coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Wealth is a Good only insofar as it is instrumental toward happiness. When we consider America’s increased wealth we must also consider the difference in lifestyle between today and the past. How are the social stressors? How is nature exposure different? How is family life different? How different is work? How different are inculcated values? Forestry, agriculture, and logging industry workers report superior happiness, superior meaning, and lower stress than finance and insurance workers, which is a blow to the “wealth and happiness are linear across epochs” hypothesis. This difference is probably just due to exposure to the natural environment, as being near forests and mountains and bodies of water are associated with greater life satisfaction. But consider all the effects this has… one hundred and thirty years ago, the median American walked on dirt roads more often, under a canopy of trees, had more contact with horses and livestock, more likely worked in a natural environment. Even just examining one dimension here — the environment — and ignoring the multitude of social and nutritional differences, we should be suspicious of pronouncing a preference for one time period.
Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!
Well, the homestead dugout woman was an expert at being a mother through social acculturation. Her daily tasks did not involve cognitive stress or constant multitasking. She probably did not spend 10 hours of her adolescence sitting in a chair in an academic rat race. She did not have to learn how to navigate a stressful high-speed husk of metal to pick up groceries. Everyone she met on the daily was likely the same religion and ancestry, which reduced stress. She probably gardened. I can see how she would have an easier time being a mother just like the Afghani women in wartime Afghanistan had no problem being mothers.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
McConnell did not find his wife in the backwaters of rural China. They met when she was working a high-level government position. Her father founded a shipping company and she received a degree from Harvard. If anything their relationship might be dysgenic for her. It is not simply that Jeb’s wife is Mexican that makes it dysgenic (after all, plenty of top tier Mexicans), but where in Mexico he located her and how. There was zero selection going on for intelligence and so we can reasonably assume a dysgenic effect (like, if these pairings occurred 100 times, for sure it would be dysgenic on the whole, though there could be a few times where it is non-dysgenic out of chance). The implicit point is that we receive millions upon millions of latin Americans just like Jeb’s wife who will be marrying higher quality Americans and eventually alter the gene pool. You need to be extremely racist and/or track family trees to prevent a deleterious IQ effect as an American, and a lot of Americans will simply select for perceived attractiveness over IQ.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
It’s possible that the rural Mexican woman that Jeb met as a 17yo is actually a genius. It’s incredibly unlikely, given the information we know about her and the fact that Jeb selected her from a low number of women in the exact town he was performing charity work in. We can make reasonable assumptions here. As /u/AhhhTheFrench fails to point out, Jeb was honor roll at a prestigious high school, magna cum laude at Yale, then became enormously wealthy as partner of a top real estate firm. His wife’s bio details are just the basic “wife of politician” charity stuff.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Developmentally delayed bildungsroman.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
What would you call them?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Jeb is the son of an elite American political dynasty. His wife is the daughter of a rural Mexican migrant worker he met doing charity work at 17. This is dysgenic if you care about intelligence and eugenic if you favor cute latinas.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Is there any comedy more implicitly moralistic than Napoleon Dynamite? The humble hard-working Napoleon finds esteem in his dance performance, with his class looking past his oddities; the pure of heart Pedro becomes president of the class; the protagonist finds innocent love; his deficient-in-character brother finds a partner which balances his flaws. Maybe Nacho Libre?
Of course, I don’t disagree. But FLDS is 6k unsophisticated people in the middle of nowhere, and the Hasidic community in Jersey/NY is perhaps ~250k quite sophisticated people who have ties of advocacy to a larger community of fellow travelers. I just looked it up and I see I have been misusing the term “block vote” (I wonder if it morphed into a different colloquial meaning around here) but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I’m pretty sure Hasidim began as a folk religion among the poorer rural Eastern European Jews. It was detested by the leading educated Rabbis. I don’t think it is correct to say that they are the same genetic stock of a typical Ashkenazi Jew. Assimilated Ashkenazi Jews came from intelligent rabbinical-finance families, whereas many of the starting Hasidic families were the poorest and least educated Jews.
smart people marry other smart people and have smart children
Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
They are in violation of these things and you could write several pages of all their infractions. Everything from declaring a personal dwelling a religious building (a Chabad rabbi does this in my own town and probably your town if you live in NJ, check the property records), to violating agreements on utilities, to simply not teaching English in schools. In Kiryas Joel (“low income”) they have their own private security that will illegally attempt to stop you if you walk through their town as a woman without the proper attire… welfare schemes involving Haredi usually result in sweetheart deals with no jail time…
there’s not really an explanation beyond “Haredi block vote and block-lobby and use all of their money to ensure the illegal flourishing of their group”
I don’t think you know a lot about Kiryas Joel. First, they are not actual members of your country. They are their own nation. They barely pay taxes. They do not share their wealth with outsiders. Nothing positive that happens to them translates into something positive to you. Kiryas Joel was nominally the poorest town in America because of their tax schemes, they were given a state funded fertility clinic, but had the highest fertility. In cities in the US they don’t even use the state emergency* services but have their own. When they gain power in your town they cut all education spending and take over councils with block votes. You will never be able to join them if you are not Jewish. You are essentially writing, “I feel safe about America because of a totally alien and sovereign nation within its borders whose numbers are increasing at an extreme rate”. You might as well request China to conquer you as that would be better for your interests.
But you’re also confusing Haredi with Europe’s pedigreed assimilated Jewish families. Haredi IQ in America has never been studied. The Haredi do not have a fertility rate that highly favors their rabbis like the historically high class rabbinical families of Europe where a Rabbi may be selected based off meritocracy and have the highest fertility. Instead, all Haredi have a lot of children, including the dysgenic ones.
“I am going to sell out my entire people for an alien group 100% against my interests because of a non-evidenced belief that they may make Einsteins” is not persuasive. We have India and China for recruiting new Einsteins anyway, and they will actually assimilate instead of literally 2000 years of hating assimilation.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile. Meanwhile we are bringing into the country millions of random immigrants, illegal and illegal. This is an apocalyptic case of dysgenics. The dysgenics Black / immigrants will also affect the whites over generations into the future through interbreeding.
The browning of America is manageable
What is manageable? Your grand grandchild will have a very high chance of marrying a “dysgenic” Central American due to the numbers. It is manageable in the sense that you will still be alive but in a less competitive country irrelevant on the world stage?
immigration enforcement is getting harsher
Not sufficiently so, and neither is white racism sufficiently high that you can rest assured that your future ancestors will not be dysgenic. Who did Jeb Bush marry? Your future great grandsons will have the Faustian dilemma of thick latinas or high IQs, to be sure.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The evangelical does not define his membership by genealogy. He does not make daily prayers to a people and a tribe and a nation. A better example would be an evangelical trying to save a different evangelical who is living in sin. In this case, yes, they are the same ingroup. The Orthodox are compelled by their belief system to consider lapsed Jewry to be their ingroup due to their qualitatively distinct divine spark as described in the Tanya and spoken about by Schneerson, their quasi-messiah. This is a very fitting parallel — per Forward,
The Rebbe believed that every Jew, even one who had helped Stalin to murder other Jews, could be saved. “When you go back the next time,” the Rebbe said to a Jewish dignitary who was to have an audience with Lazar Kaganovich, “you should tell him he should still do teshuvah,” referring to repentance. “[H]e still has a chance.”
That belief that all Jews contain a spark of the divine undergirded his belief in kiruv, or outreach, at a time when most Orthodox Jews believed that less observant Jews were something like possible contaminants. Today, other Orthodox groups do outreach work, and even leaders of the Reform movement point, perhaps with a gulp, to the Chabad model.
Schneerson identifies with secular Jews to an extreme degree:
”Every Jew, regardless of differences and levels of observances, is part of Am Echad.”
”Anyone who berates any Jew is touching the apple of God’s eye.”
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
your stories are littered with countless examples of secular Jews ratting out Chareidim
It would be survivorship bias to conclude that these are rare scenarios. In the first case, it’s one of the most important Hasidic figures showing us his outgroup. In the second case, it’s one of the most important Hasidic figures showing us his ingroup. How the secular Jew responds to fraternizing by the ultra orthodox is obviously a separate discussion topic, as it doesn’t tell us the median belief of Orthodox Jews to born-Jews. We know about these cases because we have been told about these cases, and we would not know about these cases if the secular Jew did not “rat out” the Orthodox. It would be a mistake to quantify the membership of the Italian mob based on how many Italians rat them out, right?
i don’t think that a rapidly growing ultra-orthodox population gaining more political power reduces the threat of antisemitism at all
It’s a question of when the gentiles realize the consequences of the population shift. Right now I would put my money on team ultra orthodox. The average American’s intuition is shifting toward Semite-skepticism but the average knowledge about the ultra orthodox among those who aren’t their neighbors is merely that they build funny tunnels. Their best bet is to increase their numbers. Increasing numbers increases political power when you block vote.
the Chareidim increase antisemitism
The Hasidim don’t care about bad words on the internet, which do not affect them. They care about political pressure against them, and increasing their numbers and influence increase their political advocacy.
We know that the Chareidim (whose perspective you can easily see on their forums, yeshivaworld etc) almost universally despise these secular Jewish organizations
That is motivated by their fear of assimilation with the goy. The secular Jew is still Jewish and they want him to be like them.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
The Haredi in this case are explicitly anti-goy, and they consider the Jews to be historically mistreated by gentiles, and they are very concerned about the Jewish people and Israel. This is evidenced by the quote I cited, which was said confidentially to a secular Jew. I can provide more quotes although it’s a bit annoying because I can’t ctrl-f (the book isn’t online). Your argument that the Haredi haven’t done anything to combat antisemitism and therefore they don’t care about antisemitism is speculative and non-central. It is speculative because we don’t know the extent of Haredi donations to holocaust propaganda or Combat Antisemitism or anything else. It is non-central because they are interested in increasing their size and political power, thereby increasing Semitic power, thereby decreasing the threat of antisemitism.
If they cared about threats to the Jewish nation, they would fight for it
In 140 years they will have a high enough population in NYC and NJ to rule over it politically. They already abused their political power to misuse one billion in educational funds in NYC or extract money via Cars 4 Kids. One of my favorite scams the Hasids did is when they attempted to blackmail financier Steve Cohen. The influential Balkany called Cohen, complimented his Kohanem status, told him he silenced a fellow Jew planning to report him to the SEC, and then requested millions of dollars for his Jewish school. In this case, Cohen ratted him out, but this wasn’t a one time scam. Balkany, by the way, was Rubashkin’s lawyer when he was charged with the largest illegal immigration employment violation in US history.
Most of the communities are nominally Orthodox, although the great majority of Colombian Jews are not religiously observant.
I think you are confused about the details of what I sent you. I provided you a link about an ultra orthodox community converting gentiles into an ultra orthodox lifestyle, with every law binding, while preventing them from intermingling with the real ultra orthodox or ever making Aliyah to Israel. In other words, a group of Colombians went to an orthodox Jewish rabbi, said they think they have a Jewish soul, the rabbi “converts” them, but they are kept segregated from the real Orthodox Jews. The existence of Ashkenazi in Colombia does not factor into this at all, as they are not parties to the aforementioned interaction. This is an example of how deeply the Haredi care about Jews as racial people, rather than Jews as ritual-practitioners. Were an Ashkenazi to wish to convert to ultra orthodoxy they would be welcomed with open teffilin.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Rubashkin and his underlings actively hated the gentiles. When Rubashkin was jailed for the largest illegal immigration bust in history, only brought to light because of their extreme torture of animals which didn’t even follow kosher regulation, the entire Hasidic world rallied around him in support and actually succeeded in getting him a presidential pardon. Dershowitz and other secular Jews were involved in that pardon. Their hatred of the gentile Christians stands in stark contrast to their acceptance of the Jewish secular journalist, who they wanted on their side. Let me give you an example from the book, Rubashkin’s right hand man Lazar talking to the secular Jew, already accepting him as the ingroup:
”I am a racist,” Lazar said, seemingly from nowhere. “Why is it that Israel has persisted to exist for so long? Why haven’t the Jews been extinguished after scores of attempts throughout history? There is only one answer. We are better and smarter.”
”The goyim will always be the goyim, no matter how nice they are to you. So what’s the point?” Lazar’s comment underscored the Hasidim’d contempt for non-Jews, which wasn’t limited to the Postville gentiles, but to all Christians. […] The Hasidim were waging a cultural holy war in Postville, Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Paris —everywhere. Their world was Jew vs non-Jew, and the dichotomy existed in everything they did […] If the city of Postville tried to enforce any ordinance the Jews disagreed with, the immediate cry was anti-semitism. You were pacing the way for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people, the world’s Chosen People.
I don’t really know how much more outgroup the gentiles can be for the Hasids.
Chareidim are usually moderately tolerant of converts. But Colombian Ashkenazim are, even if nominally orthodox, closer to secular Anglo-American Jews than to Chareidim. They are not, with few exceptions, a highly observant population
What I sent you were gentiles intent on converting to Orthodox Judaism, and indeed following every rule and officially converting, but they are purposefully kept apart from the orthodox community, and are not considered Jews.
that the ultra-orthodox are unconcerned by antisemitism
I mean, I have an award winning book in my hand abundant with quotations showing this is not true. It is written by a Jew and features quotes from the head of a Hasidic sect. Antisemitism defines their religion!
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
The outgroup of Hasidim is gentiles. Secular Jews are the subject of intense outreach attempts by Hasidic organizations. Hasidim would love nothing more than every maternally-born Jew to become Hasidic. They spend money attempting to do this. There’s a first person account of this in Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (which is an amazing read). The head of a Hasidic dynasty (Rubashkin) personally made time to recruit a secular Jewish journalist, drawing a firm line between us (Jews) vs them (Iowan Christian Whites). There are abundant quotes by Rubashkin to that effect. Rubashkin had him put on teffilin, and at a dinner party spoke at length about how he should have lots of Jewish children. Rubashkin only ostracized this secular Jewish journalist when he learned that the Jewish journalist was sympathetic to the mistreatment of the gentiles by his Agriprocessors business. Once the Hasidic head realized the Secular Jew was siding with the gentiles, there was no more cameraderie and he was no longer a member of the ingroup. But for every moment before, he was greeted and invited and loved as a fellow Jew.
I can take screenshots of the book if you’d like. It’s probably the best single piece of evidence of the relationship between the workings of ultra orthodox Jewish ingroup vs outgroup dynamics. The Hasids truly hated the gentiles and likened them to animals, and they rejoiced at the prospect of scamming them. To the secular Jew they extended a sympathetic hand and beckoned them to join their side, all while advising him to have lots of children, criticizing him for only having one.
Now, compare this to the “new Orthodox Jews” of Colombia. Hundreds of Colombians converted to Orthodox Judaism, following every custom, but the head rabbi of Colombia has specifically excluded them from the eligibility of birth right. They are only “Jewish” as a parallel community that can’t taint the actual orthodox community of Colombia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/04/14/converts-judaism-colombia/#:~:text=The%20emerging%20Jews%20are%20not,They%20are%20a%20parallel%20community.%E2%80%9D
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
There was also a discussion last week about fertility = female status to check out too. I 100% agree. I don’t think people realize how completely the Hasidim in America debunk an environmental or economic cause. It can’t be environmental because they live in Brooklyn and Jersey. (A good researcher should look into microplastics and their garments however, perhaps how often they eat liver.) It can’t be economic because they are poor. It’s true that the Hasidic billionaires and millionaires subsidize the lives of the poor and that they all sorts of tax fraud schemes, but they are still poor, and in fact Hasidic women will work fully or part-time to support their husbands’ Talmud studies. So, what do they do? Having children is a status marker for both men and women; Hasidic girls at a young age learn about motherhood and how to value motherhood; they are completely cut off from America’s misogynistic culture of telling women that they need to sacrifice their life-potential to work.
It’s a mix of two things. (1) Status: I get fulfillment, social respect, attention, and conversation revolves around that; I am fulfilling God’s will by increasing the number of my people’s children; I am doing a good deed by increasing the number of my children because my people are oppressed. (2) Something we don’t have a word for: “the satisfaction in going through with the skills and stories you have heard from your youth”. It’s easy to do something you were trained in as a kid. Hasidic women don’t have to google anything about child birth or motherhood. They know everything already and what they don’t know will be explained by a wise elder over a cup of coffee (do they drink coffee? I actually don’t know). It’s not stressful or arduous at all. Not having children is stressful as you fall saliently behind your peers.
Japan was mentioned ITT as an example of a country that idolizes homemakers but has a low TFR and I think this misses something. It can’t be “you get respect from economic success and homemaking”, because then women will choose economic success. It has to be homemaking. By homemaking I mean raising children and all tasks associated with it. Japan is a consumerist culture, more so than America, and women have infinite distractions to enjoy which aren’t having children, and walking around as a mother does not grant you any status. In Hasidim, walking the streets as a mother of 16 kids would have you greeted like a saint for the blessings you have brought forth in the world.
“Artificial wombs” should be left out of this discussion entirely because it’s as ridiculous as believing in spontaneous generation. That isn’t going to happen. We are trying to raise healthy children, and they need mother-child contact for years.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
The best case for freedom of speech is that “ideas / types of social organizations float to the top”, but the worst case is that large swathes of the population get manipulated by bad values and lifestyles. We need some way to ensure that only the class of people for whom freedom of speech is genuinely useful are able to practice it. Some ways to do this: (1) restrict freedom of speech to men between the ages of 23-35 who have passed a feasible course on logic, psychology, and sociology either in a written or verbal test; (2) a social practice of electing benevolent censors who filter information for the rest of population, who have passed a more arduous course and are also selected by personality and honesty; (3) require new ideas to be judged in a dispassionate way first, written and read like a PhD thesis; (4) never throw out ideas deemed bad, but sort them and archive them away, so that they can be accessed by reasonable people but not unreasonable people.
If you have a social organization (whether political or communal) which manages to elect “censors” who are genuinely honest, intelligent, and wise, who are humble enough to elect people even greater than themselves, then you have an eternal upwards spiral of prosociality. That can be applied to people, ideas, media, everything. It is the number one most important social technology and is a requirement for human advancement.
So, as examples
(1) astrology would never enter the minds of young people, because they would never read it and be mislead by it — it has literally mislead millions of people who waste time on it, and millions more for centuries in the past.
(2) no song about drugs would ever enter ears of the youth.
(3) loot boxes and gambling would be banned forever.
(4) non-prosocial video games would be relegated to the infirm.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
I agree mostly but “poetry and metaphor are just what a God does” stands in stark contrast to the modern understanding of the divine, which is philosophizing for the theologian and assertions (with maybe some music) for the congregant. We attempt to philosophize something that is inherently poetic-potent, like trying to bottle lightning, which creates a vastly different feeling of the divine phenomenologically. Today there is very little hyping up of God for the purpose of hyping and basking in that potency, which from the ancient texts is just kind of how they did worship. That the earlier gods were potent in a given capacity (of the sea, of war) makes me think that this is the root kernel of religious language, rather than a way that humans merely expressed the root kernel (the expression is the substance, not just a consequence of their root religiosity). It goes beyond mere assimilation of rival stories.
And from the perspective of identity and behavior transmission (you should be this and do this), this is important to dwell on. Saying “God is omnipotent” or “God loves you” does not change a human’s identity or behavior, because it lacks potency and signifies nothing real. Poetry and stories are potent, as are art and architecture, and this is where divinity lies, not in assertive or philosophical language. If religion is truly about inculcating behavioral and value changes, then theology matters zero, potency matters 100%.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Even if we ignore the poetry of the cosmos, poetry and metaphor are the primary (if not exclusive?) way of talking about God in ancient Judaism and Christianity. God is shield, sun, hiding place, shepherd — yet also the Ancient of Days whose word causes his servants to tremble… usually these poetic instantiations don’t intermingle. The psalm that hypes up God as shepherd isn’t the psalm that hypes up God as vanquisher of foes, which isn’t the psalm that begs God with a broken spirit / heart… what unites every poetic block is that in a given context and with a given focus, God is the potent and compelling thing considered. For fear of sins, his punishment is described potently; for love of living, his mercy and created beauty; etc.
That’s probably a good theory of origin for monotheism
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
This one has a benefit of describing the concept of deity sociologically: what is that which when described is most compelling to the subject? A secularized Anselm’s ontological theory. If the language is sufficiently compelling, you will modify your identity and behavior, which is the intended result of religious systems. We can tie this into the studies on awe as a learning mechanism with its reduced default mode network etc. The Abrahamic God elegantly combines the innate awe-reaction to the natural world (the Red Sea) with the prosocial submission to a perfect human-like presence (he parted the Red Sea, for your safe passage).
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
An interesting way of reading early Abrahamic religious texts: forget God as a cognitively-stable conception of a Being with attributes, and consider God as the placeholder for maximally persuasive and potent language. I’ve always wondered why the Old Testament had zero interesting philosophizing about God; instead of saying God is omnipotent, they will spend paragraphs about how God “stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea”. Why the incessant poetry? Why is there no describing God philosophically or as a set of assertions etc, when this would be an obvious thing to do and include in your sacred texts? I think now it’s because their focus was on powerfully persuasive language, and not the “entity” God per se. God is essential for the use of the powerful language — the Word, if you will — but actually of no use outside of potency and persuasion.
You could reverse engineer a lot of religious language with this question: “what repute and metaphor and story can I use to make someone pay attention to what I am telling them?” The language would have to be universally understood if you’re attempting a central text. Everyone understands the world, so God is its creator; they understand death, so God keeps one from the grave; or maybe they understand a certain social archetype, and so God “awoke as from sleep, like a strong man shouting because of wine”. God is the combination and crescendo of potent / persuasive felt language, and in a funny way, his power is reduced by abstracting him. “God is omnipotent” is not something that actually comes with a feeling or memorable mental image, so it is useless. It’s like the composer Tavener’s piece the Whale. If you merely describe the scientific details of a whale, it means nothing. If you write Moby Dick, it means everything.
You have the oppprtunity to give each person on earth the same advice and rules. You wish to improve the world as much as possible. What would be your universal set of advice and/or rules which ensure the most Good? Presume that each person will listen intently, not magically assent and obey immediately.
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