h_lance

I loathe anti-Semitism and support the existence of Israel but I also feel that Israel is a nation state the can be criticized as other nation states can.

I was confused by the claims that Representative Omar's comments were anti-Semitic. AIPAC is literally the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. They openly make political donations - EDIT, I have been informed that they only hire lobbyists to influence politicians and do not make direct donations in the hopes of influencing American politicians to be favorable toward the current government of Israel - as is their right. Why is it anti-Semitic to note that influence? If I say that the National Corn Growers Association makes donations EDIT or, obviously, hires lobbyists to influence politicians in the hopes of getting politicians to be favorable toward corn growers, that would not be controversial. AIPAC has nothing to do with Jewishness per se and is opposed by many Jews. Use of the term "Benjamin" to refer to US dollars is a reference to founding father Benjamin Franklin, depicted on the $100 USD bill, not an insult to Jews.

I get that numerous Jewish representatives condemned the remarks and representative Omar apologized, but I don't entirely get why. They seemed innocuous to me. In a time of again increasing prestige for real hatred of the Jewish people by right wing authoritarians, does a relentless campaign of declaring any progressive criticism of political policy of Israel "anti-Semitism" make sense?

EDIT - Deborah E. Lipstadt hasn't had a chance to answer my comment yet, apparently.

Do you realize that nobody ever "has to" go to college, do you realize that if your GPA was 2.1 in high school it may have been a moot point because you may not be gifted or hard working enough for college, do you realize that people who have much greater financial security than $1M in bitcoin go to college all the time, do you realize that people like Steve Jobs were recognized as gifted and left college because they had a passion to follow that took all their energy and not because they thought education was worthless or because they were struggling academically, do you realize that putting down the accomplishments of others indicates insecurity as well as immaturity, do you realize that if I give 1000 privileged people $1000 each (they have to be privileged enough not to need to spend it on food or rent, of course) and they each buy some high risk investment, most of them will lose but a few will hit the lottery by random chance and it isn't much to boast about, do you realize that if no-one went to college there would be no modern medicine, virtually no engineers or scientists, etc?

You are obviously correct. All human motivation is about satisfying some kind of emotional motivation. It can be very low level, like swinging a fist to hurt someone who did something you didn't like, or something very high level and and abstract like Buddhist meditation Ultimately there would be no reason to do anything without emotion. Things like "getting a PhD in computer science" or "building a start up business", or, of course, "writing a book and pumping it on Reddit", all address emotional needs. If you had no emotions, why would you care if anyone bought your book?

Humans are not machines with logic circuitry. We are animals that, late in the history of life on Earth so far, developed what we call "high intelligence" which imperfectly helps us to solve problems to satisfy out instinctive/emotional urges.

Has anyone other than enormous women ever caused you any trouble?

I get that you need to make a living and your focus is on companies legitimate enough that they can at least be sued, but I am interested in fighting back against all scam artists who use email, telephone, etc, to cheat the vulnerable, and it is a hard thing to figure out how to do; do you have any advice?