Avram in MD

anonymous Jew,

“AAQ, whatever respect I had for you is gone. Mental health is no joke, and, because of attitudes like yours, people can be reluctant to get help for themselves or a child.”

I’m not 100% sure if he was joking or not, I mean, he wrote something in a joking way but he may have been serious with his point. I know someone who had a certain type of recurring hear arrhythmia that was misdiagnosed as panic/anxiety attacks (she was usually panicking when the events occurred – because they were scary! and were back to a tachycardic normal sinus rhythm by the time she was seen), until one day when her heart was clocking north of 230bpm and would not slow down, the paramedics got leads on her and a strip showing the arrhythmia. While managing the condition, she found that some foods could trigger the arrhythmia.

Yserbius123,

“In the communities that essentially tell children that if they can’t learn for 10 hours a day and do nothing else for most of their lives that they are failures, kids who can’t do that often act out.”

Ooooh, if we’re just gonna make stuff up about other Jews, can I join too? I thought we were trying to have an honest debate, but we could have such fun instead!

“And we wonder why there is so much teen violence.”

lolol teen violence only exists in Lakewood and is the fault of those horrible anti-vaxxers. I think you’ve hit all the high notes on the people you hate. Do you feel better now? Or should we blame the national debt, ozone hole, decline of morality, and growing old on them too?

n0mesorah,

“They were told things like your not coming on time to seder so we are giving your chavrusa away. Unless you sign the paper.”

Nope. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Something seems very off with this description at first blush, and I would love to hear the other side’s perspective of the conversation. Repeatedly coming late to the learning seder harms one’s chavrusa, so giving him away may well be the right call in those circumstances. And tying in some sort of evil smartphone blackmail angle seems like an attempt to whitewash irresponsible behavior.

Yserbius123,

“different hashkafas have different things that put their teens at risk and have to put out different ways of helping them.”

I’m not sure that I agree with this – can you be more specific?

“In many MO communities, teens become too enamored with the dark sides of secular society so they have organizations like NCSY to steer them on the right path. In some communities, however, they close their ears and say “La la la can’t hear you learn more Torah!” instead of addressing the 800 pound gorilla.”

I don’t think this is true or fair. Sometimes NCSY helps a teen connect to Yiddishkeit and steer him away from trouble. Sometimes it does not. Should an outsider to the MO community then conclude from those not helped that the MO community is doing nothing to help these troubled teens? There’s some troubled teens in my community who disrupted a NCSY social party-type event to the point that they were told to leave and (allegedly) police were called. I’ve seen those same teens attending evening youth-focused learning programs offered by a local kollel and not disrupting it. I think the big difference was in the atmosphere – one was a swarm of teens plus 1 or 2 adults there to shout a dvar Torah, and one was a beis medrash with many adults and some teens mixed in attending a shiur. Is the NCSY route really superior to the derided “learn more Torah”? And as Gadolhadorah noted earlier, studies, outlets, and activities are not sufficient to really help the underlying problems these kids are having.

n0mesorah,

“Some people in chinuch dropped their own nuanced hands off approach when it came to yeshiva bachurim and their phones.”

Hands off is not the same thing as nuanced. And in your previous post you wrote essentially the same thing, but attributing it to brainwashing from an overarching anti-technology movement. Maybe the menahel or yeshiva staff decided to give smartphones the boot after witnessing firsthand how disruptive they were, or after parents pulled their kids out because other kids were showing them inappropriate images.

“The fall out -even today- is tremendous. The yeshiva staff did not see anything from the angle of the student body. They were continually at war with some talmidim.”

You can’t really have it both ways – arguing on the one hand that the specter of smartphone addiction is overblown, but then catastrophizing the impact of their removal from the Yeshiva.

“2) The boys that were not committing to permanently giving up their phone, had no one to talk to. Half the yeshiva was put on a pedestal for not having a phone”

Were they banned, or were they not? This makes it seem like they were not banned, but rather those who opted to keep their phones were treated differently?

“and overlooked them for everything.”

What does this mean?

“3) Bachurim had to get rid of their phones within a week. They had to figure out if they should cancel or not. They had to put all their info somewhere else. Some had to figure out new travel arrangements. It disrupted a lot of the routine.”

These are reasonable points. It sounds like the Yeshiva should have been more judicious with the timing of the ban; maybe instituting it bein hazmanim to give students more time to adjust or decide what to do, and providing more resources and support for the logistical impacts of the policy. But these impacts are different than the vague and ominous “fallout” you’re referring to above.

“And it encouraged face to face encounters that were not desirable.”

Please explain.

Always_Ask_Questions,

“It’s the Phone, Stupid: Mobiles and Murder Lena Edlund and Cecilia Machado
NBER Working Paper No. 25883 May 2019
New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago”

Yes, I already mentioned finding this paper above. But it says nothing about smartphone distractions being the potential cause of the link between cell phones and decreasing murder rates. The rates decreased starting in the late 1990s, which was a decade before Steve Jobs walked on stage. The study authors posit that the decreased murder rate was due to cell phones changing the illegal drug economy from street corner dealing to pre-arranged meet-ups, thus reducing the incidence of turf wars. And the Brazil paper seems to refer to a change in the number of phone number digits, not the introduction of cell phones.

Always_Ask_Questions,

“I think it is less understood that the opposite – focusing on miracles and special moments, while denying the logic – and laws – of the world that Hashem created – is equally bad – and is way more widespread in our communities.”

Explain how it is equally bad.

“At the same time, Einstein’s physics is a significant part of theory that allows for Creation … So, Einstein and other 20th century scientists helped us to finally
win the argument”

Yet Einstein was later than his colleagues to the Big Bang party. He initially introduced the “cosmological constant” (lamda) as a theoretical opposing force to gravitation in 1917 (otherwise, the universe would collapse), and had a hard time letting go of the conception that the universe was static, even as late as 1931. He did think through the evidence and accepted the concept of a dynamic and expanding universe, and was able to drop lambda from his equations, but I think it’s incorrect to suggest that he was trying to prove a creation of the universe through his theories of relativity. Interestingly, lamba has made a comeback with more recent observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

n0mesorah,

“I feel the movement as a whole is misguided. It produces a lot of of very public messaging. The main practical purpose of all their media is avoiding technology. There should be more about what is good discipline. Especially when it comes to using our free time.”

I think the so-called “movement as a whole” disagrees with you on this. I think they’d argue that “good discipline” as you define it is tantamount to fighting a forest fire with a water pistol, and that not purchasing a smartphone at all or filtering a smartphone’s content is good discipline. This post was a recapitulation of our discussion, so we’re now going in circles. But re-reading some posts above, I have a couple more comments:

“It is obvious to the phone addict that s/he has way too much screen time.”

I don’t think that this is true. Some people are painfully aware that they spend too much time on their phones, but their attempts to limit screen time are unsuccessful. What would you tell these people? That they’re failures and need to try harder? That advice would probably cause them to become depressed. Others are completely unaware of how much screen time they use, and get shocked when they view the statistics.

Also – smartphone issues and bitul zman issues are not equivalent as you make them out to be. Sure a Venn diagram would feature some overlap (the guy ignoring his kids and tapping on a phone in his living room in 2023 may have been the guy with his nose in the newspaper or watching TV in 1983), but this is not the sole issue with smartphones. And would you seriously contend that smartphones don’t seriously exacerbate the bitul zman issue? 3.5 hours a day on average.

WolfishMusings,

“I ended up fasting most of the day (until about 3:30PM)”

Why?

Always_Ask_Questions,

“Note that google et al personalize your search results based on your history (middah k’neged middah, or they are letting you go where you choose to)…”

They do a lot more than that.

“for some reason, I can’t find all these nasty things people here are saying are out there on Internets – what I search for, I got scientific papers as results. (or you can search scholar google com or books google com to begin with)”

Can you use your helige search prowess to find the paper you’re referencing and give me some keywords to find it?

n0mesorah,

“I know a few kids who gave up their phones and now spend their days looking for drugs, alcohol, or trouble. . But that is not really my point.”

Do you know what motivated them to give up their phones?

“I have come across a whole bunch of people who think it is terribly important for me to get rid of my smartphone without knowing what I do with my time.”

One of my relatives is thoroughly secular, but has the most impressive smartphone discipline I’ve ever seen. She does not check it, but only picks it up when she wants to do something like send a message. Perhaps you are also one of those people with the innate ability to resist the pull. But this is an exception rather than the rule.

I’m also curious about these interactions that you have with the whole bunch of people. Do they accost you and ask if you have a smartphone out of the blue? Do you spend your time with people who don’t like smartphones and pull yours out in front of them? Do you engage in debates with them? I don’t fully understand why smartphones are so front and center.

“When I confront them with what do they do all day, their answer boils down to not having a smartphone.”

Not that they are being polite either, but you are hitting them with whataboutisms, so I imagine they’d get defensive.

“They will openly say, a yeshiva bachur who barely learns but doesn’t have a phone, is better than a serious masmid that has the internet in his pocket.”

They feel an unfiltered smartphone is a spiritual danger, so I’m not surprised by this statement. This may be a clumsy analogy, but how they’re potentially viewing it is: who’s likelier to live a longer life: the guy who sits all day and doesn’t exercise, or the guy who works out 5 days a week, eats a paleo diet, but keeps a rod of plutonium in his pocket?

“My point is that the anti smartphone movement is misguided.”

I wouldn’t judge a “movement” based on some interactions with individuals.

Always_Ask_Questions,

“Also important what is the trade off between. I believe (meaning read something, but did not check) that there is a general decline in teenage crime & pregnancies attributed to teens spending times on the phone instead of in malls & gangs.”

Another false equivalence. There’d be an even bigger decline in teenage crime and pregnancy if humans went extinct. Also, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Violent crime among youth skyrocketed in the 1980s and early 1990s, but started declining in the late 1990s, well before the first iPhone was introduced.

SQUARE_ROOT,

“In the secular world, people who are the most intelligent and the most highly-educated already know this.”

I agree with you regarding ad hominem arguments; however, why are you juxtaposing the frum community unfavorably with the secular world? Do you think that the “most intelligent and most highly-educated” frum people don’t understand logical fallacies? Or that secular online forums are not rife with ad hominem attacks?

Who are “they” who are angry or not angry?

I think the riots were a chillul Hashem.

AviraDeArah,

“To put ourselves in situations where the best we can do is posit ad-hoc theories about what the halacha “might” be, is to push avodas Hashem on the back burner and put our own interests first. This is what “I” want to do, now let’s see how we can fit halacha into it… that’s not an eved to a master, it’s a person who is living for themselves and trying to assuage his guilty conscience.”

Why such hostility and assuming the worst of intentions? Going into space is likely assur for a much more simple reason: pikuach nefesh. Rockets are dangerous, as is outer space. Very few people go into space at all right now, and those who do go at most stay in a low Earth orbit. Most space tourism right now doesn’t even achieve orbit, so the whole trip takes less than an hour from launch to landing (you get to see the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth for a few minutes, and experience weightlessness as the capsule free-falls back towards Earth).

If rocket or novel transportation technologies become safer and cheaper, more advanced space tourism, e.g., orbiting hotels, lunar resorts, may become feasible. Large-scale lunar or Martian colonization is further off, as there is mounting evidence that the challenges are greater than previously believed, due to harmful effects of long stays in space, radiation exposure due to weak magnetic fields on the moon or Mars, solar flares, etc. It’s also possible that mining asteroids for raw materials could become big business, though I imagine that much of that work would be done by robots. So maybe in our lifetimes we’d see shailos come up about whether a 2 week vacation to the Moon is appropriate, or if a frum business man needs to take a trip to a space station overseeing a mining operation, but who knows? Nobody is trying to skirt mitzvos by taking a hyperwarp cruiser to planet Xorkon 7. It’s purely science fiction and a theoretical exercise. And the latest astronomy research has been suggesting that Earth-like potentially habitable planets are much more rare than previously thought, as the most common star type (red dwarf) likely emits atmosphere-stripping amounts of solar wind. Not that we even have the capability of interstellar travel.

AviraDeArah,

“the mitzvos are all earth-centered; zmanim, 4 minim, all food related mitzvos, etc, are all based on earth. It’s untenable that they would go to a place where they can’t keep mitzvos properly”

Not Earth centered, but E”Y centered. Zmanim are challenging north of the Arctic circle. In past generations when transportation was harder, the arba minim were hard to come by in much of Europe, as citrus trees do not grow in cold climates. We start saying mashiv haruach by Shemini Atzeres and stop by Pesach because that is the beginning and ending of E”Y’s wet season, but Florida’s rainy season tapers off after Shemini Atzeres and picks up after Pesach. And the seasons and agriculture in the Southern Hemisphere are flipped from the Northern, meaning they plant when E”Y harvests, and harvest when E”Y plants. Your argument could be applied to living on Earth as well. And until we have the Beis Hamikdash, we cannot keep the mitzvos properly anywhere, even in E”Y.

Always_Ask_Questions,

I’m not sure that ranking from better to worse is the right way to compare the terms talmid chacham and ben Torah. Talmid chacham specifically refers to prowess in learning, and I think ben Torah is a broader term referring to a person who makes the Torah his guiding force in life, of which learning is certainly a part.

Always_Ask_Questions,

It’s already Adar where you are??

Gadolhadorah,

“The term also seems to be invoked in the context of white women who invoke racist stereotypes of minorities to rationalize their fears and accuse individuals of nonexistent crimes, invasion of their “personal space” or simply breathing while black.”

That’s the sugarcoat that the left puts on it, but in reality the “Karen” meme is straight up misogyny. Some people can’t stand it when a woman dares speak up, so let’s call her a Karen and unleash the Internet shame machine! Now other women will be afraid to advocate for themselves, whether in a store, on the street, or in the hospital, lest they too be labeled a Karen. It’s insidious.

Sure, there are times when women (or men) may misinterpret situations due to prejudices or even act maliciously. And that should be rightly called out. But not by generating a stereotype that can be used as a cudgel against any woman who dares stand up for herself. Note that men who do the same aren’t called “Kens” or “Roberts”, or whatever. I don’t want my daughters to be afraid to speak up if they received inadequate service, are getting pushed around by their doctor, or to hesitate for even one second to get away from a situation or call the police if their instincts tell them there is danger.

“The tag could be used in a gender-neutral context since you don’t have to be a woman to be a Karen.”

But it’s not.

n0mesorah,

“So you don’t have a life and would spend your time looking at obscene pictures. It’s not for me and it’s not for most people. Only the extremely secular or the extremely religious normalize this garbage”

This comment completely misses the mark. Maybe try to understand people who think differently from you before resorting to insults.

n0mesorah,

“The only reason the yesivishe velt is not being tried for institutionalized sin and heresy”

What heresy is promulgated in the “yeshivishe velt”? And who would conduct the trials?

ujm,

“Avram: Isn’t that a No True Scotsman?”

Yes, it could be. However, I think that the left and right within MO are heading towards a schism. The open-orthodox have already started the process, giving their movement a unique name and establishing separate communal infrastructures. Some clear lines in the sand have been drawn, though some will say not clear enough. Given that, I think there’s legitimacy to a MO person declaring that someone holding certain OO “shittos” are outside the bounds of MO.

“That would be similar, perhaps, to Ultra-Orthodox excluding ganovim and molesters from their own definition of Ultra-Orthodox.”

So similar to what I wrote to Gadolhadofi, I think there’s a difference between those within a group who fail as people, and questions about the shittos a group holds. This debate is not making those differences clear at all.

GadolHadofi,

“So which group of Jews should get bashed next, Yeshivish or Chasidish?”

Like they don’t already? Why do MO get the exclusive mantle of victimhood? I have been in many MO environments, and they give just as good as they get, if not more. I’m in full agreement with the “let’s not bash” philosophy – though I don’t think debating a legitimate tayna is bashing. But to use the “bashing is bad” as a shield while wielding a club to bash others?

Always_Ask_Questions,

“producing people with balanced lifestyle that integrate Torah into normal life”

And this, right here, is the epitome of the world view that has AviraDeArah up in arms. Hopefully Yserbius123 can acknowledge that the “YV” do not hold a monopoly on the “holier than thou” mentality.

emes nisht sheker,

“the word “mabul” was in quotes (single quotes) because it was a hebrew word. If you look I put “environmentalists” in double quotes to give emphasis to that word. The single quotes was to indicate the change in language. Hope that makes sense.”

That is an atypical usage of quotation marks, and I have never seen them used in that manner before. Double-quotes are used for quoting, and single-quotes are used for quotes within quotes. For informal usage in forums like this one, quotation marks are frequently applied to words that are not actual quotes, with the intention of indicating doubt, casting aspersions, or to distancing the writer from what is written. For example, imagine a Trump supporter writing “Liz Cheney, the former ‘Republican’ representative from Wyoming”. The function of the quotes around Republican is to indicate that the writer does not believe she is a real Republican. Now imagine a Democrat writing “the annual ‘March for Life’ recently wrapped up in Washington, DC.” Again, March for Life was not a quotation, but the writer put it in quotes to imply that s/he does not support that name. This is how I initially interpreted your quotes, and it confused me.