Pesak Halacha Is Reduced to ARITHMETIC…

Two New Halachic Fallacies Defined

It’s time to add two more halachic fallacies to our ongoing list. Remember, ideally, these types of arguments should not be made when trying to arrive at the true halacha.

1. Lagur Mip’nei Ish (Fearing a Man): Moses himself instructed the judges he appointed to “fear no man” (Deuteronomy 1:17), and this rule is based on the language of the verse. The basic meaning is that the judges should not fear potentially dangerous and vengeful individuals they may have to put on trial. But, on another level, the sages point out that (Sanhedrin 6-8) when rabbinical judges and decisors are called upon to render their opinions, they must be willing, when necessary, to disagree with precedent exposited by someone else, no matter his stature. That is, they should not fear any of their predecessors. For example, there are many around me today who will not entertain any opinion that goes against one of the explicit opinions of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Now, if they wish to follow the rabbi’s decisions all the time, I can not fault them, but ideally they should at least consider disagreeing with Rabbi Yosef, much like they would consider any side of a dispute, despite those throughout the ages who held otherwise. Another example was the case of Rabbi Eisenstein, who believed that Rav Elyashiv could not be disagreed with. Of course, he does not have a problem with disagreeing with the opinions of, for example, the Shulhan Aruch and other great decisors on occasion. It is only with regard to Rav Elyashiv that he applies the fallacy.

2. In Bava Bathra 36b we find what I will dub the Plurality-Precedent Fallacy:

R’ Bibi inquired of R’ Nahman: What is the reason of those [authorities] who hold that ploughing a field [year after year] confers a presumption of ownership? — [He answered:] A man will not watch someone else plough his field without objecting. [He asked further:] And what is the reason of those who hold that ploughing a field [year after year] does not confer a presumption of ownership? — Because the owner says to himself, ‘The more he ploughs, the better it is for me.’ The inhabitants of Pum Nahara sent the following inquiry to R’ Nahman son of R’ Hisda: Will our master please instruct us whether ploughing a field [year after year] confers a presumption of ownership? He replied: R’ Aha and all G’dolei Hador, the great minds of our generation, hold that ploughing a field [year after year] does not confer a presumption of ownership. R’ Nahman son of R’ Isaac said: Is it greatness to count men? For Rav and Samuel in Babylonia and Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiba in the land of Israel hold that ploughing does confer a presumption of ownership.

Note that there are three Amora’im by the name of Nahman in this passage. R’ Nahman son of R’ Hisda followed a known ruling by many great Rabbis, and the latter R’ Nahman challenged him, pointing out that although his opinion was well-precedented, it did not take into account that the other side of the argument also had its supporters. When a true decisor is asked a question of halacha, he is not merely supposed to start counting how many authorities would side with his ruling; he must consider all of the sides, and actually draw his own objective conclusion. And yes, it would be good if his conclusion has been reached by others in the past, but that can not be the only factor. Sometimes, I get mentally frustrated reading responsa that reach their conclusions by using R’ Nahman son of R’ Hisda’s methodology without trying to show which opinion best fits with the Talmudic sources.

From Rabbi Avi Grossman, here.

לספר את האמת אודות ריטלין = מעין התאבדות מקצועית

“הפרעת קשב” היא “ליקוי הלמידה” הנפוץ בקרב תלמידי ישראל. ב”מחלה” מטפלים באמצעות ריטלין – סם ממריץ, קרוב משפחה כימי של קוקאין. אסור היום להעניש ילד בבית ספר, אבל מותר לסמם את הילדים שמפריעים למערכת הממשלתית האחידה להגיע ל”שוויוניות”.

דר’ יעקב אופיר הוא פסיכולוג קליני, עמית מחקר בטכניון ובאוניברסיטת תל אביב. דר’ אופיר פרסם מאמר במוסף הארץ (30/08/2019) אותו הגדיר כ”מעין התאבדות מקצועית”.

דר’ אופיר כופר בקיומה של ה”מחלה” הנפוצה אצל ילדים בעידן המודרני: הפרעת קשב, וממילא מתנגד ל”תרופה” הנפוצה – ריטלין.

“הפרעת קשב” היא “ליקוי הלמידה” הנפוץ בקרב תלמידי ישראל ומזכה את התלמידים המאובחנים בהקלות וב”התאמות” אחרות במבחנים ובבגרות. דוגמאות: תוספת זמן במבחנים, סיוע מורה בזמן הבחינה, בחינה בעל פה.

בשנות ה-80 הונהגו בהולנד קצבאות נכות נדיבות מאות. תוך מספר שנים הסתבר: כל הולנדי שישי הצליח להצטייד ב”אישור נכות” והיה זכאי לקצבה. כאשר מחלקים לתלמידים “הקלות” במבחנים אין פלא שבערך 40% מתלמידי ישראל מאובחנים כבעלי “לקויות למידה”. בשנת 2017 פורסמו האזורים המחזיקים באליפות הארץ במספר התלמידים עם “לקויות למידה”:

 2521 1

באזור השרון, לדוגמה, יש יישובים רבים שבהם שיעור גבוה מתלמידי י”ב אובחנו כלקויי למידה: במועצה האזורית חוף השרון, בדרום השרון, בתל מונד וברעננה – 65% בכל אחת, בהוד השרון 60%, בהרצליה 59% ובכפר סבא 57%.

לא מפתיע שככל שמשפחה משתייכת לאשכול חברתי גבוה יותר, מתרבים “לקויי הלמידה”. יש יותר כסף לשלם ל”מומחים לאבחון” (אלפי שקלים). ישנם בתי ספר באזורים מבוססים שבכיתה י’ 76% מהתלמידים “לקויים”. לכן לערבים ולבדואים כמעט ואין “לקויי למידה”…

האבחון הוא למעשה אישור רשמי שהתלמיד פטור ממאמצים להצליח. התלמיד מקבל ומפנים שהוא בעל נכות. מעניין – מאוחר יותר, בצבא, באקדמיה ובחיים האמיתיים ה”ליקויים” לפתע נעלמים וצריך להתמודד עם העולם האמיתי, וכנראה שבהצלחה לא מבוטלת למרות אבחנת הנכות בה רבים הצטיידו בצעירותם…

המשך לקרוא…

מאתר קו ישר, כאן.

Only John Bolton and Other Cockroaches Don’t Mind a Nuclear WWIII

September 11, 2019

John Bolton was only national security adviser of the United States for less than18 months but it felt as if he had been there forever. And we are not – alas – done with him yet.

The first thing to be said about Bolton’s fall is that it was entirely consistent with his lifelong pattern. He went reluctantly and departed with all the grace of a cockroach. He showed no loyalty or even courtesy to the president who raised him from being an aged, deserved has-been to briefly being one of the most powerful men on the planet. He could never be graceful or grateful, never be a gentleman. He could never simply shut up.

John Bolton was never a genius: Though like all his neoconservative friends he imagined himself to be. It was always the childish fantasy of a creepy little psychopath who never grew up, always a lie.

For decades, the cockroaches and spiders in the most obscure recesses of all the conservative, libertarian and liberal-progressive think tanks sprinkled across Washington like smallpox scabs spoke with awe of Bolton’s brilliant brain, his remorseless work ethic and his capacious memory. They were only exposing their own even greater mediocrity.

For Bolton always lacked any form of judgment, wisdom, discernment or restraint. He had a simplistic rigid mind that never learned any anything good that was new and never forget everything that was old and vile.

As recently as July, he was lauded at a farcical so-called “national conservative” conference outside Washington as a champion of restraint and peace in foreign policy. Josef Goebbels could not have come up with a more outrageous and ludicrous lie…

Bolton was lauded by unending generations of neocon whores in the American media for his breadth of vision as if he actually understood the world. In fact, the only thing he ever understood – and knew how to play – was the media and think tank gossip games inside the Washington Beltway.

John Bolton claimed to defend the national security of the United States: Another lie. As usual in the Infernal Groves of the National Capital, everything is the opposite of what it is presented as being. In fact, he worked endlessly to put his country at unprecedented risk.

To the very end, he sought to keep American soldiers dying in their thousands in an unending war in Afghanistan that he worked so hard with his neocon soulmates to unleash under their brainless puppet George W. Bush. Indeed, it seems to have been his efforts to (at least initially successfully) derail promising peace talks in Qatar between the Trump administration and the Taliban that finally led his longsuffering president to pull the plug on him.

John Bolton was never elected to and for anything. Even he seemed to realize that he inspired as much human trust as a cobra. But shameless, fawning flattery he could do and it won him diplomatic and policymaking entrees to one Republican administration after another.

Every one of his policies failed, cost untold hundreds of billions of dollars or took hundreds of thousands of lives. It never seemed to matter. He could count on the indulgent hosts and producers of Fox News to wheel him out endlessly, again and again to trot out the same tired old lies masquerading as wisdom and truth.

No one was ever allowed to call him out on it on national television to his face. He would never allow it. Like so many armchair warriors, he had been a draft dodger and was always a bully and a coward.

President Trump, to his genuine credit was a real sportsman and athlete. He played golf well. All his life he has revered sporting champions and war heroes. That may be sneered at childish, but it is vastly preferable to the fraudulent intellectual arrogance of the neocons none of whom have ever seen a shot fired in anger or even a gun pointed in their direction by a stranger with a scowl on his face.

Bolton liked to think of himself as a massive, manly Champion of Freedom: Instead he was always Igor, the hunchback dwarf who capers bizarrely beside Dr. Frankenstein or Dracula, the real men of power eager to bask in their reflected might.

But as Igor, he was always there: His spells of real power and influence spanned a massive three and a half decades. As early as the first Reagan administration from 1981 to 1985, he was already unleashing civil war, massacres and even genocide on the women and children of Central America. It was, really all that he was ever good at.

Bolton was also a central figure in the destruction of Iraq in 2003. He cheered on the attempt to destroy Syria in 2011. He solemnly and thoughtfully endorsed the destruction of genuine democratic and constitutional government in Ukraine in the Maidan coup of 2011. When it came to unleashing the Dogs of War, he was relentless and remorseless to the end.

Nor should we celebrate prematurely that we have seen the last of him yet: A future President Mike Pence or Nikki Haley is perfectly capable of making John Bolton secretary of defense, secretary of state or national security adviser for a second time.

And do not rule out him appearing magically reinvented as a figure of supposed wisdom and restraint at the side of a future President Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris. Compared to the fantastic, terrible and bizarre realities of Washington, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is a sober documentary.

John Bolton never saw a nuclear arms control treaty he did not hate. He was and is willfully blind to the dangers of Armageddon.

Perhaps the creators of “Team America: World Police” were right in their prophetic insight, except the secret cockroach from Outer Space masquerading as a human being and seeking to destroy the human race is not the ruler of North Korea, but Bolton, the “great” neoconservative “thinker” and “statesman.”

Apply Occam’s razor – and that is the hypothesis which most elegantly and fully fits and explains the facts. Who but a cockroach could possibly want thermonuclear war? Who but a cockroach – and John Bolton?

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

From Strategic Culture, here.

‘It Must Be Gibberish’: David Friedman’s Anarchist Poem

ANARCHY IS NOT CHAOS

Anarchy, n. 4. a theory which regards the union of order with the absence of all direct or coercive government as the political ideal. 5. confusion in general; disorder.

THE AMERICAN COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY

  • Government produces all order.
  • Under anarchy there is no government.
  • Therefore anarchy is chaos.

Q.E.D.

 

In Washington there isn’t any plan

With “feeding David” on page sixty-four;

It must be accidental that the milk man

Leaves a bottle at my door.

It must be accidental that the butcher

Has carcasses arriving at his shop

The very place where, when I need some meat,

I accidentally stop.

My life is chaos turned miraculous;

I speak a word and people understand

Although it must be gibberish since words

Are not produced by governmental plan.

Now law and order, on the other hand

The state provides us for the public good;

That’s why there’s instant justice on demand

And safety in every neighborhood.


From David D. Friedman, here.