@Avram-in-MD I define careless in way that @Goldilocks described his/her shul.

From a Torah perspective, it’s the challenge of modern “civilization”. Three hundred years ago, and all the 5400 years preceding that, war was the glorious conquest of the barbaric enemy by our heroes who may heroically die in battle. People with different looks were inferior to us and they would probably serve best as eternal slaves. In that sort of atmosphere, Torah thrived. We were forced to fight for our survival day to day and every ounce of mitzvos was precious to us.

In modern times, civilization has long reached the point were we don’t have to worry about our children reaching adulthood, nor about droughts making food scarce, nor roving gangs grabbing our possessions and leaving us penniless. In that type of world, art and philosophy thrived since people were able to afford to sit and do something that’s not immediately productive to society. Philosophers realized that in modern times, wars are stupid an unnecessary and we’ve spent too much time and energy on murder and ignoring science. This is the Enlightenment and is the basis for our current secular society. This of course led to the Haskalah Yidden, nebbuch.

So now we are faced with a different challenge. Baruch Hashem there are very few countries were people are forced to celebrate a bris in a candlelit basement, or play dreidle to confuse the soldiers. But with all this food and luxury, time to listen to Hashem is no longer precious. It’s easy! And so we no longer value it like we once did.

Why does the Democrat insistence of allowing mail-in-ballots as an option cause “distrust” more so than the Republican insistence that there’s widespread voter fraud before a single ballot was counted?

@coffee-addict Sorry I’m unfamiliar with that term. What is 2000 mules?

@1 I really really dislike the modern political climate, especially in frum communities. If you’re not 100% on board with every bit of zevel that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, you’re a liberal anti-Semite.

Maybe I’m just a conservative voter disillusioned by the insanity of US politics?

@philosopher I think the argument over voter ID laws and mail-in-ballots is a smoke screen. Republicans wanted voter ID laws to convince people that voter fraud was happening. In response the Democrats pulled that old chestnut of saying that voter ID is racist. Truth is, there’s never been any significant fraud around voter IDs. Illegal immigrants aren’t voting en masse, and making people prove they are who they say they are hasn’t made an ounce of a difference in black voter turnout. Same with mail in ballots. There was no significant fraud. Democrats were just pushing for mail ins because of the COVID lockdowns. In response, the GOP claimed that mail in ballots were fraudulent.

It’s just the same stupid sports rivalry where one guy says black and the other will say white just to spite him.

@AirOfTheLand I was just saying it in context of a way to end the argument. You can discuss sugyos all tug unt nacht, but no one alive will be able to discuss them the way the pre-WWII Acharonim did. So we are arguing a moot point since the issue is settled. Either you’re an Edahnik, Brisker, or Satmar-adjacent chusid. Or you hold it’s important to vote in the Israeli elections. That’s all.

@syag-lchochma @coffee-addict Then let me ask you two fine folk something. Given the fact that the Trump team tried to discredit the Georgian results in the way in which I’ve stated. And given the issues with that, that multiple statisticians and mathematicians have agreed with. Why are you still so certain that there was evidence of Democrats pretending to “find” votes to flip the election?

(Oh, and I have learned statistics and currently work in a job that uses a ton of statistics and analytics)

I can’t speak for the Torah since I’m not a Talmid Chacham, but I do know that Rav Shach ZT”L, the Steipler ZT”L, and many many other gedolei Yisroel told people to vote in the elections. So clearly Dayan Fischer ZT”L and the Rebbe ZT”L were not the be all and end all opinions on the matter.

@Always_Ask_Questions I haven’t done an in depth analysis of how often they go from “Dems will win” to “Republicans will win”. But I do know that when I check their predictions a week or two before elections, they are almost always spot on.

@emes-nisht-sheker If I won the national lottery four weeks in a row, it doesn’t mean that the statistics are wrong, it means I somehow cheated.

@coffee-addict Trumps legal time tried to use statistics to prove that Biden’s team “found” votes at the last minute. Their statistics were wrong which is what I’ve been trying to explain.

@Always_Ask_Questions I don’t disagree. Nate Silve of FiveThirtyEight is still very much a progressive intellectual which means he leans heavily liberal Dem. Still, they’ve been consistently very accurate. And yes, they change their numbers as it gets closer to the polls. I wouldn’t trust a pollster who doesn’t. I mean, three months ago John Fetterman was a shoe-in against Mohammed Oz. But once he was forced to have non-scripted public appearances, people realized the truth about his health.

@coffee addict Actually I was quoting those numbers from a lawsuit filed by Charles Chiccetti, a GOP donor involved in the 2020 GOP election fiasco, which was cited by Giuliani and Trumps legal team. So I’m not sure what you mean by “quantity over quality”, but they were very much disputing that Biden won Georgia using bad statistics to make their case.

@ujm FiveThirtyEight predicted a 30% chance of a Trump win in 2016 which was far higher than any other media outlet. It was based on predictions of which counties will vote for him. Every single county fell well within the margin of error. They were the only major polling analyst that got it right. They never clopped chotosi, they had to write multiple articles explaining to people that there’s a difference between 70% and 100%.

@philosopher That is factually incorrect. What actually happened was that in several states, Trump had a narrow lead, but when the votes for Blue counties and mail in ballots came in overwhelmingly in Bidens favor, Trumps lead dropped.

I go busur the shittois of FiveThirtyEight which always gives extremely accurate predictions of election results. They are predicting that it’s very likely that Republicans win the House and somewhat likely they will win the Senate. Not a huge upset, but still most probably a big win for Republicans.

People that are still claiming that Trump lost in 2020 because of election fraud are either getting their news from unreliable sources, have ulterior motives for fooling people, or have a tenuous grasp on reality.

I would like to say this story b’sheim omro but I can’t recall the Rosh Yeshiva’s name. It was either in 1950s America, or 1930s Europe a Yeshiva put a new building up. Some of the boys found pieces of rebar sticking out of one of the walls and would have fun climbing up and down. A couple bachurim came complaining to the Rosh Yeshiva, derech Yivonim, etc. etc. The RY smiled and thanked the boys for telling him and said it was a good thing they are thinking this way. He then said that he is not going to cover it up because he intentionally asked the builders to leave it like that so that the boys can get some exercise and fun.

YU is literally Modern Orthodox since Modern Orthodox, unlike Yeshivish, has an actual organization with YU taking up a massive percentage of its head. Whether or not they are frum is a different discussion.

The Yeshivish community has written them off decades ago, I’m not sure what sort of association you expect from them.

As for their “Chaveirim Kol Yisroel” club, I don’t see this as any different than the club that existed in Cordoza for the last several decades.

The language they used in setting it up basically states that it’s a support group for men that don’t have tayvas nashim, or women that don’t have tayvas anashim, and how to live a frum lifestyle with that. Which is fine, I guess, assuming they stick to the charter. Obviously, I’m not stupid and I know that they will be hosting talks, publishing media, and holding events that go against halacha. But until that point, and until RIETS officially endorses such activities, we have to be dan l’kaf zechus.

As has been mentioned a million times on this subject, Rav JB Soleveitchik ZT”L himself criticized YU for putting themselves into a position where the government can decide what their morals and ethics should be.

@AviraDeArah Having lived in a very Chassidishe place for a long time, (and being intimately familiar with some of the current narisch trend amongst Litvaks to ignore secular studies) I’m going to strongly disagree with you on that one. From personal experience, only the most successful of Yidden who had no secular education make it in the business world. It takes a huge amount of Hatzlacha to even get to the point that your average desk sitting businessman gets to in a year or two. And the vast majority never reach it and are literally fighting over scraps as to who gets the Meishiv Second Seder job, or answering phones at a frum mortgage broker for $15 an hour.

Mind you, these are not the people I referred to that put the money into the communities. A בִּיג קאָנטרְבְּיוּטַר is generally someone who grew up outside the community and becomes infatuated with their lifestyle. Walk around any overtly massive shul and tell me how many of the names on the plaques did not go to high school.

I’m going to start with four strong opinions and base the rest of what I’m saying on those.

• A proper frum education is necessary
• A secular education is necessary in this American golus
• A school can be very successful at both of these
• The secular education given by very many frum schools is very inadequate or non-existent

The main sensible argument I’ve heard against this is “Parents have a right to teach their kids how they want and it seems to work”. I would say no! As frum Yidden we absolutely do not believe in “rights” and “personal choice”. Parents have a responsibility to educate their children properly and that includes also in secular studies. And no, it doesn’t seem to work either. Many people who graduate from theses Yeshivos are forced to fight for a small number of jobs in the frum community and rely on their wives and government aid to just barely survive poverty. It’s not even a choice for people anymore. Many feel pressured by friends, family, neighbors, and the looming prospect of shidduchim leaving only the “just Limudei Kodesh” schools as the only available options.

Now it doesn’t matter what the NY Slimes or the moisers said. There is a huge problem with Yeshivos in New York and New Jersey that are under the mistaken impression that the only way to have a proper frum education is to forgoe a proper secular one. The fact that this has been going on for so long means that they were hanging by a thread and just waiting for something to trigger repercussions. And here those repercussions are.

In my opinion, the frum oilom should have worked with the government better on this. They could have taken say, Chaim Berlin, for example, which is probably scores near the top on most standardized secular metrics and said that this is the baseline secular education that Yeshivos would follow. What this would have resulted in would be perceived as the Litvish and Yeshiva working crowd using the government to put pressure on certain institutions which would be potentially bad. But the alternative is (with all due respect to the Agudah, Rabbi Hoffman, and legions of other talmidei chachamim who have weighed in on this topic) a united front towards suicide. Right now, Rabbonim and askanim are in vain trying to convince the world that since Chaim Berlin does well on the Regents, therefore the government should back off from the Yeshivos that don’t even teach the kids to speak English. Which no one accepts, so now we have to deal with a government that wants to force all Yeshivos to not only study reading, riting, and rithmatic, but also gender studies, heretical philosophy, and comparative religion.

Baruch Hashem for the Zionist State which calls itself Israel! They are the largest marbitz Torah in the entire history of galus! How many Yungerleit are sitting and learning for years, YEARS!, just because Hashem commanded the State of Israel to provide them with money and food? How many Kollelim, Yeshivos, Seminaries, Bais Yaakovs, Chedarim, and shuls exist just because Israel also exists? Imagine what a world we would live in if Chas v’Shalom Eretz Yisroel was still under the Turks, or the Palestinians, or the British!

No Jewish state, no torah.

Then according to all of this logic, the Israeli government should offer citizenship to Arabs living in all of the areas captured from Jordan in 1967, not just Yerushalayim. They should further cease to recognize the PA as any sort of authority, since the West Bank is part of Israel. Why aren’t they?

Wouldn’t JIYO be more accurate? “Jewish In Yichus Only”?

Not to sound like a smolani, but there is very much an occupation. Israel does not recognize Sheba Farms, Gaza, Areas A, B, nor C as part of Israel. People who live there do not get Israeli citizenship, but Israel has troops and buildings on some of these places. The official term for it is “Israeli occupied territory” since it is nisht a hin, nisht a herr.

@rightwriter I don’t know if a virus that targets people and animals with specific DNA is even possible. I tried looking around on many academic sites and found nothing. I then resorted to Google, and then Yandex (Russian Google, which finds a lot of the more bizarre stuff that’s censored by Google). The only thing that had any credibility was a single Congressman claiming that such weapons were “possibly in development”, which is kind of a meaningless statement.

Anyhoo, what you’re saying about vaccines and birthrates is really scary! Israel has something like a 95% COVID vaccination rate, even in the frum and Chareidi communities! Have you been there lately? Are Bikur Cholim maternity wards really empty?

He should be referred to in third person by all members of his household. “Would The Father like a glass of water to drink?” “Can The Father learn with me later?” “I apologize to The Father for making him so angry before.” “Hello Father and welcome home.”

@Always_Ask_Questions I am far more scared of a bunch of yokels running around with murderous weapons than I am of our government turning on the people. And so should you.

One thing to add to all of this: gun ownership is very goyish. It’s about toughness, and hunting. The idea that you can protect yourself and don’t need the police. It’s not a Yiddishe mehalech.

As for all those people who are unwittingly repeating the NRA motto, “If you criminalize guns, only criminals will have guns” that’s wrong too. Guns are widely legally available in most states in the US. It’s extremely easy for a criminal to get one, even if they have a record. And if someone already owns a gun and decides to commit a crime, that crime just got a lot worse. Contrast that to a country such as Australia where gun ownership is extremely rare. Criminals simply have a very hard time finding guns so there aren’t a lot of gun crimes.

What the Constitutions talks about is irrelevant. It’s a document written with the express purpose of changing for every generation. In this generation, I think it’s clear that the 2nd amendment is causing far more harm than any good.