Bill Ackerman Shocked To Find Antisemitism On The Left
Some people figure things out slower than others. Such is the case with formerly lefty billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackerman, who is simply shocked to find out that Harvard has unquestionably embraced antisemitism and diversity in the name of DEI.
Here’s Dave Rubin excerpting Ackerman’s interview with Lex Friedman:
“The governance structure [of Harvard] is a disaster.”
“October 7th is the event that woke me up. Thirty student organizations came out with a public letter on October 8th, literally the morning after, this letter was created, and said Israel is solely responsible for Hamas’s violent acts.”
“Again, Israel had not even mounted a defense at this point, and there were still terrorists running around in the southern part of Israel.”
“And I’m, like, what is going on, you know? WTF, right? And that’s when I went up on campus and I started talking to the faculty, and that’s where I started hearing about ‘Actually, Bill, it’s it’s this DEI ideology.'”
“They started talking to me about this oppressor/oppressed framework, which is effectively taught at on campus, and represents the backdrop for many of the courses that are offered.”
“You know, I’m a pretty aware person, but I was completely unaware.” If you were “completely unaware,” then no, you’re not a “pretty aware person.” The malignancy of social justice has been know for at least a decade, and the hard left’s love for Muslim terrorists manifested itself at least as far back as the 1980s, when campus lefties loved the PLO almost as much as the commie Sandinistas. My guess is that by “a pretty aware person” you mean “you read the New York Times and watched a nightly MSM news broadcast, and stayed safely inside your real estate/hedge fund bubble, and never realized just how much your news sources were lying to you.” And all those PLO- and Sandinista-loving lefties now have their hands on control levers of the Democratic Party.
“They’re like ‘Look, Israel is deemed an oppressor and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed, and you take the side of the the oppressed. And any acts of the oppressed to dislodge the oppressor, regardless of how vile or barbaric, are OK.”
“This is a super dangerous ideology.”
“DEI comes out of a kind of a Marxist, socialist backdrop way to look at the world.”
“Unfortunately it’s advancing racism as opposed to fighting it.”
As Dave Rubin notes:
Yes, his conversion is welcome, but again, conservatives (and even just anyone paying attention) has know what poison DEI/Critical Race Theory/Social Justice is for a decade. The #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots didn’t make him think something just might be wrong with victimhood identity politics?
Bill Ackerman needs to go back and look at what else the left-leaning MSM has lied to him, about (including inflation, China, crime statistics, the Russian collusion hoax and and Donald Trump).
The level of stupidity with these types is absolutely awe-inspiring. I remember talking to the left-wing “true believers” in Marxist politics who were all sure that when the Revolution came, they’d be sitting on top of the dungheap. Same-same with the racial self-haters, who thought that, somehow, they’d be big in the coming post-race war world, that they’d be recognized for their selfless treason against their own kind.
It was always interesting to see what happened when you pointed them at the actual accurate histories of what happened to all the native-born “Revolutionaries”, once the actual revolution came and they got the government they deserved. I remember talking to one white upper-middle class revolutionary type, and him telling me how it was all going to change… Overhearing us was a Vietnamese boat person, who interjected into our conversation about what his family’s experience had been… Uncle was in the Viet Cong, family helped them out during the war. After the war, with Uncle VC dead during Tet? They were singled out for eradication because they were seen as potential trouble; there was a network of former VC cadre that helped people in their situation get out, and they wound up as boat people. I got to talking with this Vietnamese guy, and it was fascinating to get the perspective on it all from him. Very bitter, very hateful towards the opportunistic Communist types. He went to high school here in the US, and he said the thing that reminded him most of the whole Communist experience were the things like Future Business Leaders of America, where all the politically-inclined and so forth gravitated. From where he sat, they reminded him of all the Communist youth groups like the Young Pioneers and so forth.
I was never able to unsee that parallel.
The useful idiots and traitors are always the first to go into the gulags and up against the wall, mostly because the idea is that if they’re willing to do it once, they’ll do it again if they don’t like how things are working out. This is an iron law of Revolution, just like how the people running said revolution almost always wind up being the apolitical pragmatic types who’re just there for the power. The idealistic ones are too much of a risk, too much of a potential problem, so they get ice-picked early on.
Which is something that few of these dimwits ever seem to recognize.
Well, precisely… The Jews are highly suspicious of the religious Christians here in the US because they remember that component of the population in Eastern Europe as “most likely to go all pogrom-y” on the local Jews.
The flaw in that reasoning is that a.) the vast majority of the Christians here in the US were not all that big on that sort of thing, so there’s no tradition of that, and that b.) most Evangelicals are actually kinda-sorta pro-Jewish. Or, were. I’ve been around a bunch of practicing, mostly urban, Jews, and the amount of projection going on with that group is awe-inspiring; they have never met an actual redneck or talked to any, but they’re sure they know them. Reality? I think you’d have to explain what the hell a Jew was to most of them, and then it’d be simply an item of curiosity: “You’re Jewish…? Like in Israel? Cool…”
At least, such was my experience in the military. The number of serving Jews in the enlisted ranks is so low that it’s not even funny; friend of mine was Jewish, and if you ever had to listen to his stories about trying to convince the Army rabbi that he was an actual honest-to-God enlisted Jew were hysterical… Most serving Jews were officers, and the idea that there’d be this bunch of Lieutenants and mid-grade officers and then this wild-looking Sergeant at the services just blew minds. I had to get him back to the brigade headquarters one time for a religious holiday (can’t remember which…) and we get there and we’re waiting for them to get organized to take him and the other Jews (all officers) back to the cantonment area. They’re taking forever, coming out and counting heads again and again, gradually getting more and more agitated. Finally, we’re about two hours late, I’m wondering what’s going on, and they come out and say “We’re missing the guy from the Engineers, so we can’t leave yet…” I raised my hand and asked them if they had a name, and they said they did, I asked what it was, and they told me my guy’s name. I’m like “We’ve literally been standing here for hours, now…”, and the response was “Yeah, we wondered why you were here…” I point to him, say “That’s your guy… Sergeant de Farge”, and they all just looked totally confused. “Wait… He’s a Sergeant…?” Cue much shuffling of paper, and they finally loaded up to leave the exercise.
Apparently, the enlisted ranks have lots and lots of lapsed Jews, and very few really observant ones.
So… Yeah. Jews are sometimes their own worst enemies with this crap. It’s a lot like the LGBTWTFBBQ types… The one thing I observed over the years was that all the most vocal and “manly man” anti-gay types were the ones most likely to “come out” in later life. Your average straight white male just doesn’t give a f*ck; they’re not threatened by gays, figure it just means more girls for them, and they really do not care. The ones who’re seriously vocal about it, and who tend to do the really outrageous offenses against gays? All of them have, in my personal experience, come out at one point or another.
Although, looking back on it… Some of those guys who were always talking trash about going out to go “gay-bashing” at the clubs? I kinda wonder now if they weren’t actually providing pre-prepared justifications for them being around those clubs in the first place…
Which goes to prove that being successful at business and rich has nothing to do with being smart about other things.
Suggesting that their success was due to luck and other conditions outside their control. Which so wounds their egos that they are in a virtual permanent state of denial.
“Which goes to prove that being successful at business and rich has nothing to do with being smart about other things.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it again: Intelligence, as we have conceptualized it, ain’t all that. There’s rather more to it than “doing well on the tests” and going on into a highly favorable-to-the-people-who-“do well on tests” environments that those same people constructed for themselves…
It’s a self-fulfilling self-referential circle of non-virtue: You do well on the tests as a kid, you’re tracked into “more advanced” and better schooling so you do well on harder tests and on and on until you’re graduating from “Hahvahd” with an advanced degree in staring at your navel. Whereupon you’re one of the anointed, and you get to go out and find a great job that pays really well doing something nonsensical like “Homelessness Advocacy”, and never once along the way was your actual competence ever looked at…
The thing we’re calling “intelligence” is a very brittle thing; it’s the exact thing Henry Ford was talking about when he described his accountants as men “…who know the price of everything and the value of nothing…”
Not everyone with a Harvard diploma is an idiot, but there are enough that are that we should cease taking that piece of paper as at all meaningful. There’s rather more to “intelligence” than can be tested on a piece of paper in a classroom over a couple of hours. I’ve met a lot of people who absolutely “did well on the tests”, like “Really well”, and they were complete and utter disasters when put in charge of anything, even cleaning a latrine. I’ve also worked with people who did not and likely could not “do well on the tests” who were infinitely more intelligent in a functional way than their dysfunctional “smart” peers. The number of times I’ve seen supposedly “smart” people get swindled because they thought they were “too smart” for that to happen is amazingly high; I’ve rarely seen the other sort of functionally intelligent type get taken by anyone.
I really don’t think the IQ tests are measuring what we think they are. At. All. There are vast aspects of actual “intelligence” that are not measurable in that way, at all.
And, the other thing is, you’re really shouldn’t care about IQ in the first place: That which you want are results, and as the old truism goes “If it looks stupid and it works… It ain’t stupid.”
I recently finished reading “Radical Son” by David Horowitz. He recounted how his parents’ generation of true-believer Marxists (mostly Jewish immigrants from eastern Poland and western Russia) suffered an existential meltdown once evidence emerged (during the Krushchev years) of the appalling scope of Stalin’s gulags, show trials, and murders. Very few of them continued to support the American Communist Party after that. Imagine learning that the cause to which you devoted your whole adult life was based on an evil lie!
The lurking, subconscious suspicion that something like that might happen to them (even if they don’t know the history of the CPUSA) probably accounts for some of the reluctance of many Leftists today to recognize or confront the parallels between their beliefs and the wretched history of utopian political schemes in the 20th century.
Losing your religion is hard, especially if you’ve devoted your adult life to keeping the faith in the face of evidence that it is a false one.
Hairless Joe puts a finger on a major component of the problem: These people don’t espouse their leftist beliefs because they’re workable political solutions to the human condition, they’ve taken them up as an article of faith, a secular religion. Because of that, going away from their faith (and, that’s precisely what it is…) amounts to a religious conversion.
Average person is a pragmatist: You show me something that works, and even if I don’t like it and may not understand it, the fact that it works is enough for me. I’ll change my mind and take up that something as a part of my life; I’ve got zero investment in something like “capitalism”; show me something that works better? I’ll be whatever -ism there is that does that for me.
However, the left? In all its many delusions? They can’t admit their ideas don’t work, because those aren’t reasoned ideas that they arrived at through empiric observation or experimentation. At some point, they read a book or heard a lecturer, and they experienced what amounted to a religious experience, and here we are: The committed Marxist.
Gotta tell ya what: I’ve experimented on small-scale collectivism. It doesn’t work, not with average people. Maybe with a highly selected, very mature SF team would something like a “clean as you go” policy work, but… Even there, the tragedy of the commons persists. Trust me on this one: I’ve run the experiments, and you simply cannot rely on “average joe” to recognize and support “enlightened self-interest” in a collective setting, even on a small scale.
The average human is not wired for that much altruism… And, trying to predicate any kind of system, whether economic or political, on the idea that people are angelic enough or possess that kind of omniscience? It is to laugh, and laugh hard.
There’s another component to the leftist hatred of Jews that the Jews don’t grasp: Envy.
The average leftist is someone who is enamored of “secret knowledge”, cultism, and belonging to the anointed and enlightened. It really gets their rocks off, being able to feel all “speshul” by taking part in these things. It’s not a thought process, it is “feels”. They’re cultists that can’t admit to being spiritual cultists, or they’d have to do some actual thinking.
Where does the envy come in? Because Jews are the longest-lasting, most exclusive cult out there. You can’t really get in, unless you’re born into the cult, and the cult is seen as always looking out for its own, sooooo… That’s a large part of why the Masons were so popular: Secret cult competitive with the Jews, or so the membership often thought. Outsiders see Jewish faith as some kind of closed shop that they can’t get into, don’t understand, and ascribe all these nutty benefits to. The left, being essentially the church of envy, are most envious of the Jews because of all that. It’s not anything the Jews have really done, other than survive and maintain a semblance of cultural tradition during their wanderings, it’s what the outsiders see when they look at them. Which is why the Communists and the Nazis always went after them… Envy, and the fact that they couldn’t tolerate competition.
I have a different interpretation of what Ackernan said,
He’s a billionaire and lives and works among other billionaire leftists. He’s read the NYT and other MSM media outlets. He always knew exactly what DEI and modern SJWs believe in. He agreed with it. He supported hiring POCs over Caucasians and Asians. He knew about the SJWs antisemitism. No one could be *that* stupid.
But the question was, would SJWs give a carve out for Jewish people when it came to rape and murder, if those Jewish people supported the SJW agenda? Would SJWs support Muslims when they rape and murder Jewish women and murder Jewish babies and children?
No one really knew the answer to that before Oct 7. I believed the Muslims would wage war against Israel soldiers, but I didn’t think they would commit personal one on one war crimes on Jewish civilians.
But we all know they did all those heinous crimes on Oct 7.
Ackerman is still a committed SJW. It’s just that he’s broken with them when it comes to Israel and Jewish people. He now knows that his fellow travelers hate him and want to kill him.
But does it mean he’ll continue to vote for and give money to the Democrats?
I did write my previous post with paragraphs. I didn’t know that the “Enter” key didn’t actually insert a newline, even thought it looks like it when you’re typing in a comment.
Also, I tried to edit my comment, but I don’t know how to do that either.
“No one really knew the answer to that before Oct 7. I believed the Muslims would wage war against Israel soldiers, but I didn’t think they would commit personal one on one war crimes on Jewish civilians.”
The only way that this could have come as a surprise to anyone is if they’d never followed the heinous acts that the Gazan and West Bank Arabs have performed anywhere and any time they’ve been able to. Do you not remember all the times they’ve snuck across the border and murdered Israelis in their sleep? What they did to them?
The only thing new on October 7th was the scale of the thing. Everything else? Perfectly aligned with their previous actions. I’d almost have to say you were being intentionally blind to what the Arabs have been doing, all these years… There’s a litany of small-time slaughter of innocents, which they have, in turn, celebrated.
Which is why I long ago quit caring about them, or their fate. Personally? If I were Israeli? I’d slaughter the lot of them, right now, and get it over with. Nothing else will do, stopping them. Ask the Egyptians and Jordanians why they fence those rabid dogs out, and refuse to let them in. They know better; the Gazans have earned everything they have coming, and even more.
I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to the news, to be honest. I can think of a round dozen incidents of them doing exactly what they did on October 7th, going back to the early 1970s.
Thanks Kirk, for your comments which are on point with what I was saying.
The notion of Marxism as a “faith”, fully in the sense that Christianity or Judaism is a faith, is the subject of the remarkable prologue that Whittaker Chambers wrote in his memoir “Witness”, addressed to his children.
Chambers started out as an atheist, became a Marxist, and ended up as a Quaker (and a friend of… Richard Nixon). In his case, it was very much an improvement regarding his commitments.
Needless to say, Chambers’ book is recommended reading for all of us who hate the Left and everything that it stands for.
“The only way that this could have come as a surprise to anyone is if they’d never followed the heinous acts that the Gazan and West Bank Arabs have performed anywhere and any time they’ve been able to. Do you not remember all the times they’ve snuck across the border and murdered Israelis in their sleep? What they did to them?
The only thing new on October 7th was the scale of the thing. ”
We are in agreement. I was very aware of the small scale atrocities that Hamas committed against Israelis, going all the way back to the Munich attack in 1972. But as you said, the only new thing was the scale of the Oct 7 attack.
Can you find a few dozen murderous psychopaths in any large population of a few million people? Yes, I’m sure of it.
But can you find a few *thousand* murderous psychopaths, willing to commit atrocities *and* knowing that the attack was suicidal? YouTuber Ryan McBeth pointed out that the Oct 7 terrorists didn’t even carry any water with them. They knew it was going to be a one way mission.
How many suicidal murderous psychopaths can there be in the world? You would think those genes would have been selected out by now.
Before Oct 7, the Israelis used a strategy of “mowing the lawn”. After each small attack, they’d go into Gaza, kill the perpetrators and re-establish deterrence. The Israelis were aware of the small attacks and they didn’t go to a massive response.
“There’s a litany of small-time slaughter of innocents, which they have, in turn, celebrated.”
I agree with you, there have been a few dozen Hamas terrorist attacks over the past 50 years. But put that into perspective, there are about 22,000 murders in the US each year.
So are a few dozen small scale terrorist attacks over 50 years sufficient to condemn all Gaza residents to death? For me *and the Israelis* , the answer was “No”.
However, the Oct 7 atrocity was completely different. That was a large scale attack that was actively and passively supported by a vast majority of Gaza residents. There was no way a couple of thousand Hamas terrorists could have been supplied and trained since 2005 without virtually everyone in Gaza knowing about it. The operational security imposed by everyone in Gaza was amazing.
So for me, my reservoir of goodwill for Palestinians was instantly drained out on Oct 7.
If Israel wipes out Hamas and forces the Gaza residents to live in tents for the rest of their lives, or even wipes them out, that’s fine with me.
I’ve got little empathy for anyone saying that they changed their minds about Gazan and West Bank Arabs on October 7th. They’ve only been broadcasting their nihilistic viewpoint through actions taken since Israel was formed.
This is a group of creatures that only mimic humanity, and that at its basest form. They walk around on two legs, but…? Have you observed them, in action? What they do, whenever they get power over someone else? Even their own kind?
Everywhere they’ve been taken in, they’ve turned on their hosts. The Kuwaitis gave them refuge, jobs, business opportunities. The minute the Iraqis showed up, the Arab scum from Gaza and the West Bank turned on their benefactors, fellow Arabs, and went over en masse to the invading Iraqis, expecting to be given high positions in the newly acquired territories. That’s why the Kuwaitis threw every single one of them out on their asses, after the war. Only a few that didn’t turn their coats remain, to this day, carefully observed. Justifiably so… You wonder why the Egyptians have that border so thoroughly fortified? They won’t let any of them onto their territories, knowing what they’ll do. They are poison in human form.
If you could really excuse the things they did before October 7th, well… That says little good for you. At all. The number of murdered Israeli children that these “heroes” killed before that infamous date? The number of brutalized victims? These are not human beings, that could do such things.
They do provide their moments of humor, though: I still remember the anger displayed by one of their females, who said that the Israelis didn’t regard them as human, because their soldiers didn’t rape their women… That’s how f*cked in the head these creatures are. The fundamental mistake Israel made was ever treating them as fellow civilized human beings, because they manifestly are not. They’re more like atavistic throwbacks to the pre-human, capable of any atrocity. If Israel were to ever fall to them? You’ll see precisely what I’m talking about, and everyone will be shocked, shocked I tell you, to witness the horror and barbarity.
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The level of stupidity with these types is absolutely awe-inspiring. I remember talking to the left-wing “true believers” in Marxist politics who were all sure that when the Revolution came, they’d be sitting on top of the dungheap. Same-same with the racial self-haters, who thought that, somehow, they’d be big in the coming post-race war world, that they’d be recognized for their selfless treason against their own kind.
It was always interesting to see what happened when you pointed them at the actual accurate histories of what happened to all the native-born “Revolutionaries”, once the actual revolution came and they got the government they deserved. I remember talking to one white upper-middle class revolutionary type, and him telling me how it was all going to change… Overhearing us was a Vietnamese boat person, who interjected into our conversation about what his family’s experience had been… Uncle was in the Viet Cong, family helped them out during the war. After the war, with Uncle VC dead during Tet? They were singled out for eradication because they were seen as potential trouble; there was a network of former VC cadre that helped people in their situation get out, and they wound up as boat people. I got to talking with this Vietnamese guy, and it was fascinating to get the perspective on it all from him. Very bitter, very hateful towards the opportunistic Communist types. He went to high school here in the US, and he said the thing that reminded him most of the whole Communist experience were the things like Future Business Leaders of America, where all the politically-inclined and so forth gravitated. From where he sat, they reminded him of all the Communist youth groups like the Young Pioneers and so forth.
I was never able to unsee that parallel.
The useful idiots and traitors are always the first to go into the gulags and up against the wall, mostly because the idea is that if they’re willing to do it once, they’ll do it again if they don’t like how things are working out. This is an iron law of Revolution, just like how the people running said revolution almost always wind up being the apolitical pragmatic types who’re just there for the power. The idealistic ones are too much of a risk, too much of a potential problem, so they get ice-picked early on.
Which is something that few of these dimwits ever seem to recognize.
Where was Bill Ackman for the last 10 years of non-stop anti-white hysteria? Oh that’s right…those kinds of ‘whites’ don’t count.
Well, precisely… The Jews are highly suspicious of the religious Christians here in the US because they remember that component of the population in Eastern Europe as “most likely to go all pogrom-y” on the local Jews.
The flaw in that reasoning is that a.) the vast majority of the Christians here in the US were not all that big on that sort of thing, so there’s no tradition of that, and that b.) most Evangelicals are actually kinda-sorta pro-Jewish. Or, were. I’ve been around a bunch of practicing, mostly urban, Jews, and the amount of projection going on with that group is awe-inspiring; they have never met an actual redneck or talked to any, but they’re sure they know them. Reality? I think you’d have to explain what the hell a Jew was to most of them, and then it’d be simply an item of curiosity: “You’re Jewish…? Like in Israel? Cool…”
At least, such was my experience in the military. The number of serving Jews in the enlisted ranks is so low that it’s not even funny; friend of mine was Jewish, and if you ever had to listen to his stories about trying to convince the Army rabbi that he was an actual honest-to-God enlisted Jew were hysterical… Most serving Jews were officers, and the idea that there’d be this bunch of Lieutenants and mid-grade officers and then this wild-looking Sergeant at the services just blew minds. I had to get him back to the brigade headquarters one time for a religious holiday (can’t remember which…) and we get there and we’re waiting for them to get organized to take him and the other Jews (all officers) back to the cantonment area. They’re taking forever, coming out and counting heads again and again, gradually getting more and more agitated. Finally, we’re about two hours late, I’m wondering what’s going on, and they come out and say “We’re missing the guy from the Engineers, so we can’t leave yet…” I raised my hand and asked them if they had a name, and they said they did, I asked what it was, and they told me my guy’s name. I’m like “We’ve literally been standing here for hours, now…”, and the response was “Yeah, we wondered why you were here…” I point to him, say “That’s your guy… Sergeant de Farge”, and they all just looked totally confused. “Wait… He’s a Sergeant…?” Cue much shuffling of paper, and they finally loaded up to leave the exercise.
Apparently, the enlisted ranks have lots and lots of lapsed Jews, and very few really observant ones.
So… Yeah. Jews are sometimes their own worst enemies with this crap. It’s a lot like the LGBTWTFBBQ types… The one thing I observed over the years was that all the most vocal and “manly man” anti-gay types were the ones most likely to “come out” in later life. Your average straight white male just doesn’t give a f*ck; they’re not threatened by gays, figure it just means more girls for them, and they really do not care. The ones who’re seriously vocal about it, and who tend to do the really outrageous offenses against gays? All of them have, in my personal experience, come out at one point or another.
Although, looking back on it… Some of those guys who were always talking trash about going out to go “gay-bashing” at the clubs? I kinda wonder now if they weren’t actually providing pre-prepared justifications for them being around those clubs in the first place…
Which goes to prove that being successful at business and rich has nothing to do with being smart about other things.
Suggesting that their success was due to luck and other conditions outside their control. Which so wounds their egos that they are in a virtual permanent state of denial.
It sure takes a lot to shake them out of it.
“Which goes to prove that being successful at business and rich has nothing to do with being smart about other things.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it again: Intelligence, as we have conceptualized it, ain’t all that. There’s rather more to it than “doing well on the tests” and going on into a highly favorable-to-the-people-who-“do well on tests” environments that those same people constructed for themselves…
It’s a self-fulfilling self-referential circle of non-virtue: You do well on the tests as a kid, you’re tracked into “more advanced” and better schooling so you do well on harder tests and on and on until you’re graduating from “Hahvahd” with an advanced degree in staring at your navel. Whereupon you’re one of the anointed, and you get to go out and find a great job that pays really well doing something nonsensical like “Homelessness Advocacy”, and never once along the way was your actual competence ever looked at…
The thing we’re calling “intelligence” is a very brittle thing; it’s the exact thing Henry Ford was talking about when he described his accountants as men “…who know the price of everything and the value of nothing…”
Not everyone with a Harvard diploma is an idiot, but there are enough that are that we should cease taking that piece of paper as at all meaningful. There’s rather more to “intelligence” than can be tested on a piece of paper in a classroom over a couple of hours. I’ve met a lot of people who absolutely “did well on the tests”, like “Really well”, and they were complete and utter disasters when put in charge of anything, even cleaning a latrine. I’ve also worked with people who did not and likely could not “do well on the tests” who were infinitely more intelligent in a functional way than their dysfunctional “smart” peers. The number of times I’ve seen supposedly “smart” people get swindled because they thought they were “too smart” for that to happen is amazingly high; I’ve rarely seen the other sort of functionally intelligent type get taken by anyone.
I really don’t think the IQ tests are measuring what we think they are. At. All. There are vast aspects of actual “intelligence” that are not measurable in that way, at all.
And, the other thing is, you’re really shouldn’t care about IQ in the first place: That which you want are results, and as the old truism goes “If it looks stupid and it works… It ain’t stupid.”
I recently finished reading “Radical Son” by David Horowitz. He recounted how his parents’ generation of true-believer Marxists (mostly Jewish immigrants from eastern Poland and western Russia) suffered an existential meltdown once evidence emerged (during the Krushchev years) of the appalling scope of Stalin’s gulags, show trials, and murders. Very few of them continued to support the American Communist Party after that. Imagine learning that the cause to which you devoted your whole adult life was based on an evil lie!
The lurking, subconscious suspicion that something like that might happen to them (even if they don’t know the history of the CPUSA) probably accounts for some of the reluctance of many Leftists today to recognize or confront the parallels between their beliefs and the wretched history of utopian political schemes in the 20th century.
Losing your religion is hard, especially if you’ve devoted your adult life to keeping the faith in the face of evidence that it is a false one.
Hairless Joe puts a finger on a major component of the problem: These people don’t espouse their leftist beliefs because they’re workable political solutions to the human condition, they’ve taken them up as an article of faith, a secular religion. Because of that, going away from their faith (and, that’s precisely what it is…) amounts to a religious conversion.
Average person is a pragmatist: You show me something that works, and even if I don’t like it and may not understand it, the fact that it works is enough for me. I’ll change my mind and take up that something as a part of my life; I’ve got zero investment in something like “capitalism”; show me something that works better? I’ll be whatever -ism there is that does that for me.
However, the left? In all its many delusions? They can’t admit their ideas don’t work, because those aren’t reasoned ideas that they arrived at through empiric observation or experimentation. At some point, they read a book or heard a lecturer, and they experienced what amounted to a religious experience, and here we are: The committed Marxist.
Gotta tell ya what: I’ve experimented on small-scale collectivism. It doesn’t work, not with average people. Maybe with a highly selected, very mature SF team would something like a “clean as you go” policy work, but… Even there, the tragedy of the commons persists. Trust me on this one: I’ve run the experiments, and you simply cannot rely on “average joe” to recognize and support “enlightened self-interest” in a collective setting, even on a small scale.
The average human is not wired for that much altruism… And, trying to predicate any kind of system, whether economic or political, on the idea that people are angelic enough or possess that kind of omniscience? It is to laugh, and laugh hard.
There’s another component to the leftist hatred of Jews that the Jews don’t grasp: Envy.
The average leftist is someone who is enamored of “secret knowledge”, cultism, and belonging to the anointed and enlightened. It really gets their rocks off, being able to feel all “speshul” by taking part in these things. It’s not a thought process, it is “feels”. They’re cultists that can’t admit to being spiritual cultists, or they’d have to do some actual thinking.
Where does the envy come in? Because Jews are the longest-lasting, most exclusive cult out there. You can’t really get in, unless you’re born into the cult, and the cult is seen as always looking out for its own, sooooo… That’s a large part of why the Masons were so popular: Secret cult competitive with the Jews, or so the membership often thought. Outsiders see Jewish faith as some kind of closed shop that they can’t get into, don’t understand, and ascribe all these nutty benefits to. The left, being essentially the church of envy, are most envious of the Jews because of all that. It’s not anything the Jews have really done, other than survive and maintain a semblance of cultural tradition during their wanderings, it’s what the outsiders see when they look at them. Which is why the Communists and the Nazis always went after them… Envy, and the fact that they couldn’t tolerate competition.
I have a different interpretation of what Ackernan said,
He’s a billionaire and lives and works among other billionaire leftists. He’s read the NYT and other MSM media outlets. He always knew exactly what DEI and modern SJWs believe in. He agreed with it. He supported hiring POCs over Caucasians and Asians. He knew about the SJWs antisemitism. No one could be *that* stupid.
But the question was, would SJWs give a carve out for Jewish people when it came to rape and murder, if those Jewish people supported the SJW agenda? Would SJWs support Muslims when they rape and murder Jewish women and murder Jewish babies and children?
No one really knew the answer to that before Oct 7. I believed the Muslims would wage war against Israel soldiers, but I didn’t think they would commit personal one on one war crimes on Jewish civilians.
But we all know they did all those heinous crimes on Oct 7.
Ackerman is still a committed SJW. It’s just that he’s broken with them when it comes to Israel and Jewish people. He now knows that his fellow travelers hate him and want to kill him.
But does it mean he’ll continue to vote for and give money to the Democrats?
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1742350235819475348
I am not right wing
His own words.
He’s still an SJW on every issue except one, the one where other SJWs want to kill him.
I’ll believe Ackerman when he publicly supports Trump and Republicans.
Until then, he’s still and SJW and he’s the enemy. He only opposes the (large?) fraction of the Democrats who support the Hamas war criminals.
I did write my previous post with paragraphs. I didn’t know that the “Enter” key didn’t actually insert a newline, even thought it looks like it when you’re typing in a comment.
Also, I tried to edit my comment, but I don’t know how to do that either.
“No one really knew the answer to that before Oct 7. I believed the Muslims would wage war against Israel soldiers, but I didn’t think they would commit personal one on one war crimes on Jewish civilians.”
The only way that this could have come as a surprise to anyone is if they’d never followed the heinous acts that the Gazan and West Bank Arabs have performed anywhere and any time they’ve been able to. Do you not remember all the times they’ve snuck across the border and murdered Israelis in their sleep? What they did to them?
The only thing new on October 7th was the scale of the thing. Everything else? Perfectly aligned with their previous actions. I’d almost have to say you were being intentionally blind to what the Arabs have been doing, all these years… There’s a litany of small-time slaughter of innocents, which they have, in turn, celebrated.
Which is why I long ago quit caring about them, or their fate. Personally? If I were Israeli? I’d slaughter the lot of them, right now, and get it over with. Nothing else will do, stopping them. Ask the Egyptians and Jordanians why they fence those rabid dogs out, and refuse to let them in. They know better; the Gazans have earned everything they have coming, and even more.
I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to the news, to be honest. I can think of a round dozen incidents of them doing exactly what they did on October 7th, going back to the early 1970s.
“The Church of Envy”. I’ll be using that. A lot.
Thanks Kirk, for your comments which are on point with what I was saying.
The notion of Marxism as a “faith”, fully in the sense that Christianity or Judaism is a faith, is the subject of the remarkable prologue that Whittaker Chambers wrote in his memoir “Witness”, addressed to his children.
Chambers started out as an atheist, became a Marxist, and ended up as a Quaker (and a friend of… Richard Nixon). In his case, it was very much an improvement regarding his commitments.
Needless to say, Chambers’ book is recommended reading for all of us who hate the Left and everything that it stands for.
@Kirk
“The only way that this could have come as a surprise to anyone is if they’d never followed the heinous acts that the Gazan and West Bank Arabs have performed anywhere and any time they’ve been able to. Do you not remember all the times they’ve snuck across the border and murdered Israelis in their sleep? What they did to them?
The only thing new on October 7th was the scale of the thing. ”
We are in agreement. I was very aware of the small scale atrocities that Hamas committed against Israelis, going all the way back to the Munich attack in 1972. But as you said, the only new thing was the scale of the Oct 7 attack.
Can you find a few dozen murderous psychopaths in any large population of a few million people? Yes, I’m sure of it.
But can you find a few *thousand* murderous psychopaths, willing to commit atrocities *and* knowing that the attack was suicidal? YouTuber Ryan McBeth pointed out that the Oct 7 terrorists didn’t even carry any water with them. They knew it was going to be a one way mission.
How many suicidal murderous psychopaths can there be in the world? You would think those genes would have been selected out by now.
Before Oct 7, the Israelis used a strategy of “mowing the lawn”. After each small attack, they’d go into Gaza, kill the perpetrators and re-establish deterrence. The Israelis were aware of the small attacks and they didn’t go to a massive response.
“There’s a litany of small-time slaughter of innocents, which they have, in turn, celebrated.”
I agree with you, there have been a few dozen Hamas terrorist attacks over the past 50 years. But put that into perspective, there are about 22,000 murders in the US each year.
So are a few dozen small scale terrorist attacks over 50 years sufficient to condemn all Gaza residents to death? For me *and the Israelis* , the answer was “No”.
However, the Oct 7 atrocity was completely different. That was a large scale attack that was actively and passively supported by a vast majority of Gaza residents. There was no way a couple of thousand Hamas terrorists could have been supplied and trained since 2005 without virtually everyone in Gaza knowing about it. The operational security imposed by everyone in Gaza was amazing.
So for me, my reservoir of goodwill for Palestinians was instantly drained out on Oct 7.
If Israel wipes out Hamas and forces the Gaza residents to live in tents for the rest of their lives, or even wipes them out, that’s fine with me.
I’ve got little empathy for anyone saying that they changed their minds about Gazan and West Bank Arabs on October 7th. They’ve only been broadcasting their nihilistic viewpoint through actions taken since Israel was formed.
This is a group of creatures that only mimic humanity, and that at its basest form. They walk around on two legs, but…? Have you observed them, in action? What they do, whenever they get power over someone else? Even their own kind?
Everywhere they’ve been taken in, they’ve turned on their hosts. The Kuwaitis gave them refuge, jobs, business opportunities. The minute the Iraqis showed up, the Arab scum from Gaza and the West Bank turned on their benefactors, fellow Arabs, and went over en masse to the invading Iraqis, expecting to be given high positions in the newly acquired territories. That’s why the Kuwaitis threw every single one of them out on their asses, after the war. Only a few that didn’t turn their coats remain, to this day, carefully observed. Justifiably so… You wonder why the Egyptians have that border so thoroughly fortified? They won’t let any of them onto their territories, knowing what they’ll do. They are poison in human form.
If you could really excuse the things they did before October 7th, well… That says little good for you. At all. The number of murdered Israeli children that these “heroes” killed before that infamous date? The number of brutalized victims? These are not human beings, that could do such things.
They do provide their moments of humor, though: I still remember the anger displayed by one of their females, who said that the Israelis didn’t regard them as human, because their soldiers didn’t rape their women… That’s how f*cked in the head these creatures are. The fundamental mistake Israel made was ever treating them as fellow civilized human beings, because they manifestly are not. They’re more like atavistic throwbacks to the pre-human, capable of any atrocity. If Israel were to ever fall to them? You’ll see precisely what I’m talking about, and everyone will be shocked, shocked I tell you, to witness the horror and barbarity.
Spare me the fake outrage. None of these people gave a damn when colleges were teaching classes on how to “eradicate whiteness”.
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