Vanity Fair's December issue has a profile of the Winkelvosses, the twins who claim Mark Zuckerberg ripped off their idea for facebook and who were caricatured as WASPs who rule Harvard in the movie The Social Network.
The Vanity Fair piece by Dana Vachon goes on to the same social terrain, though amazingly it does not identify Zuckerberg as Jewish (or Larry Summers, Zuckerberg's strenuous advocate, as Jewish). It does identify Zuckerberg as a "lifelong elite," which is a worthy amendment to the Jewish image in America today.
The article repeatedly identifies the Winkelvosses as members of the old elite. Their story, Vachon writes, has touched on the American fascination with "Wasp culture." Later there is a heading called "Late American Nobility." They are an "object of cultural wonder." Certainly they were to Mark Zuckerberg. Vachon:
They [the twins] made sure to show me the profile of “Cameron Winklevoss” on ConnectU—the name of their briefly also-ran Facebook competitor—which the undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg is reported to have created as a mockery after hacking his way into the site. (Zuckerberg declined to comment.) “Languages: WASP-y,” the profile read. “Ethnicity: Better than you,” “Hair color: Aryan Blond.”
“Where’s the outrage?” Cameron asked. “Can you imagine if we did this to him?”
It’s true—if the Winklevosses had done the equivalent to Zuckerberg, it would have been construed as a hate crime, not collegiate folly. Groups who have suffered historically get cultural protections not afforded those who have presided over historical suffering: A well-studied impression of an inbred British aristocrat may win you friends at a cocktail party. An equally evocative napalmed Cambodian peasant probably won’t. And yet the Winklevosses descend from technophobic Pennsylvania hunchbacks. And Mark Zuckerberg is a product of Westchester, Exeter, and Harvard, a lifelong elite.
“And you can go to, like, airport security?” interrupted Tyler. “People who are Muslim should be allowed to be security guards—right? There’s a difference between being a fundamentalist and being al-Qaeda and being Muslim. It’s absurd to think otherwise. But certain people have not even reached that standard of thinking with regards to us.”
But the Vanity Fair writer can make race-based jokes at the Winkelvosses' expense: "a never-had and yet somehow-lost fortune which the Winklevosses’ chromosomes demanded they fight for." Not sure what their chromosomes have to do with it.
A lot of people aren’t willing to call bias when they see it. People structure their criticism so that they themselves come out looking good, as opposed to being a fair, equal-opportunity critic.
For example, I recently read about how horribly Koreans suffered under Japanese occupation during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet South Korea (bracketing the north here–most of its problems stem from communism) is doing fantastic. Of course, whenever any countries or people groups who experienced western colonialism happen to do poorly (socioeconomically) despite lengthy periods of self rule, it’s still all Europeans’ fault. Western crimes committed in the past mean that from here on out all of their problems are all our fault.
I’d love to check the tax returns of left-liberals who play this game. I’d bet a lot they’re personally complete misers. But when it comes to collective giving (or blaming their own society), you won’t find a more “generous” group of people anywhere.
How many poor scholars have become tenured for just this reason? How many of them have padded 401-Ks all the while proclaiming their allegiance with the poverty-stricken people of the world?
Sacrifice.
By the way, just to clarify, I was generalizing about Phil’s article above. In other words, generalizing from that specific example to the entire set of examples of people not criticizing in an equal-opportunity way. I don’t believe that the left-liberals who play games (the people I mentioned above in paragraph three) are led by any particular group–I’m talking about ALL of them, regardless of their ethnicity/religion/background, etc.
And, yes, it pretty much goes without saying that a lot of people on the right aren’t the type to sacrifice personally, either. Didn’t bring that up because it’s pretty obvious!
To be fair, the the Winklevii mentioned giving up “not being a part of their DNA” – so I think that is where the author gets the “chromosone” flourish…..
I have to say, I just read the article, pretty carefully, and am disgusted/distressed at the tone, theme and general point of it.
For starters, I don’t have, and have never had a facebook page.
One reason is that I genuinely enjoy organic human interaction – i know, fucking radical idea- and facebook, no matter what it’s value in “keeping people connected,” is fundamentally inorganic.
The other reason, and I think this has mattered to me more than I have recognized, is the guy who created it. Or who stole the idea from the Winklevii etc. etc. …..
Zuckerberg, much like Gates, Jobs, Paul Allen etc., seems to be a deeply anti-social character. I think people focus on his arrogance, but I would say he is just socially inept. And I want to use this guy’s “social” software? It’s completely counter-intuitive. Facebook is a world where you can “be social” without being social. This is a HUGE WIN for guys like Zuckerberg – they have totally evened the playing field. A “cool” facebook page, with lots of interesting colorful “friends,” links to trendy websites or “cool happenings” in your area can turn a in-person social nightmare into a hip cat, without doing anything.
“Without doing anything” is EXACTLY what the author of this article, and guys like Zuckerberg, along with the real powers who are enthralled with him, want reinforced. The Winklevii’s real crime here is that they ARE DOING SOMETHING. That is so uncool. So 20th century. Even in the face of public scorn, they carry on. They actually believe in shit. This is just radically opposed to the world view of Zuckerberg and many other “techno giants.”
By mocking the Winklevii – the author conversely makes Zuckerberg the ideal. So, on the one hand, we have two physically and mentally strong young men, who think and use their bodies daily. They seem to be against special or protected classes of people. They seem to be capable of introspection and are comfortable in out of the ordinary social settings. And, on the other, we have the quintessential anti-social computer whiz. A relative shut in with little to no social grace, who spent his formative years on a computer, detached from society and apparently hateful of blue bloods – though I would say what Zuckerberg hated was society based on social ability. This is what the Winklevii represent. In this “either/or” scenario, who you gonna pick? I gotta take the Winklevii, all day. I know it sounds stupid, but they have humanity on their side, whereas I think Zuckerberg has a disdainful view of humanity, and would be happy for it to exist only electronically, in isolation.
I have so much more to say on this….but, I’ll stop for now.
“the Winklevii”
Not to pick on you Dan, as I understand you are not responsible for it, but I must say that I’ve found this term to be very demeaning. It would be one thing if it were clever in some way, but it is an obvious and lame faux-Latinate neologism.
ur right, i meant not to demean.
No worries, Dan. I was just venting a bit.
“what Zuckerberg hated was society based on social ability”
From I read of him that appeared to be his motivation in screwing the group, more than any idea it would be worth a lot of money.
Yeah, well, the Zuckerbaby has lightyears of competition coming his way and he knows it. And from his own tribe too.
Enter what Eben Moglen started on February 5, 2010: ( But since none of you are going to listen to this great seminal 45-minute speech that scared the bejeesus out of Z, which is here link to freedomboxfndn.mirocommunity.org
, and has started the next great revolution worldwide in keeping with Tahrir and #OWS from the tech side, listen to this 15-minute NYC talk last June to get a flavor. In the 45-minute talk, Moglen—visionary guru to 18-85 year old geeks—says that Zuckerberg “richly deserves bankruptcy.”)
Moglen has a PhD in History from Yale in addition to his other degrees and peppers his talks with the arc of history that makes him fascinating to listen to, and easy.
His 15-minutes in NYC, June 2011.
link to freedomboxfndn.mirocommunity.org
You’ll get it even if you’re a luddite.
Now watch a guy from Moglen’s new foundation explain what they mean…Luddites welcome.
link to dsn-test.com
The three groups to come out of this so far, which are mentioned in the comic, as a result of what Moglen is doing worldwide are: Friendica, BuddyCloud, and Diaspora*.
The NYU kids who started Diaspora* were in the audience the night of February 5, 2010 and went nutz. (So did Zuckerberg when he realized what Moglen was saying, the clout Moglen has, the smarts he has. Z. even invested in Diaspora* via Kickstarter.) But Diaspora* is still for geeks. It’s not Apple-ready, so to speak.
BuddyCloud is more ready for primetime and it’s tied into the Icelandic media initiative to provide bulletproof—in Iceland—legal protection for journalists, bloggers, and whistleblowers worldwide.
As you will hear in Moglen’s 15-minute talk (and his other talks), privacy and control over our privacy technologically provides the grist for our own development as conscious souls, and is the seed of political revolution that thwarts tyrannical power and government intervention.
I don’t care if you’re 80 years and reading this, listen to his 15-minute talk (the 45-minute one is even more entertaining) and watch the comic. The little FreedomBox server the size of your phone charger will be in our hands within a year. And Eben wrote me that he promises it will be as easy to use as an iPod. That’s what they’re aiming for. For $25-$99.
We’ll be able to send our little servers to an address in Iceland, and the MoFos won’t be able to touch it. (Another way this works is that as long as you can plug it in somewhere—any place that has electricity—you’ll be able to get around governments shutting the internet down, like in Egypt at one point last Feb.)
The FreedomBox Foundation is here:
link to freedomboxfoundation.org
MRW- Freedom is dependency on a device called FreedomBox? I listened to the 15 minute video and something about it and Eben Moglon didn’t quite sit well. I can’t put my finger on it but I would be very cautious about putting too much faith in a miracle cure for technological vulnerability.
Fascinating!
No, Keith, you don’t get it. You would if you listened to the longer talk, but yes, you are completely misunderstanding what he is talking about.
Oh, Keith, and BTW, “but I would be very cautious about putting too much faith in a miracle cure for technological vulnerability.”
You have no idea who Moglen is. You wouldn’t be able to do email today without him, because he invented it when he was 16. You wouldn’t be able to do online banking and Apple wouldn’t be able to put its UI on Linux because Moglen controls the GNU Open Source License globally with Richard Stallman; they won’t let anyone make anything with their open source software, which they will give you for free, without you supplying the source code, which you are free to alter, to everyone that uses your product. That’s why Apple went to a different version of UNIX.
Moglen and Stallman (MIT) are the reason why there is open source software. PERIOD.
What Moglen is saying is that the software HAS ALREADY BEEN CREATED. It’s bullet-proof and it operates in every bank, on every airplane, and in every military installation and weapon, and the NSA, and China/Russia/EU right now.
In 2009, Marvell invented the Plug Computer for $99. You plug it into the wall, and it can become a server. Your server. The price will come down to $25, which puts it in the price range of 2/3 of the world.
Moglen isn’t doing anything with the hardware. He’s working with 200,000 developers worldwide right now, right this minute, to put his software FOR FREE on those plugs, called “wall-wart computers.”
With Moglen’s software in a Marvell box, you can subvert the huge commercial databases, the US government, all governments, the CIA-to-NSA agencies.
And you can control your own world.
This isn’t pie-in-the-sky. This isn’t make-belief. This isn’t a miracle cure. The software parts have been invented for the past 25 years.
Marvell’s 2009 invention made this possible.
Google all this. I’m not making this up.
I’m just saying Mark Zuckerberg got diarrhea when Moglen came out with this. And for good reason.
Moglen does all this stuff for free, including legally representing open source developers. He makes his money teaching. (He could have been a trillionaire by now.)
MRW- “You have no idea who Moglen is. You wouldn’t be able to do email today without him, because he invented it when he was 16.”
Lordy, lordy, another Jewish computer “genius” to save us from ourselves! And a lawyer to boot! If he ain’t the Messiah who is? Maybe so. I will eventually look at the longer video. Until then, who can doubt Google’s revealed truth? I guess that I am just an old curmudgeon. I had always thought that the internet was developed by the US military. I’m surprised that your guru is still around. If he was that big a threat to elite power, I would have thought that he would have disappeared long ago. But, you’re right, I don’t know. Perhaps when I see the longer video I’ll be converted.
Keith, I was going to edit this last night right after I wrote the description of Moglen’s importance in the geek world when my guest tripped and wine fell all over my laptop. Kaput.
So I’m on my iPad now. (THIS NEW DESIGN IS SPECTACULAR ON AN IPAD!)
Moglen’s point is that you cannot just use technology and the web. He says that the developers missed the boat 20 years ago. They should have been developing it ethically and morally. And that’s what he’s trying to change now. So he is re-educating all the people he inspired initially.
Lordy, lordy, another Jewish computer “genius” to save us from ourselves!
i’m impressed and i don’t care what ethnicity he is either. i like his ideas.
“Moglen’s importance in the geek world when my guest tripped and wine fell all over my laptop.”
Maybe your guest deserves a high place in the geek world. I’d certainly call him a Prince of Klutzes!
Keith, after you watch the longer video, then watch the Q&A. Rather, listen to it. Click on it while you’re doing something meaningless. But you can only find it if you do a google search for the title, Moglen, NYC Internet Society, February 2010.
Keith, you assume he’s Jewish. The original talk (February, 2010 “Freedom in the Cloud”) was on a Friday night and he was joking about not having a date.
Thanks MRW!! great vids, watched em both!
MRW, i watched the video and went to the cartoon. i watched the cartoon and then visited diaspora. then visited the blog. and that is how i first heard of Ilya Zhitomirskiy. then i googled his name to find out how he died so young and it said he committed suicide. i find that very hard to believe.
I don’t believe that either, annie. When it first came out, I read that it was not suicide. But I don’t know. Either way, what a horror for the parents.
yeah mrw, he died less than two weeks ago. a horror for all his friends and colleagues too. he was obviously extremely bright. it said he got the idea for his anti facebook site after attending a lecture with Moglen. it doesn’t seem like this kind of venture can be stopped because the train is already out of the station. i have never opened a facebook account for the very reasons he talks about. it is just not in my nature to give corporations access to my personal data even tho if someone wanted to find out i am sure they could.
Annie, he was also 21 years old. Can you imagine the Thanksgiving his parents are having? Ohhhh god.
the Winklevii mentioned giving up “not being a part of their DNA”
yeah, but author interviewed them for a few days and chose to make a theme of it running throughout the article, plus invoking the wasp thing right up front and continuing the theme throughout, but only when it came to the twins. yet nothing NOTHING even comparable wrt zuckerberg being jewish. not a peep. the only reference or even hint of reference to jewishness was in the part phil blockquoted here: Groups who have suffered historically . huh? who? this is code. why in an article where time and again stressing on the twins ‘wasp’ culture it doesn’t occur to the writer to even delve in there for zuckerberg? afraid perhaps?
plus it is invoking a meme ‘jewish’ equal ‘suffer’ when in fact zuckerberg came from a long line of elite (unlike the twins whose grandfather was a coal miner). and zuckerberg is the morally challenged here. he was the one who ripped off the twins and made that insulting bio of them.
weird.
and one more thing. the author made no reference to anything either of the twins said that could be remotely construed as racist, so why the reference to Tom Buchanan? just for the hell of it?
“what Zuckerberg hated was society based on social ability”
I think that’s a cop-out. The WASP society of the 50s is since long gone. Zuckerman was born into a whole different America that began way before his birth.
The Winkelvosses are really a parody of WASPs, or a caricature.
But the fact is that they essentially had created Facebook from scratch and he came in at the very end and stole the whole thing, hacked their site and delayed it so he could take all the praise himself.
The sole difference here is that Zuckerberg is a sociopath while those two guys are honest, if naive, people. And Zuckerberg is a racist too, evidenced by his racial slurs.
To somehow give him respite by claiming that he was using his attacks against them as a ‘proxy’ for somekind of unfair society which doesn’t even exist anymore, and was abolished before his birth(at least for Jews), is, as I said, a cop-out.
In my view, he’s a racist. A lot of very smart, accomplished people throughout the world history have been racist. European history is replete with them, and even beside obvious cases as Wagner.
Zuckerberg just proves that some things don’t fundamentally change, but merely the face that is saying it at times changes. These twins never bullied him, never showed any hostility.
And the whole point of Phil’s piece was how society had changed. It now works in Zuckerberg’s favour and denies justice to WASPs, which does mean that society in a way still is based on social achievement(or your genes), because the Zuck was protected by the dean of Harvard in a ferocious manner while these WASP twins get brutalized in the Zuckerberg-sympathetic media.
I do tech. What Zuckerberg did — as per “I am going to f-ck them in the ear” — is an outrage in my little world. You don’t take someone else’s code and screw them with it. A complete breach of trust. Outrageous. In some countries he’d be swimming with fish right now.
Z’s attitude seems to be: I did it ’cause I could. Come get me.
Sounds a little bit like eee.
What a class act the “new elite” are, yes? Society seems well-poised for a new golden age.
Not.
-N49.
“because the Zuck was protected by the dean of Harvard in a ferocious manner while these WASP twins get brutalized in the Zuckerberg-sympathetic media.”
Don’t get me started on that pig Summers. He’s the quintessential Jewish bigot, equal to the worse of the Stormfront gang.
Any time Summers comments on anything having to do with Jews the anti gentile venom literally drips from his mouth.
“Summers talked about the twins at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference on Wednesday, saying, “One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”
Summer is also a shining example of the trash that oversees America these …not a grain of ethnics.
“Harvard and Andrei Shleifer, a close friend and protege of Summers,
controversially paid $28.5 million to settle a lawsuit by the U.S.
government over the conflict of interest Shleifer had while advising
Russia’s privatisation program. The US government had sued Shleifer under the False Claims Act, as he bought Russian stocks while designing the country’s privatisation. In 2004, a federal judge ruled that while Harvard had violated the contract, Shleifer and his associate alone were liable for treble damages.
In June 2005, Harvard and Shleifer announced that they had reached a
tentative settlement with the US government. In August, Harvard, Shleifer and the Department of Justice reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million dollars worth of damages.
Because Harvard paid almost all of the damages and allowed Shleifer to
retain his faculty position, the settlement provoked allegations of
favoritism on Summers. His continued support for Shleifer strengthened Summers’s unpopularity with other professors:
“I’ve been a member of this Faculty for over 45 years, and I am no longer
easily shocked,” is how Frederick H. Abernathy, the McKay professor of
mechanical engineering, began his biting comments about the Shleifer case at Tuesday’s fiery Faculty meeting. But, Abernathy continued, “I was deeply shocked and disappointed by the actions of this University” in the Shleifer affair.
I tell you what, I think people are getting fed up with this one way racist
attitude of the identity Jews. Andrew Sullivan, the last person you would suspect of losing his cool on this, slammed Summers by featuring a picture of him that was so stereotypical Jewish I can’t believe he did it by accident. You would have to search long and hard to find a picture of Summers or any Jewish figure in Obama’s adm as stereotypical of old Jewish shylock as this. I don’t think is was an accident I think Sullivan was just fed up and let it rip.
link to santitafarella.wordpress.com
American,
Download this. Read page 41. In fact, read the whole book. You can buy the book, but this guy makes it free online. His economic theory, MMT, is behind everything that Dr. William, or Bill, Black thinks. (Kathleen, take note.)
link to moslereconomics.com
This was an interesting case and the biggest thing anyone can learn from it is even if you are a college student, don’t depend on gentlemen’s agreements as WASP tend to do, and get it in writting. If you have an idea and hire others to help you, have employment contracts or witten agreements even you are operating out of a college dorm room.
The facts of the case were the twins and another student, Divya Narendra, started a social networking project. Thru the course of developing it, they had several people come and go and Zuckerman came in on the later stage when he was hired or brought in to help finish the source code for the site. Zuckerman then took the source code and the social network idea and promoted it as Facebook.
They claim they would have gotten the whole ball of wax if an e mail message Zucherman sent to a friend while working with the twins on the code had been avavilable. But the e mail leaked to Business Insider wasn’t known at the time.
““Yea i’m going to fuck them,” the undergraduate Zuckerberg had I.M.’d a friend while ostensibly working with the Winklevosses, explaining his intention to delay their planned social network and so benefit his own pre-natal Facebook. “Probably in the ear.”
If I were the twins I’d take the 200 million I got and sell off the portion received in stock and go at Zuckerman and facebook a different way…he’s a guy with severe ‘I love to screw people” social problems and is bound to screw himself and Facebook…it has muptiple dozen lawsuits filed against every month. With that many complaints some new version is gonna replace sooner or later. And with Zuckerman’s attitude of telling his users to go fuck themselves and fighting them instead of correcting Facebook’s privacy faults, among others, means one of those lawsuit is gonna hit the lottery eventually.
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that history. Will only have time to read tthe VF thing tomorrow.
I once asked a serious WASP poobah, we’re talking old, really old money, what the genesis of Jew hatred was among the WASPS. He didn’t skip a beat.
I got the most amazing answer. He said that when the stock market started in the late 1700s on what became Wall Street, they all used to meet at Fraunces tavern or thereabouts, forgot exactly where, and do their trades on a handshake. Your word was your bond, even if you lost money subsequently. He said that Jews were definitely a part of that—these were the great Sephardic families (Cardozo, Touro, etc) who came up from the Dutch Antilles that started the plantations and the Cotton Exchange and who carried with them a Spanish nobleman’s sense of honor about the importance of their word—and everything was OK until the Industrial Revolution when they started getting middle class European Jews who came to NYC and if they lost money in their trades, they wouldn’t honor their contract (Kol Nidre and all that). So Jews were excluded from trades as a result. He said that’s how it started. The action became the culture, and they were excluded from their clubs over time as well, and the taboo against Jews was passed on from parent to kid.
Hmm… Somehow I don’t think this WASP vs. Jews history will be in Simon Schama’s ~ up and coming “The History Of The Jews”
lol, you don’t say!
Sand and annie,
Don’t forget that the first Jewish congregation created in the US was around 1650 (or so), and the first synagogue was built around the corner from the current Wall Street Stock Exchange in the early 1700s, near Exchange Place today, and about a block and a half from Fraunces Tavern, where President George Washington ran the government from for three years after he was elected (approx 1789-1791) until the White House was completed in his fourth year. If you want to see how short they were then, go have a drink at Fraunces Tavern today, if they haven’t closed it. (I drank my lunch there everyday for three years in the biggest red wine glasses I’ve ever had my mitts around. They’d barely changed the place since the start of the Union, and they had brass plaques galore tucked away in places telling you the story.)
Now that same synagogue, which is also called The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, is on the corner of 70th and CPW on the Upper West Side.
Sand, I’m sure the history book you’re referring to is only going to cover the Ashkenazi tradition. This is New York history.
And just like most white-bread Americans don’t know this country was Spanish for 50 years longer than it was ever English, I’m sure the Ashkenazi population here have no clue about their Sephardic heritage on this soil; hence, the prominence of the Holocaust story.
……………………………
I had to run earlier when I posted the WASP story above., but another thing he told me was that it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (when the complaints first started) and everything to do with money. The option was to sue to get a contract honored, which ate into your profits, and no one wanted to bother spending their trading days in court. So they shunned them, and that included the Sephardic mandarins who looked upon these uncouth European Jews with contempt and disdain.
The family of the guy I talked to was from a family that the WSJ called the sixth richest family in North America (not just the US) and his family had had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange from inception, at the point of our conversation.
Seriously? You human rIghts activists amaze me.
That’s it, barring Jews from Wall Street Princeton and White Shoe firms was just plain logical then. Would you stand for this about any other group, a rationalization for prejudice? No, and good thing.
PS I can’t stand reflexive WASP bashing either, which is barely a step above using the term white trash and revealing of the same thing.
MRW
You have a ton of assumptions that you proceed with as if they are fact.
I am pretty sure the (partially Sephardic) Simon Schama is going to talk about the Sephardim if he writes about Jews in America. Unless his DNA or the Mossad gets to him, of course!
Jews who read history and even those who were dragged to a museum once know all about the Sephardic heritage of America and New York. Let alone one of the more interesting historians writing.
Step outside of the echo chamber sometimes. The air is fresh.
tokyo, i won’t speak for anyone else, as i’m not qualified, but the argument is a bit more nuanced than that. i don’t like the term, but the ‘WASP elite’ of the time was operating under a set of rules, and a competing group, in this case, jews, wished to play the game, but insisted that another set of rules should be applied. or so the argument goes. the resultant conflict was not entirely based on ‘prejudice’ as you put it, although anti-semitism certainly did exist.
by way of example, weiss posted before on the marx brothers attempt at gaining entry into WASPish social circles, and the jist of the post, if i remember correctly, was that there was an interest in the association, but that the marx brothers were complete pigs from the perspective of WASPish etiquette. harpo dashing around, dangling his prick in the cob salad and goosing the hostess, that was primarily the rub, not their jewishness.
as far as i am concerned, it boils down to this: if the WASP elite was intent on keeping jews or catholics, or whomever, out of harvard or off wall street, they likely could have done so. but they didn’t. there was a post-war meritocracy that allowed advancement for all, possibly partly due to immigration patterns, partly to do with the competition with the Soviets, partly to do with the reliance on women and racial minorities as part of the military mobilization in WWII, etc. in my opinion, a meritocracy no longer exists, but it did for a half a century or so for a variety of reasons.
and now if you’ll excuse me, i have to go stuff a bird.
They barred them tokyobk , not on the basis of “simply being Jews” but because they were sleezy characters that couldn’t be trusted to keep their word or obligations. If you read MRW’s total comment there were other Jews that were accepted because they did honor their word.
If you read MRW’s total comment there were other Jews that were accepted because they did honor their word.
Before 1776, they US Sephardic Jews were trading cotton with the Europeans. They started the Cotton Exchange. (Sephardic Jews, like Touro, controlled the slave trade, which means that either Malcolm X or Farrkhan was right, BTW.) The Sephardic Jews were rich and powerful. They helped write the defining documents that created this country. The reason why no one knows this is because they refuse to accept the Spanish heritage of this country. The majority of Spaniards who arrive here initially were Sephardic Jews. The guy who settled St. Augustine in 1514 in Florida was Juan Ponce de Leon. He was a Jew, fercrissake.
In the universe of Sephardic Jews, your word was your bond in trade. Not so the Ashkenazy. They lived by the Kol Nidre and they were used to ghettoizing themselves. The Ashkenazi have since created this myth that they are the nobility among the Jews. But that does not bear out historically.
Tokyobk,
Assumption?
Hardly.
I suggest you spend some time on this site, spend some money on the DVDs, and educate yourself:
link to demarchena.org
Better yet: call the owner of the site. She will take you down in three nanoseconds. This is one tough cookie who has done her homework.
“Your word was your bond, even if you lost money subsequently.”
Yea, that’s how it use to be. The WASP weren ‘t all pargons of virtue by any means, but they were a hell of sight better than the trash that passes for the establishment today.
Interesting, the WASPs and the Sephardic Jews were apiece over 225 years ago. READ THE GODDAM HISTORY. But because the Ashkenazi took over everything in the last 100 years, most Jews who are here, and who were as uneducated as most of the other rednecks who think they determine this country, we have a false view.
american, they even got ripped off in the settlement
well, i don’t know if it’s their chromosomes alone demanding it, but i sure would. and then the writers framing here:
so demeaning. as if it is the twins fault they are identical and handsome.
I have to say Vachon’s writing style gives me a headache.
It’s like he puts Dominick Dunne, Tom Wolfe, Capote and Fitzgerald all in a blender and spews it out as some kind of new style.
Reminded me of someone swatting flies…in no particular order.
agreed. a good example though, of how totally fcked the post modern elite is
the ‘facebook’ phenomenon is just revolting; it is literally, physically nauseating. human interaction reduced to its most reductive bits, bits useful only for compiling commercially lucrative data. ‘social’ my ass.
the winkelvoss vs. zuckerberg dichotomy is equally disingenuous. zuckerberg as the outsider, the mensch, playing david to the winkelvoss dinosaur goliath is laughable. in the ‘social network’ who does goliath petition for assistance? larry summers. zuckerberg isn’t fauned over as a member of the crew team? big f#cking deal: that’s a question of style, not substance. the president of harvard is in his corner. and the boys from brazil with lipgloss treatment of the twins is cartoonish, any semblance of an ethical code being ground to dust as anachronistic, 19th century frivolity, or even worse, femininity. (is this code of misconduct part of bellows’ call to jewish manliness? screw them all and let god sort it out?) is there any question that that weasel zuckerberg liberally stole from anyone within his reach? yet the theft is buried underneath visions of his civilizing mission, complete with poor mark staring wistfully out of the window of the attorney’s office during his deposition. his people ‘need’ him, or some such horseshit, is his response to one of the shyster attorneys wasting his valuable time.
any semblance of an ethical code being ground to dust as anachronistic, 19th century frivolity, or even worse, femininity.
…..Exactly, very, very well put. The amazing part is, it is exactly the people who NEED the “ethical code” that want to throw it out…..
thanks, dan, although i might have been a bit off with my choice of words. i suppose that zuckerberg could have been operating under a different, occult code of ethics which would permit him to ‘f*ck’ the winkelvoss twins in the ear. in any case, whether his conduct is consistent with a code of ethics (of sorts) or he is ethics averse, who, besides zuckerberg’s parents, would be upset if the winkelvoss twins beat his brains in with their oars. that might raise a whole new series of legal questions, but would it be unethical or immoral?
MARC B- “…who does goliath petition for assistance? larry summers.”
For what it is worth, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, used to be Lawrence Summers’ chief of staff at the Treasury Department.
Keith, great piece of info. Didn’t know that.
marc b., scroll up and read my post. Listen to Moglen, and if you have the 45 minutes to spare, while you’re making dinner or something, listen to his first talk (Freedom in the Cloud on the same site) in which he describes what happened that Zuckerberg could succeed. But Moglen is light-years smarter and more ethical than Z. Before this talk a year ago, Z refused to consider an IPO. By the end of February 2010, he said they were going for it. They have to come out with an IPO before Moglen’s project hits , or Facebook will be just another MySpace. Moglen accuses Zuckerberg of damaging society and explains why.
While Moglen was talking he dreamt up what they should be creating. (Feb. 5, 2010) The best part about Moglen is that he’s so damn entertaining.
i’ll take a listen over the Thanksgiving break, mrw. i am a luddite (see virilio for instance, ‘the invention of the automobile was the simultaneous invention of the automobile accident’, etc., or marx on the economic imperative to put any technological innovations to use, regardless of the negative social consequences) and much of the nuts and bolts bore me to tears, but the theory and social implications are fascinating.
but the theory and social implications are fascinating.
Then I think you will enjoy Moglen. As the 19-year-old geeks at NYU said, “Eben’s a visionary. He thinks 75 years out, but he gives us a roadmap.”
Moglen invented the first networked email program at age 16; he started it.
“i am a luddite…”
Nah, you’re more likely just a “late adopter”. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the way to be. When the tech issues settle out and it works like an appliance, I’ll get one.
Mooser, then keep your eyes and ears on what Moglen is doing. He’s your guy.
Oh great, another mainstream publication tiptoes around the position of Jews in America today. Cowards.
However, this is great:
“Groups who have suffered historically get cultural protections not afforded those who have presided over historical suffering”
The mindset behind this asymetric protection of groups is exactly what is wrong with many left-leaning people. They forget that white males are sometimes also discriminated against. It’s really simple: Judge the individual, and grant everyone the same rights you would grant the weakest member of society.
You kinda know where anarticle is going when the journalist is reaching into such depths as quoting hateful comments on random blogs to support his case, then he really has an axe to grind. This article is one long smear and a gleeful attack. These WASPs were trustful of Zuckerberg and got owned. Now they trusted a journalist who is clearly siding with Zuckerberg and they get portrayed in a hatchet job.
So why does this article matter? Because I can, just as Phil, easily detect racism.
I can do it in other groups, as well as among my own.
And I can smell what Phil can smell. These twins are probably quite gifted. Zuckerberg was too, but he’s a sociopath. He stole the code for himself, and he came late into the game. These two were honest and trusty. They shouldn’t have been.
And the article is laden with race-baiting. It’s essentially a taunt to the old WASPs, but there is something rotten with it. It’s almost about humiliation. Jews outdid WASPs long ago, but still smarting about it and kicking the boot in their collective faces like this makes me root for the underdog, which is kinda weird in this case.
Zuckerberg’s racebaiting was not much different when he hacked their site.
But of course, if these WASPs had done the same vis-a-vi Jews then outrage would ensue and ADL would be screaming. Power is a privilege and power corrupts.
We shouldn’t forget what WASPs did to hold down Jews back in the day, but this article shows that Jews have that same basic nature as every other human group have. There’s a connection from this to Israel/Palestine in this regard. The ‘light onto all nations’ was a foundational myth. The Jews are smarter/better/holier is another(although I’m not sure if Jews are smarter is a myth).
In my ways, WASP society is the most atomized society in the Western world. A lot of these people are not apt at all on ethnic campaigning and if anyone dares to do it in a way, then they’ll get attacked as ‘white nationalists’ even if they’re mild. Funny how some forms of ethnic nationalism is okay, and other forms are not. Why is white nationalism the worst disease? Does it have to do anything with what groups have power and not?
Dangerous questions, perhaps. But I’m fascinated by power relations in society. I just am. And I try to be objective about it.
If you look close enough on American society, you realise there’s a lot of hypocrisy going on, in all directions.
It’s all cyclical, though.
Power and corruption will always be with us because people reproduce and have to learn from birth. That’s individual.
But the arc of history is different. That’s society as a whole. Civilization.
If you have your ear to the ground right now, you will know one thing. Something is changing. And the change is as significant as 1454 when Gutenberg started his press and the secular world came out from behind the shadows.
The coming change—although it’s already started happening—has to do with a societal morality, if you will, an ability for self-reflection and an understanding of the responsibility nowfor one’s thoughts and actions and their consequences that transcend a religious, cultural, racial or political rulebook that only had standing at the time, and in the time, it was created in the past.
We are going into that world. You won’t be able to whine about how you or your group or your race was treated. You will be forced to face it, we all will, and heal it as a society. Put it behind us with full understanding and recognition of what the consequences of inattention and cruelty and thoughtlessness were. The bags of injustices need to be opened, examined and acknowledged, but you will no longer be able to haul them over the centuries or think you have a right to, no matter what your religion or cultural stew.
These days are coming. The thinking has already started, via the lowest common denominator, in the economic world.
I hope your right.
I just really dislike double standards, whether Jews are afflicted or other groups(Arabs, WASPs etc etc) are.
But the pessimist within me thinks that this kind of behaviour will always be there. In all societies there will be ethnic winners and losers and the winners tend to racialize the conflict and rationalize why they are suppressing the other groups(WASPs are dangerous bigots, you can’t trust them. Play the Nazi card! Arabs are dangerous bigots and crazy islamists. They want to take over the world! And so on, etc).
Granted, I recognize all too well that Jews have been on this receiving end during most of history. It just makes me sad when some Jews learn nothing of their own history. This article reminds me of that.
“Facebook is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” (Julian Assange)
For some reason I have trouble taking this whole Mark Zuckerberg computer genius business at face value. For starters, both he and fellow computer genius Bill Gates went to Harvard which, as far as I know, is not a top school for information technology. It is, however, connected with the CIA, which has more than ample computer capability. How does a Harvard underclassman crank out 500 man hours of programming over a weekend? Perhaps he had help? Perhaps surreptitious control of the internet is an integral part of full spectrum dominance?
Keith,
Assange got that from Moglen. It’s in his feb 5, 2010 talk. Moglen has been warning about that since Facebook came out.
“Facebook is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” (Julian Assange)”
I’ve never been able to figure out why even a bare minimum of common sense and experience wouldn’t convince someone to stay as far away from Facebook as possible.
Intelligent people do, Mooser.
When I tell kids my age ( mid to late twenties) that Ive never had a facebook page, they look at me like the guy who decided to live off the land somewhere in Appalachia…..and the hipsters think its really cool, cuz not being on facebook makes you “obscure” – which, to them is the holy grail of anything…….
i know some hipster kids who don’t think it’s so cool anymore dan. when i was growing up it was cool to fly under the radar/outlaw style. ie i could never understand the race to get tattoos and thought ‘but what if you were on the run’. i imagined a possible future day when big brother might go after the lefties in our society and didn’t want to give them more ammunition.
remember when a lot of news sites started requiring commenters to do it via their social media accounts? a little too close comforty for my sensibilities. i’m glad i never opened an account.
me too annie…. i also just had a weird, unexplainable, but visceral reaction to sht like facebook and even Iphones etc. Im not one of these “black helicopter” cats, but the idea of walking around with a homing beacon, or sitting on a computer, telling the world my life story never was very appealing…
just makin sure, but u know i said that some hipsters thought my NOT having a facbook was cool, right? :)
I was curious about Zuckerman as ‘a lifelong elite” as he was described so found his family bio.
His father is a dentist and his mother worked as psychiatrist. I don’t know about Dobbs Ferry, NY society but dentist is about equivalent to veterinarian among the elites I am familiar with. Doesn’t sound like any kind of elite pedigree to me…especially a life long one. Probably comfortable middle or upper middle class and that’s about it . There were three other children in the family and the whole story sounds to me like your typical nerdy kid in a family that pushed their kids to better themselves in the world. Nothing wrong with that except they evidently forgot a few things like ethics, social manners and long terms views in Mark. LOL
Looked up the writer Vachon also and he’s another typical case. Half Jewish, half Catholic he says and neither one nor the other so he ‘s “not one of the boys” in the WASP group, maybe not in the Jeiwsh group either.
Unable to “‘belong’ may be why he is so “off” and adopts some looking down his nose at what he probably secretly considers his betters….or worsers since he isn’t one of them.
He’s 28, worked in banking till he starter his blender style writing.
“The converted Russians are more Russian than the Russians”
Lenin, in a dismissing reference to the pro-Soviet Poles.
I found an interesting link on Vachon from Huffington Post.
link to huffingtonpost.com
Quote:
“Most book parties are two very short hours: show up halfway through, drink free alcohol, pretend you’ve read the book, leave. But if you’re New York media’s token Catholic-nosed “Lit boy” Dana Vachon,”
Paperthin code if I ever saw one, haha.
There’s a fabulous comic novel in this, which I’d like very much to write, except the shadow of Israel/Palestine falls over all of it, and it’s a very dark shadow. But I still cherish many of these comments, particularly MRW’s saga about the Stock Market. If we can get through this Israel/Palestine thing without a major religious war, that comic novel will someday be written.
As per the phantom “never-had yet somehow-lost” fortune of the Winklevosses (or Winkelvii, as some would have it), it reminds me of what my mother always used to say about threadbare gentility and the Old Money/New Money thing. “We’re old money, my dear, really very old–so old, in fact, that we lost it a long time ago.”
How’s THAT for the moral high ground? No money-grubbing in that picture!
PilgrimSoul, there is going to be a correction in a lot of thngs, just not this year.
Myself, I came from domestic service and miners stock.