No matter how dreamy you find trump's greasy smile or his vision for the middle east, it doesn't justify the Jewish lives that will taken by the terrorists he forced Israel to release.
He didn't break *that* paradigm, did he?
Apparently his hands were still tied by old visions of the middle east, all those centuries ago, in January.
And he hasn't actually done anything to stop those terrorists from actually taking Jewish lives.
The people who should be more hard nosed about this are so wowed by one afternoon of indiscretion in which a president dared to imply (and lo and behold, everyone has a different practical interpretation of his unconsidered and empty words) that the 2SS is completely over...
Everyone has so committed to vibes and propaganda that a propaganda victory is immensely satisfying and no other victory is necessary.
What was it herzl said? "if you dream it, there is no will"?
Sure, it's good to demoralize the enemy...
But chaos is not demoralizing to this enemy.
Order, and a plan, and relentless focus, and refusing to be distracted by shiny press conference baubles, will be necessary.
And your Netanyahu who brought about this "glorious accomplishment" should have resigned during the Biden administration, with honor, for his disastrous oversight of the worst slaughter of Jews since the holocaust.
None of those dead people has a voice in his "great victory."
So I'm a bit impatient with the delirious victory laps from so many.
Who knew that all intractable problems needed was a wink from a man who has already walked back half of the imagined points you all did podcasts about.
No American troops.
No permanent relocation of Palestinians.
No Saudi cooperation.
No Jordanian or Egyptian cooperation.
That glorious 3D chess played with the Jewish lives this time. Why so joyous?
Note how the kahanists are certain this is a kahanist plan, the Israeli center left is writing about enticing Arab states into real estate deals, the popularists in America are certain this is a negotiating tactic for Saudi Arabia...
All this whole story really teaches us his how utterly rotten the status quo is.
someone dm'd me and asked for me to share some chassidic thought on Chanukah
we begin, of course, with adam and eve in the garden of eden:
there appears to be a kind of ignorance, or more charitably innocence, that G-d wishes Adam and Eve to retain. the tree they are forbidden is the Tree of KNOWLEDGE of good and evil. the serpent is clever and cunning. they eat from the tree and "their eyes are opened"
but Adam before he eats from the tree is meant to be immeasurably wise--he names the animals in the holy tongue with "True Names" by perceiving their souls. "Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels" says the psalmist. yet somehow, Adam does not "see" his nakedness...
feyerabend is right, and there is no scientific method. that is, historically, there is no particular intellectual approach or order of operations that produces "science." "science" is produced in the same way as all other human thought.
the various historical attempts to describe a mechanism or method for producing specifically *scientific* (as opposed to, say, pseudoscientific, or philosophical-Aristotelian, or humanistic) thought do not survive contact with the enemy, i.e., the actual history of science.
verificationism, which said that only the empirically verifiable (or the tautological) is meaningful, renders much of science, including all hypotheses, meaningless, and meanwhile, literally everything is a proof of marxism or freudian psychology per their believers.
While I find some of its insights interesting, anthropology is so widely built on the error that obscure barbarian tribes are the wellspring of humanity rather than basically post-apocalyptic orphans that it's almost impossible to read
Anthropology makes the same error of the external in societies that the other sciences make in substances
"human society has lost its connection to nature, unlike the tribes of the Amazon" sir, the tribes of the Amazon so lost their connection to civilization, to nurture, that they can't see any intellectual or moral significance to the individuality of experience
Not just because I was born in the sidra of Korach is it one of my favorite Torah portions.
The back-to-back portions of the Spies and Korach orient us in eternity--because their errors are the errors of the ancients and of the moderns.
The spies are ancient in mindset. The Talmud says the spies claimed "Even the Master of the House cannot remove his vessels from there;" that is, the report for which they were punished was a report questioning G-d's power to conquer the Land.
And what's stranger, it works!
Stranger: the people buy the argument!
No one stood up and said "Before our G-d, who feeds us miraculously with manna and waters us from the Well of Miriam, who broke Egypt and drowned the army of Pharaoh, no army can stand!"
Alright I'll explain the whole "Jewish tunnel in Brooklyn" thing to you with the proper context 🧵
In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.
This made many people very upset and was generally regarded as a bad move. 1/?
OK for real: once upon a time in Eastern Europe a movement called Chabad was founded. Its founder was Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (d. 1812). He was many things, among them: a genius talmudist and rabbi, a kabbalist and mystic, and the rarest of things, a true original thinker.
on the Jewish view, Idolatry is not a denial of G-d but the belief that there are other uncreated powers -- or to put it existentially, it is the idea that G-d merely exists, rather than is the single ground of all existence
there is also something "tantamount to idolatry" called shituf, with different roots and different applications. shituf literally means partnership. it's not as bad as idolatry but still forbidden. It says that though G-d is the single ground of all existence, others help.
the classic example is the notion discussed in Rashi and the midrashim on the story of creation of G-d consulting or "partnering" with angels G-d forbid in the act of creation. these are partners who themselves would be created, so not technically idolatry.