Between Momentum activists complaining that Labour is
“not helped by the fact that the BBC has a lot of Jewish journalists“
and Corbyn saying the BBC
“has a bias towards saying that… Israel has a right to exist”
there seems to be a feeling in Labour circles that both Jews and their concerns are over-represented in the media.
This is not the first time round for such ideas. Complaints that the Germans were “a people with severed vocal chords”, that Berlin’s major newspapers were owned and/or edited by Jews, that “23 of 29 Berlin theatre managers were Jews” that “the barristers’ room in any Berlin state court was like a Jewish club” etc., were often made in the 1920s and 30s. Nazi statistics, even in the days when the press (Jewish-owned or otherwise) could still challenge them, were usually spun toward the high side – but aimed to persuade by describing areas where everyone knew Jews far exceeded their less-than-one-percent of Germany’s population. The Nazis would not have achieved anything by claiming that too many German farmers were Jews, or too many German generals. (It was the British empire, not Germany, that produced Sir John Monash.) In many a pre-power speech that Hitler gave, e.g. to students (students voted for him at twice the average German rate), he promised merely to remedy these disparate statistics and redress the historic injustices they revealed.
That’s the trouble with disparate-impact theory. Jews have often been victims of racism. But if the mere existence of racial disparities proves racism then a glance at many a country’s economic or cultural statistics will show, according to disparate-impact theory, how much more time Jews must have spent perpetrating racism. Percentages always sum to a hundred – so, even in countries where their fraction of the population is not much higher than in pre-war Germany or even lower, any Jewish higher-than-proportion achievement necessarily accompanies some lower-than-proportion percentages of other groups. Disparate-impact theory exists precisely to crush the racist excuses offered for such racist disparities.
And of course, this racism cannot remain confined within each country. Since there are fewer Jews in the world than there are citizens of Kazakhstan, disparate-impact theory makes Jews guilty of a lot of racism against Kazakhs (and almost everyone else) in Nobel prize awards. Even the evil of toxic whiteness, conveying disproportionate prosperity and prestige to caucasians, cannot quite compare statistically with Jewish disproportions, and if Jewish survivors of violent dispossession repeatedly arrived near-destitute in new places, but their descendants averaged more of such places’ increased fame and wealth than the indigenes, well, by disparate-impact theory that just proves how committed Jews must be to such racist behaviour. Don’t they understand that at some point you’ve made enough money and won enough awards – and that point is strict statistical parity with the locals.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one reason why a movement that calls you a Nazi for arguing with it so often sounds like it is taking its lines from one of Adolf’s early-30’s addresses. The political world, like the real world, is a sphere: go too far ‘fighting racism’ and you’ll meet your alleged opposites round the far side – and after that you’ll be so far gone you’re coming back.
________________________
[Nazi propaganda remarks quoted above are referenced in contemporary book ‘The House That Hitler Built’ by Stephen Roberts.]
Excellent! But let me be the first to point out that the Khazars did not win any Nobel Prize for the simple reason that they ceased to exist (under that name) long before people started winning Nobel Prizes.
Disparate impact works well as a theory if you assume that all people are of equal ability and character.
Snorri Godhi (December 2, 2019 at 7:50 pm), corrected to Khazakhs, thanks for noticing.
due to the anticipatory prejudice of Alfred Nobel’s parents in not generating him early enough in history for him to have invented dynamite and then set up his foundation in his Will in time for the Khazars to have benefited. And who gained from that?
The Khazars… somewhere in my dim recollection I remember arguing with someone that that Khazars were “a steppe nomad barbarian horde of Jews” or some such. Not sure if it’s true (the history, not my trolling of fellow history student) but it is one of those “so odd it must be true” sort of stories one likes to tell.
I’ll go back to my French Mules (the drink, not the imported cross-bred ungulate) now.
bobby,
And if you assume that all people are equally well situated as to time, place, and other circumstances.
She added, helpfully. :>))
Are some people trying to claim that not all people are equal? Tell that to Thomas Jefferson and friends, though not his coloured servants.
I think it would be fair to say that Jews and Jewish concerns are over-represented in just about every facet of western society. Are there many peak institutions that have influence and power that are not unusually Jewish? Media, academia, entertainment, many business sectors… there are an unusual amount of Jews in all of them. That has worked out pretty well for the west, to have talented people in top positions but if the suspicion arises that their main concern is in making sure Jews dominate those industries and the countries they operate in, then citizens are going to rightly ask why this should be so. In much the same way colonised black nations were asking why a few white Europeans got to be in charge of everything (even if they did do a generally good job of administration). People do not like to be ruled by out-groups, ever.
Jews have to walk a fine line between using their natural gifts to get ahead and bring prosperity to their host nations and using their natural gifts to make sure that only other Jews occupy the positions of influence and power that are created.
Part of the problem is the repeated drumbeat that Jews are “overrepresented” in “just about every [positive] facet of western society.” This myth has some traction even on the anti-left and anti-“Alt-right” (whatever that is).
I don’t have time to hunt for sources, but they do exist. For instance I read something to that effect recently about Hollywood. (Also, the same assertion has certainly been made about Catholics. I don’t think they are in league to Take Over the World.)
The thing is, we need to scotch this whenever, wherever we run across it. I am at fault here (didn’t note my source), and I need to thank Mr Black (who’s clearly not an anti-Semite) for making the point.
I can’t recall seeing an obviously Jewish or Sikh dustman, or any ethnicity of dustwoman. Should there be an enquiry? Should steps be taken to ensure provision of training, targetted advertising etc. (all permissible in UK law) to address this apparent lack of opportunity. Should waste dispoal firms be fined or banned if they fail to reflect the communities they serve?
Or might this look too silly, for now?
Historically, Jews have had to live by their wits. With the constant risk of pogroms etc. Jews have rarely had the security to accumulate wealth in terms of property and such. But what you keep in your head… You can’t lose that. Hence Jewish culture has tended to prize skills – the ultimate portable wealth. Not that I in anyway think the historical persecution of Jews is anything other than obscene it has got to be said, to their credit, the Jews have made a virtue out of their plight.
+1
The bitter irony is that the people of Jewish descent whose achievements are cited as “jewish interests” are typically assimilated and no longer affiliated in any meaningful way with the Jewish community and only vaguely committed to Jewish ideals – nothing that a liberal-minded westerner of christian descent would not also agree to.
The jews who grab headlines as cosmopolitan destroyers of the West are actually marxists in no way loyal to Judaism, and opposed to religion and biblical morality. Here in israel this political divide is explicit.
One would think that the resurgence of leftist antisemitism would clarify this (especially to left-leaning jews!) but unfortunately it has not.
The other point about 1920’s / 1930’s over-representation of Jews in certain sectors of German business and public life was that they had already been excluded from much of that already through pre-existing racist attitudes, so hardly surprising that they concentrated in the areas where they could work. That was real anti-semitism.
What we have nowadays is (apparently) anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism, although I’ve struggled to put a cigarette paper between the difference.
Maybe the modern left are just antisemitic bigots?
Just saying…
It’s a bit like Quakers… If you have a group of folk who value education and stuff but don’t allow them the usual means of advancement then things like banking, chocolate, Hollywood… well, beckon. Why not?
Oh, and JG nails it… The modern left has a huge problem with antisemitism. Why this is… I dunno. As far as I am aware Judaism is a non-proselytizing faith so… Maybe perversely that is the issue. Or maybe that – truly perversely – “identity” is the trump card for the left. Why else would lefty black “feminist” wacademics – and yes some do – speak in favour of FGM as “culturally authentic” The sort of wacademics who would burn blokes at the stake for looking at Page 3. God knows.
Doesn’t the math get a bit sketchy there? They can’t be over-represented in every facet, surely?
Are they over-represented in flipping burgers? (An important part of western society)
Or just the bits that you think are influential?
This. Backed up with a good, solid, “Oi. Behave yourself, sunshine.”
Niall, you’re linking to PJMedia.
These are the guys that we glance at, and write off as “not us”.
These are the the guys that use the phrase “red pill” and don’t get the irony.
Ain’t our fault they can’t get laid.
They’re not us. They’re really not. They don’t have the ‘nads
neonsnake (December 3, 2019 at 9:27 pm), that is a very strange comment!
Firstly, I don’t know what you have against instapundit but it’s between you and instapundit. I have found many an article worth reading there, either directly or via its links (sometimes to other PJMedia posts). Instapundit has a couple of times linked to me and a good many more times linked to Natalie. And since Glenn Reynolds is married to Dr Helen, your “Ain’t our fault they can’t get laid” seems a ‘lost in space’ remark. 🙂
Secondly, besides pjmedia/instapundit, my links in the post above include Guido, the Daily Mail, youtube, etc. Do you think that youtube are us???
The links in the OP are to stories that I believe are factual and informative re Corbyn and/or Labour and/or Antifa and/or Momentum or whatever.
The central doctrine of the modern West is “Social Justice” – the doctrine expressly designed to DESTROY the West.
All the powerful institutions in British society, including Conservative Central Office in London, say how much they support Social Justice (and parrot the language of the Frankfurt School of Marxism – whether they actually understand the words they say or not) – the difference with Mr Corbyn and the Labour Party is that they have a clear understanding of what Social Justice means, and they actually do support Social Justice (they are not just mouthing slogans – and they are not confused and ignorant).
So what is “Social Justice”? Social Justice is the doctrine that inequality is UNJUST – that “justice is fairness” and fairness is equality, “the same sized share for everyone, fair shares for all”.
So if a group of people, say white men, do better in a certain field are “over represented” – that MUST be “unjust”, it is “oppression” and “exploitation” according to Social Justice.
Now think about JEWS – are Jews “average”, if you have population that is 1% Jewish will 1% of the local successful people be Jewish? Or will it be more than 1%?
If it is any more than “proportionality” then according to Social Justice this is UNJUST and the Jews (according to Social Justice) must be “exploiting” and “oppressing” other people.
Now those Jewish people who are the left try and square this circle by working very hard for Social Justice – but that makes the problem WORSE for them, because they get to high positions in the Social Justice movement (because of their hard work and natural ability – their intelligence) which make other Social Justice people HATE THE JEWS MORE.
It does not matter how much a person says they passionately support Social Justice – if they are not AVERAGE (or below average) they are going to get HATED – because they are richer, or hold a more important position in their field of work, or are just obviously more intelligent – being more intelligent than other people, undermines their “self esteem” and they HATE you for being more intelligent than they are. At least if they are Social Justice people they HATE you.
Jews in 1960s America were very prominent in the Social Justice movement – yet who did “the masses” in the inner cities turn on most viciously? The Jews – of course the Jews. Jewish merchants were driven out – or just killed (and the media looked the other way – including Jews in the American media, and Hollywood, looking the other way).
It would be no different in Britain – and Mr Corbyn firmly believes inequality is INJUSTICE.
“But Paul – Karl Marx came from a family that had been Jewish”.
So he did – but what did Karl Marx say about Jews?
“The God of the Jew is money, the religion of the Jew is hucksterism” – that is actually one of the LESS offensive things Karl Marx said about Jews.
A consistent supporter of Social Justice has to be against Jews – even if that supporter of Social Justice is themselves from a Jewish family. “But Jews tend to be intelligent and hard working” – actually that is WHY a consistent supporter of Social Justice has to hate Jews.
That is why Mr Jeremy Corbyn is able to trot out a few Jews who support him – they are Jews who hate other Jews and (deep down) HATE THEMSELVES.
Intentional irony?
There are benefits to making “us” into a bigger tent. I’ve yet to see a politics site in which I agree with everything said, but that’s what discussion is for – putting a different view into the mix.
InstaP is mostly a news aggregator with snarky comments. Sometimes the comments are cringeworthy, sometimes not. But it has so many contributors that the news it presents is a good mix to know.
“Firstly, I don’t know what you have against instapundit but it’s between you and instapundit.”
I just did a search for ‘pjmedia’ and ‘red pill’, and it came up with what looked like a guest post article basically about why nice guys don’t get laid. I’d hazard a guess that was the article neonsnake saw.
I thought it was a fairly silly article myself, although not especially objectionable. I’d also say it wasn’t typical of their usual output, what I’ve seen of it. But whatever. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
One picky little point:
You and I, and this website and its participants, and Trump voters and Leave voters, are all part of the modern West.
So I could understand saying “the central doctrine of the progressive modern West is “social justice”.”
Nullius,
You mean this article from last year by John Hawkins?
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/20-red-pill-quotes-from-rollo-tomassi-that-will-change-how-you-think-forever/
PJMedia is a mixed bag. You’ll be much better off, however, reading only PJMedia than reading only the NY Times, or even the BBC website. The latter, of course, is good to read because (a) it contains some news about science, health, etc, that i would otherwise not get; (b) it provides an alternative point of view to Samizdata & Instapundit (and Breitbart, which i also read); (c) i can allow myself a smirk when reading the BBC, knowing that British residents pay for it and i don’t.
Among modern public intellectuals, Glenn Reynolds is one of the few that looks at things in terms of the conflict between the ruling class and the rest of us, and for this reason he is one of the closest to my way of thinking.
Snorri,
Speaking of the ruling class, do you read Angelo Codevilla?
Yes, Julie, i do!
…That is, i read his essays, when linked to by Instapundit. Haven’t read his books.
In 2010, i re-read Il Principe, and had an insight: Machiavelli makes a sharp distinction between the ruling class and the people. He wants any member of the ruling class to be ruthless towards fellow members, but liberal (in the correct sense of the word) towards the people.
In the same year, Codevilla (Italian by birth like Machiavelli, perhaps not coincidentally) published his most famous essay.
The impact of the 2 events on me was a turning point in my political thinking.
His stuff is interesting, and he’s got a lot of articles on the Web. I thought the Tablet interview (text) at
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/culture-news/292763/angelo-codevilla
was interesting. And at UToob I see a lecture at Hillsdale and another at the Claremont Institute for “The American Mind,” both on the Ruling Class.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I’m fully in agreement with him on all points. (But then I don’t agree with anybody about anything. Including me.) Then again, it’s clear to me that you’re far more acquainted with the gentleman than I am. :>)
As for The Prince, I think that Signor M. may have to wait till I get to the Other Side, assuming the Great Frog has the Compleat Writings of the Human Race in Her/His/Its archives.
What are the two daily politics programs at the BBC? Newsnight and Politics Live.
Both have female Jewish leads. (Emily Maitless and Jo Coburn respectively)
What bugs me is their relentless policing of the Overton window; look at the monstering Maitless gave Rod Liddle recently for example.
Now a lot of people will point out its not their Jewishness per se, they’re just lefties… but either way, according to the lefties equality doctrine, how do two women from a population of 280,000 end up fronting the BBC’s major politics shows when the UK has 80 million people? Ethnocentrism / networks I would suggest – the very thing their ideology is supposed to be against.
You see similar trends in the US – Jewish representation at Harvard for example.
I would have guessed along the lines of “people raised in a culture that has been demonized and murdered for thousands of years might, as protective self-coloration, raise their offspring to value the achieving of economic security through education and effort more so than the bulk of the population”, but I suppose “membership in a secret cabal” works, too.
Interestingly enough, Harvard went through a long Darkness from the mid-1920s through some time in the ’60s., in which it had a policy against accepting Jews (I was in college from ’61-’64, and the word was that it was very difficult for Jews to get into Harvard).
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-discriminating-against-jews-2014-12
The B.I. article includes an explanation of the change from anti- to pro-Jewish, and in particular that in the ’60s Harvard decided it needed to ditch the “sons of Harvard’s sons” and Protestants-preferred criteria and start going for smart kids — “eggheads” — instead, a field which included many Jewish kids.
There was a time when Harvard was awfully fussy about appearances. They also had a policy of not accepting students who had noticeable acne, so my cousin went off to MIT instead for his bachelor’s in physics. He stayed right on through his doctorate. A physics doctorate from MIT wasn’t too shabby…. *g*
It is a complex mix of internal culture and external experience. For example:
– On the one hand, for thousands of years, Jews (even when living securely in their own state) have exhibited a great interest in “The Law”. On the other hand, diaspora Jews, educated and often deprived the right to bear arms, had obvious reasons to want to know when persecution was illegal, and to want the law enforced in such cases.
– Similarly, on the one hand, Jews from their earliest history have had a huge focus on moral questions, on redeeming the world, and their special task therein. As Hannah Arendt points out, the habit of thinking they are chosen to pursue such ends can survive a particular Jew’s losing faith in He who chooses and rejects. (The heresy of Social Justice can become the substitute for faith.) On the other hand, the same Jews who wanted the law enforced against persecutors naturally wanted it to make more forms of persecution illegal. Again, practical experience reinforced tendencies that were already very strong in the innate culture.
All the above helped create the situation in which nazi propagandists could say, with no more exaggeration than seemed natural in politics, that
(I’ve read that the actual ratio of Jewish barristers to others did slightly exceed 50%.)
Just as any racism-of-contempt people (“we’re the master race”) will inevitably find the age-old claim of the Jews to specialness in their way, so racism-of-envy people (“our failure is your fault”) will find the Jews in the way of their woker-than-thou climb up the greasy pole of political correctness. In both cases there is “an element of feeble-minded resentment” (Hannah Arendt) at finding the Jews already there.
As for disentangling the two, answering the Jewish equivalent of the Celtic
well, you can read the very debatable but very well worth debating Hannah Arendt’s first section in ‘Origins of Totalitarianism’, you can read the long section on the Jews in Thomas Sowell’s ‘Migrations and Cultures’, you can read more as I have done, and you can read much more than I have ever done, and you might still end up only knowing that very ancient innate tendencies within Jewish culture combine with much more recent externally-imposed incentives.
Nothing against Insta at all. Nor Glenn Reynolds, on the contrary, while he’s not hugely on my radar, I enjoyed Army Of Davids quite a bit, and the guy seems to have a pinkish DIY attitude that I quite like.
PJMedia are, I thought, the same guys as Pajama Media? As in, one of their founders quit after it had gone so far to the social right (ie. extreme bigotry) that it was being compared to World Net Daily? Basically a screech-site dedicated to getting people good and frothy about minorities? Or is that a different lot?
I’m pretty sure that someone, somewhere, has compared Samizdata to World Net Daily. We’re all pretty extreme-center here. Hard-core center, even. Alt-center! So, similarly, someone may have compared Instapundit to WND.
But it’s not even close. Give it a whirl:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/
I’m very confused. I don’t follow Instapundit, although I’m aware of Glenn Reynolds, and I’m vaguely sure I’ve read bits by him other than the book, but did he take over PJmedia or something?
I mean, last time I came across them (some years ago), I did a full handbrake turn whilst yelling “abort abort abort!”
It wasn’t just some slightly fruity views in the comments section (cf. The Daily Mail or Guido), it was full on wing-nuttery in the articles themselves; more than enough to put them in the “here be monsters” section of my internet map.
Guessing that if Glenn Reynolds got involved (maybe after the other guy left?) he possibly calmed them down a bit.
Reynolds has always been Instapundit. He and a few others formed PJ Media (PajamasMedia) some years back. His partners (there have been and are many) have come and gone, but I don’t remember anyone who I would be taken aback by, and I’ve found myself to be easily taken aback. Of course, YMMV.
All that he and his partners do on the Instapundit site is, list articles and items of interest, with a comment or two about each. There are actual articles on the PJMedia website, (which is separate from Instapundit), but even amongst those, they’re a pretty mild bunch of writers.
I’m trying to think if there are writers there who I’ve just become used to skipping for outrageousness and so aren’t thinking of right now, but nothing is coming to mind.
IP is still so huge that, when they link to you, you get this huge influx of readers called an Instalanche, that can crash smaller websites. Meaning, they’re huge enough to be fairly bland in what they do – there’s no Vox Day on IP.
(P.S. I won’t vouch for the comments. Any huge site attracts . . . everyone.)
What timing! I have Sowell’s trilogy coming from Amazon tomorrow or the next day, and you’ve now prodded me to add Arendt’s Origins to my cart. Maybe I can find the graphic novel version. . .
Comments I can deal with.
My memory, possibly faulty, of PJMedia doesn’t involve Glenn Reynolds, bizarrely enough.
I’m going back maybe a decade or so, but I thought it was set up by two guys, Roger Simon and Charles Johnson. Johnson split from it fairly spectacularly when he concluded it was too “right-wing” even for him (he’s since renounced some of his more, uh, objectionable views)
Johnson is no longer on my radar, but was in, I dunno, late 2000s, maybe?
Is all very odd. I’ll give it more of a fair shot, if you say so.
Sorry, Niall 🙂
(The discussion over Moldbug raised my defensiveness and paranoia a bit more than I expected)
Charles Johnson did indeed start PJM with Simon. But PJM was never weird in the way you’re describing. Johnson wigged out at some point and left and started Little Green Footballs – a conservative site that started out okay, but then descended into some weirdness along with its proprietor. He was writing things at LGF that seemed . . . hard to believe . . . concerning the PJM people, so maybe that’s what you picked up on?
Roger Simon never struck me as outrageous. Maybe I missed something way back then. He’s still there, and writes pretty mild stuff. He’s so much of a centrist that he dislikes Trump.
(And keep in mind that Moldbug only came up because someone was essentially berating people here for NOT reading him.)
There is a thought about the Jewish mentality that occurred to me after reading the Pentateuch (or most of it). Perhaps somebody can give me feedback on it.
The thought is based on the threat from Above of collective punishment of all Jews if any one of them violates Divine Law. The Jews took that seriously enough to lynch a fellow Jew for gathering wood during the Sabbath.
It seems to me that living for millennia under the threat of collective punishment would be sufficient to engender a sense of collective guilt about anything immoral that any Jew does. This sense of collective guilt might be transmitted for a few generations even in families of secular Jews. And this might explain why so many prominent and not-so-prominent Jews, especially American, feel duty bound to criticize Israel.
I am not entirely joking when i say that, were i to feel guilty every time a Jew kills a Palestinian (for whatever reason) then perhaps i might wish that the State of Israel did not exist.
This might also explain other “social” “justice” positions that American Jews tend to take. Oh, and also Murray Rothbard’s quasi-religious hatred of the State.
AFAIK Charles Johnson went off the deep end as a result of an internet dispute over the Flemish party, Vlaams Belang.
It seemed to me at the time that there were good reasons to be wary of the Vlaams Belang; but it also seemed to me that Johnson was not just wary: he demonized it.
Afterwards, he started throwing under the bus everybody and everything with even the most tenuous link, not only to the Vlaams Belang, but to everybody or everything that has a link to the Vlaams Belang, or reminds him of the Vlaams Belang. In other words, he became a SJW.
That is probably why i never heard of him again: he lost his “conservative” audience, and was never going to gain a “liberal” audience, given his reputation.
As for Roger Simon, it is not true that he is critical of Trump: he was one of his earliest fans, which made me wonder about Simon’s grasp of reality. After Trump was elected (and by that time, i was happy about it) Simon even hazarded the prediction that Trump would turn out to be one of the greatest Presidents. Now i am beginning to appreciate Simon’s wisdom.
Having said that, Simon has been, in his own way, an enemy of the Jews. Not by ranting against Israel, but by ranting against “European” antisemitism. He is fully aware, of course, that the actual violence against European Jews comes from, er…, people with immigrant background. His problem is, or was, blaming anti-Israel attitudes in “Europe” on guilt about the Holocaust. It does not occur to him that people who have suffered under Nazi occupation are unlikely to feel guilty about the Holocaust; nor that they might start hating American Jews if one of them implies that they should feel guilty about the Holocaust.
I might add that i like Roger Simon’s understated sense of humor.
neonsnake (December 4, 2019 at 7:00 pm), I endorse what bobby b said – or he endorses what I said, however you care to phrase it (except that I think Snorri is more accurate about Roger Simon’s attitude to Trump).
Instapundit has always been Glenn Reynolds, with the occasional link from Dr Helen, and in the last few years has been much helped by Sarah Hoyt and others. It started before pjmedia but it has been pjmedia/instapundit for a long time – and been linking to (other) pjmedia for a long time.
Roger Simon (Mr “Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine”) is a former PC lefty who started wising up a while ago – bit like neoneocon but starting earlier. I once commented to him when he condemned his former think-alikes’ indifference to Stalin’s Ukraine famine but seriously understated its lethality. He replied admitted the accuracy of my references but said he remembered how, back in the 80s, he had believed the trivialising numbers his friends and professors had taught him, and wanted them to think about the immorality of the trivialising without also confronting them with the holocaust-denying scale of the lying. (My harsher words rather than his gentler ones – my impression was that in one or two little-examined areas he was still working through the sheer scale of the PC lies he’d been sold in decades past.)
So as regards the idea of avoiding Roger’s site because he’s so far right that it’s weird – well, I can best express the oddity of that idea by saying, “Hey, neonsnake, you’re still talking to me.” (Nor do I think Roger anywhere near too weird to read in any other direction. The Ukraine famine hiccough was unusual, and long ago.)
No need to apologise, or even visit the site if you already have enough to track quite apart from your day job. Just don’t be surprised if I link to it as readily as to the Daily Mail – or maybe a bit more so – whenever the data illustrates my point.
I’ve been wondering for over a decade:
Is there one Charles Johnson (a.k.a. “radgeek” from the old Usenet/alt. days) or are there two different ones?
“radgeek” used to post, rather combatively, on the Individual-Sovereignty Yahoo group. There were a bunch of those guys, lots of sound & fury. And I think he turned up on von Mises’ and/or Lew Rockwell’s. But then there was a C.J. who seemed a lot more, well, human, and not so ready to punch everybody’s lights out for Insufficient Libertarianism (as defined by radgeek).
Speaking of the Daily Mail: whereas apparently you Natives consider it as one of the fishwrap family — perhaps closer to our National Enquirer than to your Grauniad — we more politically aware Provincials* rely mostly on it for our favored UK news source.
Speaking of the Papers, above I pick up a whiff of disdain for WND. *g* This emboldens me to ask: Does anyone want to stick up for Jerome Corsi? In the year or so before I sent WND on its way without me, there was something about him that made my reliability red flags start flapping as in a high wind. Anybody care to comment?
.
*Provincials: I know I know, we’re Colonials, which makes us savages as against the settlers from France, who of course represent the apex of civilization and intellectuality, and hold rightful claim to the Provinces. But I have the most delightful memory of my mother, who spent several of the early years of her marriage, living in Worcester, Mass., and travelling with Dad up and down the East Coast. She always said that to N’Yawkers, anybody from west of the Hudson was disdained as a mere Provincial. This prompted her to remark further that New Yorkers were the most provincial people she knew of. 😆
(Please take all that as strictly in the spirit of teasing — although it’s true that Easterners seem to think we all have hay in our hair. Flyover country and all that, still.)
.
Niall, mygad! Even thou art acquainted with Neo. Interesting how many people seem to travel in similar circles.
Which prompts me to wonder what people think of Clare Spark? (I am genuinely interested. For one thing, I find her very cryptic. For another, I still haven’t read Moby Dick. But for some reason I keep reading her.)
Back in 2016, pre-election, Simon (IIRC) considered Trump to be a crass, boorish amateur. I remember one of his columns dismissing Trump as never having done a thing in public service.
I’ve paid less attention to Simon since then. Perhaps I was wrong in doing so – perhaps he changed. But he didn’t impress me then.
I don’t suppose it helps our case at all that, as I sit here, I DO have hay in my hair.
😆
Ah, a straw man!
Julie, I think radgeek is still out there.
I get knocked down
but I get up again
you’re never going to keep me down!
Now that dumb song is going to be in my head all day.
Replying a bit late to Julie:
Not sure about that. And thanks for the link and the pointers to Utube.
This is a bit cryptic. I can’t imagine what you mean by the Other Side or the Great Frog.
bobby b
Just don’t fall into Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, that might remove one earworm but in a Pyrrhic manner. BTW that song you mention, good tune but what a bunch of Lefties that group were, One-hit wonders thankfully.
Depending on what weirdness we’re referring to, his break with the “right” coincided and matched mine, slightly. He appeared to reject bigotry, birthers, etc (I went a little off the rails in my early thirties)
Am guessing he went a bit far, but I don’t recall exactly
I think he binned people he considered too outrageous, to both our minds.
I’m unsure he was entirely successful.
As I say, it’s a worry for me. I might be a little overboard in my paranoia about it 🙂
Thank you. But I still will apologise, if I think it’s deserved, and I think in this case it is.
I spoke out of turn, and you deserve an apology.
Snorri,
I know you’d never tease me. 😉
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Speaking of Neo, they’re discussing Drudge, among other things, and Little Green Footballs came up. And that’s where I remember C.J. II (if he is C.J. II) from. Sure, a hundred years ago I read LGF. Not bad, back then.
UPDATE: I see LGF is still in business — https://littlegreenfootballs.com — and has been sprinkled helpfully with Holy Water from the Font of All Knowledge. The front page hawks a bunch of stories, including one entitled “Who Is Worse: Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell? With Robert Reich.” Well, I wouldn’t have expected Mr. Reich to be a great fan of either of them.
Will have to pass on LGF.
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So, bobby, thanks for the radgeek link. He’s got a pretty good posting up today — some doctor talking to Russ Roberts about “but who will take care of the poors’ medical problems?”
I like it. :>) I suppose I could look in from time to time without getting cooties. After all, I voted for Orange Man and I seem to have survived whatever plague germs surround him….
CONCLUSION: radgeek ≠ C.J. II. Confidence level: 99.+%. :>))
. . .
Mr Ed,
Ee-e-e-w-www! Yer jus’ can’t help it, can yer. :>)))!!!
Bobby: I have enough confidence in my memory to assert that Roger Simon supported Trump much earlier than i did; that is, months before James Comey pronounced Hitlery to be above the Law.
Tomorrow, i’ll look for his articles that support my claim.
Julie: I have no idea why you might suspect being teased!
Of course not, Snorri. I know that the Great Frog has decreed that you be above such boyish stuff. :>))))
As you should. You were correct. I was wrong.
I googled a bit, and actually found the 2016 Politico article that originally soured me on Simon. It was snarky and smarmy and nasty and condescending, just as I remembered it.
And it was written by the OTHER Roger Simon, political writer.
I’m not sure I was even aware that there were two.
So I guess I have to start reading his stuff again.
bobby & Snorri,
Thanks to both o’ yez. I had no idea there are two Roger Simons, Political Pundits. The only one I knew of is Nice Roger.
Bobby: i should have suspected the cause of our disagreement because i had read the Tale of Three (or More) Roger Simons. That is a good example of the sense of humor of “our” Roger Simon; and there is a link to a clip with three Grouchos, for good measure.
This clip of lefties condemning anti-semitic remarks of Boris, and then being informed it was Corbyn not Boris who said them, is from Guido today, so few here will need my link to it. However it is relevant to the theme and timely so I link it.
If it were not another billow in “a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand” (in the light of history), I might have said amusing rather than excruciating.
“For instance I read something to that effect recently about Hollywood.”
Well, the Jews invented Hollywood, that is they created it from scratch, they created a whole new industry, or rather a new business (“there is no business like show business“).
And why in Hollywood? Because they were fleeing WASP antisemitism prevalent on the East coast.
Julie near Chicago (December 4, 2019 at 8:19 pm) I was interested in neo’s series “A mind is a difficult thing to change” about her progression from unreflecting leftie to her current position.
The Daily Mail tells me things the Guardian would rather withhold from me. I do not disdain it. Tabloid in the UK has a specific connotation – common people read them. People with superior minds read papers with larger pages. Or so people who think their minds superior to ours will tell you. And if they combine that with being PC, as such people often do, well perhaps the DM is a bit like FoxNews in British PC nightmares. The Daily Mail is a tabloid with aspirations to be read by a range of people – really common, moderately common, some high-earner plain-man types, etc.. It is Tory but that (or pressure, or being bought – there were various reports whose details I do not recall) made it unreliable on Brexit for a time when May’s deal was the Tory official line. The Torygraph aka the Delirium Tremens aka The Daily Telegraph has larger pages and IIRC never wavered on Brexit.
N.B. all British papers, even nominally right-wing ones, have imperfect reliability at best on some US-specific issues like guns, Trump, etc. In the past, I have seen US-sourced articles, originally aimed at the NYT or similar, recycled, little changed, into supposedly right-wing UK papers (Sarah Palin got the treatment a decade ago).
Niall: I am not familiar with the news business, but I suspect that most news outlets in the world rely on the BBC and the NY Times when it comes to foreign news. (Foreign to the news outlet’s country of publication, that is.)
That partially accounts for the popular opinion that Americans are further “to the right” of Europeans. There must be lots of Europeans who vote for anti-immigration parties but think that Trump is too “extreme”, just because of the narrative in the commercial news. If Americans talk to these people, it would natural for them to infer that Europeans are more moderate.
How timely regarding Roger Simon and PJM:
He’s leaving.
bobby b –
Yes, I saw that too. I thought, “Goodness, that’s apropos” and came over to post a link, only to see that you’d beaten me to it. 🙂
Niall,
Thanks, very helpful. The anti-Left anti-“alt.right” over here do pick up stuff from the Telegraph once in awhile.
And a commenter on one of the rightish sites writes that “we” (for some vaguely conservativish value of “we”) trust the BBC, your Times, der Spiegel, and maybe (or maybe not) Le Monde over any of the American MSM.
Your thoughts regarding how you, we, and the Continent look at each other are also quite interesting. I think there is a tendency to revere European thought and ways of doing things in general as being superior to our own, especially among the half-educated. Though of course there are those of an opposite opinion. It just kills me when I hear the tired old line “We are the only developed country in the world that doesn’t/does….” Always makes me think of the mother’s line to her kid: “So if all your friends decide to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, are you going to do it too?”
Right on.
Hope you find Neo’s journey interesting. Oh — Clare Spark has a version of her own journey going at clarespark.com . In a former life she was Program Director for Pacifica Radio, but I guess she didn’t toe the party line quite the way they wanted it toed.
Both our old friends Sunfish and Subotai Bahadur have been known to comment at thenewneo.com , and also at ChicagoBoyz.com . But I haven’t seen Sunfish in quite awhile. I wish they’d come back here.
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Thanks also to bobby and Snorri for the links. More info new to me!
But … The Epoch Times. Now, I like it; but I read that it’s a project of Falun Gong. Love to see what the PRC and the Left try doing to trash it.
For basic news of what has happened, I suspect they often do rely on the BBC and others – as, often do we. When I spoke of NYT-aimed articles on US subjects being recycled in right-leaning British papers, I was referring to cases I’ve seen where an article’s raw obvious PC spin (of the kind the paper would reject, edit or qualify about a UK or European story) appears without comment or qualification under the byline of some US reporter/aggregator – i.e. the article’s PC PoV of some event is also presented, quite uncommented, in a supposedly right-wing UK source.
I just wanted Julie (and any other US readers) to be aware that could sometimes happen when the paper’s editorial attention was elsewhere and/or the subject touched an unlike-the-UK area.
Thanks, Snorri and Niall.