העורך Editor

The Internet Shiur is a discussion of critical information every Orthodox Jew needs to know about the internet. It provides a comprehensive worldview as well as specific technologies and detailed tips to enable safer internet usage. Featuring Rabbi Gil Student and organized together with Dovid Teitelbaum, this lecture gives you the ability to take control of your and your children’s internet experience.

Is the internet lechatchilah or bedieved, meaning is it a positive opportunity or a necessary evil? Should you let your children access the internet? Should you give them mobile devices? Can a man and woman who are not married communicate online? What do you do about the shmutz on the internet? All this and much more are addressed in The Internet Shiur.

The Internet Shiur is a six-part lecture. Search for the words “the internet shiur” on Torah Musings to find it, or see it directly on YouTube, here.

The Brisker school of Torah is explicitly against trusting our intellect. They say: Don’t ask ‘Why’ but ‘What’. Likewise: “A deficiency of explanation shows a lack in comprehension”.

Rabbi Yitzchak Zev Soloveitchik once said “our” generation was not a “Dor”, but a “dor’aleh”. Of course, this kind of solipsism can and might have been used in (or against), any generation whatsoever throughout history, from Adam to the last man standing. Why the arbitrary cut-off point? Speak for yourself.

For those who think this shows wisdom, Shlomo cries:

אל תאמר מה היה שהימים הראשונים היו טובים מאלה כי לא מחכמה שאלת על זה

Note the hypocrisy: He was not undermining medicine or physics. In all secular arenas of knowledge and endeavor, we are to trust our powers of deduction and speed right ahead. Only when it comes to Judaism are we to cloak ourselves with false humility and shy away from using our God-given brain. The Brisker counsel of despair does not affect sins, only virtues.

By the way, the above “dor’aleh” statement was in reference to the Chazon Ish; after his passing “we” were less than human. But anyone who knows real history knows Rabbi Soloveitchik fought an invisible war against everything about the Chazon Ish and his students, including after his death (and his family\followers never stopped, either).

And the historical Chazon Ish never said anything like this, forever giving Torah encouragement to all.

The Charedi scribbler Cross Currents site is down, which means Hyehudi‘s links to them won’t work for now. The writers are, eh, Currently Cross. This is from the HomePage:

Yes, a hacker intruded. No, it’s not related to anything recently published by us (at least, as far as we can tell).

Over a week ago, we detected a hacker intrusion (and we must thank the alert reader who first found signs of it). We performed multiple scans using multiple WordPress security scanning tools, and thought we had cleared the infection.

Sadly this is not the case, and we must determine how a Russian hacker was able to assume the identity of a user or moderator without knowing the passwords — ideally, before making Cross-Currents available to the public again.

Wait. How do you know it’s “a Russian hacker”? Freudian slip? Probably the same way Obama knows how Wikileaks got some records of Clinton crimes, and for the very same reason: he doesn’t.

They say it’s “not related to anything recently published by us”. If they deny being the neocon blood mongers for WWIII between the US and Russia that they are, how do they pretend to think the Russians would try to down them?

They are now asking for money, of course. Will you give it to them?

Update: They are back now. Still unrepentant, and still looking for a handout.

We once wrote:

There’s an old joke that when the Beis Hamikdash is built, the Chassidim will be busy with the many different forms of Avodah (service), with the blood, the singing, cooking, frying, the clothes, etc. There will also be a special room for the Litvaks. They will be sitting and learning Torah instead, so as not to waste time…

Litvaks would like to believe this would not entail any Bittul Torah (yes, personal knowledge). But it would. Writes the Kesef Mishneh, Klei Hamikdash 3:7:

ואיכא למידק דמשמע מהכא דמשיגדיל ויהיה איש כשר לעבודה וזה סותר מה שכתב למעלה שאינו נכנס לעבודה עד שיהא בן שלושים שנה. וי”ל דהתם לשיר שהיא חכמה גדולה וצריכה לימוד המוסיק”א והכא לשאר עבודות שאינם צריכות תלמוד כגון הגפת דלתות וכיוצא בהן. כו’.

… In short, government bureaucrats do not pay taxes; they consume the tax proceeds. If a private citizen earning $10,000 income pays $2,000 in taxes, the bureaucrat earning $10,000 does not really pay $2,000 in taxes also; that he supposedly does is simply a bookkeeping fiction. He is actually acquiring an income of $8,000 and paying no taxes at all.

Murray Rothbard, in Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market

And in better prose from “Making Economic Sense“, chapter 60:

It might be objected that, after all, a politician who urges higher taxes is not only imposing suffering on other people; he himself as a taxpayer will also have to bear the same deprivations as other citizens. Isn’t there, then, a kind of nobility, even if misguided, in his plea for “belt-tightening” common sacrifice?

To meet this question, we must realize a vital truth that has long remained discreetly veiled to the tax-burdened citizenry. And that is: contrary to carefully instilled myth, politicians and bureaucrats pay no taxes. Take, for example, a politician who receives a salary of, say, $80,000; assume he duly files his income tax return, and pays $20,000. We must realize that he does not in reality pay $20,000 in taxes; instead, he is simply a net tax-receiver of $60,000. The notion that he pays taxes is simply an accounting fiction, designed to bamboozle the citizenry into believing that he and the rest of us are on the same moral and financial footing before the law. He pays nothing; he simply is extracting $60,000 per annum from our pockets. The only virtue of United Nations’ employees is that they are frankly and openly exempt from all taxes levied by any nation-state—which simply makes their position the same as other national bureaucrats, except uncamouflaged and unadorned.

The same principle, too, applies to sales or property or any other tax. Bureaucrats and politicians do not pay them; they are simply subtracted from the net transfer to themselves from the body of taxpayers.