The Jews Who Foresaw the Holocaust

Haviv Rettig Gur, writing at the Free Press: The Jews Who Saw Around History's Darkest Corner 

At the start of the 20th century ...the Zionists were a minority. Right up until they weren’t. Right up until Europe itself left Jews with no other choice.

Put very simply: Zionism, alone among Jewish movements and cultural worlds of the diaspora in the 19th and early 20th centuries, knew what was coming.

The early Zionists saw only dimly, vaguely, the bloodletting that would come. But this foreknowledge rested on serious analysis and theory, and recommended clear action. This was true across the political spectrum of the Zionist movement, from socialists to liberals to right-wing Revisionists.

I found it immediately interesting that this was not driven by political ideology, but by observation. However the Zionists concluded, intuited, or received the idea that the coming destruction was far greater than everyone else was assuming, it did not come from their political or religious priors. It is not impossible in the world to say "this group's ideas are wrong but their predictions have been right," but it certainly should signal to us that we might be talking pure nonsense.

Christians are the most persecuted religious group in raw numbers on the planet at present, and by a large margin. But there are also far more of us that there are Jews, so we get into knots trying to see what Most-persecuted might mean in a percentage sense. Their problems are not our problems, yet Christians remain fascinated by what happens to them. There have been Christians who would have rejoiced to see the elimination of all Jews.  There probably still are. Christians now run the gamut between loyalty to the nation of Israel which exceeds most Jews in the Diaspora to those who believe we should attend no more to their actions and troubles than to the Bahai or residual native animisms.

We may see our reflections in them. 

Corporal Acts of Mercy

And Lo, Jesus said unto them "You shall build for yourselves a bureaucracy, staffed with those among you who love rich foods and fine linens. They will travel to and fro, and hire members of their tribe to join them and do likewise. You shall give them the fruit of your labors and make no accounting of it.  You will acknowledge their wisdom and bow before them. And you will direct these bureaucrats to feed the poor, and heal the sick, and lift the burdens of the oppressed. They will forward a tithe of what you have sent to them to the poor and oppressed, though some of them will take an additional cut "

And the people were amazed and asked "But how shall we know them? How shall we tell who are the true bureaucrats and who are false?"

Jesus grew angry at this and said "They will identify themselves to you plainly, by telling you they love the poor. They will keep up with the latest jargon about the oppressed, calling them the Most Vulnerable, the Marginalised, and the Outcast.  My people shall open their purses instantly and without thought when they hear these words, and obey them as you would me. Do not allow any harm to come them or their bureaucracy, or they will spread on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok that you hate the poor and are deserving of great punishment."

 

Readers are encouraged to continue in the same vein if they like

Elites, Experts, Debates, Covid

Lyman Stone@lymanstoneky

Vaccine effectiveness did not diminish. Today, years later, life expectancy has still CONTINUED to rise more in the high-vax states vs pre-COVID life expectancy. Masks are complicated since elites didn't even agree-- early on "elites" (Fauci, etc) were extremely ANTI mask!

That was in response to: Michael Brendan Dougherty@michaelbd 

Eh… Vaccines had a huge impact when first released but it diminished dramatically over time as the disease evolved and the effect required timing them perfectly, yet elite opinion dug in against evidence. Elites got surgical masks very wrong. Prolonged school closures were really disastrous. Masking toddlers was preposterous, and they remained masked longest in many US states. So was the month of “Racism os spreading faster than the virus.” And the whole balance of elite reputation hinges on whether the lab leak happened and how many are implicated.

Which was in response to Claire Lehman quoting Tyler Cowen in the Free Press

A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot of things right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than people who did not. We also got a vaccination in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility meant that "lockdowns" were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case*. Most states should have ended lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many commenters have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.

That is part of a larger discussion with Rob Henderson about elites and experts over at FP 

Tyler distinguishes between elites and experts - where they are allied and where they are separate.

And Peggy Noonan weighs in at WaPo about elites and Trump, reminding us that he is a response to what has been deteriorating in America, not the cause of it.  I grew tired of her a decade ago or more, but this was sent to me and it is better than I expected. 

I have liked all the above in general on a variety of topics.  I have written things similar to each of them on the matter of elites in general and covid in specific. But if you press me, I think more highly of Stone and Cowen.

*I think he means that because of the disease itself slowing the economy, the additional restrictions by governments were not as severe as they are now portrayed.

Sperm Race Update

 I posted about the sperm race about six weeks ago.  This is the update.

Quincy Wilson

You may remember him from last year as the very young Olympian who couldn't quite pull it off at the adult level, but still looked impressive.

No one wins a 4x400m after a dropped baton.

 

Stomp

The elementary school music teacher we stayed with told us about Stomp, who we had not heard of.

We countered with Recycled Percussion, who are from around here.  Right up the street from our last house, even.

 

Neologism

I would like to add a new word (and concept) to the modern cultural discussion, mostly in visual social media: Transplaining. I'm seeing lots of it.

Post-College

The first album I bought after college. This is a fun track.

 

College Exit

We got introduced to this at a cast party just before our last set of finals.  I never did pick it up, but a theater department always has people who can pick anything up in a minute, including my roommate, who went on to become a professional dancer and then director. Mark Martino is still working as of 2023, but it doesn't look like he is coming to the reunion. There's a story about him I may tell when I get back - which should be today. 

I didn't do much dancing after that except at weddings, but this has the sound of something that would have hung on for quite a while.

 

Different Paranoias

Hitler and the National Socialists were paranoid about the Jews, about Slavs and Communists, and just plain hated other groups without necessarily feeling any paranoia about them: Roma, homosexuals, the disabled.

Stalin and the Communists were paranoid about kulaks in particular, or anyone who had a little something: power, money, connections. The obvious flaw in that was that as they gained power, money, and connections themselves they increasingly became paranoid about each other. 

So both were paranoid but the targets were qualitatively different. Being a kulak was a role or position you had in society.  Being a Jew was something that you were, and ultimately ineradicable. I oversimplify greatly, for both groups had a dozen other hatreds they might kill you for and were indistinguishable in that way. 

Yet I wonder if that is part of why we remember them differently.  Stalin killed more Jews but Hitler remains their iconic enemy. The other explanations don't go away. Many Jews had left for the West between the wars - kulaks and tsarists did not. News of Stalin and the Soviets was buried deeper in the east and did not penetrate the discussions.  Being Jewish was more of a group identity than being a kulak, so when a Jew told her story she was aware of others she was writing for and they of her, creating a mutual library of their experience. Leftists in the west continued to admire the USSR, while no one admired Nazi Germany after WWII, however much they might have before.  The leftists were something of a fifth column in that way. All that is true and perhaps is the entire explanation for why Hitler has the name though Stalin was objectively worse.  But I would like to add the possibility that it was a difference in the type of paranoia at the core of each ideology that causes us to see them differently.

Different Immigrants

I should be getting home today.

I missed this essay when it came out in 2023. Philippe Lemoine's The Mirage of America's Special Sauce Theory. He has heard for years that America must be doing something right in assimilating immigrants (and hence Europe must be doing something wrong) because immigrants to America have better incomes, less crime, and go on to get more education than those in Europe. He points out that other than those from Mexico, immigrants to the US have much more education than those to Europe. Americans have long lumped the lack of education of the incoming Mexicans with the whole package, using that to claim that overall, immigrants to Europe and the US are an apples-to-apples comparison. He calls it the Argument Ad Mexicanos, which is both accurate and clever.  

I recognised it immediately, as I have used it myself.  It is part of my controversial claim that America is much less racist than the countries which criticise it. We actually have different races, unlike most of our critics, and as those countries start to receive people of different races, they have not done well with them. Because our native population was here well before the white population and the black population has been here as long, it isn't quite the same as the immigration discussion. Still, it overlaps because of what Europe is experiencing now.  The rest of the world seldom even makes it into any discussion of races. They don't have them.

Anyway, back to the original topic.  I have believed the America's Special Sauce theory, without thinking very hard about what was behind it. I generalised that we bring in a similar percentage of people with low education overall, so the comparison is fair. Lemoine takes a more granular approach, and the results are striking. Please note that he thinks the special sauce theory might have a lot of truth in it, and grants that arguendo. He just doesn't think it rests on a firm foundation, and is quite obviously inadequate in some ways.

 The problem with this argument is that it implicitly rests on the assumption that, once you control for education and perhaps a handful of other socio-economic variables, different ethnic groups are just as easy or hard to integrate, but nobody who is even remotely familiar with the data can find that assumption plausible. Indeed, on just about every metric that is relevant to how well-integrated immigrants are, a huge amount of variation remains associated with the country of origin even when you control for education. For instance, even if you look only at non-college educated immigrants in the US and in addition control for age and sex, the average personal income still varies wildly depending on the country of origin.

America greatly reduced the number of immigrants it took in about 100 years ago, and the greater proportion of what it took in the hundred years before that was European. That demographic balance persisted for forty years but changed in the 60s. In our lifetimes the bulk of immigration has come from Mexico, and only recently did that shift to Latin America in general, then to a more world-wide pattern. Through that prism, look at the bars of the chart above again. Mentally eliminate Mexico altogether (which is not far from the truth, as the percentage of population that immigrated from Mexico flatlined fifteen years ago) from the right-hand side. Now the bars show that Europe has received a remarkably less-educated set of immigrants from different places than America has.

Lemoine spends a good deal of the rest of the essay describing the ways in which immigrants from some areas are different, and frankly, more difficult to integrate. (How Sweden's Multicultural Dream Went Fatally Wrong.) We uneasily know this here.  Somalis have proved much more difficult than Nigerians, for example.

 

Hard-Luck Cleveland

Update from 2011-2024

Since that time, not much better, but at least not heart-wrenchingly bad. Lebron came back and got the Cavs to the finals four times, winning once; the Browns made the playoffs in 2020 and 2023 but fell out quickly.  The Indians/Guardians still haven't won a championship, but they have made the playoffs seven times and made it to a World Series once.  For younger fans, this is probably enough.  For middle-aged fans a bit of relief. For older fans, it sooths the pain some, and there are fewer who remember the awful times every year.  Still worse than Boston, who has had good teams in all sports from 2001 on.

********* 

Originally published in 2011

On sports radio last week, a Cleveland fan was asked if the record-breaking losing streak, on top of Lebron going to Miami, were the worst moments in that city's sports history. "Not even close," came the reply, but I was getting out of the car after only hearing one other event on his list. I'll come back to Cleveland later.

I, of course, started compiling my worst moments in Boston sports history, which I automatically assumed would far outdistance anything any other city had to offer.

I went to Bing this week for other people's lists of Boston's worst to see if I had forgotten something important, and interestingly, a listing for Cleveland's worst came up in the first 10 hits, indicating that this was a site that had a lot of hits, and Boston was mentioned in it somewhere. I kept seeing Cleveland's worst moments in hits 11-20, 21-30 and on, so I figured I would go back and check after I had done my Boston research.

In a fit of objectivity, I supposed that every city must have its Worst Moments and zipped various cities in to the search engine, expecting to semi-acknowledge, however reluctantly, that every city's fans think they have gotten the shortest end of the stick.

This is not so.

Philadelphia's worst moments include many entries of terrible things its fans have done, not its teams. True, but not the same thing.

New York doesn't have general lists, but lists for its various teams: worst Mets moments, worst Jets moments, etc. Because New York has teams in the the same league within its rooting region, it does not think of worst moments shared by the whole area. The Jets and Mets do indeed have terrible moments, but it isn't a shared NY experience, where everyone you meet the next day is shaking their head and looking bewildered. Not the same thing.

Chicago and Los Angeles have similar situations of divided local loyalty, but even granting that, their lists don't have that zing. Michael Jordan retires. Well, players do, and sometimes prematurely if they have gambling problems. The Bulls breaking up after six championships. Yeah, that'll stir a lot of hearts in the rest of America. Walter Payton tragically ill after he retires. I loved Walter Payton, but that's a bad life moment, not a bad sports moment. And Los Angeles barely has any listings under any category - they follow the stereotype. They don't care out there, they leave in the seventh inning.

San Francisco, same thing. They just don't identify out there.

Detroit has a list of years that their team was really better, but lost in the playoffs. That's a pathetic definition of worst moments. That's just real life for a sports fan. Happens all the time.

Washington has had many bad teams. No defining heartbreaking worst moments. Dallas, Pittsburgh, St Louis? Please.

But Cleveland now, Cleveland is in our league in this category. They have been on the short end of too many The's.

The Drive, by John Elway - against Cleveland
The Shot, by Michael Jordan - against Cleveland
The Catch, by Willie Mays - against Cleveland

That's all three major sports, BTW.

Add in Art Modell moving the Browns, the worst-ever Cleveland Spiders of 1899, ten-cent beer night, your all-time best team playing half its seasons trying to break in to the top league (the Jim Brown/Otto Graham Cleveland Browns), the usual city list of championships thrown away (by Brian Sipe, by Jose Mesa, by Ernest Byner), one of the worst owners in sports history (Ted Stepien) - and Lebron puts Cleveland over the top into Boston's category. I think Boston still gets the nod for worst moments, but we have also had good teams and some very fine moments interspersed. Cleveland, not so much. You are the only poor bastards I will acknowledge into this conversation. Tip of the hat.

For the record, my Boston list starts with Len Bias.

Home Again

We have returned from Williamsburg.  I have a worse attitude toward people in general, but we had a good trip. There are still some scheduled posts, so I won't do much for a while.

I-92

I will have been on a variety of eastern roads when you read this, and may or may not have an opinion.  It is also possible I will fly down to Houston and have a private adventure driving one of the cars up to NH as they are moving here. Fortunately, they will be flying the cats, so they didn't even ask me to do that.

I-92 was proposed, but never built. There were (and I suppose, are) several proposed routes from somewhere in NY to somewhere in ME which cut across NH and VT.  The expectation was that it would be a spur to prosperity, especially to the interior of ME, but somehow the numbers never worked out.  I recall hearing years ago that VT increasingly objected, ostensibly for environmental but actually for aesthetic reasons, and this was what had driven the final nails in the idea.

Yet still, if you look at a map of the Northeast, it just makes sense.

I thought the suggestion that the old Yankee joke "you can't get there from here" is based on the absence of E-W routes was silly at first, but on reflection, it might be so.  The whole site at the link is not that interesting, but I just like looking at those three corridors and wondering about them. What do you think?  Does a trucking route make sense?

Numeracy and Self Government

Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government. Numeracy helped participants weigh benefits and risks accurately when the data was presented on a politically neutral topic (skin rash treatment), but the same data was presented as a discussion of gun-control, those who were more numerate were more extreme and less objective in their views.  This was taken as support for Identity-Protective Cognition Thesis when the topic was hot, though Science Comprehension Thesis prevailed when the matter was cooler. 

Also as expected, subjects’ responses became politically polarized—and even less accurate—when the same data were presented as results from the study of a gun-control ban. But contrary to the prediction of SCT, such polarization did not abate among sub-jects highest in numeracy; instead, it increased. This outcome supported ICT, which predicted that more Numerate subjects would use their quantitative reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks.

We talk about this all the time here. Education, even in math, statistics, or hard science doesn't fix everything.  In a vacuum this study might even suggest it makes things worse. I have a slightly different take.  There is some correlation between general intelligence and education, especially in math. Those who are more numerate are likely more intelligent, and this isn't just book smarts but all manner of cognition, including social intelligence.  That is, they know which side their bread is buttered on and have been appraising that since childhood, so their acceptance of what they are supposed to know, what the preferred opinion is, is the path of least resistance.

Originally Entitled "Brandy"

 ...but someone got in earlier with that title for a pop song.

I swear this song was on every time I turned on the car radio over Christmas break 1974. I tired of it rapidly, but it did rather command an era, as it stayed on as an oldie long after. I only otherwise heard it in girls' dorms, and that stereotype was confirmed when a Jewish girl told me the joke a few years later.

How many Jewish American Princesses does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Two. One to call her father and one to put on the Barry Manilow records.  

I'll be here all week.  Try the veal.  

Attribution Errors

There are a lot of false quotes by Albert Einstein and CS Lewis on social media, and there have always been "Bible" quotes or "In the Middle Ages/Shakespeare's Time" explanations. Have fun adding to that list for sayings or phrases.  There is a strong human tendency to associate one's own ideas with someone thought to be smart or good.

I get a lot of Impressionist art popping up in front of me, likely because I have clicked "like" on others. The fake ones, the ones by modern artists that even I can tell are not from the 1800s, are attributed to Van Gogh.  I have not seen anyone try to ride a Monet wave, or Toulouse Lautrec or anyone else, always Van Gogh. I attach no particular significance to this other than people liking VVG and considering him the best piggyback.

More From Psychblogger Days - Paranoia

I have stressed many times since putting this post up that the symptom of paranoia precedes its target and exists independently of the target. Part of my best evidence for this was watching a patient over their first few admissions.  At first, they would only know that "something" was wrong, and that forces of some sort were against them. On a second admission they had discerned it had something to do with their sister, and by the third admission that their sister must be trying to screw them out of some inheritance by making them appear insane. Ten years later, the sister had long since died, there was no mention of an inheritance until I asked about it, and the patient was certain that the police were trying to frame him.

An update is the discussion of Conspiracy theorists over at The Studies Show a couple of weeks ago.  I thought it was almost balanced, though they are clearly liberal themselves. For example, they find the analysis in The Psychology of Conspiracies interesting in its thoughts but go on to point out that there isn't much solid research in it.  It touches on possible reasons for conspiracy beliefs - epistemic, existential, and social - and cites social science research along the way, but said research is often ill-defined or biased itself.  I concur.  It reads more like a persuasive essay to convince us of the authors' preloaded opinions.  And as Tom Chivers says on TSS, "After a bit I think I'll just go back to my own ideas."

*********

From 2011.  One of my paranoid patients uncovered the site Are You Targeted (no longer exists) in his searching the internet for proof that he is being harassed by Hollywood and popular music, with messages directed specifically at him. He takes the existence of this site as evidence that his paranoid delusions are true: See, this is happening to other people, too! That different things are happening to those people, and they each have different experiences from each other, with only minor overlap, fazes him not. It's all tied in together somehow.


My other really bright paranoid patient - she was a software developer up until a decade ago - has a different, nonelectronic set of delusions. A homeless person has been stalking her for at least three years, across three states, and recently revealed his existence by mistakenly leaving a purse she had lost in 2007 in a box in her apartment.

Here's the saddening, infuriating, and fascinating part. Both of them are now on medication, and are far more organised and relaxed. Both are able to coherently put on paper or into speech what they were unable to only a month ago. Then, additional notes up the side of the page, or between lines, or underlined and arrowed onto the back made their work unreadable. Now they can write in sentences and paragraphs. (I am overdrawing that somewhat, but the difference is dramatic.) Yet their delusions are absolutely untouched, with the possible exception of the fact that no new material is being added.

So there are two - at least two - parts to the illness, one which is treated by the medication and another which is untouched.

Jungle Boogie

You will notice the quality of the dancing, in contrast to yesterday. 

I did not hear this in the dorm, but I worked at a dinner restaurant summer of 1974 and this was all the rage. Great horns.

 

Not A Dance Tune

When even the Soul Train dancers can't figure out what to do with it, it's not a dance tune. But this is the one I chose from the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" album, which ruled in its era. It also had "Candle in the Wind" and a couple of others that charted on their own.

The songs continue on all the oldies stations and mixes playing in the supermarket, but I don't think they have worn well. However, he gets credit for creating a wide variety.

 All of 1974 for this.