Real war is existential and attritional. Doctrine doesn’t matter, elan doesn’t matter, technological advantage doesn’t matter. Four things are releva… - Vox Day

the Torah is not studied in order to better obey it, but rather, to better determine how to “legally” work around it. It’s very much like the Constitution, whereas the Talmud is akin to the growing collection of case law and interpretation that takes precedence over the black letter law itself. In the same way lawyers are able to justify violating Constitutional rights despite the clear language of the Constitution, rabbis are highly skilled in their ability to justify various activities despite the clear language of the Law of the Old Testament. Which is why there is a specific warning in Isaiah against those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. If you can imagine ten thousand Ben Shapiros deciding what is right, what is wrong, and constantly redefining both over time as desired, that’s pretty much the situation.

It is entirely possible that my WND colleague [Ben Shapiro] has a perfectly good reason for not serving his country in its moment of need. For all I know, he may have a weak heart, a wooden leg, a predilection for San Francisco bathhouse sex or some other condition that prevents him from joining the military. But devoting two columns to criticizing a single word [Chickenhawk] strikes me as a lady protesting a bit too much.

Japanese literature is like no other. What the wedding is to the English novel, the suicide is to the Japanese novel. Furthermore, the absence of Christian sexual mores, the cultural inclination toward passivity and fatalism, and the lack of an individualist hero tradition will tend to strike the average Western reader as strange and, in some cases, even bordering on the perverse. But the technical skill of Japanese novelists, combined with their very different takes on the human condition, makes Japanese literature one of the most interesting and rewarding literatures available for reading on the planet.