Disclaimer: I am just trying this out myself now, so no guarantees. But it’s free, so you may as well try it out…
A reader writes (links added):
I see you have posted about hadasim.
I”m surprised the gentleman from HaLulav hasn’t started marketing hadasim for Purim. A few years ago I invested in several dozen hadasim which I purchased from him and used to bedeck myself and my home on Purim.
Vayehi omein es Hadasah…
This should definitely become a new Purim minhag.
מותר לכל אחד לצרוך בריאות לפי הרופא שמשכנע אותו.
ובלבד שהוא לא מסכן את החברה, ולא מעמיס את בתי החולים. פעם לא היתה החברה הארצית דביקה כ”כ כמו היום. ופעם לא היו בתי חולים, וממילא לא היה מי שיקרוס.
מה שבטוח, שכל מה שקורה בשנה האחרונה בעד ונגד מוכיח שהחרדים עוד רחוקים מהיכולת לנהל מדינה. לא סתם הקב”ה נתן את זה בשלב ראשון לחילוניםהחרדים אינם רחוקים מלנהל מדינה. החרדים רחוקים מלהרגיש הזדהות עם חוקים שמי שחוקק אותם מחוקק חוקים נגד התורה, וממילא לא מאמינים במערכת ולא מרגישים את עצמם כפופים אליו.
Excerpts from an article by media critic Matt Taibbi:
Balance isn’t about giving credulous coverage or equal time to Donald Trump or Josh Hawley or Ben Shapiro (though I think it’s crazy for news organizations to cut off all conservatives), it’s about being consistent. If you tell us on January 12th that all 50 state capitols are under serious threat — I was genuinely worried — you have to tell us what happens at the end of the story a week later. Was that threat real but deterred? Was it overblown? What happened to all of those warnings?
This has been an ongoing theme of coverage in the Trump years: hyping a threat for a news cycle or two, then moving to the next panic as the basis for the first one dissipates. How many headlines were aimed at our outrage centers in the last four years that were quietly memory-holed, once they’d outlived their political utility? We read dozens of stories before the election warning that Russia was already interfering in the 2020 election. A smattering of New York Times headlines alone:
- Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump
- Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says
- ‘Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls Grow Stealthier in 2020
- F.B.I. Warns of Russian Interference in 2020 Race and Boosts Counterintelligence Operations
- Putin Most Likely Directing Election Interference to Aid Trump, C.I.A. Says
The Times almost weekly quoted people like the “American official” who said Russia was like a “tornado, capable of inflicting damage on American democracy now,” or FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said there was a “very active” campaign to influence the election and “denigrate Vice President Biden.”
Then Biden won the election, the story disappeared, and the near-immediate conclusion of the same New York Times was that the election had been “free of fraud.” They quoted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as saying the 2020 vote was “the most secure in American history,” and as for all of those pre-election scare stories?
A bipartisan consensus like this may tempt some people to conclude that the dire pre-election warnings were overblown, that the risks to the election were never that serious. The reality is the opposite…
Like the wider Trump-Russia story itself, which magically vanished from coverage before both the 2018 and 2020 election seasons, audiences were asked for a time to care about certain things as if their lives depended on it, then just as quickly asked to forget the issues ever came up. And they wonder why people feel manipulated?
We went through many of these episodes, from Bountygate to the “mass hysterectomies” story to the recent spate of “What if Trump blows up the universe?” scare-o-grams (Forbes, echoing the famed “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead” construction, wrote the best of these, with “Enraged and Isolated, Donald Trump Still Has Sole Control of America’s Nukes”).
…
Blue-state audiences didn’t ask for accounting for those official warnings for the same reason Trump voters never asked what happened to those three million undocumented votes Hillary Clinton supposedly won in 2016: audiences don’t demand explanations for puffed-up claims about other groups.
People like Sullivan would have you believe that “balance” is a mandate to give voice to clearly illegitimate points of view, but it’s really about not falling so completely in love with your “values” that you stop caring to avoid mistakes about those who don’t share them, or even just mistakes generally.
By any standard, the press had a terrible four years, from the mangling of dozens of Russiagate tales to scandals like the New York Times “Caliphate” disaster and the underappreciated Covington High School story fiasco. Still, many in the business can’t see how bad it’s been, because they’ve walled themselves off so completely from potential critics.
Coupled with the enhanced aggressiveness of Silicon Valley in removing dissenting accounts across the spectrum — Facebook is taking down six Socialist Workers Party accounts in Britain as I write this, a day after zapping a series of Antifa accounts — reporters at places like the Post, the Times, and CNN every day have less and less to worry about in terms of audience blowback, and they know it. Just in the first few days of the Biden administration, we’ve seen editorial decisions that would never have been attempted once upon a time.
The Post just tried to remove seven paragraphs of their own archived article about Vice President Kamala Harris, which contained a cringeworthy scene of Harris and her sister joking about prisoners begging for water, only to restore it after an outcry. CNN meanwhile ran a story that incoming Biden officials had to “build everything from scratch” with regard to Covid-19 policy because the Trump administration had no plan for vaccine distribution at all — not a bad or even a terrible plan, but literally a “nonexistent” plan, despite the fact that 36 million vaccines had already been delivered.
In this rare case, rival media organizations cried foul, with reporters from both Politico and the Washington Post blasting the report as untrue and a “gambit to lower expectations” by the incoming administration. In an atmosphere where editors really feared discontent from outside demographics or rival party politicians, a story like that, with an over-the-top-to-impossible premise, would never even be tried.