coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
Maybe not for Haredim but there are others ways to create adherence and allegiance if you were going to copy Haredi TFR values.
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
The so-called National-Religious having a consistent TFR of 4 actually proves a lot.
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
The Haredi have always had a high birth rate, and there is no period in which they moved from the Ukrainian villages into the cities (1940s?) where they lacked a high birth rate. So there was no evolutionary selection or anything like that. And it’s also too little time for the Haredi to have evolved for it anyway. And we don’t even know if TFR has substantial genetic correlates.
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
I’m aware of every criticism against the Haredi but their TFR isn’t related to their welfare beneficiary status. The reason for their high beneficiary status is that the men insist on studying for an exceedingly long time. (That and they lobby well). Very little of their studying plausibly impacts their TFR because only like 1% of the readings are about having children or getting married. If they had normal education and normal work, but retained the pro-fertility cultural elements, which is possible, then they would still have a high TFR. In Israel you have the conservative / modern orthodox who have a high TFR while living a very productive technology-forward life.
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
I still haven’t seen a reasonable counter-argument to “learn from the Haredi”. They are the world’s most urban population, living in the costly areas of NY and NJ, often in poverty. They are as diabetic, unhealthy and sedentary as any American, and ingest as many microplastics as any American. Their lifestyle is a similitude of the American graduate student or office worker. If I were to comment about the high TFR of the Amish in Beliz or today’s increasing TFR in rural Afghanistan, there would be a ton of confounding variables, but there are no non-cultural confounders for the Haredim. What do they do? Number of children is a mark of status, as a commandment and blessing; girls are taught to value motherhood as their glorious purpose and value in the world starting at the youngest age; they pride-maxx about their heritage / peoplehood; they privilege men over women. We don’t have the studies to disentangle which of these elements are causal, but it’s going to be at least one of these things and possibly all of these things. Their lives are biologically and environmentally the same as ours, in fact they might actually be less healthy on average.
Also, any TFR strategy has to consider the longterm eugenic / dysgenic outcomes. What sort of Swedes are you selecting for if you offer a lot of money to have children? Probably not the most loving or the most interesting Swedes. Why not make giving birth an act of love and ultimate interest? Then you are selecting for the prosocial and intelligent Swedes.
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
You can plan ways to influence billionaires who will go on to buy platforms and pay for influencers; Elon’s purchase of x demonstrates the efficacy of this strategy. That is the only “mainstream” solution because everything in culture is ultimately decided by a billionaire. You actually need one of your billionaires to own a platform before you can even create counter-propaganda, because as we saw in the 10’s, anyone trying to combat left wing propaganda with their own propaganda would be banned upon getting too popular. And it really is just a propaganda war, because (1) the activist Left’s insistence on highlighting their views from the PoV of a pitiable minority is indistinguishable from the conscious development of propaganda, because it’s just as predicated on influence eg exaggeration and sympathy; and (2) the effective way to combat propaganda isn’t “telling the truth”, as that doesn’t lead to engagement and influence, but actual propaganda or counter-propaganda, otherwise you just lose. You might say, “but can’t you still boycott?”, but no, because the only place people find out about boycotts and are reinforced to boycott is on social media. Which is owned by a billionaire. Even if you have a zealot running social media, as in the case of Gab, no one is going to join it unless they see reason to join it which again requires propaganda in the dominant social media ecosystem.
What I think is the more resilient longterm solution, though it would require decades of development, is the formation of a parallel culture built upon rituals and stories of allegiance which create an abiding in-group preference. This would just be taking the most powerful civic and religious rituals of Western history and tailoring them so that they create a in-group preference among adherents whilst inoculating them against those myths of progressivism that inevitably lead to ruin (“everyone is the same”, colonialism, racism, slavery, stolen land — these need to be reproved before someone starts hearing about it in their teens). Only this is enough to combat the influence of algorithms and social media. Theoretically with the right “cultural-ritual infrastructure” you can develop a perfectly fine parallel community which will run on indefinitely.
I don’t think there’s another solution.
Those blaming old white men or women have lost the plot IMO. For around a decade, anyone consuming the news was exposed to stories designed to increase concern and love for minorities while increasing only disgust and anger at White men. This was done through daily news consumption which acted as a series of repeated trials, not dissimilar to how a psychologist can train a reflexive emotional behavior in an animal when a neutral stimuli is repeatedly paired with a conditioning stimuli. These repeated trials or iterations were variably scheduled and cross-contextual, by changing the subjects and locations but retaining the same desired response, to maximize the strength of the reflexive behavior. They used emotionally-potent stories to enhance this response, because the pitiable and unusual increases the strength of the memory. They also, perhaps unknowingly or perhaps knowingly, structured these trials like the “misinformation effect” studies, where a person who remembers an event in detail before learning new information about the event will have his memory of the event altered to encode the new information over the old. This was done using the typical format of “you might have heard… here’s why you’re wrong”, and “the rumor… debunked”.
The people who ran the news at this time, and organizations like the SPLC and the ADL who policed the news, effectively brainwashed the public into hating White people and loving minorities. Brainwashing is a real thing. It’s not just a movie trope, it’s an actual phenomenon. If you were to enter North Korea, the citizen’s reflexive response to hearing about America or capitalism may be the same as a 2016 liberal girl’s response to hearing about White men, and this was inculcated in the same exact way, which is repeated trials where something is paired with an emotionally potent “conditioned stimuli”. Except actually, the 2016 person’s response would be stronger because they received more trials.
You wouldn’t blame your sheep if they were eaten by wolves, because they are sheep, they can’t help it. Similarly you shouldn’t blame the average American for falling victim to a highly sophisticated decades-long propaganda operation by those they were supposed to trust. If you always saw through it, congratulations, you’re a news-obsessive or an autist or really neurotic or are just built different. But the average person isn’t like you, they conform to their social superiors. This is the usual mode of human living. You cannot change the fact that most people are conformist, you need to make sure that the people who control how the public is molded are not evil or stupid.
coffee_enjoyer
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16d ago
There were many Jews who opposed the Iraq war, and indeed the polling showed they were more likely to oppose it than the average American. But the issue remains that within the group are a wealthy and influential block who rally around being Jewish, recruit within the Jewish general population, and tie their religious identity to defending the “Jewish State”. For decades they have accused anti-Zionists of anti-semitism because of course criticizing Israel is criticizing the Jews. These bad apples have hidden themselves amongst an orchard of perfectly good apples, using them as human shields, and if current standards of warfare apply to the culture war, then it is acceptable to malign 15 innocents if it leads to successfully critiquing 1 bad actor.
Bari Weiss’ father was a regional head of AIPAC and nationally-influential Zionist. After Ellison’s takeover, all four major CBS hires have been Jewish, which is statistically improbable even if Jews are 10x over-represented in the field: a 0.3% probability, assuming such an over-representation. (Weiss, Gutman, Weinstein, Dokoupil). If you include Ellison himself in the list, it’s about a 1 out of 1000 chance that all five key positions just happen to be Jewish. (Again assuming 10x over-rep, otherwise it’s like 1 out of 100 million chance)
coffee_enjoyer
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16d ago
If Mearsheimer is correct that Jewish groups were essential in bringing America to war with Iraq (let’s say they were half the cause), then they are responsible for half of the 3 trillion dollar cost of the war plus 2,250 American lives. This should factor into your ad hoc economic calculation regarding the value of our alliance with Israel or the Jewish people. You mention Qatar as “undermining Western values” and promoting our collapse, but Qatar has pledged 1 trillion dollars to America and Israel has pledged 0 dollars. I do not see a rise in Islamic influence in America, which is regrettable because I think conservative fashion norms are good for society. We also have more immigrants who come in from Israel than we do from Qatar, by like, a factor of 100. It’s our own lack of nationalism and in-group preference that has caused us to bring in low-performing immigrants, and Qataris deserve no blame for that, as they had no influence in America when this occurred.
coffee_enjoyer
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17d ago
Fuentes likely has a girlfriend (if not multiple) but hides this to prevent their doxxing. He has a loyal female fanbase that calls themselves groypettes and they pay to have their superchat messages read on his livestream, where he unceremoniously declines their advances.
On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work. Vance and the couch for instance. Humans really are that base. I recall reading that the 12th century Peter Abelard couldn’t be promoted at his monastery because he was castrated and thus deemed unmanly. That’s a monastery, in the Middle Ages. And the recent insult that Trump fellated Bill Clinton is no different than when they called Caesar “Queen of Bithynia” per the accusation that he slept with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia in his youth. Something that annoyed me with Kamala Harris is that he have actual evidence that she behaved in such a prostitutional way, as she was the girlfriend of Willy Brown at 29 while he was 60 and he proceeded to hand her a comfy no-show political job. This was so ripe for insults — the guy’s name is literally Brown Willy — but no one was willing to stoop low for it, though they were all on board with the Russia prostitute stuff. I think the reason for this is man’s innate philogyny, and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men.
coffee_enjoyer
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21d ago
That’s an odd example because of the elephantine alternative explanation as to why there are settlements built in that particular country. Is there another example?
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
It’s still a far cry from an American suburb. They can walk 5-15 minutes and find a restaurant, subway, pleasant bench near a Shinto shrine, etc. In much of suburbia you can’t do that.
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
Suburbs good, cars good
Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car
How much of this is a factor of American suburbs being preferable to American cities, vs American suburbs being preferable to what cities could be, eg more like Tokyo or Bergen or Reykjavik or etc?
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
Per a Grok query, famous former famous porn stars marry “normal” men and enjoy a better than average social life. Sasha Grey is a Twitch streamer and does popular podcasts. Mia Khalifa is an influencer dating a rapper. Riley Reid is married to an athlete. So there is no significant trade-off here. This is probably because, even if 90% of men find them disgusting, there’s probably 1% who find them attractive, and a percent of that 1% will be well-adjusted and even high status.
A political party could probably gain voters by running on taxing pornstars, but maybe the connotation of being the “talking about porn” party is too negative to be worth it.
coffee_enjoyer
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24d ago
I imagine the intelligence communities of five-eyes are using sophisticated AI to inform them of risks, with AI not yet available to the public, and with the best prompt engineering in the world. What would an AI that knows everything about the genetics of IQ and prosociality say is the biggest risk to the West? And I imagine that the intelligence community has much better data on genetics, too.
coffee_enjoyer
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26d ago
The current study predicted that gender-based teasing would mediate this link between typicality and mental health, and this prediction was partially supported. Gender-based teasing fully mediated boys’ association between low typicality and greater depressive symptoms and more negative body image. Boys who were low in gender typicality were teased more on the basis of gender, and in turn expressed more depressive symptoms and felt worse about their bodies (as in Smith & Leaper, 2005). Regardless of gender-based teasing, however, boys who were low in typicality had greater anxiety and lower self-esteem (teasing accounted for some of the low self- esteem, but not much). It is unclear why gender-based teasing fully mediated associations with depressive symptoms and body image, but only partially mediated associations with self-esteem and did not mediate associations with anxiety.
The typicality metric was informed by both peer-evaluated and self-reported questionnaires and would include wearing skirts and being dysphoric.
The prompt was “a thoughtful reaction to some aspect of the article”. The article itself seem like poor science. Sci-hub link: https://sci-hub.se/download/moscow/3239/5750dde1cafb6436fe579821d78194db/jewell2013.pdf
You can’t assume that a depressed gender atypical’s self-reported data on teasing is accurate. A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics. A boy wearing a skirt is obviously going to get at least a few comments because it is unusual and noteworthy, and a depressed boy with dysphoria is going to interpret that as teasing and report it as such. The data then cannot tell us whether teasing mediates the relationship between dysphoria and depression, nor can it can inform a prescriptive value statement regarding the morality of teasing dysphorics (the implicit purpose of assigning this bullshit paper). As an example of how dysphorics interpret things as insults, the dysphoric professor interpreted the assertion —
”society pushing a lie […] is demonic”
to imply —
to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive
When in fact our pious writer was most likely stating that a force in society was demonic, an entirely mainstream and non-controversial belief for a faith which holds that “the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One”.
I side with the Christian in this kurfuffle because her beliefs are prosocial and will lead to greater social flourishing, whereas IMO the dysphoric professor is liable to produce social psych propaganda that just makes the world worse. If the actual use of psychology is its bountiful positive effects on society, and undoubtedly it is if you think about it (we get excited about the useful and informative findings), then the Christian girl is worlds away better than current academia, having internalized a socially-optimal belief system.
I also think a secular publicly funded institution should not be mandating an atheistic framework for opinion-based questions, which seems unconstititional and immoral.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
I will lodge a prediction that this guy just happens to have a terminal illness which ensures his passing before ever seeing jail time, and that he also has suspicious lapses in his work history.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
Are there any studies on whether IQ is currently being selected for in lesser-developed countries like Brazil, Haiti, Nigeria? Are the higher IQ having more children than the lower IQ?
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
Is there any additional factor in the order and beauty of Japan besides the obvious — genes, early life education, emphasis on collective pride and shame?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Popular liberal thought-chieftains (substack lady and talk show guy) told their tribe that Kirk was right wing. This simply overwrote whatever else they heard because they trust them more.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I never said that Maimonides was the only authority. I said that he is a foremost authority. Not everyone who has obtained the rabbinical title is an authority, or even has his works read in the community. It’s like how not every priest is an authority. But the Rambam (his affectionate title) is read widely and reverently throughout the whole Orthodox community. I have supplied evidence of this in my comments ITT: that when Maimonides conflicts with everyone else in the discussion of idolatry, the Israeli Orthodox student is likely to side with Maimonides; that Rav Schneerson told everyone to read his work; that the relevant quote is taught on the Chabad website. I will add, that in agreement with Maimonides on the question of whether Christians are Avodah Zarah (inexcusably idolatrous, to the effect that punishments may apply barring greater concerns) are the rulings of Joseph B. Soloveitchik (an authority in modern orthodoxy) and Moshe Feinstein (“called the most famous Orthodox Jewish legal authority of the 20th century […] served as president of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis”). If you want a more Motte-like way of ascertaining the ambient view of this issue among the Orthodox, you can search [ christians Avodah Zarah site:judaism.stackexchange.com ] and read the top threads, where the view of Maimonides will be pit or paired with other views.
this is the rough equivalent of pointing out that Thomas Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church and therefore declaring that the only thing you need to read to understand Catholicism is the Summa Theologiae
It’s important to understand why this comparison doesn’t hold. To the Orthodox (I am not 100% certain what the others do), Maimonides is more like their gospel than their Thomas Aquinas. They often skip or minimize the study of the Tanakh (Old Testament) altogether to focus on the Talmud (which they call the Torah) and their primary entry to the Talmud is Maimonides. See 1 and 2. The Talmud isn’t some reference book laying dusty on the shelf, but actually the mainstay of study (and effectively, worship) for the Orthodox. You should peruse the introduction and the influence section of its Wikipedia entry, where you will read (among other things) that Adam Schiff made his congressional oath on a volume of the work I quoted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishneh_Torah . The Summa is read in full by maybe .1% of Catholics, but the Mishneh Torah is probably read by a good 80% of Orthodox in full, and 100% who attend a yeshiva.
Do Orthodox Jews actually try to prevent non-Jews from studying the Talmud? Really? That does not seem to actually be the case in practice
There’s a difference between actively seeking to prevent, and believing it is punished by death from God and discouraging it. Here’s an example of discouragement: https://www.chabad.org/therebbe/letters/default_cdo/aid/5181010/jewish/Non-Jews-and-Torah-Study.htm
That the entire tradition is engaged in a universal deceit that you've seen through just by reading a book
Do you think they are the Parsis of India, or Druze or the Alawites? Are they a cult hosting the Eleusinian Mysteries? We’re talking about the most legalistic religion of all time. Their beliefs are neatly codified and redacted. You can just read them. There is literally no possible mechanism by which a former ruling can be abrogated except by a greater ruling, one by a greater expert or a more recent council, which would be put into writing and read in the yeshivas.
I am deeply skeptical of you drawing a distinction that excludes Conservative and Reform Jews here
I’m just not familiar with what they do. So I’m abstaining from commenting. But reform has a very easy mechanism for disagreeing with Maimonides, which is the belief in conscience and a greater principle of goodwill. So there’s nothing to criticize wrt reform. I doubt they would agree with Rambam.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
It is not so complex for Maimonides, although interestingly, he considered Islam purely monotheistic. There may be other rabbis who have said differently, but what matters is what is being taught as authoritative to the community, not what a less-significant or insignificant rabbi has published.
Why should I believe that your cherry-picking of nasty-sounding passages from the Talmud is somehow more constitutive of modern Judaism
What is “modern Judaism”? Reform Jews have reformed the tradition. Conservative Jews might have never studied these works. I’ve specified that I am talking about Orthodox Jews, the ones who take the Talmud seriously. There is no “modernization” of Orthodox Judaism. If you believe that it has been modernized since the time of Maimonides, you should be able to find a statement from an important council of Rabbis to that effect, or a book that they consider to be more authoritative than Maimonides. In fact, the most important Rabbi of orthodoxy of our age, Schneerson, who some even believe to be the messiah (really), held up the work I quoted as required reading for all Jews. Did his work have a commentary attached, which described how these rules are no longer in effect? No.
One of the issues here is that Jews aren’t supposed to teach gentiles the Talmud. As, per Maimonides again, if they study the Talmud they deserve to die (Melachim uMilchamot - 10:9) by the hand of God. So the Orthodox are probably not going to share with you everything in their books. But as an experiment, you can write a convincing email to an orthodox authority about these questions, writing in Yiddish as if a yeshiva student, and then see what they reply with, as then they would reply honestly.
if I'd like to know more about what they really do, I am welcome to come to synagogue or Torah study
I doubt an Orthodox authority would tell you that you’re allowed to attend Torah study unless you are maternally Jewish.
The first Hasidic settlement is more like a town than a city, in contrast to urban Jewry at the time, unless I am mistaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medzhybizh
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