Archives for 2019

Bret Stephens, last seen passive aggressively picking a fight by calling someone who is Jewish an anti-Semite and, like someone named Karen, demanding to see that person’s manager (contacting the provost of  the university of the professor who called him out on his stupidity), has written something VERY STUPID again! This is what we call a day ending in day.

It isn’t just that Stephens professionally lived down to his overprivileged mediocrity again, it’s that by doing so he both reinforced an anti-Semitic stereotype and did so by citing really bad research conducted by highly credentialed non subject matter experts that promotes racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. Joshua Benton does the debunking for us:

Bret Stephens cites a Henry Harpending paper in his "Jewish genius" column https://t.co/LQpug2ouKx

Here's an @nytopinion piece from *just last year* noting Henry Harpending was a white supremacist nut about this stuff https://t.co/0b5mBCwP0c pic.twitter.com/k3wY0I8EG6

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019

Cochran describes homosexuality as brain damage — but, hey, only "limited and focused" brain damage.

He says his theory is the only theory that "makes good evolutionary sense" that has ever been proposed. pic.twitter.com/1Qf1F5sQW3

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019

If you're wondering what in Cochran's educational background prepares him to speculate on Jewish IQs and gay viruses, the answer's "not much."

He has a PhD — in physics. He works in optics. But hey, "in recent years he has become interested in modern biology." pic.twitter.com/B54Slq7i0f

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019

Finally, just because I had the tab open, old man Harpending said women have one-night stands with Chads so they can get more shoes, because SCIENCE https://t.co/UyEKlg7aB7 pic.twitter.com/iRPUJajiKb

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019

I know I keep writing this here, and, I’m sure, I’m going to have to keep writing it, but Jews are not a distinct ethno-national group. Jews belong to a distinct primary religion that minimizes, and has minimized for almost 2,000 years as a survival strategy, conversion. As a result, Jews as a minority religious group, have a very distinct religious culture. And this religious culture also has several very distinct sub-cultures. One thing that the religious culture and sub-cultures of Jews and Judaism places an emphasis on is education and study. For the most devout this is first and foremost the study of Torah – Jewish Law as delineated in the 613 commandments in the Five Books of Moses/Pentateuch. For less devout Jews, this emphasis on education and study can be far more varied, which is why you will see Jewish Americans over represented in a number of fields like academia, law, and medicine. All fields and disciplines that require significant study and education.

Jewish Americans are overrepresented in these areas not because of any genetic differences. Other than among a small subset of Jews, specifically those who can document descent from the priestly religious caste known as kohanim (priests), there aren’t any real genetic differences between Jews who come from Europe (Ashkenazi Jews) and other Europeans, Jews who trace their descent from the Iberian Peninsula* (Sephardi Jews), Middle Eastern/Arab Jews (Mizrahi) Jews, Southeast Asian Jews, and Asian Jews from other Europeans, Spanish and Portuguese people, other Middle Easterners and Arabs, and other Southeast Asians, and Asians. There are three exceptions. All Jews share some genetic markers in common with Middle Eastern and southeast Mediterranean populations such as the Palestinians**, other Levantines like the Druze***, and Cypriots****. Given that the religion originated among a tribal people in the Levant, this makes perfect sense. The second is among the Ethiopian Jews, known in Ethiopia as Falasha and among themselves as the Beta Israel have some unique genetic markers most likely tied to the communities ultimate origins outside of Ethiopia followed by over a millennia worth of intermarriage with the local population. The third is among Jews of European descent whose ancestors, as a result of periods of forced isolation in shtetls and ghettos resulting from anti-Semitism, developed a propensity to the genetic disorder known as Tay-Sachs.

That’s it. Jews, like Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, Jains – religions that all have specific cultures and sub-cultures, as well as agnostics, and atheists, which also have specific cultures and sub-cultures, aren’t any smarter or any dumber than anyone else. And the same goes when comparing across the religion that is Judaism to the ethno-nationalities of parts of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Central, Southeast, and East Asia, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. There are smart Jews, there are stupid Jews, there are average Jews, there are good Jews, there are bad Jews, there are socially aware and responsible Jews and there are Jews who are racists and bigots and homophobes. Just as there are within every other religion. Whether they are primary religions like Judaism and Hinduism or secondary religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

It’s pretty obvious what type of person, let alone Jew, Brett Stephens is.

Open thread.

(I apologize if I managed to leave your religion of choice off my list above.)

* There are some theories that the Palestinians are the descendants of some of the Judaeans who did not go into exile after the destruction of the 2nd Temple by the Romans. Rather they stayed in Roman occupied and administered Philistia (Palestine) and, over time, became Christian as the Roman Empire became Christian. Then, with the rise of Islam, the majority of them became Muslim. This would make perfect sense given what we know about the patterns of religious conversations in the Levant, Asia Minor, the trans-Caucuses, and southern and southeastern Europe with the spread of Christianity and then Islam through these regions.

** Given that there is very little publicly known, let alone documented, about the Druze and their religion as they keep their ritual life hidden from non-Druze and will often claim to not be Druze at all when dealing with other Druze, but Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Jewish, Christian, and/or Muslim – it is not surprising that there would be some common heritage within the Levant. I know two Druze, or, rather, two people I think are Druze, but I can’t prove it and I’m not going to pester them about it.

*** There is speculation, based on historical records, that at least one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the Tribe of Dan, was actually a Greek speaking sea faring people originally known as the Danutu. This tribe was absorbed into the Israelite kinship and cultic community. Interestingly, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia claim partial descent from the Tribe of Dan.

Bret Stephens Was Never a Bedbug, Just an Overprivileged, Mediocre AssholePost + Comments (124)