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There’s ignorance. And there’s haredi ignorance.

“They don’t teach [their children] science so they don’t understand how viruses work… They don’t understand math so they don’t understand what an exponential function is. When you double or triple each time the number of people each person infects, then that is causing a lot of them to die and a lot of them to be sick, and along with them the rest of us.”

There’s our January 6 insurrection, and there’s the haredi insurrection.

“It has begun to dawn on people that we have basically an insurrection here of individuals who refuse to obey Israeli law, from what we mandate in the schools to health care and all down the line, everything that we do.”

Margaret Soltan, February 11, 2021 1:03PM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

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2 Responses to “There’s ignorance. And there’s haredi ignorance.”

  1. Greg Says:

    My wife and I were taking a long, and fairly fast, walk the other day, and part of this came up through some relatively hard breathing. She said that large parts of the Trump base don’t understand exponential growth. I said that her real point was fair, but that, with regard to exponential growth, neither does a large part of most people. I think that the real difference is that the Haredi and Trump supporters can’t even (or don’t want to) identify the real experts to whom they should defer. Once it was almost any research scientist, without a serious commercial conflict of interest, and Walter Cronkite. Now they find it hard to chose between Fauci and some crazy Rebbe or a Trump Flunky drinking bleach with olive and swizzle stick. L’chaim. This is the main effect of the right wing’s decades-long war on any reasonable epistemology. None of us knows, or can know, very much first hand. So it is vital to learn to appraise sources.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Greg: And yet the revolt against elites/experts has been well underway for decades. I also think cultic fundamentalist religions play a big role here. If you grow up believing all sorts of craziness is actually holy writ, and you depend for your truths on crazy holy leaders, you’ll believe absolutely anything. You’ll also be more vulnerable to charismatic con men (Trump, for example) since you’re practiced in believing in them. A lack of education (the national scandal of ultraorthodox yeshivas, for instance) also plays a role. Self-righteous paranoid collectives are unlikely to produce much beyond conspiracy thinking, reactionary politics, and violence.

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