Dessert will be served after the broadcast. Attendance is limited to 100. Click here to make a reservation and secure your spot. Congregation Anshe Emeth is located 240 Joslen Boulevard.
Monday, January 12, 2015
New York in Hudson
For years, Time & Space Limited has been bringing the Metropolitan Opera, live in HD, to Hudson. Now, starting this week, Congregation Anshe Emeth will be bringing the educational and cultural programs of the 92nd Street Y to Greenport.
The inaugural program of 92Y Live takes place on Wednesday, January 14, at 8 p.m., when, streaming live from the 92nd Street Y in New York and broadcast on a huge screen at Congregation Anshe Emeth in Greenport, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman will talk with best-selling author and "global thought leader" Dov Seidman on the topic "How to Repair Our World." At the beginning of the program, attendees will have the chance to submit questions for Friedman and Seidman to a moderator. Dr. Anna S. Kadish, one of the chairs of 92Y Live, promises it will be "a dynamic program spearheaded by two of the world's most innovative and progressive thinkers."
Dessert will be served after the broadcast. Attendance is limited to 100. Click here to make a reservation and secure your spot. Congregation Anshe Emeth is located 240 Joslen Boulevard.
Dessert will be served after the broadcast. Attendance is limited to 100. Click here to make a reservation and secure your spot. Congregation Anshe Emeth is located 240 Joslen Boulevard.
That empty middlebrow hawk Tom Friedman, neither progressive nor innovative. I prefer the tagline Tony Judt once used; "[another] useful idiot for the War on Terror."
ReplyDeleteNot to defend Friedman who I detest, but Tony Judt?!
DeleteJudt embodies the 5th column if ever there was one, which is a step beyond useful idiocy.
Even his repurposing of the phrase, "useful idiot" (above) is an example of Orwellian "Newspeak."
The phrase was invented by Lenin to describe mindless people in Western democracies who would always find ways to excuse the Soviet Union no matter what it did. In other words, it would aptly describe Tony Judt himself if I didn't believe he was a step beyond Lenin's meaning, with a commitment to calculated disinformation.
"Newspeak" is one kind of disinformation, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.
Words that could only ever have been written, by one who has never read Judt.
DeleteFrankly, you sound like the Likud goons who all too commonly used the same approach.
He did attribute useful idiot in the LRB piece this quote originates from, but I doubt that actually matters to you.
Ah, but I AM a Likud goon!, secretly planted in Hudson by IDF black helicopters to fool unwitting locals with plain talk and common sense.
DeleteFor the record I have read Judt, and endlessly listened too, seeing as he's the principal spokesman and chronic 5th Column guest on the Charlie Rose show (poor, dull man).
And I'm greatly relieved to hear that Mr. Judt correctly attributed the phrase he proceeded to cheapen.
Judt is dead, not sure how he can still be a 'chronic 5th column guest'. The sneer can be felt from here, but I can't see any teeth in it.
Delete
DeleteThe "teeth" are deeply buried in the example you provided.
The sophistry of Judt's reversal of the meaning of "useful idiots" is right out of Orwell's nightmares, a method so bereft of principle and honor that it will even cite Orwell as its authority.
No surprise that these Alinsky-types have a great forebear in the person of Aaron Burr, one of the founders of the Democratic [sic] Party.
And of course there's the invaluable and tacit contribution of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom tyrants from Robespierre to Stalin to Pol Pot owe their existence.
As for "chronic," I was watching a repeat program; too often it's some of the worst people who are here to stay, while the more honorable simply fade away.
I know you can spitball better than this, Tim, you're flailing.
DeleteNo spitballs.
DeleteDo you share my discomfort with someone like Judt recycling the meaning of the well-defined phrase, "useful idiots," in order to serve new ends which have arguably opposite meanings? (At least the continuity in the audience being described argues in favor of an opposition.)
Or is misusing language and history in this way - to serve any ends one seeks - a recklessness that cheapens our intellectual standards?
Going no further than the example you offered above, it's my view that Judt's application of Lenin's phrase to the very kinds of people who sacrificed in order to thwart Lenin's "useful idiots" is an example of a threat to our standards.
I hope you'll agree that it is dishonorable no matter who does it.
Oh please, your Sturm and Drang is just as reckless, cheap, and opposite when it arrives with a breathless endorsement of Rousseau.
DeleteI meant to disparage Rousseau actually, and never to endorse him.
DeleteBut before you get away with changing the subject again, please identify a specific content which you see as "reckless," whether or not you see me as endorsing Rousseau.
Then we can get back to the specific recklessness of distorting history (Judt) in order to serve one's own ends.
Please justify his (and your) new use of the historical phrase "useful idiots."
And yet, I emphatically agree with French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy's use of the phrase "useful idiots" in the Wall Street Journal, when writing about the Charlie Hebdo murders.
ReplyDeleteHe wrote that France and the world must slam "the useful idiots of a radical Islam immersed in the sociology of poverty and frustration."
Do I thereby contradict my previous arguments? Certainly not.