coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
governimg body uses the pipes meant for water supplies to make rockets
This was debunked, I’m pretty sure.
What percentage of the deaths on October 7th do you think died to Hannibal directive? The policy rescinded in 2016.
That’s also false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel and there’s also a good TheGreyZone article on it.
According to a December 2023 Ynet article, there was also an "immense and complex quantity" of friendly-fire incidents during the October 7 attack.[34][35] In January 2024, an investigation by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth concluded that the IDF had in practice applied the Hannibal Directive, ordering all combat units to stop "at all costs" any attempt by Hamas militants to return to Gaza, even if there were hostages with them.[37][36] The directive was first employed at 7:18 AM at the Erez border crossing to prevent soldiers stationed there from being taken captive. At 10:32 AM, an order was issued to all battalions in the area to fire mortars towards Gaza. Documents obtained by Haaretz and the testimonies of soldiers show that use of the Hannibal Directive was "widespread" after an order was issued to the Gaza Division at 11:22 AM that "Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza." At 2:00 p.m., all units were instructed not to leave border communities or chase anyone into Gaza, as the border was under heavy, indiscriminate fire. At 6:40 p.m., the army launched artillery raids at the border area "very close" to Kibbutz Be'eri and Kfar Azza.[379] It is unclear how many hostages were killed by friendly fire.[37][36] According to Yedioth Ahronoth, around 70 burnt-out vehicles on roads leading to Gaza had been fired on by helicopters or tanks, killing all occupants in at least some cases.[37][36]
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if every non military age male was killed in the Hannibal Directive rather than by Hamas. Because I don’t think Hamas went in with the RPGs required to —
In the aftermath of the attack, Israel buried hundreds of burned cars that were at the scene of the attacks "To preserve the sanctity of those murdered by Hamas
Though a video was “”released”” showing a militant with one, the original footage doesn’t show it. And by the time the IDF was firing at cars, each insurgent already had a car full of hostages. But Zionists wouldn’t stand 1000 hostages in Gaza and only militant-aged deaths, because this would mean that they would have to take their demands for freedom and justice seriously. This is my theory.
Would hamas accept a two state solution on these borders?
I think so, yes
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
Tunnels are not something that would prevent Israel from being on the ground, it would simply add to the casualties. If you think they should blow up and starve all of Gaza because they don’t want to take on-the-ground casualties, then you have to ask why America allowed any on-the-ground casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why not bomb and starve the countries entirely? There were two battles of Falluja separated by seven months — because there was always a sustained insurgent force among civilians. There was a sustained insurgent force through much of the Iraq war, with IED events getting worse as the war went on, peaking in 2007. The tunnel excuse is equivalent to destroying all of Iraq because you don’t want to take casualties from IEDs. Only ~400 soldiers killed in Gaza ground operations so far.
This has a lot to do with holocaust justification for the war being post hoc
Nazis invaded countries and killed many millions of people. This was well known at the time. And there was a lot of war propaganda about rape and civilians being killed. The American soldiers just weren’t sociopaths. They didn’t want to genocide people for losing a war.
The relevant question is what do you actually do if you're Israel
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You can stop blockading the Gaza Strip and stealing land in the West Bank and illegally imprisoning Gazans, which were the ascribed motivations for the attack
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You can not use the Hannibal Directive, which killed some unspecified % of the hostages and civilians (it’s crazy we still don’t know the extent of this)
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You can implement the most asinine security measures to prevent any future attack, starting with a common sense “don’t throw raves right next to Gaza”
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You can pursue diplomacy based on returning encroached land in the West Bank
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
Falluja was fought against insurgents in Iraq. While 60% or more of the buildings in Gaza are destroyed, after this battle (the worst of the urban combat in Iraq) only 20% max were destroyed. Why didn’t America just bomb the city until everyone died? Al Qaeda was fought in the battle of Ramadi. Years long urban battle. Why didn’t America just blow up every single dwelling? Same for in Baghdad, over 2 years.
In reality, footage of postwar Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo looks pretty similar to footage of urban Gaza today
Comparing Hamas, with limited offensive capabilities, to Nazi Germany, doesn’t make much sense. They were compared in the above to show that even the comically worst enemy of history weren’t despised with genocidal intent as Israelis despise Palestinians. But you can’t compare Hamas and their kidnappings / killings to a Nazi invasion of continental Europe. The best comparison is our fight against Al Qaeda and insurgents. They launched an attack on American soil that killed twice the number as Oct 7. We went after Al Qaeda and Baathists as a result. We didn’t aim to starve them to death. This is the closest thing to a 1-to-1 comparison. Vietnam was a notably bad war, people still bring it up all the time as an example of what not to do.
If you were in charge of the IDF and were given the order to militarily destroy Hamas with the soldiers Israel has and the equipment it has, you could likely come up with no military strategy that had fewer civilian casualties than the current approach.
This is unfalsifiable. The few accounts we get from the ground indicate little regard for human life. The recent video of the ambulance workers being killed is an example. You can do what Americans did in Iraq and go into Gaza on the ground. You can enter tunnels and raid homes like we did in Vietnam. If they are unwilling to do this out of fear, then Israel should give up and make compromises. I don’t think the answer is starvation and trying to destroy everything in Gaza.
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
They had Pearl Harbor, but Americans didn’t hate the Japanese much either, from 1940s Gallop polls you can find online. Of course they did use nuclear weapons at the end, which would be a fair comparison.
Imagine if
Or we can just look at 9/11? America didn’t bomb every Iraqi dwelling until every member of the Taliban surrendered. That would be sociopathic. And this caused more casualties than in Israel.
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
Polling from the WWII era disagrees —
https://x.com/gen0m1cs/status/1913800277792039250
Only 25% of active soldiers “really hated” Nazis. 31% felt no personal hatred and 38% thought they were “pretty much like we are”. Among those 25% who “really hated Nazis”, perhaps some amount of them would want to genocide every German, but I doubt it’s more than a few %. And only 29% thought that America shouldn’t supply aid to Germans. Those polled were active soldiers, not the general population like in the Israel polling. So not even an America soldier who literally fought against the Nazis feels the way an Israeli civilian feels about Gazans.
Apparently his manifesto is here: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto
A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.
I suppose for context, here’s something published in Haaretz-Israel yesterday (auto translated): https://archive.md/yI4Dy
In the eyes of Israeli-Jews from all walks of life, thirsting for a "solution" to the Palestinian problem, a survey conducted in March, which sought to examine a series of "impolite" questions, whose place we would not recognize in surveys that are regularly conducted in Israel, shows this. The survey was conducted by one of the HMs at the request of Penn State University, among 1,005 respondents who constitute a representative sample of the Jewish population in Israel. To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative. 65% of those surveyed responded that there is a contemporary incarnation of Amalek, and of these, 93% responded that the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek is also relevant to that modern-day Amalek.
About two months ago, Supreme Court Justice David Mintz rejected the petition of the "Gisha" organization to oblige Israel to ensure the supply of humanitarian aid to the Strip, stating that this is a "biblical war of commandment," and in effect authorized the denial of food, water, and medicine to millions of Gazans. The ruling by Mintz, a resident of the Dolev settlement, who was joined by President Yitzhak Amit and Judge Noam Solberg, from the Alon Shvut settlement, is already taking its toll.
Researchers of the education system point to a sharp shift in the nationalist, ethnocentric direction in the curriculum since the second intifada, and this process has led to high support for deportation and extermination, especially among those who completed their studies in the last 20 years. 66% of those aged 40 and under support the deportation of Arab citizens of Israel, and 58% want to see the IDF do what Joshua did in Jericho
coffee_enjoyer
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23d ago
Well, he served in the IDF and he posted on x defending the IDF actions in Gaza.
coffee_enjoyer
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23d ago
Very awesome quote. “What would CS Lewis think of Disney” now makes me wonder what all the other greats thought of Disney
coffee_enjoyer
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26d ago
The importance of status and peer judgment for promoting behavior. Outside of the workplace, there are few social contexts that try to guide or optimize behavior by consciously and meticulously allocating status. Especially not in a rigorous way to curb antisocial behavior.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
This is a microcosm of the problem with the agency people. “High agency” often just means “putting all cognition energy into obsessive self-gain”. AI that lies to people about dieting? High agency. Made something addicting with little social benefit? High agency. Foregoing relationships and social identity in order to be like the dude from Whiplash with low mood and a TFR of 0.50? High agency.
When all of your elites become high agency, the culture is ruined. No one will have the desire or the ability to solve collective action problems. Something wrong with crime? Sorry, all the high agency people have simply moved to a higher income area. Cheating scandals? All the high agency people know to use chat AI to scaffold their essays. Obesity? No one is there to consider longterm causes, because that’s not high agency. And when America is finally ruined, all the high agency will be on the first flight out of the country.
Agape and philia do not indicate different forms of love in this context. I know CS Lewis says this, but it ain’t so. It’s not something that Origen talks about when he distinguishes between agape and eros, and he definitely would have mentioned it. It isn’t mentioned in the earlier church fathers. Rather, in the context Zizek mentions, the words are used interchangeably. Imagine your girlfriend wants assurance that she is beautiful. “Am I beautiful? … I mean, you think I’m very pretty right? … Tell me I’m gorgeous again.” These are interchangeable within the context, even though there may be slight variations in the usage in colloquial speech.
Just going to quote from some papers on this. In speaking of love, Origen doesn’t even bring up philia, but compares Agape and Eros and concludes that even these two loves are interchangeable in scripture:
Mindful of the indwelling divine love being taken in a carnal sense, clearly with the [ignorant people] in view, Origen returns to the central question in the second half of his discussion on agape in section two of the Prologue. How does the recognition of agapè as a divine name clarify that eros and agapè are interchangeable in meaning? According to Origen, even in the case of God—where it is obvious that we should understand love in the spiritual sense—agape and eros are interchangeable. This is because divine agapé resembles the dynamics of a spiritual sense of eros. This equivalence of agapé and (a spiritual sense of) erõs in the case of divine love becomes evident when we consider the nature of the love we receive from God in Trinitarian terms 33 In unfolding this argument, Origen presents, to my knowledge for the first time in Christian thought, a vision of human deification expressed explicitly in terms of a Trinitarian grammar of love.
Origen's answer rests upon the key conceptual distinction between a carnal sense and a spiritual sense of love. Whereas carnal love (amor carnalis) is directed towards corporeal and changeable realities, spiritual love (amor spiritualis) is directed towards incorporeal and unchangeable realities." Origen's whole argument builds upon the claim that we use the term erõs improperly to indicate carnal love and properly only when indicating spiritual love."' This point escapes the simpliciores, the spiritually immature, who are subsequently endangered by the scriptural language of love as it can be read as an encouragement to pursue carnal pleasure rather than a life of vir-tue.18 This, however, raises the question: what then is spiritual love? According to Origen, scriptural terminologies by themselves will not help because there is no direct correspondence between the conceptual distinction between carnal and spiritual love, on the one hand, and the terminological distinction between agapé and erõs, on the other. As he painstakingly highlights, Scripture can use agapé (noun)/agapan (verb) to substitute for erõs (noun) / eran (verb) in contexts where there is a danger for the weak amongst the readers to fall into carnal sin. But Scripture is equally capable of using erõs / eran terminology to speak of a more elevated sense of love, one that is directed towards higher things.l The conclusion we should draw from this is that the conceptual distinction between carnal and spiritual love is grounded on content and not on terminological difference. It is not that carnal love is erõs and spiritual love agape; rather, both can be used to refer to spiritual love in Scripture. Thus, to discern the nature of spiritual love we need to go beyond terminologies to reach the content of love.
And from elsewhere:
Is there a significant difference in meaning between the two words for love used in the passage, [agapaw and philew]?[…] Most of the Greek Fathers like Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria, saw no real difference of meaning. Neither did Augustine nor the translators of the Itala (Old Latin). This was also the view of the Reformation Greek scholars Erasmus and Grotius. The suggestion that a distinction in meaning should be seen comes primarily from a number of British scholars of the 19th century, especially Trench, Westcott, and Plummer. It has been picked up by others such as Spicq, Lenski, and Hendriksen. But most modern scholars decline to see a real difference in the meaning of the two words in this context, among them Bernard, Moffatt, Bonsirven, Bultmann, Barrett, Brown, Morris, Haenchen, and Beasley-Murray.
As for wealth equality: Christ clearly abhors the “very rich”. Being “very rich” and ungiving damns a person, from my reading. God cares more about this than blasphemy. But we also have very clear and specific anti-equality statements. Someone tells Christ that his brother isn’t sharing the inheritance, and that he should make him share; Christ says that life is not about possessions and that he isn’t the Lord of that. Christ is the Lord of the Moral, not the lord of the specific cultural and legal rules that appear prudent to specific leaders to secure political wellbeing. He is the Lord of “help the poor”, not “no one should ever be poorer”. Or consider:
He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Zacchaeus was rich; he definitely had more than twice the average wage; yet he is only required to give half of his wages to the poor and to give reparation to anyone defrauded. Then he has full approval of God and is saved.
More importantly: the very context of the love statements makes a universal love impossible. Christ is telling his disciple to direct all of his love to the sheep. “Do you love me? Tend my sheep!” The sheep are the brothers, or in this case the younger novice Christian brothers, not random strangers. The strangers are those who do not matter at all. For instance, “If [a brother sins against you and] refuses to listen even to the church [telling him to repent in front of you], let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” You see Christ’s treatment of strangers with the Canaanite woman. It shouldn’t surprise us that these rules make sense in light of utility and game theory and psychology, if you believe in both God and science. Casting your love, a precious pearl, to random strangers, is the quickest way to waste your life and your love and to make the world worse. Consider —
If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.
This is when he tells his followers that they are being sent out “as lambs among wolves”. Now, if the Lord is the shepherd who lays down his life protecting his sheep from the wolves, then who are the wolves? The wolves aren’t sheep; the wolves are in the world; loving the world would be loving “wolves in sheep clothing”, and we have fairytales about that involving grandmas and the hood.
This is Christian love: judge whether someone is worthy if they receive you kindly or hear your wisdom; publicly shake dust off your feet as a statement against them if not; and then remember what your Lord says: their fate is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. I do not know what happened in Christianity that the clear words and obvious meaning of the gospels are ignored. Does this sound like a hippy or something? Does this sound like spiritual William’s Syndrome? Does God want you to pollute your heart by throwing it at the feet of every evil person? Christianity is not a “text-first” religion but tradition first, true, but the tradition itself attests to the primacy and accuracy of the words. There are some ridiculous zero-day bugs that have infiltrated Christianity and made it “fake and gay”. But if you’re Christian you really do have to believe these words. God is love and He defines love in the teachings of His Son, so forget what you know about love and study the Son who knows more.
Further: as Origen and tradition attests, Christ is the bridegroom of our soul. In antiquity, if the bride is found to be spending her love on random men, she would be beaten, if not by her father then by her bridegroom; she may even be divorced on the grounds of adultery. When Origen wrote on Eros and Agape, it was when studying the Song of Songs, which is a sublimated erotic love poem about our soul longing for God. What does the Bride warn in the song? “O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you by the gazelles and does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.” Otherwise: “The watchmen find me as they went about in the city; they beat me, they bruised me, they take away my veil, those watchmen of the walls.” To be more clear: if the Christian wastes the love reserved for “Christ and whom Christ wills” (your Christian community ie sheep), wouldn’t he discipline you? Just like He whipped those who abused and profaned the temple. Because now, your body is His temple; it belongs to Him; and in your body is your heart where the heavenly treasure resides. Okay, this was an allegorical aside, but whatever.
Now I agree that for a Christian, the “love for the cause” must be triumphant over everything. This is seen in Christ: he calls Peter satan when Peter warns Him against going to Jerusalem; he speaks up against elders; he disregards His relatives, and His own family becomes “those who hear the word and obey it”. But Zizek is wrong that the cause is universal love. It’s just not. “Universal love” is taking an idyllic stream and polluting it with Chernobyllic radioactive waste. We don’t love universally, but in accordance with the Love of the Universal Man.
As additional evidence for this, consider the Eucharist. You have to enjoy the Eucharist to have a part in Christ, to be a brother, to be saved perhaps. Only confirmed Christians in good standing could participate, and they had 2-3 years of training and catechesis before being confirmed, involving fasting and repentance and reading. We know this from Justin Martyr, some of the earliest Christian writings we have. This ritual is the only time a Christian sees the living Christ: the intimate shared brotherly meal becomes the real body and blood of Christ; it’s the real living Christ there, and being consumed. This tells you a lot. It’s not radically inclusive love, it’s radically exclusionary and private. At a time when anyone could participate in a Pagan feast, and when the Jews believed in national salvation, this was profoundly exclusionary and private. This was the dominant mode of Christian activity until the 300s which, in my opinion, should never have been altered.
Zizek says
To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving all of humanity directly is not enough—Christ has to be here
This is not quite it. Christ did not love “humanity”: there are many who will see Christ and Christ will tell them He never knew them. Not “I have forgotten you”, not “you never knew me”. No; “I never knew you”. These are the “vessels of wrath tailored for destruction”. For a Christian, true love is this: a man laying down his life for his friends. Not only is this literally what Jesus says, but He literally does it on the Cross. How this happens, is actually never said by Christ; it is compared to Moses lifting up a serpent staff, that those who are bit by those sin-symbolic serpents may not die but live. That it magically absolves your sins upon belief is a satanic thought. But there are at least some things that are sure: Christ loved God that He spent his life learning from His youth. He spent his adulthood healing and teaching others despite guaranteeing His death. He is wrongfully charged for disobedience for misrepresenting scripture, and obediently assents to the sentence. He continues professing truth and love. As He suffered, He sung to Himself some of His favorite songs. He wants His tormentors forgiven by God before He dies. In very mysterious appearances, He returns again. He appears to Thomas in the upper room, like the upper room of the Eucharist, where Thomas touches His side, the same side from whence blood and water flowed. Did Thomas touch the bread turned body? Did Christ’s side flow out in wine turned blood, mixed with water as all wine was had in antiquity? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. I agree with Zizek that the material is immaterial.
This is the Christian stance at its purest: not the promise of salvation, but just such unconditional love, whose message is: “I know you are bent on destroying yourself, I know I cannot prevent it, but without understanding why, I love you unconditionally, without any constraint.”
Christ’s love is, essentially, conditional. It really is. There are some people He never even knew, let alone loved. Christ issues warnings, firm warnings, shocking warnings. He is filled with warnings. Before He sends sinners to an eternal fire, He curses them. If you do not believe this, you are not a Christian, and you’re something worse than an atheist, because you have seen His words and dispute that He said it or meant it. Why does Christ tell us these warnings if not to warn us? A better Christian movie is the Whale. It’s deeply, deeply Christian. The protagonist is saved by warnings to His soul and health, and also primarily due to love for His daughter. (“not giving thanks, nor seeking forgiveness for the sins of my soul, nor for all the souls numb, joyless and desolate on earth. But for her alone, whom I wholly give you.”)
Do you know who else was saved like this? Jonah! You know, with the whale. Is Jonah the sign of unconditional love? Did the Ninevites enjoy God’s unconditional love when they fasted (cattle and man alike) in sackcloth and ashes with only the hopeful possibility that God will have mercy on them? And who “comes in the sign of Jonah”? Who is it that says the sign of Jonah is the only sign He will provide “a wicked and adulterous generation”? It is the One who, “in the days of his flesh, offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, to God who was able to save him from death, and who was heard because of his fearful reverence — He was a son and learned obedience through what he suffered.”
A decent example: if every drug user could be saved by unconditional love, very few white people with loving mothers would be drug addicts. Do you know what would save them? If every time they did the drug, I beat the shit out of them to the point of death and told them I hated them. Sadly this is illegal. But it’s what God does to those whom He loves the most, like Job and Jonah. I have no doubt that if Christ saw the disciple whom He loved drinking too much poppy tea, that He would beat that wicked servant or at least kidnap Him into the desert for an extended 40 day retreat. And this would be love. True love are the true words “given by one Shepherd”, which are “like goads and like nails firmly fixed”. Thank God the yoke is easy.
I do not believe that God wants us to love God “in Himself”, for no contingent reason. I do not believe that there is such a thing as loving a thing outside of what the thing means to us. Love is biological and God designed biology. We love our fathers if they are fatherly, and you have no obligation to love them if they are not. Yet, we have no father on earth! We have a father in heaven who is perfectly fatherly, who “disciplines us for our good that we may share in sanctity”. And “we love because God first loved us”. Similarly, Jesus tells us to love our enemies not because they are human, but because we will be rewarded by God. Because He wants our love perfect, like our father’s love is perfect. Loving enemies is our spartan practice for perfection, and has nothing to do with any obligation that emanates from our enemy.
Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong".
I’d say this is complicated. If we love Christ, even just as a “character”, and celebrate Him in social environments, and are evaluate by our peers with His law, then we will behave like Him. Which is probably the best way we can love like Christ. We can only understand more than this mysteriously, through statements like —
the King will answer, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Notice, again, the focus on brothers. Indeed, the first name of the religion was the Brotherhood.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
The evidence is not always strong. It’s mostly correlative. I’m familiar with adoption studies. I’m interested in how it affects important behaviors, not just any behaviors.
That would require numerous studies with numerous groups
It would require some strong studies with a few groups before I am convinced that culture is less important than previously considered. If Chinese Americans and Chinese French, after assimilation in the 2nd or 3rd generations, are still behaviorally Chinese, then of genetics is even more important than I previously considered, and culture is probably less important than I previously thought. It would add credence to a thought I’ve had recently where cultural institutions are primarily for filtering genetic types and not for directing individual behavior (or rather, it’s for improving multigenerational behaviors through genetics rather than improving an individual’s behavior).
then look at 2nd or 3rd generations (presumably "outside" their culture? To whatever degree?)
Yes, because I’m interested in truth-seeking; I have the luxury to not be engaged in the neurotic janitorial work of academia where careful minds go to die. In real life, because I know that Asians overwhelmingly assimilate into cultural norms, I can use this proxy to obtain the information I’m looking for. An academic would have to first spends year and publish papers “proving” that Asian Americans assimilate, when it’s obvious.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
IMO Asians assimilate in every aspect of culture, including parenting and worldview. If their educational attainment and criminality are the same after 2/3 generations then it would be strong evidence that the effect of culture on behavior is insignificant. I know there’s already studies like this wrt immigration in Europe but I haven’t seen one for this.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Do we know anything about 2nd or 3rd generation Han / Japanese / Korean criminality and educational attainment? I’m not looking for Asians generally, because of Hmong. This could conceivably tell us the influence of culture on behavior, no?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
It’s really not a big deal at all. Children are insulted by other children all the time. As a kid, skateboarding with long hair, I had lots of adults insult me. If anything, the kid developing a phobia about stealing is the best possible experience a young black kid can have in America.
Should she not do it? Yes. Is it “absolute” trash behavior? It’s a mild act of immorality, unlike the act of allowing your child to steal.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
She isn’t receiving the money for insulting a child (with a word he is likely to use 1000 times in his life against other Africans, often with prejudice attached). She is receiving the money as reparations for an unjust system of oppression that permeates the fabric of America, where a small racial infraction while White leaves you reputationally and financially destitute. There is a huge difference here. It’s not for congratulations, it’s a sympathetic safety net for a mother who has to deal with institutional racism against her people in America, in a state which her forefathers braved the cold to build from nothing.
Two other things to note:
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Somalians are statistically horrifying, with low intelligence and high cousin marriage, with a TFR greater than 5 and a grizzly Islamic culture resistant to Western civilization, plus a history of scams in Minnesota eg autism clinics. There are 100,000 in the state and growing. If calling every Somalian the N-word got them out of the state, it is arguably a moral obligation incumbent on every fairer resident to do this, in terms of securing utility. Shiloh is on the Right Side of History, if there exist future Whites in the state to write it in Deseret.
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The funds have the secondary effect of deterring the antisocials from filming grievances that they instigate. If white people get money for their low willpower replies irl (colloquially called n-word fatigue), then we will have fewer White / Karen shaming in America. This is for the utilitarian good.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
But it’s at least the case that Jesus larped, and then the Disciples larped when writing about specific miracles.
People have no idea how real world change is actually effected. Freemasonry sprung out of a LARP novel about a fictitious Rosicrucian Brotherhood; freemasonry rituals involved LARPing; this organization had a huge effect on the modern West. If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament — yet it’s the most important movement of religious history. The entirety of the Roman elite were engaged in various “mystery cult” LARP rituals, like the Mithraists who were LARPing their own version of a Persian cult. Hitler, of course, was motivated by Wagner’s Live Opera Role Playing work Rienzi, a LORP, and then joined a LARPing movement filled with LARPing occultists who inflated their numbers, and before all his speeches he neurotically LARPed the gestures to seem organic and impassioned. It was LARPing all the way down, and the last thing you can say about Hitler is that his influence on reality was small.
The thing about the LARP is that the more you do it, the more it becomes true. If I were to throw you into the Chinese military, to do their ritual allegiances, you would be faking it 100%. But when you fake it, there’s invisible peer pressure and then music and ambience which changes your memory of the event… The second time you do it, it’s only 95% fake. After enough times, you wouldn’t be LARPing anymore. Provided that the ritual is actually reinforcing the right things. Not too dissimilar to the techniques used by the Chinese in the Korean War to gradually change a person’s identity. Of course, it’s far easier when you yourself are interested in modifying your own identity.
It’s like if I just repeat an affirmation, that’s not going to do much. But if I repeat it while elaborating upon all the connections in my life, and all the benefits, and I imagine various rewards of the affirming identity, over time I will believe it. Our own identity is constructed by memories, and we can modify our memories and make new ones — ergo, we can construct our own identity. This is akin to sports hypnotism. It works.
LARPing isn’t fake, it’s pre-reality. What’s fake is people pretending that they are in reality, when they are doing nothing. This comprises a lot of posting online. Posting online does little; LARPing identity rituals can change the entire history of the world. I imagine that this is part of the reason why IRL organizations are routinely slandered as LARPs — it is a useful tool to prevent anything that has actual potency from disrupting current structures.
Also, “authentic belief” itself is kind of mysterious as a concept. If I’m some guy online, and I write all these logical reasons for why Jesus is definitely God, but my behavior in the world does not evidence this belief, then do I really believe it? I mean, Jesus says right there that giving away my wealth gives me 100fold in this life and the next. So, why am I not doing it? There would be no better investment or use of my time. The reason no one does it is because they don’t actually believe. Whatever they say they believe, it doesn’t matter, because their revealed preference belief is that they don’t believe. So their criticism of others’ lack of belief is Pharaiscal. They would be more faithful to a Mr Beast challenge prize. And well, of course, Jesus also assumes this, hence why he spends so much time talking about how we need just the faith/trust the size of a mustard seed. I think that, we don’t really believe as we think we believe; we believe we believe, because this feels good; in actual fact, in our soul, we do not believe. And we don’t believe because there is insufficient social reinforcement / identity-rituals regarding the belief. The “faith statements” are something of a stretch or exercise: you practice believing that this bread is real flesh, and that the man was born a virgin and revived from death, in a socially-reinforcing way; and though you will never fully believe, you will at least be convinced part of the way, that it’s a good idea to be kind and a little giving. The faith statement is not a belief statement (we don’t accurately know what we believe) it’s instead an exercise with a mechanical consequence in our behavior.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Another poster in that thread asked you for your research notes. Do you know of any accessible articles or books on this subject that I could share with normie friends and family?
I haven’t found a singular source for this kind of “dark arts” of manipulation. Everything I’ve learned has been via trawling through studies on google scholar, I’m afraid. If I write a longer post on all the ways we can be inadvertently / invisibly manipulated, I’ll ping.
I have no problem with billionaires investing, provided that every single time they take that money out for personal use, it is taxed so that most of the returns go to other people, and not wasted on their own consumption. This is an easy way to get the best of both worlds. Charity is part of the problem. Look at how Bezos’ wife spent her fortune on racial justice advocacy. I fundamentally dispute that “charity” can be better than raising the middle class worker’s quality of life, unless that charity is for something that actually does this. I have no problem with a law that demands billionaires give money to useful charities.
As for “subsidizing new technology”, I also dispute this and think that wealth inequality reduces technological development. This is because of economies of scale and competition. You can’t buy a new compact cassette player which is as compact as older models in their heyday, because the factories only built models with such precision because of the millions of people looking to buy them. When it’s only one wealthy person buying something, as opposed to millions of people with more money, the results are always worse. This is due to economies of scale and also due to the tastelessness of most billionaires. A billionaire alone could never get an iPhone made, only tens of millions of consumers (at least). Or if you consider the video game industry — there are billionaires who love video games, yet not a single product made specifically for billionaires. Instead, the best titles are made for millions of consumers, or else by a small group who has the “resources” to attempt to make a groundbreaking title!
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I think the question of which economic system is “right” should relate to function and results, which necessarily involves understanding evolutionary instincts (perhaps more than anything else) and metrics of national wellbeing. Our evolutionary nature enjoys both ownership and sharing. It requires incentive and status signaling to do things. It works best with peer competition for status.
So the question of ownership should be a question of degree, not “what is it” or “is it good”; ownership is our evolved desire and understanding that a thing is ours, which we crave knowing, and this concept is simply implemented differently in different economic systems. The healthiest and most dominant people have even more of this instinct, it would seem. A big problem with “capitalism” in my mind is: if we are giving people resources in excess of what is required to incentivize them, then it’s wasted resources. If Bezos would do all the same Amazon stuff at only 20% of earnings, then it’s wasteful to allow Bezos to keep the leftover 80%. Because all the wealth of billionaires in America combined is the lifetime earnings of something like 1.25 million median Americans; more when factoring in billionaire lifetime earnings and not just current wealth; there are better uses for it than expensive properties and cosmetics and ex wives and so on. Like, fuck, imagine being able to allocate one million people toward a project? And the project is necessarily better than the prodigal billionaire? It’s crazy all the resources we waste based on the modern fiction that people “deserve” what “they” made. I want utopia, not capitalist purity spiraling.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
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Tell me up front any surprising or interesting takeaways, so I know whether I ought to read it. If there are none, delete.
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Get to the point, as efficiently and clearly as possible. Smaller sentences are always better, as we digest information in units. Long sentences are for pretentiousness or concealing stupidity, or both.
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If you have successfully organized the information well, you can make it enjoyable to consume. Never in such a way that it negates the significance or order of the information. A little wordplay, a fun reference, or a surprising melding of ideas are best. Scott does this well. TLP did this well.
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if you are writing fiction, make it moral, otherwise you are selling the equivalent of a gas station transfat high fructose corn syrup snack, and you should feel eternal shame. “Oh wow, so fun to read” — are you a child? Moral means, “retrospectively this experience was greater for longterm holistic wellbeing than the alternative experiences presented to me”
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Polemics are enjoyable to read. Reading something angry and opionated is fun. Because we like fights and drama. Angry opinions are more fun to read than the castrated disinfected writings of academics.
My personal opinion
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
IMO
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small writers, researchers, and information-aggregators need to be credited with specificity. This promotes good sources to the top and incentivizes independent efforts. It’s also intuitively good manners. It is what we owe to someone who spent his free time aiding the Common Good.
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if you’re copying an original independent researcher’s small blog, just dropping it in “links” 20 subtweets down is insufficient. The reader will think that the author merely consulted the information but synthesized it themselves in digestible language. But Crem took someone’s synthesized and digestible language and simply reposted it. This would be like if I took an old themotte post and reposted it, just linking it at the bottom, or if I reposted someone’s humorous post for more views and only linked him as a reference. The small guy is owed recognition for his unique effort, or a direct mention; not a footnote.
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Twitter and blogosphere generally = zero-sum status game; there cannot be infinite “interesting people you consult”. Crem siphoned most of the status gains from the “little guy” who may have spent a dozen hours writing an effortpost after reading about aspartame.
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Crem, being the most popular twitter account in his niche, has a duty to promote good manners, ie cooperative prosocial norms. If he doesn’t give sufficient cred, then he is setting a standard where insufficient cred is the rule; suddenly, no one is ever going to do anything new or effortful, because someone like Crem will take most of the status.
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It’s trivially easy to sufficiently share the status. Just say, “x wrote a good summary at y”, or “over at z’s blog”, or “summary is from h”. Best manners would be to find his account and link it. But just “links” isn’t enough.
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Crem’s reply tells us that he is an antisocial status-obsessant like so many others, and people instinctively find this character type repulsive because it’s incredibly dangerous to the Common Good. World of Warcraft saw a similar moral quandary regarding PirateSoftware which essentially led to his plummeting in status. It’s not a “small error” if it indicates a deeper ethical violation, even though this specific error is super super tiny.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Incredible.
I think the Gazans and the IDF soldiers have agency, but I only want to see one of these groups punished severely
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