lpm100's reviews
711 reviews

Book Review
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
5/5 stars
"The uncomfortable process of man turning himself into a god."
*******

Of the book:

-20 chapters; 416 pps of prose
-21 pps/chapter
-135 citation notes (0.3/page; 6.75/chapter)

It's well worth it: 

It has elements of Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy, and History all rolled into one.

This book is interesting in the same way that designer outfits are: people may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of the cloth.

Similarly, a lot of his conclusions I disagree with but the way that he states them (as a speaker of English as a second language) is impressive and thoughtful.

And let's be clear that almost nothing here is new; it's just that he finds new ways to weave together old ideas in a way to make them interesting.

I see the purpose of this book as something like: chemical reactions follow predictable pathways under certain circumstances that don't depend on specific molecules; human civilizations and the aggregate human civilization is subject to the same laws, but we just have to learn what they are more carefully by studying the systems in question.

With what other books does this have resonances? MANY, but the ones that stick out most to me are:

1. "The Third Chimpanzee," Jared Diamond  (Denisovans. Neanderthals. The Golden Age that never was: humans have been eating everything in sight for a LONG time.)

2. "The 10,000 Year Explosion," by Cochran and Harpending. (Evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Influx of Neanderthal DNA into non-African populations.)

3.  "Gums, Germs, and Steel,"  Jared Diamond  (People that live in preliterate societies are walking encyclopedias about their natural environment because they have to be)

4. "The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
Book," Keith Houston.

5. "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World," by Simon Winchester. (Standardization of units such as time and length as need for nation building.)

Part I (The Cognitive Revolution): there were several other human species, and Homo sapiens won out. He spread very quickly from East Africa to the rest of the world, and ate half the world species out of existence. Common myths (the myth of the corporation or religious myths) enable large numbers of people to work together - - and they're also the cause of many wars.

Part II (The Agricultural Revolution): Farming started about 10,000 years ago, and nothing new has been domesticated in the last 20 centuries. Author takes the view that the Agricultural Revolution made human beings worse off than hunter-gatherers. Many more slipped discs arthritis, and hernias. Much longer work days, less social contact and a more monotonous diet. But, more people could survive per unit of area and poorer conditions, and 1,000 copies of such DNA is more evolutionarily successful than 100 copies of hunter-gatherer DNA. (The author expands this line of reasoning also to domesticated animals, who live miserable lives but exist in large numbers.) Other quantum leaps were: the invention of writing, and storage systems as well as mathematics.

Part III (The Unification of Humankind): Many human beings had no idea of one another's existence 10,000 years ago, and these days the slow, relentless progress of trade and contact is slowly homogenizing mankind. Empires also do the same. Indians started out as subject people of snooty Englishmen, and eventually adopted things that remain long after the English left. (Cricket. Tea. English judicial system. English language.) If somebody wanted to purge a culture of "foreign influences," it would be very difficult. Empire, money, and religion are all great unifiers of mankind.

Part IV (The scientific Revolution): This is easily the most dense and thoughtful section. It took a great deal of time before a significant number of people realized that there is knowledge in the world to be found independent of religious texts. The colonization of certain countries was a chance for the Europeans to expand / actualize their scientific knowledge, and it is different to the way that the Chinese empire saw its role.  Science and government have been married since the time of European colonization. Reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution as a "revolution in energy conversion." Before the industrial revolution, the extended family was the appropriate decision making unit for the individual. Eventually, that became the nuclear family and it is being slowly destroyed by an encroaching state. No this is not going to stop, because even though the case could have been made that the Agricultural Revolution was not the best it went ahead anyway, and similar to with the "permanent revolution" of industrialization. Happiness is relative and that explains how globalization also creates craving: young men of today compare themselves to Cristiano Ronaldo and not the people in their immediate environment as in times past. It also explains how people lived better under Hosni Mubarak than earlier generations, but still overthrew him. A peasant who completed his mud hut is relatively just a satisfied as a banker who finally paid off his New York penthouse... Because happiness is ultimately relative and not absolute.

Could man get so good with technology that he ends up replacing himself? It sure does seem that way....

Second order thoughts:

1. This author has a political ax to grind, and it is showing. It's like he is creating new language to describe postmodernism. (That's the land where everything is "socially constructed." He neologizes the term "imagined reality/hierarchy/etc ")

He also predictably makes the hackneyed comparison to the caste system in India and segregation in the United States. NO, it is not that black people were/are to be a social "spiritual pollution." It's just that they are (as a matter of fact) the source of a lot of crime, and not everybody wants to live around that.

There are a couple of subchapters called "The Cult of the Free Market" and "The Capitalist Hell," so there's that.

2. Some things that he says are just empirically false. ([p.136]: ".... Objective biological differences, such as skin color and hair type, but there is no evidence that the difference is extend to intelligence or morality.") Others are questionable. (The word "Eurasia" is well attested, but for some reason he insists on calling it "Afro-Asia."

3. He has bought into the sex≠gender/patriarchy hysteria, and as in Israeli Jew, it seems supremely improbable that he can really believe this. (No wonder this book was so popular.)

4. His thinking is crystal clear when he places liberalism, Communism, and Nazism among the pantheon of natural law religions. He would have been clearer if he had put Environmentalism in. The thinking gets a bit more muddled when he puts capitalism and nationalism in the same subset as the first three.

5. Harari cites a number of iron laws of history. Probably would have been better if he'd put them all in one list in the appendix.

6. Harari's argument against determinism is something that we have all heard before: it may have turned out this way, but there's no reason it could not have been otherwise. (I think the first time I ever read this was in Milan Kundera's "The Joke.")

7. Gilgamesh Project: if its succeeds, I wonder what could be the point? Time is valuable when it's finite, but if it's infinite then what is the value of a life? Also, a lot of bad ideas just have to wait for people who have them to die. If people could live forever, is progress installed eternally? Where do we put all these people? How many babies can each person have?

Neat factoids:

1. Wheat covers 870,000² mi of the Earth's surface, 10 times the size of Britain.

2. The cuneiform script was used in the Middle East for 3,000 years and was completely forgotten around 1,000 years ago. And rediscovered in the 1830s in India in the context of the British cataloging their new conquest.

4. No small part of the Netherlands getting out from abundant Spanish rule was the fact that they were significantly more skillful financiers of War than the Spaniards were. 

5. Headlines notwithstanding, these times are a lot more peaceful when they have ever been: In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of $310,000 individuals but violent crime killed another $520,000. Even so, it is 1.5% of the 56 million people who died in that year. 1.26 million died in car accidents and 815,000 people committed suicide.

6. 300 million Indians were managed by less than 5,000 British officials, 40 to 70,000 British soldiers, and maybe another 100, 000 British business people. (A ratio of 1714: 1.)

7. Sometimes technology can do things that probably shouldn't be done. Of course, people plan to reconstruct a woolly mammoth from an element. And now that the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, we can implant that DNA into a Sapiens ovum (lots of women have already volunteered to give birth to a neanderthal).

8. Other Frankenstein technologies in the pipeline: retinal prosthesis, bionic arms activated by thought, insect cyborgs, direct two-way brain computer interface that allows the reading of human brain signals.

9. Mapping the first human genome took 15 years and cost 3 billion dollars. Today a person's genome can be decoded within a few weeks at the cost of a few hundred dollars.

Quotes:

1. One of history's iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

2. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.

3. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.

4. The truly unnatural behavior......simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture is ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.

5. The victory of Rome over Numantia was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished. 

6. So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order...... In fact, monotheism is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist god, but also in the dualist devil, and polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.

7. It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable and hindsight was far from obvious at the time.

8. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.

Verdict:

This is a huge, thoughtful book. I'm of a mind to keep it in reread it several years later because there's probably too much information to be picked up on a first pass.

Vocabulary:

coprolite
First Wave Extinction (caused by foragers)
Second Wave Extinction (caused by farmers)
Third Wave Extinction (caused by industrialization)
partial script
full script
quipus
millares
Jacob Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers
lacuna 
Gilgamesh Project

Book Review
Portnoy's Complaint
-1/5 stars
"I just don't know what the hell this book is about."

*******

It must be a testament to the sparkling Ashkenazi Jewish verbal ability that one such can write a book filled with a couple of hundred pages of ranting about NOTHING and still be published and still be remembered.

Maybe this type of content was edgy/novel several decades ago when it was written (gratuitous use of the "c-word" and graphic descriptions of sexual acts), but that was LONG before the days of the internet.

These days, you can do a single search in something like OnlyFans or PornHub and see everything that this guy talked about actually done at any moment of the day. (I'm willing to bet the value of a latte at Starbucks that there is a porn genre of Jewish men sullying gentile women; Ron "Hedgehog" Jeremy and James Deen have been extremely prolific; Or the reverse: Abella Danger has been billing herself as "Jewish" for some time, even though she's.......not.)

It seems that a lot of this book was the character's/author's guilt about his obsession with non-Jewish women. (Maybe you have to be genetically Jewish to understand this guilt; I am not, and so maybe this book was not written for me.)

How many men are obsessed with some type of trim that is 180° different to what they grew up with? 

How many black guys do you see select overweight white ladies, and vice versa? 

How many guys are big into Asian girls? (Judging from the higher rates paid to Asian adult film actresses, I'd have to say quite a few.)

Something like 70% of American Jewish people are partnered with non-Jewish people--and it has been this way for a very long time. 

So now what?

Using evolutionary biology arguments, doesn't it seem healthy that you would want things that are genetically is far from you as possible? (Need I remind you that the Habsburgs died out because of inbreeding?)
*******

Lots of unhelpful stereotypes--from a Jewish author, of all people.

The Neurotic Jew
The Devouring Jewish Mother

I live with Jewish people every day (I am one, but not quite in the same sense that the others around here are, nor this author).

And for the life of me, this is just not the way I see them.

I see:

The Jewish businessman
The Jewish scholar 
The Jewish soldier
The Jewish Man of Words
The Jewish Physician

As far as Jewish women:

I think if you normed the sample set of all white women such that the average was a 5.00, the average Jewish lady would probably be 7.00-7.25.

Remember, this is the race of people that have created beauties such as:

Sarah Silverman
Jen Selter (callipygian!)
Madeline Weinstein
Aly Raisman
Kat Dennings
Abby Shapiro 
Jennifer Connelly

Then again...... maybe I really DO hope that there are more people like the Neurotic Portnoy--because then that thins out the competition for my sons in the market of Ashkenazi Jewish ladies. (If my kids ended up cranking out kids with women of caliber such as the aforementioned, then that will be definitive proof that my davening was taken seriously.)

The truth may be somewhere between the fictional theatricality of this book and my lived experience.

It is true that I see on a regular basis EXTREMELY OVERMOTHERED SONS- but not to this degree. (On the TV show "Big Bang Theory," one of the characters observed that "an adult Jewish male living with his mother is so common as to border on sociological cliché.")

The other thing that makes this book particularly bad is that it is a lot of repackaging of that bullshit discipline known as "Freudian psychology"-- the one where everybody was overwrought with suppressed sexual conflicts toward one/both parents.

In this conceptual space (that no one believes anymore), mothers get 99% of the blame for everything. (Schizophrenogenic mother et al. There is even a reference here to "neurasthenia.")

I think I found my way into this book because I noticed it was cross referenced in another book that I read "A Seat At The Table."

It was intended as a palate cleanser, because it's fictional and there is less content than some of these heavier books that I read.

It seemed to be thoroughly read and reviewed on Amazon and is contained within a book called "Great Books of the 20th Century," so there was some hubbub about it. (For the record, there was also a lot of hubbub about "50 Shades of Gray.")

Verdict:

Not recommended.

EMPHATICALLY not recommended.

Book Review
"The Decadent Society," by Ross Douthat.
4/5 stars
"Going to church/mosque/ shul and having babies is a great cure for decadence."
*******
Of the book

-245 pages of prose over 11 chapters; 22 pps/chapter
-Index but no bibliography nor citations
-5 to 6 hours worth of reading and reviewing time.

The writing is good, but the lack of citations / bibliography makes it feel like an extremely long newspaper article (that and the polemic obsession with Donald Trump).

I might also recommend that for a more thorough (and referenced!) discussion of political decay:

1. "Political Order and Decay,"  by Francis Fukuyama.

2. For an even deeper discussion of *why* things fall apart, Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Civilizations," whereby civilizations aggregate into ever more complex units for gains in efficiency until they reach diminishing returns and then collapse back into smaller units.

If exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, then some type of degringolade seems perfectly reasonable--and maybe all this angst is a bit misplaced?

*****
I have read lately several books about the transgender hysteria, and I am aware that these are not issues in their own right, but only symptoms of a society in the process of decline.

But, I thought it prudent to read a book that had some discussion of what it means exactly to be "decadent."

The answer is that: It can mean a lot of different things. (Popularly: "having low morals and a great love of pleasure, money, fame, etc.")

Douthat seeks a middle ground that is neither excessively judgmental nor excessively deterministic, and he comes up with: "economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development."

Fair enough.

Many of his observations are recapitulation for people who are already decently well read: economic stagnation, low birth rates, sclerotic governments (and repetitive, non-flourishing pop culture).

In a sense, the author's fluent prose to describe the current situation is helpful only in the same way that makeup helps a corpse: If we know that all Western civilizations are undergoing/will yet undergo these same "Four Horsemen," it's about as interesting to characterize each one as it is to do the same thing to a petri dish going through the typical lag/ log / stationary / decay phases.

What more can you add? And why is studying petri dish number 1 any different to studying petri dish number 1 million?

It seems that his answer to Rome's "bread and circuses" is, in modern times "pornography, fentanyl, video games and YouTube." 

As much as I had wanted to think of this as at least somewhat serious philosophical text, the fact that the author also seems to have a serious ax to grind against Donald Trump and his presidency really makes it seem less that than an editorial columns written by somebody who works for the New York Times. (And it seems that this author would be sensitive to the fact that avalanches are not caused by any particular snowflake, but by any particular snowflake PLUS an initial state. The fact that Donald Trump was Donald Trump is only a coincidence.)

Ultimately, the book is very speculative / inconclusive.

The decadence could ultimately be apocalyptic.

Or not.

Its reversal could come about in this way.

Or that one.

*******

What are some things that we DO learn from this book?

1. The future belongs to people who actually have babies, and that is how the author comes to the improbable conclusion of an African future. (The average African woman has 4.5 children. The average Asian/ European one has between 0.81 and 1.84 children.) The former is significantly more religious than the latter, whether Muslim or Christian.

Religious communities are not a bad idea. I'm reading that 55.2% of men father zero children, and only 4.4% father four or more. The average Orthodox Jewish man probably has 5.5 children. Ditto for the average Mormon.

2. Online life should be strictly limited. There's no reason for your sons to go out and find women (and have babies with them) if they spend too much time cracking one off to something on Pornhub, or playing video games with virtual friends instead of real ones.

3. Revolutions seem a lot less likely to happen when everybody is an armchair warrior and they can get it out of their system online, rather than putting boots on the ground. Things like the Occupy Wall Street and the CHAZ in Seattle eventually fizzled out because they just weren't real. (Douthat thinks that these black clad antifa protesters are play acting, because they don't even have the doxastic commitment to show their face.)

4. The Roman Empire stayed in a state of stagnation for ≈4 centuries before it actually collapsed. If it happened once, it can happen again, and in that case the fate of the West might not necessarily be so apocalyptic.

5. Aging societies become conservative societies, because people that have too much to lose from change don't want to see it coming.

6. Some interesting thoughts on a police state arising through the "safetyism" that is popular these days in the West (this has been talked about before by Jonathan Haidt in "Coddling of the American Mind"), where infringements upon personal freedoms are reinterpreted as a "safety" issue.  (Newport cannot sell menthol cigarettes because it discriminates against black people!)

7. If you don't want to become part of the Panopticon that comes with social media, it is easier to minimize your technological footprints. (90% of Orthodox Jewish homes do not have televisions, probably 50% don't have internet connections,  and probably 50 to 60% do not have smartphones.)

Second order thoughts: 

1. The author gives several examples of other writers that were prescient in their predictions. But, if somebody writes long enough and makes enough statements then some of them will be true.

The author here has a lot of fantastic (this is not in the positive sense of the word) ideas that really are just speculation.

2. The book is significantly vitiated by the lengthy discussion of repetition (Douthat is a movie critic, and he just had to shoehorn it in somewhere in a book about decline). 

Too many movies are repetition/inspired by recent films. Or the too many songs are remakes of old songs. 

I just don't know; in literature there are only four plots (person v. person / person v. self/person v. society / person v. supernatural force), and you could say that all books are rewrites of these four. 

But that does not necessarily mean that literature is stagnant. When musical artists find a formula that works, they stick with it. It's not so hard to imagine that a record label would do the same thing.

There's also the fact that the volume of television/ music downloads are OVERWHELMING, and it's probably harder than it's ever been to develop a new musical genre and get people to even find it in the ocean of material that's out there.

a. The making of albums and television shows are categorically different in "these" days to "those." When there are only three or four television channels, a studio will wait until they have something important to show in order to make a new TV show. Or, when it costs a lot of money to produce an album and higher personnel, then people will wait until they have something to sing to put one out. (Have you noticed how albums from the '70s are good all the way through? Can you imagine a label these days financing a song as complicated and expensive as "Bohemian Rhapsody"?)

b. Might it be too risky to try to make something that's too different if you want to get an audience somewhere? Better to stick with something safe. (Just under a thousand channels on cable TV.) 

And this is a running theme all throughout the entertainment industry, that the internet has made things so free and so low value that production values have declined in tandem.

3. (p.196) Some things that the author entertains are frankly stupid, and were actually disproven by subsequent events. ("Western fiscal and monetary policy, far from pushing us toward disaster, it's part of the system that might sustain our decadence indefinitely.")

I have to forgive him, because this was during the week that everybody thought that Modern Monetary Theory was a "thing."

But, in reality, the bond market has been humbling profligate governments for MANY centuries. Interest rates will be low right until they aren't (the FED funds Target rate went to 5.5% in just one year after being low for decades).

4. Almost the entirety of his Eurafrica thesis hinges on environmental apocalypse. There are some plausibility issues, because environmental apocalypse theories come and go, but the inability of Africans to manage a state (or even a city, for that matter: Baltimore, Detroit, or St.Louis-- among dozens of others) is something that has been stable for a very long time.

5. Even the Chinese surveillance state can only do so much. If you have 30 million bachelors in a country who cannot find a woman, using surveillance and internet bars to sweep that under the rug would be nothing short of miraculous.

Verdict: Recommended at the price of $5 plus shipping


Good quotes: 

(p.194): "The lesson of 1492... Is that any civilizational order, decadent or otherwise, is sustainable only until the right Black swan development arrives, at which point it might be doomed in a way that no simple extrapolation, no sociological analysis could have possibly predicted."

(p.193, Will Durant): "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it is destroyed itself from within."

(p.132): "Even the summer of 2020 did not establish a pattern that looks anything like the year of 1969, when there were more than 3,000 bombings across the continental United States."

(p.4, GK Chesterton): "There was nothing left that could conquer Rome, but there was also nothing left that could improve it."

(p.233): ".... Arguably the strongest non-communist worldview in china, with the potential to take over the Middle Kingdom much as Christianity wants took over the Roman empire: slowly, and then all at once."

Book Review
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
5+/5 stars
"Thoughtful, philosophical and articulate characterization of a peculiar Western Psychic Epidemic."
*******
Of the book:

-13 chapters plus introduction and conclusion
-301 pages of prose, about 20/chapter
-114 references (0.3/page= thinly sourced)
-NO INDEX nor glossary.

I was listening to YouTube presentations as I was driving at work one day, and the author of this book came up interviewing with Richard Dawkins. (Of course, I tired of Dawkins long ago, but his gender realist stance on the Transgender Hysteria made me take the time to listen to the interview with Helen Joyce.)

Her striking observation was that: you could never predict the form that a platypus would take, but you could explain its existence by evolutionary reverse engineering.

By extension, she says that the Transgender Hysteria is but one of MANY possible banalities that could have materialized in a decaying Western society. 

It's just that *this* one did.

And all of the details are just stamp collecting.

I've already read three other books about this topic, and so there is some overlap.

1. "Irreversible Damage,"  Abigail Shrier. (This hysteria is mostly in the group most vulnerable to hysterias- young women with mental problems).
2. "Lost in Transnation," Miriam Grossman. (Institutional corruption by transgender zealots, with a focus on medical corruption.)

3. "When Harry Became Sally," Ryan Anderson (similar philosophical observations, but more US-centric).

What this book brings new to the table is:

1. A less US centric perspective (yes, I'm aware that Americans tend to forget that there is an entire world outside the borders of the United States);

2. Quantification of psychic epidemics. To give just one example: Multiple Personality Disorder showed up 76 times in the previous two centuries, but after "Three Faces of Eve," 40,000 people were diagnosed between 1985 and 1995. Let's not also forget about the "satanic panic."

3. Multiple personality and gender dysphoria have parallels that a small number of therapists to count for a large share of diagnosis, and the malaise is extremely nebulous and poorly defined - - but makes the patient feel special.

4. A lot of good philosophical discussion (with doses of that characteristic dry English sense of humor--"Acompanying teaching materials often seem about to make an excellent point, only to miss it spectacularly"). 

a. The paradox that gender is socially constructed, but it needs to exist in reality for people to diagnose themselves with this disease? 

b. And the fact that gender categories also need to be rigid in order to give troubled people something to move away from, but then they are fluid in every other case?

c. People that are feminists and want to protect women's rights find themselves in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis other left wing radicals who are all for 6'4 men with a deep voice (that can arbitrarily be called "Lia Thomas") and male parts changing in the locker room with actual women that have authentic ladybits.
*******
Second order thoughts:

1. Trans foolishness is but a symptom of civilizatioal decay. I'm currently working on a book that explores just that theme. 

2. The ACLU is a wicked organization. Any time somebody is pushing some strange/perverse/destructive agenda, they are right in the thick of it. (Maybe when they get tired of this transgender thing, their next client will likely be NAMBLA.)

3. Fabulous White People (and let's be clear that that is whose crusade this is) just absolutely sickeningly insist on equating the Civil Rights movement with this mishegoss. Did they ever see black people as equal citizens, or were they just looking for some unpleasant finger to poke in the eye of Other White People?

4. When mass movements go on for too long, they sow the seeds of their own destruction: through some strange intellectual prestidigitation, the definition of women was expanded to anybody who says that he might be one. And just like *that* normative feminists became "trans exclusionary radical feminists."

5. For people like Richard Dawkins (Sam Harris, etc): the chickens have come home to roost--he has done his part to create the world in which the British Humanist Association withdraws his own award for expressing transgender heresy. Dawkins and others like him did as much as possible to destroy traditional religious morality, but "When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point" (Hoffer). And so religious zealots that might otherwise have been fine torturing themselves fasting for Lent or Ramadan have now taken up this topic.

*******
Chapter Synopses

1. A brief history of transsexuality, and the first gender reassignment surgery was in 1922 in Germany on a Danish man. It also happens that sexual dimorphism is a 1.2 billion year evolutionary project, so there's that.

2. Autogynephilia as a competing diagnosis that is also mistaken for gender dysphoria. Change of gender dysphoria from a medical disorder into a political identity. A vicious smear campaign against the sexologist Michael Bailey for even daring to do research into auto-gynephilia.

3. The famous movie "The Matrix" was actually a metaphor for "gender transition" and it was written by two siblings that both transitioned to women after its release. 

4. Evidence of all types is extremely wek, shaky, and scarce. Actual outcomes about suicide? Mental comorbidities with dysphoria? Long-term mental Health outcomes? Long-term effects of hormone treatment?

5. James Barry/Margaret Bulkley. Significant prevalence of confounding mental issues with these types, particularly autism. Teenage girls were not part of this trend until yesterday. (Point discussed at more length by Abigail Shrier in her book "Irreversible Damage.")

6. The issue is working its way through the courts with strange results. Famous case of James Younger where an embittered, mentally ill ex-wife wants to try to turn the son into a girl out of spite. Several reports of Child Protective Services being called when parents refuse to "affirm" an identity as well as many cases where children transition is enabled by school administration, who then hides it from the parents. It is VERY EASY for pedophiles to co-opt these movements, as a lot of them did during the gay rights movement. (Lots of interesting cases here with references.)

7. (p.136): "The central doctrine of gender identity ideology - - that your gender is what you say it is - - necessarily precludes any objective delineation. Try 'a squawm is anyone who identifies as a squawm,' or 'every lazap is a lazap.' Now, can you say what a squawm or a lazap is?" All manner of bizarre verbal contortion: people who menstruate / pregnant people / birthing parents / chest feeding / human milk feeding families / black birthing bodies.

8. The Strange Case of Jonathan Yaniv. Female only spaces (prisons, bathrooms) DO matter for women. Only a complete idiot would not understand why letting any guy self-defined as a woman to enter female spaces is not the best choice. So, of course that is the position of much of the US government, acting in concert with the ACLU. So, the question of female only spaces is answered with "we just need to pee."

9. Statistics on the differences in athletic performance between male and female bodies common explanation of how a man who cannot even make the top 400 competing against men can become number one when competing as a woman against women.

10. Bathroom gender wars. It's not enough to create single sex bathrooms for trans people. It's not enough to put them behind a curtain if they have to be in the locker room of their desired sex. It is important to make 99% of other women uncomfortable by having men in their locker rooms. It's very easy to change rules by ukase in the context of American regulatory agencies. Sex can become gender by doing an end run around Congress.

11. The trans movement is different to other civil rights movements in that it seems to be focused on regulatory agencies and levers of power, and is NOT not a grassroots movement. Lots of bored (Jewish) billionaires finance this. James Pritzker. John Stryker, with his Arcus foundation. And then also George Soros, the proud Jewish Nazi collaborator. Cost: puberty blockers, $20,000. Top surgery, $10,000. Vaginoplasty, $30,000. Metoidoplasty, $20,000. Phalloplasty, $150,000.

12. "Free speech is incompatible with privileging discourse over material reality. Feminist and gay rights groups..... end up promoting policies that harm women and gay people. Children's charities tear up safeguarding procedures. Scientific societies repeat cultish mantras. Anti-sensorship campaigners whip up witch hunts."

13. Transgender hysteria of today is the Scopes monkey trial of 1925. Documentation of several British reversals of the psychic epidemic. Severing of the "T" from LGBT. 

Conclusion. Transgender movement today is not the same thing as the gay rights movement of several decades ago, and the author is hopeful that this hysteria will wear itself out.
*******

Verdict: Strongly recommended.

*******
Vocabulary:

doyenne
deed poll 
androphilic
social justice≈applied postmodernism
Gish gallop
reify 
Judith Butler 
Nemo's Law
Godwin's Law
totted up
psychic epidemic 
reflex ailment
reflex theorist
"vicarious nasal menstruation" (WTF?)
tyro
begging the question (p.154)
policy capture /institutional capture
bepenised
nosey-parker 
Cheka

*******
Quotes:

(p.5) "Whether or not transition makes people happier is an important questions for individuals and clinicians, especially when it involves irreversible hormonal or surgical interventions. But it is irrelevant to evaluating the truth of gender identity ideology, and to whether self-declared gender should replace sex across society. To draw another analogy, whether a religion makes its believers happy is irrelevant to the question of whether its God exists, or whether everyone else should be compelled to pay it lip service."

(p.69): "Over the years, bewildering variety of binaries have been deconstructed. Theorists have claimed that speech is a form of writing, presence of form of absence and sanity a form of neurosis. Nowadays the technique is mainly applied to sex and gender within "queer theory" -- a hard to define academic field that seeks to upendq conventional thinking about what is normative or deviant; innate or socially constructed; stable or mutating."

(p.99): "With enough time and rumination, anyone distressed can end up thinking that they're trans."

(p.143): "In its erasure of sex categories, gender identity ideology seeks to change not just the present, but the past, too. Any woman who..... succeeded in transcending societal strictures on her sex is not at the risk of being retroactively transitioned."

(p.157): "Of the 125 transgender prisoners known to be an English prisons in the late 2017, 60 were 'transwomen' who had committed sexual offenses, a share far higher than in the general male prison population, let alone in the female one."

(p.161): "Pearsall had told fellow inmates in a Men's prison that the point of identifying as trans was to do easier time."

(p.167): "Women are not human shields. You don't make trans women safer by making women less safe."

(p.169): "... Preoperative trans women attended the festival in defiance of the band and provoked confrontation, for example by using the communal open-air showers - - to put it bluntly, exposing their penises in a non-consensually in a lesbian centered space."

(p. 194): "... testosterone suppression has barely any impact on the sporting performance of people who have been through male puberty. Muscle mass and strength typically Fall by less than 5% after 1 year of suppression and very little more thereafter."

(p.219): "Polarization feeds on itself, as extremes on one side provide the cautionary tales used by extremes on the other to whip up fear and hatred. Moderates within each party stay silent, since the opposition seems a greater threat than their own hardliners."

(p.224): "[Gender self identification] is not a human right at all. It's a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accepts trans people's subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws."

(p.251): "As journalism became a graduate profession, new entrants brought the censoriousness of campus activism with them."

(p.256): "You do not have to be particularly cynical to think that the holder of a chair of transgender studies funded by a trans billionaire or campaign group is unlikely to produce research showing that gender self identification is harmful for women."

Book Review
Kaddish
5/5 stars
"An extravagant intellectual edifice"
*******

Essentially, this book is the story of a lapsed Jew (of *extremely* superior intellect and verbal ability) who, while following tradition and reciting kaddish for his deceased father for a year enters into an intellectual odyssey about the origins of the kaddish (which actually says nothing about death or mourning).

And yet it is so much more.

Wieselter himself defined the book in a TV interview: "It is a combination of a scholarly work (on the origins of the Jewish customs of mourning);  a philosophical work (on death and mortality);  and a spiritual journal. As writers discover when they're writing something with an inner necessity, then those external questions fall away and ultimately the work is what it is."

It is written in the most difficult way, which is: as a series of aphorisms. It puts me in mind of Eric Hoffer, who also wrote this way. (Oh, but that I could write this way; all people who put pen to paper should aspire to write like this.)

I don't heretofore remember reading a book so difficult or that took so much intellectual bandwidth (it took me every bit of 7 months of stopping and starting before it was finished; I had to consciously make a decision to not read other books until this one was done)

The book is in 16 parts, all marked by Roman numerals, with no titles, and really no clear reason that I can discern for the breaks.

∆∆∆First is that:

It's absolutely maddening that the book is not indexed, nor is there a single citation for these voluminous texts that the author brings down. Also, something like a timeline would have been helpful to clarify exactly how many hundreds of years it took for this discussion to complete itself.

Wieseltier is (or was) an Orthodox Jew, and so he knows the importance of citing references; on the other hand, foundational Jewish texts such as "Mishneh Torah" also deliberately did not cite references in order to close the way for a bunch of later bickering and counter arguments.  

And that may be the line of reasoning of this author.

∆∆∆Second is that: 

It makes the reader know that the literature of Judaism is unconquerably large. It almost seems like it would be better to not get started at all, because once you did start then there's no possible way to finish.

For all of the massive bulk of responsa on Jewish law ("Halacha"), over 99% of it is ignored. And of that small residual bit which is studied, only the conclusions are studied and not usually the original text. (I have talked to people that are professional students and rabbis, and they have not heard of the majority of these texts--or if they have heard of them, it has only been vaguely.)

If somebody thought to study source texts from 1,000 years ago in order to trace the history of something, then there would be a whole book there.

*Is* a whole book there, as happens in this case.

∆∆∆Third is that:

Between all of the later rabbinic interpretations and pseudepigraphia, how can someone know what's real? (For instance, the story of Akiva and the tax collector from Lodkiya is nowhere to be found in any texts even roughly contemporaneous with Akiva himself. And even in 17th century Amsterdam, "No one version of this story is like another" [p.128].)

*******

What do we learn from this author's deep dive into historical sources about kaddish?

1. The Mourners' Kaddish is not something that sprang into existence right at the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism-nor had it appeared by the time of Mishneh Torah. It varied between Ashkenazim and Sephardim as far back as 1305 CE. Even in certain parts of Europe, the old custom of one person reciting Kaddish on behalf of everyone is still the custom (p.390). 

2. We get a taste of the many scholars that were instrumental in shaping Judaism into the form that it currently exists--at this moment. (Maimonides. Rashi. Nahmanides. Moses of Coucy. Judah the Pious (d. 1217, CE). And many others. In current times, it seems like every second or third adult Jewish Orthodox male calls himself "Rabbi," and it's easy to forget just how few people were involved in the foundational parts of earlier Judaism.

3. There exists a Geonic document called "The Registry of the Differences Between the Customs of Israel and the Customs of Babylonia."

4. A lot of things are later interpolations. (p. 97-- "Who was Solomon of Lyon? I have never heard of such a figure. The text indicates that this is a later interpolation into the book.") In this case, the story (in which R'Akiva teaches a man's son so that that son may recite on his punished father's behalf) is pseudepigraphical (p.386).

5. The customs come and the customs go; communities randomly choose one or the other, and after enough time passes it's like the opposition never was. For example, some people specifically avoided drinking water or taking a meal between Musaf and Mincha (Rabbeinu Tam). Nowadays all have kiddush and seudah shlishit.

6. Kedusha d'sidra (Uva letzion, said at Mincha Shabbat) is said on behalf of the Dead who must go back to Gehenna at the end of the Sabbath. This was true by the 13th century, although before then Justification of Judgment ("BDE") was said.

7. (p.314) There was even discussion about the custom to feed mourners round foods, and whether that was best served by lentils or eggs. Of course, eggs won out... But there was discussion.

8. (p.314). Kaddish is said for 11 months by a child for a parent, and not the full 12 so it's to not impute wickedness to him. But, a friend who who says it for a person that is childless is under no such obligation, and he may say it for the full 12. (Feinstein).

9. Does the son acquit the father or does the father acquit the son? It seems that the ruling has come down that the father cannot acquit the son to the extent that the son can acquit the father (p.387). And that explains why the child recites for 11 months for a parent, but everybody else recites only for 30 days.

10. It seems that the Sephardim had developed the custom of all mourners saying the kaddish in unison much earlier than the Ashkenazim (t appears to be around 1831), and there was lots of back and forth before this accommodation was finally reached. Centuries of back and forth.

11. "Even though he sinned, he is a Jew" is said to be one of the most momentous sentences in the history of the Jews." It is Talmudic. (p.449). These days, that statement has been severely canceled/qualified and seems to no longer extend to converts.

12. The custom to not take a haircut during the days of mourning was initially accustomed to wrap the head in the manner of the Arabs ("Ishmaelites"). It was a bit too uncomfortable in Christian lands and so an alteration had to be made by the Ashkenazim.(pps. 483-485); this was made to avoid ridicule sometimes, and for purposes of physical safety others.

13. Kaddish yatom (orphan's kaddish) was enacted rabbinically because children are too young to say "Barechu" and because Kaddish is insignificant enough for minors to say it. 

14. All enactments of kaddish are rabbinic, and it was originally a doxology for after teaching and preaching.

Second order thoughts:

1. If I didn't know before, I know now that: it is quite pointless to forward engineer correct or true answers; what is "true" is what has survived by happenstance. Or whatever. Even though it is this way, there's no reason that it could not have been different.
What is the point of trying to ascertain truth? It's very much like trying to build a physical structure on quicksand.

2. It is interesting to speculate what Judaism will turn into in the next several centuries, given that everybody is a rabbi and needs to find some way to differentiate his product from all of these competitors.

It took several hundred years to resolve these issues around kaddish with many fewer cooks in the kitchen; in the near future, I could imagine some issue coming up that will not be resolved before the heat death of the universe.

Verdict:

Recommended, but it is not for the faint of heart.

It's a real slog, but it is worth it just for Wieselter's exquisite prose craftsmanship.

After spending a very long time oscillating between donating the book and keeping it, I think I have decided on the latter.

-On the one hand, there is so much to be gleaned that it cannot be done on the first pass and a second pass is necessary. On the other, reading the book The First Time took so much out of me that is hard to imagine doing it again.

-On the one hand, this can give a reader familiarity with a VAST number of unknown/understudied sources. 

-On the other, there are only a tiny fraction of even the most Orthodox people who actually have read these sources--and so whom are/would you be addressing?

Vocabulary:

Christological awkwardness
peroration 
rostrum (amud)
precentor (shliach tzibbur/ cantor/ chazzan)
calumny
prayer quorum (minyan)
exequies
antinomian
trisagion (".......קדוש, קדוש, קדוש")
expiation 
salvific
scion
teleological
Rashi literature
Justification of the Judgment (tsiduk ha'din)
animadversion 
"Demand The Reason" (p.88).
provenance 
glossator
ratiocination 
apotropaically
mystagogues
Pseudepigraphic
Tosafists (Talmudic 
masterminds of Franco German Jewry in the High Middle Ages)
miter hat
theosophy
theurgy
quiddity
excursus
apotheosis 
chiliastic
angelology
perdurability
grappa
mitron/ matran
chaperon
kappe (German word for Jewish hair covering)
storz 
Heraclitean River
monist
antinomy

Texts:

Arb'ah Turim
Sefer Mitzvot Gadol
Ma'aseh haMikhri
Shibbolei ha'Leket
Nishmat Chayim
Torat haAdam
Machzor Vitry
Kol Bo
Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva
Rashi's Siddur
"Rashi Literature"
Old Jewish Aramaic Prayer: The Kaddish
Yeah Nohalim (The Bequest)
Hegyon ha'nefesh ha'Atsuvah (Reflections of the sad soul)
Responses of the Tongue (Ma'aneh Lashon)
Sefer Yetsirah (The Book of Creation)
Etz Chaim (Tree of Life)
Zohar Hadash
Hibbur Yafeh me-Ha'Yeshua
Midrash Tanhuma
Shomer Emunim (Keeper of the Faiths)
Tanna D'Bei Eliyahu Zuta (The Teaching of the School of Elijah, the Lesser Version)
Torat Buddha
Sefer Hasidim/Book of the Pious
Ma'amar Hikur HaDin (An Essay Inquiring Into Judgment)
Megillat Efra (The Scroll of Darkness)
Milhamot ha'shem (The Wars of The Lord)
Noda Be'Yehudah (Renowned in Judah) 
Crossing the Jabbok/Ma'avarYabbok
The Pitcher of Flour/Kad ha'Kemah
Aruch HaShulchan
Masekhet Hibut (The Tractate of The Torments of the Grave)
Midrash Tanhuma
The Book Of The Orchard (Sefer haPardes)
Sefer Mitzva'ot Katan (The Small Book of Commandments)
Book of Customs 
Emek haBakhah (The Vale of Weeping)
Sefer haDema'ot (The Book of Tears)
Sefer haMinhagim (Book of Customs)

Scholars:

Menashe Ben Israel
Abraham ben Isaac 
Saadia Gaon
Yosef Solovetchik (The Rav)
Simcha Bunim Pesicha
Sy Agnon
Nahmanides
Hayim Judah Ehrenreich
Aaron of Lunel (Aaron ben Meshulam Ben Yaakov)
Isaiah of Train
Zedakiah the Physician
Meir Ben Baruch of Rothenberg
Eliezer of Worms
Moses of Coucy
Isaac ben Ghiyyat
Eliezer Ben Yohel haLevi
Ephraim Margolioth
Ezekiel Katzenellenbogen 
David deSola Pool
Abraham Horowitz 
David Ben Joseph Abudarham
Isaac ben Sheshet Perfect
Bahya Ben Asher of Saragossa
Hai Gaon
Nahum ha'Pakuli
Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi
Rabbi Eleazar ben Arakh
Hayyim Yosef David Azulai
Nissim Ben Jacob
Isaac Aboab
Aaron Roth
Solomon Buber
(Zeev Zabotinsky)
(Getzel Selikovitch)
Judah the Pious
Menachem Azariah of Fano
Judah Loew Ben Bezalel
Ezekiel Landau
Abraham of Minsk (Abraham ben Judah Leib Maskileison)
Menachem haMeiri
Solomon ben Abraham Adret
Aaron Berachiah Ben Moses of Modena 
Bahya Ben Asher of Saragossa
Yechiel Michel Epstein
Moses Isserles (The Rema)
Adolf Jellinek
Benjamin Zev ben Mattathias
Meir Ben Isaac Katzenellenbogen
Israel Isserlein
Joseph Garçon (Portuguese exile of Castilian origin)
Moses Mintz (German Talmudist)
Jacob Moellin (Maharil)
Mordecai ben Abraham Jaffe
Abraham Gombiner (Mogen Avraham)
Moses Sofer (Chatam Sofer)
Zvi Hirsch Chajes
Akiva Eger
Beer Oppenheim
Jacob Ettlinger
David ben Zimra (Radbaz)
Jacob Ben Asher (Ba'al ha Turim)
Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet
Eliezer Ben Nathan
Solomon ben Sampson of Worms
Isaac ben Samuel of Dampierre
Isaac of Corbeil
Rabbi Abba bar Zabda
David ben Hayyim haCohen
Meshullam Finkelstein of Warsaw
Joseph Hahn Nordlingen
Sherira Gaon
Nathan Ben Jehiel
Hananel Ben Hushiel
Joseph haCohen
Simon Bernfeld
Meir Segal (Meir Ben Baruch haLevi of Fulda)
Isaac of Tyrnau
Yosef Ben Mattathias Reeves
Isaiah Astruc

Book Review 
The Unfolding of Language
4/5 stars
"A worthwhile read, but a bit wordy and speculative."

*******

It seems like there are 1001 interesting-but-trivial different things to be known about human language that have been gathered through the patient efforts of professional linguists.

If you take any couple of hundred of them, then there is enough material there for an interesting book.

And this book is just one more in an infinite series of its type. (The author wrote a different book that is similar in type about why the world looks different in different languages.)

Because the best written records of language go back only 5,000 years, it is at this point that we have to admit that any ideas deduced from uniformitarianism really are just speculation. 

And in that case, much of this book reads like a book on Evolutionary Psychology/Biology. ("It is thought that"/ "it seems plausible"/"experts currently believe.......")

Nonetheless, the changes that the author can present because they actually ARE attested are interesting.

A bit from each chapter:

*******

Intro. It is somehow known that language is encoded into the human genome, but *how* is still a mystery. It's also impossible to trace the development of a language from first words until today, because human beings have been talking for somewhere between 40,000 and 1.5 million years, but we only have (incomplete, scattered) records going back about 5,000 years. So, if we want to know what was going on between those times, we have to make deductions from the 5,000 years of data that we actually *do* have. ("Uniformitarianism.")

Chapter 1. ("Castles in the Air"). Language order/construction is arbitrary. Even though Deutscher does not use the term, he gives us contrasts between synthetic and analytic languages. As well as isolating versus agglutinative languages. Subject verb object languages. Subject object verb languages. Case markers. Gender. Semitic verb systems.

Chapter 2. ("Perpetual Motion"). Languages move, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Old English is completely unintelligible from Modern English but only 30 generations removed. Spelling systems tend to lag pronunciation by several hundred years. English is about 400 years behind its alphabet these days. (Hence the erratic spelling; long ago, words really were spelled the way they were pronounced.) Concept of a "proto language." Proto-German, etc. Vowel shifts.

Chapter 3. ("The Forces of Destruction"). People have been whining about the degeneration of language for many centuries, but we have not degenerated into ape-like grunts. Degeneration is also balanced by the force of innovation. Also, degeneration only depends on from what point you start measuring: it could be that the languages of 1,000 years ago were degenerations from what was spoken 2,000 years ago.

Chapter 4 ("A Reef of Dead Metaphors"). Metaphors are used in order to make expressive speech, but once they become commonplace new metaphors have to be invented. (And this is a source of linguistic drift.) If you read closely, common language of today is full of dead metaphors that were once powerful in their time. Another extension of words is from their initial use as movements in space to movements in time. ("Going to"/ "going forward").

Chapter 5 ("The Forces of Creation") talks about how the word "go" changed into a future marker because it is the most obvious source for the abstract concept of future. And, more generally, the concept of shifting between content words and function words.

Complicated case systems such as Latin / Hungarian/ French are actually created by irregular reductions of what used to be freestanding words. 

Chapter 6 ("Craving For Order") focuses on the Semitic root system. The explanation here is extremely speculative and strained. The $64,000 question is whether such an explanation is better than none at all. (Apparently not, if you are a Professional Linguist.)

The trilateral root system of Hebrew/ other Semitic languages can be argued to be an expansion of what used to be a bilateral root system. There are quadrilateral roots which appeared to be increasing a number as an expansion on the trilateral root system. (p.200).

Chapter 7 ("The Unfolding of Language") presents a somewhat confused discussion.  There's a lot of ink spilled on the separation between noun-thing / verb-action. And for the life of me, I can't understand why - - given that this author is a native speaker of Hebrew. (For the record, that's the language where verb≈noun≈adjective.) 

Paths of metaphor: seizing>possession>obligation>likelihood. ("Get me a beer">"he's got a car">"I've gotta go">"she's gotta be there by now")

Epilogue (enumerated because of the many recapitulated points)

1. Languages exist in something like an equilibrium between decay-by-erosion and expansion-by-word inflation.

2. It's quite arbitrary to imagine that any one point was the ideal time (for example, the foolishly complicated case system in Latin is the erosion + agglutination of what used to be separate words). 

3. Grammatical and morphological complexity seem to exist in inverse proportion to the population that the language serves. (Cantonese and Hokkien are substantially more tonally complicated then Mandarin, but they serve smaller populations. The English of 1,000 years ago had eight cases--all of which have almost completely vanished in Modern English--which has to bear the weight of 1/3 of humanity.)

4. Literacy may be a counterforce to agglutination and therefore to more complex word structure.

5. Languages are disappearing at the rate of one every two weeks, and before the century is out it is expected that between half and three quarters of the world's 6000 languages will have disappeared, and almost all of the languages of small preliterate societies.

Vocabulary:

uniformitarianism 
poor stimulus
paucal
nominative 
accusative 
genitive 
dative 
ablative
dead metaphor
analytic language
synthetic language
content word (contrasted with "grammatical element")
pointer words
property-word

Quotes:

-(p.36): "The architecture of the Semitic verb is one of the most imposing edifices to be seen anywhere in the world's language, but it is founded on a concept of sparest design."

-(p.101): Louis Thomassin wrote in all seriousness the French and Hebrew were so close to each other that 'one may truthfully say that, basically, they are no other than one in the same language.'

-(p.76): "Taking it from the authorities, then, it seems a miracle that language did not degenerate into the grunts of apes long ago."

-(p.268): "In itself, the wearing a way of all those ancient endings is anything but mysterious. As we have seen, erosion is a mighty and merciless force, and given sufficient time no endings can withstand it."

Book Review
2/5 stars
Self Made Man
"Tell us that you've never lived among real people without telling us that you've never lived among real people."

*******
This book is okay (and just barely okay) in that takes only 4-5 hours to read; if it took even 30 minutes longer, I would have to not recommend it.

Other than a few nice quotes, the author doesn't discover anything that people who live in the real world don't know. 

And this author went to a small, private liberal arts college--tuition is $61,770 per year--and it's a pretty safe assumption that she did not have even a vague acquaintance with the real world. 

And if she did, she would be the only Liberal Arts College Brat in the entire country that did.

In addition to discovering what everybody else outside of liberal arts colleges already knows, the book has about it the perfume of the author's own self-actualization therapy. And she tells us from the very first page that she was "undergoing a significantly delayed adolescence, drinking and drugging a little bit too much."

I think that men were an abstraction to her for a couple of reasons: 

1. The first is that she is / was (she died by assisted suicide in July of 2022) a lesbian, and so obviously she didn't spend that much time around men getting to know them. Because this type of stuff is not what needs an investigative journalist publication to figure out.

2. The second is that she seems to have been one of these Ivy league / academic types. (The college she went to, Williams College, has a 3.5 billion dollar endowment and 2,100 students.) 

OF COURSE the Average Joe that lives in the real world of ANY type is just such a mystery to them! 

They can write you a whole paper about black people, but have never encountered any of them in places like Chicago or Detroit--or even had dinner with a normal black family, for that matter. 

They can write a whole book about gendered social roles, but have never encountered a few beer-drinking guys playing a bowling game after getting off work. It really is the most novel thing since sliced bread that people might have an existence outside of /
totally different to the one that they are caricatured as having by Liberal Arts College Brats as being a bunch of vicious, uneducated racists.

*******
Even though the book was short, it was somewhat overwritten just the same.

Sample paragraph: "As a woman, you couldn't walk down those streets invisibly. You were an object of desire or at least semiprurient interest to the men who waited there, even if you weren't pretty-- that, or you were just another pussy to be put in this place."

(This is her observation of people walking up and down the street and guys noticing the ladies.)

Second Order Thoughts:

1. Some of the things that she learned were pretty trivial.

a. Women like to use a lot more words than men?

b. Sometimes guys just want to go out with other guys and have camaraderie that does not involve a bunch of talking.

c. Going to a bar to pick up a woman is not the most efficient way to do it. Most women go there to reinforce in their own mind the fact that they have the right of first refusal. (It's honestly a lot more efficient probably to try to find a woman at church.)

d. Harsh, live-or-/die work environments attract a lot more guys.

2. I wonder why Vincent didn't go someplace where there were normal guys in order to see what they are like? (Maybe a church group? Maybe a hunting club? Maybe a Kollel?)

And this seems a bit pedestrian, but she was so completely oblivious to what normal guys should look like (again, both being a lesbian and a product of a small liberal arts college) that it would have been better to start off crawling than walking.

I could imagine that most of the guys in the titty bar/bowling league would be normal, but people who would choose to live in a monastery or who had to go to a men's support group would definitely have some type of damage. 

When you see people who try to make a living in multi-level marketing schemes, there is very often something wrong with them; that peculiar psychology of people who are attracted to get rich quick schemes.

3. Zora Neale hurston as very aptly said that the only things she wanted was: "a busy life, a  just mind, and a timely death." This author had none of those things. And, really, this book shows you more of the value of those things by way of what happens when somebody has none of those things (that would be our dear author). 

The events in this book finished around 2006, and she went and committed assisted suicide by 2022. She said that she was never able to recover from her role playing as Ned.

Can you really just imagine that? Somebody has to live the life of a normal guy for a year and a half, and it is so traumatic that they eventually send themselves to be euthanized?

It was *that* disturbing to know that men and women are two different things, and they occupy different spaces.

Really? 

It's a good thing that this lady didn't reproduce before she made her check out.

*******
Environments:

1. Bowling league
2. Titty Bar
3. Monastery 
4. Door to door salesman (quasi multi level marketing)
5. Hokey Men's Retreat/ support group (complete with rituals and African drums and all sorts of "emotional release").

Quotes: 

(p.88): "Gratification kills desire. And constant gratification kills it permanently until even naked, willing women seem made out of cardboard."

(p.44): "Girls can be a lot nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of what they want. They know where to hit where it'll hurt the most and their aim is laser precise."

(p.38): "The idea of telling one of these guys that smoking or drinking to excess was bad for his health was too ridiculously middle class to entertain..... The idea that you would try to prolong your grueling, dead end life, and do it by taking away the few pleasures you had along the way, was just insulting."

(p.24): "..... and you understand in some elemental way that the male animal is definitely not a social construct."

Verdict: Recommended at the price of $3. And not a penny more.

Vocabulary:

vigils
lauds
vespers
niblick

The New Rabbi
Stephen Fried
4/5 stars
"Not quite timeless, not quite dated."
*******
I had thought that reading this book would give me an idea about the dynamics of selecting a rabbi. (It didn't. More on this later.)

The rabbi search at our synagogue went on for probably a year and some change.

The search for the congregation profiled in this book went on for every bit of 3 years.

And, if you know that shuls are very political places with the outward appearance of religious organizations, then none of this should be a surprise.

The amount of ego around these transitions is just breathtaking - - especially when you consider that observant Jews have been saying the same prayers and the exact same order for about 20 centuries now. (How many questions around the edges could there be for a service that can run on autopilot? And I have been to many synagogues where the rabbi is only in town sporadically and the service runs just fine without him.)

A sample of how out of control these situations can get (p.311): "....so a lot of prominent people were upset when the news spread that the Rabbi of Temple Emanuel, Leonid Feldman, had punched the President of the Synagogue in the face. [He knocked the president to the floor in his own $9 million mansion.]

Also (p.314): "Armed guards are called to one board meeting to separate angry synagogue members."

In many respects, the details in this book are just so much verbal spinach.

Spillover thoughts and things learned:

1. This book talks about search by committee, and while it is true of the non-Orthodox world (which is probably > 85% of American Judaism), it is not true for most of Orthodoxy (in the Haredi world, most of these pulpits are EITHER hereditary OR self-built to later become hereditary, and Haredim are about 3/4 of Orthodoxy). 

Rabbi-by-committee is true of Young Israel and congregations to its left.

But even the search process is not restrictive in the same way it was by Masorti Jews: Conservative synagogues are (or at least were at the time of this writing) required to select from an approved list of candidates vetted by the Rabbinical Assembly. There was no such stipulation for the Young Israel brand --with the exception of not being able to choose clergy from Yeshivat Chovivei Torah.

Is very interesting that Conservative has lost almost all of its people and Centrist and Open Orthodoxy have only modest growth, if any at all.

2. In some synagogues, if you get 9 people, the Aron Kodesh is open and the Torah itself can stand in as the 10th.

3. (p.80) The author is of the opinion that: when the American rabbinate was professionalized, they copied from the Xtians. (It's probably best to avoid using the words "pulpit" and "sermon" for that exact reason.)

4. (p.93). "In Judaism, belief in God is optional, something you may wrestle with for your entire life. But respect for and fascination with the Torah...... is not optional."

5. Strange Conservative extremes. The author counts 3,000 people there for Yom Kippur, but then a little bit later there are only 22 people in services for Sukkot.

6. How quickly things can change. This book was researched in 1999--nearly a quarter of a century ago. That is between the time that the Conservative movement was the largest branch of Judaism in the 1950s (and seemingly invincible), and the time today where they have lost over 2/3 of their membership.

At the time of this writing, Har Zion had 1,450 families, but just 20 years later they are down to 700. (We have one Conservative minyan here in town in a huge building that barely has a dozen people in it, and they are all extremely old. It's hard to foresee it lasting more than a couple of years; really, it's amazing that they have made it this far.)

7. Some of the strange psychology of people that work a job for decades and then retire is present here. 

You know the case.....Where someone retires and is then is bored out of his skull and tries to find ways to insinuate himself into the position that he used to have? (p.311: "So I am truly shocked just like everyone else who knows him [Wolpe], when he announces that he is coming out of retirement. He has agreed to spend one year as interim Rabbi at Temple Emanuel.") 

This case is just incidentally about a rabbi.

8. In Orthodoxy, it seems like synagogues are money losing affairs. But the Reform synagogues seem to be a very different thing. I'm reading here that even back in 1999, the salary for David Wolpe was $300,000. And that they were 10 other Reform rabbis that were around the $300,000 mark. (And I don't think we've even gotten into fringe benefits.)

9. Who knew? The first is that there is a Persian New Year. NoRuz. And the second is that Persian Jews celebrate it. 
*******


Interesting factoids:

1. 230,000 churches in the United States; 4000 synagogues (of the time of this writing, 2002).

2. There is, apparently, such a thing as rabbinic royalty even in Conservative/Reform Judaism: David Wolpe is the son of the man whose replacement this book is about. 

3. Conservative seminaries are graduating on the order of 15 people this year--2023. 12 rabbis and three cantors, and that demand outstrips supply. (Not sure what this could mean.) One article 2014 mentioned that the numbers were:

Yeshiva University: 75
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Reform): 35
Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies (Conservative): 17
Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative): 14
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College: 6
Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (Orthodox): 2

4. Ziegler School has slashed tuition by 80% in order to attract people.


Quotable quotes:

1. It's amazing that they [the committee] all agreed to put their chairs in a circle, with so many other geometric shapes available for debate.

2. Fryman gives the impression that if a discussion can't be resolved in one quarter of a billable hour, then it is not worth having.

3. "We basically get two chances to get you back. It's either the death of a parent, or kids' reaching preschool or Hebrew age. That's it."

4. "And that, in a nutshell, is the joy and sorrow of being a great sermonizer. Yours is the voice that many people associated with the most important moments in their lives, yet they don't always really remember what you said."

5. "They want the rabbi that has been preaching for the last 30 years but is only 28 years old."

6. "It is my dream to one day take the greatest gospel songs and edit the bejesus out of them, so that they're only about God and can be enjoyed by people of all faiths."

New Vocabulary:

gragger

Verdict: worth the read at the price of $0. It works well as a palate cleanser from heavier books.

Book Review
A Seat At The Table
3/5 stars
"Moderately Interesting. Forgettable. Not quite the Jewish version of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"
*******

The saving grace of this book is that it is only a couple of easy afternoons worth of reading time. (Chapters are about 15 pages on average, and the whole book is under 300 pages.)

I've read a number of these OTD ("off the derech") books, and I'm just not sure what I learned from this one.

So far, these books appear to be of three types:

1. Autobiographical accounts. Think of people like Deborah Feldman/Shulem Deem/Julia Haart. 

2. Books that are thinly veiled accounts of what really did happen. Think of "Hush," by "Eishes Chayil."

3. Books that are totally fictional. And that would be the one that I'm currently reviewing.

In the afterword, the author makes it a point to say that "it is not my story, nor are its characters stand-ins for real individuals."

But then, one page later, it says that he is descended from prominent Hasidic dynasties on both sides.

It seems that the reader will have to forever alternate between overlooking knowledge because what is written here is "just fiction" and attributing didactic mass to situations that don't even have any vague basis in reality.

*******
I have read these books because I wanted to know what are some of the commonalities and people that go OTD so that I can either:

1. Know way steps NOT to take with my own children to avoid it happening OR

2. Know that this might be something that just happens no matter what anybody does.

It seems like these stories have commonalities, but in a way they're never the same story twice. (Never COULD be the same story twice.)

But, these stories must happen quite frequently--because even in spite of the fact that Haredi birth rates have long been two times higher than those of Modern Orthodox Jews and probably four times higher than that of secular Jews, they still manage to stay about 10% of all of Jewry. (Somebody has run the numbers and noted that they should be over 90% of all Jews after only a couple of generations.)

This can only be explained by a large amount of attrition.

*******
It seems like this author is telling me ONE story that I have often read before, which is: a young Jewish person discovers a secular library or a university education and they realize that there are other ways of life that work for the other 99.9% of America (and the other 90% of Israel).

It seems like the author is telling me a ANOTHER story that I've not read before in any of my many other OTD books, but which is not hard to believe: a Young and Sheltered Jewish Man somehow discovers (blond) non-Jewish muff (it does seem that Jewish gentleman prefer blondes) and Young and Sheltered Jewish Man he realizes that there's no contest between going somewhere and laying up and spending moist evenings with a girl he likes versus ritually finding ways to make life as inconvenient✓ as✓possible✓(=Haredism). 

And I have actually heard from a Syrian Jewish man that that is the reason that they're banned on accepting conversions was enacted-- too many young Jewish Syrian men spread their wild oats with all of these extra-community blondes that were available.

There are so many people stateside that are claiming to be patrilineally Jewish/half Jewish / a quarter Jewish, that this has to happen a lot more than anybody wants to admit.

*******
What are some of the other running themes that I see in the book that I have seen here?

1. The initial break has varying degrees of acrimony.

2. After that, the wayward child and parents find an equilibrium and the policy becomes open door with the chance to return.

3. The process of going OTD happens as a series of stages.

*******
There are lots of very good Hasidic quotes at the head of each chapter. And the author does suggest that the plot was vestigial / only a vehicle to find a reason to use those witty quotes.

Ok...... There is a book of Yiddish folklore that is much better in that way.

Verdict: Nothing all that special, but worth a read at the price of <$1.

Book Review
"The Kosher Pig."
5/5 stars
"An economy of words to express great ideas."
*******
Of the book:

-159 pages; 20 essays
-≈8pps/essay
-Needn't be read in order
**

This author was a very interesting, insightful and thoughtful person (who was incidentally a rabbi). In his lifetime, he was an avid runner, as well as a beekeeper in addition to all of his rabbinic duties.

He puts me in mind of what Andy Rooney would sound like if he tried to write on Jewish topics.

Or, maybe Bob Newhart.

He gets in and out in 159 pages, and, based on his own words that is what you would expect. (p.49-"Verbosity and bluffing are usually part of the same package. Inadequate preparation is one of the most frequent reasons people talk too long. It is usually more work to be brief.")

These essays are essentially his greatest hits over about a 30-year period and published in many different sources.

And to be clear: the content of this book is from 30 years ago - - and it was a different world then. The author is a ba'al teshuva to the Conservative movement--way back in the days when it was an ongoing movement. (It has shrunk to about 300 people these days; it seems like there are more Samaritans in the world than there are Conservative / Masorti Jews.) 

This book is dated by the author's suggesting (in the context of recommending a prayer book) that "High on the list should be the Hertz prayer book, because of its rich content. It has another advantage [of being bilingual]." And this was way before Artscroll had taken over the world (p.37): we have a single dusty old edition of Hertz and the Soncino Chumash floating around in my Modern Orthodox shul--and almost certainly not a single copy in any of the other dozens of Haredi shuls around here.

But, even though the author has been dead for 23 years as of the time of this review..... I would say that his advice on giving a D'var Torah is the backbone of the book, and makes this particular book worth keeping for my own children. (There are many other good reasons to keep the book, but that in particular put it over the top.)

Strange But True ("Kosher Pig") questions that the rabbi has had to field:

1. One of his parishioners is a married non-Jewish woman and is having an affair with a married Jewish man. She wonders if he should not sleep with her when she is having her period.

2. Should a Jewish lesbian with a Jewish lover go to mikvah?

3. Should a woman with a yeast infection go home for a passover, since all yeast is forbidden at that time?

4. An orthodox Rabbi made a serious pass at a woman, and she wonders if she will have to go to the mikvah before she has an affair with him.

Other quotes:

1. (p.34): "They're not searching for what is absolutely true, at least not anymore. Maybe they did once, but by now they have either decided that they are not ever going to get answers to Big Questions, which they have accordingly stopped asking, or (more probably) they have forgotten what the questions were.

2. (p.53): "The standard Hasidic commentaries usually leave me cold as well, particularly if they explain the human and divine psyche in terms of the Sefirot, the Kabbalistic system.... I never like the way they dissolve the text and dehistoricize it to make it mean something altogether different from what it says.

3. (p.131): "it was impossible to participate in the games without paying one's respects to the gods of the Greek pantheon. Today's ritual of carrying the Olympic torch is a vestigial relic of the Greek torch races in which fire was brought from one god's sacred altar to another."

4. (p.115): "1 lb of Honey is the life's work of about 900 bees. They have had to fly distance which is equivalent to many times around the world in order to gather it. Experiencing that fact makes it impossible for me to deal casually with my honey. It is not an exaggeration to say that I find it a holy product."

5. (p.151): "My home synagogue was one of the last holdouts of radical Reform Judaism. Major Services were held only on Sunday mornings. Jewish holidays were not observed on the dates they fell according to the Jewish calendar, but instead, on the nearest Sunday."

6. (p.152): "Our family regularly celebrated holidays, though hardly in what could be called traditional fashion. Bread was not served during Passover, but there was no reason to remove the bacon from the house. We celebrated Hanukkah.... But we gave presents for Xmas and even had a tree for a few years."

7.(p.154): "An apikorus, a knowledgeable atheist who rejects the tradition, gets a kind of grudging respect in Judaism. A mere ignoramus gets none."

8. (ibid): "'Cut it out, will you! Let's get the goddamn prayers written already.' at that instant, I definitively discovered that I was not in a place of Torah, but rather in a sophisticated trade school."

9. (p.41): "Teaching is the best way to learn."

Second Order Thoughts:

1. (p.84). The author makes an observation about the Jewish prohibition on non-jewish wine. It is interesting that the original prohibition was also on non-jewish bread and oil. And those things are now ignored. It's not such a hard step to imagine ignoring the prohibition on non-Jewish wine.

The Italqim drank non-Jewish wine for many centuries.

Also, if the point is to not drink with non-Jewish people, that can also be short-circuited by the fact that you CAN drink beer and liquor with then.

2. Because the books that this author mentions (Soncino; Hertz), are so obscure and so far out of date, it might be enough for my kids to just pick them up and resurrect the arguments contained therein, since no one has read them in current times.

3. "We will not know in which way we will serve Hashem until we get there." (Shemot, 10:3)

One or two quotes from each chapter:

1. The Kosher Pig. (See "kosher pig" questions.)

2. The Late Jewish People. "I am told that black people, when speaking among themselves, May refer to Colored People's Time, and in some circles even talk about Old Colored People's Time (i.e., African time, which is a bit later than Ordinary Colored People's Time.)

3. Speed Davening. "Prayer is a curious business. There are no results that can be guaranteed in advance, or even in retrospect."

4. Torah and Telephones. "He believed that Torah could be seen in all of the new devices that affected 19th century life. From a train, one could learn that because of one second a person can miss everything. From a telegraph, that every word is counted and charged. From the telephone, that what we say here is heard there."

5. How to Survive Your Synagogue. "You may be flirting with Jewish observance, but it doesn't quite make sense to you yet. Or it makes a little sense, but you would like it to make a lot more sense for all the trouble it causes you." /"People who want to talk sit in the back rows. People who really want to daven sit forward. If you sit very far back you will probably only hear talk about the stock market or ball games.

6. How to give a D'var Torah. "There is a kind of person, often inexperienced, for whom making other Jews angry is a source of joy."/"Ramban's ideas are often wonderful, but he is very verbose and sometimes you can die waiting to get to them. A taste for him has to be cultivated."

7. Hospitality Should Be Practiced Religiously. "Every now and then we get a few duds--guests who pretend that they are visiting anthropologists come to watch our quaint Oriental rites."

8. On Baldness and the Jewish Problem. "Others, unable to keep them in place, whose kippa'ot are seldom on on their heads but always on their minds develop a kippah tic, forever reaching up to put the little rascal back in place." 

9. Jewish Haute Cuisine/Kosher in the Clouds. "When I started observing the kosher food rules, I viewed my decision to do so as a very private one, something between me and the Holy One. It did not occur to me that if you want to keep kosher at 30,000 ft, a lot of other people are involved as well."/"Now, you really have to have a religious mandate or a very specialized taste for bland brisket to enjoy kosher food on an airplane, because that is all you are likely to get."


10. Fast Food. "This may be hard to believe after one is 20 or so hours into a fast, but most healthy adults can survive well over a month without eating."

11. Why Jewish Wine Tastes Terrible. "When Jews start to worry about a subject, they worry a lot."/"Perhaps one of the reasons there have been so few Jewish alcoholics until recent years is that for generations, the only wine Jews had to drink tasted awful. It is hard to develop a taste for wine if one is limited to Jewish wine."

12. Memorable Weddings. "The rowdiest wedding I ever officiated at was one where the groom's mother punched out the bride's mother over a derogatory remark the bride's mother made about the father of the groom."

13. Washing the Dead. "I had never really thought that being dead and healthy at the same time was one of the available options. It seemed to me that if you are dead, you are definitely not healthy." AND "After the washing, Gorelick puts some egg white mixed with a little vinegar on the eyes, under the nose, on the nipples and groin. I remember that it had to do with some complicated Kabbalistic doctrines of birth and death."

14. The Spurious Kaddish. "He wasn't introducing me, he was giving my eulogy, and a fake eulogy at that."

15. Bees and Bee-ing. "Even though the Roman conquest was cruel, the Romans did bring with them those gentle Italian honey bees we use to this day."/"after the Roman conquest, the Jewish attitude to bees changes. Rabbinic literature begins to discuss systematic bookkeeping, controlling swarms and the crushing of combs to remove honey."

16. Jews and Wasps. "Bees eat only sweet things. Wasps can be interested in sweets, but they like meat and fats even more."/"..... Bait and switch technique. A splendid plate of food is placed outside of the sukkah so that the wasps can eat the decoy food and ignore what is on the inside. Unfortunately, the wasps never seem to know which plate is intended specially for them. They just divide up forces and enjoy."

17. Judaism and Jogging.  "Within the gymnasium, there was a considerable amount of sexual activity. Heterosexuality was coming to the classical Greek mind, a moderately dull option available to any run of the mill animal. Homosexuality was the uniquely human act, the bit of culture and civilization that could be added to ordinary sex..... Pederasty was a commonplace feature of the gymnasium."


18. The Piece of Pork. "By this time, it was a huge piece of ham they had fed the rabbi's dog. By the third day, it was practically a whole suckling pig. Each time they retold the story in my presence to other men in the firehouse, both the piece of pork, and Giggles gusto in eating it had grown."

19. Hives and Blisters. "Want to come I foolishly opened a hive shortly after a rainstorm. When they can't earn a living, bees become very irritable. Within 30 seconds, I have 60 stings on each ankle."/"some months ago, I ran my third 50-mile race. It took more than 9 hours...."

20. You Can't Do It All On One Foot. "I did not find the idea of chosenness to be a self-aggrandizing embarrassment. I took it to mean that the Jew still has a role to play in Gd's plan for the resolution of history. I see no great intellectual scandal in assuming that Gd wants to work out history through particular peoples as opposed to all of humanity together. One makes as much or as little sense as the other."/"The question of the divinity of the law would just have to wait."
*******

New Vocabulary: 

(cutting the)Gordian knot