From: ibshambat@gmail.com   
      
   Whenever a Jewish person does something wrong, someone jumps in to say that   
   Jews are bad.   
      
   By that standard Americans are bad because Ted Bundy was an American.   
      
   Are there Jewish people who are bad? Of course there are. But that does not   
   mean either that all Jews are bad or that all bad people are Jews. I am not   
   Harvey Weinstein any more than you are Ted Bundy. I refuse to be blamed for   
   actions of someone whom I    
   don’t know and over whom I had no influence.   
      
   Now to be fair we see wrong things from the other side as well. There is a   
   claim for example that saying anything about social groups is racism. That is   
   completely wrong. Racism is discrimination based on race. I don’t   
   discriminate based on race; I    
   discriminate based on culture. People are not in control of their race. They   
   are in control of cultures that they develop.   
      
   Are there differences in individuals within cultures? Of course there are. But   
   there are also differences between cultures. The culture of San Francisco is   
   very different from the culture of Saudi Arabia. Failing to see such things is   
   not enlightenment.    
   It is blindness.   
      
   Indeed in these people we see what very much appears to be an artificial   
   blindness. And artificial blindness and bigotry feed into each other. A   
   bigoted person will notice a social phenomenon and propose for it a wrong,   
   bigoted reason; the academic would    
   say “no that is a stereotype” or “no that is a generalization,” the   
   bigoted person will look again and say “no this is definitely going on,”   
   so he will decide that the academic is full of crap and will go on with his   
   wrong, bigoted    
   explanation. The only way to actually defeat bigotry is to find correct   
   reasons for social phenomena, that beget correct stereotypes but not correct   
   explanations. Neither bigotry nor artificial blindness are right. What is   
   right is finding actual reasons    
   for such things.   
      
   Among the Jews themselves, there are different cultures. The Orthodox act like   
   Muslims; the Conservatives act like mainstream Americans; and the Reform act   
   like the French. Neither is responsible for the actions of the other. Nor are   
   they responsible for    
   the crucifixion of Jesus. That was 2000 years ago, and the people who were a   
   part of it have long been dead. If the claim is that the sins of fathers are   
   visited on the sons, that would mean that Americans should suffer because they   
   had the slave trade    
   and that the Germans should suffer because there was Nazism. And if these   
   people are to be exonerated over the sins of their ancestors, then so must be   
   the Jews.   
      
   So we have bigotry on one side and artificial blindness on the other. Both are   
   wrong. And the correct solution is finding real reasons for social phenomena,   
   and in so doing conclusively defeating bigotry.   
      
   Ilya Shambat   
   https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatthought   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)