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Russia, Too, Could Have Been ‘Exceptional’. Just Like America!

Quoting Ron Unz:

Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

(Find the original NYT article here.)

If only V. Putin had agreed…

Ah, if only. Just picture it:

To quote Hyehudi Editor: 

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Remember these words, and you’ll never sweat an election.

As the famous poem goes about the road not taken (I MAY be misremembering here…):

“I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made absolutely no difference.”

Pandemic Amnesty: Why So Vague?!

Some Want Amnesty. What Do YOU Say?

A call for amnesty unleashed the exact opposite.

Etana Hecht
As Published on DailyClout

Call To Action

TLDR: The Amnesty Testimonies Project is documenting people’s responses to the article published in The Atlantic about Pandemic Amnesty. Send us your stories and your response to that request here

Submit Your Response

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, The Atlantic published an article earlier this week that called for “Pandemic Amnesty”. There have been many great analyses about why this shift in the narrative is occurring now, but regardless of what motivated the article, it opened a Pandora’s box that can’t be closed.

Eternally Hopeful 1776 @hopecrolius
The Atlantic then and now.
Image

12:29 PM ∙ Nov 4, 2022

13Retweets

The sheer anger that was sparked by this article is a sign that the Covid Class has no choice but to continue to gaslight the rest of us for as long as they possibly can. Igor Chudov wrote a great response to the article and received almost 1000 comments on his Substack.

Igor’s Newsletter
The Atlantic is Asking for “Pandemic Amnesty” and Forgiveness
Wow. The Atlantic has a front-page article (archive link) by Prof. Emily Oster, asking for “Pandemic Amnesty”. How interesting. The Atlantic is one of the most forward-looking and yet curated publications and they do not publish rubbish and random musings. And now they have a prominent author asking for “amnesty” and forgiveness…
Read more
10 days ago · 715 likes · 981 comments · Igor Chudov

The comments, on Mr. Chudov’s Substack and elsewhere, are filled with devastating personal stories, and an outpouring of emotions and feelings. The Amnesty Testimonies Project is here to document these stories for journalistic and historical reasons. The responses are a window into the will of millions of people to never be controlled like that again and ensure that the experiment of global tyranny disguised as “public health” will never be attempted in the future.

Full Article Here

From Etana, here.

Ellul on the Internet?!

Here is what was popular:

Gevald!

Argument From the Arguer Himself

I just read a doom and gloom article here.

It was coauthored by two people, one of whom’s views are no surprise, but the other is\was as mainstream as possible.

Here’s his bio:

“Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.”

No, I haven’t studied this under lab conditions, so I may be under a confirmation bias due to what I usually read. But I sense an accelerating clip of normies going sideways.

Perhaps the very change in such people is a cogent argument for paying them more attention. This doesn’t mean accepting specific claims suddenly far more popular, but reconsidering the opposing view, namely:

  • Everything is fine.
  • Upbeat economic and cultural forecasts can be trusted.
  • No one’s colluding or conspiring.
  • The sciences are doing great.
  • No major conflicts of interest.
  • You can mostly trust the news.
  • The various elites and authorities are basically good and goodwilled.
  • And so on.

Maybe not!

Keep Halacha, and You Might Never Fit in Anywhere. But It’s STILL Worth It

How Halacha is Determined

Many people are confused about how halacha (Jewish law) is determined. There are so many rabbis, so many opinions, so much information, so many divergent camps and ways of thinking. What’s a person to do?

To help make sense of it all, here is a concise overview of the main approaches for determining halacha.

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Method #1: Follow the most lenient or personally convenient opinion in all cases.

Best for: Pretending to be religious; being a menuval birshus haTorah (degenerate with the supposed permission of the Torah); bashing Jews with yiras shamayim (fear of heaven); currying favor with the goyim; eroding Orthodoxy; having your cake and eating it, too.

Pro Tip: If you can’t find lenient opinions, create them. Best done by conferring rabbinic ordination on miscreants for this very purpose, citing them as authorities, creating a precedent, then gradually normalizing what was previously unthinkable.

Warning: Your grandchildren will intermarry, become gay, or boomerang to the other extreme and become super religious.

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Method #2: Follow the strictest opinion in all cases.

Best for: Demonstrating how pious you are; making people uncomfortable; turning children off to Judaism.

Pro Tip: Outdo others who follow this method by inventing new stringencies. Rabbis can distinguish themselves by doing the same. There are always new fears and potential dangers, so the possibilities are limitless.

Warning: Every stringency is lenient in some other area (for example, if you are super strict in preventing licentious behavior, you will make it incredibly difficult for singles to date and marry); your children might write a bestselling book for the secular world about how Judaism is a cult.

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Method #3: Do whatever your social group is doing.

Best for: Playing it safe, being popular, not having to think after you learn the ropes.

Pro Tip: You only have to keep up appearances in public or when certain people are watching. The rest of the time you can chill and do what you want.

Warning: You can only function within the protective confines of your social group; your children will be defenseless against peer pressure; you live in quiet terror of your social group turning against you; you probably took a bunch of poison shots.

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Method #4: Do whatever a certain rabbi says, all the time, no questions asked.

Best for: Never having to think again; never having to take responsibility; winning arguments; feeling smart without having to learn.

Pro Tip: Get a feel for which questions to ask and how to ask them, so you get the answers you want and then piously just follow what the rebbe said.

Warning: Ignorance may be bliss, but being an ignoramus has downsides; when they interrogate you in the next world, “I was just following orders” might not be an acceptable response; it doesn’t always fly in this world either; if you picked the wrong rabbi to make all the decisions for you, you took a bunch of poison shots.

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Method #5: Combine your own learning and understanding with direction from rabbis you know and trust to make informed decisions.

Best for: Taking responsibility for your own soul; navigating new and uncomfortable situations without getting misled by fads, peer pressure, propaganda, and Erev Rav; developing a deep sense of self, while remaining true to Torah and tradition; developing a genuine connection with Hashem; avoiding death shots.

Pro Tip: Don’t lose sight of how little you know, but take a moment once in a while to appreciate how far you’ve come.

Warning: Absent a convenient way to make decisions, you will have to muddle through much of the time; you will have little to no social support; you might never fit in anywhere; you might be ostracized and even persecuted.

Bonus Pro Tip: Keep the big picture in mind. It will all be worth it.

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chananyaweissman.com/