coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
your stories are littered with countless examples of secular Jews ratting out Chareidim
It would be survivorship bias to conclude that these are rare scenarios. In the first case, it’s one of the most important Hasidic figures showing us his outgroup. In the second case, it’s one of the most important Hasidic figures showing us his ingroup. How the secular Jew responds to fraternizing by the ultra orthodox is obviously a separate discussion topic, as it doesn’t tell us the median belief of Orthodox Jews to born-Jews. We know about these cases because we have been told about these cases, and we would not know about these cases if the secular Jew did not “rat out” the Orthodox. It would be a mistake to quantify the membership of the Italian mob based on how many Italians rat them out, right?
i don’t think that a rapidly growing ultra-orthodox population gaining more political power reduces the threat of antisemitism at all
It’s a question of when the gentiles realize the consequences of the population shift. Right now I would put my money on team ultra orthodox. The average American’s intuition is shifting toward Semite-skepticism but the average knowledge about the ultra orthodox among those who aren’t their neighbors is merely that they build funny tunnels. Their best bet is to increase their numbers. Increasing numbers increases political power when you block vote.
the Chareidim increase antisemitism
The Hasidim don’t care about bad words on the internet, which do not affect them. They care about political pressure against them, and increasing their numbers and influence increase their political advocacy.
We know that the Chareidim (whose perspective you can easily see on their forums, yeshivaworld etc) almost universally despise these secular Jewish organizations
That is motivated by their fear of assimilation with the goy. The secular Jew is still Jewish and they want him to be like them.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
The Haredi in this case are explicitly anti-goy, and they consider the Jews to be historically mistreated by gentiles, and they are very concerned about the Jewish people and Israel. This is evidenced by the quote I cited, which was said confidentially to a secular Jew. I can provide more quotes although it’s a bit annoying because I can’t ctrl-f (the book isn’t online). Your argument that the Haredi haven’t done anything to combat antisemitism and therefore they don’t care about antisemitism is speculative and non-central. It is speculative because we don’t know the extent of Haredi donations to holocaust propaganda or Combat Antisemitism or anything else. It is non-central because they are interested in increasing their size and political power, thereby increasing Semitic power, thereby decreasing the threat of antisemitism.
If they cared about threats to the Jewish nation, they would fight for it
In 140 years they will have a high enough population in NYC and NJ to rule over it politically. They already abused their political power to misuse one billion in educational funds in NYC or extract money via Cars 4 Kids. One of my favorite scams the Hasids did is when they attempted to blackmail financier Steve Cohen. The influential Balkany called Cohen, complimented his Kohanem status, told him he silenced a fellow Jew planning to report him to the SEC, and then requested millions of dollars for his Jewish school. In this case, Cohen ratted him out, but this wasn’t a one time scam. Balkany, by the way, was Rubashkin’s lawyer when he was charged with the largest illegal immigration employment violation in US history.
Most of the communities are nominally Orthodox, although the great majority of Colombian Jews are not religiously observant.
I think you are confused about the details of what I sent you. I provided you a link about an ultra orthodox community converting gentiles into an ultra orthodox lifestyle, with every law binding, while preventing them from intermingling with the real ultra orthodox or ever making Aliyah to Israel. In other words, a group of Colombians went to an orthodox Jewish rabbi, said they think they have a Jewish soul, the rabbi “converts” them, but they are kept segregated from the real Orthodox Jews. The existence of Ashkenazi in Colombia does not factor into this at all, as they are not parties to the aforementioned interaction. This is an example of how deeply the Haredi care about Jews as racial people, rather than Jews as ritual-practitioners. Were an Ashkenazi to wish to convert to ultra orthodoxy they would be welcomed with open teffilin.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Rubashkin and his underlings actively hated the gentiles. When Rubashkin was jailed for the largest illegal immigration bust in history, only brought to light because of their extreme torture of animals which didn’t even follow kosher regulation, the entire Hasidic world rallied around him in support and actually succeeded in getting him a presidential pardon. Dershowitz and other secular Jews were involved in that pardon. Their hatred of the gentile Christians stands in stark contrast to their acceptance of the Jewish secular journalist, who they wanted on their side. Let me give you an example from the book, Rubashkin’s right hand man Lazar talking to the secular Jew, already accepting him as the ingroup:
”I am a racist,” Lazar said, seemingly from nowhere. “Why is it that Israel has persisted to exist for so long? Why haven’t the Jews been extinguished after scores of attempts throughout history? There is only one answer. We are better and smarter.”
”The goyim will always be the goyim, no matter how nice they are to you. So what’s the point?” Lazar’s comment underscored the Hasidim’d contempt for non-Jews, which wasn’t limited to the Postville gentiles, but to all Christians. […] The Hasidim were waging a cultural holy war in Postville, Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Paris —everywhere. Their world was Jew vs non-Jew, and the dichotomy existed in everything they did […] If the city of Postville tried to enforce any ordinance the Jews disagreed with, the immediate cry was anti-semitism. You were pacing the way for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people, the world’s Chosen People.
I don’t really know how much more outgroup the gentiles can be for the Hasids.
Chareidim are usually moderately tolerant of converts. But Colombian Ashkenazim are, even if nominally orthodox, closer to secular Anglo-American Jews than to Chareidim. They are not, with few exceptions, a highly observant population
What I sent you were gentiles intent on converting to Orthodox Judaism, and indeed following every rule and officially converting, but they are purposefully kept apart from the orthodox community, and are not considered Jews.
that the ultra-orthodox are unconcerned by antisemitism
I mean, I have an award winning book in my hand abundant with quotations showing this is not true. It is written by a Jew and features quotes from the head of a Hasidic sect. Antisemitism defines their religion!
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
The outgroup of Hasidim is gentiles. Secular Jews are the subject of intense outreach attempts by Hasidic organizations. Hasidim would love nothing more than every maternally-born Jew to become Hasidic. They spend money attempting to do this. There’s a first person account of this in Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (which is an amazing read). The head of a Hasidic dynasty (Rubashkin) personally made time to recruit a secular Jewish journalist, drawing a firm line between us (Jews) vs them (Iowan Christian Whites). There are abundant quotes by Rubashkin to that effect. Rubashkin had him put on teffilin, and at a dinner party spoke at length about how he should have lots of Jewish children. Rubashkin only ostracized this secular Jewish journalist when he learned that the Jewish journalist was sympathetic to the mistreatment of the gentiles by his Agriprocessors business. Once the Hasidic head realized the Secular Jew was siding with the gentiles, there was no more cameraderie and he was no longer a member of the ingroup. But for every moment before, he was greeted and invited and loved as a fellow Jew.
I can take screenshots of the book if you’d like. It’s probably the best single piece of evidence of the relationship between the workings of ultra orthodox Jewish ingroup vs outgroup dynamics. The Hasids truly hated the gentiles and likened them to animals, and they rejoiced at the prospect of scamming them. To the secular Jew they extended a sympathetic hand and beckoned them to join their side, all while advising him to have lots of children, criticizing him for only having one.
Now, compare this to the “new Orthodox Jews” of Colombia. Hundreds of Colombians converted to Orthodox Judaism, following every custom, but the head rabbi of Colombia has specifically excluded them from the eligibility of birth right. They are only “Jewish” as a parallel community that can’t taint the actual orthodox community of Colombia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/04/14/converts-judaism-colombia/#:~:text=The%20emerging%20Jews%20are%20not,They%20are%20a%20parallel%20community.%E2%80%9D
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
There was also a discussion last week about fertility = female status to check out too. I 100% agree. I don’t think people realize how completely the Hasidim in America debunk an environmental or economic cause. It can’t be environmental because they live in Brooklyn and Jersey. (A good researcher should look into microplastics and their garments however, perhaps how often they eat liver.) It can’t be economic because they are poor. It’s true that the Hasidic billionaires and millionaires subsidize the lives of the poor and that they all sorts of tax fraud schemes, but they are still poor, and in fact Hasidic women will work fully or part-time to support their husbands’ Talmud studies. So, what do they do? Having children is a status marker for both men and women; Hasidic girls at a young age learn about motherhood and how to value motherhood; they are completely cut off from America’s misogynistic culture of telling women that they need to sacrifice their life-potential to work.
It’s a mix of two things. (1) Status: I get fulfillment, social respect, attention, and conversation revolves around that; I am fulfilling God’s will by increasing the number of my people’s children; I am doing a good deed by increasing the number of my children because my people are oppressed. (2) Something we don’t have a word for: “the satisfaction in going through with the skills and stories you have heard from your youth”. It’s easy to do something you were trained in as a kid. Hasidic women don’t have to google anything about child birth or motherhood. They know everything already and what they don’t know will be explained by a wise elder over a cup of coffee (do they drink coffee? I actually don’t know). It’s not stressful or arduous at all. Not having children is stressful as you fall saliently behind your peers.
Japan was mentioned ITT as an example of a country that idolizes homemakers but has a low TFR and I think this misses something. It can’t be “you get respect from economic success and homemaking”, because then women will choose economic success. It has to be homemaking. By homemaking I mean raising children and all tasks associated with it. Japan is a consumerist culture, more so than America, and women have infinite distractions to enjoy which aren’t having children, and walking around as a mother does not grant you any status. In Hasidim, walking the streets as a mother of 16 kids would have you greeted like a saint for the blessings you have brought forth in the world.
“Artificial wombs” should be left out of this discussion entirely because it’s as ridiculous as believing in spontaneous generation. That isn’t going to happen. We are trying to raise healthy children, and they need mother-child contact for years.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
The best case for freedom of speech is that “ideas / types of social organizations float to the top”, but the worst case is that large swathes of the population get manipulated by bad values and lifestyles. We need some way to ensure that only the class of people for whom freedom of speech is genuinely useful are able to practice it. Some ways to do this: (1) restrict freedom of speech to men between the ages of 23-35 who have passed a feasible course on logic, psychology, and sociology either in a written or verbal test; (2) a social practice of electing benevolent censors who filter information for the rest of population, who have passed a more arduous course and are also selected by personality and honesty; (3) require new ideas to be judged in a dispassionate way first, written and read like a PhD thesis; (4) never throw out ideas deemed bad, but sort them and archive them away, so that they can be accessed by reasonable people but not unreasonable people.
If you have a social organization (whether political or communal) which manages to elect “censors” who are genuinely honest, intelligent, and wise, who are humble enough to elect people even greater than themselves, then you have an eternal upwards spiral of prosociality. That can be applied to people, ideas, media, everything. It is the number one most important social technology and is a requirement for human advancement.
So, as examples
(1) astrology would never enter the minds of young people, because they would never read it and be mislead by it — it has literally mislead millions of people who waste time on it, and millions more for centuries in the past.
(2) no song about drugs would ever enter ears of the youth.
(3) loot boxes and gambling would be banned forever.
(4) non-prosocial video games would be relegated to the infirm.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
I agree mostly but “poetry and metaphor are just what a God does” stands in stark contrast to the modern understanding of the divine, which is philosophizing for the theologian and assertions (with maybe some music) for the congregant. We attempt to philosophize something that is inherently poetic-potent, like trying to bottle lightning, which creates a vastly different feeling of the divine phenomenologically. Today there is very little hyping up of God for the purpose of hyping and basking in that potency, which from the ancient texts is just kind of how they did worship. That the earlier gods were potent in a given capacity (of the sea, of war) makes me think that this is the root kernel of religious language, rather than a way that humans merely expressed the root kernel (the expression is the substance, not just a consequence of their root religiosity). It goes beyond mere assimilation of rival stories.
And from the perspective of identity and behavior transmission (you should be this and do this), this is important to dwell on. Saying “God is omnipotent” or “God loves you” does not change a human’s identity or behavior, because it lacks potency and signifies nothing real. Poetry and stories are potent, as are art and architecture, and this is where divinity lies, not in assertive or philosophical language. If religion is truly about inculcating behavioral and value changes, then theology matters zero, potency matters 100%.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Even if we ignore the poetry of the cosmos, poetry and metaphor are the primary (if not exclusive?) way of talking about God in ancient Judaism and Christianity. God is shield, sun, hiding place, shepherd — yet also the Ancient of Days whose word causes his servants to tremble… usually these poetic instantiations don’t intermingle. The psalm that hypes up God as shepherd isn’t the psalm that hypes up God as vanquisher of foes, which isn’t the psalm that begs God with a broken spirit / heart… what unites every poetic block is that in a given context and with a given focus, God is the potent and compelling thing considered. For fear of sins, his punishment is described potently; for love of living, his mercy and created beauty; etc.
That’s probably a good theory of origin for monotheism
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
This one has a benefit of describing the concept of deity sociologically: what is that which when described is most compelling to the subject? A secularized Anselm’s ontological theory. If the language is sufficiently compelling, you will modify your identity and behavior, which is the intended result of religious systems. We can tie this into the studies on awe as a learning mechanism with its reduced default mode network etc. The Abrahamic God elegantly combines the innate awe-reaction to the natural world (the Red Sea) with the prosocial submission to a perfect human-like presence (he parted the Red Sea, for your safe passage).
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
An interesting way of reading early Abrahamic religious texts: forget God as a cognitively-stable conception of a Being with attributes, and consider God as the placeholder for maximally persuasive and potent language. I’ve always wondered why the Old Testament had zero interesting philosophizing about God; instead of saying God is omnipotent, they will spend paragraphs about how God “stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea”. Why the incessant poetry? Why is there no describing God philosophically or as a set of assertions etc, when this would be an obvious thing to do and include in your sacred texts? I think now it’s because their focus was on powerfully persuasive language, and not the “entity” God per se. God is essential for the use of the powerful language — the Word, if you will — but actually of no use outside of potency and persuasion.
You could reverse engineer a lot of religious language with this question: “what repute and metaphor and story can I use to make someone pay attention to what I am telling them?” The language would have to be universally understood if you’re attempting a central text. Everyone understands the world, so God is its creator; they understand death, so God keeps one from the grave; or maybe they understand a certain social archetype, and so God “awoke as from sleep, like a strong man shouting because of wine”. God is the combination and crescendo of potent / persuasive felt language, and in a funny way, his power is reduced by abstracting him. “God is omnipotent” is not something that actually comes with a feeling or memorable mental image, so it is useless. It’s like the composer Tavener’s piece the Whale. If you merely describe the scientific details of a whale, it means nothing. If you write Moby Dick, it means everything.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Same experience, I went twice for random reasons as a kid and the reverence of the place was palpable. A mix of reverence, seriousness, glory, order, stability… it’s actually one of the more interesting places to go because these moods are rare in America. If I lived nearby I would through it frequently.
Re the above —
yet simultaneously is so theatrical and useless, pseudo-monastic”
The costly, theatrical, monastic signal is extremely useful for inculcating values. If cathedrals were made of painted cardboard they wouldn’t be so interesting.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
I’m extremely skeptical of the phrase “non-“duality”. Is there anything valuable to be gleaned from non-duality as a concept?
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Other groups have high birth rates. These groups are different from your group and have different values. It makes no sense to work for a future in which all of your labor will go to a group replacing you. Sadly birth rates are conflict theory stuff. There are 300k Hasidim in America with a population that doubles every 20 years, so there will be 10 million in 100 years, mostly in and around NJ / NYC, and they already possess extreme political power. Factor in the other groups: Amish, Salafists, etc.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Sophisticated religious systems include humility-generating training regimens involving introspection and self-judgment, whether that be confessions or something more rigorous like the Ignatian Examen.
There are large differences between types of crime. Fabricating science is not a crime of passion. I don’t think it is impossible to suss out causation. An easy way to determine causation is by analyzing adopted twin data according to religiosity and family income and so on.
main predictor is going to be material cost/benefit analysis, not internal experience of morality
We have cases of people who abstain from a crime despite the opportunity. Personal religion involves costs and benefits that are salient and compelling, some of which are non-material and some are material-to-be.
requiring leaders to publicly profess belief in something unprovable
We do not require students applying to university to tell us what their teachers say about them, we require the teachers to tell us.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
I wish there were a study which looked into the personality and religious beliefs of scientific fraudsters. It doesn’t appear to be linked to race, culture, or country of origin, but I can easily see religious belief being correlated with lower levels of fraud because it’s all about intrinsic moral motivation and identity. And if that’s so, our institutions should require religious belief in a personal diety for high-level positions which require trust, without favoritism toward any one system of belief or denomination.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
You think that the median American gives actual extra honor to the families of fallen soldiers? “We have to invite James to this function, he’s a gold star family member”; “You should really date Dave, his brother died in Iraq”. I think there is some pity to these families, but I would be surprised if their honor has substantively increased meaningfully as a result.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
But status is relative. If you increase everyone’s pay you haven’t changed the percent of income they devote to status. Everyone will just spend more money on that one kid’s opportunities. If Koreans get more money they will spend even more on ensuring one high status kid. So what is important is to value number of kids as a mark of success for half the living humans (all the women), to balance out status concerns.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
F-LFPR doesn’t tell us what the Japanese woman or the Italian woman values, how she sees her identity in the world, whether she was nurtured at a young age to want to nurture children, and whether she feels pride/shame relative to her participation in fertility, all of which relate to status. It’s not clear that there is more going on, I don’t think, at least not from F-LFPR. If there is something more complicated than this, we should see the answer in the Hasidim, who raise lots of children while living near-exclusively in urban and suburban environments. This eliminates any diet or environmental toxin -related etiology. What is left? There’s money, but the experiments in paying women to have kids don’t amount to anything. So what’s actually left besides “pro-fertile culture” which relates to female status?
(Israeli non-orthodox fertility is complicated by the existence of the ultra-orthodox, who raise up the religious scholars, affect culture, and a percent of the ultra-orthodox become merely “religious”. The Jewish religion probably also increases female fertility as a status signifier because it’s so worldly / material regarding “existence of the Jewish people” etc.)
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
That wouldn’t boost status. Status is a real, felt, living social reality. What confers status is genuinely sought after. No status is conferred from participation medals or competitions where there are not losers. A congressional medal is pretty much worthless. You need “potentially valuable social others” to genuinely value you more highly as a result of the criterion of status. So what is required is a totalizing social change, not something fake. (“Gold star families” as a phrase fills me with utter disgust; it connotes kindergarten activity points and does not actually honor the families of dead soldiers).
An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines
S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?
[Status] finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth). Status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.
Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce. People kill themselves over loss of status.
In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from
50,000 to64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How? The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).
Will Storr describes: "In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status.
[Post-enlightenment things began to change.] We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.
I find that small “status is relative” comment valuable for understanding fertility trends. It’s obvious, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle easy to ignore. There is a limited amount of status to go around, and we disperse status points as if we are in a video game dispersing points on a skill tree. We can only increase certain behaviors at the expense of other behaviors (through omitting esteem and interest, ie status). With that acknowledged, let’s remember that motherhood is a complicated and arduous 6-year process per baby (overlapping) which requires specific skills and a specific interest (nurturing a young human). This means that even if we did esteem motherhood as highly as women working traditional male jobs, that wouldn’t affect fertility because of the additional contingent pleasures of the workplace (socializing, disposable income, a familiarity of work skills via schooling and no familiarity with homemaking and motherhood skills). And so what is actually essential is to, well, actively dislike women working. To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to be degraded, demeaned, or at least lowered relative to women focusing on the life required to be mothers. This would appear to be necessary to increase fertility according to basic human psychology: the importance of status and reward-contingency as a necessary component of reinforcement. As long as women obtain status from work, it’s unlikely that attempts to hack together a high-status motherhood culture will work. If a guy can get status from video games or war, he will choose video games, right? Motherhood is more difficult and more important, so the status associated with and the lifestyle which precedes it needs to utterly dwarf the Industrial GirlBoss Complex.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
It’s hilarious how these are the exact wrong people you want possessing decision-making capabilities regarding AI. Like, the moral test was placed in front of them, and they all failed it. They chose money over (1) honesty (2) their own pledged word (3) morality (4) the public Good.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
DESTINY'S SCHIZO ARC - [KINO EDIT]
(Obligatory: am not a fan of Destiny)
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Contra some of the other comments, I do think democracies are a proxy for civil unrest, even if that wasn’t the express purpose of democracy originally (cf etymology fallacy). Democracy is an outlet for political rage and catharsis. Radicals become political influencers and their danger to civil order is diminished as a result. Corrupt people who love power don’t raise armies but lobby politicians. Everything becomes a little safer and more prosocial with the democratic spectacle. I think there’s actually an interesting principle, “subversion subversion”, that’s at play in different antifragile social organizations — you subvert the subversive’s tendencies back toward the social order, like Ted K’s writings on the System’s Neatest Trick. Democracy does this by having political radicals work through the political process but it also does this through the mythology of voter equality, voter knowledge, and votes mattering; there’s an implied value scheme you don’t realize you are signing on to, that your political power is identical to someone else regardless of qualities. Chinese “communism” does this by calling itself true communism, giving actual communist rebels difficulty gaining support (but we have communism at home!). Christianity does this by venerating a figure of religious radicalism and innovation, capturing rebels toward the cause while also delegitimizing the attraction to antisocial rebels (we already have that figure, he is the head our hierarchical church).
The evangelical does not define his membership by genealogy. He does not make daily prayers to a people and a tribe and a nation. A better example would be an evangelical trying to save a different evangelical who is living in sin. In this case, yes, they are the same ingroup. The Orthodox are compelled by their belief system to consider lapsed Jewry to be their ingroup due to their qualitatively distinct divine spark as described in the Tanya and spoken about by Schneerson, their quasi-messiah. This is a very fitting parallel — per Forward,
Schneerson identifies with secular Jews to an extreme degree:
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