It’s some online magazine, but I don’t need to ever read it. They just came up with something they call The Sinai Awards,
given to the 36 people who have made the world freer for the rest of us
, and the list of award recipients will make you gag a little bit.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali • Masih Alinejad • Marc Andreessen • Julian Assange • Olivier Assayas • Nayib Bukele • Ted Cruz • George Deek • John Fetterman • Stephen Friend • Michel Houellebecq • Coleman Hughes • Jon Huntsman • Martin Kulldorff & Jay Bhattacharya • Mark Laita • Bernard-Henri Lévy • Conor McGregor • Douglas Murray • Elon Musk • Anonymous UPenn Student • J.K. Rowling • Christopher Rufo • Salman Rushdie • Natan Sharansky • Michael Solomonov • Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik • Thomas Sowell • Amar’e Stoudemire • Nadine Strossen • Quentin Tarantino • Ritchie Torres • Tu Youyou • Michael Walzer • Bari Weiss • Ruth Wisse
I don’t know half of them, but given the company they keep, I’d rather not know more.
Sorry, my fat fingers hit “Post” instead of “Preview.” Let me try that again:
Did he become a right-wing chud as well? Or are they only adding him because he got attacked by a Muslim zealot?
I guess they needed someone familiar with the agony of de feet.
/rim shot
That seems like quite a hodgepodge of folks. I would wonder what their criteria was, but not enough to go dig it up. Something else to forget about almost immediately.
“freer”. Strange way to spell “worse”.
Nadine Strossen?? She was president of the national ACLU for years, and a well-known feminist. Wonder what she thinks about this award and the august group of co-awardees. Weird.
Are they freeing us from Big Trans, Big Pharma, and other things Big?
I imagine that the award is a giant snowflake.
I had the chance last week to write about someone who did actually make the world freer (and better) — it was the 30th anniversary of the Farmer v Brennan decision.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/a-black-trans-woman-felon-got-your
I’ll take Dee Farmer over a thousand Bari Weiss’s.
Right-wingers: “J.K. Rowling ‘s books teach Satanism and childhood rebellion…”
Rowling: “I hate transsexuals.”
Right-wingers: “As I said, a hero of free speech and defender of Western civilization!”
Fetterman is senator from PA, after being mayor of a heavily disadvantaged town that’s basically a neighbourhood of Pittsburgh.
He’s a staunch leftist, beat Dr Oz in the elections despite literally having a stroke during the campaign, and is also all in favour of genocide in Gaza. I bet the last part is how he got on this list.
Behold! I too can come up with a list of names off the top of my head of 36 people I think are good and deserve credit:
Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, David Graeber, Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein, Andrew Feinstein, Peter Tatchell, Cornell West, Michael E. Mann, Terry Pratchett, Chelsea Manning, Vijay Prashad, Tariq Ali,
Jeremy Corbyn, Judith Butler, Owen Jones, Thomas Piketty, Caroline Lucas, Chris Hedges, George Monbiot, Amy Goodman, Norman Finkelstein, Gabor Mate, Ken Loach, Mick Lynch, Tom Hartmann, Alexei Navalny, Arundhati Roy, Roger Hallam, Greta Thunberg, Ilhan Omar, Lula da Silva, Alan Moore, Harry Belafonte, Bernie Sanders, Ai Weiwei
Clearly this exercise is valuable and in some way productive! Also my lot would be much better company at dinner, so I win.
Has to be a joke…Has to be.
Doesn’t it????
Reading through the list, basically it’s just people who are pro-genocide. That includes Rushdie and McGregor.
The only one I can’t figure out how she gets on this list is Tu Youyou.
People approved of from the point of view of someone from a weirdly specific ethno-religious-nationalist-political background.
As such it says far, far more about the person(s) assembling the list than any of the people on it.
A (very) few good names, people I may feel like meeting. Some others, less so.
“Julian Assange” – well, right at the start, that spoiled the list a bit. It did not stop there.
Let’s not mention the mustelid in the middle of the pack.
“Martin Kulldorff & Jay Bhattacharya” – covid minimizers, anti-lockdown in the largest meaning, “vaccins are useless or deadly” adjacent or proponents…
“Michel Houellebecq” – French author, filmmaker. Some success. Occasionally harsh critic of Islam. Lost a friend during the Bataclan, had friends at Charlie-Hebdo. As he got older, didn’t got better. Now anti-woke. Whatever that means. Colleague and friend of the next:
“Bernard-Henri Lévy” or BHL – French has-been. Got an overblown reputation as a thinker, philosopher, journalist. A sure way to know if a social movement is… exaggerating, is to find him among the supporters. Strongly suspected to have used ghost writers for his highly acclaimed books. Regularly publishes some essay or report from a country at war and some actual experts quickly point out some… inaccuracies. Out of shallowness rather than malice.
Their comments on Elon Musk pin his importance on his buying Twitter as an expression of free speech. Failing to recognize either that his buying it was an accident or that it is less free now then it was previously.
The list as a whole is obviously right wing and religious with a Jewish bent.
How did any of these people make the world “freer” for anyone? Are any of them activists who fought for freedom? Perhaps Assange and Strossen could be considered activist-adjacent but it’s not clear how the world is any more free because of their work.
Don’t know many of them. The ones who stand out are Masih Alinejad and Salman Rushdie for wondering what negative stuff they’ve done to get on this list alongside the ones I know are crap like Douglas Murray, Elon Musk, and Christopher Rufo. Alinejad and Rushdie are both in the cross hairs of the Iranian authorities I think.
What did Anonymous UPenn Student do?
And Conor McGregor is some MMA guy. Don’t know much else about him.
I wonder how many of those people are aware they’re on that list…
It’s a religious magazine for Jews.
https://www.tabletmag.com/about
Hemidactylus,
Wondering without clicking, eh?
Here, for you, I’ll do one:
“In August of 2022, Salman Rushdie was rushed on stage by an assailant and stabbed numerous times. He lost an eye, but not his courage or, hallelujah, his commitment to the humanistic tradition that has always urged mankind to appeal to the better angels of its nature.
Rushdie’s memoir of the attack and its aftermath, Knife, does more than merely tell the story in a deeply moving way; it reclaims literature’s power to shape and elevate our lives, the exact same power his feverish would-be assassin sought to deny him. That alone would have been enough—dayenu. But Rushdie also remains, nearly alone among our faddish literati, staunchly committed to standing up for what matters, from supporting Charlie Hebdo in the aftermath of the murderous attack on that publication to speaking out clearly against Hamas’ murderous marauders.
Having a facility with words may make one a good writer, but truly understanding why books matter—and the price we must pay for great art to thrive in inhospitable political climates—is what makes Rushdie a writer for the ages.
“
The logic is impeccable, after all: if bad people are on that list, then all the people on that list are bad people.
(oh, wait)
No, John, that’s not the logic we’re using here and you know it. The logic we’re using here is: “There’s quite a few truly awful people on that list; and that casts serious doubts both on everyone else on the same list, and on the criteria used to determine who gets on the list.”
Rowling is certainly a choice for the list. She’s not a politician, pundit, journalist, activist or intellectual – she’s a childrens’ author whose last significant work was nearly two decades ago. The only things of note she’s done in that time are become extremely rich and hate trans people on public media, and yet they consider that to be “making the world freer”. I guess their definition of freedom doesn’t include freedom to control one’s own body.
It’s also amusing that she gets the credit for speaking out, despite the fact that she’s a comparative latecomer to the UK organised transphobia movement. Apparently all those other people who were saying the exact same things years prior to her don’t count because they’re not as rich as her.
@25 — Great user name!
@26 Thank you!
RB:
:)
Sure, let’s go with that “logic”. Surely it’s nothing like what I wrote.
Reasonable guilt by association via a list someone concocted on people they commend.
I grant that there’s a form of inference called ‘abduction’ in which, absent any other information and the likelihood of acquiring more information (like, you know, clicking on the link provided) that would be the preferred inference.
So, I suppose that if one is lazy or ignorant or incompetent, that makes sense, sorta.
It makes sense to you.
(Or, one could avoid committing to some such judgement absent any need for it, given the sole discriminant is that the list contains some bad people, but might just be weird)
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/rushdie-on-hitchens-201202
#12 cartomancer, excellent list! A few may be dead now (e.g., Belafonte, Navalny, and Pratchett), alas.
I recognize maybe half the people on that list.
Some of them are monsters. No other way to describe them.
Martin Kulldorf is both a monster and a medical quack.
This is stupid and has long ago been proven to just be flat out wrong.
Kulldorf BTW, is not an MD, he has a BS in Biostatistics.
Wikipedia: In March 2024, Kulldorff announced that Harvard had dismissed him.”
Took them long enough. The pandemic is all but over with now.
Kulldorf doesn’t believe we should fight disease outbreaks and pandemics.
Even during the Dark Ages, the people did what they could with some success. They realized that infectious diseases were spread from one person to another and invented the procedure and named it quarantine in the 1300s.
These days we still use it and also a similar term, social distancing.
@ numerobis – 10th June 2024 at 5:29 pm :
Is Salman Rushie really pro-genocide?
Co-incidentally, her name came up last night in a facebook meme noting how confusing singing Happy Birthday. to her would be. No, I can’t really figure out why she’s there either – will need to check and see. But what what I’ve seen – admittedly not that much :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou
She seems like a good person and chemist who worked on anti-maleria drugs who saved a lot of lives.
Julian Assange for all his flaws did reveal war crimes and whilst a mixed bag is popular ina lot of left wing circles. He seems more an anti-establishment figure.
Ted fucking Cruz?! WTF! Dunno how he has “..made the world freer for the rest of us,” Quite the reverse so that makes no sense to me.
Then I note they have Fetterman (Democratic party arguably or often classified as left wing at least in Amercian terms albeit what #11 numerobis wrote) and also Jon Huntsman. If that’s who I think it is – the less extreme “moderate” (perceived as such by many anyhow) former Presidential candidate for the Repug nominee I wonder where this is an attempt to cover bases for bias and include people on “all” sorts of positions on the political spectrum type deal? Fetterman – left, Huntsman -centre, Cruz – reichwing. Except, of course, Cruz is way off at the reichwing fringe, Huntsman is also a Repug or was unless that’s changed and Fetterman is not all that much of a “lefty” so they fail at that.
Anonymous UPenn Student – huh? That sounds odd and no idea what that’s referring to. Indeed, I’ll be honest and admit that alot of those names are ones’ I really don’t know or only know in the vaguest terms.
(Now goes and checks the link in the OP, which, yeah, probly shoulda done first.)
Yes, it is that Jon Huntsman. Oh and from the link ..
Source : Tablet, The Sinai Awards,
Jay Bhattacharya is another monster, quack, and plague rat.
He was the one who claimed if we do nothing and let the Covid-19 virus run wild, that we would end up quickly with herd immunity.
Everyone who could use Google figured out that wouldn’t work in 15 minutes.
It was just wrong then and wrong now.
Here it is, June 2024, 4 years later, and how is that herd immunity coming along?
It isn’t.
We still have Covid-19 virus circulating, people are still getting sick, and tens of thousands of Americans are still dying from the virus.
As long as the virus produces antigen escape mutants, it is going to be endemic.
So Huntsman got the award for writing a letter saying the Penn University won’t get any more donations and working to see the President fired.
Tu Youyou’s seems pretty medically and scientuifically legit and reasonable to award tho’
Source : Tablet, The Sinai Awards.
That anonymous UPenn student :
Source : Ibid.
Source : Ibid.
Oh fer fucks sake. Yeah..
Anyone want more or more than enough? (Always the link in the OP.. ) Yeah, I was curious and yeah, very far right religious agenda and bias here. Tu Youyou seemingly the exception at least so far. Curiosity rapidly turning to disgust here.
At least its finally raining outside here. Drought breaking albiet much more rain still badly needed.
Correction. for clarity :
Wikipage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzadikim_Nistarim
StevoR, what’s your beef with Julian Assange?
Here, for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstrike
BTW, he’s an Australian.
Fuck-all help he’s gotten from the government, but, of course, mustn’t piss the USA off too much.
(A sacrifice the government is willing to take, nevermind the message that sends to other Australians)
In fact, what’s your problem with the entry you quoted?
How is it not truthful?
They have Assange in the list, that’s a promising start (Free Assange!). Strossen, too, has said a lot of things about free speech I agree with. I don’t necessarily agree with Rushdie on everything, but I respect his courage to continue to be an intellectual and make public appearances when lots of people want to murder him. There are probably a few other people in there who deserve credit who I am unaware of.
The list overall sounds like “36 People Who Have Made The Libs Cry”, though.
@12 cartomancer
That would be an interesting dinner party, I suppose. Especially after Navalny calls all the Muslims “cockroaches” and advocates for shooting them.
You’re right. It says less about the people on the list and more about the person — or possibly the machine — who came up with it.
@34– The whole ‘herd immunity’ argument was made by people who have zero understanding of the concept.
Very few infections can ever reach true herd immunity by natural spread through a population. For most infections, we will never achieve herd immunity just by letting it rip through a community, which is why most of the awful diseases of the past, smallpox, diphtheria, pertussis, etc., were rampant throughout human history…until mass vaccination programs started.
Even when natural herd immunity is possible, such as for influenzas, the pathogen often mutates long before it is eradicated and suddenly herd immunity is lost. Even for relatively evolutionarily stable viruses, natural herd immunity requires a large proportion of the population (>90% for measles) to suffer the wild infection with all the complications that entails: deaths, brain injury, permanent lung injury, scarring, reactivated shingles etc., etc. where the serious complication rate from vaccination is usually 100x or more less frequent.
Finally, almost all those who argued for natural herd immunity were doing so long before we had enough data to calculate whether it would even apply to COVID-19. On current evidence, a 71% vaccination rate is required in an urban setting to achieve herd immunity. That number will obviously change with the evolution of new COVID strains and development of new vaccines. Meanwhile there is zero evidence for COVID-19 herd immunity developing naturally. When comparing across countries, ‘A 10-percentage-point increase in booster vaccination rates was associated with a 33.1% decrease in COVID-19 mortality (95%CI, 16.0–50.2%).’ In that study, some of the countries had vaccination rates below 1% of the population, so if natural herd immunity was achievable, we should have seen it in sub-Saharan Africa. And even if natural herd immunity is possible in some circumstances, it will clearly entail a much worse mortality than vaccinating.
Ted Cruz?! Christopher Rufo!? Uhmmmmm, no, just no.
John Morales @ 37 & 38
To understand the issue that SteveR had with the quote in his #35 just reread the last paragraph of it. It certainly made my gorge rise when I got to the part beginning with “official lawfare”. I think it wasn’t Assange that set SteveR off, it was the context of that sentence and those other supposed victims.
Sorry, should be StevoR both times in above.
Alan, there’s a difference between Assange (the person) and the report about Assange (the narrative).
Conflating the two is a mistake.
Beholder, #39
I was not aware that Navalny has expressed islamophobic views. This obviously reduces him in my estimation, but I still think he did very brave and valuable work in standing up to Putin and for democracy in Russian politics. I’m sure others can find suitable replacements.
@42. Alan G. Humphrey & #37.John Morales : Alan G. Humphrey is right. The bit that I found disgusting was this part :
IOW Jan 6th denial -a rather remarkable gaslighting phenomenon given we all saw it a few years ago.. Ok , nearly 5 years ago (Yikes, already!) Plus the obvs referenc e toanti-vaxxers, Trump etc.. a s victims rather than the science0-denying toxic perpetrator sthat they are.
@37. John Morales : StevoR, what’s your beef with Julian Assange? … (snip)..
BTW, he’s an Australian. Fuck-all help he’s gotten from the government, but, of course, mustn’t piss the USA off too much.
(A sacrifice the government is willing to take, nevermind the message that sends to other Australians)”
Yes, I;m well aware of who Assange is and that he ‘s Aussie and I full agree he’s suffered more than enough for his crimes specifically rape and, well, exposing the truth about warcrimes in Iraq.. I think he should be freed.
I do have a beef with him helping Trump over HRC but that’s well in the past and whilst it reflects poorly onhis judgement, as noted he’s well and truly suffered far more than he deserved for that. Credit where it s due to him for his journalism and revealing of war crimes & blame to him where due too.
Sigh. Typos, sorry. ^”Him” = Assange ^
Yes, I’m well aware of who Assange is and that he‘s Aussie and I full agree he’s suffered more than enough for his crimes specifically rape and, well, exposing the truth about war crimes in Iraq..
To be clear whilst I think Assange was guilty of rape / sexual assault :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Swedish_sexual_assault_allegations )
I do NOT think exposing war crimes should be considered a crime – although that’s what Assange & Wikileaks did and is guilty of doing in some people’s eyes. So he did that but its NOT a crime or should not be considered so.
Leaking state* secrets and betraying the USA – which Assange is NOT a native or citizen of and thus NOT a traitor to – is what Wikileaks / Assange did. Possibly the leaking of secrets if it did jepoardise lives deserves punishment but what Assange has suffered so far – over 5 years in official jail and nearly a decade unofficially self-detained in the Ecuadorian emabassy. Allof which has damaged his physical and mental helathjand basically already wrecked his life and if he goes to face a partisan kangaroo court over in the states very much seems to put hislife in danger. Assnage has done some admirable things, some criminal things and he’s paid for his crimes many times over already inmy view and does NOt deserve further suffering or legal penalties.
. * States plural, multiple and many over the time when Wikileaks was a force in exposing crimes and metaphorical national and international “”dirty laundry.” Including, if memory serves, some of Australia’s misdeeds too – but then many of those secrets probly should’ve come out & not been hidden anyhow.
John Morales @22
Thank you for expounding on what for me was a very subtle point that did not require clicking on a very questionable link. It’s a variation on an old Sesame Street song: “A few of these are not like the others!”
Masih Alinejad and Salman Rushdie surely have shown far more courage than Ted Cruz given his bootlicking of Trump, despite the latter insulting his wife, and escaping to Cancun when his state was suffering power grid issues due to a winter storm.
@ 44 Morales
I take it you’re claiming to have knowledge of the former.
<snicker>
A very odd mixture of people.
chrislawson @40: The whole ‘herd immunity’ argument was made by people who have zero understanding of the concept.
Actually, many if not most of the people making that argument didn’t (and still don’t) really give a shit about anyone’s lives or welfare. It wasn’t a serious health-policy recommendation; it was just a lot of irrationally-selfish, uncaring Retrumplitarians finding yet another excuse to leave other people to die rather than pay more taxes or suffer any inconvenience for any larger good. Case in point: Jared Kooshner flat-out saying we should let COVID run rampant because it would hit urban populations hardest and thus kill more Democrats than Republicans.
Ted Cruz did do something good for humanity, he damaged his political career sufficiently that he’ll never become President.
Navalny ideas were always a mixed bag. For example he used to be very hard line against Georgia, including advocating expelling them from Russia during the 2008 war, but later softened his views.
Conor McGregor sure is an odd choice. It’s probably celebrity privilege that’s kept him out of jail for his multiple run ins with the law. He said he was thinking about running for the office of President of Ireland, and his comments sounded suspiciously like he’s into fiscal conservative nonsense. But not to worry, apparently only 8 percent of Irish voters say they’d vote for him if he ran.
A lot of strange bedfellows on that list.
According to Wikipedia, “Tablet is a conservative-leaning online magazine focused on Jewish news and culture.”
Further proof that “conservative” means what people want it to mean. To me, it means little, to nothing good.
How odd.
After all, what I wrote was about distinguishing between the person and the narrative some third parties provide about that person and their circumstances, not about personal knowledge of the person.
So, no. That claim exists purely in your imagination.
My actual claim is that there’s a difference between Assange (the person) and the report about Assange (the narrative).
(Do you dispute the actual claim?)
I saw Nadine Strossen “debate” Daryl Gates (then the immediate past Los Angeles Police chief) shortly after riots about the Rodney King verdict tore across LA (which Gates could have mostly prevented).
She was awful: unprepared, scattered, meek, allowing Gates to mop the floor with her by just rambling to run out the clock. Fittingly, she also allowed the hosting organization to pay her much less for her appearance than they paid Gates.
Our esteemed host has already opined on the reprehensible M. Houellebecq.
StevoR @ # 46: I do have a beef with him helping Trump over HRC but that’s well in the past …
No: the damage persists and continues to worsen to this day, and for years to come. Assange started out with a good idea, but ruined it with his own ego (and consequent susceptibility to Putin’s manipulation). I don’t want him extradited to the US, but would happily go just about anywhere else in the world to piss on him.
Oops @ my # 55: in that link, it’s a commenter dissing Houellebecq, not Prof Myers.