The reason is that elevating any standard, any religion, any text to the level of the sacred means that that it is above any individual. Therefore, what any one individual or even society believes is of secondary importance to that which is deemed sacred. If, to cite the most obvious example, the Bible is sacred, then I have to revere it more than I revere my own feelings in assessing what is right and wrong.
But for the left, what is right and wrong is determined by every individual’s feelings, not by anything above the individual.
This is a major reason why the left, since Karl Marx, has been so opposed to Judeo-Christian religion. For Judaism and Christianity, God and the Bible are above the self. Indeed, Western civilization was built on the idea that the individual and society are morally accountable to God and to the moral demands of that book. That was the view, incidentally, of every one of the Founders including deists such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
This is entirely unacceptable to the left. As Marx and Engels said, “Man is God, and God is man.” Therefore, society must rid itself of the sacred, i.e., God and the Bible. Then each of us (or the society, party or judiciary) takes the place of God and the Bible.
She forgets that tradeoffs dominate everything in life. When a culture specializes for proficiency in one area of endeavor, it must sacrifice proficiency in another area. Cultures noted for their food, music and sociability often fall short in economic endeavors. Cultures noted for economic endeavors usually don’t have very interesting cuisines, food or music. Southern Italy is a great place to vacation but its hell trying to get anything built or maintained. Germans get things done by few go to Germany for the food. (There aren’t a lot of German cookbooks on bookshelves outside of Germany but almost everyone has an Italian cookbook.) Examples abound in comparisons of any two cultures. All cultures represent some type of tradeoff and therefore all cultures relatively excel in some areas but fall relatively short in others.
Chinese culture excels in instilling individual proficiency but at the tradeoff of not teaching small or large scale teamwork.
(They might also fall short in teaching experimental problem solving an overall adaptability but that’s another post.)
Although she seems utterly unaware of it, by depriving her children of sports and other team activities, Chua guarantees they will grow up to be highly educated and skilled but they won’t have any experience forming teams or working within them. They will always have to depend on non-Chinese to provide organization. Worse, since a good leader is also always a good team player, her children will never have what it takes rise to the top of any large organization. They will never lead.
The lyrics are below:
The Alte Rockers: Purim 2009: Parody of AC/DC – You Shook Me All Night Long
You Shuckled (AC/Rashi, Jews in Black Hats)
She was a text machine
She studied kiddushin
She was the frummest damned woman That you ever seen
She braid a challah tight
Benched the licht just right
Dipped a candle in her yayin every Saturday night
Skirts down to there
A shmatte covered her hair
She sang “L’cha Dodi”
But I was already there
Cause I get that tension
When she starts benchin
The wines not quenchin
My thirst for your attention, baby–you
Shuckled all night long.
She rocked side to side
She did the Satmar slide
Shes gonna break the gates of heaven
Cause her hips are wide
Then she strapped one on
With a leather thong
What she did with those tefillin
Was wrong, wrong, wrong
She davvens double time
She never skips a line
I’m gonna slip through that mechitza
Make her mine, all mine
‘Cause the siddur was shaking
Its spine was breaking
And I was faking
The Hebrew, maybe, but you
Shuckled all night long.
GLOSSARY:
Kiddushin: Talmudic tractate on Marital Purity Laws
Frummest: Most observant
Benched the licht: Said prayers over the candles
Yayin: Wine
Shmatte: Lit: Rag Fig.: simple head covering
Lcha Dodi: Sabbath Hymn beginning Come, Beloved
Shuckle: To bow and sway fervently while praying intently in the Chassidic manner
Satmar: A Chassidic sect
Tefillin: Phylacteries (leather boxes worn during prayers)
Davvens: Yiddish word for prays
Mechitza: Barrier separating men and women during traditional prayer service
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said that most people left are center are so because of the left’s effective demonization of the right, not because they hold left-wing positions.
We conservatives think this guy Jared L. Loughner should be executed. Liberals say no. He’s not culpable for what he did.
Hillary Clinton should be removed as secretary of state. To compare Islamic terrorists to this man Jared L. Loughner as an example of our extremists just like you do, wow. Hillary Clinton tells the Arab world that we have the same problem. This is vile.
The only thing to be learned from this weekend’s terrible event in Tucson is how the left lies to further its agenda by demonizing the right.
Many of you are asking, am I demonizing the left?
Demonizing means you attribute things that are not true. Are you lying with negative rhetoric?
Hysteria is almost a monopoly of the left, from heterosexual AIDS in America to zero population growth or the world will have no more food. They are like the borderline personality — in need of constant tension. There are individuals who need permanent crises so they create them. They thrive on emotional eruptions. That’s the left. The left lives for the next reason to be hysterical. Is it peanuts in school or carbon dioxide emissions or silicone breast implants? The list is endless.
When President Reagan was shot, there was no talk about all the hate rhetoric against President Reagan from the left. It was understood that his shooter was deranged, but if a Democrat is shot, then it is right-wing hate.
Leonard Bernstein said, “If Ronald Reagan is elected, the Klu Klux Klan will come to office. I have been warned my entire life that right-wing violence will tear this country apart. It’s never happened and it won’t happen. It’s not part of the DNA of the right. It is part of the DNA of the left. Look at the animal rights groups and the violence against professors. Give me an analogous thing on the right.”
“Who needs body guards when they go to speak on university campuses? Right-wing speakers. It doesn’t matter how radically left you are, you don’t need a bodyguard. Ann Coulter. David Horowitz. They travel with bodyguards to college campuses. Whose speeches get interrupted and ended on college campuses? Right-wing speakers.”
In a better world, no one would attempt to exploit his madness for political gain. We would instead focus on the contributions of Ms. Giffords, by all accounts a laudable public servant. We would celebrate the lives of the other victims, and we would praise the survivors who intervened to tackle Mr. Loughner and disarm him before he could kill others—like 74-year-old retiree Bill Badger, who was grazed in the head by a bullet before helping to restrain the shooter.
But the shooting news had barely hit the wires on Saturday before the media’s instant psychoanalysis put the American body politic on the couch instead of Mr. Loughner. “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics,” declared a story in the New York Times, which focused primarily on the tea party and Sarah Palin in the context of mass murder. The story even hauled in opposition to health-care reform.
Politico, the Beltway website, chimed in by quoting a “veteran Democratic operative” advising the White House “to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” just as “the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people” in 1995.
…Judging from Mr. Loughner’s own website, his mind was a mess of conspiracy theories, influenced by tracts like “Mein Kampf” and the “Communist Manifesto.” His main complaint about government seems to be that he believes it is trying to control American “grammar.” Yet this becomes an excuse for the media to throw him in with the tea partiers as “anti-government.”
From DennisPrager.com: Who takes the blame for Arizona murders? Sarah Palin and the Tea Party? Keith Olbermann and the Daily Kos? Martians? Or maybe the sicko who pulled the trigger?
Monday, January 10, 2011 Radio Show
H1: Raising Arizona
Prager H1: Over the weekend the usual suspects Paul Krugman, Frank Rich and alike, wrote columns attributing the murderous Arizona nut’s motives to the Right, Sarah Palin, and so on. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton said in the United Arab Emirates that: “we have the same kind of problems…” Dennis clarifies why we do not have the same kind of problems.
Monday, January 10, 2011 Radio Show
H2: Danger on the Right
Prager H2: The discussion of blaming the Right for the assassination in Arizona continues. Callers weigh in.
Monday, January 10, 2011 Radio Show
H3: A Monopoly on Hate?!
Prager H3: Why is hate always ascribed to the Right? Dennis makes the point that hate is not only, not exclusive to the Right, but that it is far more prevalent on the Left.
Monday, January 10, 2011 | Posted by: Allen Estrin at 2:00 PM
You can get more information on Robert Davi and his concert this Saturday, January 15, at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks, CA here.
Friday, January 07, 2011 | Posted by: Allen Estrin at 12:46 PM
The French leader is more capable of speaking truth than most European leaders. Why isn’t this a bigger international news story? Even a liberal columnist for The Atlantic is wondering.
Thursday, January 06, 2011 | Posted by: Allen Estrin at 2:23 PM
This is the biggest story of the year, so far. And it’s very disturbing. If Pakistan falls, the consequences will be very grim, not just for Pakistan, but for the world, too.
Thursday, January 06, 2011 | Posted by: Allen Estrin at 1:09 PM
Dennis talks to the greatThomas Sowell, scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essential book Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy has now been issued in a 4th edition.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011 | Posted by: Allen Estrin at 12:14 PM
Dennis talks to David Garland, Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. His new book is Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition
Monday, January 03, 2011 | Posted by: Allen Estrin at 2:11 PM
The President used the Congressional recess to appointment an ambassador to Syria for the first time since Syria orchestrated the assassination of the prime minister of Lebanon in 2005. The very measured Michael Young calls it foolish, but it’s clear that he thinks it’s stupid and counterproductive.
Monday, January 03, 2011 | Posted by: Allen Estrin at 12:09 PM
The most important story of the year and we’re only three days into it! Do these young Europeans understand why they are in this position? That socialism is a dead end. That only free market capitalism can save them?
Chaim Amalek emails me: “Do you think the recent attempt on the life of Representative Giffords will make it harder for you to get within microphone range of Dennis Prager?”
Khunrum emails: “If it wasn’t for my association with Luke, I would still not, to this day, know who Dennis Prager is. Even now I view him as some wacko with an opinion on everything who also plays an accordion. I believe the assassin who is out to kill Dennis Prager would also have a grudge against Pee Wee Herman.”
Chaim Amalek emails: Seriously, I live in what many regard as the “media capital of the world” and I have never, ever, ever heard or seen this guy’s name come up. It is entirely possible, therefore, that this is a “Fight Club” type situation, and “Dennis Prager” is purely a creation of Luke’s imagination.
Similarly, it is entirely possible that “Luke Ford” was born “Leon Kampowski” in Patterson, New Jersey. The human imagination is a mighty thing.
D. emails: He writes: “If somebody had offered me a part in a movie in exchange for having sex with the men of their choice, I would’ve refused.” However, if Sunny Jim got to make the choice, it’d be a different story. He’d leap in face first, mate. My boy’s a disgrace.
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on My Boy’s A Bloody Liar!
Tierney believes that [Jared L.] Loughner was very interested in pushing people’s buttons—and that may have been why he listed Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books on his YouTube page. (Loughner’s mom is Jewish, according to Tierney.) Loughner sometimes approached strangers and would say “weird” things, Tierney recalls. “He would do it because he thought people were below him and he knew they wouldn’t know what he was talking about.”
In college, Loughner became increasingly intrigued with “lucid dreaming,” and he grew convinced that he could control his dreams, according to Tierney. In a series of rambling videos posted to his YouTube page, dreams are a frequent topic. In a video posted on December 15, Loughner writes, “My favorite activity is conscience dreaming: the greatest inspiration for my political business information. Some of you don’t dream—sadly.” In another video, he writes, “The population of dreamers in the United States of America is less than 5%!” Later in the same video he says, “I’m a sleepwalker—who turns off the alarm clock.”
Stephen Steinlight emails: Hello,
This is the first of several pieces I’ll be forwarding responding to the sophomoric, cheap and ugly politicization by many in the mainstream/liberal media about “moral responsibility” for the monstrous tragedy in Tucson. The rush to judgment is not only unseemly but downright disgusting. It is a classic exercise in the post hoc fallacy.
I should note in passing that the Washington Post, which acquitted itself with rare restraint and thoughtfulness on this occasion, recently published an editorial making the entirely unsupported allegation that all the state legislators who wish to adopt laws in similar to Arizona’s SB1070 support the mass deportation of illegal aliens. No one across the entire spectrum in the political camp that opposes illegal immigration or amnesty supports such a preposterous idea. This monstrous red herring is used to vilify opponents and to cause respondents in push polls that offer only amnesty and mass deportation to choose amnesty.
To charge that legislators endorse the kind of policy only a Hitler or Stalin or contemporary believer in ethnic cleansing would support is to endulge in precisely the dangerous form of rhetoric which the K-Mart sociologists are now claiming somehow propelled the lunatic in Tucson. Yet this goes unnoticed, of course.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
