LAT: More than 30 women come forward to accuse director James Toback of sexual harassment

Posted on October 22, 2017 by Luke Ford

Los Angeles Times: He prowled the streets of Manhattan looking for attractive young women, usually in their early 20s, sometimes college students, on occasion a high schooler. He approached them in Central Park, standing in line at a bank or drug store or at a copy center while they worked on their resumes.

His opening line had a few variations. One went: “My name’s James Toback. I’m a movie director. Have you ever seen ‘Black and White’ or ‘Two Girls and a Guy’?”

Probably not. So he’d start to drop names. He had an Oscar nomination for writing the Warren Beatty movie “Bugsy.” He directed Robert Downey Jr., in three movies. The actor, Toback claimed, was a close friend; he had “invented him.” If you didn’t believe him, he would pull out a business card or an article that had been written about him to prove he had some juice in Hollywood. That he could make you a star.

But first, he’d need to get to know you. Intimately. Trust him, he’d say. It’s all part of his process.

Then, in a hotel room, a movie trailer, a public park, meetings framed as interviews or auditions quickly turned sexual, according to 38 women who, in separate interviews told the Los Angeles Times of similar encounters they had with Toback.

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Lech-Lecha, לֶךְ-לְךָ Go forth, yourself! Gen. 12:1-17:27

Posted on October 22, 2017 by Luke Ford

This week’s Torah portion begins the story of the Jews.

Listen here.

Issue 1. Is Richard Spencer’s Alt Right college tour good for the Alt Right?

Issue 2. Is the new Netflix documentary, One of Us, about ex-Hasidim, good for the Jews? For the goyim? Were Hasidim killed in the Holocaust because they refused to blend in? Are Jews and Muslims hated for not blending in?

Issue 2.5: How whites, black and latinos differ as patients.

Issue 2.6: Jamie Kirchick: Can American Jews Be White Nationalists? White House Adviser Stephen Miller Is a Spokesman for Groups That Wouldn’t Have Him as a Member

Issue 2.7 : Melchizedek

Issue 3: Were the women who gave in to Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior 100% victims? What blame should they shoulder? Should they have spoken out earlier? Was there anything Jewish about Harvey’s perviness? What would Abraham think about Harvey Weinstein? How should Jews feel about Harvey? Will attitudes towards Jews change as a result of these Harvey Weinstein stories? Do goyim look at Harvey primarily as an individual or as a member of the tribe? Was it racist that Harvey did not direct his predatory behavior towards black women (equal to their percentage of the population)? Was Harvey Weinstein a bad man or a sick man?

Buzzfeed publishes this essay by Bim Adewunmi: “Buried beneath the sickening story of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse is another story — the problem of casting women by their fuckability — and who that leaves out.”

Issue 3.5: LAT: More than 30 women come forward to accuse director James Toback of sexual harassment

According to Wikipedia: “Toback was born in New York City. His mother, Selma Judith (née Levy), was a president of The League of Women Voters and a moderator of political debates on NBC.[1] His father, Irwin Lionel Toback, was a stockbroker and former vice president of Dreyfus & Company.”

Issue 4. A video has circulated of actor Jason Biggs peeing on Chelsea Handler. Is this behavior depraved? Are liberals the real predators?

Was Chelsea Handler the victim here? Jason is a goy, while Chelsea is half-Jewish (but not Jewish according to orthodox Jewish law). How should that information affect our calculus? Was what Jason did to Chelsea worse than the Holocaust? Is Jason Biggs worse than Hitler?

Issue 5. Does “gentrification” mean a neighborhood is becoming more white? The Guardian: “Are white hipsters hijacking an anti-gentrification fight in Los Angeles? As the Latino neighbourhood of Boyle Heights combats soaring property prices, some condemn outsiders’ involvement – but others welcome their input”

Issue 6. Are Mike Cernovich and Laura Loomer the real Right?

Issue 7. The Las Vegas slaughter. Are the government telling us the truth? Are the media?

Issue 8. The JFK files. Trump says he will release the JFK files in the next few days. What do you expect to find? Was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone when he shot JFK?

9. When Russia comes to liberate the righteous remnant of white culture from America whore of Babylon, how will we be identified?

10. Sex addiction rehab, does it work? Is there such a thing as sex addiction?

11. Steve Sailer: “JPod Can Identify Filthy Anti-Semites Just from Their Filthy Anti-Semitic Faces” Is physiognomy destiny?

12. Is there history in the book of Genesis or is it mythology?

13. The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.[a]
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

Are Jews a blessing to the world? Does God curse those who curse Jews and bless those who bless Jews?

14. Gen. 12:7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.”

Did God give the land of Israel to the Jews? Did God give Japan to the Japanese? Does God support ethno-nationalism?

* Gen. 12:11 As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai [65 yo], “I know what a beautiful woman you are. 12 When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13 Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”

Did Abraham sin? Are ethics situational or absolute or does the situation determine the absolute?

15. Gen: 12:17: “But the Lord inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram’s wife Sarai.”

Did Sarai give Pharoah the clap? If so, did she get it from Abraham? If so, did Abraham get it from a shiksa?

16. Why did God choose Abraham? Dennis Prager said in 1993: “If Abraham were a truly righteous person, and Jews came from Abraham, then Jews could say, we’re better than non-Jews because we come from the best ancestor.”

“The Torah doesn’t want the Jews to think they are intrinsically better than anybody.”

“There is no more evil doctrine than racial supremacy because it means that the people who are not members of your race can never change. They are intrinsically bad. You are intrinsically inferior, I may therefore destroy you. Auschwitz was impossible without racial anti-semitism. Regular anti-semitism would not produce extermination. In all previous anti-semitism, if the Jew converted to the anti-semite’s thinking, he was accepted the next day. In racial anti-semitism, the Jew can never change.”

“Just as the different race can never be good, you can never be bad because of your race. It undermines everything God wants in this world — that values be supreme. That people can be better.”

“The most anti-semitism today is to be found in the Arab world. It’s the only part of the world not moving to democracy. The two are related. If they make peace with Israel, there will be unleashed forces of democratization in the Arab world… You cannot hate the Jews and run a good society.”

17. Gen. 13:14: “The Lord said to Abram after Lot had parted from him”

Which people do you need to be rid of before God will speak to you?

18. It’s hard to think of any important thinkers in history who were poor. Only the wealthy have the time to ask philosophical questions.

19. Gen. 12:6 “the Canaanites were then in the land.”

Orthodox RCA commentary:

Spinoza argued that the last sentence, “The Canaanites were then in the land”, meaning “then as opposed to now”, could not have been written at the time of Moses, as the Canaanites were still in the land. The sentence could only have been written at a time when the Canaanites were no longer in the land, so as to convey needed historical/ethnographic context to contemporary readers.

Spinoza did not see himself as having discovered this; he believed that he was following in the footsteps of the thirteenth century Spanish commentator Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra. Let’s take a look then at Ibn Ezra’s comments to Genesis 12:6:
“והכנעני אז בארץ” – יתכן שארץ כנען תפשה כנען מיד אחר. ואם איננו כן יש לו סוד. והמשכיל ידום:
“The Canaanites were then in the land” – likely that the Land of Canaan was grabbed by Canaan from the hands of another. But if this is not so, it has a secret, and the one who comprehends it will fall silent.
The “secret” Ibn Ezra alludes to here is the “secret of the twelve” that he refers to elsewhere in his commentary, and the other verses he mentions in those contexts also seem to raise the possibility of post-Mosaic editorial insertions. As I have not yet understood any other attempt at explaining the secret, it seems to me fair to cite Ibn Ezra as someone who was theologically okay with there being post-Mosaic insertions in the Torah.
However, Ibn Ezra does not prefer this reading. On literary rather than theological grounds, he suggests that the more likely correct interpretation is that the verse teaches us that the Canaanites had taken the land by force from someone else. In other words, he thinks the better translation of the verse is “The Canaanites were then in the land”, meaning “then as opposed to previously”. That translation allows the verse to be written at the time of Moses.

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Ilana Mercer: Harvey Sweinstein and Hollywood’s Hos

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Luke Ford

Ilana Mercer writes:

I’d like to better understand the conservative media’s orgy over Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced and disgraceful Hollywood film producer and studio executive who used his power over decades to have his way with starlets.

To listen to conservative talkers, the women affronted or assaulted by Weinstein were all Shakespearean talent in the making—female clones of Richard Burton (he had no match among women)—who made the pilgrimage to Sodom and Gomorrah in the Hollywood Hills, for the purpose of realizing their talent, never knowing it was a meat market. Watching the women who make up the dual-perspective panels “discussing” the Weinstein saga, it’s hard to tell conservative from liberal.

“Conservative” women now complain as bitterly as their liberal counterparts about “objectification.”

However, the female form has always been revered; been the object of sexual longing, clothed and nude. The reason the female figure is so crudely objectified nowadays has a great deal to do with … women themselves. By virtue of their conduct, women no longer inspire reverence as the fairer sex, and as epitomes of loveliness. For they are crasser, vainer, more eager to expose all voluntarily than any male. Except for Anthony Weiner, the name of an engorged organism indigenous to D.C., who was is in the habit of exposing himself as often as the Kardashians do.

The latter clan is a bevy of catty exhibitionists, controlled by a mercenary, ball-busting matriarch called Kris Kardashian. Kris is madam to America’s First Family of Celebrity Pornographers. (To launch a career with a highly stylized, self-directed sex tape is no longer even condemned.) Lots of little girls, with parental approval, look up to the Kardashians.

From Kim, distaff America learns to couch a preoccupation with pornographic selfies in the therapeutic idiom. Kardashian flaunts her ass elephantiasis with pure self-love. Yet millions of her admirers depict her obscene posturing online as an attempt to come to terms with her body. “Be a little easier on myself,” counsels Kim as she directs her camera to the nether reaches of her carefully posed, deformed derriere. While acting dirty and self-adoring, Kardashian delivers as close to a social jeremiad on self-esteem as her kind can muster. Genius!

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Pro Publica: Racist, Violent, Unpunished: A White Hate Group’s Campaign of Menace

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Luke Ford

Pro Publica:

It was about 10 a.m. on Aug. 12 when the melee erupted just north of Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia.

About two dozen white supremacists — many equipped with helmets and wooden shields — were battling with a handful of counter-protesters, most of them African American. One white man dove into the violence with particular zeal. Using his fists and feet, the man attacked one person after another.

The street fighter was in Virginia on that August morning for the “Unite the Right” rally, the largest public gathering of white supremacists in a generation, a chaotic and bloody event that would culminate, a few hours later, in the killing of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was there to protest the racist rally.

The violence in Charlottesville became national news. President Donald Trump’s response to it — he asserted there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the events that day — set off a wave of condemnations, from his allies as well as his critics.

But for many Americans, conservatives as well as liberals, there was shock and confusion at the sight of bands of white men bearing torches, chanting racist slogans and embracing the heroes of the Confederacy: Who were they? What are their numbers and aims?

There is, of course, no single answer. Some who were there that weekend in Charlottesville are hardened racists involved with long-running organizations like the League of the South. Many are fresh converts to white supremacist organizing, young people attracted to nativist and anti-Muslim ideas circulated on social media by leaders of the so-called alt-right, the newest branch of the white power movement. Some are paranoid characters thrilled to traffic in the symbols and coded language of vast global conspiracy theories. Others are sophisticated provocateurs who see the current political moment as a chance to push a “white agenda,” with angry positions on immigration, diversity and economic isolationism.

ProPublica spent weeks examining one distinctive group at the center of the violence in Charlottesville: an organization called the Rise Above Movement, one of whose members was the white man dispensing beatings near Emancipation Park Aug. 12.

The group, based in Southern California, claims more than 50 members and a singular purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes. RAM’s members spend weekends training in boxing and other martial arts, and they have boasted publicly of their violence during protests in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley. Many of the altercations have been captured on video, and its members are not hard to spot.

Indeed, ProPublica has identified the group’s core members and interviewed one of its leaders at length. The man in the Charlottesville attacks — filmed by a documentary crew working with ProPublica — is 24-year-old Ben Daley, who runs a Southern California tree-trimming business.

Many of the organization’s core members, including Daley, have serious criminal histories, according to interviews and a review of court records. Before joining RAM, several members spent time in jail or state prison on serious felony charges including assault, robbery, and gun and knife offenses. Daley did seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Another RAM member served a prison term for stabbing a Latino man five times in a 2009 gang assault.

“Fundamentally, RAM operates like an alt-right street-fighting club,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

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‘I’m Sorry That Happened’

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Luke Ford

I had a conflict with somebody a few months ago. Afterward, I felt bad but wasn’t sure I had been in the wrong so I sent an email saying, in effect, “I’m sorry that happened.”

My apology was a non-apology. Unless you are clear about what you regret in your own behavior, you aren’t apologizing. Until I could get clear, I should have stayed silent. Non-apologies don’t work.

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