Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
My guess is that straight men who do creative writing and screenwriting get laid much more than straight men who do software engineering or physics. Even political science, as @Bartender_Venator says below.
They're around (vastly) more women, will have largely female social circles in many cases, meet more women in the course of their professions and have jobs that women would (in many cases) like to speak to them about. That easily cancels out the engineer's larger paycheck.
If you want to get laid as a man, studying English literature and spending your 20s and early 30s being a bum in a band and working part-time bartending gigs in Brooklyn is far superior as a sexual strategy than literally any white collar profession will be. That isn't a recommendation.
2rafa
4d ago
From 2019:
In the 2017 election, 67% of Jewish voters backed the Tories and 11% supported Labour, according to figures supplied by JPR. A poll this autumn suggested that Jewish support for Labour in next week’s election could fall to 6%.
The first and as yet only Jewish Prime Minister was Disraeli in the 1860s and 1870s.
2rafa
4d ago
A January 2020 survey regarding Orthodox political views from the Nishma Research institute found that 53% of Modern Orthodox Jews identify as Democrat, liberal, progressive or left-leaning compared to 37% who describe themselves as Republican, conservative, right-leaning or libertarian.
They do skew Democratic, although the reason for this given by the head of the polling company is:
As a possible explanation for the overall leftward lean of the Modern Orthodox, Trencher pointed to additional 2015 polling data from the Pew Research Institute that found roughly 40% of the subset’s members to be ba’alei teshuva — those who adopt a fully observant lifestyle after having been raised not religious...When [those ba’alei teshuva] are asked if there’s anything that they do hang on to [once they start leading a more religious lifestyle], they say ‘liberal political views,'” Trencher said.
It's likely that as the born Modern Orthodox population expands significantly those politics will shift over time. There have also been some questions about Nishma's data on some Orthodox forums. There's other stuff like:
NEW YORK — An overwhelming percentage of Orthodox Jews in the United States plan to cast their ballots for President Donald Trump come November, according to a poll published Wednesday...The survey from the community’s Ami Magazine found that a whopping 83 percent of Orthodox Jews said they will vote for Trump, compared to just 13% who said they’d support the Democratic Party’s nominee, Joe Biden. Four percent of respondents are undecided, with just 20 days remaining until the election
Ami leans Chareidi but isn't exclusively so. It's a mixed bag, as the poll shows many people who call themselves Modern Orthodox are liberal Jews who were hooked by Chabad and started being religious later in life. They're not suddenly going to drop all their progressive politics because they become more faithful with age. But certainly it is true that being more religious is by far the single biggest predictor of conservative politics among Jews (as it is among whites and hispanics in many cases for that matter afaik).
2rafa
4d ago
I do sometimes wonder what the total Jewish balance of funds regarding US public finances is. If you count all tax contributions including capital gains, income taxes and so on, subtract all welfare and other spending (including aid to Israel), is it positive or negative? I suspect it is still positive in the long term, but I can see that being incorrect.
2rafa
4d ago
I find him interesting personally. He’s a troll to some extent, I think he was literally fifteen or sixteen when he started doing it and it was essentially reading out smug /pol/posts in front of a camera. The issue for him now is that he can’t do anything else, there is no off-ramp for him, and competition in the DR grift-verse has intensified dramatically, so he’s kind of stuck. I think the difference between him and a lot of other people in the same space is that he didn’t really have time to develop much personality as a young man beyond his internet persona.
If you mean intellectually, if you’re here probably not, his content is essentially boilerplate /pol/ third-worldist collage posting and his voice and shock jock radio host affect are (in my opinion) annoying, like a very smarmy teenager’s. If you’re interested in those views they can be restated with more complexity in all the usual DR places online and a lot of what Fuentes does is rephrase this stuff for his zoomer audience anyway.
Antisemitism is definitely increasing in the US on the left and right. But I don’t see it becoming central to politics for a few reasons.
The first is that the last time there was major antisemitism in European countries (including the US) Jews were the most ‘visible minority’ with any political power. Blacks in the US had no political power and this was in any case before the majority of the great migration to the northern cities had occurred. Today whites are far more likely to have issues with other minorities than Jews.
The second issue is that the right and left approach antisemitism from completely different angles. As the speech you quoted from the AmRen conference down thread suggests, the problem the hard left has with Jews is that they’re too white, and that this quality is what makes Israel an ‘apartheid state’ and ‘white supremacist’. The problem the hard right has with Jews (if they have a problem with them) is that they’re not white enough, that they advocate against ‘white interests’, undermining European civilization from within.
These views are fundamentally opposed; black nationalists and white ones can agree on their contempt for Jews but will quickly disagree on what is owed to black people. Islamists and white nationalists can agree on hostility toward Jews but will quickly disagree on the status of brown and black migrants from Islamic countries in the West. And white nationalists and some far leftists may agree that some wealthy or influential Jews support progressive policies in America but ethnonationalist ones in Israel, but their desired resolutions to this hypocrisy are literally diametrically opposite to each other.
The only theory that makes sense is the argument, advanced in some white nationalist circles, that without the leadership and financial contributions of Jewish people the organized left and center-left would crumble. I don’t find this persuasive; progressivism in the West was a powerful force long before the large scale involvement of Jews in politics and many European countries with very few Jewish people involved in political life still have large, influential, gentile left-leaning political factions that also support all the stuff that angers reactionaries.
What’s the point of the weird opinion canvassing you do here? You’ve been banned like ten times for hmmposting as @sarker said yesterday. I don’t even mind your presence because I think you post some interesting discussion points, but I wish you’d be honest about why you’re doing it.
2rafa
4d ago
It’s a big failure mode for radical organizations. Say what you will about BLM activists, the leader embezzling millions in donations wasnt a positive for their cause.
2rafa
4d ago
Yes, like @hydroacetylene said, when the yeshivot were in Eastern Europe back in the day a family might send only their most intellectually gifted son (out of many) to them. Adult study in a full time kollel (for married men) was even more rare, it’s largely an invention of the last 75 years. Previously yeshiva students would graduate, become rabbis, and then marry and have children and become the religious figures in their communities. The idea of a large population of married men who were not community rabbis but who studied all day and were paid for it is modern.
Modern abundance, not just welfare but even the ease with which, say, one very rich Hasid can fund a thousand students indefinitely is a failure state of modernity. Most people don’t want to live off welfare because it provides a much lower quality of life than working, especially if you’re an intelligent people. But if you think Torah study is the highest calling in life then you can override that impulse.
That’s largely for determining the circumstances of your birth, though. For conversion you just need to find an orthodox rabbi who is widely accepted by other orthodox rabbis (the vast majority of them; easily discerned by visiting even English-language orthodox messageboards) and then convert under him. Not that I particularly recommend becoming Jewish, but still.
2rafa
5d ago
The more you think about something bad that happened to you, the more upset, traumatized and poorly functioning you will be. It is that simple.
Therapy and therapy culture doesn’t work because it dredges up trauma and negative experiences. Repression does work, this is what stuff like ‘playing Tetris after a traumatic event reduces trauma’ does, it represses. Distract yourself, forget about it, and you can have a lifetime of happiness with a few bad occasional recollections.
It is so banal that it is barely worth saying: the less you think about something, the less you stew in it, the less it will affect you.
2rafa
6d ago
Yes, many more people learnt to sing in school, and choirs were also more popular. With training most people’s voices can be made pleasant at singing, especially with conservative vocal range.
2rafa
6d ago
Would this change things?
I suppose that depends on whether you consider the defining cause of the loss of white tribal identity to be those
anthropologists and social scientists
rather than something that precedes them.
What does Shia LaBeouf tell us, who has a much larger cultural influence?
I don’t think it tells us anything, but historically Jews converting to Christianity has been much more common than Christians converting to Judaism.
2rafa
6d ago
Yeah, that’s pretty much it, there were a few thousand left between Israel and New York, a few thousand in Britain and the Netherlands together, smaller numbers scattered in some other countries. A remnant population survived in Hungary that left for Israel in 1956, and there were some in the Soviet Union who survived the holocaust. But it’s fair to say likely 90%+ of Hasidic and Litvak Orthodox Jewry was killed in the Holocaust.
Since the 80s a lot of ‘mainstream Orthodox’ Jews and even some secular ones also changed to being ultra orthodox, and there was a purity spiral in Arab/Mizrachi Jewish circles in Israel that led to them adopting a lot of Hasidic customs.
Lastly the Chabad ‘Rebbe’ (Schneerson) became a figure of great importance to the vast majority of religious Orthodox Jews in the late 20th century and he was also responsible for a lot of the Baal t’shuva movement of increasing observance. So what was once a whole spectrum of Judaism with many varying gradations of practice has essentially separated into secular/reform/conservative judaism, “mainstream” and modern orthodox movements which are closely related to religious Zionism, and then ‘ultra orthodoxy’.
Nietzsche also considered Judaism slave morality, I just think that innate tribalism acts as a safeguard against the worst excesses thereof, in the same way there have been plenty of nativist Christian groups over the millennia with high levels of in-group loyalty.
And there are failure states. If Israel is doomed, it is because the secularized elite have completely failed to forcibly secularize and integrate the ultra-orthodox, who are feckless, work-shy, subsidized by the rest of the population, do not serve in the military and consider the highest occupational calling in life to be studying torah and talmud commentary for 70+ years until they die. Ethnic loyalty often leads to a failure to hold your own people to account.
One can fairly reply that unlike the Swedes with the Somalis and Syrians, at least the welfare users the Jews in Israel are subsidizing are actual co-ethnics.
But that does not change the fact that Israel is surrounded by ethnic and religious enemies and always will be (even if accommodation with the Arab elites is secured, common Arab Muslims will never like Israel or Jews) and will scarcely be able afford to stay ahead of them when 40/50/60% of the population are ultra-Orthodox in a few decades.
2rafa
6d ago
Grain fed tastes better. I’ve heard a lot of English people say that steaks in America are so much better even than the high end (grass fed) stuff we get in the UK. Grain fed has more marbling which is in part what makes beef taste good. Many high end London steakhouses import US grain fed beef for customers and it’s usually (other than real Kobe etc) the most expensive thing on the menu.
2rafa
6d ago
Seems like a largely bullshit claim; it’s well established that aesthetically supporting a designated terrorist organization or even bragging about doing so doesn’t actually make you a ‘member’ of that organization.
If it did then half the Irish in Boston would have been arrested in the 80s.
If Smith had followed the British strategy also used in Botswana, Zambia and to some extent Namibia then the white population of Zim would be better off. That’s not to say he could have anticipated how Mugabe’s rule would go but if you look at all three of those countries they still have white farmers owning and running most of the most valuable/productive farmland and relatively little ethnic hostility toward them. A white farmer almost became president of Zambia pretty recently even. Rhodesia abolished strict racial segregation (where Salisbury etc was reserved for whites only) in the mid-1950s. By the early 60s it could have gone either way, but each side was slowly radicalized until the whites panicked at the plan to slowly allow educated blacks to become the majority of the electorate and then the UDI was inevitable.
2rafa
6d ago
Farmers are an extremely powerful constituency because they have money, are rural (privileged in most democratic systems, especially in the US with the Senate) and have a salt of the earth reputation (like doctors and firefighters, farmers do a ‘good’ job).
Screye had some good examples of how the farmers stymied Modi’s essential land reforms in India (which would in the medium and long term have had hugely positive impacts on Indian prosperity). In France the farmers just dump shit on the street and ruin daily life in the cities until their subsidies are restored. In almost every Western country farmers are often very wealthy with millions of dollars in land (usually pretty liquid given a robust farmland market).
A substantial proportion of the US obesity crisis is due to HFCS subsidies for farmers:
Just six commodities — corn, soy, wheat, cotton, peanuts, and rice — account for 94% of FCIP support. Many of these commodities are not used to provide affordable nutrition but are instead heavily processed into the fillers and sugars that are likely a large part of people's health problems, including obesity.
But as with doctor pay and healthcare costs (or indeed with cutting firefighter numbers because there are far fewer residential fires than there were 50 years ago), because farming is a ‘good’ job, the public can be baited into supporting these people and serving their interests indefinitely.
Lab grown meat, if it can be made cheaply and to taste indistinguishable from the real thing, would be an immense scientific achievement that would improve billions of people’s lives. And even though I don’t value farm animal wellbeing particularly highly, it would still reduce a lot of animal suffering which on some level is probably a good thing if it can be ensured without harming humans in any way.
A little-discussed phenomenon is that since 2011 or so, low-wage pay has skyrocketed in major urban areas. People who were making $8 an hour in 2008 make $30 an hour today. Meanwhile, white collar workers who made $50 an hour (converted to hourly pay) in 2008 may make $75 an hour today, a much smaller increase.
The cost of childcare, fast food, hotel rooms etc for white collar professionals (ie. the upper middle class) has therefore increased much faster than their own incomes.
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