Herz for . . .

Hello Lisa,

I tried to respond as you were talking, but I was muted.

My thesis is that the Jews everyone craps on circled the wagons, hunkered down and went to work building enormous wealth.

In their idiotic leftism (which correlates highly with the big five trait of openness), they supported all sorts of programs to help the other oppressed. But those oppressed didn’t thrive. Their lives got worse. If they couldn’t make it in spite of the gifts they were given, this might lead naturally to a thought that maybe the game is rigged.

Our nation’s blacks made tremendous strides in the hundred years after the civil war, exactly when they were oppressed, red-lined, lynched, Jim-crowed, rather than helped, when they had to take care of their own.

Then came Moynihan’s 1965 report on the Negro Family, along with Johnson’s Great Society—and the unfortunate fact that every government program has unintended consequences, but no measure for when to pull the plug—and Robert Moses tore down neighborhoods to build projects, and we incentivized single motherhood, and let Ginsberg, Derrida and Marcuse (all with Jewish ancestry) inform the academy’s plunge into deconstructing our society to try to identify the oppressor and give the oppressed carte-blanche to take any action that undermines the oppressor. I suggested to you “The Queering of the American Child.” It’s a really good primer on the place we find ourselves.

And this is the formula today, this being Professor Peterson’s formulation on the Victim/Oppressor Narrative

1. Identify an area of human activity
2. Note the distribution of success
3. Identify the winners and losers
4. Claim the losers are losing because oppressed by winners
5. Claim allegiance of losers
6. Feel secure in your comprehensive explanation of the world
7. Target your resentment toward your newly discovered enemies.
8. Repeat, forever, everywhere

And we’ve fallen for it, and you host Mr. Winston every week, and allow conversations of structural racism, micro-aggressions, white fragility, etc.

I have been informed on the streets of Bridgeport that I am definitionally racist, and that a black person isn’t.

So my suggestion if we don’t want to foster resentment and upheaval is actually to celebrate the individual’s capacity to overcome his circumstances, in which case he must be left to face them, instead of feeling that the state must manipulate aid and housing and childcare to level the playing field.

If you want to be able to manage childcare, maybe the best strategy is a two parent, or even better, multigenerational home, deeply embedded in a local religious community.

Who cares if most people rent? The rate of homeownership in Europe runs from the low 40s to the mid 60s in most of Europe.

Anyway, I ran across this as I was looking for a source on the Peterson formulation above: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog/jordan-peterson-my-message-to-the-jews.

If you want to discuss any of this—and especially the gender-ideology thing, or the patriotic education thing—I am running in the 136th in Bridgeport, so you have an excuse to bring me on.

Stop Calling Us Idiots

I am from the Gold Coast (U.S. Census Bureau, Super-Public Use Microdata Area Region 09600). In my neighborhood, this election season has been one of alarmism and hand-wringing about the Death of Democracy/Rise of Fascism that a new Trump term would usher in.

Now that the election is over, the analysis is not “what did we miss?” Rather it is “how come these voters can't see the terrible thing that they have chosen?”

Speculation is made about why Ms. Harris lost that has nothing to do with her vision or policy. Rather it suggests we are still racist, she was “perceived as weaker,” “she started late,” racism, misogyny, the female glass ceiling, her natural allies somehow lost sight of how good she is for them, and her “loss of the culture war.”

I was struck by your placement of the first editorial in your Wednesday paper (CT Post, Oct. 30, 2024) on page 2 under the guise of an article by Dan Haar.

The opinion page was even worse.

Your disdain for President Trump and cherry picking of facts is laughable. President Trump's handling of COVID is criticized. Do you forget the press excoriation of Trump when he went to stop flights from China? or your dismissal of his reporting in the fall of 2020 that a vaccine was forthcoming?

Read more »

Maybe the aside was tongue-in-cheek, but maybe it speaks to something.

At 71 I'm focused more than ever on doing what I can to try to secure peace, justice, and environmental sustainability for future generations. But there's also the pressing matter of how my generation (you know, the one that had everything and ruined it) can try to age with grace and wisdom.

from Stew Friedman, who does leadership stuff at Wharton.

You are so full of shit. Your generation has everything and has grown everything. Celebrate what you have created. Why are you buying into the impending doom narrative?

The world is greening. See Patrick Moore on this,

We are richer than ever and coming out of poverty at rates blowing past the U.N. goals for taking us out of poverty. This doesn't really get at the results we've created, but gives a little of the picture: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bjornlomborg/2023/02/13/prioritizing-the-best-solutions-for-sustainable-development/

You are right on the babies. Maybe we should have young co-eds actually vision out their lives. Maybe we should return to G-d and family and what brought us where we are .

Maybe we should be questioning the wisdom of Marx, Marcuse, Derrida and all the bullshit they have given us. Here's an analysis of that: https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1191-why-feminism-is-one-of-the-deadliest-and-most-destructive-forces-in-human-history-member-exclusive

Anyway, enough of my time on this.

Go out, breathe the air. Tell me if you really think the world is about to end.

I don't think it is, or is in danger thereof, unless we give in to the crazies trying to take over our college campuses and public conversations.

Cleaning up my computer, I found this piece, which I could not find as having published. It is unfortunately more relevant today. Maybe the mantra should be “Check Your Hate”

Two years now I have been at Sacred Heart's commemmoration of Kristallnacht.

Two years this has left me unmoved.

Last year, I came expecting to be made to feel uncomfortable. I am an orthodox Jew. Surely, a Catholic school's commemmoration in a Catholic Chapel would have some religious content or at least context to it, maybe a shout out to some apostle or the J-man himself for a lesson we should be taking.

It could have had a gesture across the religious divide, taught me something about where Catholicism has come, or how it has grown from its grievous indifference and even complicity in the events of World War II, and how it might have been a part of the fomenting of Jew-hatred that still infests this world, and how it is now praying and acting to celebrate the sanctity of every individual, saved according to Christian doctrine or not.

There was one glimmer of hope for me. At the end of the ceremony last year, one young lady from the choir, on her way out of the chapel, turned to the front of the chapel and bowed in acknowledgement of the place she was in.

With lowered expectations I came again this year. I was still underwhelmed.

It started with the politician's reference to his faith which his policies don't reflect.

It continued with exhortations to inclusion and seeing the humanity of the other, which of course has a place. Some of these terms are increasingly politically charged, or seemingly to me anyway, were used to push an agenda on the back of the Jews.

Then a chaplain got up decrying what some have done in the name of religion, but it is National Socialism, perhaps a religion of a different sort that ferried the evil of anti-semitism through the Holocaust.

The lesson supposedly is that it is not enough to say “I didn't,” but one must fight white-supremacy and anti-semitism, these two somehow linked, along with insurrection, by more than one.

The keynote, do not say the word hate.

In closing, it was suggested we must remember, now more than ever.

I suggest this is not particularly actionable advice.

What should we not forgot? Not to kill Jews today. Most of us have that one down. Less obvious today than it seemed when I originally wrote this.

What is missed, what our children have not been taught, is that the “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956.

The point is the Holocaust wasn't a one-off by distant people. It was simply the springing up of an anti-semitism that has simmered since there have been Jews, perhaps aided by a European enlightenment that was in the process of discarding G-d, losing along the way our absolute basis of morality.

The point is we do hate.