“Merkel’s Boner” was witty enough. But the reference was obscure and the word “boner” distracting due to current usage. It never could have caught on. And the problem is that we still need a good, pithy term for the debacle it describes.

You were supposed to answer “vos makht a yid?” with some clever play on words

Yes, that would make sense given the literal translation of the phrase. My grandmother’s understanding of it was less literal and more existential; less “what’s a Jew making” and more “what’s doing for a Jew.” I actually remember her explaining it, these many years later. Her sister was there and didn’t disagree. Her family was from the Riga area, I don’t know if the phrase took on that connotation in the Yiddish of that area, whether it was a class thing (her family was fairly well off and apparently spoke a more refined Yiddish than my grandfather’s Galicianer dialect) if it was more widespread, or what.

no corresponding name for blacks moving into primarily white neighborhoods and depressing property values.

I still think of this as “blockbusting.” The Wikipedia entry, and explanations I see online describing it as a way to scare people into selling their homes below market value, do not describe the term as I was taught it. “Blockbusting” was an SJW goal of getting black people into previously homogeneous white neighborhoods. This was first explained to me by a 20th century radical who was proud of the process.

OT

Five years ago! The pain is still indescribable.

Paul William Walker IV (September 12, 1973 – November 30, 2013) was an American actor best known for his role as Brian O’Conner in The Fast and the Furious franchise. Walker first gained prominence in 1999 with roles in the teen films She’s All That and Varsity Blues. In 2001, he gained international fame for his role in the street racing action film The Fast and the Furious (2001), a role he reprised in five of the next six installments, but died in 2013 in the middle of filming Furious 7 (2015).

His legacy lives on! He died a heroic death trying to bring about a better world, and as a result we still enjoy the Paul Walker jokes in the iSteve comment section. It’s an inspiration for us all to constantly improve ourselves and drive wonderful cars.

We have talked jokingly about just saying we are Jewish from now on, for all the advantages it might bring.

It does bring advantages, but it’s deceptively hard to pass as a Jew. I’ve had only a few non-Jewish friends who I thought could pull it off over the long-term without getting “outed.”

And even if you’re able to pass, I think there’s an art to using it to your advantage. Just “being Jewish” helps at times, but not nearly so much as when it’s well-deployed.

Your best bet would just be to go to a Reform synagogue and tell them you have a Jewish grandfather, consider yourself Jewish, and are divorced or widowed. If you look like a retired SS officer, they won’t just accept you, they’ll grab you by the scruff, marry you off, and force you into the community.

Better run this by your wife first!

What’s the use of a law which is not enforced on the diverse anyway?

Heh a fair question. I had an Algerian friend/acquaintance who was living in Arizona and gave his wife a brutal beating. When the police came he tried the “but in my culture…” defense, and the police responded very appropriately with “we don’t give a sh*t about your culture, we have laws for this” and arrested him.

On the other hand, I’ve seen laws in Los Angeles that seemed to disrupt the way East Asian communities functioned without providing any evident benefit. Because I spent a lot of time in those communities, I remember wishing that the police would turn a blind eye in those cases.

I don’t really have an answer, but I can say from my experience with gypsies in the US and UK, that I’m surprised that incarceration in an overcrowded non-compliant prison system doesn’t have more popular support.

“Yid” is actually the Yiddish word for Jew. The Yiddish greeting “vos makht a yid?” meant, according to my grandmother, “how is it going for a Jew?”

It has at least some small pedigree in English as a pejorative for Jews. The English football (soccer) team the Tottenham Hotspurs are affectionately nicknamed the “Yiddos” because many of their early players were Jewish. I know that some English Jews once resented this because Yid and Yiddo were also sometimes used derisively to refer to Jews. I don’t believe most Hotspur fans today are aware of the origins of the nickname.

Regardless, this is a term very occasionally used by older people and completely unknown (in my experience) to anyone young enough to be breaking, entering, and vandalizing.

The professor involved said she feels “very, very vulnerable.” I believe that. My guess is she’s aging, unwell, frightened, and for whatever reason wanted to see a tangible reason for her feelings of vulnerability. So she put one on her wall. I think it’s a sad case, not a sinister one. If even the ADL is already publicly hinting “B.S.” on this, you know it’s an outlier of a case.

I scored a 15, meaning I’m more privileged than only 60%. What a crock! I’ve got at least 90% of you cretins cooked.

Also, as noted by others, the Jewish spectrum is wacked. I’m pretty Jewish, but not in a “devout” sense. Jewish privilege comes from ethnic identity, our connections within the ethnic network, and the network’s influence in American culture. “Devoutness” is a whoppingly wrong metric. And in any case the more Jewish I mark myself, the less privilege it’s willing to grant me. Insulting, after all the work we’ve put in!

Yes, 14 is way too young for me. Enough that a proposal to lower the age of consent here to 14 would get me out to vote against it even if nothing else on the ballot was of interest to me.

But the system proposed in Hungary in early 2010s seems reasonable to me and likely less prone to dysfunctional application than the current system in California. Washington, D.C. has a system like the other you suggest. In D.C. the age of consent is 16 with an exemption for anyone within 4 years-of-age of the person with whom they are having sex. 18 is only an age-of-consent there in cases where the older partner is in a significant position of power over the younger partner…stepfather, pastor, teacher, whatever.

I’d be more comfortable with the two-year exemption you suggest than with D.C.’s four-year. A 16 year-old and a 12 year-old seems like a situation ripe for abuse. But otherwise, I like the clarity and simplicity provided by one specific age of consent, along with the exemption for a specific closeness in age.

Ideally, I think this would be a federal law, not a state one. It’s an unfunny joke when someone is jailed in one state for something they were doing legally the day before in an adjacent state.

That’s why I was surprised that Ghost of Bull Moose ferreted out the translation.

The aleph and resh seemed expendable, as did the hey. I figured someone else out there had used the full phrase, or eventually would, and I prefer internet noms de plume that are specific to me.

That biology might have something to do with reproductive, and thus sexual, behavior is just not acceptable to most Americans.

You’re strawmanning us. In California, with our high-as-it-gets age of consent, it must be our scientific/biological illiteracy that’s responsible. That’s why we’re such a laughingstock to the academics of the world: we’re home to those parochial vocational colleges UCLA, Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, UCSD, et cetera, that have no appeal to more scientifically-minded folk from overseas.

I’ve seldom encountered the notion in California that teen-aged girls “must never” have sex with teen-aged boys. That, ironically, is far more a phenomenon in states with lower ages of consent. The actual issue is, as you put it, with their sexual relations with the “older, well-established men.” Tor tells us that even in Hungary the age of consent is 16 when the partner is an “older, well-established man.”

I don’t understand this cringing need so many Americans have to demean their own country in conversation with Europeans.

Also, is there just one “age of consent” in the US?

Each state handles that differently. Some states have a tiered system and some don’t. In some tiered states, it’s the age of consent that varies by age differential: for example, Florida, where (I believe) the “age of consent” is 18 only if the sexual partner is over 25-or-so. Whereas, in other states it’s the severity of the punishment that varies: for example, California, where more serious punishments only kick in if the younger partner is under 16 and the older partner is over 25.

In all states, it goes without saying, people under the age of consent are having sex with each other, and the juvenile justice system addresses that in its own inimitable fashion.

I can’t really disagree with anything you say in your first paragraph. I have a personal aversion to the idea of adult men with 16 year-old girls. Yet I’m also offended on behalf of the offender to hear the act described, as it often is, as “sex with a child.” And personal inclinations such as these hardly serve as basis for intelligent policy or rebut any of the points you or Jack make. I’ll have to put more thought into the issue.

lolz well put. Jews are accustomed to hearing this stuff from Jews, but try hearing out a non-Jew who has thoughts on the same points. Usually the main differences are (1) they care less about the issue than does your niece across the seder table, and (2) they’re a hell of a lot more concerned than she is about offending you.

I’m a Californian and I would not approve of lowering our age of consent from 18 to 16. Pairings between girls in their mid-teens and men in their 30s and 40s have an evolutionary basis, but so what. Most, if not all, criminalized behavior has an evolutionary basis.

Still, I agree with some of the sentiments expressed by in his response to your comment. Hence my frustration that “ephebophile” seems the closest we’ve got to a word that differentiates someone like (allegedly) Walker from a pedophile.

And given the mitigating circumstances you mention…At least one of his two known relationships with 16 year-olds started in a state with where AOC was 16; the relationship in both cases carried on well into the women’s majority years…and then the curveball about Mormonism and parental approval…personally, I say leave the guy alone.

Though that’s a hell of a screwball regarding Mormonism and the sexual politics of the situation. If there were a documentary on that aspect of this here whole thing, I’d watch it.

Ha, well-spotted. The transliteration is abbreviated and pretty loose, but “Son of the United States” it is.

Interesting. I’d never heard of Walker before he showed up in the iSteve comments. Based on what I gleaned about him at the time from Steve and the comments, you’d think iSteve was Walker’s paid PR machine: wealthy, successful young actor with leading-man handsomeness and unusually broad demographic appeal, who nevertheless remained a grounded, kindly dude with a demonstrated commitment to philanthropy.

If Steve made some discreet allusions to the youth of Walker’s girlfriend, I didn’t catch them. The article you linked is the first thing I’ve read of him outside iSteve. It’s a good example, to me, of why we need a term in English to describe what Walker was allegedly up to. “Ephebophile” is in the dictionary, but doesn’t have much popular traction as a term for people who are sexually attracted to minors of roughly age 16. I’m not saying it should be legal to act on those desires. But one of the articles refers to Walker’s “sexual relationships with children.” To me, that reads very, very darkly, and suggests pedophilia directed at prepubescent kids.

If people intend to use the 5th anniversary of his death to do as the linked article asks and examine Walker’s relationship with underage girls,they could honor the dead with a bit of precision in their language.

Has it been five years already?

The man’s death was tragic, and I recall nothing but positive remarks about him on iSteve.

But the ensuing brouhaha in the commentariat was priceless. And Steve’s post was basically improvisational jazz of the Steve variety. It shan’t be forgotten.

I tell people (Jew and non-Jew), when asked, that I’ve never experienced antisemitism. A good bit of philosemitism, but no antisemitism. People sometimes ask how that’s possible, given that I’ve traveled widely, and like many Jews, allude to my Jewishness at a fairly rapid clip.

Next time someone asks how I avoid antisemitism, I’m going to tell them it’s just sloth. A man can only have so many hobbies.

“I’ve felt, going back at least to Kill Bill, that Tarantino is not a good man.”

I have quite a tolerance for gore and perversity in film, given the assumption it serves some artistic or communicative purpose. But I remember–as a fairly young, morally frivolous man–seeing Kill Bill in the theater and looking around wondering “what is this movie doing to the those of us who are watching it? And what kind of mind creates a vacuously sick film like this?”

I’ve never seen a Tarantino film since. The dark animals of our nature are worth observing and attending to. Reveling in them, as Tarantino does, is a game for a different sort of man.

Lee Salonga by a mile. Come on, it’s a blowout.

If I gotta be in mobile, I don’t want a long-ass list of Unz contributors, I wanna see Sailer’s posts before all that jazz.

Agreed. Sailer’s stuff should at least be visible to click from the mobile landing page.

We also need an introduction along the lines of “I’m sick and tired of Paul Walker jokes!”

What’s wrong with Paul Walker jokes? The Paul Walker episode was a great, absurdist moment at iSteve. All due respect to Mr. Walker and his loved ones, of course.

Calm down. I’ve heard far more Jews describe America as the here-on-Earth Promised Land and the best country that’s ever been. Growing up my next door neighbor was an old Czechoslovakian Jewish guy who would shout “you should kiss de’ ground to be in this country!” over and over again whenever SJWs held protests in the local park.

We’re talking about a confused/delusional minority that’s drawn distorted lessons from the lives of their grandparents or great-grandparents. I was explicit that I was talking about a minority of Jews. Your impulse to attribute it to the entire race makes you more like them than perhaps you’re comfortable with.

I will say 1 positive thing about these people, Puerto Ricans on average produce better looking women than the Mexicans. I see way more attractive Latina women in Orlando than I do in Los Angeles. Mexicans are one of the ugliest Latinos on average.

We’re agreed. I digressed (with others) on to the question of Israel’s vulnerability during the 73 war. But that wasn’t the point you and Steve were making. I’m in full agreement with you that Georgia invaded Russian territory, Russia had an obligation to defend itself, and that the American news coverage was a Russophobic snowjob.

Bedouin in Egypt and Jordan are treated like sh*t. I haven’t seen the former for myself, but I’ve seen the latter. The right to defecate in the caves in Petra seems to be the big perk of being a Bedouin in southern Jordan. In Wadi Rum they’re basically indigent (but still hospitable!).

They certainly have material and quality-of-life advantages in Israel, from what I’ve seen and what you’d imagine. And the Bedouin and the Druze have both shown themselves willing to switch loyalties depending on who controls their territory.

But they don’t immediately embrace new conquerors without some degree of confidence the new folks will remain in power. Between 67 and 73 it seems unlikely that many Sinai Bedouin would have found it prudent to start identifying with Israel.

You know, mobile motorized/armored offensive operations are not among Arabs’ strengths.

Perhaps not, but the Syrian-Israeli front of the 73 war was the largest tank battle since WWII and one of the largest in history. And the Israeli tanks were outnumbered and the battalions woefully unprepared because of the hubris that infected the Israeli military after 1967.

Not to mention the Israeli nukes.

Israeli nukes were to be used if the war was lost. They were not a tactical advantage, they were a nihilistic “Sampson Option.”

More prejudiced towards old-stock American WASPs than towards Germans and Arabs? That doesn’t match my experience.

In my experience American Jewish prejudice toward Germany has virtually vanished among Jews under 40.

Arabs are a different case. As I child I was led to believe that Palestinians were fanatics who wanted to kill me but were too feckless to get the job done. Since then I’ve spent much time in the Arab world and have Arab friends. Still, when there was a suicide bombing at Hebrew University, I felt throughout my body what I can only describe as a tribal, genocidal impulse toward Arabs. I was taken aback by the feeling and would never have acted on it, but it was there.

So yes, many Jews for understandable reasons view Arabs as a tribal enemy. But they don’t respect them.

Silly or no, among a minority of American Jews there is both a respect and an existential anxiety with respect to old-stock European-derived gentile Americans. The anxiety seems to boil down to this: these Jews suspect that given the opportunity, white gentiles would kill them.

Despite Israeli panic, there was never any danger that the Egyptian Army would somehow fight its way across all the rugged land that had taken Moses 40 years to cross and invade Israel proper.

Steve, in the early stages of the 73 war the Egyptians were blasting Israeli tanks in Sinai to smithereens with new rockets Israel couldn’t counter. The Syrians had opened an unobstructed path down the Jordan Valley. Moshe Dayan was ready to announce at a press conference that the fall of Jerusalem and Israel proper were imminent.

Many have argued that if the Syrians went straight for Jerusalem instead of admiring their success, the Arab armies would have ended Israel before Sharon had a chance to take control. All this despite Sadat’s modest ambitions for the war.

Russia was obligated to defend itself in the face of Georgian belligerence. But Moscow was never on the line.

I don’t think you have a strong analogy here.

Jack, I agree that this wasn’t one of Steve’s better efforts. Particularly the editorial comment at the end, which was needlessly hyperbolic and not generally reflective of the way most Jews think (at least in my life experience as a Jew). However…

American Jews are not prejudiced against non-Jews, they are prejudiced against what they perceive as stupid or low class people.

This sentence is not one of your better efforts, either. Yes, more and more Jews are marrying out, and Jews are more Americanized than they were even in my youth (and I’m not that old). But it remains true that a minority (shrinking, but still significant) of American Jews still harbor some level of prejudice/suspicion toward non-Jews. And some of those who aren’t prejudiced toward individual non-Jews are prejudiced toward non-Jews as a whole. And furthermore, that prejudice is often felt more strongly toward old-stock American WASPs than toward Arabs, blacks, Germans, et cetera.

I think any Jew who denies having seen this amongst fellow Jews is being dishonest with himself.

Well, that one was a gem! I’m glad he posted it, I’ve listened to that song like six times by now. Donut was right!

Really? “The hard left media” is to blame for the noun “boner” taking on its additional, sexualized sense in the decades after “Merkle’s boner”? In Australia the same concept is communicated with the word “stiffy,” which follows a similar logic. Were ideologues of some stripe behind this one as well?

Let’s blame the left for real things, not every silly thing we’d rather be rid of. Boy who cried wolf, et cetera.

lolz, amused/puzzled that this comment was posted and let thru, but wow yes her voice really *is* pure as bell, pretty as a belle

Kudos to Steve, for his continued Steveness; kudos to Weigel, for feeling along the edges of the Overton Window without having a freak-out. This is progress.

Wow, first I’ve heard of the LSD/athletics thing outside my own family.

My older brother was a state-competitive freestyle sprinter in high school (division-I caliber had he elected to swim in college). There were persistent rumors that he took a tab of LSD before swim meets. I had never taken LSD myself and never asked him about it because it sounded so moronic: why in god’s name would someone take a hallucinogen before an athletic event requiring total concentration?

Sounds like I may have been wrong.

My grandfather was one of those south Philadelphia Hebrews who made a name for himself on the basketball court in the early-ish 20th century (he was not on the Sphas, tho). In his 80s he would still talk with resigned amazement at the physical advantages black players had over white. This was consistent with my own experience as a high school athlete and the experience of everyone else I know.

That all may be just anecdotal, but the idea that black athletes only possess an advantage when roiding just doesn’t pass the sniff test at all.

The One-State Solution is dead. No one in Israel supports it except the marginal ultra-left parties and the ultra-far-right “expel the Arabs from the West Bank” parties. If anything, there’s more will among secular Israelis to punish the Haredim by evacuating them from the territories.

Sharon, ironically, was thought by many to be moving toward resolution 242 and a 2-state solution. And he may have been the only leader with the street cred in Israel to grab the settlers by the scruff (the ones outside the largest settlements, anyway, e.g. Modi’in Illit) and frog march them into Israel proper the way he did with the Gaza settlers.

Netanyahu seems happy with a perpetual expansion of settlements. I don’t think anyone knows what kind of final political arrangement that could lend itself to, but as long as the Wall keeps out suicide bombers, Israelis don’t seem nearly as concerned about the final political settlement as they were pre-wall. But it certainly wouldn’t be one-state.

Yeah, that qualifies in my book. Thank you.

Question to the floor:

Some, perhaps many, Jewish leftists have caricatured Trump as a fascist.

However, Trump has spent his business life in New York working amiably with Jews, and it’s not lost on Jewish eyes that he’s seemed genuinely indifferent to Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism. Nor that he likes and trusts his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner.

At the same time, he does not arouse Jews’ suspicions with any of the relentless, philo-semitic hysteria that comes from some Evangelical quarters.

So…can anyone point me to something written by a leftist Jewish blogger or journalist who fears that Trump is a threat to American Jews *specifically,* rather than to blacks, hispanics and muslims?

Genuinely curious here, not trying to prove a point.

Thanks.

BTW, I wonder if the German-American billionaire alliance between Trump and Thiel has given Jews an additional reason to worry that the whites have ganged up against them this election.

Nah, son. I’ve heard three different Jews express fear that a President Trump would end up dropping a nuclear bomb on somebody, but none who saw him as a threat to Jews in particular. And Thiel founded PayPal for God’s sake. The only thing we fear is that our grandmothers wish we could be more like him.

Has the unz.com commenting system changed? I seem to have just lost two comments posted via Chrome on Windows 10. The old “four minutes to edit” thing is gone, and no sign of the comment. Trying this from IE.

New Jewish visitors to iSteve usually take time to get the hang of Steve’s POV. This is particularly true for pro-Israel American Jews.

For example, the Irgun: Most Jews have never heard a non-Jew invoke the Irgun without it being a criticism from the left, slamming the Irgun as a proto-fascist terrorist paramilitary. This is almost always part of a more general critique of Israel as barbarous anachronistic ethno-state.

As I’ve said before, Steve is a peculiar gentile. American Jews will not have encountered someone of his POV before. So it takes time to get hip and drop assumptions that come from past discussions with more predictable folk.

Agreed. I doubt you could verify Sanders’s kibbutz experience, but it seems unlikely that he’d make it up.

21 years ago I spent two months on a kibbutz. If you can find one kibbutznik who remembers me, I’ll give you a thousand dollars. If their rusty filing cabinet still has my paperwork in it, I’ll give you a million.

And it’s mutual. Half the time I get the name of my old kibbutz mixed up with the name of my kibbutnik sister-in-law’s kibbutz, and the other half of the time I don’t remember either kibbutz name.

when discussed in publications intended for the private consumption of Jews, the information contained in this article is considered interesting and important

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, at jta.org, is not “intended for the private consumption of Jews.” Nor are most communal Jewish papers, which get by on advertising dollars. The Jewish Journal, which publishes more Stormfront-fodder than JTA, has (or at least had for many years) a Christian as its main religion columnist in hope of getting more non-Jewish readers.

I know at one point they were also considering ways to get more readers from LA’s Koreatown, which sounds strange and was understandably abandoned.

In one paragraph, you include the following words and phrases:

* faggots
* traitors
* executed
* violence
* assassination
* assassination (2)
* assassinated
* fucking
* seeing him killed

Granted, many of these were in quotes, characterizing points of view with which you disagree, et cetera. And I’m not expressing an opinion one way or another about Steve’s comment policy. But have you considered that some people who find merit in your ideas may find your language and tone somewhat unhinged?

“I’d say that has turned out to be a pretty good prediction, although whether I committed definitively enough to rack up points would be a matter of opinion.”

Credit where credit is due. Steve, when you were writing posts about “World War T” some time back, I thought you were going off on a weird tangent. You definitely committed to it. You saw it coming, and you nailed it.

Unz.com also has formatting issues when viewed through a VPN.

“But discrimination is the worst thing in the world, so forget I ever said that.”

You really believe Steve intended that comment for thoughtless people? Why? To protect himself from their pitchforks for using the word “discrimination”? To allow the vain among us to feel like a Straussian elite privy to his double-meaning?

I think he was just being facetious.

You are correct about this. Some Jews also don’t grasp how much other Jews devote to this. After 40 years of marriage, my father’s side of the family is still flabbergasted at how much energy my mother’s side of the family spends on this.

Cool formula. Never seen it actually used, tho. Link to an example?

I haven’t seen any evidence it’ll work.

Then you haven’t been looking all that hard. Steve’s not alone in his efforts. Jews aren’t stupid or insensible to threats to the way of life that suits them. They, too, have begun noticing things.

Sure, they always ask. And people who say they don’t have any ID and give false name and address, they get treated anyway.

It’s possible that rural or suburban ERs try harder to get real info, I don’t know. But at, say, County USC, this is so common the ER staff barely bothers. This is a national issue. Urban ERs get slammed in this way.

It definitely works in the ER. ER’s are required to treat people regardless of identity or ability to pay. This is a massive issue in ERs in communities with illegals, because they tend to use emergency rooms as their primary care provider.

This “money-saving tip” is actually a safer bet in ERs than with the police.

LOLZ! Seeing “You’ll be amazed by this money saving tip” as the title of an iSteve post was my unexpected laugh of the day. Thanks for that, Steve

I’ve been to Israel and it was my observation that the more Arabic, but still Jewish the Israeli, the more hard right they would be.

I think your observation was very sound.

As for why, I think every one of the factors you mention plays a part. Though I don’t think most Israeli Jews with origins in the Arab world even concern themselves with accusations of racism. Racism is something Ashkenazim think about, mostly.

You need to stop treating the Netanyahu administration as synonymous with Israel and Israel as synonymous with Jews.

Steve doesn’t characterize Israel as synonymous with Jews, that’s absurd. He has a better handle on the competing/overlapping interests between Israel and the diaspora than do the vast majority of American Jews.

The Netanyahu administration reflects the current and future political direction of Israel far better than do the Labor-derived parties cited by the Times. The existence of the Meretz party is no longer even worth noting alongside Netanyahu’s idlest mid-day thought. Shas and other very-far-right groups are more relevant.

“If ANY country did what Israel did, its very obvious how the media will play the narrative to attack that nation.”

This is false. Outside the West, virtually every country behaves more like Israel on immigration than like Germany. The narrative is only applied to Western countries.

I think your grievance is probably not with Israel, but with the American Jews who still get weepy when they hear Emma Lazarus’s poem. Most such American Jews have not even mentally processed Israel’s immigration measures. Too much cognitive dissonance. I can tell you from personal experience that as of 2008, Abraham Foxman was genuinely clueless, even in private among other Jews of his cohort, about his own double-standards toward US and Israel.

This doesn’t excuse anything on the part of such Jews. But if you’re going to spend time lamenting the way American Jews behave, you might as well understand what’s actually going on.

I actually have to wonder who actually reads Haaretz in Israel. Certainly no one with any power.

Haaretz readers have a higher average income and education-level than the readers of any of Israel’s other major newspapers. The paper’s influence in Israeli society is actually more significant than its circulation would suggest. To the continuing frustration of Sheldon Adelson and his pet newspaper Israel Hayom.

invoking or even acknowledging regrets after the sale flies in the face of all sound/conservative principles of salesmanship

Your “conservative principles of salesmanship” don’t sound conservative, principled, or good for sales.

Steve is “in it for the long haul,” as he says. That means investing in relationships. His gesture has the double virtue of being (1) sincere, and (2) recognized and appreciated by current and potential long-term supporters.

The first day of the second iSteve fundraising drive of 2015 was extremely successful.

Steve, I vote that you continue using the phrase “iSteve fundraising drive.” I think you should retire use of the term “panhandling” in reference to yourself. I identify with your tendency to self-deprecate, but I think “panhandling” skirts self-demeaning. You’re providing a service no one else on the planet provides, and you’re raising a bit of compensation. That’s hardly panhandling.

Paypal log-in worked fine for me. (windows 8)

I agree with a Grumpy. This is a first. Never even saw it coming. What if it becomes a thing? HBD vs LRH?

“But do you think Manohla Dargis has ever noticed this pattern in her own reviews?”

See, this is why there is a growing Jews for Steve contingent. You’re such a peculiar gentile, Steve!

Gunnar’s “market dominant minority” theory certainly has truth to it. Every single Jew who recognizes this and wishes it to be otherwise will ask the above question, but vanishingly few of the gentiles.

“As homo power becomes synonymous with US capitalist globalism, do you suppose European Left will be less enamored of homo stuff?”

For sure. I’ve seen instances of this going back at least five years. Massive US shift on “homo stuff” definitely harshes the buzz for some Euro-SJWs.

“We’re all Kardashians now”

I think Wesley missed the point of his own metaphor.

Yeah, I also knew a Jewish guy who had countless kids in California as a sperm donor. He was 6’4 and very masculine-looking/talking, and Jewish women looking for donors went nuts for him. I used to tell him he was the Genghis Khan of our generation.

I knew a black slumlord in LA who had 17 kids by his wife. But he also had at least one other kid by a mistress, and probably many more.

More Jewish baby boomers need to pass on before this happens. Jews who came of age in the sixties and early seventies are more likely to suffer from the constitutional aversion to Haven Monahan.

Younger Jews, myself included, often discovered in college that they had zero Victim Points and were viewed by the Vibrant as Haven’s rich cousin. And Haven’s dorm room was a much more natural place to hang out than DeShawn’s. The rate at which the politics of American Jews changes will to some extent be limited by the rate at which Jewish demography changes.

This, quietly, without announcing itself as such, is a watershed post.

Agreed. The funny thing is that on this post, of all posts, there’s not much discussion in the comments of the Jewish angle.

Finally, my many years of activism on this issue are yielding fruit. I still remember with nostalgia those heady, early days, when the naysayers scoffed at those of us who cast our lot with the suffering hordes of TIICs. And yet even today TIICs sometimes walk into their preferred bathroom without even the barest smattering of applause to accompany them. It makes you wonder whether we’ve come very far at all.

All the major papers of record left it to the Washington Times to check out the phone numbers for Jackie’s suitor/rape-coordinator. Has the NY Times ever let itself get scooped so easily? The Washington Times should stay on this. Not a bad look for them, taking the lead on one of the biggest ongoing stories of the day.

The reality is, prison rape is largely a myth. So, the writers of The Narrative will tend to perpetuate the myth of prison rape, but treat it more like just desserts than something to be stopped.

You are right that the MSM treats prison rape as “just desserts.” It should be a national scandal that we have essentially a state-subsidized system of sexual slavery in the prison system. Hollywood treats this as a source of light humor not because it is a “myth,” but presumably because the victims are men.

In the one-man show Tyson had touring around the country, in which he just got on stage and talked about himself for ninety minutes, he more or less acknowledged that he’d sexually assaulted other women: just not Desiree Washington, who he was convicted of raping. He used some kind of ridiculous euphemism, along lines of: “I’ve behaved despicably toward a multitude of young ladies, just NOT HER!” I’m not proud to say I saw the show twice, once in Las Vegas and once in Los Angeles. It was different each time, since Tyson basically just got on stage and motormouthed. But in both his discussion of the rape conviction was one of the more normal moments. Tyson may indeed be the strangest person I’ve ever seen.

I remember the breakup between Fukuyama and his Jewish neocon friends. It was painful for me to watch, and is one of the reasons I loathe Krauthammer. He’s a sort of caricature of the Jewish neocon: speaking in grand universal terms, while conflating what’s best for the US with his berserk idea of what’s best for Israel. His existence feels unfair.

I basically agree with you and Razib. I think it would have been much healthier to have more open discussion of the Jewishness of Jewish neocons. My point earlier was only that it hasn’t gone undiscussed. Just underdiscussed.

being buoyed by their confidence in their BJB (big Jewish brains) they didn’t feel the need to go beyond their prejudices, and investigate the actual facts?

Maybe it’s as simple as that. But if so, it indicates a whopping disconnect (and lack of communication) between Jewish American neocons and Israel. It wouldn’t be the first instance we’ve seen of this, but certainly an extreme one. And it certainly undermines the “Wag the Dog” narrative.

Saddam Hussein paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers a huge sum of cash. This displeased Ariel Sharon.

This displeased Jewish American neocons, and plenty of Israelis. But I don’t think you’ll find much to indicate that this was one of Sharon’s major preoccupations. Hamas had much bigger patrons than Saddam. Most prominently, Iran. Which takes us back to the original issue.

Jewish neo-cons and their devotion to Israel [as factor in Iraq War]

Joe Klein and Carl Bernstein are two mainstream Jewish commentators who described it as the primary cause of the Iraq War. Mearsheimer and Walt are obvious examples of non-Jewish academics writing on it. We’re still early in the game, historically-speaking, but I don’t think this issue is as excitingly unmentionable as you imagine.

One factor I’ve not seen addressed, though, is that the Israeli security establishment has since 1979 regarded Iran as the existential threat, and the Sunni Arab strongmen as sideshows. And they were for that reason anxious about the Iraq War, because the likeliest (and as it happens, actual) outcome was vastly increased Iranian influence over Iraqi Shia. So why were pro-Israel Jewish American neocons pushing for a war that Israel was, at the very best, ambivalent about seeing happen?

Actually, for me, unz.com/isteve has been faster than the old site ever was. 64-bit Chrome on Windows 8.

Maybe we like the blog fine the way it is.

Svigor, so you like the blog with a healthy number Jewish readers, commentors,and supporters contributing to the discussion? Wouldn’t want fewer Jews around? I had no idea you were such a philosemite!

Jon, you heard Jews comparing use of the word Christmas to “another Holocaust?” I call BS. Absolute BS. You’d have to comb the entire country to find a Jew mentally ill enough to make an idiotic comment like that.

I guess we should not since we’re not allowed to notice.

You’re expected to notice, that’s the thrust of Steve’s blog. But there’s a difference between noticing and fetishizing.

The motto of Vanguard is “No Jews, just right.” If that’s the kind of site you want to make iSteve, go for it. You wouldn’t have to deal with us pesky white Jews policing the content of your proud white blog. Perhaps that’d be best for all of us.

“What’s up with all the Jewish talk in the comments lately? There’s always been some discussion of that topic on this blog, but it’s out of control lately.”

Perhaps we should ask Sabrina Rubin Erdely or Julia Horowitz, but I guess we should not since we’re not allowed to notice.

You’re expected to notice, here, that’s the thrust of Steve’s blog. But there’s a difference between noticing and fetishizing. The motto of Vanguard is “No Jews, just right.” If that’s the kind of site you want iSteve to be, you’re entitled to make it that. That way you won’t have to deal with us nefarious, scheming Jews trying to police the tone of the blog.

It’s dispiriting to be a reader and supporter of ISteve who spreads word of the blog to others, and then to come across things like this Ramzpaul video. “The C-word! Christmas! It’s like another Holocaust!”

Really? This is humor? Having been Jewish for 38 years, I’ve never heard any actual Jew talk like this. I understand frustration with Jews’ role in American culture. And I understand that the comment section here will include some who think “The Jooz did it,” whatever the issue. But this video is weak stuff.

Steve’s got integrity, and he won’t let frustration from people like me sidetrack him from promoting what he truly believes. But this sort of thing bums me out.