Yesterday, a group of orthodox Jews (males only) filled Mets Stadium to hear a lecture on the evils of the Internet (apparently there’s some porn on here). Unsurprisingly:
According to The New York Times, the meeting was sponsored by a rabbinical group that is connected to a software company specializing in selling web filtering software to Orthodox Jews. You won’t be surprised to find, therefore, that the conclusion reached at the end of the rally was that we should all, Jews or otherwise, install internet filtering software on our machines as a “minimal base line of protection.”
In case you’re wondering, the women were watching from “viewing parties” in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
Linda Featheringill
And so we see that Jews really aren’t very different from Christians.
Another Halocene Human
From Shmarya:
failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2012/05/anti-internet-gathering-opens-with-protector-of-…
Anti-Internet Gathering Opens With Protector Of Child Rapist
Rabbi Moshe Green at CitiField 5-20-2012Rabbi Moshe Green, the senior haredi rabbi in Monsey, New York, was honored by the anti-Internet gathering’s organizers with the reading of Psalms to open the event. Green tried to protect child rapist Rabbi Israel Weingarten, who is now serving a several decades long prison sentence in a federal prison in Virginia.
Spadizzly
And that is why I am an atheist.
4tehlulz
@Linda Featheringill: Because all Jews are like the Haredi.
Another Halocene Human
Fm has a much deeper rundown on this story, including the lead organizer and the groups which both supported, pulled out from, denounced, and protested the gathering.
It’s being promoted by someone who sells internet filtering software for a living (surprise, surprise).
It’s being promoted by rabbis who have found out too late the the internet is breaking their control over their seemingly closed community. Shocking info on FM about mistakes and mismanagement by the DA in charge of ultra-orthodox child rape cases, with collusion by the rabbis.
Interesting comment on one of the articles: My great-grandfather had nothing to do with religion when he got to the United States because of the rabbis who made his family’s life hell in Europe.
Ultra-orthodox has all the markers of an abusive cult. If anyone dares to seek help for their child who has been raped, the entire community shuns them, tries to ruin them financially, prevent their children from being able to get married, and even, in one case, sets their house on fire with them in it? Oh, my bad, the arson was because the “offender” had dared to go with some friends once a week to see some elderly guys in the old folks’ home to make a minyan, rather than daven at the shul, per the rebbe’s orders.
For those saying “Jews and Christians are just the same”, well, any authoritarian structure provides aid and comfort to child rapists, but I wouldn’t consider these cultists to be Jews. More like heretics, turning a mitzvah into a crime.
Luckily, we’re only talking about a few ten thousands of people.
Linda Featheringill
I’ve been playing on the internet for a few years now and don’t think I’ve ever visited a porn site. I don’t see that these sites are pushy, or aggressive, or predatory. I leave them alone and they leave me alone. Without a funky little filter.
Wankers.
MikeJ
I just thought of my next software startup. Porn filtering that injects at least a little porn on every page you visit. There are already a hojillion companies doing the kind that stops people from looking up breast cancer.
People would actually enjoy using my filter.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s a scam. All of it.
Another Halocene Human
Note: this is why we need separation of church and state.
Jerzy Russian
I had no idea that there was p0rn on the internet. I’d better investigate this further.
Another Halocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est:
Truer words have never been spoken.
Linda Featheringill
@4tehlulz: #4
And all Christians are followers of Pat Robertson.
Another Halocene Human
P0_rn
Another Halocene Human
@Linda Featheringill: Pat Robertson? Piffle, not even close. We’re talking about FLDS levels of crazy, swindling, and sex crimes.
amk
Can’t wait for the day when the head honchos at teh internetz break out the .xxx domain.
Another Halocene Human
Pr8n
Linda Featheringill
@Another Halocene Human:
“Piffle”? :-)
Villago Delenda Est
@4tehlulz:
Well, not all Christians are like the Haredi.
But extremist religious wackjobs are extremist wackjobs if the religion is Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Zoastrianism, Scientology, or whatever.
Another Halocene Human
Of course, the last link was “Modern” Orthodox (ie, not crazy nutjob Chabadnik, Satmarer, Skverer, etc) so the school canned him right away.
This is how they do it at Chabad schools.
Jerzy Russian
@Another Halocene Human:
This is a relief, I guess. And it we cannot get rid of church, then the separation of church and state is essential.
Another Halocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est:
I have a sort of fascination with crazeee religious cults, and I have noticed some major differences. But YMMV.
Another Halocene Human
@Linda Featheringill: Pat Robertson doesn’t have to power to isolate, abuse, and destroy families who challenge him.
He’s really an order of magnitude less pernicious, as his followers are free to go follow somebody else.
We often see that ol’ Pat will get new revelations from time to time and change his tune when he thinks the wind is blowing in a different direction.
Jerry Failwell was the really nasty one of the pair, while Pat just got tripped up on loving your neighbor like you love yourself… I mean, who could love anyone as much as they love Pat? He’s so righteous God called him on the telephone. It’s tr00000.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Villago Delenda Est: Exactly. It’s the extremism that makes it cultlike. And the extremism also drives some bigotry, when low information folks extrapolate that behavior and set of ideas to Jews in general.
mapaghimagsik
Sometimes, I wish I could get in on a scam like that. Unfortunately, I’m not enough of a sociopath.
Another Halocene Human
Pat Robertson is so righteous, God calls Pat for advice.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I believe in the separation of church and state. We have our states so now is the time for the churches to be kept separate from us.
Damned religious cults.
Suffern ACE
After the the Psalm, does Robert Prestin come on stage to lead them in a rendition of “We got Trouble?”
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Halocene Human:
Well, mileage always varies, but a lot of these groups have more in common with each other than they have with the non-religious. Of course, the non-religious have their wackjobs as well.
Villago Delenda Est
@Suffern ACE:
With a capital T that rhymes with P and stands for pr0n!
(It’s Robert Preston, btw, who pulled another great con on screen in Victor, Victoria.)
Winston Smith
@Linda Featheringill:
And all Mithrans are like Augustine.
bemused
@Linda Featheringill:
Most of the visuals that are seen routinely on the internet must be thought of as forbidden nasty stuff to these folks.
The sight of 40,000 misogynists in that stadium made me shudder.
MikeBoyScout
The internet is for porn
EconWatcher
Hmmmm. Unaccountable, male-dominated hierarchy, with a religious ideology obsessed with repression. What could go wrong?
MattF
Speaking of Pat Robertson, and crossing that line, and inscrutable gentiles, etc.:
huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/pat-robertson-episcopal-church-apostate-break-buddha-statue_n_1525778.…
I realize this is just beating a crazy horse, but:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan
Another Halocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: They’re the same in that they recognize no authority but their own.
The details of their particular pathologies differ. Haredi, I’ve found, lack all social skills and truck in slander, while abusive buddhist cults are into gaslighting and pushing their victims into psychotic breaks. Haredi groups use psychiatric drugs to “mollify” problem people, while FLDS inculcates a pervasive fear of outsiders, and ejects members for whom this no longer works.
There’s a huge toolkit of abusive cult tactics, but it’s not as if all cults use all of them.
Bruuuuce
The women were watching exactly how? (I’d bet that their signal was streaming on a VPN or some other more or less private method on the internet.)
Another Halocene Human
@bemused:
They photoshopped Hilary Clinton’s face out of the famous situation room photo during the OBL raid.
A woman in power is apparently “immodest”.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Halocene Human:
My point is that many of them have more in common with each other (the authoritarian structures they cling to, for example) than they do with “mainstream” believers of their own particular flavor.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Wahabbists both hate modernity with a passion, for example. To include the (to them) bizarre notion of sexual equality.
Patriarchy basically sucks.
RSA
I’ve heard that books and magazines sometimes have dirty pictures in them, too. I have a business plan for a company that will sell blindfolds with a thin slit in them, which allow readers to see only one line of text at a time. Think I’d be able to fill up a stadium of potential buyers?
Another Halocene Human
@Bruuuuce: They’re not banning internet and modern technology (as 4chan apparently thought with their caveman protest), but denouncing those who slander them (=tell the truth about them and their crimes) on the internet and selling their stockholm syndrome suffering followers internet filtering software.
Obviously, rabbinical conclaves are white listed… unless of your YOUR rebbe has just denounced THAT OTHER SECT’S rebbe. Hmm, a thorny theological problem!
geg6
@Linda Featheringill:
Yeah, I don’t get why anyone (adults, anyway) needs a filter. I have never once, in all my years cruising the net, stumbled upon pron by accident. I think you have to purposely look for it, but why would I? I’m not a repressed misogynist.
Suffern ACE
@Another Halocene Human: So the filtering program will have a special feature to weed out negative stories?
Another Halocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est:
Again, you’re going to find points of confluence because cults are systems of control that are drawing from the same toolkit, but not all cults use the same set of tools.
Scientology, for example, no matter how much you wish to twist the argument, does not pick on women to the extent that older and more traditional cults do. Conversely, many extremely culty cults have no issues with the practice of psychiatry, although avoiding the most recent professional standards (you know, mandatory reporting and all that cult-busting jazz) has become a concern.
bemused
@Another Halocene Human:
Pathetic little wusses so terrified of women.
Another Halocene Human
@geg6:
I have, but it was a long time ago. The early days of banner ads were pretty crazy. The early (pre-Google) days of internet search engines were a spam-king’s playground. Altavista got totally pwned by porn sites, as I remember it.
You ended up having to use directories to avoid porn, not that that always worked. (Or to find porn, not that that always worked–gggg.)
What really sucked is that there were scammy porn websites that would try to 0wn your browser. Let’s face it, early Netscrape and Internet Exploder were VERY sploitable. They would trick you into clicking on one of their sites (say, by feeding false tag info to the internet search site) and then insert themselves into your browser, causing your browser to pop up subscription porn site (or other scams) windows… some would even crash your computer. Windows was almost completely undefended and you could get infected just by connecting to the internet, never mind anything you did with the browser. It sucked.
I also recall checking out websites run by posters from news groups I frequented (I didn’t have access to bit groups even if I had wanted it) and ran across some truly hardcore (p’shopped) images intended as satire. The web’s early days were definitely out there.
That tradition lived on in goatseing people. By that point I was pretty inured to such sights so it didn’t bother me and I think people’s “epic” reactions are really overblown in any case. I mean, what, never changed a dirty diaper? Never went in for a colonoscopy? Never seen video of open-chest surgery? (Showing off for their pixellated friends, I think.)
Also, you used to run into hardcore porn ads when looking for fanfiction, but that has mostly stopped. (However, fandom needn’t be scratched long to find its own plethora of pornographic tales and images. If you’re into that sort of thing. It’s MUCH easier to find PG rated fanfiction now and never read the explicit stuff than it was even a decade ago.)
Another Halocene Human
@Suffern ACE: It would block blogs that criticize them, like Shmarya’s.
It’s really conventional software. They have a level that blocks all blogs, period.
burnspbesq
@Another Halocene Human:
Tried and failed, apparently.
News flash: insular groups protect their own and try to deal with things “within the family.” if it doesn’t rise to the level of obstruction of justice or witness tampering (and I assume for purposes of this discussion that if Hynes could make a case he would file charges), then it’s unclear why you’re even mentioning this, unless you have some obscure agenda that I don’t even want to speculate about.
burnspbesq
@Another Halocene Human:
First Amendment not good enough for ya?
Suffern ACE
@Another Halocene Human: I was once asked at work many years ago to create biographies from web based information for a group of attendees at a conference. One of the attendees was named Swinger. I got quite a bit of unintentional porn that day.
Dave S.
@bemused: So it would be too much of an exaggeration to call it the Million Misogynist Meshugana? Rats.
maya
What’s their position on the steamier passages of the bible? And don’t say missionary.
JGabriel
And laughing their asses off?
.
handsmile
@Linda Featheringill: (#6)
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Halocene Human:
No kidding. I remember looking up the term “Midnight Lace” — I was trying to refresh my memory on the cast of the old Doris Day/Rex Harrison psychothriller — years ago, pre-Google (either Altavista or Netscape, I think) and being inundated with pr0n as a result, for weeks if not months thereafter. Because I looked up a fking DORIS DAY movie!!
bemused
@Dave S.:
Good one. It’s probably a million if you count the ones not there so it works.
Villago Delenda Est
@burnspbesq:
Apparently, there is no “separation of church and state” in the 1st Amendment, if you listen to the fundigelicals. They claim it does not exist. See crazy Delaware senatorial candidate bimbo in 2010.
JGabriel
I find pointing people who make that argument to Article VI of the constitution, particularly the last clause, typically takes the wind out of their sails: “… no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
You see, some of them are asserting that, because the First Amendment is an amendment, it’s not part of the original Constitution — never mind that it’s the very first amendment, added by the same people who wrote and signed the Constitution, or that by definition it amends and becomes part of the Constitution.
So, pointing the “No Religious Test” clause in the original Constitution usually disabuses them of that notion.
.
Villago Delenda Est
@JGabriel:
I remember back when Pat Robertson ran for Prez in ’88, prior to that he said on his shitty little Jeebofascist TV show that only Christians and Jews should be permitted to hold office in this country.
This notion is of course in direct conflict with Article VI.
Making such an assertion (which one of his co-hosts questioned, I might add) should instantly disqualify someone for elective office. Because they’ve demonstrated they have no clue as to the blindingly obvious intent of the Founding Fathers. Madison at the time, responding to an angry question from someone that the clause might permit a Musselman to hold office, specifically said that yes, a Muslim could indeed hold office, that was the general idea!
This assumes a level of intellectual integrity that fundigelicals simply do not possess.
At this point, you reach for your clue by four, and the lesson begins.
Joey Maloney
Over here in Israel, haredi rebbes dictate to their followers what kind of cellphones are kosher. It has to be a feature phone with everything but voice and SMS disabled. No camera, no ability to send/receive/display images or multimedia, no internet, no music player. And special software that turns it off during Shabbat.
If you think the black hats are loony in the USA, you ain’t seen nuffin. For the true crazeee you gotta come to the Holy Land.
JGabriel
__
__
Villago Delenda Est:
I’m actually writing from experience here. Highlighting Article VI’s prohibition against religious test has worked for me in the past when arguing with people who say separation of church and state isn’t in the Constitution.
I won’t promise that it will work every time, but there are persuadable conservatives and fundigelicals out there. Sometimes.
.
Another Halocene Human
@burnspbesq:
Yeah, Ed Koch begs to differ, as do victim’s advocacy groups, but a fair attempt all the same.
I guess you need to defend Hynes since he has had such a soft touch on the red beanie brigade, bragging about how well they’ve worked together on priest abuse cases, that is to say, doing what the RCC wanted.
Another Halocene Human
@burnspbesq:
Ya, I’m so uppity I want to enforce it, too. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Letting cardinals and rabbis scuttle child rape cases at the highest level of government certainly qualifies to me. What secular organization (other than the military, which has its own, much harsher court system) can just barge in and demand private jurisdiction and private law to protect their members against the consequences of their anti-social actions? I’m sure the NFL would love to put their players in a private counseling program rather than have them stand trial, and lord knows they try awfully darn hard to keep players out of court. It’s amazing what cloaking yourself in holy, holy can do.
Another Halocene Human
@maya: Some wags claimed the rabbi in Russia caught on tape banging a hooker was trying to convert her and bring her closer to God.
Another Halocene Human
@bemused: It’s a million if you count the Heilige Gedolim who are smiling down from Gan Eden.
Another Halocene Human
@JGabriel: So, pointing the “No Religious Test” clause in the original Constitution usually disabuses them of that notion.
And it’s always good to add that that line is there because of the abuses of the Church of England … the established church.
Another Halocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Making such an assertion (which one of his co-hosts questioned, I might add) should instantly disqualify someone for elective office.
Then you’d love Bush Sr, who said that he thought atheists should not be considered citizens. /sarcasm
Madison at the time, responding to an angry question from someone that the clause might permit a Musselman to hold office, specifically said that yes, a Muslim could indeed hold office, that was the general idea!
Love this:
Cris (without an H)
Pornography? On my computer?
Villago Delenda Est
@Cris (without an H):
There’s a classic Dilbert where the pointy-haired boss complains that the internet is slow, and Dogbert tells him that comes from downloading porn onto his computer.
The pointy-haired boss then looks around with a “I’ve been outed!” look on his face.
Jerzy Russian
@RSA:
Just out of idle curiosity, where might one find those books?
And just to update my previous comment, after an extensive investigation, there does indeed seem to be p0rn on the internet. I had to double- and triple-check things to be sure, but it is there.
ItAintEazy
@Another Halocene Human:
I remember back in 1995 when I was an innocent seventh-grader using the internets in a computer lab at some academic nerd camp. I wanted to find out information about space or something, so I typed in “nasa.com” and boy didn’t my instructor get a nasty surprise when the site came up.
Origuy
@Another Halocene Human:
Hey, it worked for Rasputin.
burnspbesq
@Villago Delenda Est:
Silly me for ignoring people who are both wrong and stupid.
burnspbesq
@Another Halocene Human:
If you read what I wrote as a defense of Hynes, you need serious remedial reading courses. And if you’ve been paying attention over a very extended period of time, you will have noticed that I have never ever defended sexual abuse by priests. Requiring that criminal charges be proven, in accordance with the law, is not the same as saying that no crimes were committed.