Ashkenazi Jews’ IQ: Judaism Itself, The Study Of Talmud, In Particular, Is a High-IQ Activity

History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews, Logic, Reason

This article reduces the reason for Ashkenazi Jews’ aggregate, genetically based, high IQ to Jewish exclusion and suffering: “selection events”:

… the frequent pogroms to which Jews were subject in Eastern Europe would have been “selection events” which would have selected for correlates of IQ such as future-orientation, social skill, planning and simply the wealth needed to escape. Thus, Lynn argued that, even though Jewish IQ was high before the Holocaust, it was probably even higher afterwards.

There are other reasons for the high IQ in Ashkenazi Jews predating the pogroms and the Holocaust. These have to do with the substantive nature of Judaism itself, not least the premium put on the study and analysis of scripture and certainly the study of Talmud. (I would argue that even the study of our Tanach, which Rabbi Ben Shapiro has mistakenly called Torah, does the brain good.)

At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really.

There is the Socratic Method and there is pilpul—“a dialectical method of Talmudic study, consisting of examining all the arguments pro and con in order to find a logical argument for the application of the Law and at the same time to sharpen the wits of the student.”

The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.

Whittling down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages has its flaws. The article, “Are Jews Smarter?”, in the New York Magazine, puts paid to such reductionism:

“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”

Remember, too, that the young scholar who did mental gymnastics the best got the prettiest girl …

Democrat Impeachment Ad Invokes … The Founding Fathers (Whom They Otherwise Call Racists)

Democrats, Founding Fathers, Government, History

Thirty five seconds into this Democrat ad for impeachment, launched by one Tom Steyer, these hypocrites invoke the Founding Fathers:

“Our Founding Fathers expected you, Congress, to hold a lawless president accountable.”

These are the very Founding Fathers whom the dim-witted Democrats call racists and bigots and whose statues they defile, deface and wish to remove.

NEW COLUMN: Visas for ‘The Brilliant’ Is Kushner Code For Replacing You

Business, Donald Trump, Kids, Labor, Outsourcing

NEW COLUMN is “Visas for ‘The Brilliant’ Is Kushner Code For Replacing You.” It’s now on WND.COM, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

“The U.S. government discriminates ‘against genius’ and ‘brilliance’ with its immigration system,” asserted President Trump, as he rolled out Jared Kushner’s immigration plan.

The president has insisted that “companies are moving offices to other countries because our immigration rules prevent them from retaining highly skilled and even … totally brilliant people.”

While it’s true that U.S. immigration policy selects for low moral character by rewarding unacceptable risk-taking and law-breaking—it’s incorrect to say that it doesn’t “create a clear path for top talent.”

Kibitzing about a shortage of talent-based immigration visas is just Mr. Kushner channeling the business and tech lobby’s interests.

No doubt, Big Business wants the “good” old days back. They currently operate in a labor market. They don’t like that, because, in a labor market, firms compete for workers and wages are bid up. Companies don’t like a labor market. They prefer that workers compete for jobs and wages not rise.

Multinationals, moreover, are stateless corporations. They are “global beasts with vast balance-sheets” and no particular affinity for American labor. But it’s not only about the Benjamins (to borrow from a U.S. congresswoman who, too, dislikes Americans).

The “men” who run multinationals are true believers. They are social justice warriors first; businessmen second. Tech traitors like the FAANG—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google—are certainly radical leftists, who believe in replacing American labor as a creed and as a principle to live by.

Back to the talent-shortage myth. The 2017 IEEE-USA Employment Survey, which appears to be the latest from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has some “bad news.” “The nearly two-thirds of U.S. IEEE members who reported being unemployed at some point during 2016, had not been re-employed by mid-April of 2017.” Hopefully, the updated report will be more upbeat.

Still, there is unemployment in the ranks of American electrical engineers. Yet for years, consumers of the H-1B visa (multinationals) have insisted they were bringing in the best and the brightest because America had too few, if any at all. Not true. The H-1B visa brings in ordinary workers to displace ordinary Americans, the kind the IEEE tracks.

Why doesn’t the president know that the H-1B visa category is a huge high-tech hoax, not a special visa for highly skilled individuals? It goes mostly to average workers. “Indian business-process outsourcing companies, which predominantly provide technology support to corporate back offices,” by the Economist’s accounting.

Overall, the work done by the H-1B intake does not require independent judgment, critical reasoning or higher-order thinking. “Average workers; ordinary talent doing ordinary work,” attest the experts who’ve been studying this intake for years. The master’s degree is the exception within the H-1B visa category.

While visa advocates—economist Stephen Moore, Trump’s adviser, is one—perpetuate the tall tale that the H-1B visa provides a steady supply of talent; visa opponents, for their part, like to cry croc about exploitation and slave-labor. I guess they think that misplaced compassion adds force to their arguments.

H-1B visa holders are not paid inferior wages. From the fact that an oversupply of high-tech workers has lowered wages for all techies, it does not follow that these (average) men and women are being exploited. Rather, it is the glut of average worker bees—their abundance—that has depressed wages for all. Which is just the way billionaire businessmen like it.

More significantly, and as this column has attempted to inform, since 2008, there is a visa category reserved exclusively for individuals with extraordinary abilities and achievement. It doesn’t displace ordinary Americans.

It’s the O-1 visa. There is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed. …

… READ THE REST. “Visas for ‘The Brilliant’ Is Kushner Code For Replacing You” is now on WND.COM, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.

‘Identity Politics’: A Term Conservatives Use To MASK Anti-Whiteness

Ann Coulter, Argument, Conservatism, Critique, Race, Racism, Republicans

Stephen W. Carson asks an interesting question on Twitter (would that intellectual curiosity abounded), relating to the column, “It’s Not ‘Identity Politics,’ It’s Anti-White Politics”:

I would appreciate your perspective though.
Do you agree that “identity politics” is a thing?
If so, what patterns have you seen in “identity politics”?

9:44 AM – 22 May 2019

Hi, @RadicalLib: I believe the term “identity politics, which originated in academia, has become a cliche, and is also now nonsensical. It is used mainly by humdrum conservatives. Why do they use it? Probably because they, consciously or unconsciously, do not want to come to terms with the fact that our politics are almost exclusively anti-white, not anti-Other more exotic identities.

It’s also considered politically incorrect or “racist” to argue that there is a dangerous, anti-white sentiment among the cohort Ann Coulter has termed “our cultural overlords.” (“It might be of some concern to the rapidly diminishing white population,” she wrote, “that our cultural overlords are so tormented by ‘whiteness.'”)

Media conservatives refuse to cop to “anti-white politics,” for fear of being called racist.

Also, most Cons are mere maze rats. Not smart, they adopt Party positions without much thought; align along the positional grooves.

But “anti-white politics” it is. Here’s what Cons do as a method:

They to pretend that it’s all about Democratic politics. Dems are dividing us, the Cons screech. Thus do the Cons virtue-signal their position as seekers of national unity. We’re all in this together. No we’re not. As I wrote in the above column,

It’s not Identity Politics; it’s anti-white politics. For, blacks are not being pitted against Hispanics. Hispanics aren’t being sicced on Asians & Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the groups just mentioned. Rather, they’re all piling on honky.

A similar tack, taken, incidentally, by both radio talker Tammy Bruce and author J. D. Vance on the Tucker Carlson Show, is to pivot away from race and anti-white hatred. To those who cleave closely to the contour of an argument, the pivot will seem inorganic. But to the Republican maze rat it’s rote.

To wit, Bruce was quizzed about Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s apology over “whiteness.” Tammy B. was expected to answer as to why men like Beto keep apologizing. (She ought to have begun by pointing out that Black men don’t apologize for existing.) Instead, Tammy pivoted from whiteness (the thing that informed O’Rourke’s apology) to … wait for this: “Humanity.”

It’s a Democrat thing, asserted Bruce, to apologize for the sins of humanity. Climate change, for instance. (At that point in the show, I scratched my head and wondered how she got from A to B.)

Incidentally, the questions posed to Beto by Republican Meghan McCain (the great philosopher) and her Republican sisters, were indistinguishable from the questions with which any black, lady Democrat would harangue the meek Beto: “Atone for your privilege, your sexism … if you were a woman, you’d not get away with being so audaciously Beto, blah, blah.”)

No. Our politics are brutally anti-white. I Wrote a book about what will come of this—and the perils of not naming the Beast.

A RECENT RELATED ARTICLE is: “The Demonization Of Whites By Mrs. Bill Gates & Other Dangerous Idiots.“