OT

What do you guys make of that Tablet article? As a soon2B Jew I’m pleased to see a Jewish kind-of-leftist magazine charging the breach.

The article is intelligent and I agree with most of it. I’m just a bit surprised and disappointed that it didn’t get more negative press.

Negative press would have tossed it into the mainstream and on the off chance that they couldn’t brand the author as a pedophile (the smartest move by rogues everywhere) it could have actually done something.

Then again, Trump was supposed to be that and was just a false messiah so maybe it doesn’t matter?

I very easily could have been one of them.

What did it take?

You follow the mob to the capital and eventually everyone gets in with the police and security people standing around directing them.

Any curious lookyloo could have ennded up in there. And arested.

I’m not a believer in Q or even in Trump but I’ll join an interesting unauthorized tour of the capital if it’s open. It’s interesting. That’s all.

These low IQ dolts who really believe every kind of nonsense are never taking over anything. What, they’re going to pronounce vegan animism from the podium and it’ll become law?

This was a non-event as far as I’m concerned. I mean it’s another reason why nobody should be a reflexive Republican and certainly not a believer in the inner goodness of Donald Trump but that’s all.

This is just…what was that old expression? Something like, “but this is MY goat” or something like that. Basically the point of it (can someone remind me what it is?) was that most people don’t notice injustice until it happens to them. The congresscritters were afraid of their subjects a teeny weeny bit. So they pretend that “democracy” was under attack.

There is no real democracy in America anyway. So there is nothing to attack. I only vote on propositions. For candidates I put my dad or husband’s name in.

Actually, I agree with mad tv guy here. Any leaders who get terrified by such a pin drop must have reason to be terrified. The legitimacy of our current government stands on very thin ice. To them, masking and lockdowns and deputizing the mommies of America was a godsend. The First Amendment is the last one standing (the Second is meaningless if it won’t protect the First) and they took it down without a fight.

Shame on us.

On to happier thoughts, it is the Seventh Day! A day beyond the realm of weekday worries. Happy Shabbos my friends!

At what point will we all agree that it WAS OBVIOUS FROM THE GET GO that lockdowns and masking and (lol) “test and trace” would be ridiculous?

I don’t mean that in retrospect they accomplished nothing but that it was always obvious that these measures would accomplish nothing?

A decade?

I mean it’s sooooooo stupid!

At this very moment my husband and I are on a train in Brooklyn and we are the only ones not masked out of around 35 people in our car.

And this is New York where almost everybody is “fully vaccinated”.

What’s wrong with Americans? Or is humanity generally?

Humans are a herd species.

At the Tower Of Babel the Lord tried to fix that problem.

It didn’t take.

I agree with Jack about the principle.

The principle is that police are essentially soldiers and that their job is to enforce the law No Matter What.

If you accept that premise then they acted correctly in both cases.

I disagree with the premise.

_____________________________

On the matter of allowing people to pass fake money however, well, maybe that should kind of stay illegal? Enforced masking and house arrest however are 100% evil laws. They are also illegal according to any honest reading of the first amendment.

If the Taliban carve out an enclave in Afghanistan for members of the Five Eyes who yearn to breathe free they would have over a million applicants tomorrow.

I love you Jack but I need to register my disagreement.

OT: Did anyone see “The Day Shall Come”? It was as deep-sixed as any movie with famous actors ever could be and one of the funniest movies ever made.

Oh, you’re 12. I thought you were a pikey that somehow learned to type.

Horrid comment. I doubt very much that 99% of Afghani women want to be covered in blankets with only their eyes out, and forced to stay locked at home and only go out escoted by men of their family.

NO human being wants that for themselves, unless you are a freak masochist(there are those). Democratic will? Hardly.

And even if it were, this is not even an issue of “democracy”. Imagine that Bernie Sanders won the election in the U.S with a platform of establishing a socialist state and abolishing private property. Even if 99% of Americans agreed to that, he wouldn’t be able to do it. Why? Because the right to property is one of those sacred individual rights that is *above the power of the democratic vote*.

How many women in Western countries right now want to cover their faces and shun exposure to the uncovered faces of others? How many want to force themselves and other women to remain locked down in their homes and unable to leave except for groceries, vaccination, disease testing while escorted or routinely checkpointed by grumpy, entitled men in body armor, body cams, armed with fully automatic rifles —who will not hesitate to choke slam their soft maternal bodies into the ground for defiance?

How many people supported suppressing all domestic economy and forcing millions to go unemployed, small businesses or rental housing to close down until they bankrupted, mandating compliance with these unelected edicts without a sliver of appearing to vote —or had their votes supplied for them during the darkness of election’s night?

You have a total dismantling of the freedoms for local economies occurring all around you. Women’s bodies forced to cover in public, forced to undergo genetic modification of their immune, circulatory, lymphatic and fertility systems; businesses forced to comply with occupancy or operations restrictions, forced to sell off assets to market monopolies metastasizing into megacorps indistinguishable from regional powers.

Your myth is controverted by what’s happening and the larger levels of willing compliance among the terrified, the desperate, the narcissistic, the cruelly indifferent. The Medical Taliban already preaches separation and exclusion for the possibly diseased and work towards punishing non-compliance and informed dissent. Not Sharia but corporate and medical Law dominate and already have begun changing laws of ownership and rights, and they have openly declared the goal is to abolish individual ownership for corporate stewardship, greatly resetting what people consider normal. You will not be able to open a new business or conduct your affairs without paying the unsanitized tax, the vaxtax, the new price for trying to live one’s own ethical life, embodying one’s life values, particularly when you are not convinced and you are not compliant and you are not among the faithful who trust the Medical Taliban.

The Western nations didn’t just accept all this. They created it, nurtured it, and export it.

You lack perspective.

Underlings figure out what the bosses don’t want to hear and then don’t tell them. Colonel Bob Crowley reported in the Afghan Papers:

Truth was rarely welcome…so bad news was often stifled. There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small—we’re running over kids with our MRAPs—because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome and the boss wouldn’t like it.

Reminds me of the dialogue at the beginning First Kings, Chapter 22: 1-17. Look it up, it’s very funny.

Yup. Twitter is demanding logins.

As for the rest, I scrolled down quuckly and alighted upon Osho, who I’m always glad to listen to…on 2X the speed. I’m curious to know what he said, but looking into his dead eyes for a solid minute as he composes his hindu thoughts in English is a bit much.

Considering his seeming philosophy of happiness in the here and now why does he always seem so…..dead?

May as well ask how Jordan Peterson, a dude who had to get himself med-evacd to Russia in a drug coma has the nerve to walk around drooping his melted face before a bunch of nerds lecturing them on how to get their lives in order. (Don’t even ask about his daughter snd the rest of his hypochondriac family – that’s what to many black pills will do.

Or how Nietzsche lived as such an untermentch.

Could be an issue of, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”.

It’s like all those psychiatrists who embody pure insanity, and all those sexual purity zealots caught with their willies in somebody else’s dinner. Or all those professional parents whose kids kill themselves. Or others. (She’s her kids’ mom!)

Puritans are the least pure, and antiracists are the most racist.

Always has been true. Always will be.

I’m pretty sure it was more a matter of assuming they would jump off when the plane was 5 feet in the air.

That seemed to be the general atmosphere.

Speaking of lying and cheating, here’s “Chicago Pharmacist”

In his defense, $10 is a decent price

Oooof. I’m gonna have to troll button you there.

You’re on the wrong side of this one.

He needs no defense except for charging those $10.

Those cards are just another brick in the wall.

Bremer really is an asshole, isn’t he?

Send them to his grandchildren’s school.

He’s already read My Pet Goat.

Not at all off the topic, and the Tweet of the Century:

H/T to the commenter that stuck this in on a previous thread.

Because he descendents from the prophet’s beard…

Considering how unimaginably inept the Americans are, do we really have any reason to believe that Bin Laden planned 9/11?

No. I know Bush didn’t do it.

They were the guys we eventually said they are. But is there evidence that they were sent by Bin Laden?

The fact that Bush named Bin Laden so quickly is what’s odd. I recall a number of groups taking credit for it as soon as it happened. And of course once the US blamed Bin Laden there was no going back.

Anyway, that’s my question.

Jack, wby di you feel humiliated or defeated by the Taliban? The puppet government tweeting about how Kabul university has more women than men and that women are getting better grades and better jobs was a tweet intended to humiliate.

Gay men and white knight men and angry women and silly girls and of course the wealthy class from everywhere piled on to celebrate it.

To the extent that Afghanistanis quo Afghanistanis are our enemy I’m happy to humiliate them by making their women dress as men and their men dress as women.

But that wasn’t the point of the tweet, or of the policy that led to it.

It was America’s puppet government in Afghanistan (and locally under any administration) that was humiliating.

If I were outside of the United States right now maybe I woukd agree with you.

I would be identified as an American and as such the collapse of America’s dumb dumb project would be seen to reflect badly upon me.

But I’m in New York. No more American than anybody else. And from this particular vantage point I accept and feel no humiliation whatsoever. Like almost everyone else here, my spirit supports the conquering goats. They have an admiral spirit. The American army had endless amounts of money and technology and could neither wipe the taliban out nor, with all that cash, but their demise or prop up a supposed “for the people” government comprised of the best educated Afghanis in existence.

Boo America!

If you are not currently in the united states or if you have some personal connection to our pathetic soldiery I get why this feels personal. And maybe if you know someone killed on 9/11 you can’t help but think of America’s ridiculous failure in that light.

Butcher and bolt and catch the bad guys should have been the only objective. No Operation Iraqi Freedom or Afghani Schooling or Iranian Christening or North Korean Toymaking….

Just wreak havoc until we get the bad guy.

See, the problem Jack is that you want it to be one way.

Embrace the winner.

I’m guessing the American Americans still in Afghanistan will, after a few harrowing car rides, be fine. There’s no upside to treating them badly. If anything the Taliban would provide them an armed escort to make sure they leave. They’ll be writing long Facebook posts about the scary guys with guns and beards from a hotel in Karachi in a couple of days.

As for Afghan nationals who happen to have an American passport, who knows? It may be a little scarier for them.

¶ GUEST COMMENT BY SOMEONE WHO KNOWS MORE THAN I DO ¶

Incredible picture. In fact I had no idea Timurlane was even still alive!
[4 rows up, extreme left]

Now Afghanistan wakes up to a new day.

Whence cometh the food.

Exporting poppies en masse to western markets through a third party will be interesting. And as an American, should offend us all. If not for the poppies why were we there?

As for bachabazi, our own are less hairy. No thank you.

Their women however will make fine 4th wives for ten thousand Saudis (who will have to divorce their aging Syrian war brides to make legal room) and even happier Emeriti Whores for Saudi visitors.

The hirsute factor is not an issue for Saudis who are used to camels but your mileage may vary. I do promise you however that if a full forehead unibrow flits your fancy, Aladdin will have something waiting for you in Dubai next year. Hell, they’re already there. But the country will soon be flooded with them. Granted, many will be repackaged as Indians or Pakistanis of some kind or other so learn a bit of Dari before you go and you’ll be able to haggle for a better price.

Then there are the weapons. Sure America would prefer they remain in the hands of the clueless Afghans but….well, America isn’t looking very threatening right now so there’s a little money to be made there.

But ultimately massive starvation cometh.

Unless America takes up the white man’s burden or allows someone else, like China or?? to shame America by loudly taking up the burden.

If America takes up the burden that is likely to include feeding lots of them on our own continent and/or paying other white countries to do so.

It goes without saying that the moral responsibility, every which way, lies with the gulf countries. And while they are sure to ostentatiously toss a few golden dhirams in the air and put on a proud show, the land of mohammed is not known for being in love with Ssedaka for its own sake.

One more thing, every new war bride imported to Saudistan means a whole brood worth of children from an earlier wife who are now angry at their father and will stomp their feet until he pays their way to an Anglo or Continental country.

A lot of pieces are about to start moving around the geopolitical board.

Glad you did that as an Anon because you made it all up. It genuinely sounds like you just looked at a map and started writing!

Wrong about Uzbekistan not having had a worthy culture. Wrong about the Chinese not having come through. You made no mention of the Silk Route for that matter. And you neglected to mention all of the different peoples that indelibly marked one part of the country or another from the Greeks to the Buddhists to the Hindus to the Zoroastrians to the Sikhs to the British.

I mean really man!

“Jacob Siegel”

Was this guy there because he lost a bet or to fill some obscure quota?

Well done!

It was specifically regarding gladiator fights or some such that he was referring to and in essence advised not to get too excited about such things except to cheer on the fellow who already won.

You know your Greeks!

Slowly dawning on the blue cheksist intifada that the maxim 'women and children first' was devised by our ancestors for good reason – even if at odds with the 'girl boss' theories they accumulated vast student debts learning about. https://t.co/D495oRWzKn

— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) August 16, 2021

Spotted the astroturfing little puta. The Taliban got their asses thrashed for 20 years while the US military suffered record low casualties for what was probably the safest invasion and occupation in world history.

Uh, Moham did pretty well for himself and despite his companions and the Rashidun killing each other, whenever they did pause to do a little conquest of infidels they, well, look at a globe.

“Not a single Taliban tried to deadlift. One of them pressed ~50 lbs. Tells you something about the strength of the other side.”

I’m guessing some of them have seen or heard of that scene from “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” that points to a certain flaw in Taleb’s reasoning.

Do you even lift, bro?

I don’t think Steve was casting aspersions on the manliness of the Taliban. Like the rest of us, he’s secretly winking at them while kicking dust in “Samson” Taleb’s direction.

Maybe I’m wrong but that’s how I read it.

You made me LOL in a non-kosher chicken place (I’m not entirely Jewish right now) in East New York (I have an adventurous family).

Yeah.

The country doesn’t hate you. Even the rulers don’t hate you. They just pay you no mind. I only fly the flag abroad where it refers to my homeland. I do not fly it at home where it refers to the system of government (which I don’t believe in which is why I personally don’t vote).

But your fellow subjects don’t hate you. We don’t. The people of this land are a generous, kind and good people. Meet them. We’re in this together.

But We The People need a revolution.

Here’s a good place to start:

What do we, and the black community, both agree on.

We can have a revolution against the insecure twitterati whose entire power vanishes when the curtain is drawn back. They are all under 35 and mostly female. They have no real power once they have to show their faces.

So, being as we all agree that our government does not represent us and that our current constitution with all its judicial interpretations ensures that it can not ever represent us – we need a revolution.

A New Declaration Of Independence.

But unless you want to live in Idaho with Richard Spencer you’re going to have to get most of the rest of the country on board.

Excluding anybody worth over 50 million dollars, what do we all want.

If we have no major common demands that accord with the demands of the denizens of the country’s inner cities then we are just whining for whining’s sake. And there’s little honor in that

So what does 99% of the country agree on. On that Plymouth Rock we will build our church.

Biden should hear from us.

The racist left are among those who are criticizing him. Biden isn’t beholden to their philosophy. He’ll take supporters wherever they’re offered.

This is our chance to celebrate him and get noticed for doing so.

It’s also honest.

If the Republicans think they own us they will never do anything for us. Faith without works is dead. Biden did the work, let’s pause to applaud and scare the Hannity Hacks in the process.

What’s the name of this movie on Amazon?

Assuming those planes aren’t heading to the US, some of those boys may make it.

I applaud them.

Not for “escaping” or “desiring freedom” or some bullhooey like that but for having fun and living to tell about it.

The West has too many laws and has too much fun with their “darwin award” laugheries and such.

I love those boys who gave it a go and hope that a couple of them make it.

I watched The Man Who Would Be King on Steve’s suggestion and positively loved it. It was no tragedy but a celebration of the life and glorious death of A Great Man. There are no morals in the tale, as there aren’t in Huckleberry Finn.

They teach you Huckleberry Finn in school as a preventative vaccine against finding the scroll later in life and going off on similar adventures of your own.

Twain foresaw this danger and attempted – unsuccessful – to stave it off by granting his opening page of the book to the following few lines.

NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

By order of the author,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance

People laughing at those boys or mourning them or attributing their deaths to the moral failures of this or that group of people have no life left in them and are but surplus meat farting into the ozone.

Thise brave awesome boys however are humanity’s pride and I, for one, celebrate them.

As Binny L pointed out, everybody cheers rhe winning horse.

As Epictitus pointed out, so should you.

My puritan autocorrect finally came through.

Behold the motherducker!

https://mobile.twitter.com/stillgray/status/1426660421050650627

I don’t understand this line of argument.

Other than for that one family out in Nevada a few years ago, when has owning a rifle ever helped protect an American man or woman from wrongful imprisonment by the powers that be?

In America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where everyone is presumed innocent, 99 out of 100 people charged with a crime are convicted.

And 1 out of every 3 men in America is handcuffed at least once in his life.

And 1 out of every 60 men in America is in prison at this very moment.

Unless you believe that Americans are the most jailworthy of peoples on the earth you’ve got to admit that there are an awful lot of normal people being shackled by their own government.

Americans are not Afghanis.

Americans do not fight.

Americans swell with pride at putting in 50 hour work weeks and, when they aren’t working, they are sheltering in place and living their lives through a screen.

Europeans have an excuse for being so wussified. After all, they have no guns.

Americans have no excuse but the faint memory of puritan morals which requires that all evildoers be punished.

And so, when its your turn to be punished you know well the psychology of your fellow citizen and submit to it as weakly as a lamb.

The American second amendment was designed to protect the first.

Yet when they came for the first amendment, closing the houses of worship, muzzling the populace, censoring the free press, and making peaceful assembly illegal did the right to bear arms help safeguard your rights?

No.

Because our government OF the people, BY the people, and FOR the people – so help me God – loved the mask.

Oh yes we did.

So too when it comes to supporting “our boys in blue”, our courts, our prosecutors, our prisons — if our guns are for anything it is to protect those fine puboic servants from the rowdy proles.

If Winston Smith is looking wistfully out of his window at the Dominican washer woman singing with abandon in Washington Heights it is with a prayer in his heart that the aurhorities come for her quickly.

The one thing that all Americans agree upon is their burning desire for Law and Order. They only disagree about which people to use it against.

Free playfulness with the acceptance of all of the risks that entails is anathema to a people who truly believe that their little ones will live forever, save they fall from uncushioned monkeybars or be spoken to by an unauthorized adult.

And the solution we found is to allow our youth to go abroad, while still in their teens, to wreak amoral havoc upon strangers so that they can come home afterwards to the news that they are heroes and to a lifetime PTSD Pension.

Americans who speak with pride about their right to publish what they will, to ark as they will, to have a speedy trial, to be presumed innocent, to be secure in their persons and posessions are so cringeworthy they don’t even know their cringeworthy.

Whose flag is that you’re waving? What have the stars and stripes done for you and yours?

As Samuel told the Jews who begged him for a King and Government (I Samuel Chapter 8): “You will be its slave”.

And still they demanded it.

As do we.

Whatever else one can say about the Afghanis of the less western sort, they do not boast of owning ornamental guns while their sons are shackled by the millions.

As we do.

As ours are.

Thank you for this. I’m not much for worrying about the geopolitics of Pathanistan but watching a happy man dance like an imbecile is a good time.

I wish we had more of these videos and fewer moralistic demands that we mourn something or other.

So long as nobody is being tortured in the background, I would like to see as many happily dancing Afghans as possible.

Any suggestions for me?

“Anyway, I would love to learn about communities of people involved in the wider world who employ such morals/strategies and find not only their own lives bettered but the lives of others as well.

…Any recommendations?”

https://www.pearmentor.org/

https://sistersoftheroad.org/

“Whack the ral-de-ra:
Hunt the hare and chase ‘er
Down the rocky road
And all the way to Dublin,
One, two three, four five.”

The whole thing is a delicate dance.

The first paragraph in Pirkei Avos advises the future Jewish Legal Leadership to:

1. Deputize many disciples
2. Judge Moderately
3. Erect legal perimeters around the law that afford people a buffer zone

And the very first paragraph in the Talmud relates to the fact that the religious leadership did this with regard to limiting how late one may say certain prayers.

As far as I can tell, the way it worked during the time of the early Pharisees (say, from 500 – 100 BC) was that “fences around the law” were taught as such once somebody was sufficiently educationally advanced. Children might be taught, “don’t talk to strangers” but as they grew up they came to understand that this referred mainly to strangers handing candy out of vans. Fences were known not to be the law itself by those whose education continued beyond the age of 20 or so.

After that, and perhaps intermittently throughout Jewish history even before that, even the legal/religious leadership began to associate the protective perimeter of the law with the law itself.

This is a matter of woe however. Extra strictures aren’t celebrated but lamented. Some of the ancient said that people who take on the nazarite vows are in some ways holy sinners for their extra levels of abstinence. After all, “lo dahy licha ma sheasra torah?”, God’s prohibitions don’t suffice for you?

After the Divine Revelation at Mount Sinai, God specifically told the Jews to not remain celebate like Moses but to return to their marital beds or “tents”.

In fact the human drive to be self sacrificially uber holy is one that Moses himself cautions against.

לֹ֣א תֹסִ֗פוּ עַל־הַדָּבָר֙ אֲשֶׁ֤ר אָנֹכִי֙ מְצַוֶּ֣ה אֶתְכֶ֔ם וְלֹ֥א תִגְרְע֖וּ מִמֶּ֑נּוּ לִשְׁמֹ֗ר אֶת־מִצְוֺת֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר אָנֹכִ֖י מְצַוֶּ֥ה אֶתְכֶֽם׃

You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I enjoin upon you.

Deuteronomy 4:2

I love Michener.

He was a fascinating human being as well.

In his autobiography he wrote about his time as a shockingly accurate Gypsy Fortune Teller.

He also writes that he was adopted and therefore felt the freedom to imagine himself as belonging to any of the peoples he wrote about.

Many adopted people do amazing things thanks to their lack of being stuck with a single identity.

My husband’s father wasn’t around when he was small and my mother in law died before I could meet her so my husband never really had what I would call roots.

But one of the things that made me fall in love with my husband was how rooted he was in himself and as a member of the human race. It turns out that, for him anyway, not having actual tribal roots or “people” made him into a man confident in himself and his own personhood.

He is his own man and because of that he is forgiving and accepting of other men. Sorry for bragging 😂 but I love my husband and I could imagine him doing some of the things Michener did in his autobiography.

Being adopted is I’m sure different for each person but I wouldn’t want my man any other way!

Steve, you are brilliant. Thank you.

Kaganovitch’s Hezekiah Tunnel is real though.

I personally saw the inscription that the tunnelers made in the rock.

Ironically I saw it in the main archeology museum in Istanbul. (It’s good to be the sultan!)

I’m new here but it sounded like Whiskey is a trolling. Her theory is obviously silly and, even if true, only one variable out of who knows how many?

Whiskey, if you are not a troll I apologize for the assumption but you come across as though you are ‘spittin facts’ when in fact if you’re not trolling you’re just daydreaming out loud, right?

If you are a troll, why? I can see how it can be fun but trolls usually try to annoy people and you don’t seem to be trying to do that. In fact I loved loved loved your comment <3 It was really intelligent and a great read! But it distracts from the conversation….is that the point of trolling?

Anyway, other people talking about "nehar mitzrayim ad nehar pras" are obviously not trolling but are in some ways even more wrong.

Sure, we Jews (can I say we yet?) believe that Hashem promised our ancestors (and after my conversion Abraham will be considered my ancestor, in fact I already feel like he is) the territory from the Jordan to the Euphrates….kind of.

After all Abraham himself was living 50km from the Euphrates when God told him to leave and trek 800km to Canaan.

Then there is the Talmudic statement that really the whole world will be called The Holy Land. Then there are all of the Jewish Laws today about fruits grown in different territories as to whether they are considered to have been grown in "Israel" deoending upin Davidian or Hasmonean conquests. Then there is Moses leading the Jews out of Goshen to Israel even though Goshen is already between the Nile and the Euphrates. And so much more. But the main point is that literally no member of the Knesset or legal political party supports conquering territory.

I can see where Bible Studies alone could have steered people wrong though (everything I know that is accurate about Israel and the Jews I learned or discovered in the past 3 years) . Also, my chassidishe friends do in fact believe that God will give the Jews all of the territory from the Nile to the Euphrates. And if there was a war I can totally understand any country keeping the conquered territory. If there does happen to be a war I myself hope that Israel keeps that territory. Only if it is a defensive war of course. Though of course defense can be in the eyes of the beholder.

Do I hope to see God fulfill his promise to my (soon-to-be 😂) ancestor? Yes. But not in any way that I can imagine. I lived with Jews and with Palestinians and I do not want any blood shed at all! But I do hope to see the Jewish God ascendant one day and the land of Israel being a Holy Land that not only is holy but looks holy from every angle.

Wow. That’s probably the longest anyone ever responded to a troll. Whether Whiskey is a troll or not however, I did really enjoy his comment. Honestly.

What seems to be missing from our system of Western law is the concept that just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it. The Western ideal is that you call up your lawyer and you ask him, how close can I get to the edge of the law without actually wandering over the line.

That’s why religion is useful. Certain “laws” should be of the divine sort which are only adjudicated by your god.

I’m not saying mankind necessarily needs religion/s, only that so far they seem to be useful for smoothing over some of the rougher elements of interpersonal relationships.

Thank you for this.

I looked it up and landed here: https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/detraction

I like it a lot.

I also found it very surprising. I know A LOT of Catholics and was unaware that “works” encompassed this level of seriousness and relevance to daily life.

In your experience, is this level of consideration regarding Catholic Virtues something that is taken seriously by the laity? A few of the old school catholics I know are wonderful people who credit their morals to following Jesus’ instructions in The Gospels (and Acts) but I have never joined them in the confession booth.

This is all very interesting.

I have come across small christian communities in out of the way places that take such considerations seriously but they don’t interact with the wider world the way that Catholics do

Thank you for both of your beautiful comments on this subject!

I’m sure Judaism is not unique in its understanding of what kind of speech is best unspoken, it’s simply the lens that I myself happen to relate to best.

Also, I personally don’t care for all of the numerous legalisms in Chassidish Judaism (which is not a problem because that’s my husband’s department anyway) but having to study and think about all of the laws relating to this particular subject of Chofetz Chaim* keeps it fresh in the mind so that as inevitable opportunities arise to speak or believe Lashon Hara I’m prepped for it.

* The name of the book is Chofetz Chaim which is from Psalms 34. It approximately means: “Eager For Life” and the verse as I see it translated in Sefaria is:

Come, my sons, listen to me; I will teach you what it is to fear the Lord. Who is the man who is eager for life, who desires years of good fortune? Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceitful speech. Shun evil and do good, seek amity and pursue it.

Anyway, I would love to learn about communities of people involved in the wider world who employ such morals/strategies and find not only their own lives bettered but the lives of others as well.

Personally, I see this all around me every single day but almost never online. And like everyone else these days, I spend too much time online.

I would like to be able to interact with the online conversation without feeling either like I’m violating my religion to do so or that I’m ignoring essential subjects because “if you have nothing nice to say then say nothing at all”.

Any recommendations?

Hi, I’m sorry that you feel this way but I can definitely understand your sentiments.

As far as I can tell from the studies I mentioned earlier, “the bad tongue” that is forbidden even when true refers to saying that a person is stupid or fat or mean. It doesn’t refer (as far as I know) to what is usually called “hate speech” in our current culture.

And even that sort of talk (that someone is unintelligent or did something immoral) is forbidden in circumstances where it isn’t “litoeles” – for an important purpose.

In other words, if you happen to know for certain that someone lacks empathy or has bulimia you are only allowed to share that with the man whonis going out with her if you are sure that he doesn’t already know it and that he needs to know it and that it will protect him from a bad situation.

And even in situations like this you need to check your purity of motives versus any biases you may have.

Where it gets complicated, as someone named Jack wrote, is whether you are allowed to BELIEVE a negative bit of news about someone.

For me this has had the positive effect of finally being able to get over Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Psychologically I can get over the cultural demand to believe “the news” (or the negative interpretation of someone’s actions on a video) by saying, “well, God told me not to believe that!”

What’s really cool is how many times it tirns out weeks later that “God” was right. The media or social media got it wrong and the individual is not actually the monster that he or she was made out to be.

It turns out that I am actually more right about what’s what, than I was before when, like everyone else, I believed the worst that was reported about my ideological opponents.

The cool thing is that this extends to people who say nasty things about Jews too – even though I’m soon going to be one.

Zee, you’re not even allowed to say Lashon Hara about yourself, so I simply disbelieve that people who are Naziing this and Hitlering that are people who actually want to murder me and my (also converting) husband. I sssume that they are writing things out of frustration or because they are poking sacred cows or for some other reason. Sure, this wouldn’t apply to how I would have reacted to reading Mein Kampf. There is a difference between not accepting Lashon Hara and being a Chossid Shoteh – a pseudorighteous imbecile. But with powerless fellow humans on the internet or even in real life I have found that assuming “not the worst” has not only made me happier and more friendly but also made me more accurate in my assessments than before.

Besides, the laws against using or believing “the bad tongue” is a personal religious law. I have never heard any Chassidish Rabbi try and legislate it, LOL.

But Odin, I do know where you’re coming from because I was coming from there too. Well, my husband more than myself. He really disliked “Judaism” until he started looking into it. And that’s how we both came to become Jews ourselves.

I’m not saying that everyone should be Jewish or even that Judaism is always interpreted correctly by any of its practitioners or myself. Only that I’m really glad that my husband was Semite-Suspicious because it brought me to a whole new world. One that is far from perfect but which is generally beautiful.

I just showed my Rabbi message and he thinks I should mention that regardless of your feelings about Jews you are still a child of Hashem and that He loves you.

Or maybe You are the Semite spreading the lie that he is spreading a lie that Jews were vaccinated by a placebo so that…

Okay, that’s enough play for today 😂
LOL

Before clicking MORE.. one in three?

Either it’s A that is heads, or it’s B that is heads, or it’s Both are heads.

I prefer the one who doesn’t publicly ridicule random victims.

That’s the thing about “the free speech debate”.

I’m a woman converting to chassidish Judaism and one of the first culture shocks – and I do mean shocks – is how my new friends regard gossiping about people as a shameful thing to do

It hit me when I made a comment about my sister at a shabbos meal on Friday night and the kids ranging in age from 9 to 18 all looked down blushing on my behalf!

It turns out that “hurtful speech” is verboten even when the gossip is true and the person isn’t in the room.

What I came to realize is that intelligent Men prefer to talk about Ideas and intelligent Women prefer to talk about People.

I’m in a women’s group that Zooms together every Wednesday evening to study a Jewish book called The Chofetz Chaim which is about a hundred pages of Hebrew laws about the sin of gossiping.

It bothers me a little that they don’t encourage talking about unkosher ideas either (they really believe that the world is 5,781 years old) but it doesn’t bother me too much. I like their closeness to God and songs and family life and kindness. So if I have to pretend that dinosaurs were killed in Noah’s flood, who cares?

But the men in my conversion class (pre covid) kept getting into trouble arguing over things like that.

That’s when I came up with my theory that men can talk about ideas more dispassionately than women can. And men also fail to appreciate the perhaps once beneficial mechanism of personal gossip.

But I’m now convinced that gossip/libel/slander/mockery and other forms of hurting people by referring to NAMED INDIVIDUALS is worse than talking about uncomfortable ideas, including ideas about groups of people.

I feel like I discovered some kind of scientific principle.

In the American media and of course social media (and college campuses, etc) it is considered perfectly acceptable to cuttingly hurt individuals – which is the kind of talk we women are more likely to fall prey to – but not acceptable to talk about ideas that might be harmful – which is the kind of talk that men are more likely to engage in.

I perfectly accept my new position in the chassidish world. I am covering my hair, my collar bone and my calves. I will never lead a Torah or Davening service and no matter how knowledgeable I become I will never lecture to a group that includes men in it.

And you know what, I’m totally fine with it!

The biggest change in my life is that the most popular women are the ones who never ever ever ever speak a bad word about individuals. We love being near thise women like we used to love being near the girls who shared the juiciest gossip!

And it makes most of the internet pretty cringe to me.

But instead of deplatforming people who make funnof individuals online, we deplatform people who say mean things about groups of people or who doubt the generally accepted opinions about Covid-19.

That’s because women (or little girls who never grew up) were given complete control of the internet and are perfectly happy to curtail the speech of men that could be harmful, while keeping their own harmful speech not only legitimated but celebrated.

The sad part of this for me is that I really loved the Borat and Bruno movies! But now I see them as cringe and stipped watching the new Borat movie halfway through felt like I was personally hurting the people who were being publicly ridiculed in the movie, by my watching it.

If it were up to me, the Chofetz Chaim book would become part of the national discourse. Real people commit suicide every single day because of what people say about them in the news or on social media. So far however I have yet to see concrete evidence that either Charles Murray or Bret Weinstein caused any deaths by dispassionately discussing their socially heretical ideas.

As a woman I am less inclined to run to the front of the battlefield to fight my sisters who are, in my soon-to-be Jewish opinion, causing the most harm to real living individuals.

I also really don’t want to see men fighting women either (even harpies and crazies).

But you don’t have to!

All you have to do is fight the men who are encouraging these women!

As far as I can tell, these children are getting away with it because their bad behavior is cheered on by the sillier sort of men. If these men didn’t exist, or if everyone had to read the book I mentioned before, then it would be Game Theory publicly known (that I know that you know that I know) that their behavior is cringe and it would happen a lot less.

So if there must be a conversation about the limits of free speech, I think it should be about the sort of speech that is designed to hurt a specific individual, rather than the sort of speech that may, possibly, who knows, cause harm through some political process get to occur.

I was told by one of my professors while in graduate school at Georgia Tech that the university standards were reduced during the late 60’s to keep students from being drafted. They were never readjusted. Some places like Cal Berkeley are very difficult to get into. Georgia Tech is relatively or comparatively “easier” to get into but they WILL fail you – unlike some other places.

And for those who see race everywhere, give me a break. The social programming done to blacks is now being done to whites – with similar results.

If one wishes to destroy a nation, the nation must be “prepped” and it’s happening underneath our noses while many of you point at others when you SHOULD be looking in the mirror.

Try reading Dr. Lana Cantrell’s book titled “The Greatest Story Never Told”. No one is looking at diet. Your skin color says a lot of your biochemistry. Blacks, Whites and Asians are unique enough biochemically that their diets should be unique as well.

How long do Africans live in developed African nations? Compare that to Whites and what do you see? I can attest from my matriarchal and paternal grandparents that Blacks can and frequently do outlive Whites. My father’s side of the family lives on average 93 years; my mother’s side is about 88 years.

Those that eat “modern foods” will complain of diabetes and dementia and diabetes are closely linked.

DIET, DIET, DIET…

If you take the time you can research the term SITOLOGY. The best information I found – and slowly corroborated much – came from Dr. Cantrell’s book which is now out of print.

Oh, down here in South Louisiana, the oldest persons in the rural parts of the state are BLACKS who either farm or still eat a “farmer’s diet” followed by the Creoles of Color (“Black” to most of you reading this) followed by Acadians or Cajuns who live the same types of lives. If any eat an “Anglo Diet” (what some of us term the SHIT that most of you consume) then each person’s/race’s inherent weakness will come to the fore and you see what you see: gout, diabetes, dementia, etc., etc.

BTW, if you look at poor Whites and poor Blacks on “Anglo Diets” they look the same: poor human specimen.