… whose failed mayoral candidacy did everything but suck the dicks of each of the major ultra rebbes. As a NYT commenter writes:
One day after the story broke and I don’t see any of the major recipients of ultra-Orthodox campaign donation rushing to their defense. Contrary to what some of the commenters have written here, the ultra-Orthodox (or haredim as they are known in Israel) are neither Democrats or Republicans. They vote as they are told by the community big shots who decide based on promises made to them by the politicians. If they were in the pocket of one party, their unholy efforts would be far less effective. The fact is that the community votes as a bloc and those votes are always up for grabs.
The commenter goes on to wonder why Andrew Yang in particular isn’t tweeting that if New Yorkers had voted for him none of this religious persecution would be taking place, and the beautiful diversity that is beating kids and keeping them ignorant would continue to assume its secure, state-funded role in our great city. Not long ago, he went very public with his love of ultraorthodox ways:
The key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas…
[Yang] criticized the city for allowing investigators “to check for infractions of various kinds” in yeshivas.
… Mr. Yang has sought to appeal to Hasidic voters on issues besides education, including support for the right of parents to choose a circumcision ritual, metzitzah b’peh, which is used by a minority of Hasidic mohels and has transmitted herpes to babies…
Yeah! And what’s even better, Andrew, is that, as you know, all the babies that get blown by infected mohels die! What a way to go, huh? Helluva cultural practice — one you were happy to support.
So here, in their hour of need, with the NYT finally telling everyone what’s going on in the schools and creating a firestorm, where are you? Where’s the great champion not only of shameful schools, but clerical herpetic cocksuckers?
World’s best job: Sit around your entire career futzing with proposals for reform of ultraorthodox education knowing nothing will ever happen. The ultimate sinecure.
These [groups have also been allowed to be exempt] from the obligation to vaccination — [which] they are skirting based on their religious beliefs. Paying them to undermine public health [along with paying them to undermine education] is another wrong we can no longer tolerate for the health of the rest of us. Measles and now polio. No no no.
Another one:
As a public health physician since the 1980’s, I can also note that the disregard of the schools for vaccination requirements are a (large) part of the peril highlighted by yesterday’s polio disaster declaration in New York state, and the detection of polio in the waste water of multiple NY counties, the latest Nassau. The US school age vaccination rates for polio in the US approach 94 %; rates are much lower among yeshiva students, contributing to silent spread of an almost eliminated infection in the US.
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Systemic welfare fraud is something else we allow them.
The article also talks about teachers violently abusing their students. It appears to be endemic. We know that rates of sexual abuse are high in these communities as well.
No one cares. Nothing will change.
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Tell you what. I’ve been studying and following the ultraorthodox scandal, in the US and Israel, for years. I fully admit that I just do not get it. Israel’s ultras are routinely violent against the state as well – street riots galore. No one cares. Nothing will change.
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I will say this: The NYT piece is a brilliant, even exciting example of fearless investigative journalism. The one hundred percent outraged, very lengthy comment thread, full of readers describing themselves as absolutely shocked by the educational gutter the article depicts, tells you what? It tells you that all that’s ever been needed for ordinary taxpayers to be sick with disgust over a scofflaw, rapidly growing, hopelessly welfare dependent subculture in this country is for our paper of record to find the guts to write about it.
Once again, nothing will change. But talk about making the situation graphic. A final comment from the thread:
I never thought I would see a major news publication actually have the audacity to describe the situation accurately, bluntly, and plainly.
WWWWuh oh. WWWWWWWWuh ooooooohhhhh. You is runnin headlong into theology, lady, as in God TOLD you He’s not a sadist but what you gonna do about the fact that God told your male Republican colleagues damn straight He IS a sadist?
This is South Carolina, the Jesus-Told-Me State. It’s like – you played your game of Telephone with the Lord, and He totally told you NOT to destroy mothers and children and babies with a no-exceptions state abortion law; but all them guys played their game of Telephone with the Lord and the Lord told them hell go ahead and force people to give birth even though it might kill them.
Static on the line? Who’s hearing it wrong?
Miscommunication – you said it. Might just make a body wonder ifn basing legislation on who’s hearing Jesus correctly might not be a good idea.
Timed to coincide with the president’s American Fascists speech, gun-toting cultists just showed up en masse at an Idaho public library demanding hundreds of books be removed or they’ll blow everyone’s brains out In Jesus’ Name Amen. The head of the library has already quit and run away, not wanting her brains blown out. “They start showing up at your house with guns on their hips and Bible tracts in their hands.”
A parochial school … baptized 100 students without permission from parents—some of whom were left angry by the surprise. “My daughter calls me from the school and says, ‘Mama, can you bring me some dry clothes? I got baptized today,’” the parent of an 11-year-old told the Fayetteville Observer. “I said, ‘WHAT?’” At least three parents complained to the Northwood Temple Academy principal, who said a handful of students were scheduled to receive the sacrament and the others “just began to respond to the presence of the Lord.”
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The Honey, I Baptized the Kids! problem is more widespread than you might think.
‘Fellow Pennsylvanians: If we go by the most recent numbers, around a million American women had abortions last year, AND EVERY ONE OF THOSE WOMEN (AND RAPED CHILDREN) IS A MURDERER. As I said in a recent townhall:
“If life starts at conception, why do you care what age the heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder, if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.”
But Dr Oz! I hear you say. That’s a lot of women and children to put on trial for murder. Won’t that strain our justice system?
It might. But consider: For a lot of these murders, there are medical records attesting to them, and if I’m elected I will work with others to give the FBI special access to all women’s and female children’s medical, and pharmaceutical purchase, records. We will also of course work to be able to confiscate all abortion clinic patient paperwork going back to let’s say 1980. None of these murders will entail a trial, because irrefutable proof of them exists.
Another question I get a lot is: If hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania women know that under Senator Oz they will be pursued for murder, won’t most of them flee to states where they will not be hunted down?
Yes, many of them will. This represents a win-win for the state. These scum are removed from the premises without our justice system having to deal with them at all. It’s called exile. Those unable or unwilling to flee will be subject to the death penalty.’
… Jinnah Family Park! Set amid the ancient dusty streets of Bannu, Pakistan, this gorgeous concrete-walled, barbed-wire-topped, Islamist-controlled women-only park boasts lush weed and trash planting and constant surveillance by religious fanatics. As the only place in town where burqa’ed women and children can gather, Jinnah Park is enormously popular with this desperate, degraded population. But the city fathers, denouncing the park as a cesspool of shamelessness, have now closed it.
… featured multiple injuries because of overcrowding, plus a vicious attack on a random woman who happened to pass nearby. One can only admire the sect’s commitment to its two most venerable spiritual rites: Finding women to set upon, and destroying its own people through wanton neglect of their welfare.
Catholic universities can sometimes be a bit… off the grid when it comes to the hiring process.
Or perhaps UD should call it the highering process, for Houston’s University of St Thomas was so excited by Mario Enzler’s heavenly contacts (it’s who you know) and the effects of their, uh, secondhand-sainthood-smoke?, that the school hired him as their b-school dean even though he had zero credentials in that particular field!
Not to worry! He had heart! For that betimes he had encountered not merely Mother Teresa, but Pope John Paul II! He would bring a warm “climate of values” to the chilly b-school world.
Some faculty complained from the start (they took him on in 2020) that his hiring process was rushed, that he was forced on them, that he seemed a bit bogus… But with God on their side, the … uh … higher administration said fie to the devil with you you know not what you do etc. etc.
But now. Gevalt. He has hastily resigned. Faculty are calling him a charlatan, a cheat, and a con-artist.
These are not high things. Rather, they are low.
Turns out all this time, instead of relying on things like peering into his heart plus his having friends in high places, faculty have been trying unsuccessfully to verify his resume’s putrid, prolific, and very pious bullshit.
A New York Times writer begins by speaking the harsh truth (see above), and then suddenly davens over backwards to absolve New York’s ultraorthodox community of decades of public health irresponsibility.
Quoting only one person as an authority on the subject of vaccine hesitancy – a member of the ultraorthodox community – she would have us believe that this particular group of Jews is justified, by its tragic history, in its appalling indifference to any state authority (this approach also lets them off the hook for endemic welfare cheating and refusal to educate their children to a state standard). The writer does not ask why groups of Jews around the world with similar tragic histories seem able to discriminate between a Nazi state and a democratic state. She does not consider that the crucial problem may be that this group obeys only its authoritarian rabbis and has contempt for profane entities outside of its sacred realm.
“Vaccine hesitancy is not rooted in Orthodox religion,” [Nesha] Abramson says. “It’s fueled by people who come from outside the community to spread lies and sow fear.” Indeed Israel’s ultraorthodox also seem captive to the same outside forces, since, as Samuel Heilman points out, their community is as just as “perfect… an incubator for epidemics” as New York’s.
Trace the problem back, in both cases, to a refusal to educate their children in basics like the germ theory of disease; but don’t forget primitive powerful rabbis, in some cases, who tell their followers not to bother vaccinating. The notorious tendency of some ultraorthodox communities to incubate epidemic is rooted in the form religion takes among them – in particular, blind obedience to a rabbi, and a shocking lack of basic cultural literacy that makes people credulous in regard to conspiracy theories, and easily manipulated, by outsiders as well as insiders.
Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has formally launched his campaign to reclaim the presidency with a ferocious broadside against his rival, Jair Bolsonaro, who he claimed was “possessed by the devil”.
Catholic Integralist Vermeule has taken a leave of absence from Harvard to run Lula’s campaign. Should be interesting.
You don’t have to agree with Kim Holmes’s overbroad denunciation of the left to appreciate his well-observed attack on the motley crew of right and left American Robespierres who know ever so much better than we how to live, and who intend to shove that way of life right down our throats.
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People who believe in individual liberty as a founding national value need to know their enemies.
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UD’s favorite from the motley Holmes assembles:
Michael Baxter, for example, a DePaul University professor writing in America: The Jesuit Review in 2013, argued that [John Courtney] Murray’s “Catholic version of American exceptionalism blinded him to the danger of Catholics being absorbed into U.S. political culture.” As a result, “Murray got the story of American Catholics wrong. The United States is not unique among modern states.” The implication is the American order is fundamentally flawed. Baxter even goes so far as to hope that “providence will bless us with a revolution” to change this order.
… And how odd, thinks she as she settles in to blog at the only wifi spot up in these here hills, that they held off on the country version of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue until your blogeuse, her Baez baggage fully intact at her advanced age, wandered in.
This park, where rustic meets ruination (everything’s in a state of disrepair, with the burnt-out hulk of a row of cottages moving the eye from disrepair to disintegration), generates strange auras like this all the time – I mean the Baby Blue moment; but also many other cosmic convergences, spots of time when some hillbilly Proust rigs up tightly-packed deep-meaning tableaus just for UD.
Or is it simply a lot of age and experience in me, folded into many Augusts one after another at this strange place?
Doesn’t hurt that the big frame of reference every second, in this fern forest/huge open-sky park, is down-home cozy Mother Earth and, at the very same time, jest past the itty bitty atmosphere, the crushing unfathomable universe. A mix embodied the other night in a lecture (downstairs, in the Massanutten Room) given by a space expert who heehawed and guffawed through the tragic gigantism of a dying cosmos. It’s the same thing out on Big Meadows, where people gather very late to watch the stars begin to fall, and it’s a gentle folk ritual with fellowship and tiny peals of music. The massive Sturgeon moon is one hell of a harsh mistress, but we’re after the golden photographable version.
What else are we supposed to do? Even the Christianity inspired by the morbid world expresses itself, ’round these parts, in happy I’m Saved ditties (they dominate the truegrass programming). Looking around her at this social space, UD flashed, yesterday, onto an image of a young monk at Holy Cross Cistercian Abbey (it’s not too far from here), who suddenly, at Vespers (Les UDs were there to do a retreat) hurled himself flat to the floor in front of the crucifix! She was shocked! Just lay flat and unmoving, his white robes flowing around his body, for what seemed forever. Now you’re talkin’.
You knew they would. Best thing to do this morning: Read his dear friend Hitch on “the absolute right of free expression and free inquiry… [and] the eternal attempt to veto by the dogmatic and fanatical the curious, the inquisitive, and the experimental.”
And while you’re at it: Don’t forget the role played by “the pathetic euphemisms about religious sensitivity that are put forward by those who know better.”
“Based on feedback from counterparts in other major cities with similar legislation, [Indiana’s passage of a radical anti-abortion bill] will have a negative impact on tourism... Exactly how significant remains to be seen. We know there were a handful of conventions already closely watching the Indiana Statehouse over the last few weeks, including Gen Con, who wraps up its annual gathering tomorrow (Sunday),” said Senior Vice President for Visit Indy Chris Gahl.
A subcommittee of the Indiana legislature is already at work trying to counteract the effect of new anti-abortion legislation on convention business. One idea being floated is to keep Gen Con’s computer game annual convention in the state by offering them, gratis, new game ideas/rights.
“The most promising one at the moment,” said Rep. Slade Bryant, “revolves around a heroine named Zygotha, who must protect her zygote from godless zombies. Pursued and menaced relentlessly by anti-government-mandate forces, Zygotha undergoes manifold challenges as she makes her way to the promised land of Mississippi.”
