Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers
Flying free from the net: With Facebook's spiritual and material decline, we are leaving Facebook's trap and moving to Twitter, hoping that a bird will better handle original content. Those interested in continuing to follow "The Degeneration of the Nation" are invited to my (the editor's) new Twitter. The snare is broken, and we have escaped
Our private Facebook group
Following the absurd blocking of "The Degeneration of the Nation" website on Facebook, hundreds of links and shares to the site were deleted from all over Facebook, and so we opened the group - to isolate ourselves. Our stance towards Facebook hasn't changed since the beginning of our activities: we are present there only to confront the enemy on its own turf. Facebook is a cultural crime organization, and our blocking - as unjustified as it may be, without providing any warning or official excuse, and of course without the ability to discuss or appeal - is the least of its sins, but of course not coincidental. The grammar of the masses hates the original
Little Shabtai: Nano-Shabtai does Tirza Atar
The ring doesn't fall far from the planet: Aharon Shabtai's entire work can be read as a "Book of Women", with each woman in his life being a chapter, and now his daughter follows in his footsteps with the bitter "Book of Men" - and the sweet, non-Ashkenazi and heartwarming Sami Ashkenazi
Shuki Ben Naim on the war between the gang and the clan
The misunderstanding in understanding the world as layers, and then ideology is just a thin cover of the soul (which is a thin cover of the body), or that spirit is an expression of matter (or vice versa), or that discourse is a product of politics which is itself a product of power and interests and control structures, etc. The understanding of the world as learning neutralizes the problem of dividing the world into a structure of layers placed horizontally on top of each other, because it creates a vertical mechanism that drives the entire system over time: the method cuts through all levels of meaning, just as the narrative in a literary work drives all layers of the text from bottom to top - from language to the ideational layer
On the close connection between French media
And the corrupt establishment - as a result of the centralized state of the Sun King, in a legacy that survived even the French Revolution. And when the administration rules, not the media, a consciousness is enabled where the story is of culture and art - not of politics. Hence another modern chapter in the ancient connection between corruption and culture
The Israeli Undercover: The first worthy Bibi-ist creation
Based on the Ruth David and Perinian brothers affairs and approaching the exclusive league of "In Treatment" and "The Boys" (the only two Israeli drama series worth watching) - but lacking sufficient psychological and ideological depth, which can be created precisely from emotional lingering at the expense of plot frenzy. Insight and emotion are created from gradual accumulation and not from sharp turns - and therefore a deep creation is round and not polygonal. This is exactly the Bibi-ist failure: a narrative of sharp turns, zigzags, spins and scandals replaces incremental building, and therefore we live in a cheap effective thriller and not in a novel navigated by a great leader (and this is his main virtue - as a creator of meaning: a leader turns his era into literature). It's no wonder that the thriller has turned into crime (will the hero-villain escape?)
Queen threatens King
Is a combination of feminism and the Arab Spring the next direction in political revolution? Could it be that a woman could have threatened Putin, Xi, Erdogan and Bibi, and even Arab regimes? Will the world's most toxic "men" find it difficult to take the same proven measures, which eliminated their rivals, against iron women? The possibility of a feminist spring is tempting: Matriarchy - now
The culture opposite to Israel in the world
Above all - the coronavirus graph expresses cultural differences, while making an objective global comparison of learning styles. Four types of students: quick to hear and quick to lose - Israel. Hard to hear and hard to lose - Europe. Quick to hear and hard to lose - East Asia. Hard to hear and quick to lose - the Americas. There is no other graph like Israel's in the world, which highlights Jewish uniqueness: an impatient culture that cuts corners, pushes in line, shouts and connects easily, a start-up nation without unicorns, that switches from panic to complacency at record speed. Its reward came in its loss
Totalitarianism, is it as bad as they say? The most beautiful response to blocking
The historical prodigy Or-El Beilinson and his commenters debate the dialectic between Stalinism and Stalin, between totality and totalitarianism, and between history and historical image. A glimpse into the depths of dealing with the depths of dealing with the depths of the archive
The individual, the collective and the scientific order
The basic research crisis of our time, whose best-known result is the coronavirus, is illuminated in a new light through the most important and influential invention of the inventor of the incandescent lamp - the Edisonian research laboratory. This invention, and not any other of his inventions, is what created the physical revolution in everyday life of the 20th century. If we want a biological revolution in the 21st century - we must return to Edison, who understood that there is a limit to the capabilities of the individual entrepreneur with the idea bulb lit above his mind, otherwise we will fall between the chairs of economy and academia
A deviant peek into the crucible of Jewish thought
Yishai Mevorach - the groundbreaking Jewish theologian of our time - continues to shape a religiosity of darkness, after a century that tried to shape a religiosity of lights - and therefore of kitsch. Since the Holocaust, there has not been a religious thinker who dealt so deeply with religious darkness and secularization, and only from such a confrontation can valuable religious art emerge. With the completion of the trilogy of Rav Shagar's most prominent student, who saves Judaism from saccharine Christian romanticism, which also affected his rabbi's thought - while replacing his melancholy with neurosis
"Duo-alogue" on conceptualizing the coronavirus as a black elephant versus a basic intelligence surprise
The purpose of the black swan discourse is to avoid the elephant in the room: to sweep away the failure in the conception that caused the crisis, and to exempt the system from impossible (allegedly) attempts at fundamental correction, therefore it is a learning-thwarting idea. The Yom Kippur-like idea of a basic surprise cannot blur the enormous contribution of the discourse of failure and conception as a (partial) vaccine for the future, as well as for creating mechanisms like the ipcha mistabra [contrary reasoning]. In the same way, the failure in the coronavirus calls for the establishment of a global mechanism aimed at identifying threats, outlining intelligence collection requirements, funding extensive basic research, building doctrines and contingency plans and routine drills, and institutionalizing ipcha mistabra to identify dangerous courses of action for global threats
Ofri Ilany: The coronavirus spoke against four sons
The belief in a sociological characterization of the intellectual, which results in searching for the spiritual future in millennials, causes a search for sociological divisions of responses in the present as an intellectual key to deciphering the spiritual meaning of the coronavirus crisis. But sociology is devoid of spiritual value - because a spiritual, futuristic, and even contemporary breakthrough is always of exceptional individuals, who do not testify about the general, and the general in turn does not testify about them. No one will remember Žižek, Agamben and their ilk, the fashionable people of the present, who belong entirely to the past
Yigal Librant against Jared Diamond: Is the devil in the generalizations or in the details?
The discussion at Librant, which opens from a historian's point of view against an anthropologist, and Uri Katz's counter-response from an economist's point of view, emphasize the need and interest in a discipline for big questions, which will make "Harari phenomena" redundant. A proportionate point of view would ask the opposite question: Why was the technological-developmental gap between the continental masses so small (about 3000 years) that expresses the gap (also astonishingly small, on a paleoanthropological scale) in the start of agriculture, and both moved on such a similar axis? The network answer to these questions stems from the advantage of seniority, size and especially networking - the tri-continental junction of the Middle East and the indentations of the Mediterranean - and networking creates learning
What determines size: random growth, returns to scale or geographical foundations
What explains where we live? The lady and the peddler bring the natural experiment of the atomic bomb - and draw the wrong conclusion. The geographical distribution is actually determined by the network structure, so removing the vertices in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not change the distribution because the network has not changed, neither in its flow (transportation and trade routes, human capital flow, etc.), nor in its essential connections to centers around it. If in the geographical center of 3 cities, and on an important passage route, a third city needs to arise, proportional to them in size, it won't help if we erase it - it will return. Let's wait then for the hydrogen bomb - which will erase an entire network
Guidelines for the next crisis upon us for good
The cause is always original - the result is always not. Surprise causes fear which in turn causes despair. When despair is at its peak - that will be the time to re-enter the stock market with full force. The next stage will be hope, which will be replaced by optimism, which will be replaced by complacency and hubris. And so on, in the tragic-comic cycle of the economy
Economics saws off its own legs
Why invest in economics if the important variable is technology and science? The resources invested in economics can be invested directly in technology and science and get better results (economically too). At most, economics should learn how not to sabotage technological-scientific development and how to promote it. Hence, economics is the servant of technology - not vice versa. Thus, technology is expected to overcome capitalism and eventually replace it - in a world where there is no material shortage, only spiritual
The dialectic between economic and cultural factors: The populist version
Prof. Yotam Margalit is recommended by Intro to Economics C - and returns again to the arena between being and consciousness. When different levels of description compete again for the title of explanation - the Wittgensteinian saying about removing all explanation and sufficing with description gains renewed validity, and affirms the validity of alternative descriptions (literary, dreamlike, kabbalistic) for history and politics
Chronicle of a totalitarianism foretold
Yigal Librant in a series of posts on the Russian Revolution: Could it have been different? The Russian fate as an approach that produces fate, and is reflected also in the post itself, in feedback between cynicism, toughness, cruelty and indifference. Russian history produces tragedy after tragedy, but without the sublimity and heroism of tragedy, and without the comedy of the march of folly, because the power of suffering replaces any other value (poetic or human)
Israel without Smilansky - may he atone for his father's bed - on the secret of the present
Thesis (zero), antithesis (infinity) and synthesis (few): In the war between Bialik's absence of present and Gnessin and S. Yizhar's continuous and eternal present, Facebook's momentary present won, producing literature that combines constant action with a continuous present (and in a dream, as we know, there is only present). All that remains is to envy Yizhar for his son's heroic commemoration project - against the winds of time
Gideon Ofrat asks where the great art has disappeared
His worship of cucumbers - is part of the answer. Another part stems precisely from the degeneration of the art world, which is why we hear about great and non-degenerate art with a great delay. Generations of art practitioners grew up on the avant-garde paradigm, so when this paradigm itself became conservatism and is in crisis - and a paradigm shift is occurring - it will take time until non-avant-garde art is established, returning to content, narrative and meaning, and not revolving around empty formal revolutionism
The Black Rock: The Solidit on the revolution of foreign funds in Israel
Real capitalism is communism: The U.S. is probably the only country in the world where the global public can effectively participate in the profits of capitalism and giant corporations through the stock market without being exploited (unlike, for example, Israel and the local stock exchange), thanks to corporate discipline and financial competition, and therefore capital from all over the world flows to it. Therefore, this is a revolution for the average Israeli investor. When technological capitalism is galloping, only buying shares in giant corporations will give the 99% true partnership in the profits of the 1%, and anyone who chooses not to participate in the capital class and not to invest - will be left behind. Workers of the world - invest!
Every day is Yom Kippur: Jesus as a super-substitute for Yom Kippur
Ishay Rosen-Zvi explains how early Christianity from its beginning managed to establish an effective hierarchical organization, which was lacking in Judaism, precisely because atonement became its theological starting point, while nullifying the system of divine law and justice, which allowed a formal bureaucratic human system. Judaism remained stuck in dealing with the formal divine law itself, without mediators, and in contorting against it and finding bypasses (for example Yom Kippur). This created enormous spiritual organizational structures, like the Mishnah and Talmud, while Christianity established enormous human organizational structures, like the Church. In the medieval Zoharic worldview, the bypass had already become part of the extensive divine bureaucracy itself, while internalizing the Gentile organizational structure into the world of spirit, in a typical Jewish inversion
Whitewashing of a black circle
The arrogance of the contemporary reader hastens to assume his superiority over the writer. Therefore, when the author is a virtuoso, the reader's lack of understanding will be interpreted as the writer's stupidity. When the writer is also an ideational innovator - his innovation will be interpreted as ignorance and misunderstanding of existing knowledge. Thus, what could have been a bold innovation if attributed to an authority (who presumably no longer innovates anything) will become amateurish nonsense. This is the reason for the degeneration into which creativity in Jewish myth has sunk. After all, if a spark from Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's soul was thrown into a contemporary - wouldn't he write under a pseudoepigraphic identity?
Freud's email
A collection of letters from the Admor Freud, Paul of Kabbalah, who knew how to take the Jewish myth and dress it in Greek garb and spread it among the Gentiles, and his Hasidism took over the American psyche world, and through it the global psyche. Since genre is the essence, the letter is the father of analysis, and the death of email in our time is the end of dialogic thinking, addressed to one person - and the beginning of forum thinking stemming from the form of writing on social media, addressed to a community. The source for doctrines - is revealed in letters
Yonatan Hirschfeld recycles himself
The greatest writer and lecturer on art in Israel today - more than Gideon Ofrat - celebrates in a fireworks display masquerading as narcissistic personality disorder for his 40th birthday, the age at which one reaches understanding, and which expands a similar performance he held for his 38th birthday, the traditional Jewish age for the death of a prodigy in esoteric teachings. On the accumulation of experiences that does not accumulate into a meaningful story as a characteristic of the contemporary artist, as an extremization of the Facebook self, as opposed to the modesty, secrecy and devotion of the Jewish-traditional figure of the man of spirit
The Jew who invented German gas
Tom Sadeh on the most important least known invention of the twentieth century, which underlies demographic growth, and thanks to which there is almost no more hunger in the world (only malnutrition). Fritz Haber died on his way to work at the Weizmann Institute, not before standing behind the German chemical weapons industry and the explosives industry, which caused his wife to commit suicide, and him to marry another Jewish woman. The Haber process: When a Jew becomes more German than a German and then back to a Jew - the result of the process is ammonia and Zyklon B
S. Yizhar returns - and in a big way
The extinct intention to write a great and innovative work - on its prices and weaknesses and failures - is foreign to our current literature and has disappeared from the landscape like S. Yizhar himself. While clashing with giants like Kurzweil and Ben-Gurion, Yizhar demonstrates why great works are no longer written today, literally. Not for lack of talent - but because this function has disappeared from the structure of culture, due to the collapse of education in the face of entertainment, media and communication - in the victory of the philosophy of language over the philosophy of learning
Jabotinsky responds to the situation in Israel
When politics had a soul, because writers were politicians and public leaders (and vice versa), then the psychological understanding behind it was also literary - and they addressed the audience like psychologists who treat conflicts by raising them to consciousness in words. Today, deciphering public opinion, polls, propaganda and manipulation treat voters with contempt and cynicism as objects and not as subjects, who respond with a similar attitude to the elected. On the longing for a subject in the public sphere - because it's clear that Jabotinsky is treating from within his own soul
Daniel Oz dismantles the fake of the rape on the island
The cucumber season in Israeli media is in full swing. Once they used to make do with real cucumbers, but today when everything is images - it's porn-media. One can notice that none of the sources are taken from "Haaretz" (formerly the most reliable newspaper in Israel), which again covers a case at the level of fake news, and creates a deep cognitive disconnect between the deep left and the rest of Israeli society, for its own reasons (the profit is both commercial and ideological)
"We didn't survive two thousand years of exile because we stood nicely in line, huh?"
On the secular schizophrenic response to the Jewish ethos in the face of the Gentile gaze. The internalization of Western Kantian moral values of universal law encounters the most insolent culture in the world in the form of a thousand people's passports at three in the morning at JFK airport, and tells the entire Israeli story. Then - the secular aspiration for German (!) morality collides with the Jewish aspiration (formulated sharply in the Zohar) for justice that is not fair, but has faces and recognition of faces, while emphasizing the demonic aspects of impersonal law
Aharon Shabtai knows how to choose poems - but not women
Shabtai's latest book of poetry prompts gloomy reflections on the damage Tanya caused to Hebrew poetry, and on the poetic inferiority of political poetry (in this case Shabtai's committed poetry) - compared to love poetry and everyday life. Tanya as a parable of the Israeli left, which lost both this world and the next - the world of spirit and eternity. In the face of approaching death, and the lost poetic years, Shabtai evokes sadness over the enormous cultural damage caused by the occupation - to the left
Yotam HaCohen on Netanyahu as a Taoist master
Do without doing and everything will be done by itself, a true traveler has no travel plan and no intention to arrive, a better ruler - rules less, the greatest of conquerors is one who knows how to win without battle, the wise is not moral - he treats the people as straw dogs, and other catchphrases from Bibi's Tao
Yigal Livnat on the intellectual landscape of Tocqueville's homeland
When your life story undermines your brilliant thesis - it is precisely de Tocqueville's extremely aristocratic upbringing that ironically illuminates the genius of his book on America, which could not have been written by an American. Democracy in America produces subculture, and it is precisely the decaying European culture that produces de Tocquevilles. So in the final account, the conclusion of "Democracy in America" is anti-democratic and anti-American - and the real book is: "Aristocracy in Europe"
Roey Tzezana on the science behind effective protests - and the boomerang effect of the Ethiopian protest
Contrary to the socialist view that sees the state as responsible for welfare, and therefore sees violence as a positive effect (budget increase), society actually operates as a free market. Therefore, violent protest is an own goal, because it damages the image of Ethiopians in the wider public (employers, potential partners, financiers, etc.), and creates a negative stereotype - the protest causes racism. In addition, it takes the protesters out of the collective, since violence between Jews is contrary to the Jewish ethos and is experienced as foreign and alienated - and turns the Ethiopian from a Jew into an African
Yehuda Vizan brings out Tzur Ehrlich
The Altermanian virtuoso of our time, who offers a right-wing, conservative and stinging poetic alternative, in a poem that would be out of place in a feminist world - but is deeply connected to the image of the sexes in the Zohar and the connection of the male to the attribute of grace and the female to the attribute of might and judgment. Kipling as an antidote to political correctness, in a world where women and men were educated differently - and were indeed different
On the state as an operating system, where the user is sovereign - versus the state as software, where the sovereign is a programmer
The contrast produces a third possibility, more suitable for the state in our era: the state as a social network, in which the individual has full freedom of expression but zero sovereign influence on the mechanism, because the state has become a platform for discourse, and all influence on reality passes only through influence on consciousness through discourse
The brilliant essayist Assaf Inbari on the cultural nullity of Religious Zionism
Inbari's tragedy, following the failure of his book "The Tank" and his realization that he remains alone in the battle, is embodied in a desperate appeal to the most ideological public in Israel (and the least cultural of all). On the game between ideology and literature, in which Inbari fails literarily - but impresses ideologically