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Bret L Bret L is offline
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Default Demography

((The irony here is that I, an openly less than worshipful observer of
The Self-Chosen Pets of Yahweh, am putting up stuff from someone who
1) considers himself an ethnic Jew and 2) really does admire Israel.
Most of you (considering 'you' on RAO is about four people!) are too
stupid to really get it. I don't hate Jews at all, but neither do I
give them a Billy Martin for the havoc they-a small and, because of
their own mischief, dwindling percent of the population-have wreaked
as a group in the US and the Western world generally. We would have no
significant organized left-liberal movement in the US without Jews. No
affirmative action, no gun control, no insane expenditure on education
in the vain hope of making blacks and whites perform equally or women
to be into man stuff and vice versa. We'd have a white Los Angeles
with only a few scattered mestizos here and there and Manhattan would
be just another medium size chunk of East Coast business. Bret.))


Demography: Is It Good For The Jews…Or The Americans?

By Steve Sailer

"As a long-time admirer of Israel, I’ve come to envy especially the freedom of discussion that Israeli culture permits on fundamental questions of demographics.


Consider, for example, the new book 2030: Alternative Futures for the
Jewish People [5 megabyte PDF], which makes for eye-opening reading
for anyone lulled by the pabulum of the American press.

This report is written by the staff of the Jewish People Policy
Planning Institute, a thinktank devoted to maximizing the long-term
welfare of “the Jewish People” (which, by the way, it always
capitalizes in its publications). An intellectually serious effort,
2030 can serve as a template for anybody thinking about improving the
demographic prospects of their own peoples or parties.

For example, GOP leaders could read it and consider how its framework
of analysis and its recommendations could be adapted to the task of
growing more Republicans.

Founded in 2002, the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning
Institute has always been chaired by prominent Jewish-American
diplomats. Its 2030 report was begun under Dennis Ross, chief U.S.
negotiator at Bill Clinton’s failed Camp David 2 peace talks between
the Israelis and the Palestinians in 2000. Ross left JPPPI in 2009 to
run the Obama Administration’s Iran policy. The new chairman is Stuart
Eizenstat, who had been Chief Domestic Policy Advisor to Jimmy Carter
and is now Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues to Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton.

Jewish-American heavyweights who participated in brainstorming
sessions for this book included: Lawrence Summers (the Obama
Administration’s top economic advisor); Elliott Abrams (Bush’s main
man on the Middle East); Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post and
FoxNews); Abe Foxman (Anti-Defamation League); and Alan Dershowitz
(the O.J. Simpson Dream Team).

Despite this American participation, the JPPPI is an offshoot of the
Israeli government’s immigration arm, the Jewish Agency for Israel.
(The JPPPI’s #2 man is a former boss of Israeli military
intelligence). It makes an annual presentation to the Israeli cabinet.
And, because the JPPPI’s publications are not intended for non-Jewish
audiences—this book has not, so far as I know, previously been
reviewed in America outside the Jewish press—it suffers less from the
timidity that emasculates intellectual discourse in America.

For example, the JPPPI’s 2030 observes:

“World Jewry today is at a historical zenith of absolute wealth
creation. …

“There are no data comparing Jewish and non-Jewish levels of
accumulated wealth. One can base the predictions only on non-
scientific analysis such as the prominence of Jews among: Nobel
laureates, lists of rich people and the ‘Russian oligarchs,’ leaders
of financial institutions, entertainment, hi-tech industries, and
political representatives.” [Links added]

Sounds like they’re reading my stuff! (See links.)

2030 continues:

“Based on these observations, one can say that Jewish wealth is higher
than almost any other ethnic group worldwide.”

That’s not the kind of thing you read in the U.S. press every day…

“Barring a financial catastrophe that would impoverish large numbers
of Jews, given Jewish professional selection, levels of education and
global mobility these trends are likely to continue in the next 20
years.”

It’s also informative to discover that the JPPPI views anti-Semitism
at present “as a moral problem and an irritant, but not having any
serious consequences”.

To its great credit, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute has
formally laid out its thinking in a clear fashion. Some may not agree
with it, but everyone can see how they got to their conclusion:
“Therefore, upgrading and increasing the power of the Jewish People,
including the net power of Israel, is an existential necessity”.

For instance, 2030’s “project mission” is to “provide insights into
possible futures of the Jewish People and into the variables shaping
them, with identification of policy instruments that can be used by
Jewish People decision-makers to increase the probability of a
thriving future for the Jewish People …”

It’s widely believed that it’s almost impossible to predict the
future, but that’s because the questions people find most interesting
(e.g., Who will win the tournament?) are precisely those that are most
uncertain (indeed, often the most contrived to be uncertain.)

But much about history is driven by long term factors, such as
demographics. This makes much that is crucially important (will
Switzerland be a nicer place to live than the Congo?) seem too tedious
to think about.

The 2030 project strives to identify the middle ground between the
ephemeral and the permanent.

The JPPPI methodology is to boil the future down to merely A) internal
factors (what it calls “Jewish momentum” -- “quantity, quality, power,
structures and leadership”) and B) external factors: “the well-worn
notion of ‘good for the Jews or bad for the Jews’.”

This generates four alternative futures: “Thriving”, “Drifting”,
“Defending”, and “Nightmare”. The thinktank doesn’t try to predict
which one will happen, but it outlines the various mechanisms pushing
the global Jewish People in each direction.

If in 2030, Jews are self-confidently ethnocentric (have high Jewish
Momentum) and the rest of the world loves them, then, according to the
JPPPI, the Jewish People will be “Thriving”.

The opposite quadrant is called “Nightmare”—where Jews are both
unpopular with outsiders and highly assimilated. Currently, Iran is
the best (or worst) present-day example of this.

The JPPPI classifies the American Jewish community as currently
“Thriving” due to an extremely positive external climate for Jews in
America and moderately high internal Jewish Momentum.

It worries, though, that Jews are so popular with other Americans that
Jewish cohesiveness will be sapped over the next 20 years. A high rate
of intermarriage could drive the American Jewish community into the
Drifting quadrant, where “Demographic shifts including accelerated
assimilation of the Jewish community in the US, and its decline
relative to other groups in the US leads to decline in its political
power”.

(JPPPI’s new chairman Stuart Eizenstat grumbled in 2009: “The growing
Hispanic and Asian populations are not per se antagonistic to Israel,
but they have little connection to the Jewish State”.)

While intermarriage slowly dilutes Jewish identity in America, the
JPPPI notes a counter-trend: that many American Jews are becoming more
“identified and affiliated”, as exemplified by the growth of Jewish
day schools. This means that:

“… the patterns of decline are taking place concurrently with the
increased number of strongly Jewish US senators and members of the
House of Representatives, Jewish studies at colleges and universities
around the US are numerous and highly visible, and in some places it
has become quite ‘in’ to be Jewish in the US, even a status symbol.”

The opposite of “Drifting” is “Defending”—where Jews are besieged by
anti-Semites, yet internally strong as a community. The JPPPI cites
France, where Muslim immigration has led to pogrom-like incidents, as
currently the closest to this alternative future.

The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute seems to prefer
“Defending” to “Drifting”:

“While the Drifting future might be very pleasant and positive for
Jews as individuals, it reflects an overall decline of the Jewish
People as a whole. … a Defending alternative future demonstrates that
even under strenuous external conditions, the Jewish People could
become stronger”.

President Barack Obama had dinner last Tuesday with Likud Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, among others, Dennis Ross, the former
JPPPI chairman who is now Obama’s own special assistant to the
President and senior director for the central (i.e. Middle Eastern)
region. This was part of Obama’s attempt to mend fences with Israel in
time for Democrats to collect big donations for the 2010 elections.

Perhaps the President should read 2030. He might learn something. As
Henry Kissinger noted in the 1970s, Israeli foreign policy often has
more to do with Israeli domestic politics than with Israel’s national
interest as the term is normally conceived. (By the way, Dr. K was one
of the JPPPI’s brainstormers for 2030.)

The JPPPI makes numerous policy recommendations in 2030. For instance,
it’s important to have a Plan B:

“The United States will likely continue to be the most powerful state
for at least the first part of the 21st century but its relative power
will diminish. …

“The rise of Asian states, particularly China and India, may be very
significant from a Jewish perspective since Asian countries do not
share the Biblical religions and traditions, and therefore, have a
radically different view of Judaism and the Jewish People than
Christian and Islamic countries. Also, they do not have significant
Jewish communities. This provides unprecedented opportunities for a
Jewish global grand-strategy, as proposed in a JPPPI paper on
upgrading relations between the Jewish People and China.”

In case you are wondering whom the JPPPI sees as coming out ahead in
the second part of the 21st century, it has prioritized its position
papers on “Enhancing the Standing of Jewish People in Emerging
Superpowers without Biblical Traditions” as China first, then India,
and Japan at a later date.

Other 2030 policy suggestions include increasing the number of Jews in
the world, both by getting more people to strongly self-identify as
Jewish, and by making it more financially feasible for Jews to have
more children.

First recommendation: “Redefining who is in and who is out and how one
joins so that more ‘semi-Jews’ are considered full members of the
Jewish community”. The JPPPI, which is largely secular, is impatient
with the traditional rabbinical definition of who is a Jew used in
Israel in determining who can legally marry.

Still, they don’t want to make purely nominal changes either. They
want people who have, say, a Jewish father and a gentile mother to
actively identify with the Jewish People and Israel.

The self-defeating rabbinical situation in Israel is analogous to that
in the U.S., where people of ambiguous backgrounds are prodded by
government racial preferences to identify as minority. Thus a huge
fraction of immigrants to America come from cultures, such as Latin
America and South Asia, where being viewed as whiter is traditionally
a strong family aspiration. The American system, however, bribes and
browbeats them into claiming the legal and moral advantages of
nonwhiteness.

Not surprisingly, most people who are eligible for affirmative action
wind up favoring the party most enthusiastic about preserving it: the
Democrats.

Another JPPPI recommendation:

“Increasing birth rates: policy instruments can perhaps affect the
statistical equivalent of one-half child per family, which when
multiplied by millions of households over tens of years equals several
millions of people. This requires developing adequate and affordable
infrastructures for early childhood, a flexible policy towards
workingwomen, housing provisions and tax exemptions for two-income
households.”

In other words, policies of affordable family formation—which I’ve
been recommending to the GOP for half a decade, to little effect.

This book’s framework for thinking about demographic trends is of
broader usefulness to Americans. Demography matters in politics.

In the U.S., Democratic analysts are free to discuss in detail their
Party’s progress toward “electing a new people”. For example, Ruy
Teixeira has out a new paper sponsored by the Center for American
Progress Action Fund called Demographic Change and the Future of the
Parties [PDF]. It’s an update of the 2002 book by Teixeira and John
Judis, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which I reviewed here. The
future didn’t arrive on time for the Democrats in the 2002 elections,
but 2008 was back on Teixeira’s track.

In contrast, however, Republicans analysts are never supposed to
consider how to push the demographic tilt back in favor of the GOP.
Any Republican think-tank that did so would be denounced in the
harshest terms. So they don’t.

Thus the major Republican strategic initiative of the last decade, the
Bush-Rove Hispander project, was launched upon—as far as I can tell
after a decade of looking into it—a few back-of-an-envelope
calculations and some conventional-wisdom talking points.

But even before Bush, Republican Administrations had a long history of
making poorly thought-through and thus self-destructive decisions
about demographics. For instance, the Nixon Administration determined
in 1973 to, in effect, extend racial and ethnic preferences, designed
for African Americans with the intention of remedying the effects of
slavery and Jim Crow, to immigrant groups that had never even been in
the U.S. to be discriminated against in the first place.

How’s that working out lately?

Or, what about the Reagan Administration’s 1982 choice to switch Asian
Indian immigrants from Caucasian to Asian so they would be eligible
for minority business benefits?

What could make more sense for the GOP’s future than encouraging
immigrant businessmen to become financially dependent upon liberal
politicians?

Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out with only modest exaggeration in
Iolanthe:

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

The problem for Republicans is that public policies, which they either
support or are too stupid/ cowardly to oppose, have the inexorable
demographic consequence of producing relatively fewer Republicans—or,
to put it another way, fewer self-identified members of what might be
termed “the American people”.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100712_demography.htm
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Clyde Slick Clyde Slick is offline
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On Jul 14, 6:29*am, Bret L wrote:
.. I don't hate Jews at all, but neither do I
give them a Billy Martin for the havoc they-a small and, because of
their own mischief, dwindling percent of the population-have wreaked
as a group in the US and the Western world generally. We would have no
significant organized left-liberal movement in the US without Jews. No
affirmative action, no gun control, no insane expenditure on education
in the vain hope of making blacks and whites perform equally or women
to be into man stuff and vice versa. We'd have a white Los Angeles
with only a few scattered mestizos here and there and Manhattan would
be just another medium size chunk of East Coast business. Bret.))




No Hollywood, no Marilyn Monroe, no come stains on your trousers.
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Bret L Bret L is offline
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On Jul 14, 7:32*am, Clyde Slick wrote:
On Jul 14, 6:29*am, Bret L wrote:
. I don't hate Jews at all, but neither do I

give them a Billy Martin for the havoc they-a small and, because of
their own mischief, dwindling percent of the population-have wreaked
as a group in the US and the Western world generally. We would have no
significant organized left-liberal movement in the US without Jews. No
affirmative action, no gun control, no insane expenditure on education
in the vain hope of making blacks and whites perform equally or women
to be into man stuff and vice versa. We'd have a white Los Angeles
with only a few scattered mestizos here and there and Manhattan would
be just another medium size chunk of East Coast business. Bret.))


No Hollywood, no Marilyn Monroe, no come stains on your trousers.


She might still be alive, although I'd never have heard of her.

The Jews ARE really good at film making, songwriting, and many other
things. Where have I denied this?

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Shhhh!!!! I'm Listening to Reason! Shhhh!!!! I'm Listening to Reason! is offline
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On Jul 14, 4:30*pm, Bret L wrote:

*The Jews ARE really good at film making, songwriting, and many other
things. Where have I denied this?


And this is how you've earned your reputation for being a dimwit.

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