coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
Prices can’t increase more than a consumer is willing to pay, and return policies have always had profit in mind (unless there’s a law / regulation). If you’re telling me that consumers would be willing to pay at a higher point, then it would be priced at that already. If you’re telling me that the price would need to rise as otherwise the business would go bankrupt, that’s disproven by the huge investor/corporate profits which would suffer before bankruptcy. If you’re telling me that every business would increase their price-per-TV in unison in order to maximize corporate profit rather than competing over lowering prices, then that’s a good reason to steal from the businesses. Whether GameStop is raking in the profits by being the foremost video game retailer, or whether they are a tiny retailer with hardly any profit at all due to online purchases, the consumer is paying essentially the same for essentially the same service. The difference is simply that the leadership once made a lot of money, and now they don’t — the service is identical. And their return policy has always sucked, because they can get away with it. Let us let the consumer get away with things too!
corporations pay a great deal of tax despite accounting for a small portion of road congestion
Road wear is why we have tolls, that’s largely caused by trucking and next by employees going to work. Surely the party which reaps the resources from both of these should be the party paying for the road wear. It would be pretty silly if an entry employer had to pay the same for road wear as the CEO of Amazon, when the CEO reaps the most profit of the economic economy which results in road wear
Nature has nothing to do with it.
Nature, uh, finds a way. Like wind. I can say at least for myself, I am literally okay with thievery but would never think about leaving a cigarette butt anywhere outside, even on a city street. For me at least, it’s the sanctity of nature. I can’t speak for others, so maybe you’re right that they have a different motive
The demand for snacks is effectively infinite
The employees should form some sort of demand organization for the implementation of receiving tokens for their labor, which can be redeemed for food items, and perhaps for other items too. They can then decide amongst themselves the proper balance of corporate pay to token maximization, by electing or bargaining with the leadership of the company. Given that the employees are motivated by token maximization themselves, this would naturally lead to a company which profit-maximizes without sacrificizing any employee benefit/quality of life / tokens. Until such a day, I do believe that the employees should be stealing snacks, even hoarding them, and staplers and other stationary on occasion too.
I know most of the people on my floor personally or by reputation
I would consider it immoral then to steal snacks from them, then, yes
coffee_enjoyer
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6mo ago
There was a blast in the inner courtyard of the hospital where patients, families, children, and women were sleeping. You are free, I suppose, to not consider this “the hospital has been bombed”. But it’s just as morally significant. And, of course, on the 15th an Israeli artillery strike did hit the hospital.
It’s true that we don’t know the precise death toll. I’m hoping that the hospital workers come out with an authoritative statement on that. The Anglicans who oversee the hospital confirm hundreds of mostly women and children have died however. So perhaps 200, perhaps as high as 400? We don’t know for sure.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Extremist Jews consider their homeland to be Israel which nullifies your example
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
That’s why I wrote “C-Suite and investors”, btw. Why do you think that a person should only get the lowest amount their employer is willing to pay? That’s not how it is supposed to work. It’s supposed to work like the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, or the Secessio Plebis of 490 BC, or the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1650. It’s supposed to work like that in the sense that this is how it has historically worked, with the modern fantasy of “just compensation = set by employers” being an historical anomaly limited in scope. This modern fantasy is not found in developed European countries, neither is it found among white collar professionals like doctors and lawyers who lobby to increase their pay.
How does one "hoard" money?
How does one hoard property?
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
The dress of that particular Orthodox Jew tells us more about his identity than merely “Jewish”. How many Chabadniks would consider themselves unaligned with the interests of the Israeli state? While they may not be religiously Zionist (maintaining that the current instantiation of the nation is the long-awaited true return from exile by G-d), it would be very rare if one of them were to protest alongside Palestinian activists. The orthodox groups who do that (like 1-2) are totally ostracized from mainstream orthodoxy, and few in rank.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43
According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.
absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
Bolshevik atrocities
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it. If you told me that some shellshocked war-scarred Soviet soldiers committed an atrocity after experiencing months of trauma, no I would not doubt it. In any case, we did have whistleblowers of Soviet atrocities.
There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt
I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,
case that knowledge of what would be later known as the Holocaust was widespread within the home front by the summer and autumn of 1941. By that time, he argues, German atrocities on the eastern front involved hundreds of thousands of participants, eyewitnesses, and passersby. While some addressed these mass executions openly in letters, others either referred to them euphemistically or kept their thoughts private in diaries. Stargardt also demonstrates that many citizens were involved in the process of death and deportation, whether as executioners, witnesses, photographers (“execution tourists”), railway men, government bureaucrats, or other functionaries. The author’s case makes it difficult to believe that “ordinary Germans” did not know what was going on
With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?
plenty of Nazis admitted to it
We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony. Neither should we consider the coerced confessions of the leaders of a defeated country who faced the risk of total destruction (Morgenthau plan) particularly reliable.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
The moral complaint against the Germans in such a scenario is nowhere near the moral complaint in the official holocaust scenario, even though they may still be ultimately culpable (full culpability and level of evilness are distinct things). Germans reasonably attempted to relocate Jews; any reasonable Germany would have to do something about the foreign nation living on their soil who have a history of revolution including in Germany, and who have compatriots in the rival Soviet Union, and who have never ever assimilated fully and unshackled themselves from ethnic solidarity. A Germany that didn’t place them in camps is a Germany that would likely have their munitions depots bombed. So they were placed in camps, like Japanese in America and like the Palestinians tomorrow. If you believe that Germany should have “evened out” their starvation so that if affected Germans and Jews equally, okay, maybe from the standard of moral perfection, but there is obviously less evilness here than purposefully taking lives which would not already be lost in a trolly problem sense.
Now if you mean, “America has no culpability because they are allowed to bomb a country to infinity”, okay, but this would have needed to be argued, and Jews might wonder why there was no attempt to negotiate their release in exchange for better terms of German surrender, or whether America even calculated their loss of life when they bombed railways.
we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads).
Yes. You don’t just forget putting women and children to death in your 20s for years. Just like how the demented will at times confess infidelity (many such cases)
but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation
If they started families and have a new life, the isn’t an easy decision, and once old age hits that becomes harder. And do you expect the demented to fill out a complicated holocaust victim compensation plan? This isn’t a reasonable comparison. However, from my hypothesis we would see them remembering their Jewish adolescence and heritage, 100%. But I don’t know how we could measure or catalog such cases which occur in the armchair of an Eastern European home.
explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question
Right but you understand that both sides have this problem, because there has been no serious archaeological attempt at quantifying human remains or cremation remains around concentration camps. Which IMO strongly reinforces the revisionist side, because why on earth wouldn’t historians be interested in finding remains and quantifying numbers and so on?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Here is my policy suggestion
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Inculcate in young girls’ a desire to have children. You do this with positive, aspirational media and experiences involving motherhood. Echoing RandomRanger’s insight downthread, require girls in the first three years of schooling to bring their dolls to school and engage in doll-oriented activity. The highlights of female education in the first 6 years of schooling should be: motherhood, cultivating the nurturing instinct, and homemaking skills. In high school, two years of required internships in which female students “babysit”, nanny, and helping out new mothers — which doubles as a cost-free program for new mothers.
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Ban women from high stress professions. (Women in STEM is grossly dysgenic due to low birth rates. Instead, reserve the least stressful STEM-adjacent positions for the highest IQ women. This is highly eugenic.) Reserve society’s least stressed jobs for women.
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Government grants to media which extol motherhood.
Raising girls as identical to boys has obviously failed. In history, the primary “skill” a girl learned was how to be a mother/wife. That’s because it’s an important, difficult, stressful 6-18 years of a woman’s fertile years. Feminism failed, we can move on. Another to note is that there is a lot of research showing that stressed mothers and mothers who cannot breastfeed or love their children properly have a much higher chance of having children who are mentally ill or autistic etc, or even have childhood obesity. So the thought that we would lose “money” with our MAMA agenda (Make American-women Mothers Again) is not necessarily correct. Tons of resources are spent on psychiatric and physical disability which is ameliorated through MAMA policy.
It’s kind of hilarious that we consciously destroyed the mothering instinct in girls who naturally gravitate to dolls and tea parties and so on, and then we look at ourselves shocked like that retarded Spider-Man meme when we realize women now don’t want children, want money and safety more than children, and are stressed at the prospect of children.
coffee_enjoyer
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6mo ago
If hatred of Jews were their first principle, we would see overseas Palestinians wage attacks on Jewish communities, where the communities do not have the heightened security of the Israeli state apparatus. That we pretty much never see that (thank God) is strong evidence that their grievances are against Israel and her people. In the average uneducated, undernourished, 85 IQ Palestinian mind, it’s a waste of time to distinguish between Israeli Jews and Israeli Zionists. Their enemies are uniformly Jewish-Zionist citizens of Israel.
I looked into the water pipe claim and I don’t see compelling evidence that this happened. It’s originally traced to a 2021 Telegraph article, which takes footage from a Memri Documentary. But per the documentary,
While the plan to reuse the explosives in the Israeli shells was moving ahead, long water pipelines were found buried in the areas of the settlements from which Israel withdrew in 2005. This discovery turned out to be a qualitative leap. These pipes, which stretched from the liberated settlements in the west across the Israeli border to the east, had been hidden from the eye. For years, they served Israel in its theft of Palestinian water. In the belly of the Earth, we found large quantities of thick metal pipes. It was part of a network that had been used to steal Gaza's groundwater and pump it into the occupied lands. We discovered the plans for that network, and then we dug into the ground and pulled out the pipes, so that they could be used in our military industries."
Given that this documentary is from 2020 and the Telegraph article is from 2021, it’s reasonable to trust the Memri documentary. Especially because it shows other procedures like collecting underseas Israeli munitions.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Read the thread. It’s disingenuous to imply that hitting the center courtyard where patients and families and refugees gather is not hitting the hospital. And the Anglicans also testify that Israel had hit the hospital on the 14th, and had told them four times to evacuate. And no, he’s not repeating Hamas lines (lol), he is in communication with the hospital leadership.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Does anyone know of a video of a Hamas rocket landing from a ground POV? The sound of the hospital blast is identical to a JDAM missile sound, but I want to hear if a Hamas rocket sounds similar.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
It doesn’t look anything like the blast of a Palestinian missile. Israel gains the infliction of terror on a population seeking shelter that they want to displace as much and as fast as possible. Hamas has never shown an interest in bombing their own hospitals (in this scenario they want the population to stay in Gaza), but Israel has attacked hospitals before and recently attacked a border crossing.
The discourse coming out of Israel has been extremist lately, with Netanyahu calling this a battle between “the children of light and the children of darkness”.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
What do you expect the average citizen of Gaza, who is about 14 years old, to do about Hamas?
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
I think there’s an element of race and culture involved here, where it wasn’t for a country like Afghanistan. Republicans in America are online and they can see that Russia is (at least in appearances) a traditional white country that respects Christianity. Both Russia and Ukraine are white and culturally Christian. If you believe that the war is impossible to win for Ukraine, then the Republicans are left scratching their head at why we are killing white Christians for the geopolitical reach of America. And the geopolitical interests of America’s elite are increasingly at odds with the interests of many white Christians who can imagine themselves acculturating more readily to St Petersburg than San Francisco.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
The Talmud has passages condemning agricultural work and encouraging learned / literate work. According to Solzhenitsyn, the Tsar tried to get Russian Jews to farm but failed. As far as I know there is no example of a Rabbi (the leaders of the Jewish micro-nation) ever asking for farming privileges in any of their negotiations with foreign powers.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
All of those things require that you believe life has a purpose, or else completely ignore thinking about human life as a whole. A reasonable person does not spend a decade building a house that will be immediately destroyed, draw on a canvas that will be immediately incinerated, or donate a kidney to someone who is immediately going to die. Those endeavors must have a point. Can you explain why an atheist would spend time reducing suffering if none of it matters once all human life has passed away? And if there’s no moral reason to ease another’s suffering, because there is no actual moral judge and in any case no one cares about the moral failings of ancient Assyrians? You can get away with literally everything because you will die and it doesn’t matter.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
But I think you need to start from the presupposition that God is maximally loving as an unquestionable dogma. As this was the dogma of Christianity since its advent, pun intended. Lacan’s construction of post-modern God should be of little interest to us, because a “theist-by-faith” can simply say he is wrong by the very first assumption. Once you define God as loving dogmatically, there’s no room for criticizing God by saying he is confused, evil, etc. Now, I accept that there is room for arguing against the epistemic leap to a God who finds us special and listens to our plea — that this forms something of a special pleading fallacy. But that’s a separate argument.
The angle I am coming at is that in the everyday life of a Christian theist, or some portion thereof, there is a willful belief and anticipation that they will meet their Loving Father and creator at the end of their days, and tell Him all about their life — though He already knows — and all things will be accounted for and made sense of. The description in the Gospel is of a heaven like a mansion with many rooms, which Christ the Friend goes to prepare for us. Now, I am not interested (personally) in the argument for this from deduction. I am just interested in how, if someone assents to a belief in this, they can think about their life forever without ever losing motivation and good spirit. Are they “wrong”? Well, from the atheistic angle it appears that there is no such thing as wrong, that in fact there is no significance whatsoever to being right or wrong because there is no Final Accounting. But the theist can make sense and ponder his whole life and even the nature of life (within the realm of faith) and spend an eternity writing poetry about this. As such, atheism is more wrong than theism, because only theism can define “wrong” from a vantage point of significance.
Maybe another angle is to read your comment, which is logical and well-argued, and say (politely), “so what?” If you have argued against God, you have lost the argument because you have now entered a realm where “right” and “wrong” are undefined. It’s a null zone. Nothing has been solved because there is no Ultimate Solution.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
Nonviolent protesting is historically treated as a legal grey area in American history, which the admins of Columbia are well aware of, their own university having a history of it. It’s treated that way because the alternative is non-nonviolent protesting, which is much worse. Not everything moral and immoral is codified in law
replies suggesting that the history of slavery and Jim Crow might have something to do with black underperformance
Even during slavery, African Americans had the highest literacy rate of any SSA group. They had a greater attainment of complex skills as a consequence of being skilled slaved and/or freed in the North. How do you reason that it’s possible for slavery to cause black underperformance, when we know that their skill level was worse before slavery? Lastly, if I enslaved you to work all day and inflicted corporal punishment whenever you misbehaved, and I did this for a decade, do you think after the decade you would be a better or worse worker? When a slave from the south was freed in the north and went on to work a productive life as a blacksmith (or something), what caused him to be unhindered from slavery that hindered the others?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Large companies have zero incentive to reduce prices when they know that their competitor will do the same. McDonald’s has actually sued 12 of the major national meat suppliers for price-fixing simply based on the fact that each supplier knew the others’ pricing due to a shared analytic tool. All it takes is one reasonably intelligent analyst at the meat supplier board room to ask “so what happens if we lower our prices” for all to realize it’s an unprofitable move.
https://www.fooddive.com/news/mcdonalds-sues-meat-companies-pork-price-fixing/637572/
If you are McDonald’s and there’s a Wendy’s across the street, you have two options. You can both keep your prices high and split the pool of consumers 50/50, knowing that stressed American consumers will continue to buy your slop because it is time-efficient and they have formed a habit to your addictive slop. Or you can lower your prices, which the competitor will do next week, which leaves you back to the first option only with less profit. Of course they don’t do this. But if a brand new competitor moves in who doesn’t play ball, perhaps they will do this to squeeze him out — no new competitor can compete with the supply chain and the institutional knowledge of McDonald’s.
It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world. There’s no reason, for instance, for OnlyFans to rake in billions of dollars when anyone can create a similar site. But OnlyFans isn’t profitable because their service is better, but because the pornographer who operated it made the site a meme among the public (a kind of psychological rentseeking), because he had the previous institutional knowledge and capital to do this. And you see with car dealerships, there’s no reason for any used car dealership owner to make tens of millions. But in an intensive competition what they do is compete over psychologically manipulating the vulnerable, so the car dealerships compete over misleading pricing plans, overpriced itemization that the customer doesn’t have the knowledge to dispute, etc. It is horrifically inefficient and immoral as a system and it is only maintained due to various mythologies in the public imagination.
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
Where is the part about the rape? I can’t find it searching through the CSPAN archives
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
The “surgical” strikes have already killed journalists and innocent civilians. But also: are you sure there will be bad press? We will have to wait and see what kind of propaganda Israel cooks up. Already they posted on Twitter, then deleted, a video “proving” that it was Hamas who launched the attacks.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
I had understood that their military branch is independent of their ruling branch for op sec reasons
This is my favorite thought-stopping word. It gives me some nostalgia for when it used to appear all the time in progressive editorials. It doesn’t really signify anything except that the reader was insulted by the writing (which also doesn’t signify anything).
This is complicated:
the influential and regenerative kernel of Judaism is the orthodox/conservative, their billionaire funders, their political influences, their attachment to Israel. This cohort creates all the rabbis and most of the leaders of the Jewish community, eg run all the Chabad houses. Orthodox Jews do not intermarry, I think like 1% do. They have the highest birth rate and are inheriting Judaism. There’s lots of articles on this.
It’s true that reform intermarry, but the data is still more complicated, because what counts for “intermarry” may be Jewish+JewishAtheist. I have yet to find data on the number of Jewish+OtherReligion marriages but maybe someone smarter can find that. From Tablet: “The Pew study offered respondents who were parents a wider range of possible responses. Among respondents with a non-Jewish spouse [[61% as of 2020, 53% when this article was written]], 20 percent were raising their children Jewish by religion, 25 percent partly Jewish by religion, 16 percent Jewish not-by-religion, and 37 percent not Jewish.” So 37% of 61% are being raised without Jewish affiliation, or about 22%. I would like more clarity by demographers on what the intermarriage rate is for “Jewish+non-Jewish-ancestry”, as this gives us a better picture on intermarriage given how many non-religious but self-identifying Jews there are. The question the polls ask is “do you have a Jewish spouse” which doesn’t really tell us the future of Jewish affiliation. From Tablet again: “Admittedly, the secret of Jewish survival may be the propensity to panic about our fate. The grim predictions made in the 1990s may have proved wrong because Jewish organizations, federations, and private foundations did what they needed to do to turn the tide. They funded massive new investment in Jewish summer camps, Hillels, Taglit-Birthright Israel, and innovative startups—all programs that reach a fairly wide spectrum of Jewish children and young adults”.
Everything I have read indicates that the Orthodox love to convert by-birth-Jews into their conservative flock. This is why they do
the man on the street interviewsJewish outreach campaign by asking Jewish-looking people if they are Jewish. Heck, this is why they fund Chabad centers all over the world.More options
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