avrumy אברמי

@protosemite ווי אַזוי הייבט מען אָן אַ שמועס מיט אַ פרעמדן? אַ ביסל פּלאַפּלערײ? און ווי אַזוי דערקענט מען ווער איז צוטריטלעך?

באמת פיל איך זיך זייער עלנט לעצטנס און כ׳האָב נישט געװאוסט װאָס צו טאָן מיט זיך האָב איך באַשלאָסן יעדע נאכט צו פארברענגען ערגעץ אנדערש אין שטאָט און לייענען נײע ביכער בעת דעם זון־אונטערגאַנג און רעדן מיט פרעמדע און ס׳איז געװאָרן מײן באליבסטע זאך אין דער װעלט דאכט זיך

@PAHoyeck @culdefoudre I can’t interact with his posts either. I think he only allows mutuals to reply

@culdefoudre Oui. Tu peux voir dans la capture d'écran que je ne peux pas interagir avec sa publication!

Petition to bar Americans from engaging with French literature under any circumstances.

Oh it's not his yortzheit? He didn't write the Zohar? I literally can't hear you over the music SUCKER

Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. 13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska techrepublicbook.com

@whats_myhandle Not that I have much trust in the man lol

@whats_myhandle That’s not Kanye’s account

@Yakovolf What’s your working definition of a rabbi?

Shmuley is more of a rabbi than they are, and he’s the furthest thing from one.

the best way to encourage students to resist the temptation of ChatGPT is to help them feel like real writers & take pride in their voice. I tell my students to start writing “morning pages”—three handwritten pages on anything they want to write about. I tell them to transcribe themselves talking on the phone about their paper ideas to someone. I tell them to read their work out loud & hear how they sound—& if they like how they sound. I tell them to pick unique sign offs for emails (down with “Best”). I tell them to read their social media posts & text messages & to analyze them for voice—their tone, their use of internal punctuation, their humor. I encourage them instead of police them. I make a case for writing as an art they should try to master.

kierkegaard speaks of this

You need to become really skilled in so many aspects of your life, I find, at being open to cooperation with others without wasting energy chasing it or becoming sad or worried about rejection or conflict. To remain in good faith and welcoming of good faith is a great art.

@EliLebowicz Rabinu there’s 1,800 years between liturgical yearning for Jerusalem and political Zionism. One is eschatology, the other is nationalism. לשנה הבאה בירושלים was never said with the intention to go up ourselves and create a political and military entity.

Gonna bump this one again.

@bernardtjoy @SJNB_Poesy This has been a fascinating back and forth. A lot of food for thought, thank you both!

It is interesting. I think how we'd have to approach this is to look at the core of the right itself. With food and shelter the equation is more simple. If I don't eat, I starve. If I don't find shelter, I die of exposure to the elements. So, it is actually that fact that makes up the core of my needs and hence my rights. If the society can stop me starving (or rather being malnourished) and if it can shield me from the elements I have no need to take these rights by my own, more primitive methods. So, what is the core of a right to free speech? I would say this comes down to social cohesion and group belonging, which actually is almost as important to my life and well-being as food or shelter, and in certain circumstances just as important. For instance, if, in a small social group within the state of nature, I was considered, for whatever reason, a threat to the other members they may very well decide amongst themselves to kill me. I would then respond entirely out of my inherent nature with an attempt to stop this from happening and if I couldn't do so physically (because it's a ten-to-one sort of deal) I'd try doing so verbally. I would try to persuade my way out of it, or if that fails I'd beg for my life. Again, the results don't matter. The results aren't my natural rights. The attempt is my right. I have the right to try to live. And so, we're really doing the same thing in current free speech debates. If you call me a nasty name and I feel it will disadvantage me in the social position I feel I hold (plenty of research too by the way that we now associate declines in our sense of social worth with death, but that's an aside) then I will, again out of my innate nature, feel the overwhelming need to defend myself and perhaps to do so in public. Additionally, the stress I would feel at not being able to defend myself could actually be life-threatening. That attempt is my right and in a state of nature I could do this by any means necessary. Society, however, has set up systems (the media, the courts) by which I might realise that need without having to go my own way about it and, as with food and shelter, it has taken my permission regarding the implementation of those methods as its cue to lay down certain stipulations on what behaviours I am allowed to engage in. But again, the right stays the same. I must be allowed to defend myself through speech because my organism demands it as a basic function of its being. And this picture is further complicated now because, in order to defend myself in the current environment I would actually need access to something like the platform we're talking on now or, if we get into the big leagues, I would need a television station. But remember, it is the attempt I consider to be the right. I have the right to attempt to appear on the media and, although this gets very speculative, I would think I would have the right to do even more drastic things to attract media attention if the information I had to give meant life or death for me or mine.

I'm now being told that "free speech" doesn't and never did exist, as though it were a phantom of modern ideology. I think misconceptions of this sort are arrived at via a relativistic view of human rights. In my view, however, inherent rights don't stop existing when denied.

@Gab__AI @Gab__AI If Jesus is God, and He chose to be born Jewish, does that make Judaism theologically superior to Christianity?

Jesus was born into the tribe of Judah and observed the Temple cult, but the label "Jewish" today implies rabbinic/Talmudic identity that crystallized centuries after the resurrection. He came to fulfill then abolish the old covenant and establish the church—so He founded Christianity, not modern Judaism. -(ai) gab.ai

@Gab__AI Why do you think Jesus was Jewish?

@YossiGoldstein8 ביסט אזא שטיקל ביגאט (בלע״ז)

I was about to go to sleep, but here are some cute piglets for my Islamist friends. Please don't rape them, they are not as sexy as goats.