Jews in the attic test gets attention

I got a call today from someone who wanted to “reprint” my Jews In The Attic Test on her blog and give me credit for it. Of course I told her to go ahead.

Here is the result.

Update: And here.

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11 thoughts on “Jews in the attic test gets attention

  1. I had written this in December. Your “test’ reminded me of it.
    “…I used to live in NYC. Lots and lots of people have guns they just don’t talk about it. Having a gun in the city is a bit like having a Jew in your attic and in Manhattan there are Nazis everywhere. There are hard core statists who rest self-assured that they are so hip and trendy and smug that nobody would dare even to talk with them, let alone hurt them, but someone in their group of friends has a secret in the attic. When most of them talk about gun control they aren’t talking about their friends who go to the Catskills for the weekend. They are talking about blacks and poor whites and us in fly-over-country who pose a threat to their beloved state.”

    I like your test, it could be expanded to fit the direction of the conversation. Interesting.

  2. Joe, I had been meaning to put your test on my Facebook page, and a conversation and then your post reminded me to do it. My son was the first to comment and had a very interesting take on it:

    “Though the “jews in the attic” example may ring true with your generation and older, im afraid it doesn’t hold weight with mine or younger. This generation is incapable of understanding true oppression, when their greatest cause is to fight for the right to be told what, where, and when to do something. When they feel oppressed because someone else’s hard earned money isn’t used to pay for their education. And social welfare isn’t their responsibility but some fantastical government, but why not? But its not fair to say it is just this generation, we went from a society that said “money doesnt grow on trees” to a society that says “duh it doesnt grow on trees, the government 4just keeps printing more! why would we have to put any work into growing it on trees?”

    • Do the millennials and younger people still have to read The Diary of Anne Frank in school, or since it doesn’t say much against the US, has Howard Zinnism taken it off the list of acceptable literature?

    • That’s the difference between liberty (self government, freedom of action without interference) and “freedom from want” as the Progressives have often put it (freedom from responsibility, freedom from the consequences of one’s choices, freedom FROM anything unpleasant).

      Each “camp” (I call them “alliances “) longs for liberation from the other.

      One is close to the truth. It rewards productivity, creativity, peaceable voluntary exchange, and protects the right to property. More in touch with reality, it learns from experience and then uses that knowledge to make things better and more accessible to more people. It is the foundation of civilization.

      The other camp is envious. Preferring the beautiful, intoxicating lie to the sobering truth, it is a spoiled, criminally insane brat that has been trained (starting with the parents but amplified by the power-hungry) to get its way by charm or by being unpleasant. All it knows how to do is pretend, and when charm doesn’t get the desired results it lapses directly into unpleasantness, ramping it up until no one can ignore it. We almost always will pay it off in some way, to make it go away temporarily, for a little bit of peace. Then it knows who’s in control. It comes back for more, ad infinitum, so long as it can find someone to tolerate it. It knows no other way, or fears all other ways. It is a greedy, frightened sociopath of our own creation, for having tolerated it and rewarded it for its bad behavior time and again. It is a reflection of our own weaknesses, living off of our life energy, eating out our substance, always coming back for more, eventually to kill us, either with kindness or with violence, and take what remains, then move on to do it again. It sees us as fools, which we are, for allowing it to distract us, entertaining its demands, feeding it and nurturing its evil, hoping a fool’s hope that it won’t become more unpleasant as we repeatedly give in.

    • And 1984 wasn’t supposed to be a how-to-manual!
      We can imagine good societies and bad ones, and the bad ones seem to become real more often.

  3. We’re getting closer to failing your test every day.

    Real-ID was an effort to establish a uniform national ID system. In the long run it would have made it impossible to disassociate yourself from government databases tracking everything from your shoe size to your magazine subscriptions, religion and political affiliation.

    In the last 30 years we’ve seen erosion of our 4th Amendment rights to varying degrees and at different court levels. It would take quite a push to eliminate the protections but it could be nibbled away by the blue headed ducks in federal courts.

    Obamacare will be used against you if you become too annoying to the ruling class. Gee, you have a refillable prescription for diazapam (Valium)? We’ll just send someone over to pick up those 14 guns for “safe keeping.” You inquired of your doctor about a substance-abuse program? Here’s a warrant for us to take your children “for their safety.” New York State has already implemented a program comparing gun owners to medical records provided by state funded medical insurance (Valium users beware!). Expanding that to other areas such as teachers or train operators taking Paxil or Prozac isn’t far-fetched.

    Some of our overlords would love to push us into a cashless society. They’ll tout the savings of not minting bills and coins, the existing prevalence of debit-card use for daily transactions, plus the reduction in robberies of businesses and people. They’ll push for systems with biometric security with fingerprint or retina scanners. What they won’t tell you about are the back-end changes that allows .gov computers to hoover up purchase data at line-item detail. Analytic systems will do comparisons to profile you and your life. Unusual changes will flag you for further scrutiny by AI systems. Increases in food purchases and water consumption tell them of your Jews in the attic. You won’t be able to avoid providing your identity when making a purchase if they force biometic verification of the purchaser. Well, not unless you use Lee Killough’s The Doppleganger Gambit.

    Note: Killough’s book is a good read.
    https://www.amazon.com/Doppelganger-Gambit-Lee-Killough/dp/0345282671

    • We need a program to compare drug use to elected officials, but that seems to be harder to do than for the mice to bell the cat in the Aesop’s fable.

    • I’ve seen a fair amount of evidence of a push for a no-cash economy. Part of that is a push to eliminate larger denomination bills; in Europe that effort seems to be particularly strong. (The Swiss are resisting, for now at least.)
      One article had the effrontery to talk about government-run bitcoin style e-money. Pretty bizarre considering that the whole essence of bitcoin is avoiding central control. And that bitcoin is by design untraceable.
      As for a uniform national ID system, we’ve had that for quite some time: the social security number scheme. While I try to resist disclosing the SSN to doctors etc. who have no need for or right to that number, somehow they seem to be able to find it in spite of my resistance. Some are even stupid enough to claim they need it.

  4. You say you made it up as you went along, but your five part test is the result of thinking about how statism has a dark side and what it means to real people for the state to have such power, based on history and reasonable interpretations of events. Your subconscious mind, or whatever it is called now, had been thinking about it for a long time.

    • The test only has one part. The five items were examples of the test failures which I came up when I was writing it down sometime later.

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