00:00 Lipton Matthews discusses gender quotas, Africa, and IQ with Dooovid, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W42iIA0pKrI
03:00 Luke’s views on authentic Judaism
08:00 Dooovid’s views on authentic Judaism
24:00 David Cole Stein on blacks & Jews, https://www.takimag.com/article/the-dysgenic-duo/
38:00 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Understanding Cognitive Distortions: Dr. Dawn Elise Snipes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOoowYQmZr8
47:00 In ‘My Unorthodox Life,’ Julia Haart Bares More Than Just Her Knees,
1:00:00 The significance of the number 12
1:10:50 Andy Nowicki: The Luke Ford Experience, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JulDz9uEUjo
1:15:00 Conspiracy Theories are for Losers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekiu9maM3wc
1:18:00 Why people believe in conspiracy theories, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/conspiracy-theories
1:21:00 If You Love Conspiracy Theories (Or Know Someone Who Does), Watch This | Michael Shermer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGDcnUbqPyU
1:25:00 Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130046
2:00:00 Andy Nowicki: The Luke Ford experience, Part 2 (“This is the end”), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrjiDGX18Y
2:13:00 Judas Maccabeus, https://twitter.com/JudasMaccabeus7
2:14:00 Judas is over Covid, he can taste and smell again
2:15:00 Judas’s Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLgGCISOp6Ytu1W6adwvAtw
2:24:00 Judas on Reform & Masorti Judaism
2:35:00 Reform, Conservative Leaders Outraged at Orthodox Crashing of Tisha B’Av Ceremony, https%3A%2F%2Fwww.haaretz.com%2Fisrael-news%2F.premium-reform-conservative-leaders-outraged-at-orthodox-crashing-of-tisha-b-av-ceremony-1.10010470
2:44:00 Samaritans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans
2:45:00 Karaites, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaite_Judaism
2:51:00 Why is Judas a west-bank settler?
2:55:00 Judas the farmer
2:57:00 Judas’s interactions with Muslims
2:59:00 Judas on Middle East peace
Posted inJudaism|Comments Off on What Is Authentic Judaism? (7-19-21)
“If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved.” (Bertrand Russell)
I interview Andy Nowicki at 7 pm, July 15, 2021.
Luke: “How are you?”
Andy: “I’m good. It’s good to be back with you. It’s been a while.”
Luke: “It has been a while. The last time we spoke was February 25, 2020. I don’t think we even mentioned the Covid.”
Andy: “That was right on the precipice of all this nonsense.”
Luke: “How was your experience?
Andy: “I live in Georgia. It wasn’t that extreme.”
Luke: “When did you start to take Covid seriously?”
Andy: “Never. I don’t take it seriously.”
Most dissident right Christians I know take the same attitude. I think this is a mistake for them as individuals, as Americans and as Christians because this nonchalance is decidedly at odds with the deadly facts on the ground.
Andy: “I don’t know how deeply we want to get into [Covid]. It is relevant to my new book, The Insurrectionist. As far as taking it seriously as a dangerous global pandemic, I always thought it was absolute fearmongering. I always thought there were nefarious authorities using this crisis to seize power and to practice petty tyranny.”
While I am conducting the Andy Nowicki interview Thursday night, I am looking at the Amazon page for Andy’s new novel, The Insurrectionist, which says:
* “The most relevant novel to date reflecting on our post-COVID society, Andy Nowicki’s The Insurrectionist is a blend of The War of the Worlds, Brave New World, and your typical fake news channel broadcasts. The story will only seem outlandish and ridiculous to those who haven’t been paying for the past year.” — T.J. Martinell, author of The Song of Wulfgar and The Pilgrim’s Digress
* “The first novel to consider the topic of dystopia from a post-COVID perspective, The Insurrectionist is at its most arresting when it reflects on the chicanery of the language with which our real-world overlords engender inaction, surrender, and despair.” — Matthew Pegas, author of Dragon Day
It seems to me appropriate to ask about Covid when an author is promoting his book as the first post-Covid novel. And how can you promote your first post-Covid novel when you believe Covid was nonsense? It’s the equivalent of promoting the first post-Holocaust novel while saying the Holocaust did not occur, or promoting the first post-Polio novel while claiming there was no such thing as polio.
Luke: “So to make an entertaining show, I’m going to push back on what you just said. How many millions of people would die before you would take this seriously?”
Andy: “The overall death toll, the needle has not moved significantly. Millions, well, thousands, tens of thousands, of people die every flu season. This was nothing… If this virus exists at all, there are all kinds of screwy things about it like the fact that the PCR test doesn’t test for Covid. Apparently the thing can’t be isolated and tested for, which is really strange, yet they get people to take these tests even when they’re completely asymptomatic and they say, oh yeah, you’ve got it. A truly dangerous epidemic wouldn’t need to get reinforced.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic: “PCR test: This tests for the presence of the actual virus’s genetic material or its fragments as it breaks down. This is the most reliable and accurate test for detecting active infection.”
Luke: “But you know better than all the public health experts.”
Andy: “It’s not all the public health experts. It’s the health experts within the system. There are plenty who dissent from what is churned out on CNN. They’re just not heard from. That’s part of what went into my writing of my book The Insurrectionist. It’s disturbing to me that whenever there is a story of someone taking the vaccine and getting terrible side effects and even dying from it, that’s always hushed up and it’s never ever talked about and there’s this increasingly tight grip of control upon the controlled media on this subject and so many other subjects as well. There was a major step in the direction of global tyranny that began in March of 2020 and continues to this day. Twenty twenty was a screwy year. The official account of things didn’t make much sense. I do get a sense of when I’m being manipulated, fear-mongered, when dissenting opinions are forbidden and you are kicked off of platforms. I had 4,000 followers on Facebook and suddenly I was off Facebook. They didn’t want me. Colin Liddell and Affirmative Right also got booted. Tech companies are getting increasingly tyrannical. Governors are running their states like petty fiefdoms, assuming powers that go well beyond what they are constitutionally allowed.”
Luke: “I’m going to give you a hard time.”
Andy: “OK. I would like to talk about my book.”
Luke: “We are talking about your book.”
Andy: “In a way, that’s true.”
Luke: “You said so much, let me take one thing. You said, why doesn’t a PCR test pick up Covid 19? Well, it does.”
Andy: “If you test positive for it, you could have a whole host of things, including the common cold. It’s not a Covid 19 test like a strep test. It has a 50% inaccuracy rate but they’ve been using it to spike up fears. They’re justifying blatantly unconstitutional things such as locking down the entire economy. There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says if something happens that is considered unprecedented, then everything goes out the window and we revert to emergency powers.”
Andy: “The Constitution is kind of a joke because it gets violated all the time.”
Luke: “On the one hand, you’re outraged that the Constitution is being violated, and on the other hand, you say that the Constitution is a joke, it gets violated all the time. It seems like you can’t hold both of those positions.”
Andy: “I don’t think the Constitution is a joke. It ought to be abided by, but it is treated as if it is a joke by our rulers. In a way, there’s plenty of precedent for what has been going on for nearly a year and a half. There have been communicable diseases much worse than this Covid 19 thing.”
Luke: “So name one in the last 80 years.”
Andy: “The common flu is more deadly.”
Luke: “How so? We have more than 600,000 dead Americans from Covid?”
Andy: “And the flu numbers go way down.”
COVID-19 appears to be more contagious and to spread more quickly than the flu. Severe illness such as lung injury is more frequent with COVID-19 than with influenza. The mortality rate also is higher with COVID-19 than the flu.
So far, more than 32 million people have had COVID-19 in the U.S. So far, more than 580,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021.
By comparison, during the 2019-2020 flu season in the U.S., about 38 million people had the flu and about 22,000 people died of the flu.
So, according to the Mayo Clinic, Covid-19 is about 40 times more deadly than the 2019-2020 flu.
Luke: “You say so many things, that I think if we looked at any one of them, they’d fall apart. We [America] get annual flu [deaths] of around 10,000 to 50,000 a year, and Covid killed about 600,000 in a year.”
Andy: “The overall death rate… If you believe the way they were counting cases, somebody dies in a motorcycle accident, and they were diagnosed with Covid 19, they are seen as dying of Covid 19.”
On the death certificate form, there is a space for the immediate cause of death and then several lines for underlying causes. In brief, death certificates are filled out by the medical certifier (who can be the physician who had treated the patient before death), who provides his best medical opinion regarding the cause of death. Part I of the death certificate includes the proximal cause of death, or what directly caused the death, and Part II lists conditions that contributed to the death…
For example, if a patient dies of respiratory failure due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which was the result of pneumonia, which was the result of COVID-19, the proximal cause of death was the respiratory failure, but contributing causes were ARDS and COVID-19, with the one farthest up the chain being the underlying cause of death under Part I. If the patient had hypertension or asthma, that would go under Part II. As I like to say, if you suffer a cardiac arrest due to blood loss after being shot, the cardiac arrest might have been the proximal cause of death, but you still died of a gunshot wound…
It is true that sometimes determining the most important underlying cause isn’t always straightforward, but in the vast majority of COVID-19 cases it is. If someone with hypertension, obesity, and type 2 diabetes catches COVID-19, then develops pneumonia, then develops failure of multiple organ systems, and finally dies of respiratory failure, the proximate cause of death is respiratory failure, but the underlying cause of death is COVID-19, without which the respiratory failure never would have happened. Yes, it is well-known that certain conditions greatly increase your risk of dying if you contract COVID-19. These include, among several others:
Age (the chance of dying of COVID-19 begins to increase dramatically after age 50 and becomes truly frightening by age 80)
Obesity (BMI > 30)
Being male
Cancer
Chronic kidney disease
COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)
Immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from solid organ transplant
Obesity (body mass index [BMI] of 30 or higher)
Serious heart conditions, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies
Sickle cell disease
Type 2 diabetes mellitus
These are contributory factors, but if you have one or more of these conditions when you contract COVID-19 and later die, it’ll very likely be the COVID-19, not your underlying health condition, that killed you. The underlying health condition(s) might have played a role in making you sicker, but it’ll be the virus that does you in.
“…most countries go to great lengths to ensure that deaths are correctly classified. Death reporting is incredibly important, and in most places it’s a detailed process that has to be checked carefully. In most cases, we can say with some certainty that deaths attributed to COVID-19 are, at best, a solid count, and at worst probably an underestimate. If anything, it’s likely that we are missing quite a few deaths that have been caused by coronavirus, but for whatever reason not picked up in our reporting systems, and thus the death count is actually higher than the reported figure.”
Andy: “The overall death rate is basically untouched. There hasn’t been a significant change in the number of deaths.”
Luke: “Life expectancy dropped by an unprecedented amount, over a year on average during 2020 due to Covid. There’s been nothing like this in over 80 years. Do you think they are just making this up?”
Andy: “I don’t know where you are getting this from. Are you talking the elderly?”
Luke: “I’m talking reductions in average life expectancy due to Covid. If you just put in ‘average life expectancy Covid’, you’ll get average life expectancy dropped 1.3 years and for blacks and latinos, about three times that much [decrease]. That’s from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
U.S. life expectancy fell by 1.5 years in 2020, largest drop since World War II
U.S. life expectancy fell by a year and a half in 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II, according to report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The decrease for both Black Americans and Latino Americans was even greater: three years.
Close to 74% of the overall life expectancy decline was due to the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 3.3 million Americans died last year, far more than any other year in U.S. history, with COVID-19 accounting for about 11% of those deaths…
Killers other than COVID-19 played a role. Drug overdoses pushed life expectancy down, particularly for whites. And rising homicides were a small but significant reason for the decline for Black Americans…
For decades, U.S. life expectancy was on the upswing. But that trend stalled in 2015 before hitting 78 years, 10 months, in 2019. Last year, the CDC said, it dropped to about 77 years, 4 months.
Other findings in the new CDC report:
• Black life expectancy dropped to 71 years, 10 months. It has not been that low since 2000.
• White life expectancy fell by roughly 14 months to about 77 years, 7 months. That was the lowest life expectancy for that population since 2002.
• COVID-19’s role varied by race and ethnicity. The pandemic was responsible for 90% of the decline in life expectancy among Latinos, 68% among white people and 59% among Black Americans.
• Life expectancy fell nearly two years for men, but about one year for women, widening a long-standing gap. The CDC estimated life expectancy of 74 years, 6 months, for boys versus 80 years, 2 months, for girls.
More than 80% of last year’s COVID-19 deaths were people 65 and older, CDC data show. That reduced the pandemic’s toll on life expectancy at birth, since it is swayed more by deaths of younger adults and children than those among seniors.
Andy: “I don’t want to get bogged down. I get that you enjoy the thrill of the debate. Again, if people want to believe the hype, they have every right to do so.”
A Google search of Andy Nowicki and constitutionality does not reveal that the Constitution has been much of a concern for him until Covid. In a 2012 interview with Counter-Currents.com, Andy says: “We’re all men of the Right here, but I’m talking about the typical Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity-type of “conservative” that’s out there who wouldn’t see any equation at all between liberty and nihilism. “Liberty is enshrined in the Constitution,” “this is the greatest country in the world,” all that kind of rhetoric.”
So in 2012 for Andy Nowicki, the idea that liberty is enshrined in the Constitution was just empty rhetoric. He added in 2012: “Mob mentality, exactly. We enshrine democracy. We enshrine the idea of the righteousness of the majority. There’s a populism that’s a part of the nature of belief in America and what America is supposed to represent that I think could be easily a shortcut to nihilism.”
In this 2005 column, Andy Nowicki, in a more libertarian frame of mind, frequently references the Constitution.
Andy: “There’s been a scam element to it all on very high levels.”
Luke: “If the PCR-DNA test for Covid turns out to be accurate, you’d be wrong, and if it turned out to be inaccurate, then the health professionals would be wrong.”
Andy: “Are you about to ambush me with something?”
Luke: “I think you’re being reckless.”
Andy: “You can believe what you want to believe. You can think that all these organizations are only interested in the public good and to protect us from harm… If you believe in the conventional wisdom, then what do you make of my book? Does it seem crazy?”
Luke: “It depends on your perspective. If you look at things from one perspective, your book makes sense. If you look at things from a different perspective, it seems crazy. Reality is confusing. The only way that reality makes sense is if I impose certain patterns from my head on reality. The only organization for reality lies in my own biases.”
Andy: “You are a man of faith?”
Luke: “I am a man of faith, but I am not a man of faith in my own sagacity… I believe that in the end, God will make things right. As far as ascertaining anything about Covid, my faith provides zero benefit.”
Andy: “In the last two years in particular, there is a limited spectrum of ideas one is allowed to have. While we still nominally have freedom of speech in the United States, it’s almost an afterthought. There’s an eagerness to destroy people who question what they’re told. I imagine you’ve had people who want to cancel you.”
Luke: “Yes. On the other hand, there has never been a time when what you say has no consequences. Throughout history, the words you say have consequences for your well-being. It would be impossible for life to be otherwise.”
Andy: “Of course. You are responsible for the things you say and you shouldn’t slander anyone. You should be scrupulous in the pursuit of the truth, but that doesn’t relate to what I’m saying. When people say you have to face the consequences for having Richard Spencer on your show, what do you say?”
Luke: “I haven’t argued back because there’s nothing I can say… From second grade on, I’ve known real life consequences for things I’ve written. I know what it is to be punched in the face. I know what it is to lose every friend I have in my city. I’ve been pushed out of the car in a bad part of town with no money. I’ve been physically assaulted many times. I’ve had countless death threats.”
Andy: “There’s been a concentration of malevolent power in recent years.”
Luke: “What’s the genesis of your new book?”
Andy: “Twenty twenty… I feel like I’m living in the last days of civilization before it slides into tyranny and despotism. I wrote this book to exorcise the demon of despair that’s crept over me… I’m 50. I’ve never remembered things being as bad, things feeling as grim as they do now. This is a work of dystopian fiction five, seven, ten years down the line from where we are at right now… I feel like we are living on the cusp of a dystopian world, a prison planet. In my book, things have regressed even more. On top of the present problem, there’s also this catastrophic event, which seems to be an alien invasion. There’s no more sovereignty. There’s no more nations. There’s just a global coalition government ruled over by a band of oligarchs.”
Luke: “So when was the last time you went months without this despair?”
Andy: “It’s partly temperamental. I’ve nursed the teat of melancholy for a large part of my life, but I know the difference between what I have sensed… It has gotten worse for me because of my awareness of what is going on in the world. Ten years ago, if I walked into a gas station, I’d glance at a newspaper and see what the headlines were, and I’d listen to talk radio…and not just get terribly depressed and angry and despairing. At some point, they ratcheted things up. Trump was the harbinger. It used to be every election season that I would tune out the news for a couple of months because things would be getting ugly. I just didn’t want to get caught up in it all anymore. So I switch off the news. I don’t want to read any [news]… But it never went back to normal. Since late 2015, it’s been non-stop bad vibes… The behavior of Trump haters has been unprecedented.”
Luke: “My question was when was the last time you were happy. Not sure I got an answer to that.”
Andy: “I was very happy through age 12 and since then…”
Luke: “To what extent are you responsible for your own misery?”
Andy: “There’s probably more that I could do about it then I am doing about it. Not sure about how much more. What do you think?”
Luke: “My perception of you is that you walk around with enormous psychic wounds so that anything beyond despair feels not possible for you now.”
Andy: “Once I became an adolescent, the darkness crept in and it hasn’t crept out… It’s been a low-grade despair.”
“I’m not sure if people are going to want to buy my book after hearing that I’ve been depressed most of my life and have big gushing psychic wounds.”
Luke: “Did this book come to you in images, character, plot?”
Andy: “There was talk earlier this year in mainstream sources that alien technology was real… It came to me that we’ve had the Covid op, maybe the alien invasion op is next. Maybe entire cities would be incinerated by this mystery weapon. I’m typically drawn to writing about Dostoyevskian anti-heroes. The protagonist of this story, instead of going crazy or becoming a murderous psychopath, he becomes a hero. He infiltrates the evil and cunningly climbs his way to the top of the ladder and strikes a blow against the forces of darkness. My feeling about The Insurrectionist is that it could do really well if it got the proper exposure… I feel that there are people who call themselves dissidents and there are people out there who aren’t on board with the world leaders, so that’s why I’m out there to self promote.”
Luke: “How would you compare this book to The Turner Diaries?”
Andy: “Well, mass murder is not presented as a positive thing. There’s nothing about race or Jews. It’s nothing like The Turner Diaries.”
Luke: “Isn’t it true that many people who invaded Capitol Hill January 6 were carrying bootlegged copies of this novel?”
Andy laughs.
Luke: “What was your reaction to what happened on Capitol Hill January 6?”
Andy: “It seemed like a farce. Ashli Babbitt’s death was an atrocity. She was unarmed and the guard shot her in cold blood.”
Luke: “What should they do?”
Andy: “Physically restrain her. Hold her down?”
Luke: “Do you think voter fraud played a significant role in the 2020 elections?”
Andy: “I suspect it did. I don’t know if you want to get into another knock down, drag out about that. I don’t have facts and figures at my disposal right now. If you find something on the internet, I’m not going to be able to retort in a way that sounds like I have one-upped you.”
Luke (1:37:00): “One way I try to figure our reality is that I read what dissidents have to say and I read what the MSM has to say. Sometimes I side with the mainstream and sometimes I side with the dissidents. Where do you get your information? Because this information then pours through your imagination into your new novel.”
Andy: “I don’t consume the news. It filters down to me.”
Luke: “You’ve said a lot of things about how the world works. How do you come to your understanding of how the world works?”
Andy: “I don’t pay attention to mainstream news because I think they’re untrustworthy and lapdogs of the power elite. So if you’re going to play gotcha…”
Luke: “I haven’t played any gotcha. I want to know where you get your information. There has to be some series of sources.”
Andy: “It’s Infowars. 24 hours a day.”
Luke: “Why are you offended by this question?”
Andy: “I don’t have any answer to that [question]. I remember election night. I remember how suddenly voting stopped in battleground states where Trump was ahead and suddenly all these new votes were found and I thought that was strange. I’m allowed to think that.”
Luke: “Nobody is saying you can’t think anything you want. You keep saying I’m allowed, he’s allowed. Nobody’s contesting that. You’ve made a lot of allegations that go against the conventional wisdom. That’s great. I go against the conventional wisdom all the time. I’m wondering if you have any sources.”
Andy: “I don’t have any sources to recommend.”
“You thrive on controversy. Where there’s spectacle, you’re drawn to that.”
Luke: “Yes.”
Andy: “You’re challenging me, not because you think you’re smarter than me, but because you enjoy the give and take of debate. The question — where do you get your information from — that can get someone defensive, because the allegation that’s lurking is that you are only paying attention to people in your echo chamber. I don’t think that’s true to me. I think I am open to people of good faith who aren’t going to call me a kook and get me kicked out of polite society… That’s my aversion to mainstream news. They try to get dissident thinkers [canceled]. It didn’t use to be like this.”
Luke: “I’ll tell you when it changed. After dissident right people started shooting people. After Christchurch and Unite the Right, and Walmart in El Paso, Texas. When people who use dissident right rhetoric go out and slaughter people, that’s going to affect everyone who uses that rhetoric. That’s inherent in how human nature works.”
Andy: “I was at Unite the Right in 2017 and the instigators were Antifa.”
Luke: “And the Alt Right were fine upstanding citizens and they contributed nothing to popular revulsion about what happened on that day?”
Andy: “I’m sure there were some bad applies [on the Alt Right], but the ones who were instigating violence were Antifa. I also saw a total willed failure by the Charlottesville police… The Antifa were throwing bottles.”
Luke: “I saw revolting behavior and I saw the media slanting things against the right-wing.”
Andy: “Now you’re sounding different than a few minutes ago.”
Luke: “No. You can have both. I think people on the Right made bad choices to go to Unite the Right and I think the news media were slanted against them.”
Andy: “Why was going to the rally a bad idea?”
Luke: “Because of the type of people who were going to show up.”
Andy: “Because of the Antifa?”
Luke: “In part. And also because of people on the Right who were going to show up. No normal person shows up to an event where Mike Enoch and Richard Spencer are headlining.”
Andy: “I was there as a sympathetic observer. I believe in free speech. I wanted to hear what people had to say. I wanted to soak it all in. I thought things might get dicey but I had no idea it was going to become the thing it became.”
Luke: “Is any of that on you? Did you make a mistake?”
Andy: “I didn’t do anything…”
Luke: “You did nothing wrong? You didn’t misjudge this situation at all? It was entirely the fault of other people?”
Andy: “I didn’t engage in any violence against anyone. By wrong, you mean it was foolish to be there?”
Luke: “You said you were totally shocked by what happened there. It was unexpected. Were you wrong? Should you have been wiser? Or was it totally the fault of everyone else and you were the victim because you came there in good faith?”
Andy: “I never said I was the victim.”
Luke: “You’ve said that all the fault was with other people. I don’t care. I’m just curious. Were you wrong or were you right to go there and expect to have a civil political demonstration?”
Andy: “There hasn’t been any precedent for it to blow up like that. I had been to a couple of the NPI [National Policy Institute] conferences in DC. I had been to an American Renaissance Conference or two. I went there because it is interesting to hear points of view that are not acceptable in mainstream culture… Like you, I am drawn to spectacle… You said you knew better and that’s why you didn’t go.”
Luke: “I didn’t say I knew better, I said there were reasons why a normal person would not have gone to that event. A normal person with a family, a job, a reputation in the community…”
Andy: “Being at an event like that does not mean that you are supporting anyone. You’re just a spectator.”
Luke: “But that’s not how the world works. You wish that’s how the world reacts, but that’s not how the world reacts. If you attend an event that seems ugly to your fellow citizens, they’re not going to draw the lines you would like them to draw.”
Andy: “That shows a failure on the part of the media for not being honest about what happened. There was a failure of the police to do their jobs, which still irks me to this day. I hang that woman’s death [Heather Heyer] on that the police were given orders to stand down and to let mayhem happen. If Unite the Right attendees are pushed out into a violent hostile crowd, of course things are going to get ugly.”
Luke: “You are writing this book from a certain place. You don’t have $50 million in the bank and a gorgeous wife and three mistresses and high status in your community. If you had those things, you’d be unlikely to be a conspiracy theorist and you would have been unlikely to write this book… We all write from a particular place. I am speaking to you from a particular place with a certain amount of money in the bank. I’m speaking to you from a certain social position. I ask you about your experience of the last five years because you are creating out of your experience.”
Andy: “I don’t feel quite as devastated as someone who’s had a condominium collapse on him… I try not to be a woe is me type person. I might have an exhibitionist side of me…”
“I haven’t felt the pull to write fiction [for seven years].”
David Stanley comments: “To be fair to Luke, he did manage to make Andy even more depressed, which is something of an achievement.”
Audio problems in first three minutes.
08:10 Andy Nowicki’s reflections on a disastrous interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YewAR9XrtYE
20:00 Are you a sex and love addict? https://slaafws.org/download/core-files/The_40_Questions_of_SLAA.pdf
25:00 The problem, https://adultchildren.org/literature/problem/
27:30 Self-Justification in Everyday Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYcgiX70WsI
53:00 Anita Busch, https://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/anita_busch.htm
1:02:00 Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130386
1:08:00 Andy Nowicki’s new novel, The Insurrectionist, https://www.amazon.com/Insurrectionist-Andy-Nowicki-ebook/dp/B09881NYM9/
1:15:00 Noam Smith: Yes, lockdowns were good, https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-lockdowns-were-good
1:17:00 Fear of infection hurt economy more than lockdowns, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-18/fear-of-coronavirus-infection-hurt-economy-more-than-lockdowns
1:20:00 COVID lockdowns saved lives without harming economies, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-19/covid-lockdowns-worked
1:40:00 Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139670
1:42:00 Fruit of the Holy Spirit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_Holy_Spirit
1:43:00 Works of the Flesh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatians_5#Verses_19%E2%80%9321:_Works_of_the_Flesh
1:49:00 Voter fraud, https://lukeford.net/blog/?cat=42874
2:55:00 Did I follow my own code of conduct? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=125692
3:05:00 Deep resentment against Big Tech, https://youtu.be/CFK0pPRK-ks?t=3363
3:18:00 The Shield TV Show, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield
00:00 Marilyn Monroe’s networks pulled her apart, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141257
10:00 Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141245
17:00 How to live given the certainty of death, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Hu465KL1w
20:00 ‘School athletics at the center of attention devalues intellectual students’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141254
26:00 Seven Reasons Cops Are Disliked, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141252
36:30 Why Be Jewish? (Jonathan Sacks), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA2U3zF_BmY
54:00 Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140872
1:22:00 Getting to Know the North American Association for the Study of Religion, https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/getting-to-know-the-north-american-association-for-the-study-of-religion/
1:29:00 Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=136098
1:55:00 Reflections on “Thinking with Jonathan Z. Smith”, https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/reflections-on-thinking-with-jonathan-z-smith/
1:57:00 Religious scholar of Jonathan Z. Smith, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Z._Smith
1:58:00 Jonathan Z. Smith, Now You See it Now You Won’t’: The Study of Religion Over the Next Forty Years, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfuypty7LGw
2:42:45 Tucker Carlson on Big Tech censorship
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Do Your Networks Pull You Apart? (7-16-21)
How did the essentialist discourse of the late German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig compare with the more contingent but still ultimately essentialist problematic hegemonic discourse of Ron Jeremy? How and why do these two intellectuals attempt to reify the Jewish essence?
Posted inJudaism|Comments Off on The Contrasting Judaisms Of Franz Rosenzweig and Ron Jeremy
Marilyn Monroe had a famous career: famously good, famously bad, pretty much simultaneously. Once launched, everything she did made her famous; and everything she did caused her grief.
Why? Look at it from the point of view of her networks.
[1] Hollywood film industry. She grew up on the periphery of Hollywood, and from an early age her ambition was to be a star. She went along with the casting-couch system, and as a result got looked down upon as just a studio whore. But she kept coming back, from other angles…
[2] Glamour photographers. This network provided her early livelihood, and caused the first big scandal that propelled her to the center of attention. Photographers were her comfort zone. They kept her in the public eye (for better or worse, including the second scandal that broke up her celebrity marriage). And photographers and their spouses were her strongest friends, the fallback whenever everything else went bust.
[3] A celebrity among celebrities. She hung around with big names like Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, her second (but first famous) husband. The result was a home vs. career conflict, and even worse, a spotlight contest that she was bound to win, and lose a husband.
[4] Theatre intellectuals. These became allies in her battle versus Hollywood studio scorn, low pay, and stereotyped roles. She got in tight with the New York elite of acting coaches and directors, and married the most famous playwright of the day. But from now on, her acting coaches would be in tension with whatever film directors she worked with.
[5] The star/politician nexus. Already during third husband-to-be Arthur Miller’s fight with the House Un-American Activities Committee, Marilyn was becoming connected with the liberal intellectuals. With the coming of Camelot, the media-beloved Kennedy White House was glamorized by its overlap with the Hollywood “rat pack” of Sinatra, Kennedy in-laws, and other party animals. Marilyn is linked sexually with JFK and his brother Robert, until it becomes a little too openly scandalous and she is dropped. Later, Joe DiMaggio would blame Sinatra and the rat pack for the drugs and drinking that led to her death.
[6] Her psychiatrists. By this time, she is dependent on psychiatrists, if not to sort things out, at least to give her drugs and a semblance of allies. One of them betrays her—worried over suicide—by having her locked up an mental hospital. Who gets her out? Her most heavyweight lover, Joe D. Not long after, her alcohol-and-drugs diet kills her anyway.
Her networks offset each other, providing a succession of reliefs, which turn into new strains. [1] clashes with [2]; [1-2] clashes with [3]; [1-2-3] clashes with [4] and with [5]. [6] claims to deal with the clashes but just extends the damage.
Her networks canceled each other out—as support networks. But their overall effect was to make her as big a star as could be: the center of maximal attention whatever she did. Whatever you can say about Marilyn, there was no dead air.
Posted inHollywood|Comments Off on MARILYN MONROE’S NETWORKS PULLED HER APART
"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)