For the Record: The Week in Shapiro

American Tory. Russell Kirk with his ancestral home, Piety Hill, in the background. He would be startled to learn that Ben Shapiro thinks his views are anti-conservative. Via The Imaginative Conservative.

This was funny, from an outraged Ben Shapiro who knows more about conservatism than his elders:

This, from @davidfrum, is nonsensical. It reduces philosophy and ideology to nothingness. It's a thoroughly anti-conservative sentiment, actually. pic.twitter.com/Ipwe6wc6As

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 20, 2017

Uh, no, with all due disrespect to old Axis of Evil David Frum:

Actually no, it's pretty much Russell Kirk. Frum's read quite a bit more than you have, I expect. pic.twitter.com/SaPy1Tt6yZ

— Yulstreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 20, 2017

Conservatives used to think of themselves as deeply suspicious of ideologies and dogmas, cautious and modest in their claims, bemusedly aware of the contradictions in the traditions they revered as you might be of a whimsical parent. Not a bad intellectual stance, in a way, if not for the bad faith that always animated it, the secret aim of preserving inequality. Nowadays young conservatives like Shapiro, hailed by The New York Times as a "destroyer of weak arguments" and "the cool kids' philosopher",  think they've got a grand comprehensive philosophical system in the maxims that tax cuts create economic growth and Islam is evil and their ideological rectitude makes them invincible. He's such an idiot.

I'll never get tired of dudes breaking out massive Torahs on the subway for some light studying.

I love this city. pic.twitter.com/EKjsAPi4K3

— Dan Lavoie (@djlavoie) December 19, 2017

That's a Talmud. If he broke out an actual Torah, that would be pretty difficult. The scroll is unwieldy. https://t.co/cDWCOCN55k

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 19, 2017

In fact the book in the picture is too big to be a Torah (which is the text of the Bible, not the form, bound or scrolled, in which it's reproduced), not too wieldy; it's a single volume from the Talmud, recognizable by the page format with the central mishnah text dwarfed by centuries' worth of accreted marginal commentary.

Torah is any copy of the Tanakh (or just the Pentateuch), not just a scroll https://t.co/RTWO9HmXWj and a bound Torah is much more manageable than "a Talmud", of which standard editions are 26 to 73 volumes.

— Yulstreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 19, 2017