What if you didn't just bitch all the time?

What if you got a paid subscription?

My rightoid friends have been pestering me about the Sdei Teiman controversy, and I was going to write something, but Baruch got there first, and he lays it out pretty well, so there’s not all that much to add. The Right made a show of force by storming the Beit Lid military base; the Left made a show of force by leaking (we’ll see, but probably) tampered evidence to the media. The Right showed they have the force, and the Left showed they don’t. So you update your priors about who holds whose balls in this country.

I prefer not to comment too much about the PostKahanism days, but the way I see it is that Baruch and I shared two opinions:

1. There’s no way that Kahanism can ever seize meaningful power in the state of Israel.

2. If Kahanism ever did seize power in the state of Israel it would be a disaster.¹

So we set about thinking about ways to fix both problems. Problem no. 1 was the more immediately pressing, so you don’t have to think so hard about Problem no. 2. Until you do. No, it’s not exactly true that Kahanism today is ascendant, but it’s Kahanism adjacent for sure. If you go to Dati Leumi schuls, you’ve probably met a lot of people like David Zini, if not David Zini himself. These are extreme people; they’re not faking. They are still medina-cucks, but only in the sense that Franz von Papen was a medina-cuck.

From Baruch’s perspective, I spent years bitching and moaning about how it was impossible to ever achieve political change, and then when political change happened I pissed my pants and ran back to the libs for comfort. From my perspective, when Baruch smelled power, all of his principles went out of the window, the actual purpose of a Jewish state pushed off indefinitely until you’ve done all of the very urgent stuff that just by coincidence makes your amygdala light up. Who’s right? Probably both of us, but I guess I should defend myself from the charge that all the Moldbug stuff was just an excuse to do nothing all along. Quoth the raven:

Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design.

The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor.

Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party. Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination.

Israeli rightoidism contains a lot more than one drop of sewage.

The point of a Moldbuggian reset is partly that, in the center of the beast itself, nothing else is likely to work, with the likelihood of a right-wing takeover elsewhere being inversely proportional to proximity to Washington. But the more important point is that anything else would be bad. The problems with mass politics are inherent to mass politics; they cannot be fixed except by turning it off. Liberalism is a system for dampening down mass politics and making it flow into predictable grooves. We already have a pretty good example of what a modern state that replaces liberalism with an anti-liberal operating system looks like. We all lived through it. They don’t want to talk about it now, but mass containment of viruses was the overwhelming consensus of edgy Right Wing intellectuals online long before any normies thought of it. The containment regime, once implemented, itself involved the most flagrant violations of basic left-liberal tenets on a daily basis. People didn’t care much, because people don’t really have opinions; they just have antennae that point them towards the opinions that represent power. The new software crumbled before too long under the weight of its too obtrusive absurdities, and the system defaulted back to its resting ideology. It was a big relief.

Anyway, back to the point. We’ll see what happens, but it looks like the way things are going round here is the way they are going to keep going for the next decade or so. My response, to reiterate, is to bitch and moan about it. Everything is ugly; people are boorish and ignorant; it’s destroying Judaism as a credible and creditable religion; we’re getting the whole world to hate us for little appreciable benefit (absent certain mystical beliefs in the metaphysical effects of settling the Land of Israel). You know the drill. But what is the point of all this bitching? You may say ‘what is the point of smoking?’ It takes the edge off, but no-one is going to pay me money to smoke.

However, can’t I say something positive, just once? After all, if the brownoid Israel that is rising is not to my taste, nor was the leftoid Israel that is shrivelling and dying. Like any other thing, it’s a trade off. Let’s take the following video. If you are frum, you should not watch this video. I should not have watched it when a certain dipstick (hi!) sent it to me, but I did, but you still shouldn’t. Here goes:

So, there are, as the cliché goes, two ways to look at this. On the one hand, she’s an empowered modern woman, dressed like a trashy tart, defiling selichos by singing them at a pool party with hooligans. On the other hand, you can say that she is a trashy tart singing at a pool party with hooligans, but at least she’s singing selichos. Both perspectives are true, almost tautologically. Mine is firmly the first. I suspect that if Raban Yohanan ben Zakkai had been able to see this, he would have been sorely tempted just to throw in the towel. However, you have to work with what you have. How do you try and push this in a positive direction?

I actually know the answer to this. Here is a friend of mine. He lives on an illegal outpost and manages one of those small units that is somewhere in between a settler paramilitary and a branch of the IDF.

I only picked that video because it’s the most watched. Look at the whole channel; it’s pretty good content. Basically, the point is to promote Rambamism by packaging it in a way that’s appealing to median Israelis. Aside, from the content itself, it’s interesting to listen to all the subtle ways he appeals to Israeli nationalism and militarism to undermine what, at present, is its prevalent justifying ideology. Now, I don’t believe in Rambamism. I think it’s a drastic mispresentation of halacha as a legal system that borders on being a confidence trick, and I think it’s a reform programme that in its original iteration demonstrably aggravated almost all of the problems it was designed to solve and it’s fundamentally senseless to keep trying to reboot it over and over again for hundreds of years. Maybe I’ll explain why one day. But, in the meantime, the big picture is monotheism and not being an עם נבל ולא חכם. And he’s seeing results.

@rina_hakiki_

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This is some bird who used to go to pray at graves and then she discovered its forbidden and stopped, and she wants to spread the news. Is what she’s saying really correct? Nope. As the Rambam says, she’s not allowed to study the law in the first place, and there’s good reason for that, but whatever. This is an emergency situation, and you take what you can get. Wherever you are, the only way is ever through.

So, there you go, I did something positive. Now your turn.

1. Just in case it ever goes missing:

In other words, the Left has demonstrated that it can run the country, corruptly and inefficiently, but more or less functionally. Whereas the Right has demonstrated only that it can run a political machine based on ethnic grievances and corruption.

And so, the battle is not between a corrupt and evil Left and a Right which represents justice, goodness and the eternal Jewish people. It is, roughly, between whether Esther Chayut or Miri Regev gets to run the country.

So, look at this from the position of your average Israeli pilot, academic, intelligence officer or civil servant. They live in a nice neighborhood. They have a nice, prestigious job, which they worked hard for for decades. They are respected by their global peers. Their kids have a reasonable expectation of the same. Though they are very aware of the imperfections of their country, it’s no third world dump. And now here come these people, who couldn’t run a pizzeria without turning it into a front for money laundering or dope sales, and want to be in charge, because they represent a majority.

It’s as though you were flying first class on some second-class airline, United or something. The plane smells kind of moldy and makes weird noises, the stewardesses are ugly and unpleasant and the meal…hummus? Really? Hate to think of what the people flying economy class are eating. And right on cue, the door bursts open and a chimpanzee marches up to the cabin and demands to be allowed to fly the airplane, baring its fangs and brandishing some sort of petition, signed by most of the economy class people. I mean, forget the stewardesses and the cold hummus, your first and only priority right now is to keep that thing the hell out of the cockpit. And, you know, you can’t be gentle-it’s a chimpanzee. What does the concept of a fair fight even mean in these circumstances?

This is grade-A writing.