WHO CREATED JASON ARDAY?

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THE GREAT AND UNFORTUNATE THINGS We live in peculiar times. That is a trivial thing to say: on the surface, all times are unique. Only now it is actually, finally, beginning to look like this. When people unaffiliated with the University of Cambridge feel a sense of relief at their unaffiliation, while those who are affiliated feel they need to explain themselves—that sounds like the mother of all peculiarities. In a society that treats any piece of news, be it a mass murder or a royal wedding, as entertainment, the explosion of commentary on the downfall of Jason Arday, the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) darling at the University of Cambridge, is only to be expected. The cruelty of it is also highly predictable. I am not sure whether Arday can stay alive after all this. Simon Baron-Cohen said that he should be left alone because he is autistic and, as an autistic individual, would find it hard to cope. Well, Baron-Cohen...
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WHAT CAUSED THE WAR IN UKRAINE? THE NATO EXPANSION OR SPIRITUAL CRISIS?

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The West is undergoing a spiritual crisis. It lost its religion, Christianity. It is not allowed to be nationalistic, which is a sentiment that replaced Christianity for a while and then got banned. So, it needs a new project-a war with Russia, for the sake of Ukraine, became such a project. Ukraine in incidental here, it is an excuse. A different country could occupy its place. Such is the view of Emmanuel Todd, communicated in the ‘Defeat of the West’. The loss of religion, and the loss of nationalism as a form of civic religion, the spread of nihilism are undoubted. One only needs to look at the figures: in a nutshell, not many attend churches or not many are prepared to defend their own country. There is no God, Devil or indeed an enemy. All that is true. It is also true, a point that Todd does not make but I do, that there is quite a bit of the...
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The Russian-Ukrainian War and the Collapse of Academic Discourse

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The war between Russia and Ukraine began in earnest in February 2022. It sent the Western political and journalistic commentariat into the shock of its life, making them forget about Covid, Israel, and the many other oh-so-important matters they had been "covering" until then. They finally located Ukraine on the map and discovered that it was more than a source of Slavic brides for Western unmarriageables. Who would have thought…? Academia—and especially the social sciences—became another arena of creativity. The level of informedness there was generally higher than among the journalistic class, though not by much. I am a member of several learned societies. Discussions of current affairs are not unusual on their forums and listservs, and the war had an immediate effect. I am a survivor of those discussions. For several months, between February and June 2022, I had to listen to groups of people—supposedly senior researchers of one thing or another—telling each other that Putin was evil, that Russia's conquest...
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Pro-Palestinianism, the fourth Abrahamic religion

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The political revenge of mass migration Have you noticed how concerned Jews and non-Jews in the West discuss what they perceive as a rise in antisemitism? They talk a lot about the increase in antisemitic incidents (granted, by the way, these have increased to unprecedented levels everywhere in Western Europe). They also talk a lot about societal attitudes towards Jews and Israel: what do the surveys say about the share of the Western public that openly dislike Jews? Has that share increased? Is it just about being anti-Jewish (for them, terrible) or about being anti-Israel (for them, somehow better)? And they, those concerned Jews and non-Jews, sponsor and conduct no end of surveys on this topic. In fact, I can bet you any money that a survey of antisemitic attitudes is being carried out somewhere in Europe as I type. In reality, I can tell you, they are not interested in any of that. To be precise, they are really interested...
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Immanuel Todd, a demographer-prophet, and his book that stings

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Let us start from the beginning. In the painting below a Soviet artist captures a very famous, to Soviet citizens of course, moment in Lenin' s life. His house in Shushenskoe, a place of his exile, is being searched by the police. As an aside: Lenin is supposed to be 27 years old here. There are two versions of Lenin in the Soviet art- an angelic looking 3 year old and a wise elder, a sage. Nothing in between. Here he is a sage. In reality, Lenin looks older than he had ever lived. He died aged 53 years. Note a little detail in this painting: one of the policemen is paging through the books on the shelves. This was, according to the large Soviet corpus of writings on the subject, the so-called Leniniana, the main point of each of the many house searches performed by the Russian imperial police in Lenin’s houses. Search for forbidden books. What were they,...
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MUSK: THE UNBEARABLE SILLINESS OF BEING

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It looks like nobody is prepared to talk about it seriously. Let me try. And to do this topic justice, I will have to lead you by the long road (derech aruka). The Alter Rebbe, Shneur Zalman of Lyadi, a founder of Chabad movement, outlined this method in ‘Tanya’, a foundational text of the Chabad. It goes like this. Whether in daily activities, or rhetorically, one can choose to put things succinctly, cut corners and ‘get there quickly’. That would be taking the short road (derech kztara). Only that method leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding, endless back and forth, correcting uncertainties and errors and explaining that takes a looooong time. It is better to go by the long road-to allocate proper time for explanation and/or activity. That way, corrections and repetitions will not be needed. One is likely to ‘get there’ in a shorter time frame ultimately. So, the long road it is. My in-laws have had this family...
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THE GREAT ISRAEL-through the eyes of the Russian nationalist

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This would easily be the most important essay on Jews and Israel in the year that is coming to an end as I type. In the West, Alexander Dugin is often cast as Putin’s philosopher. Those who do so, underestimate Putin. Putin’s philosophy is eclectic, multi-angular, with a great deal of historicism, as many of his speeches and interview testify. It is an underestimation of Dugin, equally. Dugin is his own man, known to scholars of Russia, from his early dissident activities. We are talking the mid-1980s. Then, before the Perestroika, all oppositional dissident forces appeared all the same to a Westerners’ eyes. All were perceived  to be ‘against the Soviet regime’, which gave them the status of the righteous and the differences between them did not matter. In truth, because the whole activisation of the civil and political life, outside of the Communist Party limits, was such a new phenomenon, dissidents of different shades did not feel like they...
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TRAGIC DAYS FOR POLLSTERS?

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According to Rambam, it is natural for people to follow others when it comes to thoughts and wishes. To put it differently: people, on average, tend to be led. Rather than lead, let us just say. If one takes Rambam into account, one knows everything one needs to know about why pollsters, on the occasion of the 2024 US election, look pale to some (not everybody). Seemingly, they could not predict Trump's victory..? Is that so? Let us what the best forecasters said. Nate Silver is known, hardly requires an introduction. His magic? He aggregated all Trump vs Biden and Trump vs Harris polls he could lay his hands on, but, unlike other aggregators, like ‘Real Clear Politics’, he weighted them differentially. In weighting them he took into account not just the sample sizes but other characteristics that, in his eyes, could impact on the trend. Timing of surveys was taken into account, for example. This is not something that anyone...
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THE WEST AND THE REST: THE ANTI-TRUMP VS THE PRO-TRUMP WORLD?

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Western Europe is an anti-Trump world. If there is a stable feature in the Western European politics, it is that: anti-Trumpism. For anyone who engaged in any political conversation on the topic in Europe since 2015, that much is clear. The ‘uncloseted’ pro-Trump individuals I personally came across in the UK since Trump’s appearance on the map of the world politics can still be counted in single digits. This well-entrenched European anti-Trumpism is seen pretty much nowhere else in the world. In 2017, very early in Trump’s first presidency, YouGov conducted a global survey of attitudes toward Donald Trump asking how confident respondents felt about Trump being a good US president. In every single Western European country featured in Figure 1, a majority said that they were not at all confident. It seems like the Northern European block of countries was especially pessimistic in relation to Trump , with Denmark and Sweden leading in prevalence of this sentiment. Majority of British...
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BANANAS AND POTATOES

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My grandmother never ate mushrooms. I could not understand it. I thought they were the most delicious thing on the planet. I asked her why and she said ‘You see-I never ate them as a child. We just did not eat them. And something you do not eat as a child…you rarely learn how to eat later’. I was curious about that. My grandmother’s family did not eat mushrooms. They lived in a town, not in a village. To get mushrooms-you need to pick them in the forest. Central Ukraine in year 1914 was not known for its supermarkets. To pick them-you need to know an awful lot about them, otherwise you are at a risk of serious poisoning and death. Given the lack of effortless lifestyle-based knowledge and the risks, it is easy to see why they never ate them. But: is that true that childhood determines your taste for the rest of your life? Before I was six I...
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