So, apparently Q has gone quiet since not long after last November’s US election. As a result there is a power vacuum, or perhaps “influence” vacuum, since QAnon isn’t precisely a hierarchical movement where anyone is overtly or specifically empowered to order others to take action. Whether in practice people have sufficient influence to declare an action needs to be taken and can expect that QAnons, at least some of them, will take that action is a separate question. (And I think the answer to that question is yes.) But call it power or influence, the vacuum exists, and there are many people who covet that power/influence and will pursue it.
For years there have been people who have been influential in the QAnon community who were not themselves directly related to or speaking for Q. I imagine these people gained their vast followings much the same way I gained both my readers: by writing intelligent, persuasive commentary. As it happens, though, Q did not so much write intelligent, persuasive commentary as fragmentary and incoherent musings of a conspiratorial nature.
So in the absence of Q, precisely what kind of writer is going to suck up all the vacuum in the air? (Yeah, that’s the metaphor we started with, and I can’t change biplanes midstream, so suck it up, people, this is what you get in a post about Q.) That’s right: someone writing incoherent conspiracies. And lo! And behold! Just what one might expect to happen has, in fact, happened.
For in the shadow of the valley of Vice it has been revealed that a messiah has come, a prophet named GhostEzra, who comes to rule the denizens of the QAnon world exactly as we would expect. Vice reports that GhostEzra, who now runs one of the biggest if not the biggest of the QAnon accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, began as upbeat, portraying Trump as the victim of election fraud but also portraying the election fraud as inevitably unsuccessful, something that the QAnons were clearly destined to overturn. But before much time passed, GhostEzra went from being relentlessly upbeat to excoriating followers if they, themselves, were not sufficiently upbeat.*1 It’s one thing to tell others, “Have hope!” and it’s another to tell them, “I will beat you until your morale improves.” GhostEzra, apparently, went all in on the latter.
And GE did not stop there. After more time has gone by and restoring Trump to the throne has come to appear increasingly less likely even to the QAnon faithful, GE’s postings turned more pessimistic and ominous. Earlier this month they took a hard turn into antisemitism. This is not to say, of course, that antisemitism is new to Q. Baby snatching, killing children for secret rites, world controlling cabals of the powerful who show innocent faces to the public: the entire edifice built by Q is antisemitic to its core. But in an update of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion mythology, QAnon has never held that all of the baby eating evil overlords are all Jews. Hillary Clinton, after all, is a Southern Baptist. So while the QAnon mythos was entirely antisemitic in character, the villains of their story were not necessarily said to be jewish. Essential antisemitism was part of Q, but Q was nominally not antisemitic, or at least (read “at best”) officially agnostic as to antisemitism while sometimes loudly denying antisemitism, in the midst of all their antisemitism.
This was the state of the QAnon world when GE took that hard turn into overt, nominal, even proud antisemitism. As a result of the priming inherent in the Q mythos, it’s unsurprising it was well received. This was one of GE’s earlier posts during that hard turn:
Also this:
Later GE posted links to a film series with which I am happy not to be acquainted. I’ll let Vice handle the description:
“Europa – the Last Battle” [is] a 10-part film that claims Jews created Communism, and deliberately started both world wars as part of a plot to found Israel by provoking the innocent Nazis, who were only defending themselves.
Almost all the 4,000 comments responding to the post [of links to the movie] on Telegram are positive, with very few pushing back against the openly racist message.
So how are the longer tenured influencers of QAnon responding to GE’s movement into the world of QAnon over the last 6 months? Well, they’re decrying the damage GE is doing for certain, but not damage done to race relations or that furthers religious bigotry. No, they’re disappointed that GhostEzra is causing QAnon some PR problems with the outside world. As “prominent QAnon researcher” Dapper Gander put it when interviewed by Vice:
If you look at what the other promoters actually wrote, few of them even mention antisemitism, and none mention Holocaust denial,” Gander adds. “They also do not correct him. They simply say GhostEzra is a ‘disinformation account’ that ‘discredits the movement.’”
And that is the real joke here. It could hardly be put more perfectly than by QAnon account CJTruth:
Do you see how disinformation accounts hurt our movement?
Yes, CJTruth. Yes we do.
*1: Please note that I’m getting all my facts from Vice, since I really, really don’t want to make a Telegram account and spend my own precious time reading QAnon blather for hours.
“… sources allege Murdoch has Jewish ancestry…”
So some drunk somewhere claims he’s really Murdockowitz, I s’pose. No acknowledgement of his lifelong membership in, generou$$$ donations to, and awards from, the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Hrrmmm…
> I really, really don’t want to make a Telegram account and spend my own precious time reading QAnon blather for hours.
That would be cruel and unusual (self) punishment.
Pierce,
Considering “Vatican” is on the left side of that really confusing flow chart, completely opposite from “Christianity” (interestingly a branch of “Israelite Hebrew” but not Judaism), I’m willing to wager they don’t consider involvement with the Holy Roman Catholic Church to be a good thing. These are the kind of people who consider everyone who isn’t exactly like them to be Satanists.
I’m reminded of the character Danny from American History X, when asked who he hates, replies “I hate everyone who isn’t white protestant.” That’s pretty much Q-Anon in a nutshell.
That chart is really something … Templars, Illuminati, Jesuits, Freemasons, and a line all the way from Baal worship to bankers. I am surprised they don’t have aliens and bigfoot in there somewhere.
Hillary Clinton is not a Southern Baptist.
She is a lifelong Methodist.
If I read that chart correctly, the ancient Canaanites are basically the original root of all the evil in the world. Also, Islam came from the Vatican and Switzerland is the “land of the sisters of Isis”.
I feel bad for the Canaanites and Philistines. They happened to be territorial rivals of a group of people who ended up writing religious texts that went on to be the basis of extremely successful religions, so for billions of people over thousands of years their names became synonymous with evil.
@jsrtheta
Thanks for the correction!
Whomever made that “history flowchart” should be monitored for mental illness. Maybe even placed under a hospital order, to protect themselves or others.
The history map is ridiculous for all sorts of reasons. The first thing that struck me was – did NOTHING happen, ever, west of Portugal, south of Egypt or east of Iran, ever? Because there’s a whole lot of world outside their tiny narrow focus there. I mean – China, anyone? Just, irrelevant, or what?
A different and probably problematic thought about the other “infographic”, though: is it false? As in, are those people
(a) not actually Jewish?
(b) not actually in those elevated positions of power in those major media organisations?
(c) just a tiny cherry picked slice of the layers of power in those organisations?
Organisations are, more and more, being rightly lambasted for having upper echelons that do not fairly represent the demographics of the nations they draw staff from. Complaints abound that FTSE100 (insert Yank equivalent here) companies don’t have enough state educated/ethnic minority/female/gay/disabled/whatever people on their boards, and companies are expected to DO something about it. Always the argument is “50 % of the population are female, how come only 2% of company directors are?”. “10% of the population is black, how come only 2% of top lawyers are?”. These are perfectly reasonable questions. But for some reason (possibly related to how fucked your career would be if you were to be accused of anti-semitism publicly) it is NOT reasonable to point out that while Jews in the UK have been shown to be outnumbered three to two by Jedi (Source: 2001 census), they form a MASSIVELY disproportionate slice of the legal, medical, political and media industries, particularly at high levels, in comparison to their presence in the population.
I am not an anti-semite. Apart from anything else, living in the UK and working outside the legal, medical, political and media industry, I have never in my entire working life ever met or interacted with a Jewish person in any capacity, and not living in any of the large cities where the overwhelming majority of the tiny population live I can’t say I’ve ever met one socially either. I abhor those who deny the Holocaust, discriminate against Jews (or anyone else), espouse racist ideologies or repeat bullshit like the blood libel or nonsense conspiracy theories like QAnon.
When those people bring up the massively disproportionate number of Jewish people in positions of power in the media, legal and political classes – what is the best response?
It’s a sincere question. It would be just stupid to deny that they are massively disproportionately represented. There are more people in Burkina Faso than there are Jews in all the world, yet give me ONE fact about that place without googling it first. Can you even point to it on a map? Yet if you’re honest you know there are a lot of Jewish people in positions of power in the US, UK and other western countries. Given how much shit companies are getting nowadays for their hiring and promoting practices and how much diversity is now expected to be practiced and valued, it’s hard to argue that massively disproportionate representation of one tiny slice of society is a good or acceptable thing. You can’t just say “so what?”. You can’t appeal to history, either, because historically white men have been in charge because slavery etc. and that’s not acceptable as an answer when you’re trying to promote the interests of women or Black people.
So… in all seriousness, when someone shows an infographic like that – how is the responsible SJW supposed to respond? Asking for myself.
sonofrojblake @ # 29: … how is the responsible SJW supposed to respond?
Depending on social context, guffaws or gunfire.
sonofrojblake @ # 29 “Apart from anything else, living in the UK and working outside the legal, medical, political and media industry, I have never in my entire working life ever met or interacted with a Jewish person in any capacity, and not living in any of the large cities where the overwhelming majority of the tiny population live I can’t say I’ve ever met one socially either.”
How would you know? My best friend is Jewish, but unless you know him very well you’d have no reason to know as he isn’t observant neither does he live in a large city.
I do some of the rituals, rarely. But outside of Passover, Tu B’Shevat, Purim, and a rare friday evening, looking at me you wouldn’t know. I don’t even regularly do anything for the high holies. They’re really more something that I would want to go to temple for, but I no longer go to temple, so… I often quietly reflect for a few hours spread over several days during that time, but little else.
@10 – scorn and violence are not arguments. I was hoping for better.
@11 – fair enough point that does nothing to address my question.
To expand on the response to 10, on the probably wrong assumption it isn’t simply trolling:
If I asked you how to respond to a woman asking why there aren’t enough women in positions of power and influence, would say “laugh at her”?
If I asked you how to respond to a Black person who wanted to know why there was nobody on any of those photo galleries of the powerful who looked like them, would you consider “shoot them” to be an acceptable response?
Any answer offered has to be of a piece with what you’d say in those situations. Help me, I do really want to know.
It seems that in progressive circles, Jews are usually considered a religious, rather than ethnic minority. Are religions usually considered relevant for power and representation? How would you classify someone who’s culturally Jewish (or Christian), but not religious (or marginally religious) if you were seeking to increase the representation for “religious perspectives other than Christian or Jewish”?
As for ethnicity, white people sometimes hide their whiteness by faking a non-white minority ethnic status, but presumably it’d be even more easy to hide one’s Jewish background as a white English-speaking US jew, if Jews were deemed more severely overrepresented in power than Anglo-Americans. Neonazis claim this kind of ethnicity laundering is already widely happening, because “people would be horrified if they knew how overrepresented Jews are in our institutions”
How overrepresented are Jews really in power? I can only tell it’s hard for anyone to tell. However, when neonazis go around counting the Jews in power, they seemingly tend to include anyone who disagrees with them, especially if you have some known link to Jewish ancestry. For example, in those posters it is suggested that Murdoch must be a secret Jew because of his maternal line ancestry (allegedly, according to Pastebin et al.), and because he’s some sort of Zionist by someone’s interpretation.
Do the neonazis apply this same far-reaching standard (assuming it’s not largely outright lies) when they go around counting the proportion of Jews in general US or UK population? I doubt. If they did so, they might find that half (rather than 2%) of the US population are actually Jewish. For example, I hear that the US Zionist movement is mostly (and increasingly) supported by evangelical Christians, for their own rather antisemitic reasons. But what if those tens of millions of Bible thumpers are actually all secret Jews?
sonofrojblake @ # 13 – Oh, you wanted an argument, not just a response?
Anyone offering that chart seems well beyond the reach of fact or logic, the cores of what most mean by “argument”.
Signals of disapprobation, repeated long enough, may encourage some to switch to a different social approach; otherwise, further engagement seems likely to lead only to a need for self-defense.
The only other alternative I can suggest is prayer.
sonofrojblake @ # 14 – The two examples you offer here are both rational, thus categorically different from that chart. In those cases, you can productively discuss the prevailing power structure and how to change it: the structure itself may or may not offer reasonable opportunities or exploitable weaknesses, but at least the people you describe seem grounded in realism.
GhostEzra has the evident motive of agitating craziness and crazy people. GE either believes what they peddle, or just wants to provoke the weak-minded: either way, you won’t get even a chance at sincere dialog. Go into takedown mode, or go away.
Every single definition, progressive or otherwise, that I’ve ever seen for the word “Jew” recognises its unusual position as both a faith position and an ethnicity (or in fact several distinct ethnicities). So I think it’s safe to dismiss that argument right there.
Your next paragraph is some irrelevant waffle about somehow hiding one’s ethnicity, something that’s not in discussion.
The next para begins “How overrepresented are Jews really in power?”, a question so ludicrous in its disingenuousness that again I suspect trolling. Are you, for starters, disputing that the people in the posters are Jewish? Or disputing that they have power? Or disputing that they’re cherry picked from a much larger cohort with the same power? Or that their numbers in positions of power are in proportion to their numbers in the general population. You’re not clear. Be specific.
I’ll take a single data point: the number of MPs in the UK parliament, vs. Jews in the UK population. And for the purposes of the latter figure, I’ll assume the extremely generous “enlarged Jewish population”, which includes non-Jewish relatives of Jews). UK Jews represent fewer than one in a hundred and eighty people in the general population. One in sixty five MPs is Jewish. You can do your own research about the medical, legal, broadcasting or whatever other professions may interest you, but I’ve given you a data point most adjacent to power. Trying to pretend that Jews are NOT over-represented in positions of power and influence in comparison to their numbers in the population just makes you look shifty, as though you’ve something to hide or something you know you’re wrong about. Address the facts.
As for the “aren’t we all Jews, kind of?” line in the last para, I don’t think it deserves any consideration.
@Pierce R. Butler:
I am not “offering that chart”, I’m trying to react rationally to it. I am within reach of facts and logic. I have asked, repeatedly, for the argument that addresses the factual observation that Jews are over-represented in positions of power and influence in the UK, US and elsewhere, in comparison to their numbers in the population. I have received from you in return suggestions to simply try to laugh it off or physically assault anyone making the observation. Now you’re offering simply repeating “SHAME!” at them until they go away, or prayer.
Are we looking at the same chart? Seriously? I’m NOT looking at the history one. I pointed out myself at least one place where that’s a hot mess of nonsense. I’m looking at the one that points out the demographic makeup of positions of power and influence in various media organisations. I did ask, in my first post, the question of whether the chart is in fact accurate. You’ve not responded to that. You’ve simply dismissed it as not even worth arguing with… which is what people often do when they don’t HAVE a response they’re comfortable with.
What I’m interested in is that when the under-represented group is “women”, or “Black people”, or “disabled people”, or “trans people”, or “working class people”, or “gay people”, then you can “productively discuss” how to change something that it’s simply taken as read is bad and needs to be changed. But when the (still perhaps majority even but still) under-represented group is “Gentiles”, discussion simply shuts down. It’s odd, and I’d love to have a way of responding to it rationally. I’m not seeing one yet…
@9 sonofrojblake
Your question is reasonable, so it deserves a reasonable answer.
When people point to the prevalence of Jews in (for example) the field of banking, you can give them a history lesson.
My understanding is that, from the middle ages to around the 17th or 18th centuries, the association between Jews and banking in Europe had less to do with cunning or conspiracy on the part of Jews than with stupidity on the part of Christians. For whatever reason, the Catholic Church decided it was sinful for Christians to loan out money at interest. Borrowing was as popular as ever, though, so the Jews filled the gap.
This also explains the origins of European antisemitism. If you happen to be a nobleman who took out a large loan from the local moneylenders, which option makes more sense:
1) pay back the interest and principal on the date you agreed upon, or
2) come up with absurd accusations about sacrificing babies or causing the Plague aimed at your creditor, and have them arrested and either thrown out of the country or killed, helping yourself to all their property in the process?
You can see why option 2 might appeal to some. I have heard that much of the Spanish Inquisition was undertaken specifically with the purpose of relieving Ferdinand and Isabella from the debts incurred from Jews from funding Columbus. It is an open question as to whether or not anyone expected that…
sonofrojblake:
OK, that’s your general impression; I offered mine. I’m not terribly familiar with how affirmative action politics is supposed to work in the US or UK. That’s why my first couple paras were basically just wondering aloud.
Your original question seemed to suggest that the Jew vs. Anglo distinction is usually ignored for representation purposes, and that this is some kind of double standard. I consider it a valid question, and somewhat interesting. I’m not denying that Jews could be overrepresented to some substantial degree, but I’d say it’s difficult to measure, and the discourse is flooded with bad actors and disinfirmation.
There’s hardly any credibility in these conspiracy community posters, since they seem to deliberately obscure the total cohort size, clearly in order to give the impression that “all” influential people are Jewish. I’m certainly not going to check the sources for all these individual people’s Jewish background or societal influence. My general understanding of the “Jewish Question” is that people who make a big deal about the Jewish Question are nazis and habitual liars who want their opponents to be tied down in endless debunking of mass-produced dishonest claims.
It’s another matter if anyone credible isn’t collecting statistics on Jews in positions of power, in order to avoid appearing antisemitic. You say (without citation) that in the UK Jews constitute about 0.5 % of the population and 1.5 % of the Parliament. That sounds plausible to me, if not very impressive. In my country (Finland) the Jewish community is so small (around 5000, or 0.1 % of the population) that their any presence or absence in positions of power is best considered a statistical fluke.
sonofrojblake @ # 18: Are we looking at the same chart?
Actually, no – I’d thought you meant the “history” hallucination, not the faces poster. Sorry ’bout that.
I agree that brucegee1962 @ # 19 & lumipuna @ # 20 make good points, and would just add something to the effect that Jewish culture very often puts a premium on deep education and careful long-term career plans, so nobody should feel surprise that those raised with such priorities often tend to surpass those raised on tv entertainment.
@brucegee1962, 19:
Thank you.
I’m aware of the history. The problem with that is that you can do the exact same response when people point to the prevalence of white upper-class men in positions of power at the expense of women, Black people etc. “Here’s why it is how it is” doesn’t address the implied point that “how it is” is an undesirable state that can and should be changed.
@lumipuna, 20:
Well, yeah, but your general impression is that “Jewish” is not an ethnic identity. That may indeed be your general impression, but it’s also simply factually inaccurate, something you can easily verify with a quick google search. I can’t really say more in response to that than your impression is just, well, wrong.
Well, I hadn’t even considerd that possibility, but now you raise it I can certainly see why collecting such data, let alone reporting it, would be career-limiting to say the least.
Oh, that’s easily remedied if you can’t be bothered spending a minute googling it:
Source for the figure of number of Jews in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Jews (being careful to take the “enlarged population” to be generous).
Source for UK population: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/
Source for UK Jewish MPs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_Jewish_politicians#2000%E2%80%93present (being careful to count only those labelled “xxxx-present”)
Source for number of MPs in Parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Commons_of_the_United_Kingdom
Do you need me to do the actual sums for you?
Oh, absolutely agreed, which was why I dumped on the other one. It’s just that anyone with eyes and no agenda can observe the prevalence of Jewish people at the top of various professions and it’s obvious that that bakes Nazi noodles and I’d really, really like to have a snappy comeback to it but I can’t think of one and it seems neither can anyone else…
@Pierce R. Butler, 21:
Oh, no apology necessary. It’s not like you made me look like a mindless troll jerking their knee and dashing off a patronising answer to a question they hadn’t even bothered to read the first sentence of properly. No harm done (not to my credibility, anyway).
Ah, I’ve heard this one before. It’s the “racism isn’t real, Black people are disadvantaged because culturally they don’t bother working hard at school and just sit eating fried chicken and watching TV” argument.
You are Ben Shapiro and I claim my five pounds.
It isn’t an either/or proposition: “Either culture is important to kids’ outcomes or racism is real.” Both of these things can be true.
A lot of damage to Black family structure was deliberately inflicted by racism (splitting up families during slavery times and mass incarceration today). Not working hard at school is a rational decision when you know for a fact that both the quality of your education and your ability to use it are sharply constrained by racism. Etc.
That did make me chuckle – thanks.
Though I thought this :
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Q
was what (or rather who) you got when it came to Q?
sonofrojblake:
To be clear, I wasn’t talking about our respective impressions on Jews. I was talking about our respective impressions on how Jews are perceived in Western progressive society. Then again, I now realize that you originally meant to discuss this in the context of English-speaking world, so my experience is less relevant than yours. My bad.
@ ^ lumipuna :
There was also Joe Lieberman who ran as Al Gore’s presidential running mate in 2000 “..becoming the first Jewish candidate on a major American political party presidential ticket.” I don’t recall a huge amount being made of Lieberman’s Jewishness at the time but then a) I’m not American, b) it was twenty + years ago, c) open blatant racism incl anti-Semitism was maybe (?) less acceptable back then pre-Trump and Tea party and Fox News degradation of the culture.
Point (C) being a serious worry.
That typed, I don’t recall a lot of anti-Semitism per se directed at Sanders albeit some hateful claims of him being a “..JINO and “self-hating” and a “kapo” etc on extreme pro-
IsraelLikud right-wing sites notably World Israel News.. where the commenting community is pretty much outright genocidal, very toxic and extreme. (Indeed, Soros and many others who are Jewish but not rabid Likud fans get the same derogatory and baseless labels there.)@lumipuna, 25:
As well you might. That’s why I offered actual verifiable data, rather than vague anecdotal stuff.
Then I can only conclude you’re actively closing your eyes.
How about US Supreme Court justices? For ten years until last year fully one third of the US Supreme Court were Jewish, That’s 2.3% of the population providing 33% of the most powerful judges in the land. Meanwhile there has never, ever, been a single Hindu, Muslim, Mormon, Sikh or Buddhist SCJ. There are still two out of the nine, that’s 22%, handily almost exactly TEN TIMES the representation one should expect statistically.
I could go on, citing publicly available data about influential positions like heads of large media organisations (see the posters that prompted the question), professional institutions, educational establishments, and so on. That, however, would make me come across like some kind of “wotz wid al deez JOOZ?” anti-semite, which I’m emphatically not, and I think you’ve established clearly that you’re actively avoiding this data anyway, so I don’t see the point.
I wanted an answer to give to people who complain about the disproportionate number of Jews in positions of influence. “WHAT Jews in positions of influence?” is the worst kind of disingenuous, reality-ignoring bullshit answer possible and one I tried to waylay before anyone offered it. Still hoping someone can help me.
sonofrojblake: 13% of New Yorkers (as in, the city) are Jewish. So a lot of people in US national media (based mostly in NYC, the biggest US city) are Jewish, maybe not hugely surprising. If you live in the UK, which has so few Jewish people that you *don’t know any*, your intuitions on what seems wildly disproportionate may be off. (I’m not saying there’s *no* disproportion).
(Urbanization may partly explain some other disproportionate economic stats, like incomes of gay people for example. Wages and cost of living both higher).
Anyway, a minority group being disproportionately successful at something isn’t usually a problem, unless one wants to get all “Harrison Bergeron” in level of equality being demanded. I’m more concerned with leveling *up*. Since the majority group isn’t being politically oppressed by an affluent market minority, general economic redistribution (tax and welfare state) can take care of any problem.
If conservatives were consistent, anyone who is affluent must have done something to deserve it, right? If Jews are assumed to be smarter than everyone else, why shouldn’t they be at the top? Tbf, some conservatives do seem to be OK with rich Jews, but the white nationalist turn seems pretty inconsistent.
So what’s your non-“SJW” as you put it, internally consistent take on why this (actually fairly modest) disproportion is a problem? You’re doing the (usually trolly) thing of asking everyone else if they’re being consistent with their premises and “making the SJW’s heads explode”, but are *you* at all consistent?
@davidj, 28:
50% of the population of London are men, so it’s natural that they’re wildly over-represented above that number on the boards of major companies based there, regardless of the demographic of the rest of the country. Most of them are white, so it’s perfectly natural there are hardly any people from ethnic minorities in those positions. There are historical reasons for this too, so it’s fine. This seems to be the logic you’re proposing.
Also, my evidence that the Jewish minority in the UK is small is not simply that I don’t know any. It’s that THE CENSUS SAYS SO. One of my favourite stats ever is that in 2001 Jews in the UK were outnumbered three to two by Jedi. It’s interesting to me that you’d attempt to ridicule this bald, easily available statistic by implying that it’s anecdotal. Agenda, much?
So you’re fine with, say, just 7% of kids in the UK benefiting from a private education, but 29% of UK MPs being privately educated?
Ah, well, there’s your thing, isn’t it? Is it oppressive to have basically all your news media have a leadership so unrepresentative of the people to whom they’re selling their news? I mean you may say not, you may deny the news media has tangible power. I’d disagree.
I don’t have a non-SJW take on it because I’m coming at it from a frustrated SJW position. My gut feel is that it is NOT a problem. Gut feel isn’t good enough. People (non-SJWs, or let’s call ’em what they are – Nazis, or Nazi-adjacent) do say “what’s with all these Jews at the top?” and I *want* a snappy answer. “What Jews at the top?” – an answer already suggested – is self-evidently stupid. “What’s the problem with that?” is my current go-to answer, in fact. “Why would you care?”. Generally at that point most of them are such dolts they reach for Soros-is-in-charge type conspiracy theories and you can write them off. Occasionally though there’s one who’s NOT a swivel-eyed loon, and it’s those I’m on my guard against.
The difficulty is that in progressive circles it’s taken as axiomatic that, when it comes to power and influence in politics, the law, the media and the professions generally:
– the over-representation of men in such positions is BAD
– the over-representation of straight people is BAD
– the over-representation of white people is BAD
– the over-representation of cis-gendered people is BAD
– the over-representation of privately-educated people is BAD
– the over-representation of Jewish people is something something history something something cultural something something please don’t call me an anti-semite some of my best friends are Jewish.
You can, I assume, see the problem.
sonofrojblake, here is what I would say.
When we say we are concerned about groups being underrepresented in certain professions, we aren’t (or at least we shouldn’t) be saying it in order to drag the successful down. Sometimes the privileged like to pretend that this is the goal of liberalism, as if every gain by one group automatically means an equal loss to another group. But economics doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game like this; providing a poor person with an education provides some fairly direct benefits to me as a wealthy person. Harrison Bergeron is imaginary — there is literally no liberal who says “Too many top jobs are going to the well educated, so we need to make everyone stupid.” If an individual or a group is successful, we shouldn’t accuse them or say that they are bad people — as long as they don’t balk at their responsibility to help take the obstacles away from some of the next runners to line up at the starting gate.
Our goal should be equality of opportunity, not necessarily equality of outcomes. We are still a long, long way from removing barriers of racism, classism, and sexism that prevent a lot of kids from reaching their potential. If we got rid of all those barriers, would every group be likely to be represented in every profession exactly along demographic averages? No, because culture and tradition will still be a thing. Germans may still dominate beer-making, there will still be various ethnic restaurants. But if every kid truly had the same opportunities, those differences wouldn’t matter as much.
Intuition is not a bad thing, reason is and should be a servant of the passions as Hume would say.
But I think market minorities (whether Jews in many contexts, or ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, Christian minorities historically in the Middle East etc etc) are not a terrible thing for reasons related to the difference between profit and rent. Rent is unearned income and economists from Marx to Milton Friedman have agreed that it is a bad thing (Marx would say worse than profit, while Friedman would say profit is good). A lot of the hatred of market-based rich people historically comes from landlords and military elites who represent much worse types of exploitation.
The majority group is likely to have more political power and use that to enrich itself. In fact, the greater wealth of the US white elite is based in part on robbing Native Americans and Black people using political power and armed force – wealth is inherited, and it’s hard to accumulate wealth and pass it down when not being paid anything for one’s work. And certainly sexism has a lot to do with political power and violence, not meritocratic market success.
Actual problems with the US media coverage seem to have little to do with how many Jews there are and a lot more to do with practices like “both sides” coverage – which started as a way to maximize readership/viewership but are now a dogma. Anyway, low-quality, uninformative coverage actually benefits conservatives contrary to their constant whining about the media elite supposedly being mean to them.
But seriously, if you want a response to anti-Semites, ask them why it’s not OK for Jews to be the superior race if they’re so smart they can supposedly run all these vast conspiracies.
Ha! I like that answer.