Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 13

Review of “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History”

writes:

The minor league for many of these older comedians, the place where they honed their skills, was the Borscht Belt in the Catskills, whose resort audiences of mostly New York Jews provided one of the most knowing and toughest of all audiences going, so tough that Joey Adams, quoted by Dauber, remarked that “when you bomb in the mountains, it’s like a concentration camp with sour cream.” (…)

Some things, inevitably, are more lightly touched than others. Talmudic humor is among them. The humor of Jewish intramural rivalry—the snobbery obtaining among Eastern, German, and Sephardic Jews—is another. All I remember from a novel read decades ago, whose title and author’s name are lost to me, is that what separates Sephardic Jews from all others, apart from their extravagant genealogical pretensions, is that no Sephardic Jew can stand gefilte fish. German Jews were known by Eastern Jews as yekkes, meaning jackets, or suit jackets, which German Jews in their formality were said never to remove. The stereotype made possible the joke that holds the difference between a yekke and a virgin is that a yekke remains a yekke.

My favourite example of the “intramural rivalry” variety comes from a real life incident:

A very white-collar Jewish acquaintance of Ashkenazi descent began telling me a story about the time he was using a power tool.

Anticipating my surprise (“Jews don’t fix their own cars…”) he added, with perfect timing and a wry smile:

“Yeah — there was a Sephardic guy around and he started it up for me…”

 

‘Muslims are the new Jews!’ ‘They’re the new communists!’ ‘Muslims are the new Jewish communists!!’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesSteve Sailer: “Miller perhaps recognizes how much hatred he attracts from many Jewish members of the media as a sort of ‘renegade Jew’”The Great White War: “Most of my hatred (…) is INTRA-racial”Joe Bob Briggs defends Susan Cabot — by dissing “The Wasp Woman”  

“Right at the moment when I was ready to flush all hope down the toilet, along comes Donald Trump with a comment about shitholes”

Jim Goad writes:

Norway also wins the blue ribbon when it comes to per-capita income, which is a staggering 38 times that of Haitians and 173 times that of Somalians.

The noble Norsemen also win when it comes to their nation’s mean IQ, which is 100 compared to the USA’s 98. Somalia (68) and Haiti (67) both suffer a mean IQ that is below the commonly accepted cutoff line for “retarded.”

The only category where the USA comes out on top is the percentage of the population with access to improved sanitation facilities—one index claims that 100% of Americans can find a functional toilet if they try. Next comes Norway at 98.1%. Haiti (27.6%) and Somalia (23.5%) are far, far worse. According to Wikipedia, “Sewer systems and wastewater treatment are nonexistent” in Haiti, which would mean the country is a literal shithole. (…)

Last week’s events only underscore the sad fact that by and large, most people tend to get far more outraged at unpleasant truths than at comforting lies.

Sailer: “A little-known survey revealed the single most decisive reason Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton…”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesThe Great White War: “Most of my hatred (…) is INTRA-racial”Joe Bob Briggs defends Susan Cabot — by dissing “The Wasp Woman”Steve Sailer: “Shithole” countries, immigration and the Deep State  

Joe Bob Briggs: “All these attempts to police internet content will founder on the shoals of human complexity”

Joe Bob Briggs writes:

Prodigy used software programmed to get rid of offensive language—evidence that they were editors and publishers, not simply distributors.

So now we had a legal situation where if you police content you’re a publisher, and so you’re subject to the same rules that apply to Doubleday or Esquire or The Washington Post.

If you pay no attention to what’s on your platform, then you’re cool. You’re protected.

Obviously this couldn’t last…

 

Joe Bob Briggs: “‘Take a knee’ in football used to mean ‘run out the clock.’ We really need some other term.”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesJoe Bob Briggs defends Susan Cabot — by dissing “The Wasp Woman”Steve Sailer: “Shithole” countries, immigration and the Deep State“This sheds a different light on the well-known MLK plagiarism scandals…”  

Steve Sailer: President Trump’s Murder Report Card

Steve Sailer writes:

Murders should be falling annually due to improved medical care (ambulances are basically rolling emergency rooms these days). And we now live in a surveillance society, so we ought to at least be getting the benefits in reduced murder rates.

For example, the increasingly widely deployed ShotSpotter system for locating gunfire via audio triangulation originated in work begun by Silicon Valley seismologist John C. Lahr in 1992 in response to East Palo Alto becoming the murder capital of America with 42 homicides in a population of only about 24,000.

In 2017, however, East Palo Alto suffered only one murder. Some of that is due to all the surveillance tech now scanning the streets. But much of the difference stems from Hispanics driving blacks out of East Palo Alto. The black share of the population fell from 61 percent in the 1980 Census to 17 percent in 2010.

(…)

In sharp contrast to heavily black cities, towns near the Mexican border were exceptionally murder-free in 2017, such as San Diego (2.4), Tucson (3.2), and El Paso (2.8).

El Paso has been famous for its calm citizenry for generations. A 1971 article in Time, “The Texas Tranquilizer,” attributed the low murder rate in El Paso to the high levels of lithium in its well water.

 

 

Jim Goad: Madame Clinton vs. the Super-Predators

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesJoe Bob Briggs defends Susan Cabot — by dissing “The Wasp Woman”Steve Sailer: “Shithole” countries, immigration and the Deep State“This sheds a different light on the well-known MLK plagiarism scandals…”  

“Rosaries and Razorblades: The Acrid Catholicism of ‘Brighton Rock’ (1948)”

Via FilmStruck:

It isn’t long after this opening bit of carnage that two women come to be recurring thorns in Pinkie’s side. One is a young waitress named Rose (played by Carol Marsh with a sweetly smiling susceptibility) whose pure-hearted naïveté is buttressed by her unwavering Catholicism and who, by an accident of chance, stands to fatally complicate Pinkie’s alibi. The other is a fixture of the surrounding amusements, an entertainer named Ida (Hermione Baddeley) who all but witnesses the killing and becomes a force of probing morality. But she is not Catholic. Officious, superstitious and betokened by an ear-splitting cackle, she cares more for earthly justice than the great mystery of redemption. Rose, stupidly but sublimely, falls for Pinkie, while Ida hopes to wrest her away from his evil influence. The vile, seemingly sociopathic Pinkie then becomes a hopeless candidate for saving grace. Whether Rose’s love is exerted in vain is the operative spiritual question.

 

Re BELOW:

Do read Folk Devils & Moral Panics if you’re into that sort of thing (although if you are, you’ve probably read it already…)

 

“Behind every word of Amis’s corpus, Wilde lurks…”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“Long after he claimed to have left the church, [F. Scott Fitzgerald] described himself as a ‘spoiled priest’”“Giving Offense, or How to Overcome Mass-Media Morality”Joe Bob Briggs: “Your Honor, the President Is Acting Like He’s in Charge and We Want It Stopped”  

“Long after he claimed to have left the church, [F. Scott Fitzgerald] described himself as a ‘spoiled priest’”

Review of a new biography:

Paradise Lost does not venture far into the territory of the spirit, and its author misses the importance of Catholicism in shaping Fitzgerald’s identity, content simply to lump it with his Irish heritage as something that gave him outsider status in elite circles. In reality, Fitzgerald, who claimed to have left the church in 1917, never escaped its influence. He went out of his way to ensure that the major events of his adult life were recognized by church rituals, including his request for a Catholic burial, which, thanks to his daughter’s persistence, finally occurred thirty-five years after his death. Some of Fitzgerald’s fiction deals specifically with Catholic practices, such as “Absolution,” one of his finest short stories. More importantly, the moral urgency found in his writing bears witness to the faith from which he could never quite escape.

 

New Evelyn Waugh bios reviewed by world’s least catechized Catholic

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“Giving Offense, or How to Overcome Mass-Media Morality”Joe Bob Briggs: “Your Honor, the President Is Acting Like He’s in Charge and We Want It Stopped”“How an ACLU founder became an apologist for Soviet tyranny”  

“Giving Offense, or How to Overcome Mass-Media Morality”

Christopher DeGroot writes:

As we learn from Drs. Paul R. McHugh and Lawrence S. Mayer in their summary of the vast research on the subject, gender confusion is a natural and quite common part of life. Most people grow out of it. But some don’t. And some of them, when faced with news of traditional gender roles and customs, will respond with fierce anger, like a teenager who didn’t get invited to a popular party. (…)

Yet in order for this commonsense truth to be widely understood again, we must, as I say, be willing to offend others. People, indeed, must be offended so much that their very sensibility changes. For this is a matter of shaping perceptions and, therefore, emotional responses and value judgments. It is essentially irrational, the sort of thing against which mere reason is quite weak. So, let us offend the precious busybodies. They can whine all they please. They are their own burden. We will laugh at them, but not be troubled in the least by their silly indignation. Fools are, at best, amusing. When we elect to yield to their opinions, we are no longer a people worth preserving.

Or, as I’ve been saying for years, what people really need is insensitivity training…

RELATED:

Jim Goad provides another reason not to go to New York

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesJoe Bob Briggs: “Your Honor, the President Is Acting Like He’s in Charge and We Want It Stopped”“How an ACLU founder became an apologist for Soviet tyranny”Steve Sailer: “It is becoming a cliché that America is undergoing its own version of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution”  

Joe Bob Briggs: “Your Honor, the President Is Acting Like He’s in Charge and We Want It Stopped”

Joe Bob Briggs writes:

You might disagree with what Trump is doing, but the way to change what he’s doing would be to change the law. That’s not how he’s being challenged. There were five—count ’em, five—major lawsuits filed against the president for changing this purely administrative policy. One of them was filed by the University of California on behalf of students there who might get deported if Trump has his way. This is the same University of California that recently complained about spending too much money to ensure the security of speakers on campus.

Speaking of which:

Joe Bob Briggs: “I worked at a newspaper in Dallas where we had tornadoes all the time”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesJoe Bob Briggs: “Your Honor, the President Is Acting Like He’s in Charge and We Want It Stopped”“How an ACLU founder became an apologist for Soviet tyranny”Steve Sailer: “It is becoming a cliché that America is undergoing its own version of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution”  

Joe Bob Briggs: “Your Honor, the President Is Acting Like He’s in Charge and We Want It Stopped”

Joe Bob Briggs writes:

You might disagree with what Trump is doing, but the way to change what he’s doing would be to change the law. That’s not how he’s being challenged. There were five—count ’em, five—major lawsuits filed against the president for changing this purely administrative policy. One of them was filed by the University of California on behalf of students there who might get deported if Trump has his way. This is the same University of California that recently complained about spending too much money to ensure the security of speakers on campus.

 

Joe Bob Briggs at Taki’s!

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“How an ACLU founder became an apologist for Soviet tyranny”Steve Sailer: “It is becoming a cliché that America is undergoing its own version of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution”“Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the [Pentagon Papers] actually said”  

“How an ACLU founder became an apologist for Soviet tyranny”

I suppose Reason Magazine intended that subhead to be ironic, rather than the unintentional set up to the obvious (and unfunny) punchline, “So what’s your point…?”

Anyhow, Matthew Harwood writes:

At the outset of the book, Baldwin admitted that the “bourgeois western ideas of civil liberty” cannot exist under Communism. “In the Communist philosophy, from the days of Karl Marx to the present, there is no room for the ideas of freedom of speech, press and assemblage, or liberty of individual conscience, except as they represent liberties for the working class and the poor peasants,” he wrote. The freedom he sought in the Soviet Union was primarily “economic.” By redefining liberty that way, he felt he could look past the crimes against humanity that he documented in the second half of the book. And by doing so, he became one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent American apologists. (…)

Goldman and her former lover Alexander Berkman had been deported to Russia in 1919, during the anti-radical Palmer Raids. Goldman had been hopeful about the Soviet experiment, but two years in the country convinced her that the Bolsheviks were thugs bent on absolute power. “Those familiar with the real situation in Russia and who are not under the mesmeric influence of the Bolshevik superstition or in the employ of the Communists will bear me out that I have given a true picture,” she recounted in her 1923 book My Disillusionment in Russia. “The rest of the world will learn in due time.”

It was a lesson she couldn’t teach Baldwin. In March 1924, Goldman wrote to the ACLU chief, calling Lenin “the modern inquisitor” and inquiring whether he agreed that “the silence of the American liberals in the face of such horror [is] the most damnable thing.”

It’s easy now to complain about anarchists and vilify Goldman et al., but in those days (and even within living memory), they were staunchly (and thanklessly) anti-communist as well as anti-capitalist.

 

Dawg, is that you…?

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesSteve Sailer: “It is becoming a cliché that America is undergoing its own version of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution”“Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the [Pentagon Papers] actually said”David Cole: The Left-Wing Cannibal Holocaust