Driving by Beverly Hills High School this morning, I saw a patriotic Mexican-American alleviating the dire effects of the drought by watering a tree from a public sidewalk with his own pee. His strong steady stream contrasted sharply with the drizzle of sclerotic old white men. As the sunlight bounced off the Mexican’s whizz, I saw a vision of the USA in 100 years as an outpost of Mexico.
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Ezra Glinter writes for the Forward about Marc B. Shapiro’s new book Changing the Immutable: All this could make for a hearty polemic against the Orthodox scholars, publishers and editors who are more concerned with enforcing ideological conformity than with dealing with historical truth. Yet for all his provocative material, Shapiro is no polemicist. Although he compares Orthodox censorship with the Soviet kind — “what was accepted as fact one day could be entirely rewritten the next” — he also shows how its practice is consistent with classical and medieval conceptions of historical truth that predate contemporary notions of academic scholarship.
So, too, Shapiro goes out of his way to show that censorship of Jewish texts isn’t just an Orthodox practice. In many cases, non-Haredi publishers have been guilty of similar distortions, sometimes out of concern for what liberal readers might think. Finally, in the last chapter of the book, Shapiro examines the concept of lying in Jewish law, and shows how some authorities believed it permissible to lie in order to encourage obedience to rabbinic leadership. Shapiro warns us that these examples might be shocking, but he often seems to be defending Orthodox censorship by showing its consistency with traditional practice. Maimonides himself warns, in the introduction to his “The Guide for the Perplexed,” that not everything he wrote was the pure truth, but was still a “necessary belief” for the masses.
Shapiro’s evenhanded, evidence-heavy approach will perhaps make the book more convincing to its detractors. But his argument could also have benefited from a more critical thrust. Although he claims that censorship has increased in recent decades, he does little to analyze the causes or consequences of this phenomenon. In a recent interview with radio host Zev Brenner, he noted that part of the rise in censorship is due to so many more books being published and to older books being reset, and in “Changing the Immutable” he notes the rise in Orthodox publishing for a nonscholarly readership, including many works of biography and history.
But he doesn’t go far enough in examining what role Haredi fundamentalism may have to play, and whether current Orthodoxy is more or less inclined to censor texts than Jewish communities of the past were. The phrase “ da’as Torah ” — an arguably contemporary notion that implies obedience to rabbinic authority independent of halachic justification — appears just once in the book, and is explained only in a footnote. And although Shapiro does address the particular role translation plays in censorship, he does little to address the phenomenon of increased Haredi literacy, whether through access to yeshiva education, English translations by publishers like ArtScroll or the return of Hebrew as a vernacular language in the State of Israel. Most noticeably lacking is any consideration of the effect that censorship has had on the Orthodox community itself. If Orthodox censorship is comparable to the Soviet variety, what does that say about the intellectual conditions of Orthodox life?
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Frum Satire: Look, we’re not children anymore, let’s not pretend that Orthodoxy’s mesorah which goes back to Moshe Rabbainu is any less crooked than the Tail of the Dragon and let’s not pretend it doesn’t have a proportionately equal number of annual casualties. Those casualties usually come, like those at the Tail, from those who love it most, who take it seriously and who therefore throw their lives into it.
One needn’t go further back in history than the past fifteen years when The Making of a Godol was banned because it told stories about the previous generation of gedolim that were true but which would have either unmade their godol status or it would have shown sincere young bochurim that they can read Anna Karenina during their lunch break between first and second seder and then grow up to be like R’ Yaakov Kamenetzky. Likewise Natan Slifkin’s books were banned, not because anyone could dispute what he wrote but precisely because they couldn’t dispute him, which should be obvious; obviously you don’t need to ban a book you can dismiss.
So the Orthodox Created the Past in Their Image
But what about books we can’t dismiss or ban? What’s to be done about those?
Look, we’re not children anymore, we don’t have to pretend that the Inquisition invented censorship and book banning. Luckily we live in the 21st century in a free country where a brilliant professor of Judaic studies has the liberty to research historical acts of Jewish censorship going all the way back to Chazal editing the Torah! Marc B. Shapiro expertly lays out the history of Rashi’s explanation of this Talmudic censorship of the chumash (Bereishis 18:22) and ArtScroll’s censorship of this Rashi.
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Steve Sailer writes: “Last week David Frum was widely denounced for reacting to a New York Times article about Serena Williams’ late career resurgence to Barry Bonds-like dominance (and how her rivals are hamstrung by society’s outmoded body image prejudices that discourage them from bulking up like Serena does) with bemused skepticism rather than with the conventional hosannas for Serena’s strength and feminine beauty.”
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Blacks and doping. Isn’t it overkill since blacks are naturally more muscular to begin with?
If a Chinese female tennis player suddenly bulked up, people would notice.
People notice less with blacks since it’s well understood that blacks are more athletic and powerful.
But with Serena, it’s getting to be a bit too much… as with Ben Johnson.
* Is there a pattern here? Frum advocates against mass immigration. It’s tough to denounce him on that, because the facts are obviously on his side. So the pundits wait until he stumbles on a taboo, in this case, questioning the glory of a symbol of black female achievement.
Trump advocates against mass immigration. Facts are on his side as well, so the pundits pounce on his quip about McCain, a symbol of military heroism (suffering/captivity version, rather than the ass-kicking Alvin York/Audy Murphy kind of military heroism we used to celebrate when we declared wars and won them).
* Serena uses PEDs. She is still a wonderful athlete because her rivals also use PEDS. The only advantage that she sort of has is that naive and clueless sports nerds believe that massive biceps on her could be natural because she is black and they are clueless dolts.
* Antisemite will be tough. Trump has a Jewish son-in-law and a daughter who converted to Judaism.
* A welfare state tends to work better when the whole of the population served is homogenous and in agreement that the needy should get a leg up. In a multicultural society it is inevitable that jealousies will arise and one group will feel that another group is exploiting the system.
In the US almost every single political issue is ultimately about race or ethnicity and allocation of resources.
Even Medicare, because elderly blacks probably use a disproportionate amount of the resources of the system due to inherited morbidity factors, such as a high rate of diabetes and heart disease, and Medicaid, because there are more poor blacks with disabilities. Even special education for the mentally handicapped, for similar reasons.
Health, crime, education, abortion, immigration, foreign policy, taxes, ornamental flags over state houses, drugs, defense (government employment for minorities, VA)–the controversies are all about ethnicity and who gets what is coming to them.
Another illustration of my point is that a few years ago I remember reading about a huge controversy in Northern Ireland over the location of a new hospital that was being built as part of the socialized British National Health system to serve two towns a few miles apart. If it was built in the Protestant town this unfairly discriminated against Catholic employees who had to travel further to work, and Catholic patients and their visitors for the same reason. If it was built in the Catholic town, the reverse would apply Sometimes no one can win.
Posted inBlacks, Steroids|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: David Frum Denounced for Not Taking Serena Williams Wholly on Faith
But here’s my dilemma. I make Jewish jokes all the time.
Case in point: I was at a birthday party recently. The dad hosting the party was Jewish. We were playing on his kids’ new swing set when I asked him if he put it together himself.
He said: “No, I paid someone $100 to do it.”
I replied, “That’s what we Jews do! We pay someone to do it for us.”
This got a big laugh from him and his friends who were standing nearby. His friends weren’t Jewish. I was happy to get the laugh (as always), but it felt wrong.
When is it OK to make a joke about Jews? Jew to Jew? Jew to non-Jew? Non-Jew (married to a Jew) to a Jew? Isn’t it all wrong?
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* Two rival male TV helicopter pilots who covered O.J. Simpson chase now are severely mentally ill psychotics who are pretending to be women.
* Endocrine disruptors. There are byproducts of plastic production that look chemically similar to estrogens.
We know this is causing changes in frogs and fish, and more and more boys are being born with genital anomalies. If they estrogenize the brain…
I’m afraid this is one of these weird cases where the left doesn’t want to admit transgender is wrong and the right doesn’t want to admit industrial pollution is important, so it gets hushed up. But someone needs to speak out about it–whatever the left wants to say, being born with a ‘feminized’ brain if you are a man leads only to misery either way. It’s a medical condition, like diabetes or arthritis, and our bizarre attitudes about it don’t make it any less painful.
Posted inTrans|Comments Off on NYDN: Two rival male TV helicopter pilots who covered O.J. Simpson chase now are transgender women
* It’s odd how desperate people like Flores are, to come to the most racist, evil nation on the planet.
My legal resident wife (of Scandinavian extraction) remarked to her mother recently about an openly illegal immigrant in her public university class. Her mother was confused–why hasn’t she been deported? Why isn’t anyone telling the authorities?
That’s really all that’s broken about our immigration policy.
* In all fairness, Jeffrey Toobin and The New Yorker have been long supporters of open immigration to Israel from Sub Saharan Africa and Islamic countries in the Middle East.
He’s a good guy. Totally being honest and fair. There is no agenda or double standard going on.
* If Mexico was sending it’s creme de la creme to The United States, you would be seeing affluent Mexican neighborhoods popping up all over the Los Angeles metropolitan area, but you don’t. Mexican neighborhoods in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are all lower working class.
It seems that Iran though tend to send it’s creme de creme to The United States, because Persians are over represented among Los Angeles affluent class. Same for China and India. Lot of Chinese nationals are buying up big beautiful expensive homes in affluent neighborhoods in Southern and Northern California. The same can not be said for Mexican nationals.
* ‘A job in a nearby city would have required a high school certificate, while she only had a middle school certificate’.
Yup. The implication being that entry level accreditations are somehow lower in the USA than in Mexico. An interesting proposition to say the least.
* At one time, there were non-Spanish Whites, Middle Easterners and others who found in Mexico an opportunity, but it would be slim pickings today for most even if they could legally go there to work. That goes double for Americans, who are not really wanted in Mexico except as rich dumb tourists.
For most nonwealthy people, the United States is still the place where one has the best chance of “success” in the entrepreneurial sense. However, I will say that French truck drivers and German autoworkers and European aircraft mechanics generally probably live a more secure and comfortable life than their American counterparts. Being a factory worker in western Europe means you don’t worry about healthcare, college for your kids, or about getting fired unless you commit some enormously grave offense. You have a smaller house and if you have a car it’s a little schumerbox, and if you need to be De Gaullebladdered in France plan on several months on the waiting list. If you need a MRI anywhere in Europe it’s a big deal.
Most of us are not entrepreneurs, and since only a small number of us can be successful entrepreneurs by definition, the hassle of trying to do a startup in Europe isn’t why we wouldn’t like living there. The lack of living space is.
* I listened to Rick Santorum being interviewed on Fox’s Special Report tonight. I was very impressed with what he had to say about immigration. I think he’s making the best argument, one that would be the hardest for Democrats to respond to. Main points:
–Immigration policy must be based on what best serves the interests of Americans, not some altruistic or idealistic vision.
–Use e-verify and enforce employee sanctions to drive illegals from the workplace.
–Illegal immigration is depressing the wages of Americans and largely accounts for wage stagnation since the 1970s.
–We don’t need more unskilled workers when we don’t have enough work for our own.
–The so-called skilled workers we’re bringing in are mostly ordinary programmers replacing American workers and contributing nothing of great value.
–Cut LEGAL immigration by 25 percent. We don’t need to import over a million new workers a year.
* What strikes me is the massive evil of taking these people from their tribal homes and forcing them to try to live in Western Civilization. The results of that experiment have been the greatest social disaster in history for both the Africans and the Europeans. When you watch the African in his native habitat and culture, so much of what you see in the American ghettos begins to make sense. It is every bit as cruel and perverse as it would be to force Europeans to live in African villages and abide their customs. The only possible result is destruction.
* The early American and Australian settlers came to undeveloped territory where they had two options: (1) work very hard (and intelligently) to scrape survival from the land or (2) die. Conflating this with the current immigrant is nonsense. The current immigrant bears zero risk of hunger or death (unless shot during commission of a crime). He has no need to work – the State will provide him a luxurious air conditioned home, food, transportation, and medical care. To the extent he may decide to work, his income is supplemented by State welfare gifts along with what he may steal (by avoiding taxation).
This is such obvious common sense that when you hear someone conflating immigrants prior to the 1920′s to current immigrants its an immediate red flag that the speaker is an anti-white (or anti Western Civilization) fanatic.
Posted inImmigration|Comments Off on ‘America, the world’s flophouse. Emma Lazarus would be proud.’
Jenner was the white male winner of decathlon. Image of normality and health.
Look at him now. Look of age, decline, and decadence.
Ashe was an odd Negro given the nature of mainstream Negro-ness. When most Negro athletes were dominant in boxing, basketball, football, and etc. Ashe was a star in Tennis, sports of the well-heeled. When most Negro athletes were dumb, childish, and/or loud-mouthed, Ashe was soft-spoken, mature, and serious. When colleges were filling up with big dumb black dummy athletes, Ashe spoke in favor of some standards for student-athletes. He was a sober, serious, and thoughtful Negro.
Ashe died of HIV-related disease due to blood transfusion during an operation. In other words, he got sick cuz of blood infected by homos who buggered one another way too often.
Given the kind of life that Ashe led and how he died–due to complications arising from decadent and excessive homo lifestyle among the homos who donated infected blood–, the last thing you wanna do is trivialize the man’s life by handing an award in his name to a trashy narcissistic freak, the New Jenner, who is now the darling of the homo community that NEVER took responsibility for the HIV epidemic and blamed it all on Reagan’s ‘indifference’.
Chris Hedges is a shithead, but he spoke a kernel of truth in EMPIRE OF ILLUSION when he said we can’t tell reality from fiction anymore. At Michael Jackson’s funeral celebration, a series of images were shown that juxtaposed Jackson with Kermity the frog with Jackson with Mandela.
It’s all so silly. But this is what happens when the culture of a nation is handed over to a bunch of out-of-closet pansy freaks.
At the point, the real culture is less about left vs right than about serious vs frivolous or mature vs childish.
Look at leftist or liberal intellectuals and cultural figures of the past. Whether it was Dwight MacDonald, Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, or Edmund Wilson, at least they were serious adults (even if some of them were a bit nutty and neurotic).
But look at the clowns today in arts, culture, and letters. Childish and frivolous. Europe has the bearded lady, America has ‘Caitlyn’.
This is culture?
* That’s not a woman’s body.
What I find freakish is a man dressed as a woman having hundreds of people applaud him for being a woman when in reality he’s still just a man–albeit a rather freakish man–dressed as a woman.
It’s not enough for him to live the fantasy, we’re supposed to enter into it with him. But of course, only certain groups get to live their fantasies and impose them on the rest of us. Or else.
I find that truly freakish.
* “Tranny, Bob “Zoey” Tur, evincing lady-like behavior threatens to put Breitbart reporter into an ambulance for referring to Tur as sir.”
That’s typical of trannies. They are generally giant assholes, and violent people. I wrote about gender issues for some time on the side of reason, and the only threats I took seriously came from trannies.
If a tranny threatens you, don’t brush it off.
I think the left loves them because they are like radical Muslims in that regard. They will hurt people to prove their point. That’s kind of gratifying and sexy if you’re a repressed liberal white male.
* Caitlyn Jenner has extremely racist dating preferences. Dennis Rodman told TMZ and social media that he wants to go out on a date with Caitlyn, yet Caitlyn never accepted Dennis’s invitation to go out on a date with him. Caitlyn is racist for not wanting to get romantically involved with Black bodies. Caitlyn better check “her” racist White privilege.
* Does anyone but homos and women watch award shows anyway, unless they’re being paid to be there?
* Funny how everybody in the cult stresses not only Jenner’s courage, but also his supposedly good looks. In the video the butch lesbian introduces her as the ” courageous, stunning, Caitlyn Jenner”.
Not only are we supposed to accept he’s a woman now, who made the bold move to “transition”, we’re also supposed to find him stunning, well- dressed, faaabulous, young-looking, etc.
Posted inTrans|Comments Off on Jenner Got The Ashe Award
…college debate has collapsed into complete farce in recent years due to white and Asian people letting black contestants turn it into a contest over who is most black. (The black contestants don’t use the word “black” to describe themselves, however.) While the white-Asian teams discuss Constitutional law and social science findings regarding the debate’s official topic, the black teams ignore the subject they are supposed to be debating. Instead, they rap and twerk and denounce white women for shoving them while they were riding on the escalator when they were four.
And they win, because few white judges dare vote publicly against blacks acting stupid. (The secret ballot is an underrated thing.) That would be like admitting you read The Bell Curve….
It’s the main college debate organization.
Some people tried to start a Policy Debate organization recently to get back to serious debating, but it was denounced for racism.
It’s a pretty interesting example of how the logic of social justice war can destroy an institution that’s dedicated to logic but doesn’t have a lot of money to protect it.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* The most memorable part during that rant by those two obese manly butch dyke looking Black “women” is when they mention the violence that Whiteness does to Black bodies.
Not even The Onion could come up with something this retarded.
White on Black violence is an epidemic in America is one of biggest political lies of the 21st Century. Repeat a lie long enough with your huge powerful Megaphone and eventually the dumb masses will believe it is true.
* I think most of the violence done to those black bodies was done by Captain Crunch, Twinkies, and Root Beer.
* It doesn’t bother me seeing negroes act that way. Given that American negroes have an average iq of 85, I have very low expectations for them in anything other than athletics.
It does bother me to see white people bowing and scraping to negroes acting like fools. Are these whites really that desperate for the approval of the negroes? Don’t they know that the negroes will hate them even more because of their obsequiousness?
* Wimmin and Persons of Colour (honorific capital intended, as is the dissing non capitalisation of oppressor groups) are the new benchmark for emotional restraint, the exemplars for considered and logical debate. It would be racist to suggest that” the greater the amount of melanin in the skin, the more emotionally continent the individual” but it’s not racist at all, because it is not offensive to persons of colour, and if white males can’t handle the truth about race and gender, then that be their white-assed problem, know what ah’m saying, y’all?
These two groups are rightly renowned for their legendary levels of unemotional and rational articulation on all matters pertain to themselves, they do not unjustly claim to be victims of White and /or male oppression, they are the Survivors
I thought that the Black Sisters use incoherence, hyper-ventilation and hysteria were a clever and yes, courageous , deliberate reclaiming of a cultural norm demonised by white racist misogynists.
The debater rapping brought tears to my eyes with his impassioned genius married so effectively to a massive Black contribution to Art.
Only Black Art keeps it real, white art is shit, know what ah’m sayin’, y’all?
Black art has been stifled by the white-assed patriarchy for centuries.
They imposed on us their white , anodyne and offensive-to-Black -ears shit like wagner, puccini, and that Jew guy, moe zart.
Racist white scum will tremble when they witness the oratorical genius of these debaters, the cannot help but marvel at their genius.
I believe I overheard some whites say so at the debate when I overheard the two janitors mumbling to themselves..
Due to the PTSD that I and all other Brothers and Sisters endure because of centuries of white oppression, I I had to spend mah Welfare hearing-aid cheque on some crack to ease my suffering, I’m sure that they said that they were master debaters.
The janitors were commendably satirising their own race in an attempt to match the brilliance of the Black debaters ” Fuckin’ bitches and baboons, bad enough when they’re one or the other, but when they exist in one person, they are complete and utter master-debaters.
Sistahs and Bros, the world is rightfully ours!
* When exactly can we say idiocracy has arrived? T-Neezy Coates would be a stellar debater. He would just start talking about his body, and the judges would be paralyzed by ambivalence over whether to laugh out loud or be appalled at the idiocy amounting to disrespect. Which is why the trannies necessarily win: its nothing but the body with them. And their bodies are just too disgusting to laugh or be appalled.
* The left won’t admit it in frank terms, but they’ve given up on blacks ever competing with whites on equal terms. The result is somewhat harmless absurdities like these debate competition to Orwellian social engineering like the new fair housing rules that will force racial and economic integration under threat of federal litigation. Progressives are authoritarian to their core and it won’t be long before the idea that we live in a republic will be a joke.
* Like the news lady said: Where do you go from here? That was the funniest line.
* That resembles debate as much as an aboriginal making a ‘refrigerator’ out of a cardboard box and then expecting it to be full of food.
* Those truly interested in debate will find other ways to show their prowess. My niece, who just scored perfectly on the SAT, was in debate and the big emphasis was on con law; that’s where all the smart kids go to compete.
* I’d like to think there’ll be an eventual synthesis of the classical and this ‘modern’ debate style, forcing/enabling lawyers to out-rap the rappers.
* As a former college debater, it’s worth noting that there are three very different styles of debate. The three leagues are the American Parliamentary Debating Association (APDA), the National Parliamentary Debating Association (NPDA), and the Cross Examination Debate Associated (CEDA). APDA and NPDA are ‘parliamentary debate’ which generally corresponds to a form of argument a lay person can watch, understand, and enjoy.
There’s a bit of a caste system — the best schools (mostly on the east coast) are all in APDA; NPDA tends to be more west / central, and generally more of a state school thing. If you look at the APDA national champions, you see schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale as the top teams. In the 2015 NPDA finals, Kansas City defeated Southern Illinois.
CEDA is a total freakshow wherein the teams compete to speed read ‘arguments’ from note cards. Most people can’t understand what is happening in the event. The fact that it has morphed in a totally crazy way into the ‘debate’ in the embedded clip is bizarre for many reasons, but it’s not like the CEDA finals from previous years was anything especially eloquent.
* …whenever a pupil joins a school debating society, they should be escorted outside, stood up against the nearest wall and shot unto death by musketry.
They are incipient lawyers and politicians-in-waiting, and as such they should be put down humanely for the good of all.
The purpose of debate, or even a personal difference of opinion should be to arrive as near as possible to the objective truth, not to “win” by blustering, bullying or artifice.
Points “won” in that way cause miscarriage of justice in courts, and bad polity in civic affairs.
* Interesting that the 2007 movie “The Great Debaters,” about a debate team from a black college, was set in 1935 instead of contemporary times. Perhaps director Denzel Washington and producer Oprah thought audiences would be more impressed by blacks employing the traditional, more rational style of debating than by the new blackety-black-black style.
Posted inBlacks|Comments Off on Blacks Dominating Debate Contests
Forward.com, April 27, 2015: As people worldwide mourn the devastation in Nepal, one rabbi posted a different reaction to Facebook:
Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi: “All the idols worshiping places in nepal are now destroyed”
The post appears to express the rabbi’s pleasure, if not glee, at the collapse of numerous temples throughout Nepal. The Israeli-born Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi is a popular “kiruv” rabbi—someone who specializes in attracting secular Jews to Orthodoxy. He lectures widely, and this Facebook page has 12,000 “likes” (his Hebrew-language page boasts another 53,000).
Mizrachi’s post this morning has already earned him some harsh rabbinical backlash, including from Rabbi Eliyahu Fink, until recently the rabbi of LA’s Pacific Jewish Center:
What’s the worst possible thing a “rabbi” could say this morning? Yep, he went there. When will people stop supporting and promoting this sad, angry, pathetic, mental midget of a man?
I wish that Mizrachi’s sentiments were a rarity. But sadly, he is heir to a long tradition of rabbis finding odd spiritual causes lurking behind natural disasters. For example, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the renowned former Chief Sefardic Rabbi of Israel, blamed 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on President Bush’s support for the Israeli evacuation of settlers from Gaza, as well as on the general fact that New Orleans is inhabited by “Blacks” who don’t learn Torah. (His remarks were emphatically condemned by the Anti-Defamation League).
So, pathetic as this is, I am not exactly shocked that Mizrachi would say something like that. Indeed, on other occasions Mizrachi has said that one may steal somebody else’s Buddha statue and smash it, and he explained that homosexuals are cursed by God with their urges because they chose to be gay in previous lives.
It’s tempting to compare Mizrachi’s attitude toward other faiths with that of ISIS, which has recently made a show of destroying ancient Babylonian statues and artifacts. In fact, just yesterday Mizrachi posted an image to Facebook showing the black ISIS flag, pointing out that ISIS’s slogan reflects an admirable radical monotheism, and adding in red: “May God save us from allowing murderers to be our teachers, God forbid.”
Posted inRabbis|Comments Off on Rabbis React To The Tragedies Of The Non-Jews
