Precisely. Well said, sir.

Um, you might want to check those serial numbers on those helicopters and the chemical weapons used to kill the Kurds. They were US manufactured and supplied.

When we lost our puppet Shah in Iran, the US needed a balance to keep a resurgent Iran from threatening Saudia Arabia/oil (the real key to all of this mess). So we built and supported and funded Saddam.

We gave him the money, technology, and weapons to fight Iran (Rumsfeld was the one who delivered these btw in a previous administration). Saddam first used the chemical weapons on Iran, so we didn't blink. It was only when the Iran/Iraq War was fought to a stalemate that Saddam turned inward and gassed his own people. We slapped him on the wrist for that.

After that, as long as he counterbalanced Iranian interests and did not threaten Saudi Arabian (re: Bush family) interests, we shielded and supported Saddam. It was only when he invaded Kuwait (with our weapons remember) that he actively threatened Saudi Arabia. This was why we had the curtail his ambitions and put him back in the doghouse.

It's also why we didn't take out Saddam wholesale at that time, since his loss would have led to a resurgent Iran, which was against US (re: oil, Bush family) interests.

We had declawed Saddam a decade earlier. And while he was clearly the scum of the Earth, we could have taken him out any time we wanted with a handful of well placed cruise missiles.

Since he didn't have anything to do with the 9-11 attacks, the only reasons to go into Iraq were oil and war profiteering from nation building. The neocon goal was to build a new counterbalance to Iranian power in the region.

So endeth the political history lesson on just one of your assertions. Ahem.

(duplicate post - deleted)

No I never named you sir, you named yourself.

larry this post is absolutely ridiculous.wrong topic,wrong site. post this junk somewhere else man.  

pjdark, if you don't like this discussion, don't read it.

You have been a member of this community since December 23, 2006.
I joined this community on April 1st, 2001.

You have not earned the right to tell me what should or should not be posted here.

Excalpius, I began with the assertion that Jews had contributed to the success of the Internet far out of proportion to their numbers in the general population. That is exactly what I set out to prove when I posed the question "So you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our numbers." I went on to illustrate that by founding Google, Facebook, Digg.com, Paypal, and more. To this point no one has offered any evidence to the contrary.

Now there are plenty of successful non-Jews, both on and off the Internet. I never stated otherwise. But it is a matter of proportion. And I maintain that is due to cultural values.

Accumulation of wealth is not the only area that where people from Jewish culture exceed the statistical norm. Between 1901 and 2006, there were 750 Nobel Prize winners. Of these, at least 158 are Jews. Link:
WWW Link

If you think that anything that I have said is not true, offer sources to contradict me. Otherwise, you have time and time again fallen back on your opinions. Your strong, if unsupported, opinions. Oh wait, you offered anecdotal evidence from your relationship with Steven Spielberg. You stated he was a very, very successful man from a Jewish culture....but he wasn't religious. Then he started on the Shoah project...so maybe he was more Jewish than you though, but your opinion won't change.

I got it, you have a very strong opinion.

This is not the forum to discuss the war in Iraq (which I oppose, incidentally) or the peace process in Israel (which I don't really believe will happen in my life, but I support in spirit)or anything else off the topic.

Let me offer you an interesting source for material. Arthur Hu is an Asian American (anyone care to comment on the values of that culture?) who collects statistical material related to race. Here is his Jewish stats page: WWW Link
Please feel free to examine the statistics and the sources (Arthur Hu lists them all in text format) and tell me if you find anything to contradict my assertions.

But if you can't support your opinion with facts, don't feel that you need to say anything at all......

Precisely. He's just posting to hear himself speak. And he thinks reams of statistics will keep anyone from noticing that he's just being a self-serving bigot in an effort to bolster his own glaring inadequacy issues.

For example,



Which means almost 600 of them AREN'T Jewish. So what? Who gives a crap?

But, for now, I'll pretend your point isn't quite frankly irrelevant (to ALL of us)...

I'd argue that since Nobel Prizes are predominantly awarded to Westerner academics, and there is a disproportionally large Jewish element in Western academic culture (as opposed to say India or China or Africa or South America), I wouldn't be surprised that 20% of Nobel Prize winners are (to varying degrees) "of the tribe". In fact, it seems a bit low to me. Whatever.

However, I doubt that the Chinese or Indians are as impressed with Westerners giving awards to Westerners as you are with it.

It's all a matter of perspective and mutual cultural respect. I thoroughly respect Judaism's traditional support of clan (as Brad put so well) and for intellectual pursuits as a means of furthering one's personal and professional development (very much like the Buddhists in that regard actually).

Looking at your own link of Nobel Prize winners...

(NOTE: Even these numbers are suspect, as they don't indicate who may or may not be PRACTICING Jews. For example, your resource is clearly pro-Judaism biased since it names Einstein as Jewish, when it is well known that he outgrew Judaism early in his life, link-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Religious_views)

...it's interesting to notice how many have contributed to medical and physical sciences, but how (in proportion) very few have contributed to the categories of World Peace or Literature.

One COULD make a couple of assumptions from this...

Jews can't write.
Jews are warmongers.
Jews are better at the sciences than they are as writers or peaceniks.
Etc. Etc.

I would argue that ALL such assumptions would be WRONG (and racist/disingenuous in one sense or another). I presented them above purely to make this point.

So, deconstructing just one of these fallacies:

The vast majority of Nobel Prizes for Literature are awarded to books written in English or once they have been translated to English. Why? Because the judges are predominantly English speaking. And why is that? Because English has absorbed so many adjectives and adverbs from other languages that it is currently the world's messiest, and therefore richest, language from the perspective of permitted and understandable sentence constructions, descriptive passages, rhyming possibilities, homonyms, etc. It therefore has a disproportionate ratio of writers and professors who study them (hence an equally high ratio of English speaking judges and academics). Since there's a good chance that many Jewish writers might not be writing in English, I would argue that one can make NO causal connection between the lack of Nobel Prizes for Literature and whether or not one practices Judaism.

Etc. etc.

In each case, there are COMPLEX and often non-causal relationships at work here. So, I neither blame no credit something as arbitrarily demographic as choice of mythology for the success or failures of ANY man. I instead measure each man according to his gifts and accomplishments.

If strong family/clan support helps, then great! My cousin's husband is from a large Italian family that does custom rock work in Canada. It's a family business and as long as you choose to be a part of it, you'll have the benefits of everyone's collective wisdom. They are, as a family, VERY successful in this regard...and not one bit of it has to do with their family's choice of religion.

Apologies to everyone NOT interested in this discussion.

And by equal measure you have not earned the right to post something so blatantly self-serving and off topic/off site and not have some of us call you out on it.

Nor am I going to fail to point out just how arrogant, hypocritical, and quite frankly un-American your comment to pjdark is (quoted above).

I don't believe in "success through association" any more than I believe in "guilt by association."

The point I was making that clan is more of a factor for Jewish success can be seen in the original article:

Rich student, Mark Zuckerberg, going to Harvard already is able to get capital from fellow member of his clan to expand his fairly straight forward idea.

This is an advantage most people don't have. Again, to use myself as an example, I could never have afforded Harvard. And even if I could have, it's difficult to get in without pull. 

And even if I had an idea for a great community site (like, oh say a blog community site in which activity generates points with users able to create their own custom blog pages with user info, images, photo albums, etc. that get syndicated) I could never have gotten the necessary capital at the time I started such a site (JoeUser.com was circa 2001 -- before Digg, before Facebook, before MySpace even though in concept it had features of all 3).

I would argue I have the right attitude for success having built a multimillion dollar business on my own.  What I lacked, and what many Jewish people have, is an instant support network with access to capital and expertise.  If I had had say $2 million in capital to put into a JoeUser.com back in 2001 then who knows what might have happened.  But i don't. I don't have a dad or uncle or "member of the tribe" who can instantly put me in touch with capital and expertise for every obvious idea I have (and I'm not trying to belittle face book but I think it's a pretty obvious idea and one that many others were trying to do but lacked capital -- JoeUser.com and Modblog come to mind).

I realize I'm repeating much of what I said in post 28 but I really do think that the article really just reinforces the advantages that members of a clan have over those who do not. I also think it is one of those things that creates resentment that is often mis-characterized as anti-semitism (as a capitalist, I certianly would never discriminate against Jewish people, I'm happy to leverage their advantages to my benefit if I can). 

I also feel strongly favorable to the Jewish culture of celebrating success.  But at the same time, I'm not going to aid and abet some sort of fantasy that Jewish success is due mostly to their culture when it's pretty apparent that it's due to the advantages of being part of a clan with access to capital and expertise (otherwise, why isn't the Internet dominated by Israel or Jewish people in other countries -- a winning attitude without ready access to capital and expertise ain't enough).

Having first hand experience in seeing the advantages in being part of a clan, whether it be a religion, an alma mater, a fraternity, or highly defined culture (judaism), can bring, I am not surprised to see that people who have the capability to call upon resources others do not have simply because they were born into a particular creed are dispraportionately successful.

Hello, my name is Jack and I'm a White Boy on the Internet! And I rock!!!

You know, in Western culture there is a disproportionate ratio of white guys who rock to those who do not.

Bravo.

I personally find it very very sad how so much of the above plays to stereotypes, in particular the one wherein Jewish people are supremely materialistic. The above posts seem to imply that the only measure of success is wealth.

Also the posts about Palestine are quite frankly racist and obscene and the poster should be banned. The Palestinians are a proud and noble people who have been beaten into the ground by Israel and its support from the US.

Wincustomize is a global website and community. Please do not assume we all subscribe to the Bush administration propaganda. Arab does not eqaul bad and jewish equals good. There are a lot of damn evil people everywhere- and you know what- there are a lot of damn rich and succesful people everywhere too. I put a lot more faith in those who work to better the lot of mankind as a whole rather than counting their little piles of gold, because that is what they believe is the right thing to do instead of their belief in some weird supreme entity...

Frogboy has his finger on the pulse with each of his responses.

I think overall our internet experience is in fact dominated by the Anglo culture, its just being an egalitarian group they don't go around blowing their own [tribal] trumpet. Just look at the modern world around you, from the jet engine to penicillin, mostly invented/discovered by someone British or American of British descent (you might not be alive today without some of these) yet we don't feel the need to tell everyone what clever people we are.

Added to this there seems to be a slightly vainglorious definition of what might be considered Jewish. I worked with a Jewish guy a while ago who was very proud of his heritage however as I got to know him I discovered he had an English Dad and indeed many other English relatives on his Mother's side. He was really only slightly Jewish but used this as leverage to get what he wanted from the Jewish community. Harmless enough but I wasn't impressed when he hired mostly Jews, admitted that he had favoured them because of that and then moaned to me when they turned out to be pretty useless.

I am of the opinion that a man stands on his own individual merit regardless of history and this original post smells slightly of supremacist tendencies in spite of its light-hearted tone.