coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I don’t think he is ordinarily trustworthy, but I checked all his links and the links appear trustworthy to me.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
That’s replied to in my post: East Asian cultures have strong pressure to reproduce yet do not, which nullifies the social pressure hypothesis. Highly religious cultures will also reproduce regardless of social institutions, eg poor Muslims who have moved to France — and also, social institutions are usually formed consequent to desires: if there were a strong desire to have children then the social institutions would form as a consequence. We have social institutions for all sorts of desirable things from furry fandoms to Marxist communes to higher education.
Progressives who claim to have piles of self-love
They may claim this, but I think in actuality they don’t. They don’t believe that they as individuals are particularly valuable to the universe, they don’t believe that their culture is positive let alone God-ordained, they don’t believe they were specially chosen for anything, and it’s questionable whether they enjoy “just living” in the sense of the devout. IMO these people are usually attempting to cure the low-esteem that permeates their life, without much success.
Men in tribes that are 'hyper-competitive'
In nomadic cultures you mean? Like Bedouins? These culture heap pride and privilege on men, and there are religious rituals that create either an “equality among believers” or extreme affiliative pride. Which hyper-competitive tribe are you thinking about which doesn’t have a religious festival that enhances male self-love?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Max Blumenthal’s TheGrayZone has an interesting article compiling accounts of Israel shelling / shooting its own citizens during the October 7 attack. Lots of citations to mainstream newspapers; of course, that shouldn’t preclude being skeptical of his overall point. Some excerpts:
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
An Israeli woman named Yasmin Porat confirmed in an interview with Israel Radio that the military “undoubtedly” killed numerous Israeli noncombatants during gun battles with Hamas militants on October 7. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she stated, referring to Israeli special forces.
According to Haaretz, the army was only able to restore control over Be’eri after admittedly “shelling” the homes of Israelis who had been taken captive. “The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed,” the paper chronicled. “Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
Hitting low-probability potential targets in order to prevent hostages leaving Israel — regardless of whether it kills the hostages — would be in line with Israel’s Hannibal Directive. Examples of this in the past include —
The Hannibal Directive was invoked in October 2000 after the Hezbollah capture of three Israeli soldiers in the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms area. An Israeli border patrol was attacked by a Hezbollah squad with rockets and automatic fire. St.-Sgt. Adi Avitan, St.-Sgt. Benyamin Avraham and St.-Sgt. Omar Sawaid were captured and brought over the ceasefire line into Lebanon by their captors. When the abduction was discovered, the Northern Command ordered a "Hannibal situation". Israeli attack helicopters fired at 26 moving vehicles in the area since they assumed that the abducted soldiers were transported in one of them.
During the 2014 Gaza War, the third major offensive launched by Israel in Gaza since 2008, IDF Givati Brigade Lieutenant Hadar Goldin was captured by Hamas soldiers after a brief skirmish on August 1, despite the announcement of a 72-hour ceasefire agreement earlier that day. Israel then reportedly initiated the Hannibal Directive, ultimately resulting in carnage dubbed "Black Friday. The IDF carried out air and ground attacks on residential areas of Rafah during the Hannibal Directive attempt to prevent capture of Lt. Goldin. A2015 joint report by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture found that Israel's indiscriminate violence against all human life amounted to war crimes. […] The massive Israeli bombardment killed between 135 and 200 Palestinian civilians, including 75 children, in the three hours following the suspected capture of the one Israeli soldier.
I wonder how many of the civilians and particularly the children were actually killed as part of the Hannibal Directive. I guess it’s unlikely we will ever know. How would it change the moral calculus if some quantity of the Israeli children killed were actually shelled by the IDF in an attempt to prevent them becoming hostages and kill the hostage-takers?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Your post is very clearly criticizing what you mistakenly believe to be a clear-cut case of a criminal act on the part of the Palestinian man. That’s why you include the testimony of someone from the Israeli side, omit the more authoritative testimony of the police chief which negates the former, and why you sarcastically write “what a freak acci-“ and an emphatic “oh”.
But it’s just not clear cut right now. That’s not my opinion, it’s the words of the Sheriff who possesses maximal information.
No one is “redefining a public space” here, we are using the limited information we have to make preliminary judgments on who is likely the instigator.
Why would it be “extraordinarily unlikely” that there are mitigating factors or extenuating circumstances for a claimed manslaughter/homicide during a heated protest? IMO this should be the default opinion unless there’s very persuasive evidence. I’m thinking back to Rittenhouse, some of the Unite the Right charges, the Covington Catholic Kids… protests always get raucous for heated issues.
What we know is that: (1) the police lack evidence to charge him, despite the passioned pleas of local Jewish orgs, plus national spotlight on the police; (2) the altercation took place on the Palestinian side, which greatly increases the odds of the Jewish man having instigated the conflict (what was he doing “encroaching on their land”? There’s clear borders put in place by the authorities, the yellow tape*); (3) the Palestinians say one thing happened and the Jews another, yet the Palestinians were right next to the altercation, and thus their opinion outweighs the Jewish one; (4) the Muslim man said he tried to hit the phone, which tells us less than one might think, because placing a phone right in front of someone’s face aggressively is certainly grounds for swiping it away; (5) the Palestinian man immediately acted like a Good Samaritan and called the hospital plus cooperated with authorities.
edit on second look it’s unclear whether the tape was there before or after
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think the article from Forward is pretty good about a facts-only assessment:
[Ventura County Sheriff] said that the nature of the altercation — including “who the aggressor was” — remained unclear because of conflicting statements about what had occurred and a lack of definitive video evidence.
Some of the witnesses were pro-Palestine, while others were pro-Israel,” Fryhoff said. “During the investigation at the scene, deputies determined that Mr. Kessler fell backward and struck his head on the ground. What exactly transpired prior to Mr. Kessler falling backward isn’t crystal clear right now.”
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Male self-love: a key hidden determinant in the high fertility of the conservative religious?
I came across this interesting study (PDF archive link here) that measured the correlation between “dark triad” traits and lifetime offspring. The authors claim that this is one of just a handful of studies on the subject. Among the dark triad traits, only narcissism was significantly associated with lifetime offspring, and only in men. There’s something insightful here, because men and women differ in their level of selection for sex, so a narcissistic woman may be overly-selective and end up with a lower number of offspring. A narcissistic man, on the other hand, is predisposed to be less picky, so his narcissism turns into maximizing offspring earlier with less selection. The study is flawed because it uses a basic question as a proxy for “narcissism”, but I think the preliminary finding and the hypothesis are still worthy of discussion.
A common belief for why religiosity impacts fertility is that having children is socially sanctioned and esteemed among these communities. But on closer inspection this falls apart. Consider that the Japanese and Korean, with their disastrous fertility rates, are chided by their mothers and grandmothers to have children. Their governments and media push family formation which is also a metric for a successful life. All of this is amplified by their culture of conformity. Yet the fertility rate trends downward. Regarding the study’s finding on the difference of male and female narcissism, we can note conservative religion privileges men uniquely with honor and respect. In traditional religions, women usually cover their head and stay quiet in sacred spaces as symbolic gestures of obedience. Women are told to be subservient to their husbands and that their role is to support him, which works to reduce female self-esteem and increase male self-esteem. Men are told that they are privileged by God for certain duties.
There’s a more significant dimension to this that I want to discuss. Having a child fundamentally changes a person’s life, and people do not voluntarily change their whole lifestyle unless the pleasure of the change outweighs all the discomfort. You need to sincerely desire the change to make the change. Humans are terrible at making changes that are merely “good for them” in the abstract without any concomitant overriding pleasure, which obesity and addiction and low exercise rates clearly prove. So when we’re talking about having children, we really ought to ask, “why would anyone want to be around a child every day instead of having fun?” Because adults don’t usually make this decision — they don’t skip the bar to go read a book to children at the library. So what’s the reason that the conservative religious actually desire to be around their children, these versions of themself in miniature?
Reproduction in all of its sense
I think that what the fertile religious cultures are good at is inculcating sincere and deep-rooted male self-love. As a consequence of this self-love, they naturally desire to have children as extensions of themselves, to be around and expand themselves. This desire is intrinsic and compelling on its own, and they are not compelled to have children because of a social prescription. Their self-love means that simply being around their child is fun and positive regardless of any criteria of parenting or external criticism. If you love yourself, and know yourself to be loved and to enjoy living, then reproducing yourself is intrinsically desirable. There’s more of you! It’s like a self-friendship, where one wants to increase their friends and time spent with friends.
Now, I mean self-love in a particular way. I don’t think these words — esteem, narcissism, pride — capture the type of positive self-assessment of the devoutly religious. I’m not talking about clinical narcissism here. What I mean is all follows: (1) there is a complete devaluation of capitalist or hierarchical notions of success, as well as concerns for beauty, meaning that a man is buffered against attacks on his worth which overwhelm so many today, eg balding or income, not to mention there’s an equality among believers; (2) there is intensive gratitude for the primary aspects of a man’s identity: merely the state of being alive, having a healthy body, being a man, and being personally selected and personally cherished by the maker of the universe itself regardless of one’s acumen or skillset; (3) lust for one’s wife, contrary perhaps to popular notion, is invested with divine purpose, and each moment of intimacy fulfills a chief command of God Himself; (4) in a counterintuitive way, one’s own life and local community become the center of the universe, because it’s through here that God works, and nothing else has relevance to one’s ultimate purpose, so no such comparisons to self are made.
An immediate (and anticipated) criticism of this would be: what about sin? What about original sin? But sin is just one item within whole religious package, and the package needs to be understood as whole. Whether one believes he sins daily doesn’t actually tell you about his self-regard unless you know whether he is forgiven daily. The emphasis in traditional religion is on the state of being forgiven and favored by God, and the emotions of guilt and shame are fleeting and quickly washed away with more positive emotions. (This holds true for the Abrahamic religions). And so, while sin is a big aspect of religion, it needs to be understood that (in practice) sin is merely a way to increase thankfulness and forgiveness and so forth, which increase one’s own positive valence. (Consider the emotional life of a child who is bad at chess yet is being lovingly tutored by Magnus Carlsen. His self-esteem as a whole is increased, and yet his skill has never been self-judged lower. The calculus on positive/negative valence vs self-judgment can be pretty nuanced).
So maybe this is key variable for understanding religious fertility. Maybe this is why the hyper-competitive, hyper-capitalist East Asian countries are dealing so badly with fertility right now. Maybe the esteem-crushing competition of a consumer nation can never be more fertility-promoting than simply loving the act of being alive. And maybe the direction that society is going with its condemnation of male pride and (seeming) reduction of joie de vivre will prove to be disastrous in the future.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense
Where have you been this past decade? There’s been a whole cohort of young white people raised to hate white culture and white people because of propaganda that depicts them as stained with the sins of oppression and racism. This is called “white privilege” discourse. The shooter specifies white privilege as one of her motivations for the shooting. The motivation is not muddled. She absorbed far left propaganda to hate her race and she lashed out violently as a result. She mentions white privileged, khakis, fancy schools and “Daddy’s money” because these are the ideological memes that she came in contact with.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I just found a UNOCHA report today, updated as of November 4th, that also reinforces my numbers (courtesy of Paul Graham of all people, weird world). 31 out of 1135 identified casualties out of 1400 total reported casualties. If we extrapolate from the ratio it’s still a little under 40 children. Now to address the reasons for thinking there could be many more childrens’ names released,
they won't be in many photos / databases / no nearby family
I’m just not so persuaded by this. It’s 2023, I think they know exactly who is living in these areas especially so close to Gaza. Every Israeli is reaching out to other Israelis in the affected areas, there’s social media, there’s employers, there’s property records, cell phone plans … so I’m not persuaded here. But of course, I can be wrong! But I think my assessment is somewhat more probable. This isn’t a natural disaster where all the lines are down and hundreds of thousands have fled to various shelters.
norms
Possible, I guess. But I think Israel would also be interested in determining deaths from youngest to oldest, identifying younger individuals first.
how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts
My original linked article from the intercept provided a compelling argument that we should trust the ministry of health figures, because they have historically proven to be accurate. By that I mean, their reports during past conflicts were later concluded to be accurate by international bodies like the UN.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
But Israel can’t get away with killing that many people. If they tried to “Tokyo Firebomb” Gaza they risk being Dresden’d by Hezbollah, not to mention further alienated by Arab countries.
The question is perhaps not whether Israel is targeting people, but whether those they are targeting are actually militants. Are they targeting the innocent families of journalists and Hamas members? There are claims they have intentionally targeted journalists. If you were a member of Hamas with 300 miles of semi-sufficient tunnels impervious to missiles, wouldn’t you hang out in the tunnels a couple weeks after launching your largest attack in 50 years? Isnt this pretty much a given?Remember, these tunnels are stocked with many months of supplies, and there have been 7000 strikes in Gaza and there are 25k Hamas combatants. It seems more probable to me that these combatants are in their tunnels, and that whoever Israel strikes is probably not a militant most of the time.
From what I can gather on population pyramids, Gaza is 47% under 18 and Israel is 33% under 18. But that Israel figure also includes Arabs so maybe the real value we’re looking for is much lower?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
There is a serious question of whether Hamas was ever using “human shields” during the air bombings in the current conflict, given that they have 300 miles of semi-sufficient infrastructure underground and it was not in their interest to scare the Gazan population from fleeing infrastructure. If the members are overwhelmingly underground, safe from bunker busters, then they were not at all using human shields, and Israel was just punishing the civilian population.
They will definitely be using “human shields” during the ground invasion which we have already seen, but this is no different than how various other rebellions have used human shields, like the Zionists against the British and the resistance against the Nazis.
Another question is whether Israel is actually targeting Hamas members with reasonable precision, when they can just claim an ambulance convoy was being used by Hamas and their supporters will simply believe them. There is almost never evidence provided to the public for these strikes.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
King David had a non-terror objective, if a stupid one
Those resulting in fatalities usually result in conviction and serious sentencing by Israeli justice systems
Can you provide sources for these claims?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I’m genuinely at a loss trying to understand your position. Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that? Do you have evidence to believe that they are intentionally withholding the names and ages of under-18s? Or do you believe that someone would read the half and assume a total?
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
What’s so interesting about this back and forth (beside the fact that either I am embarrassingly missing something obvious or you are aiming for criticism like Hamas aims their rockets) is that we are comparing 2,664 children killed by Israel to the “40 children” figure. Let us suppose that the 40 figure is wrong, and the final count comes to 100. Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Because the word instigate means to initiate, or cause to occur, or to begin urging some action. Zionism, as a modern era push to create a Jewish state, began with Ashkenazi Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zionism
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The Haaretz paper has every name and age of half the killed… which I linked and specified. So your original point wasn’t very relevant, though I grant the unlikely possibility they are holding back on the children’s’ names. If you look at the number provided, it’s half the total of the dead. Here’s someone doing an age breakdown: https://twitter.com/lqgist/status/1717623479225241672
The only number we have ever gotten on children killed is 40, which came from the original reporting, and was briefly (and falsely) amalgamated with a story of beheaded babies: here’s a link. Israel has been opaque on total numbers.
Anyway, I stand by my original sentence as being adequately sourced and qualified:
The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I specifically wrote that it is half-complete. It is possible that more under-18s will come out in the full list, but 40 is also the widely distributed number of children killed.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
There are two important omissions and inaccuracies IMO:
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You ignore the DNA evidence that Palestinians are the direct ancestors of ancient Canaanite and Levantine inhabitants of the land, and doubly ignore that Ashkenazim — the chief instigators of Zionism — are half-European in DNA. The crucial question of who the original inhabitants are is swept aside with a misleading, “the area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration [who were the] last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds”. But Palestinians are Arabized more than Arab. They took on the dominant Arab culture and language, and intermixed with Arabs, but this in no way denies their claim to original occupancy. If I leave Ireland for Germany and marry a German girl, and meanwhile the Irish who stayed in Ireland changed their language and creed and adopted some Arab immigrants, I would be (reasonably) laughed at if I arrived by boat and demanded claim to half the land as an original inhabitant.
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You claim that you could never “support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence”. Yet this is precisely how the early Zionists obtained as much land as they did. A chunk of it was purchased through less sadistic means, yes, by concealing their intent to ethnically cleanse the land and only hire Jewish workers. But for much of the land they inflicted terror on the British to pressure them into favorable terms, and terrorized the Palestinians to force them into fleeing. 1, 2, 3. This is important to dwell on: how would Israel behave if their bloodshed couldn’t be excused by targeting Hamas leaders? 40% of their missile strike casualties so far have killed under-18s, right? (The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s). If Israel lacked a powerful state — if they were in the shoes of the Palestinians — would they engage in sadistic orthogonal violence? History says yes. That’s how they were founded. And they also hid under civilian cover, at one point requiring the British to institute a curfew of 200,000 Jews.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think the problem is that these self-made humans are going to be less efficient, less effective, and more stressed as a result of always needing to “turn on the news” and triple-check whether they are being duped. It decreases rationality as a whole because of the needless time spent thinking about whether we are being deceived in our daily or weekly decisions. It’s not about wit levels, but more that we are fretting away our wits needlessly. I recall what David Lynch said about eating the same thing every day at the same time and place, that it gave his mind the room to think about what truly matters. So it could be if we all had trustworthy authorities above us, as a hypothetical child might have an ideal father. If someone can outsource his cognition on trustworthy black boxes then a whole world of rationality opens up where you can think about more and truly important things.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think this hints to a more serious problem: we are a species designed to live in hierarchical high-trust communities, and instead we live atomized under untrustworthy authorities motivated by capital gain.
Humans are designed to black box their cognition but this only works if you can sufficiently trust the inputs and outputs. Many people do not legitimately trust the “grey boxes” today. Worse yet, those who do are continually duped. Something as simple as buying healthy food is fraught with needless issues: what counts as truly organic or grass fed or wild caught, whether organic is actually important, what counts as actually healthy, whether nutrients are even to be found in them because of soil depletion, whether you’re being duped on calories, etc. Buying a vehicle requires that you dump an extra needless ten hours to ensure you are being sold the right thing with the right terms. Moving apartments requires that you scope out reviews to ensure your landlord isn’t a sociopath.
For news it’s all the same problems made worse. Unions bad because GDP? Is GDP relevant to me? But GM workers just got a 25% pay bump. Should I dwell on crime? Should I dwell on immigration? Do I have an obligation to consider the war? There is no organization you can trust, you have no idea who is running it and there’s been a “survival of the fittest” selection of liars, which is incentivized by consumer capitalism. If you are a rootless atomized American you become your own tribal leader, your own high priest, your own adviser, which means you feel obliged to pay attention to the news. You do that, or you become one of the mindless conformists which this forum shits on. What a great choice!
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Look forward to reading (can’t see it just yet)
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Do new users know not to delete posts? I had assumed JewDefender was someone financially / personally invested in, well, defending Jews on online forums, much like we had that one user who coincidentally would post whenever a certain Eastern European nation came up. In this case, deleting old irrelevant posts hardens their identity. I assume this happens not infrequently in online discourse. For some reason themotte comes in really high on google search results when you plug in a phrase of someone’s post. If this is case, which is mere conjecture and not accusation, I’m personally fine with it provided they make good arguments and don’t spam.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I would definitely be interested. The relationship between reason and religion is the most interesting question to me.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I don’t think it is super significant that some Jews in Academia are anti-Zionist if the whole infrastructure of the religion is Zionist. If you consider yourself a practicing Jew and are not a Karaite, the odds are that you participate in and pay a membership to a synagogue which promotes Zionism, and the wealthier Jews of that synagogue spend money on various Zionist associations like the World Zionist Organization. Even the liberal Reform Judaism “views a Jewish, Zionist, democratic and secure State of Israel to be the expression of the common responsibility of the Jewish people for its continuity and future.” Zionism is entrenched in non-Haredi Judaism. The idea that Judaism is merely a religious community and does not have nationalistic or political aspirations a la Zionism is actually criticized by major Jewish publications,
Initially, Reform Jewry rejected peoplehood and Palestine. America’s Reform rabbis distorted Jewish history and ideology — anticipating today’s ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews — in their 1885 Pittsburgh Platform when they declared: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”
Obviously, Jews as a whole are not “complicit” in Zionism in the sense that they bear moral responsibility and/or blame. Just like not every American in the South was complicit in slavery, not every Catholic complicit in Vatican scandals, not every German complicit in WWII. But the relationship between mainstream institutional Judaism and Zionism is still a little troubling IMO and it can’t be ameliorated with a simple “there are anti-Zionist Jews in academia”.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I asked this in the last SQS but does anyone know what’s up with Jackson Hinkle? A “MAGA communist” spamming low quality anti-Israel tweets has managed to become the most viral twitter account, apparently. Make it make sense…
Did anyone see David Fincher’s the Killer? Thoughts?
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