Not hating yourself

But how?

In the last article, I argued that the logical response to the finding that the Ashkenazi intelligence profile exhibits high scores in verbal and mathematical reasoning and mediocre scores in spatial ability is to calculate Ashkenazi IQ by ignoring the latter. The reason for this is that verbal and mathematical reasoning are the measurable skills that correlate most closely to the word intelligence as used in ordinary English, and because they are the most valuable in fields associated with high intelligence.

I got a range of interesting responses, and also typical antisemite pilpul explaining that all the tests are fake, everything is fake, and Jews get Nobel prizes by lying or being ethnocentric or something. Honestly, it’s sad - like watching Sam Kriss try to juggle (more on him later). It’s left to me, then, to point out what the actual antisemitic argument is to the detritus of antisemitism left behind when the smart Nazis got the memo that they lost. So, here goes:

Ashkenazi so-called intelligence is essentially effeminate and specializes in the manipulation of symbols. The Aryan mind produces Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin, men who impose themselves upon nature through alliance of the intellect and the will.  High spatial reasoning ability is a prerequisite for manly mastery, without it, you are left with the snake-tongued intellectual, the lowest of all persons. The Jewish mind produces Freudianism, Marxism, and casuistical discussions of whether squeezing a lemon on your salad constitutes the forbidden labour of threshing. At best, these are harmless and pointless, at worst destructive. In the face of Jewish word logic, the ubermensch rotates shapes. Consider this shape; it has 17 sides, watch it spin, Aryanly.

You get the gist. So the question is, who’s right, is rotating shapes good, or wordceling? 

The obvious answer, I think, is that both are right. Obviously someone with better spatial abilities is better than someone with worse ones in that respect. Obviously, someone with better verbal abilities is better than someone with worse ones in that respect. No-one is best at everything, though, so the inevitable question becomes which is a higher priority. This is basically a subjective question, so the natural way of dealing with it is that we all just be narcissistic and declare whichever skill you or I excel at to be most important. The bottom line, though, is that if we do that, I’m gonna win. The common language in which such disputes are arbitrated is, well, language. I can use words to mock you rotating shapes, you can’t rotate shapes to mock me using words. Sure, in real life, you can breakdance or something, drawing around you an adoring crowd while I impotently Jewsnipe in the background, but we’re on the internet now. Whatcha gonna do, post your score on Sonic?

There are somewhat less arbitrary ways to arbitrate these disputes. Empirically, verbal and mathematical scores are much more predictive of success in a modern economy than spatial ability. True, you would do better if dropped out in the outback than me, but a feral dog would do better than either of us. Since I’m winning, though, I can afford to be magnanimous and say that we shouldn’t go down this road at all. The truth is that it is a bad road to go down, easily verging into the territory of the deranged. One form of this derangement is the Nazis banning the theory of relativity because it wasn’t based and red-pilled enough, sending Europe’s most talented physicists to America to go build the bomb. Another, opposite, form is found in certain Jewish intellectual subcultures where all areas of human endeavor beyond a narrow form of book learning and analysis are held in disdain. Some of these subcultures are religious, some are secular. I have seen them; they have their charms, but they are kind of nuts.

A more healthy approach is to acknowledge that, since no group is best, you’re better off using a mixture. The New Deal WASP elite that conquered the world in the years 1941-45 naturally thought they were superior to Jews, and perhaps they were right, but they wanted better bombs, demoralization campaigns against their domestic and foreign enemies, and to become a world leader in advanced physics and computing, and they weren’t too prideful to use the best human resources they had to hand. This is the basic wisdom behind imperialism, and it works.

At an individual level, a good strategy is to capitalize on your strengths, and then use that capital to improve your weaknesses. A perfect example is Mark Zuckerberg.¹ He’s a very smart guy, and also obviously driven, conscientious, and all the other stuff you need to be successful, and so he became very successful. On the other hand, he was still an incredibly stereotypical Jewish nerd. He could have used his money to hire PR agents to explain why jocks suck and nerds rule, but he did the right thing, hired one of the world’s best trainers and is now a jiu-jitsu champion. He doesn’t talk about vitalism; he is vitalism. Sure, he still kind of looks like a nerd, or perhaps a transhumanist nerd-jock hybrid, but that’s an incredibly shallow way of looking at things, and, if it doesn’t bother his wife, there’s no reason it should bother you. If, instead, Zuckerberg had taken time off coding earlier in life to work out, he would now be both poorer and weaker than he is today. This is not a lifestyle column (I write a substack, I have no idea about how to be successful), but this is obviously the ideal strategy, generically speaking, to make the best of the genetic chips life dealt you.

Dude is ripped

The New Jew, same as the Old Jew, only worse

I’m rambling somewhat, but this is all in the service of making a point. I haven’t written anything about Zionism for a while. Strictly speaking, this is in keeping with the name of the blog, but not the mission statement. No-one forced me to write that, so I should make some kind of token effort to stick to it. Here goes.

Of all the anti-Zionist arguments I hate, the absolute worst is that Zionism is actually antisemitic. For example, here’s an old article from Sam Kriss. I think he’s kind of renounced it, so it’s OK to take the piss, and the piss I am going to take:

What does it mean to be a Jew? Over the centuries, Jews in every corner of the world have led any number of different modes of life; there’s very little to unite the Jewish experience beyond the Tanakh (some Jewish communities split before the composition of the Talmud) and the fact of being in exile. From Sinai to Babylon to Persia to Brooklyn, we’ve spent far more of our history pining after the Land of Israel than actually living in it. Throughout, this loss has been felt as a critical gap between how things are and how things ought to be, a recognition that things have gone wrong; this is why Jewish thought has always tended towards the Utopian. This is why Jews practice circumcision: there’s something missing. This is why the Torah begins with the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, beit, a square missing one of its sides. This is why Kabbalah envisages a God that isn’t almighty and all-powerful, but fractured, broken and weak, a God that must be repaired. This is why Jews are commanded to dedicate themselves to tikkum olam, the healing of the earth. Throughout Jewish history, there’s been the vision of a better world, a Messianic return to Zion: it’s what animated Jesus Christ, Baruch Spinoza, and Karl Marx. For almost all of this period, the idea that the Messianic gap could be closed by simply sending thousands of armed men to the Levant to boot out the existing inhabitants and set up a Jewish state would have not just been premature, but ridiculous.

Genuine question: is it actually possible to be more of a gaylord than this? First of all, did you get the thing about the ב from a Chabad campus lunch ‘n’ learn or volume iii of Yitzchak Ginsberg’s The Wisdom of the Hebrew Alphabet for ex-Hippy Retards who Wrecked Their Brain on Drugs and Now Want to be Frum For Some Reason? That stuff is for ‘arty’ girls on their gap years struggling with intense feelings of low self esteem and some kind of inchoate desire for ‘spirituality’. It isn’t real; if you have either a brain or a penis, you’re supposed to laugh at it. Secondly, doesn’t it strike you as a bit weird that your three exemplars of the Jewish spirit all rejected, and are rejected by, Judaism, the only clear reason for calling them Jewish at all being, in the final analysis, their ethnicity? Bit racist no? Thirdly, tikkun olam, really?

I could, and maybe should, go on,² but the broader point here is that the Zionists were antisemites because they made critical comments about Jews like ‘you are poor, despised, and frequently subject to violence, maybe fix that’ and this is supposed to be bad or something. 

Whatever disasters have yet to befall us, as the contradictions between the promise of Zionism and the brute reality of the Middle East special-needs insane asylum play themselves out in increasingly gruesome forms, one thing no-one can take away from Zionism is the attempt to introduce a spirit of rational self criticism into the Jewish people. The tendency of post-talmudic Jewish tradition, given into entirely with the rise of the ‘kabbalah’ Kriss thinks is so nifty, was to try and hold in balance a spirit of self-congratulation with one of self-torture, amping up one or the other each time the excesses of its partner got a bit too much. Zionism offered a route out of this endless love-hate relationship with ourselves by offering the simple thesis that we could feel better about ourselves by just being better. It scarcely matters what the model of the New Jew offered was: proletarian, farmer, soldier, aristocrat. The mere fact that a great movement suggested that we could be something else by working at it was enough to merit our thanks. 

The problem with Zionism is not that it wanted to improve the Jews, the problem is that it failed, and then gave up, and then conjured up a pastiche of the New Jew instead. Here’s Daniel Gordis trying to polish the turd:

I was already AirPod’ed up and listening to music, hoping just to rest or even sleep until the train arrived in Jerusalem about 40 minutes later. But at that next stop, the train (or at least our portion of it) was suddenly overtaken by at least sixty exceedingly loud, hormonally overdosed Israeli teenagers, probably about 16 or 17 years old. Boys and girls, they were laughing, yelling to each other from opposite ends of the car. They were being … kids. It was impossible to hear anything other than them …

Those kids on our train, had they been on a train in England or Germany, would have known very well that sixty ultra-rowdy Jewish teenagers on a train would have ended badly. They would have known that they had to be quiet. They would have known to stay under the radar. And that, of course, is the point of this place…

Alternatively, though, you could note that what Israel has done is to eradicate the fear, the nervousness, the tentativeness that Herzl believed would always characterize Diaspora life. Fear is no longer an instinct. For better and for worse, many Israelis have forgotten how to be afraid.

Sam Kriss, all is forgiven. You may sin against our people, our law, our G-d and against innumerable other things, but at least you’ll never try and tell me that Zionism succeeded because Israel is full of poorly brought up oafs who make every aspect of life outside the Anglo ghetto Gordis can afford to spend most of his time in pointlessly stressful. But Gordis is still being unimaginative. If we’re going to do this then why stop halfway? The real problem Herzl unwittingly set out to solve was not merely that Jews were too polite, it’s that they weren’t all bald by age 30, that they didn’t realize that a white vest could be formal wear on condition that it has sleeves, that they didn’t throw half-drunk cups of coffee straight into the bin, that they didn’t eat absolutely all their food off flimsy plastic plates, puddles of paprika-dyed soy oil oozing off the sides. If anyone can use the magic of words to turn the wanton, systemic destruction of human capital into a virtue, it’s us, so let’s just do it.

Making do

OK, calm down. In many respects, the project of the New Jew was an exercise in pushing water up a hill with spoons. The proportion of the human race working in agriculture has been declining relentlessly for over a century across the globe, so the dream of returning the Jew to the soil was always hard to square with reality. You could argue that the fact that any Jews are farmers today is a victory of sorts on this front. In other respects, it failed because there just wasn’t time for it amidst the struggle for national survival. If you want to get fit and athletic, you join a gym; you don’t hang around in an alley with drug addicts and have knife fights. In some ways, the exigencies of state formation and maintenance in this region have aligned with New Jew ideals - Israel is about as close to a nation of warriors as a capitalist country could conceivably be - and in other ways they don’t. As it turns out, if you want to survive in a troubled region, a good dollop of usury and financial chicanery is pretty helpful.

The true death knell of the New Jew, though, was Israel’s real war, namely the struggle for international legitimacy in a world that has embraced the anti-morality of decolonialism. The metaphysical concept of antisemitism and its implantation at the moral heart of pax Americana was not the work of Zionists - those responsible, for the most part, would have preferred Zionism to never have existed. It did prove, however, to be an irresistible weapon for the Zionists to employ. The Jewish State had once been heralded as a way to solve, or transcend, antisemitism, but, faced with inarguable evidence of its own illegitimacy in the eyes of a moral order so drunk on pity it cannot hear the screams, the Jewish state that actually was entered into a symbiotic relationship, not so much with antisemitism itself, but the idea of antisemitism. If antisemitism is, indeed, eternal, ever mutating, impossible to catch, then, by rights, a Jewish state, conceived of as a giant bomb shelter, needs no further justification.

As we have seen, though, the metaphysical concept of antisemitism is metaphysical precisely because it purports to incorporate every negative sentiment, at least above a certain threshold, anyone ever has had, will have, or can have towards Jews. Thus, essentially by definition, a state dedicated to an endless war against antisemitism cannot but espouse the principle that there never has been, never will be, and never can be anything bad (above the aforementioned threshold) about Jews. The chief virtue - I shan’t say the only one - of Zionism had therefore to be set aside in favour of unremitting self congratulation balanced not even, this time, by psychological self terrorism, but by neurosis. 

Except not quite. There is one way in which Zionism has not given its assent to the principle of the universal blamelessness of the Jew. Everyone here is familiar with the motif of the IDF babe, pouting into the camera with an assault rifle slung across her shoulder. Partly this is hasbara for the simp demographic, but not just. It’s also for domestic consumption. Now, it’s just objectively a fact that the idea of an armed women contradicts Jewish tradition, whether one chooses to view this from a halachic, cultural or any other perspective. I’m not going to get preachy about it: Jewish tradition can change, and maybe this is a change it will make. The only way to know for sure is to teleport 100 years into the future. Rather, I want to point out that it isn’t enough for Zionism to have made this change, it insists on marking it, making you take notice.

We’ve discussed before the mawkish militarism of Zionist iconography, how it fundamentally makes no sense and forms part of the dumbness spiral. I won’t belabour the point here except to note that Zionism allows precisely one criticism of the Jew before he got his present state. This criticism is not that the Old Jew was a victim, for Zionism is very insistent that the New Jew is also a victim, and the failures of Zionism, to be fair, have given it plenty of material to work with. A jaundiced way of phrasing it might be the criticism the New Jew makes of the Old is that he looked too much like a victim, but let us try and be a bit fairer. The real criticism is that the Old Jew was not, in addition to being a victim, also a killer. I’m not saying being a killer is a bad thing. A killer can be a hero, a zero and everything in between. Still, it seems odd that we should have embarked on all this just for that. Not wrong, maybe, but weird, for sure.

Cheer up

When I started this article, I thought it would be a positive little piece. I’m not sure what happened. Perhaps the somber thud, thud, thud of Iron Dome in the background is getting to me. Let’s try and rescue it. Zionism happened, Zionism won. If you don’t want to spend all your time beclowning yourself on podcasts with gay race communists, then you have to find a way to work with it, and if you have to, why not play up the good? Instead of poring over the works of the Zionists to prove how bad and wrong they were about everything, why not try and make Zionists live up to some of their promises?

Which brings me back to where we started. Ashkenazi Jews don’t have great spatial abilities. Could that be related to what you see here?

DeZeen tells us that Tel Aviv is home to ‘extremely talented young architects’, that it’s ‘like really hot stuff’ and there is ‘something very inspiring happening in Israel’. Please do click the above link to see what they mean. The natural response to these buildings is to be ‘inspired’ to kill yourself. This is the wrong impulse, though. You should kill an architect, lots of architects, like King Josiah in 2 Kings 23, only with architects. You shouldn’t even feel bad about it; after all the people we’ve killed this year, what difference, at this point, does a few hundred more make?

Israel is full of shoddy tenement buildings, and run down slums. For this, there is an excuse: money is tight and the population line just keeps on going up. What cannot be excused, though, is what Israelis build when money is no object. So that no-one accuses me of picking on seculars, here is a mashup of Religious Zionist synagogues. 

These are schuls for people who deeply love Eretz Yisrael; imagine what they’d do if they hated it.

Clearly, we suck. This isn’t because we are literally incapable of drawing a nice shape; we are spatially mediocre, not spatially Downs syndrome. Rather, it’s a consequence of founding a state amidst the rule of Modernism, without an indigenous architectural tradition to draw on, and possessed of the belief (which is true enough) that the architectural styles used by Jews in the diaspora are not truly are our own. The ‘verbal tilt’ just makes it easier for us to justify the terrible failure to develop something that isn’t complete jank than to make something nice instead. Thus talent becomes a crutch for weakness, and weakness spirals into vice. 

So I have an idea. After we kill all the architects, we turn to the nations of the world and we fess up. No bullshit this time. “We have absolutely no idea what we are doing, please tell us how to do something good, so we can copy you”. Which architectural style we pick doesn’t really matter. My preference would be for that of the Greek-speaking peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, because that is what is closest to Judaism at the earliest stage at which it is open to genuine historical investigation (a story for another day), but it doesn’t really matter. The point is just to copy someone because we know, and can admit, that we can’t do it ourselves.

I think this would be a very cleansing experience. On top of being able to wander around and look at buildings that don’t fill a soul that hasn't been beaten down into orcishness with burning shame, we would also get to experience what national improvement means. After a few decades of self-discipline, we can start to experiment a bit: a menorah here, a lulav and esrog there, but it has to be baby steps. A century or two in, perhaps we can talk about building a temple and it won’t just be a bad joke. 

And on that note, I wish all my Jewish readers a כתיבה וחתימה טובה און א גוט געבענטשט יאר and, to the gentiles, maybe throw me a couple of bucks. I’ll always be a nerd, but I’d like to learn Taekwando one day, and I’m getting long in the tooth. 

1. Shout out to my homie, Meir, for the idea.

2. One more example “The Hebrew word for migration to Israel, aliyah, has echoes of the German Aufheben: to go up, but also to cancel out.” 🤯