performed for gentile authorities, like accounting. Nevertheless, the economic niches by which this population provided for itself served to effect a curious and rare process of genetic selection that resulted in a population perhaps one standard deviation more intelligent than the average of the surrounding gentile communities.
In the 18th century, European society began to change. While one Jew, Spinoza in Amsterdam, had some minor impact on this development, it was otherwise an almost entirely gentile movement, itself the product of a series of intellectual and religious movements set off by the reformation or, even earlier, the Renaissance. The ideas of universality, the equality of man, and a kind of eschatological vision of civilizational progress that would one day be turned into the foundation for our own sociopolitical culture. True, the European civilization of the time was very different to our own, and still involved many of the decidedly non-universalist ideas around identity of the age. But the seeds were sown.
It is hardly surprising that Jews embraced these ideas in large numbers, since they meant for them the opportunity to take, increasingly, part in the wider societies in which they found themselves. This much is not disputed by antisemitic dissident rightists (I think), but they argue that for Jews this was an underhanded deal, an attempt to have their cake and eat it, to preserve particularity for themselves but to end it for others. I disagree. Many, in increasing numbers, bought into it wholeheartedly.
Indeed the alternative to your argument, that Jews engaged in these movements as part of an insidious plan to destroy their host civilizations in service of an ancient hatred and/or fear is equally implausible. Extremely high, sometimes exceeding 70%+ intermarriage rates for secular Jews (which almost all the relevant figures were) in the US and Soviet Union speak to a sincere desire for assimilation or at least a fading of strong ethnic identity. Strong tribal loyalty demands, at the least, endogamy. Secular Jews eschewed this in ever increasing numbers. At the height of the British Empire, many of the most elite Jewish families, most prominently the Rothschilds, intermarried to the extent that the younger generations are now neither religiously nor culturally Jewish. The same is increasingly true in the US, where many of the most prominent Jews, from Mark Zuckerberg to Anthony Blinken, have gentile wives and so will not raise Jewish children. This is not the behavior of a people trying to preserve the in-group at all costs; tribal loyalty begins and ends at the point of continuation; the Jews who do practice high-fecundity endogamy are deeply culturally and politically detached from those in positions of power in Western societies.
The basic explanation for the ideology of Jewish progressives and leftists is that most have genuinely bought into the ideas they preach. That is why many of them are increasingly hostile towards the actual, extant Jewish ethnostate, despite tribal loyalty being very hard to break (see nth-generation Turkish Germans, Irish Americans during the Troubles and so on). Of course hypocrisy is always present, as it is in every people. But that is not enough to claim that their views are not motivated by a sincere belief in the same universal trend towards equality and liberty that motivated many of the gentile writers of the enlightenment and its successor movements.
I don’t mean to persuade you, I respect your posting on this topic enough to know I’m not going to convince you of anything. Still, given you mentioned me, I felt I should restate my point for anyone reading.
2rafa
1d ago
Borough? Westminster is a very diverse borough with 250,000 people. It’s possible that Kensington and Chelsea has a higher proportion of rich people. Both Boroughs contain very rich and very poor neighborhoods, though.
2rafa
2d ago
One argument is that various insular communities would just game the system by requiring marrying couples to ‘technically’ meet via some app right before marriage and then pocket the grant. The government would therefore merely be paying for people who are already going to get married to marry. For that matter Tinder, Bumble etc would instantly introduce a cashback feature whereby they split the payment with you if you technically marry after meeting the app. Many an unmarried couple could then join the app, “meet” through it (won’t take much swiping in most places) and claim the money after marriage.
2rafa
3d ago
Hmm. I’d say £100k is equivalent to $200k in NYC. Sure, housing in London is 60-70% as expensive (still substantially cheaper), but groceries are less than half the price (Manhattan grocery store prices are often double midwestern suburb prices ime, in the UK You pay the same in London for groceries as someone in a town in Lancashire), restaurants and bars are half the price, many services and goods from private healthcare to personal trainers to piano tutors are much less expensive due to lower labor costs, Uber is less expensive, haircuts and cosmetic services are half the price, culture from museums to the opera, ballet and theater is so much less expensive. The only stuff that costs the same are consumer goods sold at identical prices internationally like iPhones and high end makeup.
There are certainly parts of London that have Manhattan prices, but they tend to be those parts where people are either independently wealthy or making ‘Manhattan rich’ salaries anyway.
2rafa
3d ago
The part of (very central) London I live in is impeccably clean. The streets are swept daily by machine operators, there is no trash on the street except in the early morning on pickup days, in the early hours briefly from restaurants, and occasionally during big sports events or concerts nearby from crowds, which I think is reasonable. It’s much cleaner than any comparable major tier 1 Western city. There are bad parts, but there’s no need to visit them unless you’re unfortunate enough to live there.
There isn’t one major North American city that comes remotely close in cleanliness, and big European cities like Paris, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, arguably (still) even Madrid are worse. The only 4m+ inhabitant cities I’ve seen much cleaner than London are in Asia. Prague and Warsaw are clean but not noticeably moreso.
2rafa
3d ago
The Mormons would be fine: they’re already very over represented in the CIA and FBI, and gendarmerie and secret service officers tend to do the best after regime change or collapse.
2rafa
3d ago
Fertility just isn’t going to be necessary in the near future with mass automation. Having 300 million useless mouths to feed vs 50 million is only going to be a drag on productivity and prosperity for those left. In addition, tfr in the rich world might well rise when most people are ‘retired’ and no longer have a career to provide a sense of purpose.
A few countries with extreme collapsing rates like South Korea and possibly China might struggle briefly while human labor is still widely necessary, but for the West, where native tfr still hovers above 1.5 in most countries, there’s more than enough time left. And as you note, the Amish, Hasidim and so on are - in a true ‘collapse’ scenario - sitting ducks for faction with modern weaponry.
2rafa
4d ago
A lot of becoming President/PM/etc is pure luck; being a competent political operator, sure, but being in the right place and right time. There could certainly have been a Jewish President of the US by now (and probably any time from the 70s onward), it didn’t happen for a variety of reasons but none are on the level that they precluded it from happening, they were just headwinds. Parliamentary systems elect more outsiders because leaders are chosen by MPs or by parties, rather than by the public, which is why you have more women and minority PMs than Presidents. Still, even that’s not prescriptive.
2rafa
4d ago
There’s no way the Pope would excommunicate arguably the world’s most powerful Catholic (other than or perhaps even including himself) even if he had done something to warrant it.
2rafa
4d ago
There are a number of dynamics in US politics that have made it hard for a Jewish Democrat to become President. Not impossible by any means, but difficult because of the nature of the Democratic base and the historic constituencies that made it up. The best shot would probably be as a business Republican with heartland appeal, and as Mark Levin quipped, there is something kind of intrinsically Jewish about Donald Trump. He’s a sleazy Queens slumlord who took on Manhattan and became president of the most powerful country on earth. He has chutzpah.
2rafa
5d ago
The Republican Professors Association represents as in many of these cases a Republican professor not hired at the university after a final round interview and mandatory diversity statement submission.
That’s fair, I mean converts by personal choice rather than to be able to marry in a church (?). I don’t think many whites convert to happy clappy guitar liberal Catholicism, which tends to have an audience of ethnic Catholics who are socially liberal (and of course Episcopalians and Reform Jews are the same way). White centrists looking for some motivational, life-affirming, vaguely Christian spirituality tend to join mainstream evangelical megachurches or other charismatic movements like Hillsong; they’re unlikely to become Catholics.
If a single Jew told me they had converted to Catholicism out of sincere belief I would assume that they were pretty devout / trad.
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