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🦌 the fool Profile picture
🦌 the fool
@kilovh
Jew. The holy Baal Shem Tov said that for every question you can ask, he has an answer, and for every answer, he has a question.
2 subscribers
Dec 4 • 42 tweets • 7 min read
thoughts on scientific method:

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.
Nov 17 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
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
Jul 2 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
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!
Jan 10 • 42 tweets • 8 min read
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/?
Nov 8, 2023 • 28 tweets • 5 min read
lil' 🧵re:atheism

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.
Oct 13, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A Chassidic story for you to take into Shabbos:

Before Reb Yitzchak Vorker left this world, he promised his son that he would contact him from heaven and tell him how things were for him in Gan Eden. But four weeks passed, and his son didn’t hear from him. He couldn’t understand what was going on, so he went to his father’s best friend, Reb Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, and said: “Rebbe, I’m so worried about my holy father. He promised to come back and speak to me, if only in a dream. But it’s been four weeks, and I haven’t heard anything from him.
Aug 14, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Community note desire for headshots cannot overwhelm the multi-decade mimetic inertia of internet reddit brain about religion (the community note is full of it, and eventually the current academic orthodoxy about the Bible's alleged composition (a particularly weird 19th century German hatchet hatchet job, among many) will soon see its last sunrise)
Jul 23, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I recently attended a meal with a ~25 yr old law school grad who's about to take the bar exam.

Questions they asked in earnest:
-How does the atom bomb work, like isn't the air in my hands made of atoms right now?
-Why were people so worried about communism? -Why would anyone need thousands of atomic bombs?
-"Why did killing King Ferdinand start the war?"
-Why were people against the theory of relativity?
-Why did the US get involved in a war in Korea?
-Was the US really on the same side as China, against Japan?
Jul 3, 2023 • 60 tweets • 10 min read
I think the euros have never quite been able to wrap their head around American culture not manifesting as operas (though there are those too) "you mean you just do culture, without living in the same village for a thousand years and running down Jews on your horse? But what do you even write about?"
May 10, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
There is something just straight idolatrous about insisting the object formed by one's hands is greater than oneself, and then defining oneself down to accomplish it I always return to the teaching of the Chasam Sofer, who explained that idolators shaved their entire heads in order to reflect their idols, in which they could not recreate convincing hair. They reduced themselves to convincingly argue for the superiority of their handiwork.
May 8, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Here's a thought - what happens if you have an itch for being allowed to think based on intuition and experience but feel precluded for whatever reason from "spirituality", left-coded things, or feminine-coded things? You'd get a tidal wave of base village essentialism. People with equally incoherent and equally feel-good (for them) "thinking hobbies" but centered around what are perceived to be traditional hierarchies. Expounding the simple but inevitable consequences of formal essence
May 8, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Thinking of my two adventures in Meron on Lag Ba'Omer...one of the "let's not do that again but I'm glad I did it" things ofc that's what I said after the first time too...
May 8, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Per some scholars, ancient Judaism's most remarkable trait was its protean formlessness such that it was able to simply absorb the ideas of every single other ancient culture whole cloth and become a totally new and unrelated thing called "rabbinic Judaism" Whatever Judaism was before the Rabbis, it was able to become not a "sacrificial cult" and extremely roman and also hermetic but actually zoroastrian however quite helenist, all of those cultures having actual legitimate flavor in the BCE years,
May 7, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
THEY'RE WISER ON AVERAGE (IN THE TRIVIAL SENSE THAT THEY AREN'T STARVING AND HAVE READ A BOOK) BECAUSE THEY LIVE IN THE RUINS OF A CIVILIZATION BUILT OVER MILLENNIA ON THE ANCIENT WISDOM BRIAN Image In the non-trivial sense, Brian is *quantifying* *wisdom* it hurts me just to read it
Jan 31, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
oh dear I have to give reddit its due, at least there you would find ten thousand nerds to downvote and explain thoroughly why this is a terrible idea
Jan 31, 2023 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
it may not seem like it, the senses may at first rebel against the notion, but this is a selfish demand for Jews to become more selfish. and less Jewish. Jews didn't react to Whoopi and Ye as some kind of moral opprobrium, "bad things are happening and we as a society need to do better," a statement that requires the speaker to stand above the object of their criticism
Jan 30, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I know every track on't is a masterpiece but this is a masterpiece

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a better four-track album ending than Climbing Up the Walls -> No Surprises -> Lucky -> The Tourist
Jan 30, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's soooo good A bowl of weetbix with warm milk, a rusk and a piping cup of tea is bliss
Jan 30, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
it's not any particular theory that's most at fault, it's the second-order hubris of thinking the whole world is captured, that there's a network of knowledge that (apart from particulars that don't matter by definition) embraces the universe without remainder it's the ability to say "it was the same story as everywhere else" without guilt or shame
Jan 29, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
"Rabbi" in the Twitter username is a bigger red flag than "PhD" man I have more soi dissant rabbis blocked than any other group profession
Jan 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Sefaria is kinda killing it lately I mean it in the positive sense. I know some of you elitists are reading this and thinking "yeah they're killing it, if it is any appropriate respect for torah"