The cure for IQ shredders

Our best hopes for a high tech future, for avoiding a dark age, are consuming the genes needed for a high tech future. Smart people go to Hong Kong and Singapore and fail to reproduce.

Singapore has taken numerous measures, similar to those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus, to improve fertility, which will doubtless be as ineffectual as those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus.

Just as the cure for Chinese poverty was to import the economic laws and customs of Hong Kong into Shanghai, the cure for Singaporean infertility is to import the marital laws and customs of Timor Leste, where women cannot own property, because they are wards of their parents until they become wards of their husbands.

Dubai already has a system where low status expat workers are effectively wards of their employers. This typically applies to Indian construction workers (who are all male and unaccompanied by their wives and families) and Filipino “maids”, who are all female and normally single when they arrive. If an employee’s sponsor is her employer, the employee is effectively a ward of the employer. A higher status employee usually has the free zone authority is his sponsor, not his employer, even though his employer asked the free zone to sponsor the employee so the process looks very similar.

An employee sponsored by her employer normally resides in accommodation provided by the employer. The employee cannot change jobs without her employers permission. If the employer dismisses the maid, he normally cancels her visa, her bank accounts, her phone, and gives her a ticket back to her homeland. He has to give her a ticket out, because he paid a deposit to obtain her work visa, and because if she fails to leave by her employer’s fault, the employer is in trouble. If the employer cancels his employees visa, he is supposed to provide the employee with the means to leave. Often however, she fails to show up by her fault, in which case the employer still loses his deposit, so if he can, he drags her off to the airport whether she will or not.

Male Indian construction workers seldom do a run. If fired, they leave without any drama. “Maids” frequently do a run and fail to show up at the airport, because the usual cause of a falling out with her employer is raging hormones. If she does a run, her phone stops working, her credit cards stop working, her bank account stops working and if she does not withdraw any money in her bank account in a timely fashion, she loses the money. She cannot get a new phone, bank account or legal accommodation, and is subject to a large fine for every day she fails to show up. If caught, and unable to pay the fine, goes to jail for considerable time, then is sent out of the country and forbidden ever to return.

106 Responses to “The cure for IQ shredders”

  1. M says:

    “Singapore has taken numerous measures, similar to those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus, to improve fertility, which will doubtless be as ineffectual as those of the Nazis”

    That’s not true: https://i0.wp.com/de.metapedia.org/m/images/6/67/Kinderzahl_Deutsches_Reich.jpg

  2. […] shredders. Related: Domestic IQ shredders. Related: The cure for IQ shredders. Related: Cities as verbal IQ […]

  3. Zach says:

    Okay, let me get serious for a moment.

    Line-Boundaries in betting groups, with IQ results visible, would be very entertaining to see, given that I am not after the obvious truth (dummies bet better), but after the line on the graph – the threshold where on the scale the dummies are apt to bet better.

    Sigh.

  4. Zach says:

    IQ is absolutely instrumental in engineering, programming and the like.

    Fascinatingly, it has a weak control for judgment.

    An accurate world view does not require a high IQ. My life experience alone tells me this. Nothing else.

    It might be curious to examine what a high IQ does require, in proportion to what it does not.

    Strangely, those biased – perhaps yourself – have not examined this. Nor has academia. This is understandable given the extreme predictability of having a high IQ with success.

    • Zach says:

      Thought about this…

      How does IQ and Gambling numbers look? I think this is relevant. But I have no numbers…

      • Zach says:

        For fucks sake… always have an addendum because I spend two seconds fucking around with you n00bs…

        If one gambles successfully, can they be good at judging a situation without extreme intellectual (IQ) prowess?

        Do good gamblers have a high IQ?

        The best hardcore (and filthy rich) vegas brahs I know… are dunces. So. Ya’ll can tell me what I’m missing.

        k thnx bye

        • Zach says:

          Uhhh yeah! Score! I win! I win at losing!

          I mean betters. doh!

        • jim says:

          If someone is betting against the house in Vegas – then dumb as a post, because the house always wins in the long run.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            Sports betting – technically the house is the counterparty (but the house is really acting as a market maker).

            • jim says:

              One could make money on sports betting, if one was very good at predicting sports outcomes. Unfortunately, large numbers of people study sports for entertainment reasons, so there are probably a lot of people very good at predicting sports outcomes. Tough road.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            Actually you only need to predict the systemic biases of the betting crowd.

            Point spreads are set to clear markets – not to make the most accurate possible predictions. They make accurate predictions only to the degree that the betting public can therefore can be beaten.

      • jim says:

        Smart people never bet against the house.

  5. anonymous says:

    Jim, you’re starting to sound like Whiskey, that’s not a good thing

    • Alan J. Perrick says:

      “Whiskey”?

      • red says:

        Wiskey’s place blog. Guy is a frequent manosphere commenter. He comments in an intresting and insightful manner…. and then goes stright to crazy street with no evidence to back his positions. I’d describe wiskey as a failed modern prophet living in a bubble.

        On the other hand Jim’s more a prophet of doom who has a good grasp on the reality of the world. I don’t know if his solutions will work, the analysis of the doom seems pretty spot on.

        • Alan J. Perrick says:

          Failed modern prophet living in a bubble? Hahaha, that’s pretty funny. 😀

          Sometimes blogging can see like a lot of talk without much real results, but that’s why it is a good idea to limit them to only a few, or several that really suit you. There’s just too much out there…

  6. VXXC says:

    Jim,

    Dubai sucks. If the British or even Irish expat workers ever, ever, EVER REMEMBER THEY USED TO BE FUCKING MEN, or if the Indians suddenly grow Initiative, or their mercenaries get tired of Jabba the Childeric and his fat retarded brat Joffrey…

    come to think of it those people should all sit down. Perhaps Erik Prinz will think of something.

    Jim, the raging hormones of the maid = they’re shattered after being raped by the retarded brat of Jabba the Hutt.

    You should travel more.

    • jim says:

      Dubai is run well. Back in the good old days when the British expats were pirates, bandits, and conquerors, back in the days before Victoria was crowned emperess, they conquered the badly run places, not the well run places.

      Jim, the raging hormones of the maid = they’re shattered after being raped by the retarded brat of Jabba the Hutt.

      If that was the problem with the maids, they would take the flight home rather than do a bolt.

      The whole “slavery” debate presupposes that there are lots of people kept in Dubai against their will, when the problem is one of people remaining in Dubai against the will of the authorities and their employers. Being raped by someone unattractive would result in them leaving Dubai. The staying in Dubai problem indicates them fucking someone more attractive than their employer.

      • B says:

        Dubai example: a city produces a lot of shit. You can use how well a place deals with its waste as a proxy for its civilizational level.

        Dubai trucks the shit (in tanker trucks) 30 miles away and dumps it into the sea. With all the predictable consequences.

        A functional civilization would have leveraged modern tech to build a pipeline to a sewage treatment facility which would not pollute the environment.

        (UPDATE) Apparently, they’ve built some treatment plants and pipelines within the last 7 years. According to the Wiki page, which is written in a way that suggests an official press release, 70% of waste now runs through a pipeline, and only 30% through trucks. “Filtration system a marvel to behold-removes over 80% of solid human waste!” Blogs written by expats suggest shit still goes into the sea. Some bloggers have faced repressions for pointing it out.

        This is a step up from the VICE Liberia special-“the minister comes and shits on the beach with the people!”-but only a step, and a shaky one at that.

        • jim says:

          Does it have all the predictable consequences? Are these consequences directly observable to someone taking a swim, or are they only visible to the superior vision of politically correct official science? Can a critical blogger take a photo on the seashore that discredits Dubai? Or is this like Jewish ritual, rather than actual, cleanliness?

          The Soviet Union used to dump high level nuclear waste directly off the end of the dock into Vladivostok harbor, and in surface drains. Somehow, this never troubled Greenpeace and the rest.

          I read a pile of stuff about slavery in Dubai. I see it on television. And it is not true. The “slaves” are not being held against their will. They are failing to leave against the will of the authorities and their employers.

          What you are talking about is septic tanks. I live in a house which has a septic tank. Large areas of major Australian capital cities rely on septic tanks, and no one gets excited about this. Dumping what comes out of septic tanks is not a problem, since it is a tiny fraction of the original volume, and nearly all the feces has been digested. The US government gets upset about septic tanks, but this is ritual and religious cleanliness, not actual cleanliness. Typical Jewish behavior. You are worried about cheese crumbs touching meat grease, and dirt that once was human feces long ago.

          Complaining that parts of Dubai still use septic tanks is ludicrous. You could dump the entire contents of my septic tank in a small part of my garden, and I sometimes have, and it just disappears by the next day. Maybe the worms eat it, or the grass grows over it. It is illegal to dump your own septic tank in your own garden, but this strikes me as a religious prohibition without any practical reason, other than creating jobs for government waste disposal services.

          I have a grey water line, which dumps in my garden, and a septic tank. The main toilet is legally connected to the septic tank. Part of the toilet output accumulates in my septic tank, which has to be pumped from time to time, but the main part flows through the septic tank into my garden, as designed, as the government requires septic tanks to work. The entirely legal and planned outflow into my garden is completely clean. What accumulates in the tank is rather disgusting looking and smelly.

          That is the stuff that the tankers collect. A tanker comes every few years to my place to empty that stuff from my septic tank – but it is not feces, and it is a tiny fraction of the volume of the original feces.

          I also have a second, less used, toilet illegally connected to my gray water line. It was not actually planned that way, it was an error. The output from this toilet joins the grey water which goes through two traps, and then winds up in a pit in my garden. Surprisingly, human poop never appears in my garden, nor do odd smells. I have no idea what happens to the solid material. The final destination of the gray water outlet is a shallow unlined pit in my garden covered by large flat stone. Frogs live in the final pit. Strangely, I never see the pit overflowing except during very heavy rain. The grass around the final pit is a slightly greener and grows slightly faster than grass elsewhere in the garden, but not enough to be noticeable unless you know what to look for. The last trap before the final pit is full of disgusting looking, but non smelly, white slurry that looks like white ash from a fire mixed with water. It seems to be mostly lint from the clothes washer. The final grey water pit, however, is so clean that if you did not know what it was, you would probably drink from it. I keep expecting that the system will fail and I will find a pile of feces has accumulated somewhere, in some forgotten mystery part of the grey water system, but so far, continues to work fine, and has done so for many years.

          Originally the second trap was a problem. Gray water would overflow from the final trap. So I added the pit. Since the pit, no further problems. No overflow, which is surprising considering that the bath, the dishwasher, the shower, the clothes washer, and the rest all empty into the grey water line, and the pit is tiny. I am on a hill overlooking the sea. I suppose the waste water percolates through the rock into the sea. After percolating through some kilometers of dirt and rock, probably clean enough. The frogs seem happy enough.

          • Dave says:

            I live in a wet temperate climate, and used to have a garden for vegetables not eaten raw. I fertilized it by digging holes and crapping in them. After about one week, there was no trace of feces. I suppose the earthworms ate it.

        • B says:

          Consequences like large amounts of people swimming in the sea and getting sick.

          Mock the Jewish thing all you want. But even Richard Burton pointed out that in the European ghettos, despite living in more crowded conditions than their Christian neighbors, with more poverty, in the worst part of towns, Jews were remarkably healthy and not affected by the plagues which affected their neighbors, which often led to us massacred as they made the conclusion that we were not affected by plagues because we had caused them.

          The article you linked has His Highness bragging that Dubai has joined the ranks of such brain-gain nations as Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria. Enough said.

          • jim says:

            Consequences like large amounts of people swimming in the sea and getting sick.

            Evidence? Did people actually get sick, or did they think that people would get sick due to invisible feces?

          • B says:

            For contrast, check out sewage treatment in Israel, Singapore, Japan.

            • jim says:

              Checking the first link:

              an official said tests previously conducted on samples taken from the site proved the streak was “harmless”.

              In October 2008, the Dubai Municipality had shut down the beach near the club after tests reportedly confirmed higher than normal levels of E.coli bacteria in the water. A few days earlier, a sewage truck was seen stopping over an unlocked storm water drain in Al Quoz. The illegal dump had put a stop to swimming and sailing at the club at that time.

              Dr Reza Khan, a wildlife and zoo management specialist at Dubai Municipality’s Public Parks and Horticulture Department, however, said it is possible the brown streak is a result of algal blooms, microscopic single-celled plants known as marine phytoplankton, or popularly known as “red tide”

              So, bottom line is that on rare occasions, trucks that drain septic tanks illegally dump in stormwater drains, the last such incident being several years ago, and this causes people to panic every time they see the red tide, the red tide being a regular natural occurrence off Dubai, and incidentally also in the coral sea.

              That is a far cry from the claim that dumping untreated sewage is part of the standard Dubai way of doing things. I am pretty sure you have septic tanks in Israel. Do Israeli honeypot tankers that pump the septic tanks never dump illegally?

              Most rural people along the coast of the coral sea use septic tanks. I am sure the honeypot tankers along the coral sea coast sometimes take an illegal dump. Every few years, the coral sea coast gets a red tide similar to that described, and yet one never sees this sort of news, just as one never saw news that the Soviet Union was dumping high level nuclear waste in Vladivostok harbor.

              You get this sort of news, I presume, for the same reason that you regularly get news that people are being kept in Dubai against their will as slaves.

          • B says:

            Now you’re just being the mirror image of the Leftists who claim that reports of NIH hospitals smelling like death are just panic-mongering by those damn Teabaggers. Nothing to see here, move along! An Arab official has issued an official denial-what more could we need? Socialized medicine is good, thus the NIH is good, thus reports of NIH dysfunction are lies. Monarchy is good, thus Dubai is good, thus reports of Dubai dysfunction are lies.

            I have never heard of sewage washing ashore in Israel, though we have a massive Green lobby (funded by the US,) and a free press, unlike Dubai. I have never heard of anything like that in Singapore or Japan, either. But I have been around the Arab world and seen dysfunction, and specifically in the sanitation field (the mindset being, if it’s not in MY house, it’s not a problem,) so have no trouble believing these reports.

            • jim says:

              I have seen similar slimes (red tides) in the coral sea. I don’t believe it is possible to dump enough sewage to create a visible slick, unless there is the major industrial scale dumping which you initially claimed was happening, but which your links do not report happening.

              For non industrial scale dumping, for the occasional honeypot truck that dumps its load in the storm drains, you detect it by detecting fecal bacteria in sea water. Which detections have been rare and slight, and would probably be pretty similar off the shore of Israel.

              And fecal bacteria off the shore of Hawaii is a big problem, because sewage systems similar to my gray water system have been grandfathered in, where instead of the worst part accumulating in the septic tank, it percolates into the rocks and dirt. Yet somehow, seldom gets reported.

              Around the world the big problem is not fecal bacteria in the water from illegal dumping by honeypot trucks, but fecal bacteria in the water from sewage systems that drop their load directly into the dirt and rock, like wells in reverse, of which there are a plentiful supply in the US, and in particular in Hawaii, but, evidently not in Dubai.

              It is like a septic tank, except unlined. And somehow, the feces mysteriously goes away without the inconvenient necessity of having it pumped. You get a lot of it in Hawaii, grandfathered in, illegally installed, or just the result of people patching their systems ad hoc when they got obnoxious overflows.

              If you don’t like government officials testing for fecal bacteria – well, anyone is free to test for fecal bacteria. But, going by the description of the slick, sounds like red tides of the coral sea.

            • jim says:

              I have never heard of sewage washing ashore in Israel, th

              Nor is sewage washing ashore in Dubai. From the descriptions, obviously a red tide, similar to those I have seen in the coral sea. For example it stings. The red tide frequently stings. Sewage does not sting.

          • Alan J. Perrick says:

            Love seeing someone finally point out this kind of mystical hocus-pocus, which is really a degenerate form of paganism. I wish I could find something to criticise you on so I seem more impartial, “Jim”! L.O.L….

            A.J.P.

  7. VXXC says:

    [pushed wrong button]

    Jim Islam fell into decline because of High IQ Clerisy. As have we.

  8. VXXC says:

    Jim,

    Our best hope for avoiding a dark age is a proven solution for heading off one already beginning.

    The Arabian peninsula solution was Mohammed. Because that’s what he did.
    No I’m not advocating conversion to Islam, as it’s failed. And is failing to accomplish now that prime purpose.

    We should learn from the man though. His chief contribution to the Canon was to make Shirk a mortal sin. That part of his parcel of genius is brilliant, it takes young men from barbarism to solemn duty and defenders of tradition in one fell swoop. Dread defenders of their people as well.

    And then behind those spears rose for a time a great civilization.

    Jim Islam fell into decline because of High IQ

    • jim says:

      Are you thinking of “The incoherence of the philosophers”?

      Certainly our clerisy used to be high IQ, for example Chomsky. Bertrand Russell was very, very, smart indeed.

      But today, dim and getting dimmer, and ever less tolerant of the slightest sign of intelligence. Gould was not too bad, but it has been very much downhill since Gould.

  9. Hidden Author says:

    You really have a slavery fetish, don’t you?

    • Hidden Author says:

      I’m not just mocking you. You seem to want the enslavement of women, minorities and poor people like a cartoon conservative drawn by a liberal. And your admiration for terror-sponsoring Arab sheiks and slave-selling African tribal chiefs is reminiscent of a cartoon money-worshipping libertarian drawn again by a liberal.

      • jim says:

        Dubai does not sponsor terror – unlike Saudi Arabia.

        And unlike the US government, which in its effort to overthrow the regime in Syria, a regime notorious for protecting religious minorities and particularly Christians, armed ISIS, the organization now claiming the Caliphate.

        I don’t want the working poor enslaved, nor the genuinely unfortunate, the deserving poor. I want what used to be called “sturdy beggars” enslaved – people who are physically capable of earning a living, but lack the inclination or the temperament.

        I don’t want women enslaved. I want the system that was legally enforced until around 1820, legally on the books until 1860, and to a considerable extent socially enforced all the way to 1960, within living memory, wherein women remain subject to their parents, until they become subject to their husbands through a formal and sacred contract voluntarily made before witnesses. The present system is brutal to children, and results in our society failing to reproduce physically or culturally.

  10. tgmoderator says:

    I’d be interested historic fertility data for the Brahmin caste of India. I know that US and UK fertility among the cognitive elite were once much higher. Jim has made a very convincing case that female emancipation is the primary factor in the decline; however, I think cost of living may be an important lessor factor. Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong are all crowded and expensive places to have kids. Does the Sailer/Ben Franklin/Frederick Jackson Turner idea regarding affordable family formation play a role in fertility? I think that it must, but I lack the data. Once a cognitive elite create an IQ shredder locality they also create high real estate prices and overall cost of living as a side effect of making the region deisrable. They become tempted to import a lower class of servants or slaves. Being a Brahmin in any culture is expensive, but it must have been managable at one time or there would be no more Brahmins.

    • Dave says:

      People need savings. We need to invest in something today that will hold its value in the future, so as not to be left begging for handouts when we’re old and feeble.

      There’s no point saving paper money that central bankers can devalue at will. Few Americans own much precious metal. Most of our saved wealth is in our houses, so we cheer when home values rise, weep when they fall, and vote for policies (e.g. zoning) that make housing more expensive.

      This is perverse. Young adults need safe, spacious, affordable housing close to good jobs if they are to marry and raise children. Forcing them to live with their parents or rent studio apartments leads to Japanification and eventual extinction. Section 8 makes this worse by bidding up rents on family-sized apartments, and subsidizing only the families least likely to incubate productive citizens.

      • anonymous says:

        Most of our saved wealth is in our houses, so we cheer when home values rise, weep when they fall, and vote for policies (e.g. zoning) that make housing more expensive.

        This is perverse. Young adults need safe, spacious, affordable housing close to good jobs if they are to marry and raise children.

        I try to explain this to (self described) right wing boomer age people every time I get a chance, that their “rising home values” means their children not being able to afford homes of their own… but they really don’t get it.

      • Alan J. Perrick says:

        Excellent point regarding investments made on housing, “Dave”!

    • cloudswrest says:

      I’ve repeatedly said, given that most “progressive” societies have progressive income taxes, tax rates should be based on adjusted gross per capita family income. A family of four with say the dad making $200,000/yr should be taxed as four people, each making $50,000/yr. This is as it should be as the income is supporting four people. It also rewards the wealthier for having more kids, and doesn’t encourage the poor to have more kids as they don’t pay taxes anyway.

      • jim says:

        Financial incentives help, but they do not help a huge amount. The only thing that makes a big difference is the authority of husbands.

    • thinkingabout it says:

      Brahmins never had a fertility issue back in the day, but of late with female emancipation their numbers are beginning to stabilize, and even dwindle. The cuntiest cunts in India are Brahmin women from those Brahmin communities who are considered most intellectually capable, like the Tamil and Bengali Brahmins. Every feminist screed you read in an Indian newspaper is usually written by these women, in spite of them forming less than 1% of society.

      • jim says:

        The position of high IQ castes in India resembles that of whites in Europe. Unsurprisingly, because they are white, asianish white, or close to it. With progress, failing to reproduce and being swamped by the orcish hordes.

      • yeahright says:

        The Tamil Brahmins are the only ones that win Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry for India, more specifically, the Iyer group, and the ones like Bengali Brahmins usually win prizes for Literature, way different achievement levels, the Iyenger Tamil Brahmins have virtually no mathematicians or scholars, except for the odd Ramanujan, for example, the leader for one political party in India is one of these Iyenger and she hasn’t done anything for the state at all.

      • yeahright says:

        The Tamil Brahmins, specifically Iyer, won every single one of the India’s Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, while the Tamil Brahmin Iyenger have no prizes at all, except for just one person, and thats Ramanujan, the rest don’t achieve anything.

      • yeahright says:

        Tamil Brahmin Iyers are the only Brahmins winning prizes for Physics and Chemistry, the Bengali Brahmins are fake imposters

      • yeahright says:

        Your wrong, many Brahmins in India are frauds that weasled their way to Brahmin status, like so UP Brahmins.

      • nope says:

        the Brahmins are too mixed up now, even some Ksyhtriya caste have more ancient R1a1 M-17 groups compared to some Brahmin groups

      • nope says:

        your wrong

  11. spandrell says:

    wtf does Dubai’s slavery system have to do with fertility?

    Dubai native people don’t have to work, have low IQs, their women are ostensibly controlled, yet they have sub-replacement fertility.

    Dubai is a shithole, it’s not representative of any country on earth, least of all any civilized country that we could want to have some effect on. It produces no culture or technology, it doesn’t feed itself, it does nothing. It doesn’t even get their women to reproduce! Nothing to learn here.

    • jim says:

      I don’t think their women are ostensibly controlled. Dubai has coed schools and is crawling with fertility clinics. If their women were controlled, why the fertility clinics?

      If a woman needs a fertility clinic, it is because she did not want to get married until after she stopped getting booty calls from Jeremy Meeks. Whatever happened to marrying them off as soon as they developed secondary sexual characteristics?

      • spandrell says:

        Well that tells you how much Dubai sucks, that they can’t control their women even with Islam.

        • jim says:

          If a modern ultracapitalist economy can make low status expats into wards, nothing is stopping them from making fertile age women into wards.

          • B says:

            The only way in a wealthy society you will make women into wards of men is if the men are servants of something higher, and for real, no fakery. Otherwise, hedonism flows down to the women and children. As you see in Dubai.

            You can’t have a hierarchical order without a suprahierarchical purpose, unless you are living in conditions of adversity and privation.

            • jim says:

              Again, Restoration England, the one that brought us science, the industrial revolution, and empire: The British elite was not suffering adversity and privation, their official religion was manufactured post hoc to fit, not taken seriously. And the British elite reproduced just fine. They reproduced just fine because they took seriously, and legally and socially enforced, the one flesh doctrine, that the husband and wife were one person, and the husband the head of that person.

          • B says:

            Were the cream of the crop of Restoration England reproducing at a high rate?

            A brief perusal of the early Fellows of the Royal Society suggests not. Newton had no children. Neither did Boyle. Keill had one son. Wilkins had none. Wren had four children, one of whom died in infancy and another was mentally disabled. Villiers (an “Alpha”!) left no known children. Huygens had none. Isaac Barrow had none. Samuel Pepys had none.

            On the other hand, many of them came from families with many children. But half those children died before reaching adulthood. Which tells you something about adversity and privation.

            On the third hand, when you read their biographies, it’s obvious that many of the FRS’ took religion very seriously, though it was not the established religion of their society.

            • jim says:

              The first leader of the Royal Society were Robert Hooke. Robert Hooke was the last of four children, all of whom survived, though he himself had no children. Notable scientists tend to be terrible at reproduction, but the people around them did fine. Darwin was fifth of six surviving children, and had seven surviving children, an atheist son of atheist parents.

              Better to look at the bourgeoisie, the people who founded businesses. The first man to build a steam engine and make money out of it was Thomas Savery, but I cannot find how many children he had, so, looking at James Watt, deist, which is as close as a sensible man could get to atheism before Darwin explained the origin of species, who had seven children, three of whom survived to adulthood.

      • B says:

        Dubai does suck. It’s a cargo cult version of Singapore, with weather that is somehow even worse. The ruling class is basically Jabba the Hutts and the slaves are a mix of dumb worker drones, obsequious office slaves and Western yuppies. It’s a bad, bad place, like a Brett Easton Ellis novel but with Arabs.

        Not all infertility is caused by waiting too long to get married. A family I know closely has nine kids, four married, the rest too young. Of the married ones, one girl had to go through long and grueling fertility treatments despite marrying in her mid-20s, and one son has been unable to have children so far due to a childhood accident. Shit happens.

        • jim says:

          Dubai ruling class is the opposite of Jabba the Hut. Handsome, smart, aristocratic looking. Look like aristocrats should look like. Sound like aristocrats should sound like. A living advertisement for aristocratic rule.

          • spandrell says:

            Smart my ass. Arabs are arabs are arabs.

            You’re gonna start giving real evidence of your claims of Arab or Vietnamese aristocrats being something else from what the historical record says: a bunch of stupid and fat fags.

            • jim says:

              Vietnamese aristocrats are not around any more, but Dubai aristocrats are around. Just look at them. King Mohammed bin Rashid:

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDXGI9RTyk4

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeDb2nU9jKU

              Google you tube for his son Hamdan Mohammed Bin Rashid Ala Mahmout. All the eleven year old chicks have shrines to him and make you tube videos worshiping him.

              OK. They look aristocratic. That is not Jabba the Hut. The reason maids keep running away is that they hope Hamdan Mohammed Bin Rashid Ala Mahmout will fuck them.

              How about smarts? Vietnamese aristocrats were very very smart.

              Here is some writing by the King of Dubai. I am pretty sure he wrote it himself, because that is the same voice I hear when he is interviewed on television. He does not seem super smart, not like Vietnamese aristocrats, but definitely smarter than the average Harvard Graduate.

              He is saying the obvious, but to the typical Harvard graduate, not obvious.

              Talent flows naturally to countries that create an environment for economic growth; that make life easy for enterprise; that attract and welcome investment; and that nurture a culture of achievement. Skills are attracted to challenge and possibility.

              Obvious, right? But somehow obvious to very few people.

          • B says:

            The King of Dubai is smart (I guess.) The average Arab resident of Dubai, who has been skyrocketed to aristocrat status by the discovery of oil by Euros who were, for historical reasons, disinclined to just take the oil away, but preferred a facade whereby they extract and process the oil while sharing the proceeds with the “natives”, is anything but smart or hardworking. I recommend you read up on the expat perspective of dealing with the “aristocracy.” The best thing those jackasses do is to get out of the way, but because of greed and high reproductive rates, that’s bound to come to a halt sooner or later.

        • anonymous says:

          a lot of infertility in the arab world is caused by arab men, being buggered by their cousins, uncles, imams, etc since childhood not knowing which hole on the woman they need to put it in

        • jay says:

          Mid-twenties. The problem right there. They are married well after their teens it seems to me.

  12. Orthodox says:

    If God really did change from the Old Testament to the New Testament and he doesn’t like fire bombing cities and flooding whole regions anymore, maybe he decided to kill all the unbelievers with kindness.

    • Erik says:

      There’s not much to suggest that God changed, though. The New Testament is far shorter, chronologically. If you pull a 30-year period out of the Old Testament at random, you are likely to get one with no fire bombing of cities, because the major incidents are infrequent. The New Testament still has various people ending up blinded for sorcery, smoten dead for lying, eaten by worms for arrogance and false worship, et cetera; and the majority of the mentions of “hell” are in the New Testament.

      Killing unbelievers by letting them stew in their unbelief rather than flooding the city, though, is Biblically supported: Romans 1. (“…even as they did not think fit to have God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do the things not right, being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; being full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, evil habits…”)

      • Jehu says:

        Ever considered that while God is not afraid to push the genocide button, he does so judiciously and in a non-futile manner?
        Ever noticed that we don’t have any world powers that demand a huge yearly tribute in human sacrifices every year backed by the threat of nuclear weapons and a doomsday device protecting against a preemptive strike? That’s what I suspect nuclear Aztecs would be.
        My suspicion is that God preemptively wiped out of existence any groups likely to present such problems. Thank Him for His holy genocides.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          “Ever noticed that we don’t have any world powers that demand a huge yearly tribute in human sacrifices every year backed by the threat of nuclear weapons and a doomsday device protecting against a preemptive strike? ”

          We don’t?

          Looks to me that that’s exactly what we have.

        • B says:

          Things are moving along.

          First you had extensive selection through hunter-gather scarcity.

          Then, through agricultural scarcity and dealing with a nation-state.

          Then, between nation-states and their competing ideologies (hence, no nuclear Aztecs.)

          Now, through plenty and the ability to do anything you want. Who needs babies when you’ve got iPhones?

          Two possibilities-the primitives can come back and take over (the neo-pre-Columbians of MS-13 and the Santa Muerta worshipers/ISIS)-or, the civilized pass through the bottleneck. Not all civilized people prefer iPhones to babies. So you have Western civilization shrink a bit, then rebound.

          I don’t believe in primitives taking over. Even assuming mil-tech does not advance, the last 100+ years of mil-tech advances have gotten us to the state that without competent logistics, discipline and high organizational trust, numbers do not matter. And the primitives are precluded from these, by definition. See: Gaza, where the numbers don’t even come close, despite favorable terrain for defense and a sympathetic media/patron state hampering Israeli ops.

          So, it’s to be the first scenario.

          • jim says:

            without competent logistics, discipline and high organizational trust, numbers do not matter.

            Progressive competence is deteriorating, their discipline is terrible, and, as we saw in the financial crisis, their organizational trust has completely collapsed. Rightly fearing military takeover, they are busily remaking the army in their own image, with male submission to women and transexuals taking priority over discipline in the face of the enemy.

            Which implies that Orthodox Jews in Israel could, and probably will, eventually take over in a Monck style military coup (Monck had his praetorians “guard” the British parliament, and they continue to guard it to this day.) Pity you no longer have a religion capable of being a nation state religion.

            After Monck installed Charles the Second, they cynically fabbed up a pretty good state religion, and claimed, half truthfully, that it was the pre-puritan state religion.

            In the Christopher Dorner incident, we saw that police were hopeless. But if Orthodox take over in Israel without fixing up their religion to make it suitable to rule an Israel that includes the temple mount, you will get the holier than thou contest similar to that which Jesus ridiculed and that Cromwell had to end. Could get very nasty, and is likely to converge to something much resembling progressivism once the holiest start getting holier than Moses. Notice that Caliphate wants to destroy the Kaaba because they are holier than Mohammed.

            Come to think of it. You are already holier than Moses. Do you think he worried about cheese crumbs coming into contact with meat grease?

          • B says:

            Nonetheless, the worst US army infantry battalion has much more organizational trust and discipline than ISIS. There is a lot of ruin in a military. Meanwhile ISIS and the rest of them rule over populations of retards who can’t feed themselves, and it’s getting worse yearly. In a contest between Western military degeneration and retard population growth outstripping productivity, I bet on the latter.

            Cynically fabbing something up is unsustainable. Earnestness is the way to go. The cynicism of the DE is the main reason for its sterility-you guys are intellectual eunuchs, like Procopius writing his Secret History.

            Did Moshe worry about meat grease and cheese crumbs? First, as usual, you are ignorant of the Law-once something is no longer recognizable as food, it’s not considered food. Second, we don’t know, but we do know that he had a man executed for gathering firewood on Shabbat. That’s earnestness, and that earnestness is the reason Judaism is around and growing today, 3KY later.

            • jim says:

              Nonetheless, the worst US army infantry battalion has much more organizational trust and discipline than ISIS

              Do we know this? We seem to be losing in Afghanistan.

              War is the test. Israel is killing lots of human shields, but that is what human shields are for. Sandbags. How many Hamas is Israel killing? Last I heard, Israel lost eighteen killed, one captured. Given higher Muslim tolerance for casualties, got to kill two hundred to two thousand Hamas. I don’t think Israel has done so.

            • jim says:

              Cynically fabbing something up is unsustainable.

              On the contrary, the ability of Charles the Second to laugh at people holier than his royal self avoided the possibly inconvenient necessity of cutting off their heads.

              Did Moshe worry about meat grease and cheese crumbs? First, as usual, you are ignorant of the Law-once something is no longer recognizable as food, it’s not considered food. Second, we don’t know,

              I am pretty sure we do know.

              1. If he meant “Don’t mix meat and dairy products”, he would have said “Don’t mix meat and dairy products.

              2. The prohibition on boiling a kid in its mother’s milk is obviously an anti entryist measure, an antibody to an antigen that no longer exists.

              Moses was at the end of the collapse of bronze age civilizations, and the beginning of the start of iron age civilizations. The collapsed Bronze age civilizations worshiped a golden goat, as well as a golden calf. Chances are that the dish in question was part of that worship.

              See also Paul on eating meat sacrificed to idols. He tells us that if you don’t believe that the meat is anything special, and it looks like you don’t believe the meat is anything special, you are allowed to eat it. But if it looks like you are showing respect to idols, absolutely forbidden, even if you think in your own mind that you are not showing respect to idols. This is an anti assimilation measure, rather than anti entryist measure, but the intent is similar. His position was subsequently interpreted, obviously correctly, as forbidding Christians from paying divine honors to the emperor.

          • B says:

            >On the contrary, the ability of Charles the Second to laugh at people holier than his royal self avoided the possibly inconvenient necessity of cutting off their heads.

            This is a tactical advantage achievable in other ways. The strategic disadvantage is that the fish rots from the top down. Once you don’t believe the things you claim to believe, shortly nobody believes in anything. By “belief” I mean that the principle affects your decisionmaking significantly, and you are willing to forego concrete benefits for an abstract principle to a large degree. Problem: 1) people NEED to believe in something, and nature abhors a vacuum, so another, genuine system of belief will step into the gap, turning yours inside out (see: Islam in Britain,) 2) there are many situations where you need people to forego concrete benefits for the benefit of the group, and in a cynical system this doesn’t happen.

            >1. If he meant “Don’t mix meat and dairy products”, he would have said “Don’t mix meat and dairy products.

            Not so. There is an Oral Torah, which is the set of all traditions and practices, and which has the same relation to the Written Torah as the ability to drive a car well has to the car manual-you can’t even get from the latter to the former. The Written Torah has commandments which refer to the Oral Torah (for instance, the commandment for kosher slaughter,) and other commandments which are impossible to fulfill properly without context and tradition (for instance, the Four Species for Sukkot, which we have discussed as referred to in Josephus.)

            >2. The prohibition on boiling a kid in its mother’s milk is obviously an anti entryist measure, an antibody to an antigen that no longer exists.

            You are not giving any sort of grand revelation here. Maimonides has a whole section of the Guide to the Perplexed where he speaks about the fact that this commandment, like the ones prohibiting the shaving of the corners of the head, or grafting different tree species to each other, comes from opposition to the idolatrous practices of the period in the Mediterranean Basin.

            However, his conclusion is not that, since we successfully wiped out those practices, we can now go shave our head, eat some cheeseburgers and go graft an apple branch to a cherry tree, because what does it matter. His conclusion is that since the Torah is a set of divine commandments, we continue to follow these commandments, even at an inconvenience. Because once you appoint yourself the arbiter of what’s a commandment and what’s not, you will inevitably throw the baby out with the bathwater, and prove, at length, that only commandments which involve doing stuff you wanted to do anyway in the exact way that you wanted to do it are divine. As we see with Christianity’s evolution.

            Now, the Oral Torah is more flexible than the Written Torah, which was the reason that it was given as an oral/practical tradition, and that it was considered a tragedy when it was written down-there were force majeure circumstances that necessitated that codification, but it was still a tragedy.

            >See also Paul on eating meat sacrificed to idols. He tells us that if you don’t believe that the meat is anything special, and it looks like you don’t believe the meat is anything special, you are allowed to eat it. But if it looks like you are showing respect to idols, absolutely forbidden, even if you think in your own mind that you are not showing respect to idols.

            As usual, Paul is a great marketing specialist. But in reality, we are forbidden from deriving benefit from anything sanctified to idols, in any way, and even a golden statue of an idol is to be destroyed in such a way that we can’t melt the gold down and reuse it. When you demand this level of commitment and sacrifice, you can have something that lasts in the long run. When you say, “sure, they sacrificed that goat to an idol, but the kebabs are delicious and idols aren’t real, so chow down,” you end up with tattooed lesbian preachers, a pope kissing Muslim refugee feet on Lampedusa, etc.

            • jim says:

              1. If he meant “Don’t mix meat and dairy products”, he would have said “Don’t mix meat and dairy products.

              Not so. There is an Oral Torah, which is the set of all traditions and practices, and which has the same relation to the Written Torah as the ability to drive a car well has to the car manual-you can’t even get from the latter to the former.

              When the written Torah was translated to Greek, the translators showed no indication of any awareness that it did not mean what it said nor say what it means, which is the sort of thing one normally has to deal with in translation.

              The Written Torah has commandments which refer to the Oral Torah (for instance, the commandment for kosher slaughter,) and other commandments which are impossible to fulfill properly without context and tradition (for instance, the Four Species for Sukkot, which we have discussed as referred to in Josephus.)

              Why impossible to fulfill? Logically, one would expect any attractive trees and fruit will serve, since the purpose is to decorate the feast, and that is what the old testament says. If the Old testament does not say “four species”, the logical implication is that it does not mean “four species”

              What it says is:

              Also in the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto the LORD seven days: on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath.

              And ye shall take you on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook; and ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven days.

              Sounds similar to the standard harvest celebration of pretty much every culture. In which case, the sensible interpretation is “decorate the feast with attractive fresh leafy things, including palms and willow branches”

              2. The prohibition on boiling a kid in its mother’s milk is obviously an anti entryist measure, an antibody to an antigen that no longer exists.

              You are not giving any sort of grand revelation here. Maimonides has a whole section of the Guide to the Perplexed where he speaks about the fact that this commandment, like the ones prohibiting the shaving of the corners of the head, or grafting different tree species to each other, comes from opposition to the idolatrous practices of the period in the Mediterranean Basin.

              In which case, the command was intended to be very specific, rather than very general.

              However, his conclusion is not that, since we successfully wiped out those practices, we can now go shave our head, eat some cheeseburgers and go graft an apple branch to a cherry tree, because what does it matter. His conclusion is that since the Torah is a set of divine commandments, we continue to follow these commandments, even at an inconvenience.

              OK, but then you:

              1: Hugely expand these commandments, instead of merely refraining from long forgotten religious practices. Those goat worshipers did not eat cheeseburgers.

              2: Fail to avoid the idolatrous practices of New Age and progressivism.

              Because once you appoint yourself the arbiter of what’s a commandment and what’s not,

              If you don’t interpret commandments in accord with their original purpose and meaning, you wind up suffering entryism and assimilation through following the religious observances of Pogressivism and New Age. Which is why the Southern Poverty Law Center, instead of wearing funny hats to advertise their ethnicity, bleach their hair orange to disguise it.

              But the big problem is the tendency towards holier than thou. You wind up with ever more inconvenient observances, and ever more magic spells to excuse the faithful from these inconvenient observances.

              Just as all aneuploid metastatic malignant cancers wind up looking alike, regardless of their tissue of origin, religions driven by the force of holier than thou all wind up looking alike – looking much like leftism.

              The problem is never creeping unholiness. It is creeping holiness. The pope is holier than Jesus, and you are holier than Moses.

            • john says:

              “Because once you appoint yourself the arbiter of what’s a commandment and what’s not, you will inevitably throw the baby out with the bathwater, and prove, at length, that only commandments which involve doing stuff you wanted to do anyway in the exact way that you wanted to do it are divine. As we see with Christianity’s evolution.”

              I’d just like to point out in Christianity’s defense that Christianity is far from the only faith which has “evolved” in this way. Just look at reformed or progressive Judaism, for example.

          • B says:

            >When the written Torah was translated to Greek, the translators showed no indication of any awareness that it did not mean what it said nor say what it means, which is the sort of thing one normally has to deal with in translation.

            The translation of the Written Torah to Greek was considered a tragedy by the Jewish people precisely due to the loss of context, and a miracle by the Greeks forcing the 70 translators to translate, because they all made the same translations. No context/tradition/Oral Torah would have led to differing translations. In any case, all they were being forced to do was to translate the Written Torah, not the Oral Torah.

            >Why impossible to fulfill?

            Because if I tell you, “slaughter animals like I showed you,” it is impossible to do it unless I’ve showed you how to do it. If you just knock them in the head with a hammer, you’re not doing it properly. It’s like taking a car and driving into oncoming traffic because your driver’s manual didn’t mention that you should drive on the right in the US but on the left in Britain. You can, if you know these rules from context, see certain things that are explainable by them, like the fact that the driver’s manual shows the driver’s side being the left-but in general, the manual presupposes contextual familiarity and doesn’t much bother providing it.

            >Logically, one would expect any attractive trees and fruit will serve, since the purpose is to decorate the feast, and that is what the old testament says. If the Old testament does not say “four species”, the logical implication is that it does not mean “four species”

            The purpose is to do what G-d is telling us to do, in the exact fashion that he tells us. In Josephus, we see that the Jewish people were, except for a breakaway set of “do-what-thou-wilt” rebels, all in agreement that the commandment deals with a specific set of plants, not just any beautiful ones, and that this set of plants is expounded in the Oral Torah. They all agreed on which plants to use.

            >Sounds similar to the standard harvest celebration of pretty much every culture. In which case, the sensible interpretation is “decorate the feast with attractive fresh leafy things, including palms and willow branches”

            In which case, you no longer have Judaism but some horseshit which inevitably devolves to self-worship and thus idolatry. Hey, how’s Christmas doing these days? Sales up? What’s with Easter, that giant bunny still bringing his message of cheer to the kids?

            >In which case, the command was intended to be very specific, rather than very general.

            No, when we deal with idolatry, we go out of our way to put a fence around it and avoid anything resembling it. The command is given three separate times in the Torah, from which we understand its importance-assuming you consider the Torah of divine origin and binding, this makes sense. If not-good luck with your self-spun social engineering projects, I hope you have a better result than the Oneida Fabians, but please don’t tell us how to interpret the Torah.

            >Hugely expand these commandments, instead of merely refraining from long forgotten religious practices. Those goat worshipers did not eat cheeseburgers.

            They did not, but we build fences around idolatrous practices.

            >Fail to avoid the idolatrous practices of New Age and progressivism.

            Any culture taking the Torah’s outer observances seriously enough to avoid eating meat and cheese off the same plate will end up taking its inner meaning seriously enough to avoid Gaya-worship. In practice, this is what we see happening-the Orthodox Jews of New York City, who are fastidious about things like the prohibition of mixing wool and linen, are immune to New Age and Progressivist idolatry, leading to high birth rates, etc. I’ve already told you that I think that the outer observances of Judaism and its inner essence, the letter and spirit of the law, are symbiotic and mutually reinforcing, and that any attempt to have the one without the other is doomed in the long run. This may not be logically provable, but it’s empirically verifiable.

            >If you don’t interpret commandments in accord with their original purpose and meaning, you wind up suffering entryism and assimilation through following the religious observances of Pogressivism and New Age. Which is why the Southern Poverty Law Center, instead of wearing funny hats to advertise their ethnicity, bleach their hair orange to disguise it.

            That’s hardly entryism. The people who take the Commandments seriously are not joining the SPLC or donating to it, nor are the members of the SPLC spending their free time learning the Halakhot of mixing species.

            >But the big problem is the tendency towards holier than thou. You wind up with ever more inconvenient observances, and ever more magic spells to excuse the faithful from these inconvenient observances.

            I’ve already told you that I don’t see this, and that the big problem I see is the tendency towards idolatry, towards worship of aspects of the self projected upon idols. Don’t take my word for it-your Carlyle talks about the devolution towards lingam-worship.

            >religions driven by the force of holier than thou all wind up looking alike – looking much like leftism.

            If you look close enough, I guess, especially if leftism is your benchmark. But to me, devolution of society always looks like idolatry and loss of asabiyya. Loss of asabiyya is what happens when a society makes comfort and wealth their god, and then achieves it.

            >The pope is holier than Jesus, and you are holier than Moses.

            I am not holier than Moshe-I follow his commandments as best as I understand them, using the tradition which is passed down from him. I am sure he understood them better than me, and if he were here, he would revise significant portions of the current practice. However, he is not here, and neither is the body empowered to do so in his place, the Sanhedrin. Given this sad fact, I am obviously not qualified to make the decision to revise these practices as best I see fit, so do the best I can with what I’ve got.

            • jim says:

              When the written Torah was translated to Greek, the translators showed no indication of any awareness that it did not mean what it said nor say what it means, which is the sort of thing one normally has to deal with in translation.

              The translation of the Written Torah to Greek was considered a tragedy by the Jewish people precisely due to the loss of context

              There is no contemporary evidence (Philo, Josephus) that Jews considered it a tragedy. Further, everyone knows that context affects translation. If, for example, “magnificent trees” meant certain specific species of trees, they would have translated accordingly. No one shows any awareness of an “oral torah” until four hundred AD or so. Further your Oral Torah continues to this day to get ever holier, a process that will inexorably converge to something resembling every other religion that goes all the way to maximum holiness.

              Logically, one would expect any attractive trees and fruit will serve, since the purpose is to decorate the feast, and that is what the old testament says. If the Old testament does not say “four species”, the logical implication is that it does not mean “four species”

              The purpose is to do what G-d is telling us to do, in the exact fashion that he tells us. In Josephus, we see that the Jewish people were, except for a breakaway set of “do-what-thou-wilt” rebels, all in agreement that the commandment deals with a specific set of plants,

              Does he now? Give me a link. I recall that when I looked up the Sanhedrin in Josephus, I found that they were a Roman creation. Perhaps the Romans got tired of trying to negotiate with warlords who lacked the power to make war or peace, and prophets who lacked the sanity, so proceeded to manufacture something in the image of their own senate.

              In which case, you no longer have Judaism but some horseshit which inevitably devolves to self-worship and thus idolatry.

              Israel does not seem immune to a progressive induced tendency to suicide. Armenians can kill troublesome Muslims with considerably fewer difficulties that Jews have.

              Progressives aim to assimilate Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It is hard to say who is being swallowed up easier, but Jews, as a whole, are not resisting well. You yourself have been industriously rationalizing away and interpreting away the subordination of women.

              Hey, how’s Christmas doing these days? Sales up? What’s with Easter

              Christmas was from the beginning a celebration to which all men, not just Christians, were invited and encouraged to participate. It is doing very well, because, just as planned from the beginning, it is being celebrated by Chinese, Japanese, and Muslims. Muslims spread Islam by blowing themselves up, while Christians spread Christianity by wishing people Merry Christmas. The Puritans never liked Christmas, tried to suppress it, and to this day their ideological descendents continue to suppress it, because, like Muslims, they prefer to spread their religion by state power. That they continue to this day to suppress Christmas indicates it continues to this day to be a bigger threat to them than Muslims blowing themselves up.

              please don’t tell us how to interpret the Torah

              It surely evident that your interpretation of the Torah has drifted substantially in living memory to greater holiness, and that this drift has been going on for at least sixteen hundred years.

              Fail to avoid the idolatrous practices of New Age and progressivism.

              Any culture taking the Torah’s outer observances seriously enough to avoid eating meat and cheese off the same plate will end up taking its inner meaning seriously enough to avoid Gaya-worship.

              Says the man who rationalizes away the subordination of women.

              In practice, this is what we see happening-the Orthodox Jews of New York City, who are fastidious about things like the prohibition of mixing wool and linen, are immune to New Age and Progressivist idolatry, leading to high birth rates, etc. I’ve already told you that I think that the outer observances of Judaism and its inner essence, the letter and spirit of the law, are symbiotic and mutually reinforcing, and that any attempt to have the one without the other is doomed in the long run. This may not be logically provable, but it’s empirically verifiable.

              Survivorship bias. Most Jews have been assimilated or are well on the way to being so. Orthodox Jews are, for the most part, frightened to get the temple back. Some orthodox Jews oppose the state of Israel, because they want a miraculous Messiah to do the heavy lifting.

              If you did what you conceive yourselves as doing, stuck to ancient traditions, yes, obviously that would immunize you against progressivism, but you still have interpretation drift under way to ever greater holiness. Your traditions are not in fact all that ancient.

              Judaism was stable for a long time because priesthood was a hereditary possession in the male line, hence no holiness competition. Once you got open entry into the role of opinion leader, you had the problems that Jesus ridiculed.

              These problems are acceptable in a non state religion, because an irritatingly holy rabbi loses members of his congregation to a less holy rabbi, but they are going to be fatal in a state religion, and if Israel is going to survive, needs Judaism to once again become a state religion. Jewish Orthodoxy is already excessively holy for a state religion, and once it becomes a state religion, its natural tendency to ever greater holiness will become much worse.

              To become a state religion, have to enforce the least common denominator of Judaism, and shut down open entry into the role of opinion leader.

              The people who take the Commandments seriously are not joining the SPLC or donating to it, nor are the members of the SPLC spending their free time learning the Halakhot of mixing species.

              The state religion of Israel is not Judaism. It is progressivism.

              religions driven by the force of holier than thou all wind up looking alike – looking much like leftism.

              If you look close enough, I guess, especially if leftism is your benchmark. But to me, devolution of society always looks like idolatry and loss of asabiyya. Loss of asabiyya is what happens when a society makes comfort and wealth their god, and then achieves it.

              Looks to me that the chief cause of loss of asabiyya is diversity. The Caliphs were white. The Mamalukes were white. Same problem for middle easterners as Jews in our elite is a problem for Americans.

          • B says:

            http://www.judaismsanswer.com/Oral%20Law.pdf

            >There is no contemporary evidence (Philo, Josephus) that Jews considered it a tragedy.

            But our Talmud says they did, and I believe the sages who wrote it.

            > No one shows any awareness of an “oral torah” until four hundred AD or so.

            Not so. You haven’t actually read Josephus, have you? He makes mention of many practices only mentioned in the Oral Torah, and specifically explains that these are the practices of the Pharisees, who represent the majority of the people and are most skilled in the Law, as opposed to the Saducees, who represent a minor rich faction and deny the Oral Torah. The Essenes, by the way, he points out are a super-stringent minority. When there is a contradiction between the seeming sense of a Written Torah law and an Oral Torah law, he explains the latter as the practice. He refers to these laws as coming from Moshe directly: http://www.judaismsanswer.com/Oral%20Law.pdf

            >Perhaps the Romans got tired of trying to negotiate with warlords who lacked the power to make war or peace, and prophets who lacked the sanity, so proceeded to manufacture something in the image of their own senate.

            Perhaps you can just go ahead and write us a history which would best support the Dork Enlightenment theories, as our actual history doesn’t fit them well enough.

            >Israel does not seem immune to a progressive induced tendency to suicide. Armenians can kill troublesome Muslims with considerably fewer difficulties that Jews have.

            This is like reverse of the old joke where they bring Hitler back to life and he announces that he will destroy all the Jews and unicyclists. “Why the unicyclists, Hitler?” “Ah, I knew you guys didn’t really give a shit about the Jews!” Nobody cares about the Armenians.

            >It is hard to say who is being swallowed up easier, but Jews, as a whole, are not resisting well.

            Our birthrate says otherwise.

            >You yourself have been industriously rationalizing away and interpreting away the subordination of women.

            We have a functional framework governing gender relations. I’m supposed to throw it away in favor of something you came up with based on a cursory reading of Heartiste’s blog?

            >Christmas was from the beginning a celebration to which all men, not just Christians, were invited and encouraged to participate.

            Ah, yes. How’s Baldur doing these days, still being sacrificed so that spring happens again?

            >It is doing very well, because, just as planned from the beginning, it is being celebrated by Chinese, Japanese, and Muslims.

            Everyone likes shopping.

            >Muslims spread Islam by blowing themselves up, while Christians spread Christianity by wishing people Merry Christmas.

            Since Christianity as practiced is quite compatible with tattooed lesbian pastors and requires no effort or sacrifice from its adherents, this tactic works fine.

            >It surely evident that your interpretation of the Torah has drifted substantially in living memory to greater holiness, and that this drift has been going on for at least sixteen hundred years.

            So, where are the Essenes?

            >Survivorship bias.

            Evolution has a survivorship bias.

            >Most Jews have been assimilated or are well on the way to being so.

            Not seeing it.

            >Orthodox Jews are, for the most part, frightened to get the temple back. Some orthodox Jews oppose the state of Israel, because they want a miraculous Messiah to do the heavy lifting.

            As the Russian saying goes, the eyes fear while the hands do.

            >If you did what you conceive yourselves as doing, stuck to ancient traditions, yes, obviously that would immunize you against progressivism, but you still have interpretation drift under way to ever greater holiness.

            So, where are the Essenes?

            >Your traditions are not in fact all that ancient.

            Should I believe you or our sages and Josephus?

            >Judaism was stable for a long time because priesthood was a hereditary possession in the male line, hence no holiness competition.

            The priests were almost never leaders in any sense but the ceremonial. The Torah itself gives them no special power in resolving religious questions. There was exactly one period where they had any non-ceremonial power, which was under the Maccabees, who came from Matityahu, the son of the High Priest, but his authority did not come from his priesthood but rather from his leadership of the rebellion. You are taking what you are familiar with, the Western concept of priesthood, reverse-mapping it onto our priesthood with which it has little in common, then lopping off the bits that stick out (all of them.)

            >Once you got open entry into the role of opinion leader, you had the problems that Jesus ridiculed.

            Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.

            >Jewish Orthodoxy is already excessively holy for a state religion, and once it becomes a state religion, its natural tendency to ever greater holiness will become much worse.

            I guess we’ll have to see.

            >To become a state religion, have to enforce the least common denominator of Judaism, and shut down open entry into the role of opinion leader.

            Doubtful. If the sons of Israel are not prophets, they are the sons of prophets. They will choose the leaders they need.

            >The state religion of Israel is not Judaism. It is progressivism.

            For now. But things are changing.

            >Looks to me that the chief cause of loss of asabiyya is diversity. The Caliphs were white. The Mamalukes were white.

            You can see right away that the “white” Caliphs immediately went to shit and lost their position to the ghulams and Khurasaniyya and so forth, Central Asians who were ethnically diverse but united by purpose and ideology.

            • jim says:

              >There is no contemporary evidence (Philo, Josephus) that Jews considered it a tragedy.

              But our Talmud says they did, and I believe the sages who wrote it.

              How would they know? They wrote five hundred years after the event.

              Supposing that those who wrote the talmud were correct, rather than making stuff up as politically convenient, the fact remains that the translators of the Torah, five hundred years earlier, were obviously unaware of an oral torah that tells us that the written torah does not say what is says nor mean what it means.

              No one shows any awareness of an “oral torah” until four hundred AD or so.

              Not so. You haven’t actually read Josephus, have you? He makes mention of many practices only mentioned in the Oral Torah, and specifically explains that these are the practices of the Pharisees, who represent the majority of the people and are most skilled in the Law, as opposed to the Saducees, who represent a minor rich faction and deny the Oral Torah.

              What happened to that link where Josephus explains that according to the pharisees, Leviticus 22:39-40 does not mean what it says

              Perhaps the Romans got tired of trying to negotiate with warlords who lacked the power to make war or peace, and prophets who lacked the sanity, so proceeded to manufacture something in the image of their own senate.

              Perhaps you can just go ahead and write us a history which would best support the Dork Enlightenment theories, as our actual history doesn’t fit them well enough.

              Josephus’s account of the History of the Jews seems consistent with the Dark Enlightenment account of how religions and religious states function, and is incompatible with Talmudic history – one striking example being that in his account, the Sanhedrin were created not long before his own day, rather than going all the way back to Moses or the immediate successors of Moses. Josephus’s account also illustrates how theocratic power combined with open entry into the role of opinion leader results in escalating holiness and fanaticism, ultimately resulting in suicidal behavior, consistent with the Jesus’s complaint that the pharisees were holier than thou.

              >You yourself have been industriously rationalizing away and interpreting away the subordination of women.

              We have a functional framework governing gender relations.

              It will not function for very much longer if you are unwilling to admit to what it is and defend it.

              Israel does not seem immune to a progressive induced tendency to suicide. Armenians can kill troublesome Muslims with considerably fewer difficulties that Jews have.

              This is like reverse of the old joke where they bring Hitler back to life and he announces that he will destroy all the Jews and unicyclists. “Why the unicyclists, Hitler?” “Ah, I knew you guys didn’t really give a shit about the Jews!” Nobody cares about the Armenians.

              The biggest problem for Jews is not that the Cathedral cares about Jews killing Muslims. The biggest problem is that Jews care about Jews killing Muslims. Much like you being in denial about Orthodox Jewish sex relations.

              >Most Jews have been assimilated or are well on the way to being so.

              Not seeing it.

              Most Jews are progressives. In America, progressive Jews are assimilating. In America, Orthodox Jews are having children and not assimilating, but they are turning progressive. Progressivism really is not compatible with having children or refusal to assimilate. If going to stay Jewish, cannot become progressive, and they are becoming progressive.

              >Your traditions are not in fact all that ancient.

              Should I believe you or our sages and Josephus?

              Jews did not adopt monogamy until about four hundred years ago, and when I read Josephus, he sounds dark enlightenment, not Talmud.

              You were going to give me Josephus on the harvest festival.

              >Judaism was stable for a long time because priesthood was a hereditary possession in the male line, hence no holiness competition.

              The priests were almost never leaders in any sense but the ceremonial. The Torah itself gives them no special power in resolving religious questions. There was exactly one period where they had any non-ceremonial power,

              The system described in the Torah, and by Josephus as I understand him, was that the top Judge was chosen by consensus, or possibly God, and it was the priests that told the people what the consensus was or what God had decided.

              >The state religion of Israel is not Judaism. It is progressivism.

              For now. But things are changing.

              The Orthodox in Israel are frightened to become the state religion, as they are frightened to take back the temple, because they know that modern Judaism is ill suited to being a state religion.

          • B says:

            >How would they know? They wrote five hundred years after the event.

            We take our history seriously. Always have.

            >the fact remains that the translators of the Torah, five hundred years earlier, were obviously unaware of an oral torah that tells us that the written torah does not say what is says nor mean what it means.

            This is your conjecture. The fact is that they were forced, under duress, to make a translation of a document without conferring. They translated it in the same way, which means they had context. The Oral Torah is that context.

            >What happened to that link where Josephus explains that according to the pharisees, Leviticus 22:39-40 does not mean what it says

            There is no “Leviticus 22:39.” What are you attempting to ask?

            >It will not function for very much longer if you are unwilling to admit to what it is and defend it.

            Any day now, our system which has worked for thousands of years will fail unless we rewrite it in accordance with the Gospel According to Jim.

            >The biggest problem for Jews is not that the Cathedral cares about Jews killing Muslims. The biggest problem is that Jews care about Jews killing Muslims.

            True.

            >Much like you being in denial about Orthodox Jewish sex relations.

            Untrue. I see this from up close and from the inside. Your perspective comes from Western press reports.

            >Most Jews are progressives.

            No, they’re not.

            >In America, progressive Jews are assimilating.

            Yes, they are. But in Israel, they are becoming more observant, as reflected in daily experience and their increased birthrate.

            >In America, Orthodox Jews are having children and not assimilating, but they are turning progressive.

            No, they’re not.

            >Jews did not adopt monogamy until about four hundred years ago, and when I read Josephus, he sounds dark enlightenment, not Talmud.

            Jim, if you can’t get basic facts right, how can you make sweeping judgments? The prohibition on polygamy was instituted by Rabbeinu Gershom 1000 years ago.

            >You were going to give me Josephus on the harvest festival.

            I linked you a whole paper, which is well worth reading. The “harvest festival” is not a harvest festival. It is called Sukkot (or Sukkos in Ashkenazi pronounciation) and concludes the holidays at the beginning of the year. You might as well call Rosh Hashannah a “harvest festival.”

            Josephus tells us that the Pharisees, distinguished from the Sadducees by their observance of tradition, were the majority. “He tells us that “the Pharisees
            have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in
            the law of Moshe” and they “interpret the laws more accurately.”” He refers to Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel, featured prominently in the Talmud as a sage, as a prominent Pharisee. When describing the giving of the Torah, Josephus says that Moshe “appointed such laws and afterwards informed them in what manner they should act in all cases” (this is a clear reference to the Oral Torah.)

            Examples of Josephus describing Pharisaical practices which are in the Oral Torah but not the Written Torah (and referring to them as Torah from Moshe) include:

            1) “Regarding Succos and the four species he says, “that we should then carry in our hands a branch of myrtle, and willow, and a bough of the palm tree, with the addition of the pomecitron.”” This is from the Oral Torah. The “pomecitron” is the etrog. He also points out that when Alexander Jannaeus, a Maccabee living long before Josephus’ time, attempted to make himself high priest during Sukkot, the people pelted him with etrogs. Obviously, they were carrying the etrogs because it was Sukkot, as is written in the Oral Torah, but not mentioned explicitly in the Written Torah. Jannaeus’ disqualification? He was the son of a captive woman. But the Written Torah says nothing about this being a problem for priests! See below.

            2) The Oral Torah and the Written Torah disagree on the maximum number of stripes to be administered for disobedience. Josephus quotes the Oral Torah, which says 39 (not the Written Torah’s 40.)

            3) Josephus, when listing the women a priest is prohibited to marry, adds two categories which are not in the Written Torah but in the Oral Torah-a slave and a captive. See above.

            4) Josephus quotes Moshe as forbidding the legal testimony of women. This is from the Oral Torah, not the Written.

            There are other examples where Josephus brings the Oral Torah as the Law from G-d via Moshe, including the laws of divorce, false witnesses, tefillin and mezuzot (purely Oral Law, and by the way also found at Qumran from the first century CE,) saying Shema, etc. His calendar uses lunar intercalation to determine the months, which is a crucial function but not mentioned explicitly in the Written Torah, and names Nisan as the first month, again not mentioned in the Written Torah (because it was not named Nisan then,) but explicit in the Talmud as Oral Torah. Finally, when he lists the stringencies of the Essenes, it is obvious that they are stringencies on the Oral Torah, not the Written. As I said, the entire monograph is worth reading.

            >The system described in the Torah, and by Josephus as I understand him, was that the top Judge was chosen by consensus, or possibly God, and it was the priests that told the people what the consensus was or what God had decided.

            No. The system described in the Torah is that the council sits in their appointed place and decides by majority. There is a subcouncil of priests, but they have no special judiciary power (neither, for that matter, does a prophet.) The issue is that you lack context. When someone who knows anything about the Oral Torah, i.e., as it is practiced, reads Josephus, they instantly recognize it as being the common practice of the day he describes.

            >The Orthodox in Israel are frightened to become the state religion, as they are frightened to take back the temple, because they know that modern Judaism is ill suited to being a state religion.

            They are frightened because it’s an ambitious project. However, the entire history of Israel is the people being afraid to do their duty, and G-d forcing them, as I think is happening with Gaza (where our religious duty is to kick the Arabs out or secure their explicit submission, we just want to live in peace and make high-tech, but they are intent on forcing us to do our duty.)

            • jim says:

              the fact is that they were forced, under duress, to make a translation of a document without conferring. They translated it in the same way

              The writers of the Talmud report this astonishing miracle five hundred years after the event. Interesting that those much closer to the event, such as Josephus and the Christian fathers, were entirely unaware of this astonishing miracle.

              The writers of the Talmud also report lots of things that you interpret as fairy tales intended to illustrate a religious point, rather than literal truth. Why not interpret this as another fairy tale?

              >It will not function for very much longer if you are unwilling to admit to what it is and defend it.

              Any day now, our system which has worked for thousands of years will fail

              You are not operating on a thousand year old system. A whole bunch of spells to ameliorate the inconvenient effects of certain observances are relatively new, which implies that those inconvenient observances are almost as new. Sephardic Jews are still not entirely on board with monogamy. You are rationalizing a system under which women are profoundly unequal to make it conflict less with progressivism, instead of defending it.

              Progressives believe that religions have no essence, that any religion can be gradually mutated into any other. This is true and false. It is true if you don’t take measures to prevent it. Bans directed against bronze age entryists are not going to protect you from twenty first century assimilationists.

              Much like you being in denial about Orthodox Jewish sex relations.

              Untrue. I see this from up close and from the inside. Your perspective comes from Western press reports.

              My perspective comes from knowledge of human nature, and comparisons between fertile and infertile groups. Orthodox Jews are doing what other fertile groups are doing, and you brush this off as irrelevant, and not really part of Judaism. What orthodox Jews have in common with other fertile groups is not an obsession with cheese crumbs.

              >The system described in the Torah, and by Josephus as I understand him, was that the top Judge was chosen by consensus, or possibly God, and it was the priests that told the people what the consensus was or what God had decided.

              No. The system described in the Torah is that the council sits in their appointed place and decides by majority.

              This is what happens when I use your loaded language. I meant, of course, to say that the system described in the books of the old testament and in Josphus’s account of that time is that the top judge – which is to say the people referred to as Judges in the book of Judges – was chosen by consensus, or possibly God, and it was the priests that told the people what the consensus was or what God had decided.

              The Orthodox in Israel are frightened to become the state religion, as they are frightened to take back the temple, because they know that modern Judaism is ill suited to being a state religion.

              They are frightened because it’s an ambitious project. However, the entire history of Israel is the people being afraid to do their duty, and G-d forcing them, as I think is happening with Gaza (where our religious duty is to kick the Arabs out or secure their explicit submission, we just want to live in peace and make high-tech, but they are intent on forcing us to do our duty.)

              Well, it could be, like the supposed unanimous translation of the Old Testament, another miracle, but I think the Dark Enlightenment analysis adequately explains it. Since progressivism is Israel’s state religion, they, like Obama, imposed democracy upon the Arabs, with disastrous consequences. Had you gone eighteenth century colonialist, and given them an emir, you would not have these internal problems.

              Before you can impose Jewish rule upon the Arabs, you will need to impose it upon yourselves.

          • B says:

            >The writers of the Talmud report this astonishing miracle five hundred years after the event.

            Yes, they do.

            >Interesting that those much closer to the event, such as Josephus and the Christian fathers, were entirely unaware of this astonishing miracle.

            The Christian fathers would not have used the Septuagint as an authoritative translation if it was not one translation. It would not have been called the Septuagint if 70 translators hadn’t translated it. As for Josephus, I need to sit down and read everything he had to write. I doubt he was unaware of the event.

            >The writers of the Talmud also report lots of things that you interpret as fairy tales intended to illustrate a religious point, rather than literal truth. Why not interpret this as another fairy tale?

            Because it is quite reasonable to assume that 70 sages who knew the Torah inside and out, whose life work was knowing what it said, all translated it the exact same way.

            For an instance of Jewish scholarship, a not unheard of ability in the yeshivot of Ashkenaz was the ability to put a needle through a book, then name the word it touched on every page.

            >You are not operating on a thousand year old system. A whole bunch of spells to ameliorate the inconvenient effects of certain observances are relatively new, which implies that those inconvenient observances are almost as new.

            You are confused as to the difference between a “spell” and a piece of jurisprudence. The reason we have an Oral Torah is so that our leaders in every generation can make the necessary rulings appropriate to context while remaining within the bounds of the Torah. This is the difference between a “system” and a “holy text.” And our system is thousands of years old.

            >Sephardic Jews are still not entirely on board with monogamy.

            The number of Sepharadi Jews (not Yemeni or Ethiopian ones) in Israel under age 80 with multiple wives is under 10, I’d estimate. But it is interesting that you’ve gone from claiming that there was no Oral Torah until last Wednesday when three guys with beards sitting around their local pub made it up to focusing on the intricacies of monogamy vs. polygamy in Judaism without skipping a beat. By the way, what happened to your grand proof that the prohibition on carrying children between domains was invented last week? Josephus, when listing the points where the Essenes are more stringent that the Pharisees, specifically points out their prohibition on carrying CHILDREN on Shabbat. Now, we know that the Pharisees, i.e., mainstream Torah Jews, were according to Josephus more skilled at applying the tradition (Oral Torah) properly, and in the Oral Torah, you can carry a child on Shabbat, just not between domains (unless the child can walk on its own, etc., long list of specs here.)

            >You are rationalizing a system under which women are profoundly unequal to make it conflict less with progressivism, instead of defending it.

            Eh? In Judaism, women have different roles, rights and responsibilities than men. The way in which our roles, rights and responsibilities differ is not the way which the Dork Enlightenment would require. The Dork Enlightenment is about 7 years old. Judaism is about 500 times older. Enough said.

            >Bans directed against bronze age entryists are not going to protect you from twenty first century assimilationists.

            I see absolutely no fundamental difference between 21st century progs and 4th century BCE Greek Epicurean sybarites. The latter were much more formidable in practice. Yet, Hanukkah.

            >My perspective comes from knowledge of human nature, and comparisons between fertile and infertile groups. Orthodox Jews are doing what other fertile groups are doing, and you brush this off as irrelevant, and not really part of Judaism.

            Well, you are much more of a universalist, a progressive, in other words, than I am. You believe all nations are the same, except insofar as it comes to things like IQ, which is a very secular humanist viewpoint. We believe that different nations are fundamentally different, and that we are fundamentally different from all of them, and that a set of laws which is likely to be beneficial to one will not be beneficial to another. I suspect that Carlyle, Froude and Burke would be in my corner on this one, not that they are authorities to me except insofar as they jibe with a verifiable truth (unlike our religious authorities.)

            >This is what happens when I use your loaded language.

            Well, THAT is not a very Neoreactionary complaint to make.

            >I meant, of course, to say that the system described in the books of the old testament and in Josphus’s account of that time is that the top judge – which is to say the people referred to as Judges in the book of Judges – was chosen by consensus, or possibly God, and it was the priests that told the people what the consensus was or what God had decided.

            Really? Jim, you have a Book of Judges easily available in your choice of English translations (we don’t need to go to the Talmud here.) Please explain to me this process as it applied to Judges like Huldah, Devorah and Yiftah. Please show me where the priests told the people about their divine appointment by G-d. When you’re done explaining that, please explain to me how your Neoreactionary Gender Theory explains female judges in the Torah and their behavior.

            >Had you gone eighteenth century colonialist, and given them an emir, you would not have these internal problems.

            Qatar has an emir or whatever his title is, who loves and supports Hamas very much. If we’d made Yassir Arafat the Chief Sheikh of the Palestinians, would we be better off? Was his predecessor, Sheikh Haj Amin Al Husseini, less of an asshole for not having the trappings of democracy?

            >Before you can impose Jewish rule upon the Arabs, you will need to impose it upon yourselves.

            This is the only right thing you’ve said during this entire conversation.

            • jim says:

              The writers of the Talmud report this astonishing miracle five hundred years after the event.

              Interesting that those much closer to the event, such as Josephus and the Christian fathers, were entirely unaware of this astonishing miracle.

              The Christian fathers would not have used the Septuagint as an authoritative translation if it was not one translation. It would not have been called the Septuagint if 70 translators hadn’t translated it.

              Contrary to what I claimed, Josephus does report this miracle.

              The King James Bible, perhaps in imitation of what Christians believe was done with the Septuagint, had a large number of translators each translate, separately and in private, a book of the bible, then after translation, the translators and others got together in public and in private to iron out the differences between their numerous translations.

              King James commanded the translators as follows:

              Every particular Man of each Company, to take the same Chapter or Chapters, and having translated or amended them severally by himself, where he thinketh good, all to meet together, confer what they have done, and agree for their Parts what shall stand.

              Thus, though Josephus reports the miracle, this seems an adequate non miraculous explanation.

              You are not operating on a thousand year old system. A whole bunch of spells to ameliorate the inconvenient effects of certain observances are relatively new, which implies that those inconvenient observances are almost as new.

              You are confused as to the difference between a “spell” and a piece of jurisprudence.

              When a ritual makes a requirement go away, sounds like a spell. And, supposing it to be jurisprudence, the necessity for such jurisprudence shows the holier than thou disease remarked on by Jesus. You are getting holier and holier, and have long been more holy than is practical for a state religion.

              You are right that a lot of today’s Judaism is confirmed by Josephus as long predating the written Talmud, and I was wrong.

              However, reflect that in Josephus’s account, the Sanhedrin is a recent creation, which, as the Dark Enlightenment would have predicted, moved rapidly to ever crazier holiness, much as those in the Gaza strip are now doing.

              The number of Sepharadi Jews (not Yemeni or Ethiopian ones) in Israel under age 80 with multiple wives is under 10, I’d estimate.

              The qualifier implies that not long ago it was a lot higher. And though you have produced evidence for some Jewish practices being two thousand years old you still have not produced evidence that the prohibition on women taking babies for a walk in strollers is ancient, or even a couple of centuries years old.

              You are rationalizing a system under which women are profoundly unequal to make it conflict less with progressivism, instead of defending it.

              Eh? In Judaism, women have different roles, rights and responsibilities than men. The way in which our roles, rights and responsibilities differ is not the way which the Dork Enlightenment would require. The Dork Enlightenment is about 7 years old. Judaism is about 500 times older. Enough said.

              I have been questioning you on the role of women in Judaism, asking you how you kept your women in line, and you never admitted that women were not supposed to testify, a position more extreme than that of the Muslims who rank their testimony as half that of a man. If that quietly disappeared from Judaism, and I suspect it has for the most part quietly disappeared from Judaism, you would think you were still adhering just great to a tradition that goes back all the way to Moses, because every decade or two you get even stricter on a rule originally intended to exclude bronze age entryist worshipers of the Golden Goat.

              You need to exclude entryist feminists more than you need to exclude entryist worshipers of the Golden Goat.

              >Bans directed against bronze age entryists are not going to protect you from twenty first century assimilationists.

              I see absolutely no fundamental difference between 21st century progs and 4th century BCE Greek Epicurean sybarites. The latter were much more formidable in practice. Yet, Hanukkah.

              Antiochus outlawed Judaism. Progressives know well that does not work. Instead progressives tell you that Judaism, rightly understood, is progressivism, pretty much as in the last days of the collapse of the bronze age civilizations, some people insisted that worship of the Golden Calf was Judaism. Decadent civilizations are good at that sort of trickiness. Rising civilizations use simpler means.

              >I meant, of course, to say that the system described in the books of the old testament and in Josphus’s account of that time is that the top judge – which is to say the people referred to as Judges in the book of Judges – was chosen by consensus, or possibly God, and it was the priests that told the people what the consensus was or what God had decided.

              Really? Jim, you have a Book of Judges easily available in your choice of English translations (we don’t need to go to the Talmud here.) Please explain to me this process as it applied to Judges like Huldah, Devorah and Yiftah.

              Judges 1:2 God appoints Judah. How would people know that God appointed Judah except the priests tell them.
              Judges 3:9-10 God appoints Othniel,
              shortly afterwards Ethnud, and so on and so forth.

              So how is a Hebrew supposed to find out who is judge?
              Deuteronomy 17:8-9

              If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose;

              And thou shalt come unto the priests the Levites, and unto the judge that shall be in those days, and enquire; and they shall shew thee the sentence of judgment:

              So if a bunch of Hebrews show up seeking judgement in a quarrel, either the priests are the first level of judges, or the priests send you to the top judge. Either way the priests inform you who the top judge is.

              Please show me where the priests told the people about their divine appointment by G-d.

              Someone told them about their divine appointment by God, and who else would it be other than the priests? Plus Deuteronomy 17:8-9 appears to say “Ask the priests”

              When you’re done explaining that, please explain to me how your Neoreactionary Gender Theory explains female judges in the Torah and their behavior.

              Social decay. The Hebrews went through more bad patches than you can shake a stick at. Happens to everyone, some sooner than others. Feminism in our society is in part product of progressivism, the rising tide of fanaticism, but it is, as argued by “The Garbage Generation”, the natural state of chimps, to which all civilizations tend to decay unless actively resisted. You don’t need a left singularity to catch feminism, though if you catch feminism, you are apt to suffer a left singularity. Feminism is just one of the manifestations of entropy. Just as stuff tends to get dirty unless cleaned, civilizations tend to go feminist. No explanation is needed for catching feminism, explanation is needed for resisting it.

              >Had you gone eighteenth century colonialist, and given them an emir, you would not have these internal problems.

              Qatar has an emir or whatever his title is, who loves and supports Hamas very much.

              Easy for him to be holy. He is a long way from Israel.

              If we’d made Yassir Arafat the Chief Sheikh of the Palestinians, would we be better off?

              Probably, because that would have substantially changed his incentives, but you would have been even better off had you made someone of an illustruous bloodline Chief Sheikh, someone who worries about his son inheriting the position.

              Was his predecessor, Sheikh Haj Amin Al Husseini, less of an asshole for not having the trappings of democracy?

              Sheikh Haj Amin Al Husseini never had power to lose, so his incentives not very different from those of an elected leader or a mobile bandit.

          • B says:

            >When a ritual makes a requirement go away, sounds like a spell.

            You misunderstand the basic principle of Judaism. When Moshe finishes giving the Torah before his death, he makes a speech telling us that all this is accomplishable, it’s not in the heavens or across the sea, it’s been given to us. From this, we learn that it is not magical or subject to revision/interpretation based on miracles or prophecy. It is to be interpreted by scholars acting in good faith in the best way they can at the place and time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_in_Heaven

            >And, supposing it to be jurisprudence, the necessity for such jurisprudence shows the holier than thou disease remarked on by Jesus.

            Jesus said: “the teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you.” Probably he should have had you around to advise him.

            >You are getting holier and holier, and have long been more holy than is practical for a state religion.

            We are not-you can see from Josephus that we are not even as stringent as the Essenes were in his time.

            >reflect that in Josephus’s account, the Sanhedrin is a recent creation

            I suspect that as I dig into Josephus’ account, I’ll find that he confirms that there was always a Sanhedrin. At the very least, he speaks of a Sanhedrin in Antiochus’ time. The issue is that entities have multiple names, which those familiar with an issue use interchangeably. “Sanhedrin” is not a Hebrew word but a Greek one, meaning “council.” There is another Greek word, “gerousia,” and several Hebrew terms, all referring to the same thing, all translated differently into English. I.e., think about the Talmud, which is also called the Oral Torah, the Tradition, etc.
            http://www.thesanhedrin.org/en/index.php?title=Historical_Overview#Biblical_Origins

            >The qualifier implies that not long ago it was a lot higher.

            So? See above.

            >And though you have produced evidence for some Jewish practices being two thousand years old you still have not produced evidence that the prohibition on women taking babies for a walk in strollers is ancient, or even a couple of centuries years old.

            There were no strollers a couple of centuries ago. Carrying babies between domains has always been prohibited.

            >you never admitted that women were not supposed to testify, a position more extreme than that of the Muslims who rank their testimony as half that of a man.

            Admitted? It’s a basic fact of Jewish jurisprudence. I assumed you knew the deal from the aplomb with which you speak on everything we’ve done in the last 3,000 years. Of course, the question of who can testify on what and how we weigh their testimony is very complex, and if I get into the details, you will either say that we are being holier than or lax in reaction to our natural tendency to be holier than in every case, etc. In general, you are not dealing in good faith and trying to find out the facts of the subject matter, but trying to fit the subject matter to your preconceptions and accusing me of dealing in bad faith when it doesn’t.

            >You need to exclude entryist feminists more than you need to exclude entryist worshipers of the Golden Goat.

            They are the same thing.

            >Antiochus outlawed Judaism. Progressives know well that does not work.

            You don’t know the full story. Antiochus was one episode in centuries where we dealt with a universalist, secular (nobody really believed in Zeus qua guy with beard occasionally raping maidens by then,) libertine, esthetically and technologically advanced civilization which believed itself to be the pinnacle of human possibility and opened its doors to everyone from North Africa to the Black Sea to India. It was very seductive, and many Jews became Hellenizers, “mityavanim,” adapting the Greek lifestyle and mores, doing things like foreskin reconstruction (the details of circumcision the way it’s done today are such that this is made difficult precisely to prevent this.)

            The only religion in the vast area under their rule that the Greeks persecuted to my knowledge was Judaism. It really got under their skin, because it was the incarnate defiance of their basic tenets-that G-d exists, that he wants something from us, individually and historically, that he has a personal relationship with a people and a place and times, and that the Greek worldview is completely insignificant.

            I think what really pissed the Greeks off about this was that they couldn’t just dismiss it and suspected there was something to it. Same reason Silicon Valley Renaissance Man Paul Graham is upset at us about Dead Palestinian Babies ™ while expressing no opinion on Syria.

            Anyway, long before they attempted to destroy Judaism by defiling and occupying the Temple and forbidding its practice, they tried to do so by seducing the Jews, successfully with many. And after their attempt at destruction by force failed, they continued their seduction, which is why you have kings named things like Jannaeus, a Talmudic sage whose father was named Hyrcanus, etc. None of this is new to us.

            >So if a bunch of Hebrews show up seeking judgement in a quarrel, either the priests are the first level of judges, or the priests send you to the top judge. Either way the priests inform you who the top judge is.

            No. This is not what it’s saying. At every level, in every village, there is a “sanhedrin,” a religious council, of 3 or 21 members. A dispute progressively goes up the structure as it grows in difficulty. The Sanhedrin (the highest one, with 71 members, in Jerusalem in the Chamber of Hewn Stone) has, preferably, some Kohanim and Levites in it. There is a head of the Sanhedrin, but his voice does not count for any more than that of the junior-most member in the decision. The way you got onto the high Sanhedrin was by 1) having ordination in an unbroken line from Moshe, 2) being invited by the rest of the Sanhedrin, 3) beating one of its members in a halakhic debate. The priests as such had nothing to do with it, and being a priest or a prophet gave you no additional advantage in joining the Sanhedrin, and gave no additional weight to your voice on it. In fact, we are commanded to put a prophet on the Sanhedrin to death if he claims prophecy as the reason his opinion is to be adapted.

            >Plus Deuteronomy 17:8-9 appears to say “Ask the priests”

            This is not what it is talking about.

            The Judges you refer to, the ones in the Book of Judges, were not the ones on the Sanhedrin of 71. They were local leaders whom people held in authority and to whom they would go for leadership and adjudication. Their authority was based on popular recognition.

            >Social decay. The Hebrews went through more bad patches than you can shake a stick at.

            Devorah is an example of a good judge, and certainly not an illustration of social decay or feminism (though the fact that Barak, the military leader, refuses to go to battle without her is explained as a bad thing.) Jezebel is the prototypical example of feminist decay-but she’s not a judge, a prophet or even Jewish.

            >Probably, because that would have substantially changed his incentives, but you would have been even better off had you made someone of an illustruous bloodline Chief Sheikh, someone who worries about his son inheriting the position.

            We would have been even better off expelling them all, or at least making every village mukhtar the local leader.

            >Sheikh Haj Amin Al Husseini never had power to lose, so his incentives not very different from those of an elected leader or a mobile bandit.

            He had an illustrious bloodline and position as Qadi of Jerusalem. Had we put him in charge of a hereditary position as Chief of Israeli Arabs, would we have been better off? Obviously not-he would have stabbed us in the back as soon as possible. GIGO, even if the G has a crown on top.

            • jim says:

              You misunderstand the basic principle of Judaism. When Moshe finishes giving the Torah before his death, he makes a speech telling us that all this is accomplishable, it’s not in the heavens or across the sea, it’s been given to us. From this, we learn that it is not magical or subject to revision/interpretation based on miracles or prophecy. It is to be interpreted by scholars acting in good faith in the best way they can at the place and time

              And the fact that in this place and time they keep finding loopholes indicates that the thing they have to loophole through did not exist very long ago.

              >And, supposing it to be jurisprudence, the necessity for such jurisprudence shows the holier than thou disease remarked on by Jesus.

              Jesus said: “the teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you.” Probably he should have had you around to advise him.

              What Jesus actually said to the multitude, and to his disciples, was:

              2 The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat:
              3 All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.
              4 For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
              5 But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,
              6 And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,
              7 And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

              What he said sounds pretty much what I have been telling you in this thread. “You are getting holier and holier, and have long been more holy than is practical for a state religion.” (In context, of course, by “holy” I meant holier than thou, which is what Jesus means when he says “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”)

              You will notice that Jesus, like myself, accuses the pharisees of making shit up, making rules harsher, in order to be holier than thou.

              And, Dark Enlightenment theory: If you have a theocracy with open entry into the role of opinion leader, your theocracy is going to get crazier and crazier as each theocrat out holies the next, and if it survives long enough, will eventually converge to something rather like progressivism. Of course Pharisaic Judaism never got that far, because the Romans terminated its theocratic power, hence now cannot get too much holier than the congregation will put up with. Hence, when out of power, rule tightening has to be matched by loophole boring. However Pharisaic Judaism did get crazy enough to be a pain for the Romans.

              >And though you have produced evidence for some Jewish practices being two thousand years old you still have not produced evidence that the prohibition on women taking babies for a walk in strollers is ancient, or even a couple of centuries years old.

              There were no strollers a couple of centuries ago. Carrying babies between domains has always been prohibited.

              If a woman takes a baby for a stroll, is she carrying it between domains? Surely not.

              >you never admitted that women were not supposed to testify, a position more extreme than that of the Muslims who rank their testimony as half that of a man.

              Admitted? It’s a basic fact of Jewish jurisprudence.

              I asked how you keep women in line. You assure me that you don’t do anything oppressive to keep women in line, that Orthodox Jewish practices are, or should be, progressive approved. Which we both know is not at all true. But if you start rationalizing that it is true, pretty soon it will become true. This is the direct opposite of your position on cheese crumbs. Absolutely no tolerance for bronze age worshippers of the Golden Goat attempting entryism, but you are furtive about excluding feminists attempting entryism, and promptly bring up Deborah when you feel, incorrectly, that you are being accused of vigilance against feminist entryists.

              Now in fact I have a fair idea of how you do keep women in line, but you are spinning the truth to make it more feminist friendly, which is half a step from adjusting Judaism to make it more friendly to feminist entryists, of which you have a large supply, considerably larger than the supply of worshippers of the Golden Goat. I ask you how you keep women in line, and instead of saying “Not allowed to testify”, you say “Deborah”.

              Well, “Deborah” is true, and “not allowed to testify” is also true”, but “not allowed to testify” is the more relevant truth.

              >You need to exclude entryist feminists more than you need to exclude entryist worshipers of the Golden Goat.

              They are the same thing.

              Googling up feminist entryists to Judaism, does not look as if bans on cheese crumbs are likely to have much effect.

              >So if a bunch of Hebrews show up seeking judgement in a quarrel, either the priests are the first level of judges, or the priests send you to the top judge. Either way the priests inform you who the top judge is.

              No. This is not what it’s saying. At every level, in every village, there is a “sanhedrin,” a religious council, of 3 or 21 members. A dispute progressively goes up the structure as it grows in difficulty. The Sanhedrin (the highest one, with 71 members, in Jerusalem in the Chamber of Hewn Stone) has, preferably, some Kohanim and Levites in it. There is a head of the Sanhedrin, but his voice does not count for any more than that of the junior-most member in the decision.

              This specifically and directly contradicts Deuteronomy 17:8-9 which tells us priests and/or the top judge.

              Or, if one is so cynical as to be inclined to doubt direct divine appointment, a group of priests small enough to sit around a table and feel each others’ breath, reach consensus on who the judge will be, and the priests, having resolved differences between themselves, unanimously announce the judge as the will of God, all politics having taken place in groups small enough and informal enough that all dissension is quietly forgotten, because if politics took place in plain sight, the priests would lose credibility. Safer to announce the will of God, than the will of (some) priests

              Further, this would involve lots of politics and factions. In the stories about the Judges, with the early judges there is little or no politics and factions. God, supposedly, directly appoints the Judge and that is that. How would he do so except speaking through priests?

              Later, there is politics: Josephus tells us that Othneil was chosen “By the multitude”, and specifically tells us that some judges were elected, apparently for life, like Roman Kings. Maybe they were elected by the Sanhedrin, but obviously “the multitude” is not the Sanhedrin. Then, with Abimelech son of Gideon, we see the judgeship turn somewhat hereditary. No Sanhedrin for Abimelech and no multitude either.

              Initially in the Judges period, no politics, therefore no Sanhedrin.

              Later in the Judges period, lots of politics, and in all the politics that is reported, no Sanhedrin politics. What was the Sanhedrin doing when the sons of Gideon ruled and quarreled amongst themselves?

              The Book of Judges never mentions any organization resembling the Sanhedrin. Judges are appointed by God, by the multitude, or, like the sons of Gideon, appoint themselves.
              And similarly, Josephus

              He had an illustrious bloodline and position as Qadi of Jerusalem. Had we put him in charge of a hereditary position as Chief of Israeli Arabs, would we have been better off? Obviously not-he would have stabbed us in the back as soon as possible.

              The Jews did not give him any choice other than to fight the Jews to the end. If Jews, no power for him. If, after winning a military victory over him, the Jews had attempted to cut a deal with him instead of utterly rooting out any traces of his power, probably would have made life a lot easier. Reflect on what happened in Iraq. In retrospect, obvious the Americans should have cut a deal with Saddam.

          • B says:

            >And the fact that in this place and time they keep finding loopholes indicates that the thing they have to loophole through did not exist very long ago.

            This is weak sauce. Having exhausted your specific accusations, you resort to vague generalities.

            Typical loophole created recently: using a stove on Shabbat to keep food hot is prohibited by rabbinical decree from 2KYA+ lest you forget it’s Shabbat and stir the coals, thus violating the Torah decree of kindling a flame. However, there are now electric stoves. Therefore, the rabbis decided it is ok to use an electric hot plate to keep food hot.

            Typical loophole created around 2KYA: it is forbidden to carry between certain domains (household and public street, roughly) by rabbinical decree on Shabbat, to prevent you from accidentally carrying between domains which are prohibited by Torah decree. At the same time, the rabbis said that if you surround the community with an eruv and all go together on some food, it is one large household, as it were.

            Two things can be seen here: first, this is very different from the Christian “have some idol burgers, as long as you don’t believe in idols” laissez faire approach. There is a clear set of rules that don’t get played with, and a clear procedure for adding additional rules as per emerging circumstances. Second, this is something much more resistant to entryism, as we will see in a minute.

            >What Jesus actually said to the multitude, and to his disciples, was:
            2 The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat:
            3 All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

            So, in other words, what they are saying is correct! But they are not doing what they are saying to do. So do as they say, not as they do.

            >5 But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments

            “Phylacteries,” incidentally, are tefillin, which are completely from the Oral Torah. Jesus is not objecting to the tefillin themselves, or to kashrut, and would have been aghast at Paul, whom he’d never even met, inviting people to have some idol burgers in his name.

            >What he said sounds pretty much what I have been telling you in this thread. “You are getting holier and holier, and have long been more holy than is practical for a state religion.”…You will notice that Jesus, like myself, accuses the pharisees of making shit up, making rules harsher, in order to be holier than thou.

            Jesus is not complaining about the tefillin. He is complaining that the Pharisees are putting on big tefillin while not being holy enough. He is being a communist. Jesus is more of a rabbi than the rabbis, in the exact same way that Obama is more of an American than Abraham Lincoln, who only freed the slaves but didn’t give them affirmative action positions in his cabinet, in the same way that Lincoln was more of a Patriot than Thomas Jefferson, who preached freedom but owned slaves, in the same way that Luther and Calvin were more Christian than the Pope and in the same way that Paul was more Christian than Jesus. The underlying principle (freedom, equality, Christianity, Torah) is never to be challenged by communists, although it can be reframed subtly for convenience. What they challenge is the adherence of the authority they attack to the underlying principle. Since man is limited and can’t comply to a principle perfectly, there is always some room to wedge into and reframe yourself as the actual perfect incarnation of whatever principle it is that the structure you are attacking embodies. And this is what Jesus is doing here. “These guys are all about the Torah! The Torah is great! You should do everything they say…but unfortunately, what they are doing is not what they are saying. So keep the Torah, chuck these guys out, and follow me!” Typical prog tactics.

            >if it survives long enough, will eventually converge to something rather like progressivism.

            We see from above who the progressives were.

            >Of course Pharisaic Judaism never got that far

            The Essenes sort of did. And what?

            >because the Romans terminated its theocratic power, hence now cannot get too much holier than the congregation will put up with.

            This was always the case, and is an explicit Talmudic limitation on stringency-if the sages implement a stringency which the people reject, it is invalid. I can think of at least one example where this happened.

            >Pharisaic Judaism did get crazy enough to be a pain for the Romans.

            These things happen. It got crazy enough to be a pain for the Greeks, the Moabites and the Midianites, too. Sometimes the matador gets the bull, sometimes the bull gets the matador.

            >If a woman takes a baby for a stroll, is she carrying it between domains? Surely not.

            Since Judaism has extremely precise definitions determined by a transparent process, and the protocol is not “what does Jim Donald think”, I can safely say that a woman taking an infant incapable of walking between her house and a public thoroughfare is, in fact, carrying it between domains in the Torah sense of the concept.

            >promptly bring up Deborah when you feel, incorrectly, that you are being accused of vigilance against feminist entryists.

            I don’t feel you are accusing us of that. I feel that you are insinuating that we use some sort of trickery to keep women in line.

            In fact, keeping women in line is very easy, since they enjoy following detailed rules issued by authority (see their enthusiastic participation in the organic/fair trade/low fat/whatever food movement, or that book The Rules, written for women by a woman.) They quite enjoy keeping each other in line, too. How do they know what the authority is? By seeing what the men treat as authoritative. The issue you guys have is that you have no real authority that you follow.

            >Well, “Deborah” is true, and “not allowed to testify” is also true”, but “not allowed to testify” is the more relevant truth.

            Actually, neither is relevant. The sort of courts before which women’s testimony is invalid are the ones that rule on capital cases and things like this. They haven’t been operative in quite some time. I think in the Ottoman Empire they might have had some. This is not as long ago as Devora, but certainly longer than the lifetime of any Jew alive today. In religious civil courts, divorce courts, etc., which do operate today, a woman’s testimony is equally valid to that of a man.

            >Googling up feminist entryists to Judaism, does not look as if bans on cheese crumbs are likely to have much effect.

            Perhaps there are channels of information that are deeper than Google?

            A woman who only eats what her rabbi tells her is ok to eat in accordance with a book written by another rabbi, who refrains from physical contact with her husband 12 days a month and consults a rabbi on whether she is permissible to her husband in case of doubt, etc., is implicitly affirming authority every day in the most basic functions of her life. Do you think she will go and burn her bra? The cost of entryism is too high. This is why the Jewish feminists are, largely, Reform and Conservative women, Christians without Jesus.

            >This specifically and directly contradicts Deuteronomy 17:8-9 which tells us priests and/or the top judge.

            As we have discussed, we have an Oral Torah which explains to us how to read and interpret the Written Torah.

            >and the priests, having resolved differences between themselves, unanimously announce the judge as the will of God

            Again-the priests have no special decisionmaking authority except insofar as they are learned in the law, and their learning is what counts. They get one vote each, as do the non-priests on the council.

            >all politics having taken place in groups small enough and informal enough that all dissension is quietly forgotten, because if politics took place in plain sight, the priests would lose credibility. Safer to announce the will of God, than the will of (some) priests

            Well, that’s the difference between the Torah according to Jim and the actual Torah. In reality, arguments are public, recorded scrupulously, it is forbidden for one who disagrees to hold his peace, the judges speak in order of reverse seniority to avoid intimidation, and a unanimous decision by the Sanhedrin is INVALID. That is to say, if everyone agrees the accused gets the death penalty, and there is no dissenting voice, he is set free. On the other hand, a member of the Sanhedrin who refuses to abide by the majority’s decision is a zaken mamre, a rebellious elder, and is put to death, so there’s that.

            >God, supposedly, directly appoints the Judge and that is that.

            He appoints the Judge generally through prophecy which is proven true and through making it obvious in the eyes of all that this is someone who speaks with authority.

            >Later, there is politics: Josephus tells us that Othneil was chosen “By the multitude”, and specifically tells us that some judges were elected, apparently for life, like Roman Kings. Maybe they were elected by the Sanhedrin, but obviously “the multitude” is not the Sanhedrin.

            They became judges by having people go to them for judgement. How did Moldbug become an authority in this little thing of ours? By inventing it and making sense to people. If me and you have a dispute and go to him to settle it, he is now a DE judge. It is the same exact system that exists today in Afghanistan, and having had the privilege of spending many an afternoon sitting in the corner of my friend’s court and watching him adjudicate disputes between angry Pashtuns and Baluchis, I can tell you that it works alright.

            >Then, with Abimelech son of Gideon, we see the judgeship turn somewhat hereditary.

            Abimelech was not a judge. He was a thug who captured power through thuggery. He was a tribal prince-but not a judge.

            >What was the Sanhedrin doing when the sons of Gideon ruled and quarreled amongst themselves?

            In a tribal setup, with no king over the land, the court’s power is limited to the agreement of the participating parties. Meaning, they come to the court and agree to abide by its decision.

            >The Book of Judges never mentions any organization resembling the Sanhedrin.

            The Book of Ruth does. Boaz brings together the council of elders, the local Sanhedrin, in order to settle legal questions-the obligation of the nearest of kin to marry his relative’s widow, and the legality of conversion of a Moabitess (implied in the Book of Ruth, explicit in the Talmud.) Later, the Sanhedrin (according to the Talmud, which for me is an authority) in Jerusalem had to determine whether David could be admitted to the congregation, being descended from a Moabitess, and upheld the decision of Boaz’ court (i.e., that the Torah prohibition of accepting a Moabite’s conversion only applied to the men.)

            >If, after winning a military victory over him, the Jews had attempted to cut a deal with him instead of utterly rooting out any traces of his power, probably would have made life a lot easier.

            Using this logic, bringing Arafat back from Tunisia and putting him in charge of the Arabs here was a good thing. But in reality, it was a disaster from which we are still suffering.

            Also, in the Torah we constantly see that when we defeat our enemies and leave them alive and amongst us, it causes us no end of suffering. For instance, Purim, with Haman, who was descended from Agag of the Amalekites, whom Saul didn’t slay as commanded.

            • jim says:

              Second, this is something much more resistant to entryism, as we will see in a minute.

              You have a large supply of feminist entryists, and you are reluctant to offend them. It is much easier to double down on cheese crumbs lest you be infiltrated by bronze age golden goat worshipers.

              What Jesus actually said to the multitude, and to his disciples, was:

              2 The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat:
              3 All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.
              4 For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
              5 But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,
              6 And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,
              7 And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

              So, in other words, what they are saying is correct! But they are not doing what they are saying to do. So do as they say, not as they do.

              As is typical Jesus style, his subsequent words force a change in interpretation of his earlier words. In the context of his subsequent words, what he is saying is that the Pharisees have seated themselves in the seat of Moses, have illegitimately usurped the seat of Moses, and from this stolen seat improperly demand that you do what they say, not what they do. Jesus claims to legitimately have divine authority, and rejects the claim of the Pharisees to legitimately have divine authority.

              “Phylacteries,” incidentally, are tefillin, which are completely from the Oral Torah. Jesus is not objecting to the tefillin themselves, or to kashrut, and would have been aghast at Paul, whom he’d never even met, inviting people to have some idol burgers in his name.

              You are talmudizing Jesus as you talmudize Moses. His meaning is perfectly clear. He is no more endorsing the authority of the Pharisees than Marc Antony came to bury Ceasar, no more endorsing the authority of the Pharisees than Marc Antony is endorsing the honor of Brutus.

              >if it survives long enough, will eventually converge to something rather like progressivism.

              We see from above who the progressives were.

              We have seen something remarkably similar to progressivism arise from Chinese worship of heaven, and Zoroastrian worship of fire. The Zoroastrians had a longer pedigree than your own.

              Since Judaism has extremely precise definitions determined by a transparent process, and the protocol is not “what does Jim Donald think”, I can safely say that a woman taking an infant incapable of walking between her house and a public thoroughfare is, in fact, carrying it between domains in the Torah sense of the concept.

              If this is what the ancient sages thought, if this is what rabbis thought a couple of hundred years ago, they would have caught grief about it from women, and would have had to explicitly address the issue long ago. A woman carrying her baby out of doors for the sunshine is a more common event than a fishmonger going through the gates of Jerusalem with a load of dried fish.

              >Well, “Deborah” is true, and “not allowed to testify” is also true”, but “not allowed to testify” is the more relevant truth.

              Actually, neither is relevant. The sort of courts before which women’s testimony is invalid are the ones that rule on capital cases and things like this.

              Yes, “not allowed to testify” is not relevant to the here and now, but it does indicate the spirit and intent of the religion – which you are talmudizing away.

              If Israel is going to survive, needs to have to have Jewish theocracy rather than progressive theocracy. And while you are psychologically ready to double down on cheesecrumbs in ever heightened vigilance against worshipers of the Golden Goat, you are not psychologically ready to have courts in which women cannot testify.

              Nor should you be – what you will need to do is use measures with similar spirit, intent and effect, but different in detail, after the fashion of Saint Paul. But you are not going to do what you need to do, neither will you do what your two thousand year old precedents require you to do. You are going to talmudize away those courts in which women’s testimony is invalid, and have only courts with rules acceptable to progressives, only courts different not only in formal rules, but in spirit, intent, and effect.

              In religious civil courts, divorce courts, etc., which do operate today, a woman’s testimony is equally valid to that of a man.

              You are not treating the rule on women’s testimony the way you treat the rule on goats milk.

              Under progressivism, female sexual autonomy is sacred, and carries infinite weight in the utilitarian calculus. If you go all the way with progressivism on this, you will stop reproducing. You have gone part of the way, are denying to progressives how much further you have to go to meet their requirements, and denying to yourselves how far you have gone.

              >This specifically and directly contradicts Deuteronomy 17:8-9 which tells us priests and/or the top judge.

              As we have discussed, we have an Oral Torah which explains to us how to read and interpret the Written Torah.

              What Jesus was saying about the Pharisees is a matter of interpretation, and your interpretation is unreasonable. What Deuteronomy says about judges is a matter of fact, and you reject the plain words of Moses, or his immediate successors. Moses, or his immediate successors, tell you to go to the priests, and you do not go to the priests, instead saying “Rabbi, Rabbi”.

              >The Book of Judges never mentions any organization resembling the Sanhedrin.

              The Book of Ruth does. Boaz brings together the council of elders, the local Sanhedrin, in order to settle legal questions-the obligation of the nearest of kin to marry his relative’s widow, and the legality of conversion of a Moabitess (implied in the Book of Ruth, explicit in the Talmud.) Later, the Sanhedrin (according to the Talmud, which for me is an authority) in Jerusalem had to determine whether David could be admitted to the congregation, being descended from a Moabitess, and upheld the decision of Boaz’ court (i.e., that the Torah prohibition of accepting a Moabite’s conversion only applied to the men.)

              Again, you are talmudizing the plain words of the old Testament:

              1 Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and, behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he said, Ho, such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside, and sat down.
              2 And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, Sit ye down here. And they sat down.
              3 And he said unto the kinsman, Naomi, that is come again out of the country of Moab, selleth a parcel of land, which was our brother Elimelech’s:
              4 And I thought to advertise thee, saying, Buy it before the inhabitants, and before the elders of my people. If thou wilt redeem it, redeem it: but if thou wilt not redeem it, then tell me, that I may know: for there is none to redeem it beside thee; and I am after thee. And he said, I will redeem it.
              5 Then said Boaz, What day thou buyest the field of the hand of Naomi, thou must buy it also of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance.
              6 And the kinsman said, I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance: redeem thou my right to thyself; for I cannot redeem it.
              7 Now this was the manner in former time in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour: and this was a testimony in Israel.
              8 Therefore the kinsman said unto Boaz, Buy it for thee. So he drew off his shoe.
              9 And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people, Ye are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech’s, and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s, of the hand of Naomi.
              10 Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day.
              11 And all the people that were in the gate, and the elders, said, We are witnesses.

              Boaz makes the precedent. The ten elders are just there to witness it and put it into the record. Where it remains to this day. Boaz, not the elders, is making the decision.

              Also, in the Torah we constantly see that when we defeat our enemies and leave them alive and amongst us, it causes us no end of suffering. For instance, Purim, with Haman, who was descended from Agag of the Amalekites, whom Saul didn’t slay as commanded.

              You are not only unwilling to slay your enemies, you give them democracy, which is disastrous for them and for you. Giving them benign dictatorship is a middle course between these extremes.

          • B says:

            >It is much easier to double down on cheese crumbs lest you be infiltrated by bronze age golden goat worshipers.

            As I’ve said repeatedly, the restrictions, Shabbat, dietary, sexual, etc., are part and parcel of the immune system. The feminists, socialists etc. generally chuck these restrictions out right away-they can’t stand them. Why? Because the core of leftism is self-worship, and something that is so fundamental to the self, like food or sex, is not to be infringed upon.

            >As is typical Jesus style, his subsequent words force a change in interpretation of his earlier words. In the context of his subsequent words, what he is saying is that the Pharisees have seated themselves in the seat of Moses, have illegitimately usurped the seat of Moses, and from this stolen seat improperly demand that you do what they say, not what they do.

            You’re just making shit up and putting it into his mouth. He’s saying that their authority is legitimate, but their actions are not, that they are abusing their authority.

            >You are talmudizing Jesus as you talmudize Moses.

            At this point, Jesus is not yet in open rebellion against the Torah (and in fact he was not in open rebellion against it up to his death-that was for his successors to complete.) He’s not saying, chuck your phylacteries, he’s saying, don’t show them off.

            >We have seen something remarkably similar to progressivism arise from Chinese worship of heaven, and Zoroastrian worship of fire. The Zoroastrians had a longer pedigree than your own.

            Idolatry and hedonism are a default human setting, so it is unsurprising to see them recurring through history. Do the Zoroastrians have a longer pedigree than us in Jim-world, where the Oral Torah was invented in Brooklyn in 1956, or in our regular reality? In the latter, they showed up around the 6th century BCE, about 1400 years after Avraham. Not that it’s relevant-there was idolatry before Avraham, too, and apparently totalitarianism (Shinar) and social degeneracy (Soddom).

            >If this is what the ancient sages thought, if this is what rabbis thought a couple of hundred years ago, they would have caught grief about it from women, and would have had to explicitly address the issue long ago.

            You’re projecting the way the women around you think and act upon us.

            >A woman carrying her baby out of doors for the sunshine is a more common event than a fishmonger going through the gates of Jerusalem with a load of dried fish.

            But not among the Jews, and not on Shabbat. Here, let me help you: “if going for a hike was an issue on Shabbat, the Jews would have rebelled, because people commonly enjoy backpacking! And the sages would have had to address hiking specifically! Therefore, backpacking must be exempt from the prohibition on travel beyond 2000 amot beyond the city limits and from the prohibition on carrying, and any claims that this is not so must have come from the last 50 years! I’ve proven your slide into holier-than-thou!”

            >Yes, “not allowed to testify” is not relevant to the here and now, but it does indicate the spirit and intent of the religion – which you are talmudizing away.

            You’re not really arguing in good faith here. If they are allowed to testify in civil law cases and not allowed to testify in capital cases, then the spirit and intent of the religion is obviously that they have limitations but are not chattel or property.

            > while you are psychologically ready to double down on cheesecrumbs in ever heightened vigilance against worshipers of the Golden Goat, you are not psychologically ready to have courts in which women cannot testify.

            Please don’t tell me what I am and am not psychologically ready for.

            >Nor should you be – what you will need to do is use measures with similar spirit, intent and effect, but different in detail, after the fashion of Saint Paul.

            Christianity has been working out well for you guys. We should copy it. Yes?

            >But you are not going to do what you need to do, neither will you do what your two thousand year old precedents require you to do.

            We will see.

            >You are not treating the rule on women’s testimony the way you treat the rule on goats milk.

            I am treating it in the exact same way-I am seeing what the Talmud says and what the Mishne Torah says, and what the other religious authorities say, and I am understanding it in good faith in light of all of the above. We don’t have a free-for-all, do what thou wilt religion, unlike, say, the Protestants.

            >Under progressivism, female sexual autonomy is sacred, and carries infinite weight in the utilitarian calculus.

            But in Judaism, women have autonomy within a framework. For instance, they can’t sleep around, but you can’t compel them to have sex, you can’t sleep with them when you or they are drunk (that’s in the Talmud,) they have to give consent to a marriage (also in the Talmud,) etc. There is such a thing as good faith.

            >If you go all the way with progressivism on this, you will stop reproducing.

            But if we go with the Dork Enlightenment vs. the Torah (including the Oral Torah,) we will also die out. There is an infinite number of ways in which you can break your car or computer, and a relatively tight envelope within which you can operate them. Saying “if you pour water on your computer, it will die, therefore let us pour hydrophobic oil on it” is what you are doing.

            >Moses, or his immediate successors, tell you to go to the priests, and you do not go to the priests, instead saying “Rabbi, Rabbi”.

            He tells us to go to the priests, Levites and judges who will be in that day. Our Oral Torah informs us that this is referring to a court in which all of these are represented, which is the Sanhedrin, Beit Din Hagadol, Gerousia, or whatever you wish to call it.

            >Boaz makes the precedent. The ten elders are just there to witness it and put it into the record. Where it remains to this day. Boaz, not the elders, is making the decision.

            Here again you are in the position of a man who has read a car manual and never seen a car explaining to a driver what it means. The precedent is not Boaz’ to make. The commandment to marry your deceased brother’s widow (“yibbum”) is from the Torah. Boaz is gathering a court to ratify his applying this precedent to marrying Ruth after her brother’s closer kinsman, Ploni Almoni (a generic term meaning Anonymous) takes an out (“halitzah”.) The court is needed to ratify all this stuff, otherwise Boaz wouldn’t have gathered them. Incidentally, you can notice this all happens at the city gate, where courts traditionally sat.

            >You are not only unwilling to slay your enemies, you give them democracy, which is disastrous for them and for you.

            I am seeing an increasing openness to the idea of slaying our enemies. For instance, street violence against antiwar leftist protests and Arabs, with the police standing by idly.

            >Giving them benign dictatorship is a middle course between these extremes.

            Once you give dictatorship, its benign nature is subject to change. If you hold the strings, it’s not a dictatorship but a satrapy, which is always dangerous.

            • jim says:

              >It is much easier to double down on cheese crumbs lest you be infiltrated by bronze age golden goat worshipers.

              As I’ve said repeatedly, the restrictions, Shabbat, dietary, sexual, etc., are part and parcel of the immune system. The feminists, socialists etc. generally chuck these restrictions out right away-they can’t stand them.

              Assimilationists cannot stand them. Entryists, of which I can google up a large supply, claim to be just fine with obsessing about cheese crumbs, but claim that Judaism, rightly understood, makes women equal – or possibly superior.

              >As is typical Jesus style, his subsequent words force a change in interpretation of his earlier words. In the context of his subsequent words, what he is saying is that the Pharisees have seated themselves in the seat of Moses, have illegitimately usurped the seat of Moses, and from this stolen seat improperly demand that you do what they say, not what they do.

              You’re just making shit up and putting it into his mouth. He’s saying that their authority is legitimate, but their actions are not, that they are abusing their authority.

              Oh come on. This is almost as silly as the Talmud’s reinterpretation of Moses.

              Notice that Jesus says that Pharisees “sit in the seat of Moses”. This is a stronger claim than the Pharisees themselves admit to making. Obviously he is parodying their claim to authority, not endorsing it. Pharisees present themselves as bowing respectfully before Moses and reporting what Moses really said, even if it happens to directly contradict what the Old Testament reports him as saying. If they “sit in the seat of Moses”, then, as Jesus then proceeds to tell us they are making shit up and attributing it Moses. The Pharisees “lay heavy burdens”, not Moses.

              >You are talmudizing Jesus as you talmudize Moses.

              At this point, Jesus is not yet in open rebellion against the Torah

              He is in open rebellion against the Pharisees, and against Pharisaical interpretation of the Torah.

              >A woman carrying her baby out of doors for the sunshine is a more common event than a fishmonger going through the gates of Jerusalem with a load of dried fish.

              But not among the Jews, and not on Shabbat.

              If fishmongers, then women. Two thousand years ago, people had enough physical work that there was not much enthusiasm for backpacking. It is a modern phenomenon. Babies and women carrying their babies are an ancient phenomenon.

              > while you are psychologically ready to double down on cheesecrumbs in ever heightened vigilance against worshipers of the Golden Goat, you are not psychologically ready to have courts in which women cannot testify.

              Please don’t tell me what I am and am not psychologically ready for.

              OK. Asking you now: Suppose, as is quite possible, tomorrow morning the Israeli government agrees to a “truce” that is a decisive victory for Hamas, and the army is so disgusted by this that there is a coup or a creeping coup like that of Monck or the Japanese fascists. The coupists are as Jewish Orthodox as Monck was royalist. Their first priority is a permanent solution to the Gaza problem. Gaza is re-occuppied, bloodily subdued, and resettlement begins. Everyone, even the surviving Gazans, is much relieved. The Egyptians say “tut tut”, scarcely concealing their smiles. The UN passes yet another resolution against Israel, and then returns to its normal focus on embezzling foreign aid. Suddenly you are in a position to implement your program. Assume you are one of the leading coupists, and you are among orthodox Jews who believe in taking back the Temple Mount. You take the temple mount back, you eject the Muslims from the Dome of the Rock, depriving every religious Jew everywhere of the fig leaf that you are still in comfortable exile. You place some soldiers who just happen to be Levites in charge of Temple Mount security. Now you are like the dog that caught the car. What is the dog going to do with it? It is still 2014, maybe early 2015. Gaza is history. The Temple Mount is Jewish. What is next? What would you then do about female testimony for 2015?

              >Nor should you be – what you will need to do is use measures with similar spirit, intent and effect, but different in detail, after the fashion of Saint Paul.

              Christianity has been working out well for you guys. We should copy it. Yes?

              When we actually followed the program devised by Saint Paul, for example Restoration England, did work out well.

              >Moses, or his immediate successors, tell you to go to the priests, and you do not go to the priests, instead saying “Rabbi, Rabbi”.

              He tells us to go to the priests, Levites and judges who will be in that day.

              Priests and judge, not judges. That is not the Sanhedrin. No rabbis, no elders, and priests either exercising judicial and political authority, or having the primary influence over who does exercise judicial and political authority. Either they are lower rank of judges, or they tell you who the judge is.

              Our Oral Torah informs us that this is referring to a court in which all of these are represented, which is the Sanhedrin

              Your Oral Torah informs you that up is down and black is white.

              When you had a Jewish state religion, you generally did not permit open entry by opinion leaders. When you did permit open entry by opinion leaders into the state religion, holier than thou disease led to suicidal war. When you resume having a Jewish state religion, which you will do or else die of progressivism, you will need to once again stop open entry by opinion leaders.

              >Boaz makes the precedent. The ten elders are just there to witness it and put it into the record. Where it remains to this day. Boaz, not the elders, is making the decision.

              Here again you are in the position of a man who has read a car manual and never seen a car explaining to a driver what it means. The precedent is not Boaz’ to make.

              Here again you are reading black for white and up for down.

              The commandment to marry your deceased brother’s widow (“yibbum”) is from the Torah. Boaz is gathering a court to ratify his applying this precedent to marrying Ruth after her brother’s closer kinsman, Ploni Almoni (a generic term meaning Anonymous) takes an out (“halitzah”.) The court is needed to ratify all this stuff, otherwise Boaz wouldn’t have gathered them. Incidentally, you can notice this all happens at the city gate, where courts traditionally sat.

              9 And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people, Ye are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech’s, and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s, of the hand of Naomi.
              10 Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day.
              11 And all the people that were in the gate, and the elders, said, We are witnesses.

              Are they supposed to think about it and decide whether they are witnesses or not? They are not sitting in judgement over Boaz’s decision that his children by Ruth shall be part of the brethren of Mahlon and the inheritors of Mahlon. They are not ratifying it, they are witnessing it, lest there be subsequent litigation over the inheritance of Elimelech.

              Naomi, an old Hebrew women, is the sole heir of Elimelech, owns everything that was his, including his daughter in law. She sells herself, or gives herself, and everything that was Elimelech’s, including his daughter in law, to Boaz. Boaz, being concerned with legality, has the anonymous kinsman who arguably had a better claim publicly renounce the claim before witnesses, and Naomi sell herself to Boaz before witnesses, rather than Boaz merely making a private arrangement with Ruth, as Naomi originally proposed. The elders and the people that were in the gate are witnesses to what happened. They don’t get any say in it.

              Further, Old Testament does not say “The elders said …”. It says “The elders and the people that were in the gate said …”. The elders might be your Sanhedrin, but “The elders and the people that were in the gate” are not your Sanhedrin.

          • B says:

            > Entryists, of which I can google up a large supply, claim to be just fine with obsessing about cheese crumbs, but claim that Judaism, rightly understood, makes women equal – or possibly superior.

            Please google up these mythical Orthodox entryists.

            >Notice that Jesus says that Pharisees “sit in the seat of Moses”. This is a stronger claim than the Pharisees themselves admit to making. Obviously he is parodying their claim to authority, not endorsing it.

            Obvious to you, but not obvious to the commentators here: http://biblehub.com/commentaries/pulpit/matthew/23.htm

            Not only can you teach the Jews Judaism, you can teach the Christians Christianity! What next, the Diamond Sutra according to Jim-common Buddhist misconceptions?

            In reality, a basic principle of Judaism is that the leaders of each generation sit in Moshe’s seat. Tractate Rosh Hashanah:”“Scripture also says, And Samuel said to the people, It is the Lord that made Moses and Aaron, and it says [in the same passage], And the Lord sent Jerubaal (Gideon) and Bedan (Shimshon) and Jepthah and Samuel..…It says also: Moses and Aaron among his priests and Samuel among them that call on his name. [We see therefore that] the Scripture places three of the most questionable characters on the same level as three of the the most estimable characters, to show that Jerubaal in his generation is like Moses in his generation, Bedan (Shimshon) in his generation is like Aaron in his generation, Yiftach in his generation is like Samuel in his generation, to teach you that the most worthless, once he has been appointed a leader of the community (parnes), is to be accounted like the mightiest of the mighty.”

            When Jesus says they sit in Moshe’s seat, this is what he means. Likewise, when Shimshon (Samson) was the leader of his generation, doing what he did (eating non-Kosher food, sleeping with non-Jewish women) was inadvisable, but what he said held.

            >He is in open rebellion against the Pharisees, and against Pharisaical interpretation of the Torah.

            He is not. Where does he say, e.g., wave a pine tree around on Sukkot, or have an idol burger? He is being an entryist, he is being a prog, but he’s not in open rebellion.

            >If fishmongers, then women….

            The fishmongers were a) non-Jewish, b) violating the law of the land.

            >Babies and women carrying their babies are an ancient phenomenon.

            Yes. But you have, as usual, no context. In the Middle East, people live in buildings/communities with courtyards, where they take their recreational rest. Women didn’t generally go promenading with their toddlers up and down boulevards, but sat with each other in courtyards for their sun. Without a stroller, carrying a child around IS backpacking. My son is 8 months old and weighs about 10 kg ; his mother does not find carrying him up and down the street to be a restful experience.

            > Suppose, as is quite possible, tomorrow morning the Israeli government agrees to a “truce” that is a decisive victory for Hamas, and the army is so disgusted by this that there is a coup or a creeping coup like that of Monck or the Japanese fascists…What is next? What would you then do about female testimony for 2015?

            I would let the Sanhedrin and the King whom they appoint make that decision. I assume they will give female testimony in civil cases equal weight, and in capital cases some weight, but that is, like many other issues, for them to decide. I am quite happy with letting them decide it.

            >When we actually followed the program devised by Saint Paul, for example Restoration England, did work out well.

            When we drove the car off the cliff, things seemed to be going well for the first three seconds. I can’t figure out for the life of me what went wrong.

            >Priests and judge, not judges.

            In this case, judge and judges are used interchangeably, which often happens in the Torah. You can see in Deuteronomy 19, shortly after, it speaks of judges in the plural, elders in the plural, etc. The Christian commentators do not disagree-Gill’s Exposition and the Pulpit Commentary both tell you this is speaking about multiple judges. You take things out of context.

            >Either they are lower rank of judges, or they tell you who the judge is.

            And once you take things out of context, you make invalid inferences. If you are speaking of a “judge” in the sense of a war leader like Ehud or Devora, EVERYBODY knows who the judge is-do you need a special reference agency to let you know who the President is today?

            >Your Oral Torah informs you that up is down and black is white.

            Seems to beat your expounding from your orifice without bothering to look two chapters down, let along look around for context. Josephus would agree, I think-he didn’t think much of the Sadducees, and neither did the rest of the Jews of his time. Two days ago, you didn’t know where the Septuagint came from, or the difference between an etrog and a watermelon, and thought that Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel was some dude with a black hat in Williamsburg, now you’re going to lecture me how the Talmud doesn’t know what it’s talking about?

            >When you had a Jewish state religion, you generally did not permit open entry by opinion leaders.

            Like any decent professional association, the rabbinical system is not open to all and sundry, but has a transparent accession system available to anyone who would acquire the expertise.

            >Are they supposed to think about it and decide whether they are witnesses or not?

            Of course they are. The procedure for yibbum takes place before a court of three at the minimum, and preferably more. Without their witnessing it, it’s invalid, like any marriage. And you can’t force someone to be a legal witness.

            >Naomi, an old Hebrew women, is the sole heir of Elimelech, owns everything that was his, including his daughter in law.

            There you go again, expounding from the orifice. It says nowhere in there that she owns Ruth, there is no place in the Torah that says a mother in law owns her dead son’s wife, Naomi is nowhere in the legal picture when it comes to Ruth’s marriage, and she specifically told Ruth and her other son’s wife that they were free to go at the beginning of the book.

            >She sells herself, or gives herself, and everything that was Elimelech’s, including his daughter in law, to Boaz.

            The orifice speaks! Naomi does not give herself or sell herself or sell Ruth to anyone. She has no power over her dead son’s widow.

            >Boaz, being concerned with legality, has the anonymous kinsman who arguably had a better claim publicly renounce the claim before witnesses, and Naomi sell herself to Boaz before witnesses

            Naomi doesn’t sell herself to Boaz. Where are you getting this crap from?

            >The elders might be your Sanhedrin, but “The elders and the people that were in the gate” are not your Sanhedrin.

            The elders were judges. You can check Wesley’s Explanatory Notes if you’d like, or Gill’s Exposition, which is quite explicit: “Who were such, not merely in age but in office, who were the heads of thousands, fifties, and tens; ten of whom were a quorum to do business in judiciary affairs, to determine such matters as Boaz had propose, as to whom the right of redemption of a brother and kinsman’s widow, and her estate, belonged, and who were the proper witnesses of the refusal of the one to do it, and of the other’s doing it and from hence the Jews.” This is a Bet Din, a Sanhedrin, a Gerousia, etc. The people are in audience. The Christian commentators agree that this is what’s being discussed here-what else do you need, an Ayatollah to concur?

            • jim says:

              > Entryists, of which I can google up a large supply, claim to be just fine with obsessing about cheese crumbs, but claim that Judaism, rightly understood, makes women equal – or possibly superior.

              Please google up these mythical Orthodox entryists.

              http://www.jewfaq.org/women.htm

              >Notice that Jesus says that Pharisees “sit in the seat of Moses”. This is a stronger claim than the Pharisees themselves admit to making. Obviously he is parodying their claim to authority, not endorsing it.

              Obvious to you, but not obvious to the commentators here: http://biblehub.com/commentaries/pulpit/matthew/23.htm

              The first paragraph of the document you link to tells us that Jesus told us that the pharisees “were proved to have misunderstood Scripture, and were incapable of interpreting it aright” and that “it was necessary to draw a line beyond which they were not to be obeyed.”

              Which is of course, obviously what Jesus is indeed saying.

              Does the Talmud not only tell you that Moses did not say what he said nor mean what he meant, but also that Jesus did not say what he said nor mean what he meant, and not only that but the Christian commentators on Jesus do not say what they say nor mean what they mean?

              When Jesus says they sit in Moshe’s seat, this is what he means.

              What Jesus means is entirely clear. In Mathew 23, Jesus is, as usual, pissing on the Pharisees, and every Christian everywhere takes him at his word on this topic, and always has, while the Jews conspicuously fail to take Moses at the word of Moses.

              > He is in open rebellion against the Pharisees, and against Pharisaical interpretation of the Torah.

              He is not. Where does he say, e.g., wave a pine tree around on Sukkot,

              Mathew 12

              Mark 2

              > Suppose, as is quite possible, tomorrow morning the Israeli government agrees to a “truce” that is a decisive victory for Hamas, and the army is so disgusted by this that there is a coup or a creeping coup like that of Monck or the Japanese fascists…What is next? What would you then do about female testimony for 2015?

              I would let the Sanhedrin and the King whom they appoint make that decision.

              You are weaseling. You are going to wait for a miraculous Messiah to do the heavy lifting. In the hypothetical, you don’t yet have a Sanhedrin or a King. You have a coup. Perhaps in time the general will become a King, but Kings take time. You are not going to have a King, even less are you going to have a Sanhedrin, unless you get started on a state religion. The state religion is going to remain progressivism, unless you get started on changing it.

              And you are not willing to get started, which means your general is not willing to get started.

              Let us suppose you are one of the junior officers who actually made the coup and conscripted the general to “lead” it, and the general tells you he lacks confidence in all these crazy rabbis, but he has confidence that your faith makes you strong and united, so he is making you (the more religious elements among the junior officers who made the coup) the Sanhedrin. Now, he tells you “Get started on whipping up a theocracy to replace progressivism, because if I step down after this the progressives will hang me for war crimes. And watch out for those crazy rabbis or we will all hang.”

              OK, your general has given you the task of planning a theocracy, subject only to the requirement that the theocracy shall say that it is the will of God that the general does not step down and hand power back to the progressives, and that the theocracy be sane, the definition of sanity being pretty much left in your hands. All other details are up to you and some like minded people. You are even allowed to get up the noses of secular Jews, because your general buys your theory that the more arbitrary, ridiculous, and unreasonable the rules, the better.

              Now, in that hypothetical, what are you going to do for female testimony in 2015?

              That you really do not want to answer the question tells me that you know in your heart that Orthodox Judaism is still a religion of exile, that it furtively changed in the past, and that to return from exile, to once again become a state religion, it is going to need to change again. That is why the Rabbis don’t really want the temple back. They need the fig leaf that they are still in exile. If a bunch of Jewish soldiers were to occupy the temple mount, a pile of embarrassments would come live.

              As long Judaism still in exile, progressivism rules, is the state religion of Israel. As long as progressivism is the theocracy, Israel survives only by unprincipled exception, and is weak before those with higher principles. The left scold you because of the unprincipled exception, the right scold you because you get the exception and we do not.

              >Priests and judge, not judges.

              And once you take things out of context, you make invalid inferences. If you are speaking of a “judge” in the sense of a war leader like Ehud or Devora, EVERYBODY knows who the judge is-do you need a special reference agency to let you know who the President is today?

              Actually yes. It is called the US Electoral College, and as every election approaches and proceeds, you hear a a great deal about the electoral college.

              When Judges are chosen in the book of Judges, don’t hear anything about the Sanhedrin.

              >Are they supposed to think about it and decide whether they are witnesses or not?

              Of course they are.

              You are going against the plain words of the book of Ruth.

              >Boaz, being concerned with legality, has the anonymous kinsman who arguably had a better claim publicly renounce the claim before witnesses, and Naomi sell herself to Boaz before witnesses

              Naomi doesn’t sell herself to Boaz. Where are you getting this crap from?

              Book of Ruth: Ruth offers herself to Boaz, but Boaz cannot accept, because arguably someone else owns her.

              12 And now it is true that I am thy near kinsman: howbeit there is a kinsman nearer than I.
              13 Tarry this night, and it shall be in the morning, that if he will perform unto thee the part of a kinsman, well; let him do the kinsman’s part: but if he will not do the part of a kinsman to thee, then will I do the part of a kinsman to thee, as the LORD liveth: lie down until the morning.

              So in the morning rounds up the kinsman, and has the kinsman drop the claim before witnesses. But still does not own Ruth, so to own Ruth …
              9 And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people, Ye are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech’s, and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s, of the hand of Naomi.
              10 Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day.

              “all that was Elimelech’s, and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s” is Naomi and Ruth. So he purchased them both in a job lot. Notice that Ruth is not present. In the previous chapter she was told to tarry while Boaz takes care of business. He does not legally need her consent, she is property, though his reference to “the hand of Naomi” would hint that he needs Naomi’s consent. There seem to be contradictory precedents about who inherits when all the males in a family die.

              >The elders might be your Sanhedrin, but “The elders and the people that were in the gate” are not your Sanhedrin.

              The elders were judges.

              If they were, they did not get to do any judging in the book of Ruth.

          • B says:

            >http://www.jewfaq.org/women.htm

            And? This woman is providing a female-friendly FAQ. None of this stuff (“oh, women are not obliged to pray 3 times a day because they are closer to G-d”) has any practical ramifications, and none of it is taken seriously by considerable swathes of Orthodox Jews. In practice, women defer to men, and the woman who is writing this FAQ consults with a rabbi on what she puts in there and on the basic details of her life.

            >The first paragraph of the document you link to tells us that Jesus told us that the pharisees “were proved to have misunderstood Scripture, and were incapable of interpreting it aright” and that “it was necessary to draw a line beyond which they were not to be obeyed.”

            Well, that is the way modern Christianity must interpret these words for its very existence.

            >Which is of course, obviously what Jesus is indeed saying.

            What he is saying is what he is saying-listen to the rabbis, they are in Moses’ place right now, don’t do what they do but do what they say. As your own commentators tell you. It is hilarious that you accuse us of turning things upside down while doing exactly that.

            >Does the Talmud not only tell you that Moses did not say what he said nor mean what he meant, but also that Jesus did not say what he said nor mean what he meant, and not only that but the Christian commentators on Jesus do not say what they say nor mean what they mean?

            This is what your Pulpit Commentary says: “This is stated as an undoubted fact (????????), with no idea of blame attached. Literally, sat on the seat of Moses from time immemorial. These (meaning not individuals, but the collective body) are the authorized expounders and teachers of the Law; their position is assured; they are not to be displaced. The scribes were the party chiefly denoted; they were of the Pharisaical sect; hence the addition, “and the Pharisees,” by which is intimated, not that these latter, qua Pharisees, had any teaching office, but that the former shared their religious opinions. The Sadducees seem to have had no popular influence, and were never recognized as leaders. The Levitical priests never appear in the Gospels as teachers or expositors of the Mosaic system; this function of theirs had devolved upon scribes and lawyers.”

            Meaning, he is not challenging their authority (in this passage,) but their use of it.

            The Talmud, among many other useful things, teaches us that attempting to analyze something without context is pointless.

            >while the Jews conspicuously fail to take Moses at the word of Moses.

            You can see that Jesus agrees that the word of Moses is to be understood as the Oral Law, as expounded by the Pharisees, see above. He doesn’t even acknowledge the Sadducees, who were a minority believing that the Written Torah should be performed as written, with no oral tradition.

            >Mathew 12
            >Mark 2

            Here, he is making an argument within the Pharisaical framework, that medicine and hunger supercede the Shabbat, and with the reference to David also alluding that it’s wartime (another good reason for the rabbis to want him dead, given the context.) He is wrong-they do not, unless there is a danger of death-but the way in which he is making his wrong argument is significant. He is not saying, as you are, “hey, the Shabbat is to have fun on, your prohibitions are just stuff you made up.” His quote, “the son of man is the lord of Shabbat” comes from the Talmud, Tractate Yoma. There is also the question of whether the prohibition of harvesting on Shabbat (which is directly from the Written Torah) includes picking food and eating it directly-Beit Hillel, I believe, held that it does not. In short, here he is not abrogating the rabbinical framework but undermining it.

            >You are weaseling. You are going to wait for a miraculous Messiah to do the heavy lifting.

            Where did I say anything about miracles?

            >In the hypothetical, you don’t yet have a Sanhedrin or a King. You have a coup. Perhaps in time the general will become a King, but Kings take time. You are not going to have a King, even less are you going to have a Sanhedrin, unless you get started on a state religion.

            Not at all. The way to have a Sanhedrin is to make a Sanhedrin, and invite the luminaries in the field to join. The way to make a Temple is to announce the construction project and build it. A king will be appointed by the Sanhedrin.

            > the general tells you he lacks confidence in all these crazy rabbis,

            Then he is not a religious Jew. He may like these rabbis over those rabbis, but if he has no confidence in rabbis as an institution, he is not a Torah Jew.

            >but he has confidence that your faith makes you strong and united, so he is making you (the more religious elements among the junior officers who made the coup) the Sanhedrin.

            This is not a Sanhedrin, any more than Nero’s horse-wife was his wife.

            >your general has given you the task of planning a theocracy, subject only to the requirement that the theocracy shall say that it is the will of God that the general does not step down and hand power back to the progressives, and that the theocracy be sane, the definition of sanity being pretty much left in your hands.

            In that case, again, I will create a Sanhedrin in the normal meaning of the word.

            >Now, in that hypothetical, what are you going to do for female testimony in 2015?

            The same exact thing that I will do for water planning, agricultural policy, theoretical physics research, etc. I will put together a board of the most qualified people to figure it out and enable them to make the best decisions they see fit.

            >If a bunch of Jewish soldiers were to occupy the temple mount, a pile of embarrassments would come live.

            Doubt it. The Temple Institute is made up of rabbis, and those rabbis are quite serious. Presumably, the exile-oriented rabbis would not take a seat on the Sanhedrin.

            >Actually yes. It is called the US Electoral College, and as every election approaches and proceeds, you hear a a great deal about the electoral college.

            But in reality, once there’s been a presidential election, everyone knows who the President is. And the judges of the Book of Judges, to whom you are referring, ruled much longer than the president.

            >When Judges are chosen in the book of Judges, don’t hear anything about the Sanhedrin.

            These judges were not the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin was a different entity.

            >You are going against the plain words of the book of Ruth.

            I have context, and the book was written by and for people with context, who didn’t need everything spelled out. If I tell you to drive up the road and turn left at the light, it presumes that you and I both know how to drive a car, and what a road and stoplight look like. I don’t need to spell everything out for you.

            >Book of Ruth: Ruth offers herself to Boaz, but Boaz cannot accept, because arguably someone else owns her.

            No. The nearer kinsman doesn’t OWN her. He has the right of first refusal on performing the mitzvah of yibbum.

            >Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day.

            He’s not purchasing her from Naomi. Again, context. A Jewish wedding involves a ketubah, which is a marriage contract of acquisition of the woman by the man. Of course, the woman’s consent is required for the marriage to be legal. But the woman was not the property of her mother-in-law beforehand, and you can see that he says he is purchasing the field from Naomi, but he doesn’t say the same about Ruth.

            “all that was Elimelech’s, and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s” is Naomi and Ruth.

            No. He is speaking of property, meaning, their inheritance in Judah. Every man has his inheritance, which even if he sells returns to him at the Yovel year. Naomi was not Elimelech’s after his death, nor was she the property of her sons, and Ruth was not Naomi’s property. There is no such provision in the Torah.

            >There seem to be contradictory precedents about who inherits when all the males in a family die.

            They are contradictory when you have no context. A woman’s consent is necessary for a marriage to be valid. This, again, is directly from the Torah, when Eliezer, Avraham’s slave, secures Rivka’s consent to marry Itzhak.

            >If they were, they did not get to do any judging in the book of Ruth.

            Your own commentators whom I quoted and gave links for said they were judges. Do you also know better than John Wesley, or than John Gill? The Torah is not a history book, it does not go into every single detail, it presupposes a familiarity with context and institutions and traditions, etc. It presupposes that the reader knows the significance of the city gate and the elders who sit there:

            http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0006_0_05737.html

            http://www.gotquestions.org/city-gate.html

            http://www.followtherabbi.com/world/encyclopedia/article/city-gates-in-the-bible

            It doesn’t have to present the minutes of the deliberations, the arguments made by opposing sides, etc.

            • jim says:

              >http://www.jewfaq.org/women.htm

              And? This woman is providing a female-friendly FAQ. None of this stuff (“oh, women are not obliged to pray 3 times a day because they are closer to G-d”) has any practical ramifications, and none of it is taken seriously by considerable swathes of Orthodox Jews. In practice, women defer to men,

              I am pretty sure that this woman does not defer to men, and does not feel all that much like marrying and having sex and children with the kind of man who is likely to marry her and have sex and children with her. She is changing the meaning of Jewish practices so that instead of implying that women should submit and obey, they imply that women should not submit nor obey, and you are incapable of resisting her in the vigorous way you so industriously continue to resist bronze age goat worshipers.

              You defend Jewish Orthodoxy against feminists the way that Israel defends itself against Hamas – as little as possible, guiltily, and furtively. If the Orthodox are still fertile, it is because some of the Orthodox are doing a better job.

              >The first paragraph of the document you link to tells us that Jesus told us that the pharisees “were proved to have misunderstood Scripture, and were incapable of interpreting it aright” and that “it was necessary to draw a line beyond which they were not to be obeyed.”

              Well, that is the way modern Christianity must interpret these words for its very existence.

              No that is the way Christians have interpreted these words because that is, in fact, what these words, Mathew 23, say.

              I repeat my rhetorical question, and I really would like an answer. Do you think that Marc Antony really came to bury to Caesar, and that he meant that Brutus was an honorable man?

              If you don’t think that Marc Antony meant that Brutus is an honorable man, how can you conclude that Jesus meant his listeners should obey the pharisees?

              >Mathew 12
              >Mark 2

              Here, he is making an argument within the Pharisaical framework, that medicine and hunger supercede the Shabbat,

              As Stalin said, “Who, whom”.

              In an ironic counterpoint to Mathew 23:3, here he tells his disciples to not do what the Pharisees tell them to do and then justifies it by the arguments that Pharisees use when they evade the heavy burdens that they place on others.

              And then he departs from the Parisaical framework: “What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?”, making each man interpreter of the law.

              >You are weaseling. You are going to wait for a miraculous Messiah to do the heavy lifting.

              Where did I say anything about miracles?

              You assume a Jewish theocracy somehow already in place. How does it get to be in place? Mortals, such as yourself, are going to have to place it.

              A King is not a King because he is a King, nor a general a general because he is a general. A king is a king because other people act like he is a king, which is why coups are in reality made by junior officers, rather than generals.

              >In the hypothetical, you don’t yet have a Sanhedrin or a King. You have a coup. Perhaps in time the general will become a King, but Kings take time. You are not going to have a King, even less are you going to have a Sanhedrin, unless you get started on a state religion.

              Not at all. The way to have a Sanhedrin is to make a Sanhedrin, and invite the luminaries in the field to join. The way to make a Temple is to announce the construction project and build it. A king will be appointed by the Sanhedrin.

              It is intentionally circular: The state supports the church because the church supports the state. But the church is not strong enough to substantially support the state, unless the state makes it so.

              This is not a Sanhedrin, any more than Nero’s horse-wife was his wife.

              Then you are doomed.

              Recall how King David came to power. There is no record of any of your kings being appointed by the Sanhedrin, and when the Sanhedrin actually had power, in the time of Rome, there is plenty of record of parties, factions, and all the usual crap and drama. That lot could not agree on what pizza to order. Realistically, you are not going to get a Sanhedrin powerful enough to appoint a King, barring overt divine intervention with overt miracles. You never have had a Sanhedrin powerful enough to appoint a King, even in the time of its greatest power, under Rome. You are going to get a general who is, like King David, quietly dependent on junior officers acting like he is a King, King David’s mighty men.

              What you have is incapable of exercising power and does not want to exercise power. They just want to enlarge their phylacteries and have men call them “Rabbi, Rabbi”, which as progressives know very well is not power, merely its semblance. They don’t really want to touch the temple mount, because they are happy to be in exile forever. They are comfortable with what they have, and have no intention of changing it.

              >Now, in that hypothetical, what are you going to do for female testimony in 2015?

              The same exact thing that I will do for water planning, agricultural policy, theoretical physics research, etc. I will put together a board of the most qualified people to figure it out and enable them to make the best decisions they see fit.

              This, circularly, assumes you already have a Jewish, rather than progressive, theocracy. The question is getting there from here. I am trying to get you to admit that it takes some changes, and you have sort of admitted that it will take some changes, but piously say, the rabbis shall decide on those changes.

              Hmm, but which rabbis. As I said, a general is not a general because he is a general. A general is a general because his junior officers act like he is a general.

              The way power works is that a bunch of alpha males quietly sort things out between themselves, and then present a solidly united face to the rest of the world. You are skipping over the quietly-sort-things-out-among-themselves phase. And the Sanhedrin that actually existed, when they briefly exercised real power, never quite managed to quietly sort things out among themselves. If they ever existed before those disastrous events, they were able to act cohesively because they had a King or a supreme Judge elected for life to whip them into shape – which is to say, if they existed at all before those disastrous events, they had marked resemblance to Nero’s horse wife. As I said, recollect how King David came to power. The mighty men were the equivalent of junior officers, not the equivalent of rabbis.

              You want a new David, you will need some mighty men. The Sanhedrin, supposing that they existed apart from the brief period when Josephus records them existing, and records them screwing up, never managed a David. When they mattered enough that Josephus records them acting, could not manage to order pizza.

              >Actually yes. It is called the US Electoral College, and as every election approaches and proceeds, you hear a a great deal about the electoral college.

              But in reality, once there’s been a presidential election, everyone knows who the President is.

              As the election approaches and proceeds, we hear how many supporters the candidate is getting on the electoral college. In the old testament, we never hear how many supporters the candidate got on the sanhedrin, nor how he got them. The earliest judges are chosen by God. (Or at least that was the priest’s story and they stuck to it.) Later they are elected by the multitude. Then it looks more like hereditary authority limited partly by anarchy, partly by military coups. The sons of Samuel lack the mojo to succeed him, so the people call for a King. If the Sanhedrin existed and had the power to make a judge a supreme judge, no one would have worried about the sons of Samuel not measuring up.

              >You are going against the plain words of the book of Ruth.

              I have context,

              All your supposed context dates from long, long after the book of Ruth.

              >Book of Ruth: Ruth offers herself to Boaz, but Boaz cannot accept, because arguably someone else owns her.

              No. The nearer kinsman doesn’t OWN her. He has the right of first refusal on performing the mitzvah of yibbum.

              This procedure only makes sense in a society where woman are as much property as a dog is. You today retain the form without the substance, but back in their day, Boaz, Naomi and the witnesses act as if the substance is entirely real.

              if you guys had the courage of your convictions, you would tell women they were property, albeit very specially protected property, which imposes great obligations on its owner, and when you raised the status of women by requiring their consent, would have discarded a procedure that only makes sense in a society where women cannot consent.

              Everyone acts as if Ruth is property. She is not present when Boaz goes off to dicker with his kinsman. They settle her fate and Naomi’s fate in her absence without input from her. Then he summons the elders and the crowd, and tells us Ruth is his property. Then he marries Ruth to himself in her absence. Everyone needs to witness the kinsman’s consent. They need to witness Boaz’s decision. They don’t need to witness Ruth’s consent. Therefore, property.

              You don’t admit to abandoning the old rules, and neither do you admit to endorsing the old rules.

              The old rules I think, took subordination of women too far. The point is to contain our biological urges inside the rules of contract and property, not to replace our biological urges with the rules of contract and property.

              The sensible way to do this is that fertile age women start off as property of their parents and become property of their husbands, but they get to choose the husband that shall own them, having the right to refuse their parent’s choice or elope with their own choice, so that everyone has to arrange for contractual property rights to be as closely aligned as possible to biological impulses. The right way to do this would have been for Ruth to become the property of Boaz by the witnesses observing the consent of herself and Naomi. But that is not what they did. What they did then fails to recognize that women, uncontrollably, have agency and we little choice but to accommodate it. What everyone does now errs in the opposite extreme, by granting women too much power and authority – they should be required to decide once and forever, not decide from moment to moment.

              A Jewish wedding involves a ketubah, which is a marriage contract of acquisition of the woman by the man. Of course, the woman’s consent is required for the marriage to be legal.

              Now it is. But in the book of Ruth, everyone acts as if consent is irrelevant. And some of your present day rituals make no sense in a society where a woman’s consent is required, are reminders of a time when the woman’s consent was not required, are an effort by Rabbis to accommodate change while denying change.

              Today, those rituals are a formality. In the book of Ruth, those old rituals are the real substance, and they don’t bother with today’s new rituals. Boaz simply announces to the witnesses how he proposes to dispose of the estate

              >If they were, they did not get to do any judging in the book of Ruth.

              Your own commentators whom I quoted and gave links for said they were judges.

              They believe that because the Jews claim it to be true. Supposing it to be true, supposing the elders were judges, the christian commentators do not believe that they got to do any judging in the Book of Ruth. Thus, the book of Ruth is not evidence that elders were judges in that time.

              It doesn’t have to present the minutes of the deliberations, the arguments made by opposing sides, etc.

              But it does have to present their decision. We hear of no decision. They are just witnesses and recorders.

          • B says:

            >I am pretty sure that this woman does not defer to men, and does not feel all that much like marrying and having sex and children with the kind of man who is likely to marry her and have sex and children with her.

            There is no obligation on women to marry and have children in Judaism.

            >She is changing the meaning of Jewish practices so that instead of implying that women should submit and obey, they imply that women should not submit nor obey, and you are incapable of resisting her in the vigorous way you so industriously continue to resist bronze age goat worshipers.

            She has no authority whatsoever and is expressing her opinion online. She grew up Reform and became Orthodox as a grownup, accepting upon herself all the restrictions involved. By doing so, she is implicitly supporting Torah Judaism.

            >You defend Jewish Orthodoxy against feminists the way that Israel defends itself against Hamas – as little as possible, guiltily, and furtively.

            I do not see the need to defend Judaism against 49 year old ladies with a website.

            >No that is the way Christians have interpreted these words because that is, in fact, what these words, Mathew 23, say.

            What they say is that the Pharisees occupy Moses’ place, so listen to what they say, but don’t do what they do. Not too complex.

            >Do you think that Marc Antony really came to bury to Caesar, and that he meant that Brutus was an honorable man?

            No. But given that Gill thinks that this means that the Rabbis had authority (though he hedges that Jesus means they should be listened to until he overrules them,) and John Wesley takes this in its plain sense, it’s obviously not obvious sarcasm.

            >In an ironic counterpoint to Mathew 23:3, here he tells his disciples to not do what the Pharisees tell them to do and then justifies it by the arguments that Pharisees use when they evade the heavy burdens that they place on others.

            He doesn’t get specific about these heavy burdens or their avoidance. Given what I see in the Rabbinical world today, the Rabbis are more stringent in personal observance than what they demand of their followers.

            >And then he departs from the Parisaical framework: “What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?”, making each man interpreter of the law.

            Yep, do what thou wilt, pure leftism.

            >You assume a Jewish theocracy somehow already in place. How does it get to be in place? Mortals, such as yourself, are going to have to place it.

            Obviously. So where is the miraculous part?

            >A king is a king because other people act like he is a king, which is why coups are in reality made by junior officers, rather than generals.

            Yes-but smart junior officers then emplace someone qualified to run the country in power. Hence, Moldbug’s two-part plan with the Plinth, etc.

            >It is intentionally circular: The state supports the church because the church supports the state. But the church is not strong enough to substantially support the state, unless the state makes it so.

            Correct-hence whoever takes power will then vest a significant part of it (the legislative and judicial) in a Sanhedrin of Torah scholars who are 1) prominent, 2) willing to accept this burden.

            >Then you are doomed.

            Get in line behind all the other prophets of doom to Israel over the last 3K years. I prefer Bilaam, who was an actual prophet.

            >Recall how King David came to power.

            The same way that Saul came to power-he was anointed by Shmuel.

            >Realistically, you are not going to get a Sanhedrin powerful enough to appoint a King, barring overt divine intervention with overt miracles.

            Sure we will. Whoever takes power will convene a Sanhedrin and vest this power in it.

            >You never have had a Sanhedrin powerful enough to appoint a King, even in the time of its greatest power, under Rome.

            During the Bar Kochba revolt, they were seriously debating anointing him. Rabbi Akiva was for, the rest of the sages against. No miracles were involved.

            >You are going to get a general who is, like King David, quietly dependent on junior officers acting like he is a King, King David’s mighty men.

            His mighty men were commandos, not internal enforcers. Had the relevant spiritual authorities not supported him, he would have lost power, like Saul.

            > They just want to enlarge their phylacteries and have men call them “Rabbi, Rabbi”, which as progressives know very well is not power, merely its semblance. They don’t really want to touch the temple mount, because they are happy to be in exile forever.

            You are painting with a broad brush and taking something widespread and calling it universal.

            >This, circularly, assumes you already have a Jewish, rather than progressive, theocracy. The question is getting there from here.

            If a group of religious Jewish officers or a political party takes power and appoints a Sanhedrin, you’ve gotten there from here.

            >Hmm, but which rabbis.

            The ones who will be on a Sanhedrin. In order to be there, they have to be of sufficient stature to be invited, of sufficiently Zionist bent of mind to accept the invitation, and learned enough to hold their spot against contenders.

            >The way power works is that a bunch of alpha males quietly sort things out between themselves, and then present a solidly united face to the rest of the world.

            Not the way it works with us. The deliberations of a Sanhedrin are open. Those of the executive are not-but you can see all our executives’ dirty laundry in the Torah.

            >When they mattered enough that Josephus records them acting, could not manage to order pizza.

            At the time described by Josephus, the executive had been destroyed by infighting and Roman politics, and the Sanhedrin was forced into its place, which is not its place.

            >In the old testament, we never hear how many supporters the candidate got on the sanhedrin, nor how he got them.

            The Sanhedrin doesn’t vote for a royal candidate, and the Torah’s job is not to be the minutes of the Sanhedrin.

            >The sons of Samuel lack the mojo to succeed him, so the people call for a King.

            Not so. The people called for a king because they were tired of tribal anarchy. Hence, Saul.

            >If the Sanhedrin existed and had the power to make a judge a supreme judge, no one would have worried about the sons of Samuel not measuring up.

            There was no institution of “supreme judge.” You are confusing the judicial/legislative (the same thing in a religious state) with the executive.

            >All your supposed context dates from long, long after the book of Ruth.

            If not for the Torah sages whom we got this context from, we would not have received the Book of Ruth. It’s not like it was dug up in the 15th century.

            >This procedure only makes sense in a society where woman are as much property as a dog is.

            No. We have a record of female consent being required going back to Avraham’s son.

            >if you guys had the courage of your convictions, you would tell women they were property, albeit very specially protected property, which imposes great obligations on its owner, and when you raised the status of women by requiring their consent

            You are upset at Avraham’s slave, Eliezer, claiming that he was overstepping his authority at asking Rivka’s consent?

            >Everyone acts as if Ruth is property. She is not present when Boaz goes off to dicker with his kinsman. They settle her fate and Naomi’s fate in her absence without input from her.

            She gave her consent the previous night. What is being discussed is whether the closer kinsman wishes to exercise his prerogative or not. Why does Ruth need to be present at these deliberations? BTW-it’s not clear that she’s absent-she’s not mentioned, but it’s not said that she’s not there.

            >Then he summons the elders and the crowd, and tells us Ruth is his property. Then he marries Ruth to himself in her absence.

            There is no such thing. For marriage, the woman must be there.

            >Everyone needs to witness the kinsman’s consent. They need to witness Boaz’s decision. They don’t need to witness Ruth’s consent. Therefore, property.

            Again, you have no textual proof of her absence at the marriage, nor can you point at any other points in the Torah where there is a marriage with the wife not there. This is retarded on the face of it-if the woman who is supposedly being married dies in the meantime, then what?

            >You don’t admit to abandoning the old rules, and neither do you admit to endorsing the old rules.

            We know what the old rules actually are from our tradition, which is the same way we actually got the Torah. If we believe that the Written Torah we have today is the same as it was 1000, 2000 and 3000 years ago, we believe that the people who passed it on were honest and trustworthy. If so, we believe that they were honest and trustworthy when passing on the Oral Torah.

            >The old rules I think, took subordination of women too far.

            Certainly, the ones you are inventing would have-but they never existed.

            >The sensible way to do this is that fertile age women start off as property of their parents and become property of their husbands, but they get to choose the husband that shall own them, having the right to refuse their parent’s choice or elope with their own choice, so that everyone has to arrange for contractual property rights to be as closely aligned as possible to biological impulses.

            Perhaps you can build a commune in Idaho and emplace your rationally derived principles there. Get back to us in 3000 years and we will see how it went.

            >The right way to do this would have been for Ruth to become the property of Boaz by the witnesses observing the consent of herself and Naomi. But that is not what they did.

            That’s is exactly what they did, because that is what a Jewish marriage is.

            >Now it is. But in the book of Ruth, everyone acts as if consent is irrelevant.

            Eh? The events in the Book of Ruth take place long after the events of Yitzhak’s marriage to Rivka, which required consent. If we know consent is required today and consent was required 3500 years ago, Occam’s Razor tells us it was required 3000 years ago (+/- for all dates) and that the book of Ruth doesn’t tell us about it for the same reason it doesn’t tell us what the weather was, what the guests ate, etc-it’s irrelevant to the plot.

            >And some of your present day rituals make no sense in a society where a woman’s consent is required, are reminders of a time when the woman’s consent was not required, are an effort by Rabbis to accommodate change while denying change.

            Like what?

            >They believe that because the Jews claim it to be true.

            And why do they believe the Jews on this point? Because they are such gullible children?

            >Supposing it to be true, supposing the elders were judges, the christian commentators do not believe that they got to do any judging in the Book of Ruth. Thus, the book of Ruth is not evidence that elders were judges in that time.

            The elders are identified as judges in Deuteronomy and in Josephus. Why would they not be judges in Ruth?

            >But it does have to present their decision. We hear of no decision. They are just witnesses and recorders.

            There was no legal contest requiring their decision. The kinsman chose not to contest. Nonetheless, it all had to take place before a court in order to be legal.

            • jim says:

              > I am pretty sure that this woman does not defer to men, and does not feel all that much like marrying and having sex and children with the kind of man who is likely to marry her and have sex and children with her.

              There is no obligation on women to marry and have children in Judaism.

              The reason that Jews have high fertility and that in particular orthodox Jews have high fertility is not the obsession with cheesecrumbs. It is that the old testament position is that women are simply property, and orthodox Jews have various rituals and practices that remind women of this. The problem is that you are running away from this position, from the clear meaning of your rituals and practices.

              She has no authority whatsoever and is expressing her opinion online. She grew up Reform and became Orthodox as a grownup, accepting upon herself all the restrictions involved. By doing so, she is implicitly supporting Torah Judaism.

              Old Testament Judaism was pretty bloodthirsty and unambiguously treated women as property. Talmudic Judaism is even guiltier than actually existent Christianity about slaying its enemies, and equivocates on women as property

              Talmudic Judaism gets reinterpreted by each successive set of rabbis. If you are not prepared to treat her Judaism like a cheeseburger, it will go the way it is in fact going. Since each successive set of rabbis has full authority (“sits in the seat of Moses” as Jesus parodied them) there is nothing to stop her kind of Talmudic Judaism from having authority.

              >You defend Jewish Orthodoxy against feminists the way that Israel defends itself against Hamas – as little as possible, guiltily, and furtively.

              I do not see the need to defend Judaism against 49 year old ladies with a website.

              The fact that you cannot read the book of Ruth as meaning what it means about the status of women tells me she is winning, and you are losing.

              >Recall how King David came to power.

              The same way that Saul came to power-he was anointed by Shmuel.

              His crown, however …

              >You never have had a Sanhedrin powerful enough to appoint a King, even in the time of its greatest power, under Rome.

              During the Bar Kochba revolt, they were seriously debating anointing him. Rabbi Akiva was for, the rest of the sages against. No miracles were involved.

              As I said, could not agree on what pizza to order.

              >You are going to get a general who is, like King David, quietly dependent on junior officers acting like he is a King, King David’s mighty men.

              His mighty men were commandos, not internal enforcers. Had the relevant spiritual authorities not supported him, he would have lost power, like Saul.

              His mighty men slew his rebellious son, and when he got upset about it, reprimanded him for undermining his and their authority.

              > They just want to enlarge their phylacteries and have men call them “Rabbi, Rabbi”, which as progressives know very well is not power, merely its semblance. They don’t really want to touch the temple mount, because they are happy to be in exile forever.

              You are painting with a broad brush and taking something widespread and calling it universal.

              True. But it is widespread. Orthodox are a minority, and orthodox that genuinely want to come out of exile, to replace progressive theocracy with Jewish theocracy, are minority of a minority. And of that minority of a minority, there is reluctance to confront the choices that would need to be made in coming out of exile.

              A cohesive minority with a clear plan can easily take charge of an incohesive majority with no clear plan. But the sanhedrin does not have an impressive record of coming up with clear plans.

              >The way power works is that a bunch of alpha males quietly sort things out between themselves, and then present a solidly united face to the rest of the world.

              Not the way it works with us. The deliberations of a Sanhedrin are open.

              This may partially explain its inability to order pizza.

              >If the Sanhedrin existed and had the power to make a judge a supreme judge, no one would have worried about the sons of Samuel not measuring up.

              There was no institution of “supreme judge.” You are confusing the judicial/legislative (the same thing in a religious state) with the executive.

              Whatever you want to call Samuel and the rest. I keep trying to use your terminology, and you keep chiding me for it. Old Testament terminology is “Judge in the day”, which implies that there were no other judges. I therefore believe that there were no other judges, but I am trying to accommodate your belief system.

              >This procedure only makes sense in a society where woman are as much property as a dog is.

              No. We have a record of female consent being required going back to Avraham’s son.

              The servant makes a deal for Rebecca with her father as if she was a puppy. The servant pays up.

              Then the following day, after the servant has paid up, her brother and her mother (but not her father) insist on consent. Her consent was not required by her father, nor by the servant (who seems rather pissed by this last minute issue)

              So consent was not a legal or social requirement, not expected, preferred, but not required.

              32 And the man came into the house: and he ungirded his camels, and gave straw and provender for the camels, and water to wash his feet, and the men’s feet that were with him.
              33 And there was set meat before him to eat: but he said, I will not eat, until I have told mine errand. And he said, Speak on.
              34 And he said, I am Abraham’s servant.
              35 And the LORD hath blessed my master greatly; and he is become great: and he hath given him flocks, and herds, and silver, and gold, and menservants, and maidservants, and camels, and asses.
              36 And Sarah my master’s wife bare a son to my master when she was old: and unto him hath he given all that he hath.
              37 And my master made me swear, saying, Thou shalt not take a wife to my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose land I dwell:
              38 But thou shalt go unto my father’s house, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son.
              39 And I said unto my master, Peradventure the woman will not follow me.
              40 And he said unto me, The LORD, before whom I walk, will send his angel with thee, and prosper thy way; and thou shalt take a wife for my son of my kindred, and of my father’s house:
              41 Then shalt thou be clear from this my oath, when thou comest to my kindred; and if they give not thee one, thou shalt be clear from my oath.
              42 And I came this day unto the well, and said, O LORD God of my master Abraham, if now thou do prosper my way which I go:
              43 Behold, I stand by the well of water; and it shall come to pass, that when the virgin cometh forth to draw water, and I say to her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water of thy pitcher to drink;
              44 And she say to me, Both drink thou, and I will also draw for thy camels: let the same be the woman whom the LORD hath appointed out for my master’s son.
              45 And before I had done speaking in mine heart, behold, Rebekah came forth with her pitcher on her shoulder; and she went down unto the well, and drew water: and I said unto her, Let me drink, I pray thee.
              46 And she made haste, and let down her pitcher from her shoulder, and said, Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also: so I drank, and she made the camels drink also.
              47 And I asked her, and said, Whose daughter art thou? And she said, The daughter of Bethuel, Nahor’s son, whom Milcah bare unto him: and I put the earring upon her face, and the bracelets upon her hands.
              48 And I bowed down my head, and worshipped the LORD, and blessed the LORD God of my master Abraham, which had led me in the right way to take my master’s brother’s daughter unto his son.
              49 And now if ye will deal kindly and truly with my master, tell me: and if not, tell me; that I may turn to the right hand, or to the left.
              50 Then Laban and Bethuel answered and said, The thing proceedeth from the LORD: we cannot speak unto thee bad or good.
              51 Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her, and go, and let her be thy master’s son’s wife, as the LORD hath spoken.
              52 And it came to pass, that, when Abraham’s servant heard their words, he worshipped the LORD, bowing himself to the earth.
              53 And the servant brought forth jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment, and gave them to Rebekah: he gave also to her brother and to her mother precious things.
              54 And they did eat and drink, he and the men that were with him, and tarried all night; and they rose up in the morning, and he said, Send me away unto my master.

              No one even tells Rebecca about the deal, let alone asks her consent. The servant gets a wife for his master in the same manner as he would get a puppy. In the morning, when he is about to leave the issue of consent arises, obviously unexpectedly.

              The old testament, and many present day Jewish rituals, make no sense in a society where female consent was expected or required.

              >if you guys had the courage of your convictions, you would tell women they were property, albeit very specially protected property, which imposes great obligations on its owner, and when you raised the status of women by requiring their consent

              You are upset at Avraham’s slave, Eliezer, claiming that he was overstepping his authority at asking Rivka’s consent?

              Abraham’s servant does not ask for Rebekah’s consent. He is about to leave with her, when her brother starts stalling. Up till then no one has asked her consent, and there is no mention of her even being told the deal, though she must have figured it out when she received her dowry.

              Notice the order of events. First the deal, then the payment and dowry, then they go to sleep. In the morning the servant is about to leave with Rebekah, and Rebekah’s brother starts being difficult. Then they ask Rebekah. Who “consents” after being married (since the payment makes the marriage) and without ever having met the man she has just been married to.

              >Everyone acts as if Ruth is property. She is not present when Boaz goes off to dicker with his kinsman. They settle her fate and Naomi’s fate in her absence without input from her.

              She gave her consent the previous night.

              That influenced Boaz, but it was his choice to be so influenced. He still settled her fate with his kinsman in her absence. Her consent had no legal effect. He could have made the same deal with his and her kinsman without ever speaking to her. If her consent mattered, Boaz would not have needed to cut a deal with his and her kinsman.

              Again, you have no textual proof of her absence at the marriage, nor can you point at any other points in the Torah where there is a marriage with the wife not there. This is retarded on the face of it-if the woman who is supposedly being married dies in the meantime, then what?

              In the case of the marriage of Abraham’s son, I suppose that Abraham might have asked for a refund.

              >You don’t admit to abandoning the old rules, and neither do you admit to endorsing the old rules.

              We know what the old rules actually are from our tradition

              Your quite recent and deliberately evasive and ambiguous tradition. Female consent being a requirement for marriage does not go back very far at all, and you still practice rituals that make no sense in the context of a society where female consent is a requirement – you still do that business with the shoe.

              Eh? The events in the Book of Ruth take place long after the events of Yitzhak’s marriage to Rivka, which required consent.

              That it required consent evidently came as a surprise to her, her father, and Abraham’s servant. She had already been given her dowry the day before the issue of consent arose.

              >Supposing it to be true, supposing the elders were judges, the christian commentators do not believe that they got to do any judging in the Book of Ruth. Thus, the book of Ruth is not evidence that elders were judges in that time.

              The elders are identified as judges in Deuteronomy and in Josephus.

              I am pretty sure they are not identified as judges in Deuteronomy.

      • Orthodox says:

        You can also remove God from the equation: maybe this is natural selection at work. In a highly technically advanced society, there’s advanced selection at the high end.

        Imagine Maslow’s pyramid of natural selection. In pre-history, people who cannot find food and shelter die. Always there is disease. Next up safety. People who organized and formed efficient groups wiped out other groups. Eventually, selection takes place at the level of values. People/ideologies than do not favor children are selected against.

        Religion is an evolutionary advantage, it is a value system that can defeat other value systems given enough time. God plays the long game. Once this selection process is complete, there will be a long period of social stability because the population will have been heavily selected for having evolutionary advantaged values.

        This is sort of the reverse of the dysgenic argument. The dysgenic argument is in part that, many people who would have died in harsher conditions have been saved by medicine etc. Similarly, in the past, many people susceptible to poor values were saved by very traditional/religious society. It just happens that many of these people are high IQ, but from a God or evolutionary view, it’s not IQ that being shredded.

        • Kgaard says:

          Orthodox — Interesting theory that natural selection is selecting for religion, basically above all else. Kind of disturbing in that I like to think of myself as being at the top of the Darwinian ladder and yet am not religious and perhaps not coincidentally am childless.

          The problem with religion as the defining Darwinian trait is that our received religions are technically false. So you’re proposing that the weeding-out mechanism be adherence to false doctrine. Almost by definition that’s anti-high-IQ in many cases. So you’re asking religion to do a lot. Doesn’t mean you are wrong though.

          • jim says:

            Natural selection is not selecting for religion. Some religions, such as progressivism and New Age, are profoundly harmful to fertility.

            In order to reproduce, need an enforceable contract between a man and a woman. And since a household, like a ship, can only have one captain, that contract has to designate the husband as head of the family. So, failing state enforcement of such contracts, people belonging to religions that socially enforce such contracts, will reproduce.

          • jay says:

            I think what he is referring to is theism which the new atheists automatically assume is religion. However there is such thing as an atheist religion such as you state that renders its members non-fertile.

  13. peppermint says:

    hm, we want to try to prevent slave girls from getting impregnated by their masters, because it is presumably eugenic for them to have children by their wife

    • jim says:

      Seems to be happening, though I don’t have the data.

      The big problem with Dubai is that women generally have a higher status than employees sponsored by their employers. I think the fertility rate would go right up if women with parents or husbands in Dubai were as subject to their authority, or more subject to their authority, than employer sponsored employees.

  14. Okthe says:

    Proof nazis were unsuccessful at upping fertility?

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