This Week in the Insurrectionist Whore of Trump Tikvah Tablet (1/17)
David Shasha
The Insurrectionist Whore of Trump Will Not Relent: Sedition is Alive and Well at Tikvah Tablet
On Tuesday we got a bunch of very interesting articles from the Whore of Trump that show us what is going on in the minds of the Trumpists there.
The first article is from Federalist Society macher Stephen Vladeck, which argues against the Bush 43 Patriot Act:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/patriot-act-2001-homeland-security-20-years
Though his brief Tablet bio does not mention it, Vladeck is in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/stephen-vladeck
It is indeed ironic that Vladeck stands against one of Bush’s signature moments, as the Federalist Society was once all in with him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society#George_W._Bush_administration
And why would a Federalist Society lawyer turn against the Patriot Act?
Because of Trump:
Between 2010 and 2013, the Justices rejected a constitutional challenge to those USA PATRIOT Act provisions that criminalized advocacy on behalf of foreign terrorist organizations as a form of “material support”; they upheld a nakedly pretextual use of a statute authorizing the detention of “material witnesses” to detain a University of Idaho football player who the government had no intention of using as a witness to anything; and they held that the constitutionality of the 2008 surveillance reform could only be challenged by someone who could prove that interception of their communications under that authority was “certainly impending”—a rather tall order for a program that is entirely secret. In each of these cases, Justice Kennedy sided with the Obama administration. And for each of these rulings, the Court refused to even hear additional cases in which lower courts had turned away challenges to post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policies. Thus, as Sept. 11 retreated further and further into the rearview mirror, the policies it provoked, which were putatively tied to the urgency of meeting the threat, ironically fared better in court.
It is indeed a very canny way to attack the FISA matter that has long animated the Putin-Trumpists, as we see in the following post from The Heritage Foundation:
The Vladeck article supports the Trumpist idea that government overreach is the problem, however much it contorts the usual Bushist principles into a pretzel.
A couple of days after Tikvah Tablet posted the article, Vladeck flexed his muscles on The New York Times’ Op-Ed page, affirming the idea that Trump could be tried after he leaves office:
Indeed, it is curious that Newhouse did not choose to publish the NYT piece!
Perhaps more curious is how Vladeck’s tenure with the newspaper of record began a month before Bari Weiss resigned, though his name does not appear in her famous resignation letter’s litany of Neo-Con worthies she brought to the paper:
https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=Stephen+I.+Vladeck
One of his four articles for the paper is on election fraud, published just after Election Day:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/08/opinion/voting-results-elections.html
The second Tikvah Tablet article shamefully ropes in Emmanuel Levinas in another article on surveillance:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/levnias-facial-recognition-technology
Right now, we are dealing with a situation where the Trumpist Insurrection, apparently okay with Whore of Trump Newhouse, has created a situation of police malfeasance that allowed the seditious perpetrators to escape justice:
The FBI is now trying to find them using various tech means:
David Zvi Kalman, apparently associated with the racist Shalom Hartman Institute, argues against Facial Recognition Technology by using the work of Emmanuel Levinas:
But the face is also important for Levinas because it doesn’t have to mean anything else—it is, in his words, “signification without context.” In the ideal encounter, you experience the face of the other without actually noticing anything about it, not even eye color. Given what we know today about unconscious bias, this is perhaps a little naïve; people may not notice eye color immediately, but they certainly do notice race. Still, even if a pure encounter is not possible, Levinas’ point is that there is something in the human face that cuts through so many of the ways that we define ourselves and are defined by our bodies, to reveal a single essential quality: that the person you are looking at is not you, and that in recognizing this it obligates you, first to preserve it, and then to lead an ethical life. “There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me,” Levinas said. The details of Levinas’ face philosophy are sometimes obscure and difficult to follow, but the face he is describing is always real, never a metaphor; faces—especially the faces of strangers—actually matter.
It is indeed very curious that Tikvah Tablet chose to publish this article when it did:
This is the ethical life cycle of modern technology, and its major problem is that it doesn’t know how to distinguish between technologies that complicate morality and those that destroy it—that is, it lacks the ability to say no, absolutely not. All technologies have some redeeming value, goes the underlying assumption, and while there’s a short list of technologies we’ve decided should never be used—certain weapons and forms of genetic engineering most prominently—they nevertheless persist, and there isn’t a mechanism for adding to that list. We can turn the volume down, but we cannot turn it off.
At the very moment when we need to identify the faces of those who tried to take down this country, we have an argument against the technology that might help us to put them in jail.
Well played!
We then got a glowing tribute to the vile Trumpist Sheldon Adelson:
Just in case you did not get the news on Tuesday morning, Whore of Trump Newhouse wanted to make sure that you knew how great Adelson was from his hometown fans at The Las Vegas Review Journal!
The final article from the Tuesday e-mail newsletter is from someone called Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman – try saying that one five times fast!
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/come-with-me-feuerman
The article of course pays tribute to the Haredim:
For example, in the days preceding Yom Tov, for inspiration, he would travel to Brooklyn to hear his rebbe, the famous Rav Hutner, expound for several hours at a clip in a Yiddish that was so esoteric, on topics so mystical and sublime, that mature scholars had difficulty to comprehend. Naturally, at 7 years old, I had absolutely no understanding. Yet I kept him company, sitting for hours. Du vest mir bagletn, come with me, he would say. Lomir lernen a bissel, come study Talmud with me, was a signature of his being. When he gave a class as he often did at shul or in school, I would also go with him and watch him speak. I adored him and was one with him.
After some Woody Allen type questioning of his loyalty to the Yiddn heritage, he gets to the actual point:
I heard him scream out with hot-blood pain as they heaved him from a gurney to an operating table. I was relieved that he was alive but his pain ripped through me—he was in agony. You may not believe this, but as the life ebbed out of him, he cried out in loshen koidesh, the sacred tongue: “In His hand I put my life when I sleep and wake, my soul and body are in His care. God is with me. I have no fear.” God keeps him company.
That’s right, it is an article about Haredi Death!
His very pious father lives for many years after that hospitalization, but the resonance of his eventual passing brings the current COVID situation to mind:
Next to his body on that autumn evening, I felt an odd relief. My father in his pious personality and religious sensibility could brook no rift, no separation. He called me and called me and I mostly heeded his call, but it was all an illusion. Over his dead body, I was sure of it now. He had a quirky hunger for me and in my appetite to be special, I took it far too seriously. It was a mutual fantasy, a pyramid scheme of intimacy that sustained us both, but at the expense of the truth: that we were two very plain people who had an extraordinary experience together that was over now. There would be no more calls for company.
Feuerman is apparently a psychotherapist, and apparently his article is another attempt to address the COVID Haredi issue with some sensitivity.
Though he does not make the connection explicitly, it all has the feeling of another Tikvah Tablet con-job that asks us, as the Trumpists have been doing, to get over it and just live with the Pandemic.
It is the Whore of Trump way.
Michael Lind: Pure Trump!
On Friday morning I had finished all my reading for the week’s various notes, but after I was done formatting the e-mails to be sent out today, I received this gem:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-new-corporate-tyranny
It is really hard to say just how offensive and shocking this all is.
I had already made note of how Michael Lind’s Trumpist depredations fit into the Whore of Trump Newhouse worldview:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/GpmRv_HvRm4
The Friday article rams the point home in no uncertain terms, right down to the Lysol Projection:
Was there an alternative to allowing a dystopian informal corporate constitution to emerge and engross more and more of the American economy and society like a black hole devouring a galaxy?
As we have learned, Trumpworld is very upset with their leader being thrown off the social media platforms:
The Lind piece is no different from this one by House Negro Trumpist Larry Elder:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/twitter-permanently-bans-trump-larry-elder/
Though Elder adds moral equivalence to his Lysol lament:
Why do Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Harry Reid get a pass?
And let us not forget the New Jews for Jesus CEO Prager, who sent out a special fundraising appeal to fight Big Tech on behalf of the Inciter-in-Chief:
http://click1.mail.wnd.com/ViewMessage.do
Indeed, as I was preparing this note, Tikvah’s Friday e-mail had an audio piece from its Haredi division leader Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer that spoke in similar terms:
Here is the description:
Recently, we have seen an unprecedented crackdown by America's tech giants on what they deem "dangerous" speech. In this week's special edition of "Conserving Torah," guest presenter Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer—the head of Tikvah's haredi division in Israel—explores how the revelation of God's personal name helps us think more clearly about the nature of freedom, speech, and modern communications.
The “revelation of God’s name” and social media banning of Trump – it is all too much to stomach.
Whore of Trump Newhouse and all the hack Tikvah Neo-Con writers pretend that they are different from the guttersnipe Trumpscum, but in the end it is all the same thing.
Incitement to Sedition.
The Jewish Review of Books and Adam Kirsch
On Tuesday we received another piece of Tikvah Tablet racism, this one from The Jewish Review of Books:
That’s right, the Tikvah Intersectionality brings us a very special event with White Jewish Supremacist Adam Kirsch.
For those who might still not be familiar with Kirsch’s anti-Sephardi oeuvre, here are my two articles on his Ashkenazi insights:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/QZZmUdvALTk/m/3y0b0WWFAwAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/fDOa6iBH0eU/m/Bfw5DQ30BQAJ
It is always wonderful to see that Tikvah Synergy at work – at our expense!
David Shasha