jesserosenthal

I admit to bristling a bit at your suggestion that I "do some reading" on the Jewish experience in America. I like to think that I'm fairly well read on the topic. But if it wasn't clear from the previous post, I am also a (secular) Jew, married to a Jew, and come from a large, geographically spread out (and politically spread out) Jewish family. Most of my relatives are married to Jews. I've been to more family bar and bar mitzvahs than I can count, including my own. My name (and, to some extent, phenotype) leave little doubt of my background to those who might care to know. Like you, the places and I have lived and the professional environments I have worked in have brought me in contact with many more. Perhaps unlike you, shared cultural background also offers the possibility of pretty frank discussion on matters related to Jewish experience.

So while I certainly don't presume to speak for all American Jews, or most American Jews, I am operating under much more than "impressions" or "opinions." Like your neighbors, I am describing what I, and many, many besides me, are, as you say, "currently, personally, experiencing as Jewish Americans."

The point you were supporting claimed that this was an experience that "everyone who is Jewish" faced. This is a gross overstatement, and one that is without doubt being mobilized currently for political purposes. If you want to speak about a rise in antisemitic acts in the US, we could do that, provided we are operating under a shared definition. If you want to talk about the experience of suburban Jews in the Northern Midwest, I'd be happy to hear more, and compare it to what I've heard from friends and family who live there. But I was responding to your post about why anyone would question a universalizing claim about the experience of Jews in America. Please don't tell me I need to do more reading to do that.

You ask why it is hard to believe that "everyone who is Jewish constantly fears for their life and lives with daily radical antisemitism." I can't speak for the poster you're responding to, but I can speak from multiplication of anecdote: neither I nor any American Jew that I am related to (born after, say, 1950) has ever in their life experienced any threat of violence or loss of opportunity due to being Jewish. I want to extend that further to any Jew I know, but I know a lot, and I'm afraid I might forget some edge case. To be clear, I'm talking about the US. That isn't to say it doesn't happen -- I'm well aware of the Pittsburgh shooting, and other acts. But there is no significant history of antisemitic violence in the US (roughly four anti-semitic lynchings during a period that saw 3,500 anti-black lynchings), so if this is arising here, it is arising as a new historical formation. Not---as various billboards or Philip Roth novels would have you believe---as the return of a barely repressed, long-simmering animus.

There is a sense among many that the overall vibe has changed. I can buy that---the nativist and anti-globalist vibe in America, and on this message board, has changed, and Jews may well become the totems for that, as they often have. But numbers are harder to come by. The ADL, which does much of the counting, has been open about the fact that it considers Jewish anti-zionist groups like JVP to be hate groups, and their demonstrations (made up largely of Jews) to be anti-semitic acts.[1]

My point is just that if we're talking about vibes and sense of the discourse, there are many Jews (myself included) who also are deeply suspicious that, as the parent said, "everyone who is Jewish constantly fears for their life and lives with daily radical antisemitism." You asked why they find it hard to believe. As an n of 1, closely connected to an n of many more, I find it impossible to believe.

[1] https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/171479177486948797...

I might have missed one but it looks like there is only one city (Miami) with an NFL team and a Republican Mayor. Las Vegas has an independent, former Dem. That list of team cities is:

Arizona (Phoenix), Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Carolina (Charlotte), Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Green Bay (and Milwaukee), Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minnesota (Minneapolis, St. Paul), New England (Boston), New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa Bay, Tennessee (Nashville), Washington D.C.

It's the project behind Plover (https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Beginner's-G...), a cross-platform free steno program that works with normal (NKRO) keyboards and steno machines. There are also a number of hobbyist steno machines, made by the community, that run ~$100, instead of >$1000 for a real machine.

https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi

https://stenomod.blogspot.com/

I'm typing this, in Plover, on a georgi.

I use notmuch instead of mu4e, and have been quite happy with it for the last 7 years or so. The org integration is good, though I don't actually use it all that much. What is indispensable for me, though, is being able to start a longer message in a text file, save it, open a message window, (C-x i) the message file, pull in some code or text from another buffer -- basically to treat my longer emails the way I treat any other piece of text that I'm working on.

Similarly, if I'm writing, any mail (or attachment) from the last decade is just a few key strokes and a search query away, without ever really taking my eyes off my current buffer.

I know there are other ways to accomplish the same thing, but that close link between my mail and the rest of my writing is the main benefit, for me, of having my mail in emacs.

I wrote an open-source reader for docx, including for math equations, in a week or two of part-time hobby work. The spec isn't always sensible (though I'm sure there are historical reasons for most of the decisions) but it's always easy enough to look at the xml and figure it out. Most importantly, your language only requires a zip lib and an xml parsing lib. So, yeah, I'd say it's much nicer to deal with than what this article describes.

A couple of cool things about pandoc:

1. It's a tool built in large part by folks involved in the humanities. John, of course, is a professor of philosophy. (We could stop there, since his contributions so outnumber all the others, but I'll go on...) I'm an assistant prof. of English. It has large contributions from the curator of medieval manuscripts at the British Library, and contributions from a historian as well. And those are just the ones that come to mind -- I'm sure there are others. It's cool to have a tool used by many folks in the humanities, but also in large part driven by their needs.

2. John is a great project lead, and it's an amazingly open project. If you're interested in getting started with haskell, the filters API allows you to really adapt it to your needs. And if you're interested in adding another reader or writer, there's a good chance it can be added.

For myself, I started out using the python docx library, found it didn't handle enough stuff, wrote one myself (covering mainly my conversion needs, not creation) and had it output JSON that pandoc could read. When that worked, I ported it to haskell, and posted it to the mailing list. Within a few weeks, the docx reader was part of the program. It's been a great experience -- both in using haskell, and in playing a significant role in a program I use and love.

This looks great! My only complaint is that sometimes I do want to work on a quick script outside of a stack environment, and this seems like an all-or-nothing proposition. (I use haskell for pandoc filters quite a bit, for example, and setting up stack for that seems like overkill.) I'm sure a bit of elisp could make it fall back to haskell mode if it can't find a local .stack dir.

I just wish there were some way for it to deal with paywalls -- since most of the pdfs I need are behind JSTOR or Muse. I realize this would be a technical and/or legal hassle (things from behind a paywall would have to be private by default, I guess) so I'm not holding my breath. But for use in the humanities and social sciences, it would make it a lot more useful.

I keep meaning to write some script that downloads jstor PDFS that I want to pin, uploads them to my server, and bookmarks them as private there. But trying to figure out whether I'd need to add a robots.txt and the like has kept me from making it happen.

English teacher cosign. Though I do usually advise students to be aware of their audience, and avoid the singular "they" if it will distract pedantic readers. (Essentially, and unfortunately, you have to advance to the point in life where people are no longer searching for reasons to use a red pen.)

The threads in response to you are fascinating and mystifying. I'm not sure whom to respond to, since everyone seems to be saying some variation of the same thing: that Facebook is simply a necessity of modern life. I think I'm a pretty normal, fairly technical, member of society, and I've never found that to be the case. I turned down the first stage of Facebook invites in 2006 or 2007 or whenever. Honestly, at the time, I probably thought I'd spend too much time obsessing about my ex. I work in a fairly computerized environment (a university) and I've never felt particularly hermetic. We have friends, live in a city, I have and make professional connections, etc.

I'm 37, so maybe I'm not representative, and I'm willing to believe that my life might be a little more wife-and-kids-and-job-centric than some here. But I'm honestly a bit surprised by the claims that it's impossible to live without it. I'm willing to believe it, because it seems unlikely that this many people would be so wildly exaggerating, but it's surprising all the same. What are the elements of life that I live without that folks can't even conceive of living without?

Pleasingly ambiguous phrasing. The first two times I read it, I got that this was the smartest anyone had ever looked (no one has ever looked smarter). Apologies for going off-topic, but I hadn't come across this particular cramp in the language before.

I disagree with your claim that "[the set of integers] is bigger than [the set of even numbers]." They have the same cardinality, and I'm not sure how else you can reasonably define "bigger" or "size" for infinite sets. If you prefer to treat it like real money, you can buy just as much with {1, 2, 3,...} dollars, and {21, 22, 23, ...} dollars (after you lost $20). Or, from another direction, you could go to a currency exchange and do a real life bijection, trading 20 -> 1, 21 -> 2, 23 -> 3, and so on. Either way, it makes sense to say you have the same amount of money. "Makes sense," since we're talking about an abstraction that doesn't exist.

If mathematically, the sets are the same size, and practically, in terms of buying power, the bankrolls are the same size, I'm not sure how we can reach an abstraction in either perspective where one is "less" than the other.

(The question of walking away is sort of ill-formed for the original Martingale discussion -- since the point there was that you'd stay at the table until you won a spin.)

Interestingly this brings up another simple flaw in the "infinite resources" caveat. When you do finally win a spin, you'll still have aleph-null dollars -- you won't have actually won anything. So the only condition under which the martingale works -- when you can't lose -- is one under which you can't win either. Unless your goal is not to increase your purchasing/gaming power but to break the casino, as in an "Ocean's N" film.

The definition of losing in gambling is running out of resources. If you stipulate infinite resources, you're stipulating that you can't lose. In which case, clearly, you have a much better chance of winning.