If it leaves behind it a trail of human trash then you know it is a cult.

My feeling is that the excommunication  {Cherem } that the Gra signed would be valid even if it was not based on objective reality. Besides that I think it did reflect objective reality. That is to say when he identified the groups he put into Cherem [excommunication] with the Sitra Achara [the Dark Side], I think he was correct. Sadly enough I am basing this on evidence and study over a period of many years.

Part of the problem is idolatry. Another aspect of the problem is the claim that their idolatry is in accord with the Law of Moses.  That is a kind of fraud.


I did a great deal of study on this, which is sad- because if I had been smart, I simply would have accepted what the Gra said, and not have wasted years. But the human ruin that that movement leaves behind it ought to give any decent person pause. If it leaves behind it a trail of human trash, then you know it is a cult.

  I am very well aware of their doctrines and teachings. Have nothing to do with them at all. Do not go to their place on Shabat and don't read their books. It is pure Sitra Achra.


  This is why understanding the cultural assumptions tells you a whole lot about the trajectory a culture is on. It’s also important to realize some people can change a culture for generations by either positive or negative actions, given their place. 

But some ask, why did the Gra put a Cherem [excommunication] on the whole movement when not everyone was bad? The answer is that poison got mixed up into it. What if I tell you, " Here’s a box of candy. One of them is poisoned with Ricin, but don’t mind that. Enjoy." Would you eat any?

The laws of Cherem are strict. One that ignores them is also under Cherem. There are difference between types of Cherem and Niduy, but in case of fact the cherem is the most strict. And it does mean one can't sit within four yards of the person nor learn Torah from them.


If others ignore these laws that does not make them invalid.

If one ignores the cherem it is guaranteed he will become infected

It is a kind of deflecting people's interest in fear of God and to redirect it into something that destroys their sanity. While fear of God is a good thing and ought to be pursued by means of learning books of Musar [Mediaeval Ethics], still this desire to be right with God can be hijacked.

To a large degree this happened with me. I was at the Mir in NY and often instead of learning Musar I would learn books from that cult thinking that qualified as Musar.

It took me a long time until I starting noticing the poison contained in them. I needed experience with that cults and also to see the books from the Shatz cult to see from where many of the doctrines were coming from. It would have been better if the Litvish Gedolim [the great Roshei Yeshiva of Lithuanian Yeshivas] had been aware of this from the beginning and warned others, instead of my having to make my way through that filth.

Socrates:

Thoughts on Socrates:

(1) I think some things in human life are constrained. To me it seems Socrates had to do what he had to do and his end had to be the way it was.

(2) It has been argued that  Socrates could have argued that not all laws are created equal. Some laws are for expedience. Some are  expressions of natural law. Some laws are unjust.

(3) Also, I should mention that Socrates was not just bothering the leading citizens of Athens, but  among his followers were people that were traitors to Athens. The court might have been aware of this.

Marriage

It was easy when the rules and obligations were spelled out. This is what I found. When both the husband and wife know exactly what is expected. That is at least what I discovered. But it gets difficult when others stick their noses into your business. Especially psychologists and others that are supposed to be helpful.Religious teachers especially are to be avoided as they are experts at home wreaking. Traitors to Torah.
They are a separate category from those who learn  Torah for its own sake--not for money. 

"Transgender"

"Transgender" comes from the idea that people think reality is a social construct That is why it is best to throw out the social studies and humanities departments in universities.

People that were responsible should not have let pseudo science be called science. STEM just have been called science and everything else should have been called "fraud" or some other appropriate name.

Philosophy departments also tend to be trash.

Wittgenstein's naturalism reduces even science to word game behaviors that do not refer to objects and are not justified by facts.
Psychologists especially ought to be put into some garbage bag and thrown out.

Torah with Math and Physics and Aristotle's Metaphysics is my approach in a nutshell. That means simply to get through the basic Oral and Written Law word for word, plus math up to Algebraic Topology and Abstract Algebra and string theory plus the actual sets of books, The Metaphysics  of Aristotle. [Oral Law is the two Talmuds,  Sifra Sifri the Rambam with Rav Shach's Avi Ezri]
Say the words דרך גרסה in the way of just saying them and going on, with no repeats.

I would like to defend this approach but for right now I thought it is enough to at least state it in a simple straightforward way.

Source for Math Physics Metaphysics is Rambam (Maimonides), and  the Musar book, Obligations of the Heart.
Source for just saying the words and going on in the Talmud לעולם לגרס אינש אע''ג דמשכח ואע''ג דלא ידע מאי קאמר.

(The Lithuanian yeshiva world has a lot of this right, but the nepotism hurts it. It is  purported to be a meritocracy. But that seems to be not the case. Mostly the perks are  for family members only. The fact that the State gives money to yeshivas which are nothing more than private club houses with no learning Torah hurts the entire system.]

Feminism is hatred of Western Civilization [Comment on Dalrock]

1. 
   
2. link
3. The entire basis of Feminism is hatred of Western Civilization, and in the context of Feminist ideology, hatred of White men. Don’t believe me? Take it from arch-Feminist/Lesbian/Jewess Susan Sontag,

   “If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization.[…]

   […]The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do….”

   From Susan Sontag’s collection of essays, ‘Styles of Radical Will’, 1969. Link:https://books.google.com/books?

   IMO, this is the veritable ‘Rosetta Stone’ of the Left. Feminism, Marxism, Post-Colonialism, LGBTnXYZ, Black Nationalism, MultiCulturalism, et al. All of it is about a visceral, obsessive hatred of the Christian, Western Civilization that White men have created over the past 3000+ years.

To The Other Jim: Not all Jewish people agree with those views. She might be Jewish but feminism is not the view of the Law of Moses. Not everything Jewish people do is in accord with the law of God. She is clearly an enemy of Western civilization but that is not representative of all Jewish people nor of the Torah

Concerning Justice Ginsberg:
I am very unhappy with liberals and see them as very destructive towards Torah values and objective morality. The fact that she is Jewish does not help in the slightest since her view oppose the Law of Moses. In the Torah you will find that Jewish people do not get a pass when they transgress the law of God.

Political correctness and secular humanism

Nice comment on Kiev Post: Political correctness and multi-culturalism (as well as repression of Christianity while coddling of Islam, secular humanism, etc.) is to blame not only for the terrorist incidents but for the continuously unfolding suicide of the West.