Scott Alexander’s blog used to be good, but now he has been terrorized out of politics. Therefore boring. The problem was he purged all frequent commentors to the right of him out of the comments, which means that he had only enemies in his comments. And, being the rightmost, was persecuted. He has stopped posting on politics, I assume as a result of this persecution.
Every so often I see someone reeling in shock and horror that we cannot possibly tolerate any connection with Person P, because they have some connection with person Q, who went to an event that was also attended by person Y, who has some connection with person Z, and, gasp, shock, horror, person Z has some connection with the “extreme” right.
Meanwhile posters, badges, and tee shirts of notorious communist mass murderers continue to sell well, and checking academic syllabi, one regularly reads questions of the form “explain why this noted communist mass murderer was amazingly wonderful, and why those whom he had eradicated were vile scum of the earth”, which questions usually contain very clear hints as to exactly what the answer is supposed to be.
If one follows this policy, and one’s friends and enemies also follow this policy, then one’s enemies are one’s friends and one’s friends are one’s enemies.
Thus the tea partiers and rinos quarrel for republican pre selection, but, once republican preselection is over, the tea party allies with the rinos, the rinos ally with the democrats, and the democrats ally with the foreign enemies of America. The right acts towards the left the way an abused woman acts towards her boyfriend. Hence the pattern of inner party and outer party. The permanent government is innermost, then then democrats, and the republicans are the outer party.
[…] Source: Jim […]
Faggot blocked me for calling out some recent bit of his retarded bullshit. Fuck ‘im.
Maybe he’s be less inclined to ban you if you didn’t call him a faggot.
I’m calling him a faggot BECAUSE he blocked me. My comments on his actual blog were perfectly polite, albeit racist/sexist/homophobic/islamophobic/etc, hence unacceptable, hence banned. But nothing I said was false or hostile. I was just trying to redpill some braindead liberals.
Therein lies the problem. You were trying to teach parrots to think. Unless you’re on a higher perch within the Cathedral than they are they will not even try to repeat back what you are saying.
I appreciate the link in your name. I’ve been meaning to reread the archive at UR for sometime now. It made for a good reminder.
Careful, friend. That homosexualist almost got you to squawk “I’m not anti-sodomy!” Which, of course, is the winning, albeit completely short-sighted, rhetorical technique that Leftists have used decade after decade…
Best regards,
A.J.P.
No, there was never any danger of my capitulating on the issue of sodomy. However, I do think it’s rude to use words that people don’t like, especially when using their blog as a platform, and it is relevant that I never called him a faggot on his blog. The purpose of pointing out Scott Siskind’s faggotry here is that he did not ban me for calling him a faggot – he banned me for embarrassing him by pointing out how stupid something he said was. That’s just how Jews operate, I guess.
Steve Sailer left a long and thoughtful reply on the topic of the post.
Nobody replied.
The usual psycho friends of SA start to whine about their parents.
Lively threads of 10+ comments each.
Freedom/power to insane people really destroys everything. You have to post more on your theory of committees. Best stuff you’ve written.
The dynamic there is pretty clear.
No one wants to hear anything that will pierce their own particular bubble of delusion so they all herd together and police each other’s bubbles.
Anything that threatens the bubbles is threatening and gets calls for bans.
It doesn’t map precisely to politics.
Not what I see.
What I see is that right gets banned, left does not get banned. No one bans commies.
What I also see is a pattern of one way alliances. Tea party allies with rinos, rinos with democrats. If Alice is to the left of Bob, Bob wants to be friends with Alice, but Alice does not want to be friends with Bob.
Scott Alexander banned those commenters to his right, so that in the end, he was the rightmost. On esr’s blog, winter defends the liquidation of the kulaks, and esr does not blink. I defend Jim Crow, and he reels in horror and considers banning me.
Here’s a particularly bizarre example of this. Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou held a conference on the wonders of communism is South Korea last year:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-eperjesi/communists-meet-gangnam-style_b_4047098.html
Being a commie was once a good way to get arrested in South Korea, for obvious reasons. Now Maoist former Khmer Rouge supporters are invited to hold high profile events in the rich part of town, where they assure you that their communism is not the communism that wants to kill you. It’s the fun communism.
To paraphrase “Of course we are not planning to take everything you possess and enslave you. On the contrary, we are highly motivated by the milk of human status. Look how high status we are. If we were planning terror, confiscation, and slavery, would we be this high status?”
I think an outright ban on communist talk is as counterproductive as an outright ban on denying the holocaust of the Jews, but communism needs to be made low status, the way nazism is made low status.
This only applies to decaying states. During the English restoration, I assume there were no friends to the left, and no enemies to the right.
Whichever direction the country is heading, those people will be your new masters. If leftward, then you will soon be ruled by the left. If rightward, then you will soon be ruled by the right.
So, in anticipation of future punishment or reward, you submit to your future rulers. Or, a current activist, eager to please the future rulers, does something nasty to you in the name of the future rulers.
Bill Ayers was effectively paid by the US government to start the Weathermen. They rewarded him with status, power and money. Mostly through academia. Of course, he had to wait a few years, and let the terrorism charges die down. Was Ayers a rational actor, simply responding to incentives? I don’t know, but he certainly could have been.
Not supposed to be a response to this comment
Not news. SK has had local commies for decades; they used to riot heavily every few years, and Reagan put them in power in the 1980s.
And yet…despite a century of steady movement leftwards since Ned Lamont and his buddies (who were Communists and big fans of Lenin,) we do not see the US govt taking everybody’s stuff and enslaving them.
After FDR, the U.S. didn’t get Stalin. It got Truman and Eisenhower. Who ran what amounted to a fascist empire, with a giant agitprop/military/industrial/intelligence complex, but didn’t send millions of American kulaks to log trees in the Yukon.
The anglosphere version was about women and blacks, to which were recently added assorted sexual deviants, rather than the proletariat, which made opposition to private property less central to the anglosphere version – and opposition to the family more central.
Survivorship bias. Russia approached its left singularity in 1932. The anglosphere is still approaching its left singularity.
After both have maxed out, then will be the time to compare kill levels.
>The anglosphere version was about women and blacks, to which were recently added assorted sexual deviants, rather than the proletariat, which made opposition to private property less central to the anglosphere version – and opposition to the family more central.
The anglosphere version today is about women and blacks. The anglosphere version in the 20s, 30s and 40s was about property. See the UN’s list of “rights.” Freedom from want is on there. Freedom from chauvinism and cis-het oppression is not. Furthermore, to the extent that the anglosphere version in the early 20th century was about women as far as Sanger and the suffragettes were concerned, the Soviets were as well, with Kollontai et al.
>Survivorship bias. Russia approached its left singularity in 1932.
1932 was not a singularity any more than 1922 was. You don’t come out of a singularity, you accelerate into the cliff face. The Soviets kept it going until 1939 at least. 1932 was the beginning of a consolidation of power, with the countryside being crushed in order to mobilize manpower and resources for urbanization and industrialization.
>The anglosphere is still approaching its left singularity.
I think the ever accelerating movement leftwards is obviously a model that doesn’t work very well across the board.
If you were transported back to 1935-era America and attempted to use it to forecast the future, you would have predicted a very different-looking 1955.
There are very significant sectors where things have moved rightwards. For instance, gun ownership, gold ownership, tax rates for the upper brackets, gentrification of the inner city.
There are, obviously, more sectors where things have moved leftwards.
But it’s not across the board.
Anglosphere leftism started to alarmingly transform society with the early nineteenth century doctrine that it was so incredibly unlikely that a woman would do something immoral that no amount of evidence could constitute proof she had done anything immoral, and furthermore if anyone paid attention to evidence that a woman had done something immoral, that was very bad person to cast such horrid aspersions on a woman.
It logically followed from this principle that the apparatus of coercion to keep women in line was mere cruelty, was completely unnecessary, and should be applied only to men – in practice, primarily to aristocrats and royalty.
Then we had the abolition of slavery: London took over the colonies from the colonialists. Although its undeniable that the colonialists were a bunch of slave trading brigands who were apt to engage in massacre and ethnic cleansing, apt to steal anything not nailed down and pry it up if it was nailed down, the London takeover nonetheless was strangely unpopular with the colonized, which I attribute to the tendency of do gooders to casually do bad to far away strangers, but I digress.
Then we had the Matrimonial Causes act, which emancipated women – turned marriage legally into a completely one way contract that effectively bound the husband, but not the wife. The old marriage contract, however continued to be socially enforced. And, at about the same time, Dickens proposed to turn poor people into middle class people by giving them money.
We had once poster girl after another manufactured, starting with Florence Nightingale (poster girl for the government taking over the military support functions previously performed by camp followers) Marie Curie, and of course the expendable Amelia Earhart.
Then, under pressure from the communists, they kind of lost interest in women and blacks from 1944 to around 1964 and during that period focused on the proletariat and capitalism. But soon enough, back to their original program: Women and blacks.
In 1932, hit the cliff face.
Look at Russian leftism as starting with Tsar Alexander the liberator – starts out reasonably left, and then just gets steadily lefter and lefter faster and faster all the way from Tsar Alexander to the liquidation of the kulaks. Nothing dramatic happened in 1922. 1922 fits right on the curve. And then in 1932-34 it just abruptly stops getting lefter, and gets a little bit righter. Khruschev a little bit more right, Putin gets cheered by reactionaries and makes Greek Orthodoxy the state religion.
They started killing people for being too far left in 1934, restoring workplace discipline, eased up on the peasants in 1932-34, eased up religious repression. The League of Militant Atheists reached its maximum membership in 1931, and its activities were considerably curtailed by 1934. In 1931, if you disrespected a member of the League of Militant Atheist, something very bad would happen to you, making them very high status. In 1933, they were just irritating nuisances.
Obviously at some point it breaks down, since it predicts infinite leftism in finite time, and by definition you can never actually reach infinite leftism, but it accurately describes the periods it is intended to describe. Once the positive feedback cycle sets in, your civilization just gets lefter and lefter, faster and faster, until things blow up.
You now have gay marriage in Israel, and I bet that just as you found female emancipation in the Talmud, you will soon find gay marriage there too.
Israel is an unprincipled exception to the progressive position on racism colonialism and all that stuff, and if you were good leftists, you would let the Muslims kill you all. Each unprincipled exception gets curtailed further and further. You retreated from Gaza, you are not going back. The Palestinian authority uses the money you give it to fund terrorists to murder random Jews. You arrest the murderers, but not those who funded and trained them, then let them out in yet another peace initiative. Slowly and reluctantly, in very tiny steps, you move towards the politically correct position of allowing yourselves to be murdered.
If Israel retakes Gaza, and does not give the Gazans citizenship as expiation for so doing, then Israel will falsify the left singularity model.
If gay marriage, cannot retake Gaza. If you cannot move rightwards on Gay Marriage, cannot move rightwards on Gaza, if you cannot move rightwards on Gaza, cannot move rightwards on keeping Jews from being murdered.
If I looked at the second hand on my watch, by which I mean if I looked at the New Deal, I would have been badly wrong in my predictions. If, instead, I looked at Cromwell’s puritans, the nineteenth century enclosures, and the divorce of Queen Caroline, would have been pretty accurate.
>There are very significant sectors where things have moved rightwards. For instance, gun ownership, gold ownership, tax rates for the upper brackets, gentrification of the inner city.
I keep getting told I have more gun rights now, yet when I check which guns laws are enforced in my state I have fewer rights than I had 10 years ago. Hell the courts just said that Californians can get CCW’s without having prove good cause but the local sheriffs ignore the courts with without being penalized.
I can own gold, but only if the US government is informed that I own it and can thus size it at any time they feel like it. Gentrification is part of the process of progressives pushing blacks out so they’ll move into the white suburbs to continue their war on working whites. I hardly see how that’s a move towards the right.
On the property front the local police spend more and more time robbing people on the roads for any sum money above 1,000 through assets seizure and I had the cops ingratiate me for close to an hour on the side of the road because they wanted to seize my car. No one likes traveling long distances via car anymore because of the predatory behavior of the American police. Government agencies are stealing anything that’s not nailed down. That shows a trend towards collapse, not away from it.
The anglosphere Progs completely forgot about the blacks after the Reconstruction ended and didn’t remember them until the 1930s, when some of them like Wirth started to see them as potential weapons in the war against unassimilated white minorities. The view didn’t really take off until the 1960s. This is almost 100 years of no mainstream prog interest. And certainly when they did start caring about the blacks, it was only in the context of a nationalities policy a la Stalin. It was not actually about the blacks but about power, breaking up hostile neighborhoods and voting blocks.
I don’t think you actually know very much about Russian history-this is one of those cases where you would sound informed except to someone who was actually somewhat informed. Hertzen and the Decembrists preceded Alexander by quite a ways. 1922 was the peak of an artificial famine in Southern Ukraine and Povolzhye which killed millions, induced the same way and for similar reasons to the 1932-33 famine. Unlike the latter, the earlier famine led to NEP, the relaxation of government control over the economy, a swing rightwards, which lasted until Stalin started going after his enemies for serious. The “left leaning” followers of Trotsky were crushed in 1927-1929. The “right opposition”, followers of Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, were crushed in 1929-1930. Then they were allowed to live until 1936/37, at which point they were wiped out in a series of purges.
To see this whole process as a movement rightwards is missing the point. It was simply the consolidation of power, with all real and potential enemies destroyed in turn. The League of Militant Atheists had served its function in destroying religious opposition, and could thus itself be destroyed. The Law of the Three Stalks had served its purpose in destroying the peasants and making them flee into the cities or crushing them into abject slavery (they didn’t even have passports from 1935 to 1974, meaning, no right to leave their assigned district, and violations were criminally punishable.) Then it was time to crush those peasants who had fled into the cities and were working in the new industrial sector built by Americans through Amtorg, imposing progressively harsher penalties for absenteeism, lateness, etc.
I fail to see any kind of right-ness in any of this. It was just the progressive crushing of all opposition and the consolidation of Stalin’s power in preparation for outwards expansion. Trotsky proposed pretty much the same thing. It’s not like there was any principle to any of it, except for power consolidation-the same Bukharin whom Stalin had crushed in 1929 for rightwards leanings was executed in 1937 for leftwards leanings. If this is right-wing, then 1984 was right-wing.
This is not true: “Separate but equal”, with more and more worrying about equality the whole time. Plus the entire imperialist movement was “White man’s burden” – left wing and getting steadily lefter the whole damn time. The imperialist movement was largely motivated by anti slavery and the desire to stop white people far from the capital from getting rich, to bring the colonialists under central control, a program left wing to its very core. When the anglosphere called the German’s “Huns” in world war I, they meant that anglosphere imperialism in nonwhite regions was lefter, more humane, progressive, more intended to benefit nonwhites, than German imperialism in nonwhite regions, to which the Germans replied that their imperialism was lefter.
Your version of russian history is Commie apologist history.
Everyone wants to blame Stalin, because they don’t want to blame communism, the party, and Trotsky. Supposedly communism would have been just lovely except for this one bad man.
“Dizzy with success” is the voice of a frightened man riding the tiger. He is appeasing and apologizing to the terrorists, while trying to get them to ease up, not commanding them to ease up, still less commanding them to commit terror.
Until 1932, Stalin was riding the tiger. He had to be lefter than the next guy, or he would be dead. When the League of Militant Atheists was quietly disempowered some time in 1932, this meant that the continuous everyday pressure on each person to be lefter than the next eased up. A few years later, he started making a peace with religious orthodoxy.
Similarly, people stopped voting for ever higher quotas, and then voting to overfullfill their quotas. Instead they just got told what their quotas were. That is consolidation of power, but it is also the pressure on everyone to be ever lefter easing up – including the pressure on Stalin to be ever lefter easing up. A system where quotas are set from above is consolidation of power – but it is a lot less leftist than a system where the masses “spontaneously and enthusiastically” vote for ever higher quotas.
>You now have gay marriage in Israel, and I bet that just as you found female emancipation in the Talmud, you will soon find gay marriage there too.
Care to put a time horizon on that bet?
I think that within 25 years we will take Gaza again, and within 35 will implement Rabbi Kahane’s program.
I see the physical carriers of leftism here not reproducing, except insofar as they adopt Judaism, and the right wing reproducing, and not being converted to progressivism. It’s not too hard to project forward.
>I keep getting told I have more gun rights now, yet when I check which guns laws are enforced in my state I have fewer rights than I had 10 years ago.
California is…different.
>Hell the courts just said that Californians can get CCW’s without having prove good cause but the local sheriffs ignore the courts with without being penalized.
I suspect that soon, some of the sheriffs will stop ignoring the courts. All it takes is a couple to build momentum on.
>I can own gold, but only if the US government is informed that I own it and can thus size it at any time they feel like it.
?
>Gentrification is part of the process of progressives pushing blacks out so they’ll move into the white suburbs to continue their war on working whites.
You have to put them somewhere. The fact that the most naturally valuable real estate is being reclaimed by whites, even annoying yuppies and hipsters, is a good sign.
>On the property front the local police spend more and more time robbing people on the roads for any sum money above 1,000 through assets seizure and I had the cops ingratiate me for close to an hour on the side of the road because they wanted to seize my car.
I’ve gotten pulled over a few times and never had this experience, nor have heard of any of my friends, family and acquaintances that had it. Not saying it’s impossible or nonexistent. Just saying…
>No one likes traveling long distances via car anymore because of the predatory behavior of the American police.
I’ve driven across the US probably about 20 times (if you count going from the Rockies to the East Coast and back in there,) and never encountered anything like this.
If your car is too nice (red sportscar) or too beaten up, police will stop you and find something you are guilty of. If you have a nice bland car, you will be OK.
After the 2013 election, gay marriage was more normalized than before the 2013 election. They are creeping it up on you right now. Israelis can get gay married now, though with difficulty, and not rabbinically. Israeli papers and media carry disgusting pictures of gay couples acting as if they were normal couples, normalizing homosexuality.
So, have the rabbis accepted gay marriage when they tolerate the existing degree of legalization? Or have they only accepted it when some rabbis are allowed to gay marry people. Or have they only accepted it when it is mandatory for all rabbis to gay marry people and recognize gay marriage, and any rabbi that resists gets sanctioned? And the sanctions themselves will creep up on you, so that people will deny that resisting rabbis are being sanctioned – its just that everyone spontaneously saw the light, and no one likes those horrid people that failed to see the light.
Right now you have gay marriage, just barely, and next year you will have it rather more. There will not be a specific date that the rabbis accepted it, except in retrospect – but they have already accepted the camel’s nose in the tent.
So my specific prediction is that by the time of the next election, there will be substantially more of the camel’s nose in the tent, and less objection to the camel. After civil marriage, then the heat goes on the rabbis.
To read into official Stalinist statements any kind of reflection of what Stalin himself was feeling or thinking is foolish, because they are completely formal meaning, and no real meaning whatsoever (to use Burnham’s terminology.) The field of Sovietology was based on the attempt to decipher a real meaning from the formal, which was a foolish enterprise on the face of it, but kept Sovietologists lucratively employed.
No apologetics necessary-had Trotsky or Bukharin risen to the top, they would have employed the same exact methods to consolidate power.
As for quotas, the quotas for arrests and executions continued to come down from the top and be exceeded due to enthusiasm from below as late as 1938 at least. Your read into things (that conditions got more bearable or humane after 1932) is not confirmed by any of the dozens of memoirs (Samizdat and not) that I’ve read from the time period, from all layers of Soviet society.
>If your car is too nice (red sportscar) or too beaten up, police will stop you and find something you are guilty of.
I’ve driven some awful beaters, and had friends who drove very nice sports cars (and beaters, of course,) and this was not an impression any of us got.
>So, have the rabbis accepted gay marriage when they tolerate the existing degree of legalization?
I guess in the same sense that they accept marriage between Jews and non-Jews. The government allows them to get married overseas and recognizes the marriage. In the eyes of the rabbinical establishment and the Torah, those aren’t marriages at all. Needless to say, if the government gives two men or a man and a chair a marriage certificate, the rabbis will not recognize it.
>Or have they only accepted it when some rabbis are allowed to gay marry people.
No rabbis (in the sense of a Torah Jew who has smicha and is recognized by a significant number of other rabbis as a rabbi) will perform “marriages” between homosexuals. Of course, if you first redefine the term “rabbi” to include women and non-Jews and Jews who don’t keep the precepts of the Torah, then you can have “rabbis” “marrying” homosexuals.
>Or have they only accepted it when it is mandatory for all rabbis to gay marry people and recognize gay marriage, and any rabbi that resists gets sanctioned?
This will not happen. I would be happy to put a bet on it. The religious establishment in Israel is pretty strong and getting stronger. There is a crucial difference between rabbis and Protestant pastors and Catholic priests.
In fact, I’ll be willing to bet that Orthodox rabbis in the US will not be “marrying” homosexuals to each other in any time period you’d care to name.
>So my specific prediction is that by the time of the next election, there will be substantially more of the camel’s nose in the tent, and less objection to the camel.
This is not a very specific prediction.
Obviously “Dizzy with success is no indication of what Stalin really thought, and no one suggests that it is. But in “Dizzy with success” Stalin was kissing terrorist ass – therefore they had power, and he was afraid of them. Official progressive history, your history, is that the red terror was just fearful communists obediently carrying out Stalin’s commands, that there was only one bad guy in Russia and the communist party and that bad guy was Stalin.
If that had been the situation, Stalin would have simply commanded them, not groveled to them and pleaded with them. What we hear instead is the classic mechanism of the left singularity. Everyone claims to be even lefter than the other guy, fearing the consequences of insufficient leftism, Stalin as frightened as everyone else.
I was stopped in Redwood City for driving a beater, and police attempted to intimidate me into confessing to vague and nonsensical crimes. As a result I immediately dumped the beater and purchased a new car. My son was fairly regularly stopped for driving a hot sportscar.
The trouble is that the way the Cathedral amends other people’s religions is that it allows them to pretend that their religion has not been amended, even though everyone acts as if the religion has in fact been amended. And then eventually, several decades later, several decades after the reality of your religious practice has in fact changed, people forget that they were pretending, or those that keep on pretending are destroyed. There is a very long gap between the real change in the religious practices, and the open and official change in religious practices.
Before long, you will be saying that the workaround for gay marriage is just mere formality, and always was, just as you now say that the workaround for levirate marriage is just a mere formality, and always was.
Here is another prediction: Until the state of Israel refuses to recognize gay marriages, and refuses to give gays anything that has legally the same consequences as marriage, until it ejects every last nostril hair of the camel’s nose from the tent, the state of Israel will not be able to retake Gaza, nor even fight wars in Gaza very effectively.
Gay marriage is a reflection of Cathedral power, and retreat from Gaza is a reflection of Cathedral power. As one goes, so goes the other.
>But in “Dizzy with success†Stalin was kissing terrorist ass – therefore they had power, and he was afraid of them.
Stalin, in classical Oriental despot fashion, spoke soothing words to his enemies before murdering them in horrible ways. This does not indicate any kind of fear. He was a fan of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.
>Official progressive history, your history, is that the red terror was just fearful communists obediently carrying out Stalin’s commands, that there was only one bad guy in Russia and the communist party and that bad guy was Stalin.
Now you’re just making stuff up and putting it in my mouth. Stalin was a bad guy who clawed his way to the top of other bad guys by playing them against each other. Any of them would have done the same (probably, although it’s possible that a Deng would have emerged from NEP) once the claws came out.
>If that had been the situation, Stalin would have simply commanded them, not groveled to them and pleaded with them.
Stalin, unlike you, was a master politician. Commanding your possible enemies to do your will is not a smart thing to do. Soothing them and then crushing them is a smart thing to do.
>Everyone claims to be even lefter than the other guy, fearing the consequences of insufficient leftism, Stalin as frightened as everyone else.
Nonsense. Until Stalin eliminated Trotsky as a political threat, the USSR had enjoyed about 6 years of increasing prosperity and normalcy. Stalin didn’t do what he did out of fear. He did it to consolidate power internally before reaching out externally.
>I was stopped in Redwood City for driving a beater, and police attempted to intimidate me into confessing to vague and nonsensical crimes.
Did the cops confiscate your beater or anything else? Doing traffic stops based on profiles and then doing obnoxious field interrogations of anyone willing to play along is what cops do regularly. Although I’ve never had an interaction with a cop on a traffic stop lasting over 30 minutes, and that was during a DUI stop (my girlfriend was driving, and made a wrong turn into a secured military facility after having about 3 beers too many.) Jacking you for your stuff is not, in my experience and the experience of anyone I’ve ever spoken to, what cops do regularly.
>My son was fairly regularly stopped for driving a hot sportscar.
And each time they confiscated it?
> There is a very long gap between the real change in the religious practices, and the open and official change in religious practices.
Let’s make a specific prediction about a “real change in religious practices,” shall we?
>Before long, you will be saying that the workaround for gay marriage is just mere formality, and always was, just as you now say that the workaround for levirate marriage is just a mere formality, and always was.
The workaround for levirate marriage is to be found immediately following the commandment for levirate marriage in the Torah, explicitly, and there is a mass of Talmudic literature going back 1700 years or so talking about it. Gay marriage is not to be found except as a theoretical atrocity in line with human flesh being weighed out at the market, which even the non-Jews aren’t depraved enough to do.
>Here is another prediction: Until the state of Israel refuses to recognize gay marriages, and refuses to give gays anything that has legally the same consequences as marriage, until it ejects every last nostril hair of the camel’s nose from the tent, the state of Israel will not be able to retake Gaza, nor even fight wars in Gaza very effectively.
That’s probably true. But, so what? Obviously, gay civil marriage will be repealed right around the same time as civic (as opposed to human) rights for non-Jews in Israel, recognition of marriages between Jews and non-Jews made overseas, and Arab autonomy in Yehuda, Shomron and Gaza.
No, the classic oriental despot has his enemies approach the throne kowtowing nine times. Then when they get close enough to the throne that they can experience the immense honor of licking the floor on which the royal feet have trodden, has his guards cut off their heads.
That sounds like restatement of my position – that everyone including Stalin was frightened that they might be deemed insufficiently left wing.
No it was not a workaround, not a mere formality, but the real thing, and the behavior of all the males depicted in the Book of Ruth shows it was the real thing. Ruth could not give herself to Boaz because she was the property of Naomi, and Naomi could not give Ruth to Boaz because Naomi was the property of Elimelech’s brother, so, to resolve the problem, Boaz prevailed on Elimelech’s brother to quit his claim. The right to dispose of Ruth was not Ruth’s, nor Naomi’s, but belonged to Elimelech’s brother. With Elimelech’s brother quitting his claim, Naomi became the property of Boaz, thus Boaz could pronounce Ruth his wife to the witnesses, without the potential inconvenience of the witnesses needing to witness Ruth’s opinion on the matter.
What Ruth wanted or consented to was never at any time legally relevant, and what Naomi wanted or consented to only became legally relevant when Elimelech’s brother released her in favor of Boaz.
So as long as you are moving closer to the Cathedral Cause of the Day, you are moving further from getting the Land of Israel back – and closer to getting a democratic one state solution.
>No, the classic oriental despot has his enemies approach the throne kowtowing nine times.
Once he has seized and consolidated power, sure.
>That sounds like restatement of my position – that everyone including Stalin was frightened that they might be deemed insufficiently left wing.
Or insufficiently right wing. Or 20 minutes late to work. Or in possession of 3 stolen ears of wheat. Or behind on the quota for confessions by enemies of the people.
>No it was not a workaround, not a mere formality, but the real thing, and the behavior of all the males depicted in the Book of Ruth shows it was the real thing.
Unlike other cases where there is no explicitly stated workaround (like the rapist of an unbetrothed girl, who is forced to marry his victim, unless she doesn’t wish to be married to him,) here there is a procedure to be followed if he doesn’t wish to marry her.
>Ruth could not give herself to Boaz because she was the property of Naomi, and Naomi could not give Ruth to Boaz because Naomi was the property of Elimelech’s brother, so, to resolve the problem, Boaz prevailed on Elimelech’s brother to quit his claim.
He was not Elimelech’s brother but an unspecified kinsman. If you are going to go the sola scriptura/Karaite route, you might as well know the scripture you are attempting to interpret. And again, your interpretation is stupid. There is absolutely nothing that says that a man’s widow becomes the property of his brother. And there is nothing that says that she becomes the property of his mother (and in fact Ruth obviously and explicitly chooses to stay with Naomi at the beginning of the book, which is not a choice property has.) You are just making things up.
>The right to dispose of Ruth was not Ruth’s, nor Naomi’s, but belonged to Elimelech’s brother. With Elimelech’s brother quitting his claim, Naomi became the property of Boaz, thus Boaz could pronounce Ruth his wife to the witnesses, without the potential inconvenience of the witnesses needing to witness Ruth’s opinion on the matter.
Again-you’re making things up, reinterpreting things retroactively to fit a crazy theory.
>What Ruth wanted or consented to was never at any time legally relevant, and what Naomi wanted or consented to only became legally relevant when Elimelech’s brother released her in favor of Boaz.
Nowhere in the Book of Ruth is Naomi spoken of as property, or is the question of anybody marrying her raised.
>So as long as you are moving closer to the Cathedral Cause of the Day, you are moving further from getting the Land of Israel back – and closer to getting a democratic one state solution.
We have different social sectors. The judiciary, dominated by pointy-haired lesbians wishing nothing more than to emulate Harvard, is moving in a different direction from the mass of the people.
You are pig shit ignorant about Soviet History
Before 1936, being prematurely left could be bad for your career, but it did not get you killed, just rusticated, whereas being insufficiently left got you killed.
It was not until 1936, 1934 at the earliest, that you could get killed both for being too far right or too far left.
In 1930 party members were being tortured and sent to Siberia under conditions likely to lead to their deaths, or executed, for supporting policies that Stalin had supported not long ago, and was plausibly suspected of still supporting.
In 1932, party members demanded the re-admission of leftists to the party, which quite certainly would have led to Stalin being outvoted, tortured, and executed.
Kirov, seeing which way the wind was blowing, switched sides and supported readmission. In 1934, Kirov was still opposing Stalin and supporting re-admission, which is to say, supporting Stalin losing power and getting executed for insufficient leftism.
In 1934 Stalin proceeded to kiss Kirov’s ass, as if Kirov had won and Stalin had lost, then furtively and deniably murdered Kirov, then blamed the murder on Stalin’s other opponents inside the party. And in 1936, convicted his opponents to the right and the left of this crime and executed them.
Until 1934, still safer to be prematurely left, than to fall behind the zeitgeist of the times. Until 1934, if you were going to err, the safest way to err was to be lefter sooner, rather than lefter too late.
Until 1934, to move too far left too soon could merely get you rusticated or exiled, whereas to fail to move leftwards soon enough got you tortured and sent to Siberia.
Trotsky and company had been expelled for supporting left wing policies too soon. But now the party was further left than these policies, further left than the policies Trotsky had been expelled for supporting. So, logically, they should be re-admitted and rehabilitated – except that of course as soon as they had been re-admitted and rehabilitated, they would have then supported policies even further left, policies which would have probably made Pol Pot turn pale – because their re-admission would have demonstrated the safety of being prematurely left, at a time when it was regularly demonstrated that it was horribly dangerous to fail to be sufficiently left sufficiently soon.
During the positive feedback loop that leads to the left singularity, if you are at the top, the movement ever leftwards continually threatens to devour you, but if you are close to the top, continually offers the opportunity to surf to the top by being lefter than the competition. What could very easily have happened is that Kirov might have gotten Trotsky re-admitted, Stalin would have been sent to Siberia, Kirov would have landed on top, then Trotsky would repeat the process against Kirov. Then Trotsky might have held power for a very long time by continually shifting leftwards before anybody could outleft him, after the fashion of Chang Hsien-chong who reduced the population of Szechwan from three million to seven thousand, largely by torturing people to death.
Well, there are the plain words of the old testament, and the behavior of everyone in the Book of Ruth shows that these words, to them, meant what they said and said what they mean.
Deuteronomy 25:5 obliges a brother to marry the widow of his childless deceased brother Deuteronomy 25:7-10 allows him to refuse, to punished only by social opprobrium, but makes no provision for the widow to refuse..
And throughout the entire old testament, we just see women being assigned to men with no formal indication of consent. What the woman wants matters to the extent that the men in her life care, but there is no legal requirement that anyone has to care.
And what happens in the west is that when the people get too far out of line from the pointy haired lesbians, there is a massive propaganda offensive to bring them to heel, followed by selective firings, hate crime convictions, and so forth, and if this does not work, the government elects a new people.
I think I am seeing the propaganda offensive. Have the firings and hate crime convictions started yet?
>You are pig shit ignorant about Soviet History
>Before 1936, being prematurely left could be bad for your career, but it did not get you killed, just rusticated, whereas being insufficiently left got you killed.
Naturally. I’m very dumb.
I see Ivan Smirnov, a leftist opposition leader, getting kicked out of the party in 1928 and sentenced to 3 years exile, writing an “I’ve seen the light” letter, getting rehabilitated in the party, forming an underground group, getting busted and being sent to jail in 1933, where he stayed until execution (in conditions where, according to Alexander Orlov, a high-ranking NKVD defector, even prisoners’ families had no idea if they were alive or not.)
And I see Vasiliy Kayurov, a rightist opposition Communist, forming his Union of Marxist Leninists, getting arrested in the fall of 1932, kicked out of the party, then exiled, writing an “I’ve seen the light” letter, and then getting arrested in 1935.
And I see Martemyan Ryutin, a rightist, opposing the expropriation of the peasants and forced industrialization, getting kicked out of the party in 1930 and arrested, denying his guilt and being released in 1930 to be arrested in 1932 for organizing the Union of Marxist Leninists and sentenced to 10 years, then executed in 1937.
I could go on, but basically, I do not see that it was any more or less dangerous to be to the left or the right of Stalin pre-1932. It was obviously more dangerous to be associated with the (leftist or rightist) opposition in 1936 than in 1928-1932, which does not jive with your assertion that leftist terror was sweeping the country, steadily increasing until 1932.
I also can plainly see that Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s personal secretary until 1928 (at which point he defected,) wrote the following: “Вообще надо отноÑитьÑÑ Ñ‡Ñ€ÐµÐ·Ð²Ñ‹Ñ‡Ð°Ð¹Ð½Ð¾ ÑкептичеÑки к политичеÑким контурам оппозиций вÑех Ñтих годов. Обычно дело шло о борьбе за влаÑÑ‚ÑŒ. Противник обвинÑлÑÑ Ð² каком-то уклоне (правом, левом, кулацком, недооценке чего-то, переоценке, забвении чего-то, отÑтуплении от заветов Ильича и Ñ‚. д.), а на Ñамом деле вÑе Ñто было выдумано и раздуто: победив противника, ÑÐµÐ¹Ñ‡Ð°Ñ Ð¶Ðµ без вÑÑкого ÑтеÑÐ½ÐµÐ½Ð¸Ñ Ð¿Ñ€Ð¸Ð½Ð¸Ð¼Ð°Ð»Ð°ÑÑŒ его политика (ÐºÐ¾Ñ‚Ð¾Ñ€Ð°Ñ Ñ‚Ð¾Ð»ÑŒÐºÐ¾ что объÑвлÑлаÑÑŒ преÑтупной, меньшевиÑÑ‚Ñкой, кулацкой и Ñ‚. д.).” “In general, one should be very skeptical of the political description of oppositions during this whole time period. Generally, the issue at stake was the power struggle. One’s opponent would be accused of some sort of leanings (rightist, leftist, kulak, underassessment of something, overassessment of something, willfully forgetting something, stepping away from Lenin’s precepts, etc.), while in reality, this was all made up. The second the opponent was conquered, his politics were immediately adapted (though they had been declared criminal, menshevist, kulak, etc. just a short time ago.”
Whom should I believe, Bazhanov, who says that you can’t see the events of the period through the prism of left vs. right, or Jim Donald? Who has a better perspective on Stalin, his personal secretary, or some dude who was a Stalinist in the US in the 70s? Probably, Bazhanov was also pig shit ignorant of Soviet history. Dude didn’t even have a blog, or Wikipedia access, so…
Next, about whether Stalin was scared, as indicated by his tone in Dizziness from Success. Orlov, a high ranking NKVD defector and an intimate participant in the purges, says: ” Ð’Ñе знали, что не в обычаÑÑ… Сталина убирать наркома или члена Политбюро, ареÑÑ‚Ð¾Ð²Ñ‹Ð²Ð°Ñ ÐµÐ³Ð¾ на меÑте, при иÑполнении Ñлужебных обÑзанноÑтей. Прежде чем отдать раÑпорÑжение об ареÑте любого из Ñвоих Ñоратников, Сталин имел обыкновение отÑылать их на отдых или объÑвлÑÑ‚ÑŒ в газетах, что такой-то получает (либо получит) новое назначение.” “Everybody knew that it was not Stalin’s custom to get rid of a People’s Commissar or a member of the Politbureau by arresting him in place, while he was carrying out his duties. Before giving the order to arrest any of his comrades, Stalin would typically send them off to a vacation, or announce in the papers that such-and-such was getting (or would be getting) a new appointment.” The period under discussion is 1936, when Stalin’s grasp over the USSR was more complete than in 1932. Was he terrified of Molotov, who was the gentleman being sent off on vacation and lulled with soothing telegrams in the passage above? This is pretty obviously what I’m talking about-Stalin’s SOP was soothing his enemies right before crushing them. His tone or the things he said were no indicator of his thoughts and plans. But then again, Orlov didn’t have a blog either.
As for the Torah stuff-I don’t want to waste a bunch of time going through the same argument. Nowhere in the Torah does it say that you can marry a woman against her will, or treat her as property (with the exception of a minor whom her father sells to be married to the purchaser’s son when she reaches majority.) In fact, you are explicitly prohibited from selling a woman whom you took as spoils of war and then decided you didn’t want to marry-by extension, a wife is not property to be bought and sold. The one time the issue of a woman’s consent to marry is brought up explicitly, in the story of Rivka and Eliezer, her word is final in the issue. The Torah is extremely sparse, and the first record we have of how these legal issues were actually dealt with in practice is from the rabbis of the Talmud, who were 1800 years or so closer to these events than you and I are, and whose life’s work was their study and analysis. They say that a woman’s consent is always required for marriage. So against all that, your little sola scriptura exegesis is not very convincing to me. It doesn’t even strike me as being in particularly good faith.
As for firings and hate crime convictions-Israel was started as a socialist state, by socialists. The firings and hate crime convictions have always been with us. They are now less intense than they were 20 years ago, at which point they were less intense than 50 years ago.
Indeed. Quite so – but only because Stalin, and everyone else, was moving steadily and rapidly leftwards.
Clearly each of these many shifts by many party members was motivated by hope for power and fear of punishment – which tells us that the way to gain power and avoid punishment was to move leftwards.
By saying “relative to Stalin” you define out of existence the conspicuous and dramatic feature of the left singularity – movement left. Nikolai_Bukharin and company stop opposing Stalin on the basis of economic rationality, property rights, peasant motivation, and peasant incentives, and instead cozy up with Trotsky to oppose Stalin from the left, on grounds of equality and the classless society. If Stalin does not send the right to Siberia, it is because by the time Stalin gets around to sending the right to Siberia, they are already the left.
To attack Bukharin, Stalin moves left, attacks Bukharin for insufficient leftism. To counterattack Stalin, Bukharin moves left, attacks Stalin for insufficient leftism.
No, you are prohibited from selling her after you had sex with her, which implies she does not get to consent to sex. You can sell her before you have sex with her. But, having had sex with her, you are then stuck with her.
I would say 1600 years, not 1800 years, but either date means that they were more subject to Christian influence, than influence from priests who ruled in the land of Israel.
Exodus 21:7 A man can sell his daughter into slavery. If he can sell her into slavery, he can certainly sell her or give her into marriage. Exodus 21:7-11 guarantees slave girls wife treatment if they are required to sexually service someone – which kind of implies that wives get slavegirl treatment.
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 Marriage by abduction. Clearly consent is not required.
If her word was expected to be final, would have sent Isaac, not Eliezer.
>Indeed. Quite so – but only because Stalin, and everyone else, was moving steadily and rapidly leftwards.
This is an assertion that needs backing up. Nobody else I’ve read has asserted that everyone moved leftwards during the 20s until Stalin took place and launched the 5 year plan. On the contrary, we have Bazhanov saying that “left” and “right” are meaningless when discussing Stalin’s political moves.
>No, you are prohibited from selling her after you had sex with her, which implies she does not get to consent to sex. You can sell her before you have sex with her. But, having had sex with her, you are then stuck with her.
Correct. Because unless you have sex with her, she is a war captive with no special status. Once you have sex with her, she takes on a special status. She is certainly not property to be disposed of as you wish, and you can’t have sex with her again until you marry her, and if you don’t want to marry her, you have to let her go free. Now, if the Torah gives such consideration to a war captive, does it make sense that it would treat Jewish women, who are of a much higher status, as property to be bought, sold, inherited, etc.?
>I would say 1600 years, not 1800 years, but either date means that they were more subject to Christian influence, than influence from priests who ruled in the land of Israel.
The priests did not rule in the land of Israel. Never. You are making an assertion based on a misreading of one passage, with absolutely no evidence to back it up and a mass of counterevidence. For instance, you can see what happened with Shaul and Nob. To the extent that there was a leading spiritual authority at that point in time, by the way, it was Shmuel, who was not a cohen (priest.) The cohanim had an official ceremonial function, and their leadership function depended on their quality as a person, not their priestly status.
The rabbis were not subject to Christian influence-they saw the Christians as whacky interlopers (there’s a bunch of explicit stuff about that.)
>Exodus 21:7 A man can sell his daughter into slavery. If he can sell her into slavery, he can certainly sell her or give her into marriage.
The rabbis inform us that what this is speaking of is a man who has nothing and no way to feed his daughter, so he sells her to another in order that the buyer may marry her himself or to his son when she reaches maturity. Mishne Torah discusses this in the Laws of Slavery, the English translation of which is available on line, where Maimonides summarizes the Talmudic Sages’ summarization of the Torah.
>Exodus 21:7-11 guarantees slave girls wife treatment if they are required to sexually service someone – which kind of implies that wives get slavegirl treatment.
Even just dealing with the plain sense of the words, this is a very silly logical error. If my car garage treats customers like family, does this mean that I change my wife’s tires and charge her money?
This situation being discussed is about what happens when a man bought the abovementioned girl to marry and then decides he doesn’t want to marry her anymore. Incidentally, he is forbidden from having sex with her until marriage takes place-you may not have sex with your female slaves or anyone else outside marriage (except the war captive discussed above, which is a unique situation.)
>Deuteronomy 22:28-29 Marriage by abduction. Clearly consent is not required.
You are not even reading the plain text here. What this is discussing is that a girl who is raped has the right to make the rapist marry her. In the Laws of Women in Mishne Torah, Maimonides explains that aside from paying damages listed here, the rapist is culpable for other damages, such as her humiliation, and that she is not obliged to marry him if she doesn’t want.
>If her word was expected to be final, would have sent Isaac, not Eliezer.
Again you are not well acquainted with the plain text on behalf of which you presume to speak. Itzhak was expressly forbidden from leaving the Land of Israel, first here by his father, then later during the famine when he wanted to go to Egypt. When Eliezer asks Avraham, what if she doesn’t want to go to Israel, Avraham doesn’t spit out his tea, fall over laughing and say, ” do you ask sheep you buy permission to take them home?” He says, “in that case, you are free of your oath to me.”
I gave the concrete example of Bukharin. To attack Bukharin, Stalin moves left, attacks Bukharin for insufficient leftism. To counterattack Stalin, Bukharin moves even further left, attacks Stalin for insufficient leftism. “The Union of Marxist Leninists” very name implies Stalin insufficiently Marxist Leninist, and its critique demands greater equality. You might say that Stalin attacked Trotsky from the right, but that is not exactly true. Bukharin attacks Trotsky from the right. Bukharin says war communism was a bad idea. Stalin says Trotsky fucked up the implementation of a good idea, and, after getting rid of Trotsky, promptly proceeds to implement that good idea.
To go back a little earlier, to the Bolsheviks taking power. We see a long bunch of power struggles, and always the leftmost wins. Thus everyone wants to be the most left, and eventually the Bolsheviks win, being the leftmost. Being the leftmost, they attempt to implement socialism overnight, with disastrous results. Thus the NEP, arguably a movement right compared to Bolshevik intentions, but a movement left compared to what existed previously. Then we get a power struggle in the Bolshevik party over how quickly to move forward from the NEP to socialism, and how socialist that socialism is going to be. Trotsky, the leftmost, loses, but this reflects the fact that he gets blamed for the disaster that ensued when moving rapidly leftwards. Thereafter, it is back to everyone out lefting each other, after the Bolsheviks seized power just as before the Bolsheviks seized power.
In Roman times, high priest executes a bunch of his opponents and gets away with it at first. This is remembered because some of those opponents were Christians. Priests ruled the temple, and the temple was the center of Jewish religion. As to whether that constitutes ruling Israel, the Romans had a hard time finding or creating anyone who could be said to rule Israel. The tendency to anarchic theocracy never quite went away.
No, you don’t charge her money but you do change her tires. In the context of Exodus 21:7, everything that follows takes a coercive meaning.
Rather, the marriage is considered to have taken place when he had sex with her. Since there is no requirement of consent, there is no ritual of marriage in the old testament. You make a deal with someone for their daughter, then the daughter goes into your tent, and that is it. The point of a marriage ritual is marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. Old Testament Hebrews did not have that because women had no agency.
Oh come on:
This, like levirate marriage, only makes sense in a society where women have no right to be consulted, and seldom are consulted. The recent rabbinical reinterpretation makes no sense in context.
> “The Union of Marxist Leninists†very name implies Stalin insufficiently Marxist Leninist, and its critique demands greater equality.
The Union of Marxist Leninists is a cipher name. In the USSR, everyone was a Marxist Leninist, and with Lenin safely dead, it could with equal plausibility be claimed that were he alive, he’d be for or against any particular proposal, whether one moving to the left or the right. Point is that Kayurov and co. were “rightists” and were treated exactly the same way as “leftists” during that time period.
>To go back a little earlier, to the Bolsheviks taking power. We see a long bunch of power struggles, and always the leftmost wins.
Not particularly. It is difficult to argue that the Bolsheviks were left or right of the Mensheviks or the Anarchists. They won not because they were left or right of their enemies but because they were better organized and more ruthless.
>Thus the NEP, arguably a movement right compared to Bolshevik intentions, but a movement left compared to what existed previously.
This is sophistry. Anything except a royal restoration would have been a movement left compared to what existed previously. The fact remains that for six years, the Communists abandoned their central planning and socialistic policies and implemented a capitalism similar to what happened in China in the 70s. I suppose that your view on the Chinese Communists is that they are leftists because they are to the left of the Kang-hsu Emperor? NEP is not at all what your theory would predict-an ever-accelerating movement leftwards, with more and more bloodshed.
>Then we get a power struggle in the Bolshevik party over how quickly to move forward from the NEP to socialism, and how socialist that socialism is going to be.
We get a power struggle over power. Not over movement leftwards. As Stalin’s secretary points out, none of these guys could really objectively be called to the left or right of Stalin, and these terms were used in the same sense that “wrecker-ism” or “revanchism” were-strictly as a bludgeon. Once there was a critical mass of scumbags who were empowered to arrest, torture, prosecute, kill, leftism and rightism were irrelevant. You might as well speak of photosynthesis and epiphytism.
For instance, I just read an interview with Vladimir Efroimson, a Soviet biologist (http://bio.1september.ru/view_article.php?ID=200002606). In late 1932, he was arrested for attending a 1929 lecture of the Free Philosopher’s Society, where the lecturers discussed time and space as immanent realities. Efroimson had read Einstein’s work on spacetime and decided never to waste his time with philosophers again. When he was arrested, the investigators told him that the real reason was his insistence on human genetic inheritance, thus eugenics, thus fascism. Along with Efroimson, who got 3 years in a camp, they arrested Lev Ferry, who was the most talented geneticist of that generation, and who got sentenced to exile, where he was forced to choose between suicide, collaboration and having his family attacked by the NKVD, and so killed himself. Efroimson was re-arrested in 1949 and was in the camps until 1955 for his attacks on Lysenko.
Now, was Efroimson a leftist in 1932 relative to his persecutors? Or a rightist? What about 1949? The question itself is stupid. It’s like trying to figure out whether a man attacked by a pit bull was the victim of leftism, rightism, religious persecution or a misunderstanding.
>In Roman times, high priest executes a bunch of his opponents and gets away with it at first. This is remembered because some of those opponents were Christians.
This is irrelevant to the period under discussion. The power struggles that took place in Israel after the collapse of the Hasmoneans, subjugation by the Romans and suppression of the Great Revolt don’t tell us much about what things were like during the First Temple period, or the first half of the Second Temple period. The question is whether we can trust the rabbis whose discussions about those things are recorded in the Mishna and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds. My personal answer is that we can. Certainly, most of those rabbis were not exposed to Christian influence or Roman influence, living as they were in Babylon. Where we can check their assertions against a concurrent historical record, they check out-for instance, the rabbis say the etrog is the fruit of the goodly tree you need to bring for Sukkot, and Josephus confirms that this was the case and the tradition. And in general when learning those sources, I’m struck by the fact that everyone involved is arguing in good faith and that there are basic things they all agree on. So if the rabbis say, for instance, that there was a Sanhedrin in Shaul’s time and that Doeg the Edomite was its head, I am inclined to trust them.
>Priests ruled the temple, and the temple was the center of Jewish religion.
Priests had a ceremonial function. They were represented in the Sanhedrin in proportion to their Torah knowledge and had their own court which was below the Sanhedrin.
>No, you don’t charge her money but you do change her tires.
You may, or you may not, but the fact that you claim to treat customers like family doesn’t tell us that you treat your family like your customers.
>Rather, the marriage is considered to have taken place when he had sex with her. Since there is no requirement of consent, there is no ritual of marriage in the old testament.
If the Torah doesn’t mention something explicitly, this doesn’t mean it’s not there. Lots of commandments are mentioned in the Torah in a very cursory way, like the commandment for Kosher slaughter, yet in practice there are extensive requirements, and always have been as far as we have records.
The requirement of consent is there according to our sages. Having sex with a woman does not make her your wife, and having sex with her against her will makes her the victim of a crime you committed and entitled to damages. Furthermore, there is such a thing as a pilegesh, a concubine, who has a legal status not quite that of a wife, but she has certain rights upon the man and her children with him are legitimate. If you acquire a woman for a wife just by sleeping with her, how does one differentiate between a concubine and a wife? The rabbis said that there was a formal contract and ceremony, you say there was nothing. Someone here is wrong.
>You make a deal with someone for their daughter, then the daughter goes into your tent, and that is it. The point of a marriage ritual is marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. Old Testament Hebrews did not have that because women had no agency.
Nonsense. Of course women had agency-how else could they be put in charge of a husband’s business if the contracts they made wouldn’t be binding? How else would they have rights upon their husband, to the extent that a newly wed man was exempt from military service for a year so that he would fulfill his duty of making his wife happy? And if there were no wedding rituals, how could Psalm 45 be a wedding song, how could Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) talk about a bride not forgetting her wedding ornaments, how could Pharaoh take the town of Gezer and give it as a wedding gift to his daughter as she married Shlomo? How can Malachi say “G-d is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant”? You feel free, because of your ignorance of the Bible, to make things up about what it says or doesn’t say, and then dismiss anything that contradicts you in such a cavalier fashion. If you’re so postmodernist with the foundational document of Western civilization, how can you be trusted about anything else?
>You are not even reading the plain text here. What this is discussing is that a girl who is raped has the right to make the rapist marry her
>This, like levirate marriage, only makes sense in a society where women have no right to be consulted, and seldom are consulted. The recent rabbinical reinterpretation makes no sense in context.
The “recent” rabbinical “reinterpretation” is the Talmud, which was codified 1800 years ago but consists of traditional jurisprudence and aggada (non-juridical anecdotal material) going back as far as the Written Torah. In the Talmud, a woman’s consent is absolutely necessary for marriage. Again, perhaps you are more familiar with the Torah than the sages or than Maimonides, who spent their lives studying it. Or maybe you’re blowing smoke.
Kayurov was a rightist? I thought he was left of Stalin from the beginning.
And regardless of whether he was left of Stalin from the beginning, everyone in the Union of Marxist Leninist moved left of Stalin when they formed the Union.
Stalin moved left, and Bukharin and company moved further left. The Union of Marxist Leninists criticized Stalin not because property rights were just, or economically efficient, but because Russian society was unequal.
This is just a gross falsification of history. The last Tsars were pretty far left, even by twentieth century standards, and Kerensky was a lot further left. The NEP does not resemble chinese capitalism. It was a policy of socialism starting by capturing “the commanding heights” of capitalism. The NEP was socialism in the sense of Wilson’s British Labor party, which deliberately used the language of the NEP. Can you imagine a left wing party using the language of today’s China? Today’s British labor party condemns china as “authoritarian capitalism”. Wilson, on the other hand, loved the NEP.
But they sought power by each being lefter than the other. Stalin out lefts Bukharin, then Bukharin out lefts Stalin.
Bunkum: Under the Kings of Israel they interpreted the law, and punished disobedience:
In Roman times, Priests got to execute people they disapproved of. That is more than ceremonial function. In exodus times, Joshua was commissioned by the high priest, consistent with instructions that the priests will tell you who is Judge in Israel.
Old Testament describes various people marrying various other people, and the legalities surrounding the marriages. There is never any marriage ceremony, never any formal process to witness and record female consent. Marriage is simply taking possession of the girl, and then having sex with her. For example Boaz simply announces the legal basis of his ownership of Ruth before witnesses. Where female consent is mentioned, it is given informally and in private.
That she is the victim contradicts the plain, clear, and quite extensive wording of Deuteronomy and numerous other sections of the Old Testament. There are no important crimes against women, only crimes against the man who rightfully owns their sexual and reproductive capability.
Egyptian Women were emancipated in late bronze age Egypt, with a social and legal status not very different from that of modern American women. Hebrew women, however, were not.
As in so many matters, the Talmud directly and flatly contradicts the plain commands of the old testament, and the actual behavior of people in the stories of the old testament.
Further, you have been drifting left the whole time. Not only is the Talmud is well to the left of the old Testament, and of Jewish practice in first century times, but today you are reinterpreting the Talmud to make it even more feminist – in particular, requiring a man to give his wife divorce because she wants it, even if he does not – sneaking female initiated divorce in by the back door, with gay marriage soon to follow the same path.
>Kayurov was a rightist? I thought he was left of Stalin from the beginning.
Kayurov and Ryutin were “rightists” in the sense that they were against forced industrialization, collectivization, high hidden taxes, inflation and governmental terror.
>And regardless of whether he was left of Stalin from the beginning, everyone in the Union of Marxist Leninist moved left of Stalin when they formed the Union.
This is a meaningless statement.
>Stalin moved left, and Bukharin and company moved further left. The Union of Marxist Leninists criticized Stalin not because property rights were just, or economically efficient, but because Russian society was unequal.
You are an expert on everything! In fact, they criticized Stalin because he was driving expropriation, collectivization, forced industrialization and inflation/hidden taxes through terror.
>The NEP does not resemble chinese capitalism. It was a policy of socialism starting by capturing “the commanding heights†of capitalism. The NEP was socialism in the sense of Wilson’s British Labor party, which deliberately used the language of the NEP. Can you imagine a left wing party using the language of today’s China? Today’s British labor party condemns china as “authoritarian capitalismâ€. Wilson, on the other hand, loved the NEP.
This is a pretty twisted argument. NEP had property rights for individuals, privatized and semi-privatized large enterprises, lots of people getting rich through free trade, etc. It was far to the right of what had preceded it, and of course of what followed.
>But they sought power by each being lefter than the other. Stalin out lefts Bukharin, then Bukharin out lefts Stalin.
Bazhanov says different. They sought power by accusing each other of anything imaginable, with no link to reality.
>In Roman times, Priests got to execute people they disapproved of. That is more than ceremonial function. In exodus times, Joshua was commissioned by the high priest, consistent with instructions that the priests will tell you who is Judge in Israel.
Yehoshua was commissioned by Moshe at G-d’s direct command. As I’ve pointed out, in Roman times the situation was quite abnormal. In reality, you need a Sanhedrin to execute people, and the Sanhedrin needs to preside in the chamber of hewed stone.
>Old Testament describes various people marrying various other people, and the legalities surrounding the marriages. There is never any marriage ceremony, never any formal process to witness and record female consent.
The Torah is, as I’ve mentioned several times, not an explicit catalogue. Many important things are either alluded to or mentioned in passing. Instances include how to keep Shabbat, how to slaughter animals and also how to marry. This doesn’t mean there was no set procedure.
>Marriage is simply taking possession of the girl, and then having sex with her. For example Boaz simply announces the legal basis of his ownership of Ruth before witnesses. Where female consent is mentioned, it is given informally and in private.
We don’t know what they wore at the wedding, what they ate, who said what, etc. But there was obviously a wedding and a legal procedure. I brought several Torah sources speaking of weddings, of the “wife of your marriage covenant,” etc. Like a good Communist, you ignore them and focus on the party line.
>That she is the victim contradicts the plain, clear, and quite extensive wording of Deuteronomy and numerous other sections of the Old Testament. There are no important crimes against women, only crimes against the man who rightfully owns their sexual and reproductive capability.
Sure.
“But if a man finds the betrothed girl in the field, and the man overpowers her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die.
Whereas to the girl, you shall do nothing the girl did not commit a sin deserving of death, for just as a man rises up against his fellow and murders him, so is this case.
Because he found her in the field. The betrothed girl had cried out, but there was no one to save her.”
Here, a woman who is raped is compared to a murder victim. But, obviously, no important crime against her. The Torah is just funnin’, and Jim will give us the real story.
>Egyptian Women were emancipated in late bronze age Egypt, with a social and legal status not very different from that of modern American women. Hebrew women, however, were not.
Sure. And the rest of the sources are to be ignored. A very Marxist dialectic, Comrade!
>As in so many matters, the Yalmud directly and flatly contradicts the plain commands of the old testament, and the actual behavior of people in the stories of the old testament.
As in so many matters, the Torah doesn’t make sense without the Oral Tradition, and the Rabbis are the bearers of this tradition. As in so many matters, context-free Sola Scriptura exegetical attempts are hubristic and unconvincing.
Example: the Rabbis discuss the eye-for-an-eye commandment. They say, the plain sense is that you put the offender’s eye out. But the actual meaning is that there is a price for an eye, and you extract that price from him. Otherwise, what if the offender only has one eye? Now he’s blind and the victim is one-eyed, and that’s not just. Or what if he dies from having his eye put out? Etc. In fact, we don’t have a single example of someone having his eye put out in the Torah and the exact punishment meted out to the offender, but given that the Rabbis were the bearers of a tradition and great scholars, I believe them. Of course, you think you are more knowledgeable about the Torah than the rabbis and more knowledgeable about Shinto than a guy living there and more knowledgeable about Stalin than his secretary and more knowledgeable about Google recruitment than a guy who sits on their hiring committees…when the plumber comes over, I’m sure you lecture him on plumbing theory and practice.
>Further, you have been drifting left the whole time. Not only is the Talmud is well to the left of the old Testament, and of Jewish practice in Roman times, but today you are reinterpreting the Talmud to make it even more feminist – in particular, requiring a man to give his wife divorce because she wants it, even if he does not – sneaking female initiated divorce in by the back door, with gay marriage soon to follow the same path.
You’ve already passed on the opportunity to make a specific prediction about gay marriage (my prediction: never performed, sanctioned or accepted by Orthodox rabbis in the mainstream,) so I will call this more Jim-smoke.
As for a man being pressured to give his wife a divorce, this is in the Talmud (for certain situations,) and Maimonides says that after 10 years of an infertile marriage, if a wife wants a divorce, the court forces the husband to grant it, even through beating him with rods. Ditto if she says he is loathsome to her and wants a divorce. Perhaps Maimonides was a crypto-commie and would have written for Huffington Post had he been fortunate enough to have a blog, or perhaps something else is going on here.
“The Great terror, a reassessment”, summarizes the “Appeal to all members of the all union communist party ” as follows:
“collapse of genuine planning”, not “individual property rights of the peasants”. That is a leftist critique of Stalinism – that Stalinism is too unequal and insufficiently socialist. A right wing critique would propose a NEP like return to markets instead of plans.
It was far to the right of what the party had intended – but what they intended had failed to eventuate. The question reamined, how to get to where they wanted to go.
Stalin accuses Bukharin et al of Kulakism, which was an entirely accurate depiction of Bukharin’s old position. Bukharin accuses Stalin of failure to implement a planned economy, which was an entirely accurate depiction of the result of Stalin’s attempt to implement a planned economy.
Your Sanhedrin only existed in Roman times, so whatever happened in Roman times was the normal for the Sanhedrin.
During the power struggle between the house of Saul and the house of David, obviously no such thing as the Sanhedrin, nor any analogous or equivalent organization. Or if there was an analogous group, they spent the entire period in hiding trying not to be noticed.
There was indeed a legal procedure, and it is described. There obviously was no wedding in the sense of a legal procedure involving the bride. Ruth is told to sit tight while Boaz takes care of the legalities.
Similarly, Rebekah:
No wedding procedure or ritual. Weds her by boinking her. Rebekah did consent, but privately and informally, hence, consent not legally required.
I don’t think you did. If I ignored them, it was because your interpretation seemed too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
If, however, she does not cry out, then they both are killed. Therefore, an offense against the property rights of the betrothed, not against the rights of the girl.
And, if she is not married or betrothed, if no man has property rights in her sexual and reproductive capacity, then no big problem, no man’s property rights were violated. Rape away. No big deal. If no man has property rights over her, then it is nothing like murder.
I have given you a pile of sources. Despite your claims, you have none, or rather, non earlier than about 400AD or so. No matter how you try to twist clear and direct words of the old testament, your position is just ridiculous. Women were property in the time and clan of Abraham, and they were property in Israel at the time of Jesus. There was no marriage ceremony in the sense of procedure forming a contract between wife and husband, because wives were not party to that contract, but property governed by the contract. Priests judged people’s compliance with the law and punished disobedience. See, for example, 2 Chronicles 19
I made two specific predictions about gay marriage, and you did not like them.
Indeed, this is a regular procedure. I say X will happen, you say Y will happen. You propose a bet. And then we attempt to hammer out the details, and you get cold feet.
I say Israel will get closer to the one state solution. When people propose measures making more Arabs citizens, as happens regularly, is that not getting Israel closer to the one state solution?
I say gay marriage will get easier in Israel. It got easier last year. Pretty likely it will get easier next year. Or reform or reconstructionist rabbis will get power to perform marriages, which will shortly thereafter result in gays getting Jewish marriages.
I grant you it will be a long time before “Orthodox rabbis in the mainstream”. Will not be so long before mainstream gets redefined. Reconstructionist rabbis will get to perform marriages. Then gay marriages. After a while, after gay marriages performed by reconstructionists have been normalized, and people have gotten used to them, Orthodox will face discrimination and hatred charges. But that will be the final step. By that time, Jewish gays getting married in Israel will have become so normal that hardly anyone notices the final step.
>“collapse of genuine planningâ€, not “individual property rights of the peasantsâ€. That is a leftist critique of Stalinism – that Stalinism is too unequal and insufficiently socialist. A right wing critique would propose a NEP like return to markets instead of plans.
The thing it is critiquing is collectivization. I understand that anything short of “comrades, we’ve abandoned our socialist evil ways and embraced the free market” is leftist to you, but in the context of the time, this was rightist.
>It was far to the right of what the party had intended – but what they intended had failed to eventuate. The question reamined, how to get to where they wanted to go.
My read is that throughout NEP they pulled a China, by dialing back the craziness in action and reducing it in the rhetoric. Stalin turned the craziness back up to 11 after getting rid of Trotsky.
>Stalin accuses Bukharin et al of Kulakism, which was an entirely accurate depiction of Bukharin’s old position. Bukharin accuses Stalin of failure to implement a planned economy, which was an entirely accurate depiction of the result of Stalin’s attempt to implement a planned economy.
Bukharin was a kulak? Bazhanov says that Stalin would shamelessly adapt the same positions for which he would castigate his enemies, the second they fell.
>Your Sanhedrin only existed in Roman times, so whatever happened in Roman times was the normal for the Sanhedrin.
Our Talmud, Mishna and Torah say different. Either you are full of it, or they are.
>During the power struggle between the house of Saul and the house of David, obviously no such thing as the Sanhedrin, nor any analogous or equivalent organization. Or if there was an analogous group, they spent the entire period in hiding trying not to be noticed.
Talmud says a Sanhedrin was operative during Shaul’s time, and Doeg was the head of it.
>There was indeed a legal procedure, and it is described. There obviously was no wedding in the sense of a legal procedure involving the bride. Ruth is told to sit tight while Boaz takes care of the legalities.
The Book of Ruth is not court minutes. The wedding took place as usual, no need to transcribe the details. Torah gives the germane details. If there was a procedure for halitzah, obviously there was a procedure for a wedding.
>No wedding procedure or ritual. Weds her by boinking her. Rebekah did consent, but privately and informally, hence, consent not legally required.
Nonsense. The Torah eludes the details, just as it eludes e.g. what Rivka was wearing. I suppose you’ll say that they went around naked, since the details of their dress are not mentioned?
>I don’t think you did. If I ignored them, it was because your interpretation seemed too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
I will repeat: there are Psalms which explicitly are for weddings. Malachi says ” G-d is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenantâ€. Yirmiyahu talks about a bride’s wedding ornament. Yeshayahu (Isaiah) speaks of brides, weddings, etc. Psalm 19:6 speaks of the bridegroom emerging from his huppah, and Yoel ays, “Let the bridegroom emerge from his chamber [chedro], and the bride from her chuppah.”)
And separately a concubine is discussed, and she obviously has a different legal status from a wife (or a whore, for that matter.) But in your world, having sex with someone is enough to make them your wife! So how do you differentiate between wife, concubine and whore? Obviously, just like with everything else in the Torah, there was a legal procedure.
>If, however, she does not cry out, then they both are killed. Therefore, an offense against the property rights of the betrothed, not against the rights of the girl.
No. An offense against G-d.
>And, if she is not married or betrothed, if no man has property rights in her sexual and reproductive capacity, then no big problem, no man’s property rights were violated. Rape away. No big deal. If no man has property rights over her, then it is nothing like murder.
You are smoking mescaline. If she is not betrothed, she is entitled to damages from the rapist, and entitled to make him marry her if she chooses (by the way, this avoids the false rape accusation problem.) “Rape away” may be the law of the land in the Congo, or in Neoreactionland, but it was never the law of Israel.
>I have given you a pile of sources. Despite your claims, you have none, or rather, non earlier than about 400AD or so.
The Mishna was compiled around 180 CE. Its tractate Nashim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashim) deals with marriage. It was not made up on the spot but rather compiled by Yehuda Ha-Nasi from existing tradition.
>No matter how you try to twist clear and direct words of the old testament, your position is just ridiculous. Women were property in the time and clan of Abraham, and they were property in Israel at the time of Jesus.
Interesting. Because the Christian Gospels talk about brides, bridegrooms, weddings, etc. at length. I suppose that they were not aware that a woman is purchased like a sheep and then had sex with and that’s that. If only they had Jim Donald to explain the custom of the land to them!
>There was no marriage ceremony in the sense of procedure forming a contract between wife and husband, because wives were not party to that contract, but property governed by the contract.
They had a huppa, just like we do. The earliest sources we have discussing details say that there was consent. You are making things up.
>See, for example, 2 Chronicles 19
Very good-let’s see what it says:
>4 Jehoshaphat lived in Jerusalem, and he went out again among the people from Beersheba to the hill country of Ephraim and turned them back to the Lord, the God of their ancestors. 5 He appointed judges in the land, in each of the fortified cities of Judah.
Not priests (who are hereditary) but judges, who are appointed. This is exactly as described in the Talmud and in Josephus-there was a hierarchy of courts of elders (judges.)
>8 In Jerusalem also, Jehoshaphat appointed some of the Levites, priests and heads of Israelite families to administer the law of the Lord and to settle disputes. And they lived in Jerusalem.
This is the Great Beit Din, the Sanhedrin. It had representatives from the Leviim, the Cohanim (priests,) and the elders of the rest of Israel, who were learned in the Law. Exactly as our sages say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_din_shel_Kohanim
>11 “Amariah the chief priest will be over you in any matter concerning the Lord, and Zebadiah son of Ishmael, the leader of the tribe of Judah, will be over you in any matter concerning the king, and the Levites will serve as officials before you. Act with courage, and may the Lord be with those who do well.â€
So, Amariah was the head priest and led the sub-Beit Din of priests, dealing with things like sacrifices, and Zebadiah, of Judah, not a priest, headed the Great Beit Din dealing with more mundane matters.
You’ve already passed on the opportunity to make a specific prediction about gay marriage
>Indeed, this is a regular procedure. I say X will happen, you say Y will happen. You propose a bet. And then we attempt to hammer out the details, and you get cold feet.
You provide no dates and numbers, so your prophecies are Nostradamus-like-unfalsifiable.
>I say Israel will get closer to the one state solution. When people propose measures making more Arabs citizens, as happens regularly, is that not getting Israel closer to the one state solution?
Again, need specifics.
>Or reform or reconstructionist rabbis will get power to perform marriages, which will shortly thereafter result in gays getting Jewish marriages.
And I say, unlikely, and invite you to set a specific deadline.
>I grant you it will be a long time before “Orthodox rabbis in the mainstreamâ€. Will not be so long before mainstream gets redefined. Reconstructionist rabbis will get to perform marriages. Then gay marriages.
And I say, unlikely, and invite you to set a specific deadline. If Reform/Reconstructionist/Conservative failed to get a foothold during the socialist/secular first 40 years, then now, when there are more Torah Jews than ever with more power than ever, when even the head of the Shin Bet wear a kippa, this is improbable.
>After a while, after gay marriages performed by reconstructionists have been normalized, and people have gotten used to them, Orthodox will face discrimination and hatred charges. But that will be the final step. By that time, Jewish gays getting married in Israel will have become so normal that hardly anyone notices the final step.
And again, I invite you to set a deadline.
If one says “More planning”, leftist. If one says “less collectivisation”, rightist. They are not saying less collectivization. The are no longer even saying slower collectivization. They are saying make planning work, and make planning work without the planners being so far above the planned.
The last guy to say “slightly less collectivization, while trying to make collectivization work, while industriously planning the peasants, while we collectivize and set up agricultural cooperatives we also will try to sell some little bit of land out of collective ownership”, was Pyotr Stolypin, and look what happened to him.
After Pyotr Stolypin, everyone is more in favor of more collectivization than everyone else. The “right” says collectivize slowly, the “left” says collectivize fast. The “left” attacks the right for intending to collectivize too slow, and the “right” attacks the left because collectivization is not happening as fast as it is supposed to.
The “Rightist” Pyotr Stolypin’s main activity was setting up agricultural collectives and placing industry under direct state control. Therefore a raving moonbat leftist, and everyone after him was lefter than him, and in their power struggles, each was lefter than the other, attacking the other from the left.
More collectivization is movement left. Less collectivization is movement right. Everyone was in favor of more movement left, and accused the other guy of moving insufficiently left.
That is not a China. That is a tea party. They debated whether to drive off the cliff at one hundred miles per hour or ninety eight miles per hour. If they had proposed to allow wage labor, that would have been a China. If they had proposed to allow free markets, that would have been a China. If they had encouraged exiles to invest, that would have been a China. If foreign investment, that would have been a China. if corporations, that would have been a China. If private individuals or corporations engaged in international trade, that would have been a China. The NEP was an inspiration and model to Wilsonian socialists.
Old Testament never mentions anything resembling a Sanhedrin. When David gets the upper hand, he is declared King by “the men of Judah”, which is not the Sanhedrin, but the militia or aristocracy of the tribe of Judah.
Similarly, 2 Chronicles 19. Priests do the judging on religious law and are answerable to the high priest. Not a rabbi in sight. The High Priest explicitly exercises the power you attribute to the Sanhedrin. If the Sanhedrin existed, It would get mentioned in 2 Chronicles 19. Indeed, it would get mentioned pretty much everywhere. The Sanhedrin is supposedly a body with authority to appoint a king, enforce and interpret the law, and judge crimes, and the Old Testament is full of power struggles over laws, crimes and Kingship. The high priest’s power was a lot more than ceremonial. For the Sanhedrin to have existed, you need to believe the high priest to have only ceremonial power, which requires you stand the Old Testament on its head and read it backwards.
If the high priest was restricted to checking sheep for blemishes, he would not get mentioned in Chronicles, and the Sanhedrin would get mentioned.
If the Sanhedrin existed during these power struggles, you would expect the winner to drag them out from under the bed to pronounce him the winner
Josephus tells us the Romans created the Sanhedrin.
Old Testament Israel was mixture of orderly religious anarchy, disorderly violent anarchy, Kingly power, aristocratic power (the mighty men), priestly power, and more anarchy, with sometimes one being stronger than another. In all that chaos and all those power struggles, nothing resembling the Sanhedrin shows. If the Sanhedrin existed, we would read about it all over the place, in particular we would read about it in the struggle between the House of David and the House of Saul, and in depictions of the judicial system such as 2 Chronicles 19.
Oh come on! “Officials before you”
I normally would not bother replying, but when you are being obstinately ridiculous, and I ignore you, you proclaim victory. I give you 2 Chronicles 19, and you just flatly deny that it says what it plainly says, means what it plainly means, just as you just flatly denied that Deuteronomy 22 and Deuteronomy 25 were inconsistent with female consent having any legal relevance.
If your Sanhedrin existed, and the high priest was stuck with checking sheep for blemishes, the Sanhedrin would be in 2 Chronicles 19, and the high priest would not get a mention. The priests of Chronicles, like the priests at the time of Jesus, could have people killed. In Chronicles, the high priest appoints priests as judges, and the usual penalty for just about everything was death. In Roman history, high priest executes people.
The Talmud stretches the Old Testament beyond recognition, and then today’s Judaism stretches the Talmud beyond recognition. Having stretched the Talmud far enough to emancipate women, stretching it far enough to marry gays is a small step.
Romans had marriage by consent. Paul was culturally Roman. Paul, and Rome, imposed this practice on Christianity, and indeed made it central to Christianity. If someone is writing in Greek, he is culturally Roman. If culturally Roman, has a marriage ceremony at which the bride and groom pledge obedience before God and man to a marital contract. Paul absorbed this from the Romans, and the Talmud absorbed this from Paul. The Christian marriage ceremony, which is now followed by everyone all over the world, is closely based on the Roman marriage ceremony. Jews follow it for similar reasons as Japanese follow it. MacArthur emancipated Japanese women at gunpoint, so, people in Japan get now married in the same style as MacArthur did, which is the same style as an aristocrat of the Roman Republic did.
They are quite falsifiable. You have gay marriage in Israel, just barely. I said that there will be legislation or judicial or regulatory decisions in 2015 that will make gay marriage more available, or more normal, or, like empowering reconstructionist rabbis to perform marriages, enables such normalization. I just don’t give any specifics of the decision or legislation, same as I cannot tell you which part of a flood levee is going to fail, or which group of Arabs is going to get Israeli citizenship, or which terrorists are going to be allowed out of jail, or exactly when the next war in Gaza is going to be, or exactly how you are going to lose the next war in Gaza.
You are losing, but you will go on losing for centuries, just as the Christians have been in the west. You ask me to set a final date for your final defeat. By the time your final defeat comes in sight, it will already not matter any more. No one will care, for all that matters will have been lost already. The Orthodox rabbinate will be a letterhead in an office in Harvard. Already the major religious issue is not having to fight for Israel, a position entirely indefensible from the Old Testament or the Talmud.
>If one says “More planningâ€, leftist. If one says “less collectivisationâ€, rightist. They are not saying less collectivization. The are no longer even saying slower collectivization. They are saying make planning work, and make planning work without the planners being so far above the planned.
The only way to criticize planning in the USSR was to criticize its implementation but not the idea of planning. Likewise, in China nobody criticized Communism in the 70s…just its execution.
>If they had proposed to allow wage labor, that would have been a China. If they had proposed to allow free markets, that would have been a China. If they had encouraged exiles to invest, that would have been a China. If foreign investment, that would have been a China. if corporations, that would have been a China. If private individuals or corporations engaged in international trade, that would have been a China. The NEP was an inspiration and model to Wilsonian socialists.
They had wage labor, free markets, corporations (“trusts”) and foreign investment.
>Old Testament never mentions anything resembling a Sanhedrin. When David gets the upper hand, he is declared King by “the men of Judahâ€, which is not the Sanhedrin, but the militia or aristocracy of the tribe of Judah.
What is a sanhedrin? The word comes from Greek, and the thing is also called a gerousia, a council of elders. We see the first council of elders officially convened by Moshe in the desert, composed of 70 elders, with himself presiding. Obviously, since nobody spoke Greek then, they referred to it in Hebrew. In Hebrew, elders are called zakenim, the council is called a Beit Din (House of Law), with the Sanhedrin called a Beit Din Hagadol (Great Beit Din) or Beit Havaad (House of the Council.)
http://www.thesanhedrin.org/en/index.php?title=Historical_Overview#Biblical_Origins
David is declared king first by the men of Judah, which means the highest council Judah had, and then by a council of the elders of Israel. Which is the sanhedrin.
>Similarly, 2 Chronicles 19. Priests do the judging on religious law and are answerable to the high priest. Not a rabbi in sight.
What is a rabbi? Rabbi means teacher. A rabbi is someone who knows the Law and teaches it. A priest can be a rabbi, and obviously has to be to be in a position to judge on ceremonial law (not “religious law”-all our law is religious, including that dealing with contracts, for instance.)
>The High Priest explicitly exercises the power you attribute to the Sanhedrin. If the Sanhedrin existed, It would get mentioned in 2 Chronicles 19. Indeed, it would get mentioned pretty much everywhere. The Sanhedrin is supposedly a body with authority to appoint a king, enforce and interpret the law, and judge crimes, and the Old Testament is full of power struggles over laws, crimes and Kingship. The high priest’s power was a lot more than ceremonial. For the Sanhedrin to have existed, you need to believe the high priest to have only ceremonial power, which requires you stand the Old Testament on its head and read it backwards.
When you refer to “ceremonial” power, it is dismissively. But in fact the Temple was the center of Jewish spiritual existence, so it was a very serious power and responsibility. Further, since the Beit Din of priests was a part of the Great Beit Din, making up a third of it, its head had serious judicial power over issues not involving priests. Needless to say, he had to be a great Torah sage in his own right (this was not necessarily the case in the Second Temple period’s second half, sadly.)
>If the high priest was restricted to checking sheep for blemishes, he would not get mentioned in Chronicles, and the Sanhedrin would get mentioned.
I am trying to explain the structure of the Sanhedrin to you. He was mentioned, and the Sanhedrin was mentioned, because he sat on it.
>If the Sanhedrin existed during these power struggles, you would expect the winner to drag them out from under the bed to pronounce him the winner
A hereditary king is not anointed according to the Law. Since the Torah is quite curt in its description of the reigns of the kings following Shlomo, it is to be expected that it omits the vast majority of details and tells us only the germane and non-intuitive ones.
>Josephus tells us the Romans created the Sanhedrin.
Where?
>In all that chaos and all those power struggles, nothing resembling the Sanhedrin shows. If the Sanhedrin existed, we would read about it all over the place, in particular we would read about it in the struggle between the House of David and the House of Saul, and in depictions of the judicial system such as 2 Chronicles 19.
We do.
>Oh come on! “Officials before youâ€
You are upset at me that this is how your translation looks and that it doesn’t go into more detail? The word is “shotrim,” “officers.” The Levites officiated at the Temple. They (unlike the priests,) each had a specific, hereditary job.
> I give you 2 Chronicles 19, and you just flatly deny that it says what it plainly says, means what it plainly means, just as you just flatly denied that Deuteronomy 22 and Deuteronomy 25 were inconsistent with female consent having any legal relevance.
Because you lack context.
>If your Sanhedrin existed, and the high priest was stuck with checking sheep for blemishes, the Sanhedrin would be in 2 Chronicles 19, and the high priest would not get a mention.
It is difficult for you, who lives in a completely atheist society, to imagine a society whose existence is predicated completely on G-d’s service and religion, and how important that service is to daily functioning. In any case, 2 Chronicles 19 deals with the reconstitution of a sanhedrin, and its component parts, and with Temple service.
>The priests of Chronicles, like the priests at the time of Jesus, could have people killed. In Chronicles, the high priest appoints priests as judges, and the usual penalty for just about everything was death. In Roman history, high priest executes people.
The high priest could not personally execute people. But, yes, the sanhedrin, part of which was the Beit Din Shel Kohanim, the council of priests, had the power to put people to death. However, the death penalty was quite rare. Talmud says a sanhedrin that put someone to death every 7 years was considered unusually cruel, and some say 70 years.
>The Talmud stretches the Old Testament beyond recognition, and then today’s Judaism stretches the Talmud beyond recognition.
Since you’re not conversationally familiar with any of the three, how do you judge? The same way you judge Google, Shintoism and the SR-71 program?
>Having stretched the Talmud far enough to emancipate women, stretching it far enough to marry gays is a small step.
And I call bullshit.
>Romans had marriage by consent. Paul was culturally Roman. Paul, and Rome, imposed this practice on Christianity, and indeed made it central to Christianity. If someone is writing in Greek, he is culturally Roman.
There were great Torah scholars in the 20th century who wrote in Russian and English. Were they culturally Russian or British?
>If culturally Roman, has a marriage ceremony at which the bride and groom pledge obedience before God and man to a marital contract. Paul absorbed this from the Romans, and the Talmud absorbed this from Paul.
Amazing. The Talmud rejected other things that Paul absorbed from the Romans outright, such as eating non-kosher food, not keeping Shabbat, profiting from idolatry, not circumcising one’s children. It was vocal about this rejection and stated clearly what it thought of Christianity. Yet you would have me believe that the sages (half of whom lived in Babylonia, far from Christian influence,) just up and adapted Christian marriage (and retroactively wrote weddings into the Prophets, Psalms, etc.) Pardon my skepticism.
>The Christian marriage ceremony, which is now followed by everyone all over the world, is closely based on the Roman marriage ceremony. Jews follow it for similar reasons as Japanese follow it. MacArthur emancipated Japanese women at gunpoint, so, people in Japan get now married in the same style as MacArthur did, which is the same style as an aristocrat of the Roman Republic did.
You provide no dates and numbers, so your prophecies are Nostradamus-like-unfalsifiable.
>They are quite falsifiable. You have gay marriage in Israel, just barely. I said that there will be legislation or judicial or regulatory decisions in 2015 that will make gay marriage more available, or more normal, or, like empowering reconstructionist rabbis to perform marriages, enables such normalization.
Perhaps, out of inertia…but the pace of progressivization is slowing drastically. Note the impending bill declaring Israel as the Jewish State. And soon the pendulum will swing back the other way, as it already has in many areas-see http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/187814
>the Orthodox rabbinate will be a letterhead in an office in Harvard. Already the major religious issue is not having to fight for Israel, a position entirely indefensible from the Old Testament or the Talmud.
Christians and Muslims have been predicting our fall and assimilation for a long time, and the Greeks and Romans before them. We continue to disappoint.
Which sounds mighty close to saying that the only possible political criticism was from the left, that everyone had to be lefter than anyone else.
And, observing the career of Pyotr Stolypin, the same was true under the Czars after Alexander the Liberator.
Private individuals could not employ wage labor, and private corporations did not exist. If you worked for a wage, you worked for government or semi government business.
Only internal free markets, and only in some goods, most importantly, in food.
I don’t think so.
With himself in charge, not merely presiding. Councils of elders were summoned ad hoc, and never exercised any real power. Until Roman times what we see councils of elders doing is witnessing and recording, not deciding, not judging.
“Men of Judah” is not elders of Judah. It might mean the militia of Judah or the mighty men (aristocrats) of Judah, or it might have been an actual election.
No he was never declared king by a council of the elders of Israel, for if he had been, would have surely been mentioned in the Old Testament. If we get told about “men of judah”, would surely be told about “men of Israel”.
During the life of Samuel, theocratic power was in his personal hands, and with his death, theocratic power ended, to be partially restored only after Solomon built the temple and Kings yielded increasing power to high priests. You are completely making up this council, whose existence is entirely incompatible with the story told of Samuel, Saul, and David.
If this council continued to exist after Samuel and before 2 Chronicles 19, then nothing that happens between Samuel and Chronicles makes any sense.
Further, if this council existed at the time of Samuel, it lacked power, being merely a bunch of witnesses whose job was to report and act upon his will, much like that convened by Moses and Boaz, and similarly, if it existed after the time of Chronicles, it lacked power, being merely an instrument of the high priest. The elders come when Boaz asks them to come, which may go far to explain why Elimelech’s kinsman was willing to yield ownership of Naomi and Ruth.
Whenever something that plausibly looks like a council of elders shows up in the Old Testament, the scenario is that a powerful man summons the elders to bear witness and record, so that his acts will be remembered and make precedent. No one ever asks them to decide anything.
What is described in Chronicles does not resemble the Sanhedrin. Further, it is being created at that time. After Samuel and before Chronicles, no theocratic power.
No we do not. You, and the Talmud, are just making crap up out of thin air.
Chronicles says they judged and ruled in parallel with the King. No mention of “in the temple”. No mention of how the chief priest gets to be chief priest, but, since after Samuel and before Chronicles, no theocratic power, since the King is setting this theocratic system up, or recreating something long dead, it seems likely the King appointed the chief priest from among the priests.
Context is the rest of the old Testament. Isaac and Boaz act as if Deuteronomy means what it says and says what it means, that female consent has no legal significance, that women are legally property, incapable of consent. Moses, Boaz, Samuel, Saul, and David act as if Chronicles means what it says and says what it means – that power is personal and individual, not held in councils or committees.
High Priest Ananus filius Anani executed a bunch of people in one go, which the Romans felt was a little too much power.
The way talmudism is headed, I would say chances are they were culturally British.
Paul got eating non kosher food and less strict observance of the Sabbath from Jesus. Christian marriage, however clearly comes from Rome, since it closely follows the Roman ritual, and Paul invokes Roman imagery. Jewish marriage similarly closely follows the Christian ritual and Christian concepts. Old Testament Jews, and Jews in Israel at the time of Jesus, had no female consent, hence no marriage ceremony. Look at the Jewish marriage ceremony. Where does it come from?
Muslims never tried assimilation, but demanded overt conversion. Christians never tried assimilation until recently. Greeks never consciously and intentionally attempted assimilation. Observe that your marriage ceremony descends from Rome through Christianity, not Greece through the Ptolmiac dynasty. Even though the Christians and the Muslims never tried assimilation, Jews are more assimilated to them than to the Ptolmiac Greeks.
In a sense you are already assimilated, in that the official, and enforced, religion of Israel is progressivism. Maybe that will change, I hope it will change, but until the tide on gay marriage goes into reverse, until you resettle Gaza, it is not changing in your favor, is currently changing to your disfavor.
I very much hope that the Jewish religion comes home, ceases to be a religion of exile, and becomes a religion of Israel, becomes the state religion of the land and the people. I hope your efforts in this direction succeed. I very much endorse your efforts to link your religion to the celebration of the land, the physical landscape, and the celebration of the battles that regained it and men that died regaining it.
I don’t think what you are trying to do goes far enough, and I don’t think it possible for an ordinary Jew to go far enough. To make your religion once again a religion of the land and the people of Israel, rather than a religion of exile, you are going to need a Solomon. (And not a Sanhedrin.)
Regardless of whether Jews go home, if Judaism goes home, and has a safe and strong home to go to, a sore that has long troubled the west will be healed. If Judaism goes home, Jews will not have a permanent and inconsolable grievance any more, no matter where they live.
>Which sounds mighty close to saying that the only possible political criticism was from the left, that everyone had to be lefter than anyone else.
That’s generally how it is when there’s a dominant ideology. You can’t say that, e.g., Americanism is stupid. You have to say that the truly American thing is, blahblahblah. You can’t say that Muhammad sucked, you have to say that if he was alive today, he would XYZ. But in fact, Lenin and Trotsky both explicitly announced that NEP was a forced concession to capitalism.
>Private individuals could not employ wage labor, and private corporations did not exist. If you worked for a wage, you worked for government or semi government business.
Private individuals could employ wage labor as long as they were working alongside said wage labor. Private corporations did exist, and one of the first thing that the Soviets did under NEP was to raise the ceiling of wage employees from 10 to 20. In 1922 they declared that everyone had a right to private property, and in 1923 declared that every citizen had the right to organize private industrial and commercial enterprises. They then allowed those enterprises to form “trusts,” sort of super-corporations, which bought their inputs on the free market, sold their outputs on the free market, took out loans (not guaranteed by the government,) and the trusts formed syndicates, which issued private debt, etc. There was a system of banks, about 60 in total, which acted as semi-private financial institutions. They stopped issuing unbacked paper currency and moved to a fully gold-backed currency.
>Only internal free markets, and only in some goods, most importantly, in food.
No, industrial production was largely fairly traded. The most the government did was to establish price ceilings on some stuff.
>>corporations (“trustsâ€) and foreign investment.
>I don’t think so.
Don’t “think.” Read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_concessions_in_the_USSR
>With himself in charge, not merely presiding. Councils of elders were summoned ad hoc, and never exercised any real power. Until Roman times what we see councils of elders doing is witnessing and recording, not deciding, not judging.
No, councils of elders were established on a permanent basis, as a Torah commandment. Deuteronomy 16:18.
>“Men of Judah†is not elders of Judah. It might mean the militia of Judah or the mighty men (aristocrats) of Judah, or it might have been an actual election.
Without context, you can make anything up you want. But in reality, these were the elders.
>No he was never declared king by a council of the elders of Israel, for if he had been, would have surely been mentioned in the Old Testament. If we get told about “men of judahâ€, would surely be told about “men of Israelâ€.
You are right. We would be told something like: “All the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and said, “We are your own flesh and blood. In the past, while Saul was king over us, you were the one who led Israel on their military campaigns. And the Lord said to you, ‘You will shepherd my people Israel, and you will become their ruler.’â€
When all the elders of Israel had come to King David at Hebron, the king made a covenant with them at Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David king over Israel.”
Amazing the stuff you can find in the Bible if you actually read it instead of making it up.
>What is described in Chronicles does not resemble the Sanhedrin. Further, it is being created at that time. After Samuel and before Chronicles, no theocratic power.
>In all that chaos and all those power struggles, nothing resembling the Sanhedrin shows. If the Sanhedrin existed, we would read about it all over the place, in particular we would read about it in the struggle between the House of David and the House of Saul, and in depictions of the judicial system such as 2 Chronicles 19.
The Sanhedrin’s job is to decide the law. Not to participate in power struggles.
>Chronicles says they judged and ruled in parallel with the King. No mention of “in the templeâ€. No mention of how the chief priest gets to be chief priest, but, since after Samuel and before Chronicles, no theocratic power, since the King is setting this theocratic system up, or recreating something long dead, it seems likely the King appointed the chief priest from among the priests.
Again, the Torah talks about very extensive matters in a cursory way.
> Context is the rest of the old Testament. Isaac and Boaz act as if Deuteronomy means what it says and says what it means, that female consent has no legal significance, that women are legally property, incapable of consent. Moses, Boaz, Samuel, Saul, and David act as if Chronicles means what it says and says what it means – that power is personal and individual, not held in councils or committees.
The rabbis of the Talmud, and of Josephus’ time, and of the Great Council, were better acquainted with the Written Torah than you (to put it mildly, )and yet they had a different perspective and a different context. Now, you can say, they were just making stuff up, and all the Jews from Persia to North Africa except a few Sadducees just went with it (you know, Jews are notorious for just going with radical reinterpretations of their Torah,) and in all the time since, nobody except the Karaites pointed this out. Or you could maybe say that they had a larger context and dealt in good faith.
>High Priest Ananus filius Anani executed a bunch of people in one go, which the Romans felt was a little too much power.
He did this through the Sanhedrin, and in an extreme situation
>The way talmudism is headed, I would say chances are they were culturally British.
Could you name some of them, please? Being familiar with “talmudism” as you are, this should not be difficult. Then point out their cultural Britishisms, specifically.
>Paul got eating non kosher food and less strict observance of the Sabbath from Jesus. Christian marriage, however clearly comes from Rome, since it closely follows the Roman ritual, and Paul invokes Roman imagery. Jewish marriage similarly closely follows the Christian ritual and Christian concepts. Old Testament Jews, and Jews in Israel at the time of Jesus, had no female consent, hence no marriage ceremony. Look at the Jewish marriage ceremony. Where does it come from?
I know. The huppah, which David mentions, comes directly from Rome. That’s where he got it from when he put it in the Psalms (based on your demonstrated familiarity with Judaism, I know I don’t have to explain what a huppah is, or its significance to you.) And when Isaiah and Malachi talk about weddings and marriage as a covenant between the man and wife, they are just copying the Romans who would show up 700-500 years later. Logical.
>Muslims never tried assimilation, but demanded overt conversion. Christians never tried assimilation until recently.
I fail to see a crucial difference between sustained pressure+ the offer of a public conversion (occasionally as an alternative to death and exile,) vs. sustained pressure+the offer of a de facto conversion.
>In a sense you are already assimilated, in that the official, and enforced, religion of Israel is progressivism. Maybe that will change, I hope it will change, but until the tide on gay marriage goes into reverse, until you resettle Gaza, it is not changing in your favor, is currently changing to your disfavor.
Not so. The second derivative changed in the 70s (with the settlement movement). The first derivative is changing now. Gay marriage abolition and the resettlement of Gaza (and I think most of Syria, Jordan, the Sinai and parts of Iraq) will be towards the end of the process, not its beginning.
>I very much hope that the Jewish religion comes home, ceases to be a religion of exile, and becomes a religion of Israel, becomes the state religion of the land and the people. I hope your efforts in this direction succeed. I very much endorse your efforts to link your religion to the celebration of the land, the physical landscape, and the celebration of the battles that regained it and men that died regaining it.
Thanks, but the last parts were tried by Ben Gurion and his circle. It’s nice, but it’s not enough.
>I don’t think what you are trying to do goes far enough, and I don’t think it possible for an ordinary Jew to go far enough. To make your religion once again a religion of the land and the people of Israel, rather than a religion of exile, you are going to need a Solomon. (And not a Sanhedrin.)
Not a Shlomo but a David. David was a wartime king. Shlomo lived in a time of peace and building. But a David without a Sanhedrin behind him is a Bar Kochba, or a Ben Gurion (and that is at best.)
>Regardless of whether Jews go home, if Judaism goes home, and has a safe and strong home to go to, a sore that has long troubled the west will be healed. If Judaism goes home, Jews will not have a permanent and inconsolable grievance any more, no matter where they live.
I suspect that a Judaism with a rebuilt Temple will have much deeper global significance than Rahm Emmanuel and his brothers finally getting out of US politics. The last time we built a Temple, it killed idolatry in the Mediterranean basin and the rest of the world (gradually and slowly, but within 700 years, nobody in the neighborhood was sacrificing their children to Moloch or anything else.) I suspect the Third Temple will bring bigger changes.
multiheaded got banned for saying something about gulags.
We’ve got similar politics but you puncture bubbles more effectively with concision.
You’re banned, I’m not. Scott even put in the comments that he was looking for an excuse to ban me. nydwracu seems to hold the same opinions but phrases everything in the weird bubble speak they all have so I haven’t even seen anyone ask for his ban.
which post? link?
Divorce one.
Mainly goes to show that the attempt to bring a non-racist, non-sexist understanding of conservatism to liberals is generally doomed, and those who try to sail under that banner will get crushed or compromised by the crazy commenters.
Greetings from Romania. We just pulled a Barack Obama with a reactionary twist over here and got a competent ethnic German mayor elected as president of the country. I think it’s significant development for NRx in general that something like this happened, considering all of the circumstances. I’ll comment some more on the topic when I have the time, I’m a bit tired after celebrating and Monday work.
The most interesting part is the distribution of votes in the 1st round of voting (the German candidate, Klaus Johannis, is the blue one – the red guy is, of course, our shameless communist PM and the green one is the Hungarian minority candidate):
http://storage0.dms.mpinteractiv.ro/media/1/186/3927/13496771/9/harta-4.jpg?height=338&width=600
Now take a look at this map of the pre-WWI border between old Romania and Austria-Hungary:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kYyvgvellMM/UklHatdDmAI/AAAAAAAABG0/-EVlOi1sFyA/s1600/I8M11IFFPP4YFQHVNUV5Q7TZB.jpg
Keep in mind, this pattern of voting comes after almost a century of Romanian rule in Transylvania and Banat, even with plenty of migration from the poorer regions outside of the Carpathian arc into the richer, former Austro-Hungarian provinces of Banat and Transylvania. Ironically, President Johannis will preside over the festivities marking 100 years since Romanian unification.
No election result is ever good news, though some may be less bad than others.
Not even when the People’s Action Party won in Singapore?
OK, people’s action party is good.
Good by your standards, but getting worse all the time.
13 years ago when I moved into this neighbourhood as a teenager, HDB void decks clean and empty at night. Now, full of south Indians sitting on the ground getting drunk.
13 years ago, vote-buying not an issue. Now PAP is vote-buying with free train rides into the city during peack hours, doling more cash from the coffers while talking about social safety nets.
13 years ago, demonstrations and protests never happened, now increasing demotism and shows of mob power in Hong Lim Park and rioting Indian immigrants.
Don’t bet TOO much money on running to Singapore when the West explodes.
The PAP is full of degenerate traitors and Singapore is dieing. I will explain further when I am not on a cell phone.
Singapore is gradually slipping into the abyss because Lee Kuan Yew’s successors do not possess the fortitude to offer resistance against Liberalism and because Cthulhu has its tentacles firmly grasping the brains of Singapore’s shrinking youth. The problems go deeper than mere subcontinental riff raff who are the simply Gothic hordes circling a city rotting from within. The biggest sign of Singapore’s degeneracy is the class of helots that performs all manual labor that comprises a significant portion of the city’s population. Unlike the West, Singapore doesn’t exactly shower them with welfare and encourage them to settle, but for everyone that leaves, there are ten more willing to come, creating a permanent alien presence whose members while ever shifting is still permanent. This wage suppression eliminates the value and dignity in labour making life a constant struggle for the Chinese working class who are crushed by the ruthless landed tycoonocracy from above and the grasping brown multitudes from below. Even worse are the cheap Malayan female domestic servants which completely saps the reproductive vitality of Chinese women. With a writhing underclass comprised of racial aliens below, the great middle class fear of socio-economic decline hangs like a sword of damocles over the heads of Chinese families, delaying and altogether preventing childbirth. The presence of foreign domestics also demeans the value of being a wife and mother, associating natural domestic with low class servitude.
One startling example of the demise of Singapore is the rate of miscegenation between the different ethnicities. In the 1980’s despite being a multi-ethnic state in a very geographically compact area, interracial marriages only accounted for only 5% of total marriages. Fast forward a generation to 2010 and now interracial marriages are already 20% of total marriages. Chinese cultural and ethnic cohesion was completely shattered in Singapore during the last decade of the 20th century somehow and now our ethnic cohesion is being destroyed by a tide of miscegenation that is going to end up with the destruction of our polity. Examples of this abound as the Chinese, once mistakenly regarded as clannish and cliquesh, are turning against each other with ever greater leftist fury as they seek to more out-holier-than-thou each other. Once recent example was one Chinese families complaint about the cooking smells emanating from their Indian neighbor’s apartment, resulting in an online shitstorm of “racism badâ€, “multiculturalism good†that is typically found in the West. Or another example of an employee fired from her job for complaining about the noise from various helots making merry because an Indian decided to that it was racist and complained. There are speech and thus subsequently thought control laws in Singapore that are equivalent to the more Jacobin regions of Europe that ostensibly serve to limit social friction but in reality is a one way street. Anyone is free to accuse the Chinese of being racists, or chauvinists, or whatever they feel like but if the Chinese were to do the same to any other community, the state will come after them.
There is even more wrong with Singapore, but the more I write, the angrier I get and I want to keep my blood pressure down.
Singapore, for the moment, still has capitalism, but, without reproduction, will not have anyone capable of making capitalism function. Not to mention the gimmiedats will vote capitalism out.
My recommendation is that just as the world should imitate the economic order of Hong Kong and eighteenth century Britain, and China and India are now beginning to do so, the world should imitate the sexual and reproductive order of Timor Leste, eighteenth century Britain, and Japan before MacArthur.
But you are in Singapore, the heart of the gene shredder, while I am not. What is your recommendation?
What is your prescription?
I don’t feel that Hong Kong’s economy is particularly worthy of emulating or even possible for most. The engines of Hong Kong’s economy depend on finance and real estate, similar to London. It is not sustainable except as part of a larger economic polity. Chinese people have an instinctive economic herd mentality which leads to outrageously high real estate prices wherever we are. The social expectation to own property is strong and the desire to be a rentier landlord is part and parcel of this. Unfortunately stratospheric housing costs are good for only two people, property tycoons and old people who got in while it was still cheap. It is an economic drag on everything else, particularly affordable family formation.
I am not presently in Singapore but rather than South Florida, which just goes to show how much faith I have in the future. Blank eyed Mexicans and surly blacks not withstanding, the houses are cheap (relatively), the communities gated, and firearms are a legal last recourse. Short of revolutionary terror, nothing will stop Singapore’s eventual economic decline as the demographic profile gradually and inexorably changes into a Malay/Indian mestizo one. Either the PAP ends its present immigration policy or it ends Singapore. It may take a century or so longer for Singapore to die on it’s present course than some Western states, but dead it will be.
It may surprise you, but I’m am very much an isolationist. Nothing would please me more than to see Chinese communities everywhere return to their urheimat (without the Communists in control). For China to close it’s borders to the rest of the world and say thanks, but no thanks. But that is just a dream…
Socialism with Chinese characteristics is, as everyone knows, capitalism imported via Hong Kong.
The problem is that cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore are dysgenic. The smart people go there and do not reproduce, largely due to stratospheric housing costs and feminist social expectations. I think Dubai is eugenic, but only barely.
Almost every rightist looks to his right, and is afraid; and looks to his left, and is afraid. Fear everywhere, and the coward cowers.
Not so.
No symmetry
On further though, you are right. The man cowers at those on the right, because of what the left will say/think. Or maybe it’s his conditioning at the hands of the left coming up through school.
But cowardice is still at the core.
I hear the “cowardice” argument a lot, mostly from conservatives to reactionaries, but I’m not seeing any real cowardice, just political reality. What should one do, in your opinion, that would be both brave and smart/practical for the goal of preserving our civilization?
Well I am a hard core conservative and live under a rock in Mayberry where the clock stopped back in the 1950’s.
I’ve lost count of how many forums and blogs and such that I’ve been banned from and I see a pattern that repeats again and again – especially when women are involved. I notice that whenever they get the most offended – it is when I am debating with them and proving myself to be smarter than they. When I call them names and mock and deride them – they are just fine with it and call me names like ‘neocon’, ‘hater’, etc ad nauseum. They can play that game all day long. Unfortunately I just got bored with them – you can’t argue with an idiot and listening to leftists and stupid people is a waste of time. I got better things to do.
The Vatican hates the SSPX. It does not hate Protestants.
Yup.
This. The vitriolic hatred the Vatican and many priests (including some ‘conservative’ priests) feel and even express (in Church-speak) towards SSPX is incredible. The destruction that VCII wrought on the Church is something truly hard to comprehend, and until it is reversed de facto if not de jure I fear for the fate of the Church.
Ooooh ooooh!
Can we use this as a way to measure who is the most right?
Your average 1950 pro-segregation Southerner hates Nazis for their racism. Therefore, Nazis are to the racial right of the average 1950 pro-segregation Southerner.
Jim does not hate Nazis for their racism. Therefore, Nazis are not to the racial right of Jim.
Nazis would probably hate Jim for his (factual) admission that Jews have higher IQs. They assumed that the (relatively) poorer Germans were more intelligent than the (relatively) richer Jews. Therefore, Jim is to the racial right of Nazis.
> Therefore, Jim is to the racial right of Nazis.
Neat!
I think Germans killed their Jews and then adopted several million Turks. Which was a very stupid thing to do.
Now, almost everybody on my racial left is incapable to see this and almost everybody on my racial right is also incapable to see this.
There may be a lot of stuff I can’t see from where I am presently. But I can read articles and comments on this blog and get enlightened. Selecting, of course!
Not sure I buy the idea that Nazi’s thought Jews were stupid. Degenerate, evil, and parasitical, but not stupid. Of course who actually knows what Nazi’s actually think, most of what we know about Nazi’s comes from progressive propaganda.
Hitler did not think we were stupid.
In general, the Nazis’ views of us were very similar to those of the Five Percent Nation of whitey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Percent_Nation
Basically, through his demonic cleverness, trickery and deceit, the Jew takes advantage of and destroys the innocent, simple, kind-hearted German.
Jews have been run out of a lot of places. What is wrong with all these people??
http://biblebelievers.org.au/expelled.htm
They knew that their problems were largely caused by us, which is why after robbing, murdering and driving out the Jews of their land, they lived happily ever after.
Look how well the Germans did after getting rid of that Communist Jew Einstein and relying on Deutschefizik.Observe the flourishing economy of Judenrein Iraq and Syria, free after 2500 years of Jewish subversion and exploitation. It’s wonderful, no? Just like the Zimbabweans, who have expelled their oppressive white overlords-life instantly got better and it keeps getting better.
I know. What is WRONG with all these people?
The same question arises in my mind when I read thugreport.com
From what I know about Nazi racial studies, Jews were not viewed as intelligent. They were of inferior (mixed) racial stock.
The Nazi view of Jews is similar to the modern sociology professor’s view of Whites. There’s a semi-conscious belief that they’re intellectually superior, followed by a ton of rhetoric to deny that they are intellectually superior.
Officially, Jews/Whites were inferior. But a lot of the political rhetoric depended on them being a scheming, oppressive, ruthless racial caste. So they were often treated like superiors, too.
Nazis aren’t alive to defend themselves but Jim (and NRX in general) is far to the racial left of actual modern day racialists.
Jim is pro-Jew, pro-blacks, whites, mestizos and Asians in the same society, etc. Far closer to a conservative HBD nerd position than a racialist position.
Actual modern day racialists acknowledge higher Jewish IQ. This high IQ along with their opportunistic, parasitic and ethno-centric nature make separation absolutely essential.
Conservatives (and NRX) are like Jews are smart and rich, what’s not to like? Utterly naive. Jews are not us. And they don’t like us. And they are very effective at pursuing their own interests, which are not our interests.
Mass deportation of Jews is to the racial right of Jim and NRX.
The only reason some people want ethnic purity is that they want everyone within the state to be equal. If you are fine with some people ruling over other people, some groups ruling over other groups, ethnic purity does not sound so important.
It seems like this experiment has already been conducted and your version didn’t work out so well.
Latin America has a stratified society with off-whites ruling over mestizos, mulattoes and tri-racials. But Latin America is a horrible place. It seems that if the masses are of a sufficiently low quality the elites won’t accomplish anything either. Elites in Latin America do *something*, but it’s not science, or art or whatever we’re supposed to value, and Latin America appears unlikely to ever produce a technological singularity. It’s a waste of a continent.
On the other hand, the U.S., Australia, etc. practiced racial separatism / segregation / one drop rule / expulsion of the natives, etc. instead of racial cosmopolitanism. And those countries worked out far better than Latin America by almost any reasonable metric, although progressivism is now destroying them.
History makes it abundantly clear that the one drop rule is a far better strategy than what Spain and Portugal did in their colonies. You don’t want blacks or mestizos in your country.
Rhodesia was just fine before the international communist conspiracy destroyed it. So was the Southern United States, for that matter. Yes, segregation is unstable and eventually Zoroaster or the Buddha denounces White privilege. But it can last for thousands of years.
Latin America has had democracy for quite some time, and before democracy, had rulers who claimed to rule on behalf of all the people, which is to say, has always been demotist – and considerably more demotist than the US.
Argentina is white, Chile is indio. Chile does about as well as Argentina, because less demotist. Demotism cause racial mixing, and demotism causes bad results, and, as in Argentina, a white population gives you little protection against these bad results.
Argentina is mestizos pretending to be white.
Wiki
“Recent genetic studies concluded in 2005 have shown that a significant portion of the population has varying degrees of Amerindian and to a lesser extent African ancestry. The first study on the matter in Argentina was conducted in 1985. A scientific team from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine analyzed the blood types of 73,875 donors from the Blood Bank of the PoliclÃnico Ferroviario Central, with the purpose of finding European and Amerindian genetic components. The samples were organized following a map of the country, and the study concluded that “the percentages found in native population were: European component, 81.47%-81.77%, and Amerindian component 18.23%-18.57%.” Another study of the Amerindian ancestry of Argentines was headed by Argentine geneticist Daniel Corach of the University of Buenos Aires. The results of this study in which DNA from 320 individuals in which 9 Argentinen provinces were examined showed that 56% of these individuals had at least one Amerindian ancestor.”
Note that Argentina also rocks an average IQ of 93, which is just not high enough.
The Nazis and many wise European monarchs agreed: Jews out.
See Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion.
“Jews acquired a reputation as extortionate moneylenders which made them extremely unpopular with both the church and the general public”
“In 1218, England became the first European nation to require Jews to wear a marking badge” (heh)
“The edict of expulsion was widely popular and met with little resistance, and the expulsion was quickly carried out.”
Nazi racial policy towards the Jews was not much different from that of many European kings. Jews were expelled over a hundred times.
“Jews out” is far to the right of the liberal, individualistic, NRX position, which is not really very different from the positions held by the mainstream conservatives.
This is why Nazi positions about Jews are unacceptable in mainstream society while NRX positions about Jews fit right in.
Ny the way, B is clearly not operating in good faith, should be ignored. There were over a hundred expulsions of Jews, clearly the Jews did something to make themselves unwelcome. But B will always deny this, adhering to a strictly politically correct, Semitically correct narrative of Jewish victimization.
I think B has acknowledged that the Jews did stuff likely to make themselves unpopular, but blames this on the conditions of exile – when the ruling elite wants to do bad stuff, hire outsiders to do the dirty work, then punish the outsiders. Money lending scenario: The Jews operate a money lending business and make lots of money, in part because they have a monopoly on money lending granted by Church and King. The King “borrows” this money from the Jews, then expels the Jews without paying them back.
blah blah blah Jews out blah blah. Do you have a point here? Perhaps you are trolling? But if so, why did you write several paragraphs with quotes?
I think you are here as an agent of the Jews to waste our time.
NRx in general is to the racial left of racialists because of the “techcom” element, a.k.a. ancaps. Ancaps hang out in coffee shops with ancoms and then go home and have degenerate sex with each other. Ancaps believe that the Singularity will save them from having to think about race.
Jim is not that retarded; you may be thinking of Nick Land. Bryce LaLiberte claims to be an anarchist, but only because he started out there and hasn’t changed his blog title.
Jews only have the power that they are given. Perhaps they are an attractive nuisance and should be banned like lawn darts.
Someone is handing out power, and it’s not me. I have not given anyone power.
they were given increasing amounts of power starting at least 100 years ago. The history is complicated. Of course, breaking Jewish power is an important goal. To do so, we giggle about lampshades and soap.
Typical scenario leading to the expulsion of the Jews.
Church and King give Jews a monopoly on money lending.
Church and King vigorously enforce repayment of loans.
Church and King are shocked, shocked to learn that a monopoly charges excessive rates.
Church and King borrow all the Jews money and do not pay it back.
Being deeply shocked, shocked, expel the Jews and do not repay the loans.
Analogously, tax farming and estate management.
1. Act like antisemitic retard on anonymous forums.
2. ???
3. Profit, breaking of Jewish power.
A somwhat schematic bishop was recently excommunicated after saying only maybe 300,000 died in the Holocaust. He meant the camp system, like everyone else does. Officially, 1,500,000 died at Auschwitz, and that’s why Israel gets to do stuff. And as the stuff Israel does gets more and more beyond the pale of what first-world countries are allowed to do, a 90 year old man has to be extradited and there needs to be a bill prohibiting maybe 4 people from receiving Social Security.
Similarly, as slavery to the government gets increasingly onerous and Blacks continue to misbehave, we are required to believe that slavery means Blacks being beaten and raped and killed by their masters for no reason.
Of course, liberals aren’t the only ones who change the meaning of words and phrases. Who was the idiot who decided to use the leftist slogan ‘rule of law’ like it means God’s personally enforced law?
Anyway, Jewish power is inextricably tied to the story of millions of gassed and burned. Take that away and you’re just smart, weird people with funny hats. Who might be useful as a religious minority aggrieved to remove Christian symbols from public places.
Could the focus on the Old Testament in the US be a result of trying to find common ground with the Jews held up as offended?
Yes, but the thing is I am in favor of Israel, and indeed everyone else, for example Rhodesian whites, being allowed to do stuff, and I get the feeling that most of those who complain about Jews are not in favor of Jews, or indeed anyone, being allowed to do stuff. Nazism is leftism frozen in the 1930s.
The left loved using the Holocaust to push sexual degeneracy according to their authoritarian personality theory. But now Israel is an increasingly blatant exception, and the DailyKos crowd are grumbling.
What I would expect if current trends were remotely sustainable is the Holocaust as the worst thing ever, but proving that Jews must submit to genocidal intermarriage with Arabs. The Holocaust is too important to the left to be abandoned just because Project Zion is increasingly not the socialist worker’s paradise hoped for. The Holocaust is why the Serbs had to be stopped in the ’90s and why Golden Dawn leadership needs to be arrested on the pretext that some violent foreign gangster rapper may have been shot by a member, and why a German athlete needed to be expelled from the Olympics because of her exboyfriend’s former political affiliation.
Yes, you can see them drifting from Jews are excused from compliance because of holocaust, to Jews are required to comply because of holocaust. That is the more leftwards position, closing down one unprincipled exception after another, and Israel is one great big unprincipled exception.
I’m continuing this conversation despite my better judgement.
>Anyway, Jewish power is inextricably tied to the story of millions of gassed and burned. Take that away and you’re just smart, weird people with funny hats.
If our magical powers of domination stem from our victimization by the Nazis, then how would proving that, say, the Germans only murdered a million of us in the camps and murdered the rest via mass shootings and starvation reduce the victimization and thus our magical powers?
Likewise, if our magical powers of domination only stem from the Holocaust, how is it that we supposedly dominated politics in pre-WW1 Europe to such an extent that it drove Hitler bonkers?
Perhaps somewhere along the way your logic has a massive gap?
>Could the focus on the Old Testament in the US be a result of trying to find common ground with the Jews held up as offended?
Could it be a result of the US being founded by Puritans who saw themselves as the new Hebrews, loved the Torah, taught Hebrew in their universities and gave commencement speeches in it? Could it be that you are such an ignoramus that you don’t know the history of your own country?
As for your darling 90 year old concentration camp guards, they should have been executed in their 20s, but better late than never, you know?
very funny, B.
OK, not Old Testament. But I’ve been at a number of churches over the past few years, and at many of them, the pastor has mentioned that Jesus was a Jew. There’s a reason our culture went from being Christian to Judeo-Christian. It’s not really the Holocaust, or Jewish power, but a response to Jewish lawyers as sturmmänner of atheism. Conservatism used multiculturalism as a defensive gambit; I can call conservatives retarded, but I’m not sure what they should have done.
Jews are not recognized as White in the social construct sense. If they were, they would have been forced to convert to Christianity or killed. Since they’re not recognized as White, they’re used by factions of Whites against other factions of Whites. Only they have more intelligence than the other non-Whites, so they cause more trouble.
The evil anti-Semitic dolchstoßlegende is a misinterpretation of the fact that Jewish newspapers promoted strikes in Germany towards the end of the war while Jewish newspapers promoted the US entry into the war. The misinterpretation is that Jewish soft power drove the Anglo-American alliance rather than the other way around.
Anyway, the Holocaust. It’s the worst thing that has ever happened ever, in which six million were gassed and burned in evil death camps. It’s proof that fascism can not be tolerated, and thus communist thugs beating people up can. It’s why radical sexual license must be imposed so people can make love not war. And it’s soon to be why Israel exists as a holy site for Abrahamic faiths where all are welcome.
And don’t you dare compare the Japanese concentration camps in the US that didn’t have libraries or swimming pools or the gulags of the USSR to the evil Nazi death camps.
I think I’m getting stupider reading your comments.
“”White” as a social construct” is, first of all, telltale Prog-speak. Second of all, the idea of “whiteness” as a primary identity is also an unnatural and Progressive one. Just from a while back. Until a certain point, people identified primarily by their religion and ethnicity, i.e., Irish Catholic or Swedish Lutheran or whatever. You embrace an extinct loser Prog worldview against a winner Prog one, and proudly proclaim yourself a reactionary. This is very similar to La Raza, which pretends they’re Aztec nationalists, with the Aztecs safely dead and gone.
As for the rest of it-I don’t even want to delve. Were the Jooos with their Holohoax also responsible for sexual immorality in the Oneida Community and the Fabian Society? If your dog throws up on your carpet, is it the fault of the Jooos and the Shoah Business? Is the remedy to giggle anonymously about the showers and soap and so forth?
>Nazis aren’t alive to defend themselves
There are plenty of Nazis on the internet, if you know where to look.
only enemies to the left; only allies, at best, to the right…
[…] No enemies to the left, no friends to the right. […]
Scott Alexander posted a response to this on his blog but then deleted it about 2 hours later.
I did not see it, but I would assume he announced it is not true, and then, by deleting it, demonstrated that it was true.
You are correct.
Even better – he demonstrated it in the second half of that same article.
I’ve got the post archived in my RSS feed.
It’s on the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141121033326/http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/20/petty-internet-drama-part-1-of-%E2%88%9E/
You spectacularly criticized personal reality, without getting personal.
Personally, I’d argue he isn’t boring. Not yet.
Personally, I’d argue, he’s an important voice. I like his blog. Still.
[…] Jim remarks the upon Scott Alexander’s sad but altogether predictable disappearance from matters political. […]
[…] support for the restoration of Latin. Meta-fragmentation. Hawk politics. No enemies to the left. Greetings! Unity (I don’t get it). The basic dissymmetry. Reliable […]