181–190 of 203 posts
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Taiwan doesn't even technically recognize itself as a country. It's just a part of China ruled by a rival government.
Taiwan doesn't recognize itself as a separate country. It recognizes itself as the legitimate government of China.
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Answering as someone Jewish. . . Jews don't assimilate (fully). In the Passover story, one of the things we note is that even living in Egypt for a long time, they didn't assimilate and they were disliked for it. Heck, how often do you hear people talking about other immigrants "not assimilating these days". For centuries, Jews even spoke a language other than the vernacular. We're a much more tolerant world today an…
It's worth pointing out that there's something in Jewish character that produces revolutionaries and anti-establishment types who rock the boat. The anti-tsarist intelligentsia, the 19th century anarchists, the Bolsheviks, Spanish Red Terror, German 1918 revolution, Alinksy-ite 60s radicals, Neo-Cons -- All these movements and more had very identifiable Jewish leadership.
Another big point is the importance of education among Jews as compared to other second class citizens who may be of the same race/ethnicity as those in leadership but are poor. Even today in America, poor Caucasians and African-Americans concentrate a lot less on education than the wealthy or certain ethnicities (this of course is more complicated than just being educated). If you look at all of the revolutionaries, regardless of race, they are typically highly educated.
Between feeling like they do not belong within the current incarnation of the country while also being educated enough to point out issues and know about successful revolutions in the past, Jews were able to lead these movements.
It is that or the probability that a lack of bacon makes us all a bit more uppity.
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>>until recently, throughout much of the west You should see my local Swedish media... The reason I follow this is not that I care about Middle East politics -- it is because I am shocked about my local media. I have compared Swedish media with BBC and NY Times since 7-8 years. Some subjects are more or less censored in Sweden. Things like torture between Palestinian groups have been cut out since the 1990s, Pallywoo…
Now very OT, but: _I have compared Swedish media with BBC and NY Times since 7-8 years_ Neither of which is, in my experience, particularly reliable (although there's less of the blatant bias/censorship that you described). Comparing them against AJE (which has had it's own issues of late, in the /same/ direction) reveals that their reporting is severely biased toward sensational stories - every article needs a good…
Sensationalism and jingoism comes with times of war/terror. That excuse is not relevant for my local Swedish media.
(Even democracies do realpolitik and lie about it. Foreigners don't have votes at home. This is a built in disadvantage of democracies, I guess.)
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Wow, I watched myself go from +3 to now -3 Either I made some sense (pointing out that AIPAC or Zionism could be a reason for hatred) or these guys just showed up in the thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Defense_League
This isn't reddit, and it definitely isn't /r/politics. Your tone is out of place on news.yc and people are downvoting you because you're diminishing the quality of the discussion.
My original points about AIPAC and Zionism is when it happened.
The people ghostdownvoting are diminishing the quality of discussion. Why would I get mass downvotes for stating that AIPAC and Zionism are logical reasons for modern day antisemitism? -63 now. Who are these people to disagree? How is their perspective better than mine?
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Here's a nice article about Grigori Perelman, Fields medal winner, solver of the Poincare conjecture, and mathematical genius/recluse. Perelman came up in the Soviet system in the 1980s, when the discriminatory practice you mention was in force: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/he-conq... Relevant quote: "For a Jewish boy [sic] gifted in mathematics to be admitted to a university, there were three…
Moral questions aside, I wonder if forcing entire ethnic groups to "perform for the country" in order to earn social status is really that bad. A lot of countries have done it across the centuries (Rome, France, UK, Arabs... and more recently US and USSR); they were usually successful in "extracting value" from those groups in the short term, while in the long term fostering a sense of belonging to a non-discriminato…
It may well have been less "produced a Perelman" than "one Perelman out of hundreds snuck through".
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Haha, you think it was that easy to emigrate from the USSR, especially for Jewish men and women? There's a reason people didn't, and it isn't because everyone thought they were better off staying.
Actually, it was easier to emigrate from the USSR for Jewish men and women than for the rest of the nation due to refugee programs that US offers for minorities suffering persecution. I think other countries offer those two. I am one of the people whose parents emigrated in 2004 as Christian refugees, btw. They had to prove they suffered from religious persecution (bible raids, not getting into colleges, etc). The wh…
I don't think that made it any easier getting out.
There are ~50 mutually exclusive religions in this world. It is prudent to create 50 independent states for these people. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Religious_wri...
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Taiwan doesn't recognize itself as a separate country. It recognizes itself as the legitimate government of China.
Which, from an objective standpoint, is a rival government.
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Wow, I watched myself go from +3 to now -3 Either I made some sense (pointing out that AIPAC or Zionism could be a reason for hatred) or these guys just showed up in the thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Defense_League
This isn't reddit, and it definitely isn't /r/politics. Your tone is out of place on news.yc and people are downvoting you because you're diminishing the quality of the discussion.
You obviously don't understand how the HN discussion system is supposed to work, and you've been hellbanned to boot (which is why I am responding to you here), so you might as well just stop.
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Answering as someone Jewish. . . Jews don't assimilate (fully). In the Passover story, one of the things we note is that even living in Egypt for a long time, they didn't assimilate and they were disliked for it. Heck, how often do you hear people talking about other immigrants "not assimilating these days". For centuries, Jews even spoke a language other than the vernacular. We're a much more tolerant world today an…
Slightly irrelevant to the overall topic, but what is the reason for not spelling out God's name? iirc someone once told me that it was wrong to ever erase or otherwise "dispose" of God's written name, so it'd be wrong to, for example, write "God" on a whiteboard and then have to erase it later. Is this the case? (if so, it seems like writing it on HN might be okay) Or are you just not supposed to write it out at all…