daf bit: Bava Batra 74

From a mishna about selling ships the g'mara moves to a discussion of Leviathan, the great sea monster. Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav: all that the Holy One, blessed be He, created in this world, He created male and female. Likewise He created Leviathan the male serpent and Leviathan the female serpent, and had they mated they would have destroyed the world with all their progeny. What then did the Holy One do? He castrated the male and preserved the female in salt for the righteous to feast on in the world to come, as it is written: he will slay the dragon that is in the sea (Isaiah 27:1). And also Behemoth were created male and female, and had they mated they would have destroyed the world. (A note in the Soncino edition says that they ate daily the grass of a thousand hills.) What did the Holy One do? He castrated the male and killed the female. Why not preserve it in salt like with Leviathan? Salted fish is palatable; salted meat is not. (74b)

(I had previously thought that Leviathan was a singleton, and therefore that the one in the sea was the one that would become the feast in Olam Haba.)

Unrelated, for my LiveJournal friends: I don't know if this will crosspost because of some very recent changes at LJ, but if it does: they've reportedly changed the terms of service in some very problematic ways, and it's likely that very soon the interface that allows Dreamwidth (or anybody else) to import your journal will stop working. If you haven't migrated to Dreamwidth yet, or at least backed up your content somewhere, please do so Real Soon Now. (I haven't yet had a chance to look into the TOS change, but chances are good that I will stop crossposting soon. Possibly they'll break crossposting too and force my hand.)

LiveJournal terms of service

I don't have time to do a close reading of the new LiveJournal terms of service right now, but there are a few things there that are deal-breakers for me:

• I would be bound by a TOS document that I cannot read. They're very clear that the English translation is non-binding and the Russian original is the actual agreement. I am not equipped to review it.

• I would be bound by Russian law, and they explicitly mention political "solicitation". It's unclear whether a post stating an opinion they don't like is enough to be on the wrong side of that rule (since, you know, I don't know much about Russian law). It seems likely that doing something like announcing an event would be. While I haven't done much of this, I'm not prepared to say that I've done zero. I certainly won't commit to doing zero in the future.

• They disallow external retrieval, like Dreamwidth import. It seems that automated backup to one's own hard drive would be similarly disallowed. They of course can't stop a manual scrape, but that's tedious. They are actively impeding users getting their own content out of the system for no good reason.

• ETA: I can be held liable for things that are not under my control. If you get a lot of views, they do...something; I can't tell what but it seems to involve government reporting. Now I don't anticipate writing something that would somehow become wildly popular, but ordinary people can have things go unexpectedly viral. I've seen it plenty of times. I'm not going to bet that it couldn't possibly happen to me.

I do not plan to accept the new LJ terms of service. This breaks crossposting from Dreamwidth, so I hope that my LJ-only friends will find their way here. If you are an LJ user and reading this then please, even if you don't plan to migrate, back up your content somewhere. It takes five minutes to create a DW account and start an import. If you never use the account again, you've still protected your content should LJ delete your account. (Which they do sometimes if someone with unacceptable politics comes to their attention.) I hope you'll start using DW (you can crosspost if you still want to publish on LJ) and that you'll let me know you're here. (For example, by subscribing to my journal, which I'll notice.)

I'm planning to reduce my LJ footprint, selectively deleting entries there. (Everything is here.) I might end up deleting everything, but there are some published links to individual posts that I need to fix somehow, so I'm not just dropping a nuke right now.