by the way, the word "jewsnipe" only gets you 11 results on google. i sense a golden opportunity to crown a new word into the dictionary if i were you.
You could copy the Turkish mosque style (which is actually the Eastern orthodox style) which has become "modern" Muslim mosque style. You can use it to flex on the Muslims. Greeks are overrated imo.
I consider the 9/11 memorial in NYC to be a work of true architectural beauty. Do you know who conceived of the original design motif for it? Michael Arad, an Israeli architect. I don’t believe that Israelis or Jews are inherently incapable of designing something beautiful. If you look through the catalog of a few famous Israeli architects, you will see the Israeli listing as your typical Israeli slop, but then, for example, one work they did in France is actually quite nice. Something going on in Israel that actively discourages anything that isn’t an assault to the eye.
Let’s not forget, montefiore funded the construction of Jewish neighborhoods on the outskirts of Jerusalem in the late 1800s, and those little developments turned into the current heart of west Jerusalem, centered on the downtown triangle and Jaffa and Ben Yehuda. Beautiful buildings of human scale and pleasant forms. The most desired parts of Israel. We have a foundation to start building beautifully from. The fact that it’s not done seems to be a conscious choice.
The riff on shule architecture was worth it and I'd read a broader piece on that. I assumed all the buildings are ugly in israel because Israelis are ruthlessly pragmatic - ie for the same reason they go to a wedding in shorts. But maybe that's wrong
It really isn't any more or less practical to dress decently. What it is basically is that people feel self conscious dressing more formally than those around them. There are then 2 sources of downwards pressure (1) really messed up people who just can't dress themselves properly and (2) people with an aversion to formality who try to push the boundary even further down.
Zionist culture has always had this aversion to formality. It's just that in the early 20th century, general culture was pretty formal, so Zionist attire was still somewhat decent. Now westerners in general dress shabbily, so Israelis take it to the hoop.
"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"
While I get the point...the Merkava tank is arguably the best in the world and the Tavor is pretty good.
Every smartphone has Israeli/ Jewish tech in it and Waze and Facebook are Jewish inventions...oh and the polio vaccine and Nuclear bomb.
Re: "Ashkenazi so-called intelligence is essentially effeminate and specializes in the manipulation of symbols."
There is a fringe theory by a sociologist named Christopher Badcock about imprinted genes which claims that "mechanistic" cognition (which would include spatial skills) is largely a product of paternal gene expression, whereas what he calls "mentalistic" cognition (which includes an understanding of symbolism, meaning, metaphor etc, and which he says Jews excel at over Aryans) is largely a product of maternal gene expression. HIs theory has a lot of issues, but it's still interesting.
Unfortunately, an appreciation of and ability to create beauty is not the same thing as the ability to quickly rotate shapes in one's head.
To be fair to Kris, I don’t think his opinion is uncommon amongst reform Jews (because in both belief and law, they hardly are. Only the ethnic/history remains) and is one of the many reasons I (and many others) moved towards Chabad.
"...the creative thought process responsible for the relativity theory and all the other Einsteinian innovations was completely nonverbal and was mediated through the constructive manipulation of mentally visualized images."
"The brain regions active during visuospatial creativity are analogous to the structures that were increased in density and convolution in Einstein's brain. It is also interesting to note that these regions share many overlapping similarities with the mirror neuron network (Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004). Additionally, Einstein's left inferior parietal lobule and right SPL were unusually large and may have been responsible in part for his increased creative and spatial abilities, respectively."
Don't mention it my Hebrew friend. We cold, blue-eyed northern seers never would have fallen for Pythagorean Judaism (i.e. Christianity) if it weren't for your visionary prophets.
Don't shortchange yourselves: Jews can see things in their minds, too, whether wordcel rabbis recognize this or not.
Einstein's main advantage over Von Neumann was creativity. Relative to eachother, as both men clearly outclassed even the average scientist creatively, but I've long thought what gave Ol' Albert the edge over Johnny was his being a violinist. Von Neumann loved music, but I only ever heard about him loving to listen, nothing about him ever playing instruments himself. Not even the bongos:
I may be a minority on this, but I think a lot of modern architecture can be pretty cool. I admit; those synagogues are hideous. But the office tower/shopping center looks like something from a sci fi movie. It’s kind of cool! I love the shape, and all the glass. Makes me tingle for Howard Roark.
I agree that Israeli architecture is mostly bad. However, I can't think of any contemporary architectural habits that are good. Half of Scruton's stuff is about how bad the architecture of England is, with tradition or without it.
There is a lot of good stuff happening in western countries, both renovating old areas, and building in traditional styles according to the principles of good urbanism. Check out Samuel Hughes on Twitter and The Aesthetic City on YouTube. It's true that this is a drop in the ocean compared to the mountains of filth built everywhere since WW2, but there are some grounds for hope, and a sense in which Europe has turned the corner. In Israel it just gets worse every year, and there is no hope at all.
I don’t see any evidence at all that Europe has “turned a corner.” Look at the skyline of London. And this is a general theme across all the arts, btw.
Where you do see some hope in Israel is in the humble yet generally pleasing style of private homes in the various moshavim. Meaning, not grand ego-filled and big-name-architect-stamped projects, but the simple red shingle home of the private family.
Moshavim are also being ruined. I see it all the time.
Check out Samuel Hughes. Nixon once said that inflation was still going up, and the rate that it was increasing was going up, but the rate that the rate was increasing was going down. I think Europe has reached that stage architecturally.
I am such a stereotypical Ashkey I can't figure out why architecture is that important. I like the concept of beautiful things but they don't really change my mood look like they are supposed to. I try to understand art- every time I go to the museum all I can think about is how much the paintings cost.
Thankyou for sharing. I wonder how many people/Jews are like this. I would guess it's at least 5%. If all such people just agree that beauty is good as a concept and understand the need to promote it, but that they can't really contribute to that, then we can make more progress.
“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.”
Your writing is complex AF, but this part above…anyone who thinks early Zionists were victims and such, are delusional. Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, Begin, even Weizmann. These dudes were relentless, calculated and responsible for their destinies and actions, amongst other qualities.
The synagogue I went to was atrocious in design in every way. The only good one in AZ is now a ghey event venue. It’s still a little corny, but I believe it was a Frank Lloyd Wright design anyway. I know the cool church up the street from my synagogue was designed by him. It was majestic.
I agree about all of them except Begin. I think he must take a big share of the blame in turning Zionism from an ideology that rejected victimhood to one that wallowed in it. TBF, he went through a lot.
Don’t know if this is on-subject…But there’s a certain victimhood that’s common to most Jews I grew up around.
It’s going to sound cliche, but our parents kept us away from cool shit in school. Shop. Auto. They said “that for low class people”. Now I weld. Now I work on vehicles. I do electrical work. I work with my hands. I take responsibility for the things I own. I trust very few people to fix anything.
You encourage only shit like being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, you’re going to have generally soft people that expect everyone else to do the hard work. Ben-Gurion is the ideal example. Labor. Work with your hands. Farmer. Builder. No excuses. You do it all with your own hands. Ben-Gurion archetype would never let someone fix his car.
Maybe not much of a point, but being a victim is decidedly American (and probably European) Jew. It’s the Jewish mother martyr mentality. If you grew up in America, you know it well. I don’t think that mentality necessarily originated from sad Jews lined up in Polish shtetls gonna ghettos. An awful lot of Polish Jews left because they saw a way to get what they wanted. They took matters into their own hands. All the early Zionists that left Poland and elsewhere to go to Mandatory Palestine, were wagging fingers at the Jews that stayed behind the whole time. They were doing that for a reason. The seeds of victimhood were kind of there. Not that there weren’t plenty of blue collar Jews in Eastern Europe, but at some point there was a general split.
For sure, when looking at his whole life. Early Begin though, pre-independence. Dude was an animal.
Later I can’t really comment beyond the standard story. Him and Sadat were pretty close (I could be wrong). For better or worse, he went soft to try for peace.
If you ever for some reason find yourself in Cincinnati, Ohio, check out the Isaac M. Wise Reform temple. Derivative it surely is, but whatever you may think of the sectarian and/or ideological project that drove it, it is also surely beautiful.
1. A lot of mathematical ability *is* spatial reasoning. You can do logic, computability, abstract algebra, and some number theory with that combination of verbal talent + spatial retardation (which I also have), but good luck doing any geometry, topology, combinatorics or linear algebra. Your physics Jews can rotate shapes as well as any Blond Beast doing engineering at Humboldt. The reason your people aren’t applying what shape rotation abilities they do have is because you’ve gone and made it low-status.
2. Idk mate, if I ever met an ex-IDF babe and she meets reasonable thresholds of intellect and good sense, I might go bang on a rabbi’s door three times. The Moslemeens already circumcised me so I’m all geared up really
Growing up in LA, the style of Jewish-modern synagogues and schools always seemed cold, empty and weirdly holocaust-memorial-ish. Partly just because I had to go to them, but also because they lacked imagination. Or imagination was paper children's drawings plastered on ugly brick. The art deco in Tel Aviv was a sigh of relief, as was Jerusalem stone, compared to things in the diaspora. But this notion of verbosity substituting for spacial ability is total BS, and I'll prove it: I'm one of the few Jews who went to art school. (Twice, dropping out both). You cannot talk your way out of a bad design, in a room full of Christians. Although they may find it somewhat amusing when you try. At best, in a commercial sense, you can convince your patron they got what they paid for (because they want to believe that, and plus they're tired of paying for more changes). But no, Ashkenazi Jews - who were the first people to conceptualize a 4-dimensional spacetime manifold - do not by default lack spacial reasoning skills. A lot of us just appear to like ugly architecture and art. Possibly as a holdover from something quite recent where a wannabe artist and architect, bent on the idea of restoring classical aesthetics and ridding the world of obscene art, went about doing so by sending most of us up smokestacks. There's not a small amount of the same impulse in your review here, which has apparently been fuel for less generous takes. Go ahead and accuse me of being only a verbose type - I spend most of my life making art, music and design. Oddly, I've always scored higher on spatial reasoning tests than on verbal or mathematical ones, making me the black sheep of a family of lawyers. Nothing to be proud of. But as much as I hate the architecture of postwar Jewish institutions, as this hangover of brutalist + postmodern negative space, I think categorizing it as an Ashkenazi malady is fundamentally kinda disgusting. Even if you mean it as a joke.
On the subject of IQ and such, what is your take on Jewish disinterest in video games? Film -- at least in America -- may as well be a Jewish art form, but despite mathematical brilliance and Israel being a tech hub/knowledge economy, it seems that Jews are largely absent in video game development. I'm sure they're there, but most of the big names are non-Jew whites (incl. slavs) or East Asians. There's even decent Turkish representation.
My guess is that the Jews who're interested in art and entertainment aren't all that good at or interested in math/computers, while the mathsy, code monkey Jews spend their efforts on making money and/or more serious applications of their intelligence, and are perhaps less likely to be interested in art -- or at least in video games, which aren't really considered an artform and are kind of seen as a low-prestige waste of time activity.
I'm Jewish. And I write code. And I studied graphic design, so mainly I'm a UI artist whose specialty is turning design concepts into beautiful procedurally generated graphical interfaces. If you want the marriage of art and code, that's me. And I love working on video games. Love writing graphics code and thinking through all the ways players will interact with it. Love coming up with game logic and fun things for the player.
If I were to classify how Jewishness works for me in this regard, it's that I spend 20x longer thinking about what I'm going to design and write than I do actually putting my fingers on the keyboard. And I think through every single possible mistake, every edge case or flaw, before and after I write the code. And they keep me awake at night, so I know in the morning exactly what other code I need to write to make it perfect.
It's not exactly obsessive-compulsive, it's a sense that doing my best isn't enough. I have to keep trying harder. Reducing this to the idea that I should just spend my time making financial software to make money is, well, insulting. But also it's a misunderstanding of how the world works. Not everyone is just trying to score points before they die. I get to live a life loving what I do, and have the satisfaction of making beautiful things. That should be enough for anyone.
But I don't really play games, except for research. The only games I play for fun occasionally are things like Crusader Kings or Cities: Skylines. I lost some time to No Man's Sky. But you can see what kind of games these are. Single player, open-ended, not particularly addictive. The reason I don't play most games is that I don't have the time to be pulled into the world of the game. I would rather be writing and creating a game than playing one. And if I'm not working, I would rather be painting or playing music than watching TV or playing a game. I design games, I work on them, I know how they work, I understand how to make each interaction addictive. Honestly, I have pushed against certain addictive patterns throughout my entire career, because I don't want to be a drug dealer. I'm not immune to becoming addicted to them myself, but I have a better immune system than most people, because I understand the mechanics.
Contrary to what you're saying, I think video games are definitely an artform and are not a waste of time or low-prestige at all... they're better than most passive entertainment like movies. But I want to spend my time on Earth creating things, not consuming them, and video games are the worst time-suck ever invented. I can binge-watch a series and feel a little bad, but that's nothing compared to how I feel after a real video game binge. I only have so much time, and I need to keep creating.
If you need to reduce everything to what race, ethnicity, religion or culture someone came from to explain why they do X, Y or Z, you're going to be baffled. The object of this article, to explain bad Israeli architecture as a flaw in Ashkenazi spacial thinking (compensated for by good verbal skills or too much calcium in their teeth and kidneys) is a flawed way of thinking about the world. Because any smart Bengali or Indonesian can see the world the way I see it, and any stupid redneck can make smartass racist comments trying to explain why their countries' architecture sucks too.
by the way, the word "jewsnipe" only gets you 11 results on google. i sense a golden opportunity to crown a new word into the dictionary if i were you.
You could copy the Turkish mosque style (which is actually the Eastern orthodox style) which has become "modern" Muslim mosque style. You can use it to flex on the Muslims. Greeks are overrated imo.
That's pretty much what the architect of the Great Synagogue of Budapest did.
https://www.greatsynagogue.hu/gallery_syn.html
It was so successful that it was copied throughout Europe and even in New York; but that was long before 1947.
I consider the 9/11 memorial in NYC to be a work of true architectural beauty. Do you know who conceived of the original design motif for it? Michael Arad, an Israeli architect. I don’t believe that Israelis or Jews are inherently incapable of designing something beautiful. If you look through the catalog of a few famous Israeli architects, you will see the Israeli listing as your typical Israeli slop, but then, for example, one work they did in France is actually quite nice. Something going on in Israel that actively discourages anything that isn’t an assault to the eye.
Let’s not forget, montefiore funded the construction of Jewish neighborhoods on the outskirts of Jerusalem in the late 1800s, and those little developments turned into the current heart of west Jerusalem, centered on the downtown triangle and Jaffa and Ben Yehuda. Beautiful buildings of human scale and pleasant forms. The most desired parts of Israel. We have a foundation to start building beautifully from. The fact that it’s not done seems to be a conscious choice.
The riff on shule architecture was worth it and I'd read a broader piece on that. I assumed all the buildings are ugly in israel because Israelis are ruthlessly pragmatic - ie for the same reason they go to a wedding in shorts. But maybe that's wrong
They don't go to weddings in shorts because they are ruthlessly pragmatic either.
low key practical culture no?
It really isn't any more or less practical to dress decently. What it is basically is that people feel self conscious dressing more formally than those around them. There are then 2 sources of downwards pressure (1) really messed up people who just can't dress themselves properly and (2) people with an aversion to formality who try to push the boundary even further down.
Zionist culture has always had this aversion to formality. It's just that in the early 20th century, general culture was pretty formal, so Zionist attire was still somewhat decent. Now westerners in general dress shabbily, so Israelis take it to the hoop.
"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"
While I get the point...the Merkava tank is arguably the best in the world and the Tavor is pretty good.
Every smartphone has Israeli/ Jewish tech in it and Waze and Facebook are Jewish inventions...oh and the polio vaccine and Nuclear bomb.
I think Jews don't suffer from
I'm not a NAZI, for the record.
maskil binah...Definitely not Aryan
Re: "Ashkenazi so-called intelligence is essentially effeminate and specializes in the manipulation of symbols."
There is a fringe theory by a sociologist named Christopher Badcock about imprinted genes which claims that "mechanistic" cognition (which would include spatial skills) is largely a product of paternal gene expression, whereas what he calls "mentalistic" cognition (which includes an understanding of symbolism, meaning, metaphor etc, and which he says Jews excel at over Aryans) is largely a product of maternal gene expression. HIs theory has a lot of issues, but it's still interesting.
Unfortunately, an appreciation of and ability to create beauty is not the same thing as the ability to quickly rotate shapes in one's head.
To be fair to Kris, I don’t think his opinion is uncommon amongst reform Jews (because in both belief and law, they hardly are. Only the ethnic/history remains) and is one of the many reasons I (and many others) moved towards Chabad.
Einstein had extraordinary spatial intelligence, but he was totally outclassed by Von Neumann in math. Who's considered the more consequential genius?
+1 for shape rotators
Is it true that Einstein had extraordinary spatial intelligence? (I'm not contradicting you, just asking)
"...the creative thought process responsible for the relativity theory and all the other Einsteinian innovations was completely nonverbal and was mediated through the constructive manipulation of mentally visualized images."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002221947300600702?journalCode=ldxa
"The brain regions active during visuospatial creativity are analogous to the structures that were increased in density and convolution in Einstein's brain. It is also interesting to note that these regions share many overlapping similarities with the mirror neuron network (Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004). Additionally, Einstein's left inferior parietal lobule and right SPL were unusually large and may have been responsible in part for his increased creative and spatial abilities, respectively."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3822289/
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Don't mention it my Hebrew friend. We cold, blue-eyed northern seers never would have fallen for Pythagorean Judaism (i.e. Christianity) if it weren't for your visionary prophets.
Don't shortchange yourselves: Jews can see things in their minds, too, whether wordcel rabbis recognize this or not.
Einstein's main advantage over Von Neumann was creativity. Relative to eachother, as both men clearly outclassed even the average scientist creatively, but I've long thought what gave Ol' Albert the edge over Johnny was his being a violinist. Von Neumann loved music, but I only ever heard about him loving to listen, nothing about him ever playing instruments himself. Not even the bongos:
https://youtu.be/qWabhnt91Uc
I may be a minority on this, but I think a lot of modern architecture can be pretty cool. I admit; those synagogues are hideous. But the office tower/shopping center looks like something from a sci fi movie. It’s kind of cool! I love the shape, and all the glass. Makes me tingle for Howard Roark.
Unlike.
I grew up in a midcentury modern house. With lime green shag carpets.
I agree that Israeli architecture is mostly bad. However, I can't think of any contemporary architectural habits that are good. Half of Scruton's stuff is about how bad the architecture of England is, with tradition or without it.
There is a lot of good stuff happening in western countries, both renovating old areas, and building in traditional styles according to the principles of good urbanism. Check out Samuel Hughes on Twitter and The Aesthetic City on YouTube. It's true that this is a drop in the ocean compared to the mountains of filth built everywhere since WW2, but there are some grounds for hope, and a sense in which Europe has turned the corner. In Israel it just gets worse every year, and there is no hope at all.
I don’t see any evidence at all that Europe has “turned a corner.” Look at the skyline of London. And this is a general theme across all the arts, btw.
Where you do see some hope in Israel is in the humble yet generally pleasing style of private homes in the various moshavim. Meaning, not grand ego-filled and big-name-architect-stamped projects, but the simple red shingle home of the private family.
Moshavim are also being ruined. I see it all the time.
Check out Samuel Hughes. Nixon once said that inflation was still going up, and the rate that it was increasing was going up, but the rate that the rate was increasing was going down. I think Europe has reached that stage architecturally.
Sounds like you woke up with a happy song in your heart! ;)
I am such a stereotypical Ashkey I can't figure out why architecture is that important. I like the concept of beautiful things but they don't really change my mood look like they are supposed to. I try to understand art- every time I go to the museum all I can think about is how much the paintings cost.
Thankyou for sharing. I wonder how many people/Jews are like this. I would guess it's at least 5%. If all such people just agree that beauty is good as a concept and understand the need to promote it, but that they can't really contribute to that, then we can make more progress.
“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.”
Your writing is complex AF, but this part above…anyone who thinks early Zionists were victims and such, are delusional. Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, Begin, even Weizmann. These dudes were relentless, calculated and responsible for their destinies and actions, amongst other qualities.
The synagogue I went to was atrocious in design in every way. The only good one in AZ is now a ghey event venue. It’s still a little corny, but I believe it was a Frank Lloyd Wright design anyway. I know the cool church up the street from my synagogue was designed by him. It was majestic.
I agree about all of them except Begin. I think he must take a big share of the blame in turning Zionism from an ideology that rejected victimhood to one that wallowed in it. TBF, he went through a lot.
Don’t know if this is on-subject…But there’s a certain victimhood that’s common to most Jews I grew up around.
It’s going to sound cliche, but our parents kept us away from cool shit in school. Shop. Auto. They said “that for low class people”. Now I weld. Now I work on vehicles. I do electrical work. I work with my hands. I take responsibility for the things I own. I trust very few people to fix anything.
You encourage only shit like being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, you’re going to have generally soft people that expect everyone else to do the hard work. Ben-Gurion is the ideal example. Labor. Work with your hands. Farmer. Builder. No excuses. You do it all with your own hands. Ben-Gurion archetype would never let someone fix his car.
Maybe not much of a point, but being a victim is decidedly American (and probably European) Jew. It’s the Jewish mother martyr mentality. If you grew up in America, you know it well. I don’t think that mentality necessarily originated from sad Jews lined up in Polish shtetls gonna ghettos. An awful lot of Polish Jews left because they saw a way to get what they wanted. They took matters into their own hands. All the early Zionists that left Poland and elsewhere to go to Mandatory Palestine, were wagging fingers at the Jews that stayed behind the whole time. They were doing that for a reason. The seeds of victimhood were kind of there. Not that there weren’t plenty of blue collar Jews in Eastern Europe, but at some point there was a general split.
Just some thoughts.
For sure, when looking at his whole life. Early Begin though, pre-independence. Dude was an animal.
Later I can’t really comment beyond the standard story. Him and Sadat were pretty close (I could be wrong). For better or worse, he went soft to try for peace.
If you ever for some reason find yourself in Cincinnati, Ohio, check out the Isaac M. Wise Reform temple. Derivative it surely is, but whatever you may think of the sectarian and/or ideological project that drove it, it is also surely beautiful.
Good piece. Two remarks:
1. A lot of mathematical ability *is* spatial reasoning. You can do logic, computability, abstract algebra, and some number theory with that combination of verbal talent + spatial retardation (which I also have), but good luck doing any geometry, topology, combinatorics or linear algebra. Your physics Jews can rotate shapes as well as any Blond Beast doing engineering at Humboldt. The reason your people aren’t applying what shape rotation abilities they do have is because you’ve gone and made it low-status.
2. Idk mate, if I ever met an ex-IDF babe and she meets reasonable thresholds of intellect and good sense, I might go bang on a rabbi’s door three times. The Moslemeens already circumcised me so I’m all geared up really
Growing up in LA, the style of Jewish-modern synagogues and schools always seemed cold, empty and weirdly holocaust-memorial-ish. Partly just because I had to go to them, but also because they lacked imagination. Or imagination was paper children's drawings plastered on ugly brick. The art deco in Tel Aviv was a sigh of relief, as was Jerusalem stone, compared to things in the diaspora. But this notion of verbosity substituting for spacial ability is total BS, and I'll prove it: I'm one of the few Jews who went to art school. (Twice, dropping out both). You cannot talk your way out of a bad design, in a room full of Christians. Although they may find it somewhat amusing when you try. At best, in a commercial sense, you can convince your patron they got what they paid for (because they want to believe that, and plus they're tired of paying for more changes). But no, Ashkenazi Jews - who were the first people to conceptualize a 4-dimensional spacetime manifold - do not by default lack spacial reasoning skills. A lot of us just appear to like ugly architecture and art. Possibly as a holdover from something quite recent where a wannabe artist and architect, bent on the idea of restoring classical aesthetics and ridding the world of obscene art, went about doing so by sending most of us up smokestacks. There's not a small amount of the same impulse in your review here, which has apparently been fuel for less generous takes. Go ahead and accuse me of being only a verbose type - I spend most of my life making art, music and design. Oddly, I've always scored higher on spatial reasoning tests than on verbal or mathematical ones, making me the black sheep of a family of lawyers. Nothing to be proud of. But as much as I hate the architecture of postwar Jewish institutions, as this hangover of brutalist + postmodern negative space, I think categorizing it as an Ashkenazi malady is fundamentally kinda disgusting. Even if you mean it as a joke.
You’re a smart guy, so go google what a ‘bell curve’ is.
On the subject of IQ and such, what is your take on Jewish disinterest in video games? Film -- at least in America -- may as well be a Jewish art form, but despite mathematical brilliance and Israel being a tech hub/knowledge economy, it seems that Jews are largely absent in video game development. I'm sure they're there, but most of the big names are non-Jew whites (incl. slavs) or East Asians. There's even decent Turkish representation.
My guess is that the Jews who're interested in art and entertainment aren't all that good at or interested in math/computers, while the mathsy, code monkey Jews spend their efforts on making money and/or more serious applications of their intelligence, and are perhaps less likely to be interested in art -- or at least in video games, which aren't really considered an artform and are kind of seen as a low-prestige waste of time activity.
I personally share the disdain for video games as an art form and recreational pursuit.
I'm Jewish. And I write code. And I studied graphic design, so mainly I'm a UI artist whose specialty is turning design concepts into beautiful procedurally generated graphical interfaces. If you want the marriage of art and code, that's me. And I love working on video games. Love writing graphics code and thinking through all the ways players will interact with it. Love coming up with game logic and fun things for the player.
If I were to classify how Jewishness works for me in this regard, it's that I spend 20x longer thinking about what I'm going to design and write than I do actually putting my fingers on the keyboard. And I think through every single possible mistake, every edge case or flaw, before and after I write the code. And they keep me awake at night, so I know in the morning exactly what other code I need to write to make it perfect.
It's not exactly obsessive-compulsive, it's a sense that doing my best isn't enough. I have to keep trying harder. Reducing this to the idea that I should just spend my time making financial software to make money is, well, insulting. But also it's a misunderstanding of how the world works. Not everyone is just trying to score points before they die. I get to live a life loving what I do, and have the satisfaction of making beautiful things. That should be enough for anyone.
But I don't really play games, except for research. The only games I play for fun occasionally are things like Crusader Kings or Cities: Skylines. I lost some time to No Man's Sky. But you can see what kind of games these are. Single player, open-ended, not particularly addictive. The reason I don't play most games is that I don't have the time to be pulled into the world of the game. I would rather be writing and creating a game than playing one. And if I'm not working, I would rather be painting or playing music than watching TV or playing a game. I design games, I work on them, I know how they work, I understand how to make each interaction addictive. Honestly, I have pushed against certain addictive patterns throughout my entire career, because I don't want to be a drug dealer. I'm not immune to becoming addicted to them myself, but I have a better immune system than most people, because I understand the mechanics.
Contrary to what you're saying, I think video games are definitely an artform and are not a waste of time or low-prestige at all... they're better than most passive entertainment like movies. But I want to spend my time on Earth creating things, not consuming them, and video games are the worst time-suck ever invented. I can binge-watch a series and feel a little bad, but that's nothing compared to how I feel after a real video game binge. I only have so much time, and I need to keep creating.
If you need to reduce everything to what race, ethnicity, religion or culture someone came from to explain why they do X, Y or Z, you're going to be baffled. The object of this article, to explain bad Israeli architecture as a flaw in Ashkenazi spacial thinking (compensated for by good verbal skills or too much calcium in their teeth and kidneys) is a flawed way of thinking about the world. Because any smart Bengali or Indonesian can see the world the way I see it, and any stupid redneck can make smartass racist comments trying to explain why their countries' architecture sucks too.