coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
What specifically do you disagree with in my comment? The OP is asserting that Jews sit at the top of some progressive status hierarchy totem pole; I’m saying that instead they are outside it due to their culture. Then I explained why I think this is, and what you can do if you envy their position.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Let’s apply this principle to other cases (all may answer of course):
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Should we surrender to the Han Chinese, once the Chinese Middle Class is wealthier than ours? We may eventually have to speak Chinese and surely we will all eventually have a Han Chinese genetic infusion. Would this be the correct choice implying China is wealthier than us? Invite them to conquer us?
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Was Ancient Israel in the wrong for revolting against Rome? From a purely material standpoint, ancient Israel would have been more prosperous under perpetual Roman occupation, and all they would need to do is worship the emperor and the Roman pantheon. There would probably be no Judaism left as a result. How many Jews would say this was actually the right choice? Instead the Jews fought back; they were defeated but continued their religion; 1800 years later they have their own nation again. And they rejoice at this fact that, though they were in the wilderness, they held faithfully to the promised land. The Palestinians, of course, are also the descendants of the ancient Jews.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Jewish concerns are an exception case which exist outside the Progressive hierarchy, because they have their own self-contained culture in which ethnic pride is good (indeed, obligatory). I think It’s important when we discuss “Jewish interests” to note that it’s a small percent of the Jewish whole who are committed to extreme pro-Jewish lobbying, but that these are the ones who are wealthy and/or have courted the wealthy, and have ties to Israel and rabbinical schools. It wouldn’t matter if 70% of Jews were hypothetically pro-Hamas because the remaining 30% are the ones who are well-connected to wealthy politically-active Jewry and all the important rabbis and organizations.
If you are envious of Jewish power then you can build up your own racially-conscious religion which emphasizes shared experiences of tragedy and historical uniqueness. It really is that simple. They can exert influence because they have a self-contained cultural ecosystem where “love of race” is encouraged and comprises half the point of the traditions and rituals.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Downthread /u/bro posted a video from a tunnel expert which would make 1 and 4 infeasible. 2 is probably infeasible because of steel doors. 3 would require finding all the tunnels and 5 would require a risky amount of personnel within drone distance.
https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/147199?context=8#context
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
We should probably wait for third party inquiry and confirmation before blindly agreeing with sensational stories coming out of Israel right now. Lots of hidden intel officers among the Israeli public for this exact kind of scenario, and there’s a vested interest in presenting heinous but unverified information involving rapes.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
You’re conflating fundamentalism with extremism here; the topic of the discussion is Zionists. A religious group can be fundamentalist but not extremist, for instance the Amish.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
See if there were any large cohort surveys done across the decades with questions like “would you say you are happy with your life”, “how often do you think about killing yourself”, “do you consider your life to have purpose”, “do you look forward to the future”, “how often do you feel gratitude”
IMO you can’t do “deaths of despair” because Americans have more cheap distractions now than ever, which is certainly preventing some from suicide. You can’t do mental health diagnosis because criteria changes and because of availability differences.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
By reasoning? The same way we use our reasoning to predict other future contingencies. There’s a reason so many people were on board with invading Iraq over WMDs and after hearing about Iraq killing innocents. There was then intense backlash once it was realized that this intelligence gathering was horribly faulty and in some cases fraudulent. So it’s actually already normal to consider what our geopolitical enemies would do if they could, and to make judgments as a consequence.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
AFAIK Hasidim are not Zionist. With that said they have engaged in violence to defend their community in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Square_arson_attack
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I am not taking it as a given.
Per Richard Catling regarding the Deir Yassin massacre in the 40s by Zionists, just weeks before the creation of Israel:
On 14th April at 10 a.m. I visited Silwan village accompanied by a doctor and a nurse from the Government Hospital in Jerusalem and a member of the Arab Women's Union […] I interviewed many of the women folk in order to glean some information on any atrocities committed in Deir Yassin but the majority of those women are very shy and reluctant to relate their experiences especially in matters concerning sexual assault and they need great coaxing before they will divulge any information. The recording of statements is hampered also by the hysterical state of the women who often break down many times whilst the statement is being recorded. There is, however, no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young schoolgirls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested. One story is current concerning a case in which a young girl was literally torn in two. Many infants were also butchered and killed. I also saw one old woman who gave her age as one hundred and four who had been severely beaten about the head with rifle butts. Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers and parts of some of the women's ears were severed in order to remove earrings
The men were paraded in the streets of Jerusalem and spat on before being executed.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Do you think that one group is more immoral than another simply because of chance? So if two people try to kill each other equally, the one whose gun didn’t jam is more immoral? If two people attempt adultery, the immoral one is the one who is more attractive? I don’t think I’m representing your view correctly here. In the case of Hamas vs Israel, I’m saying Hamas can’t be “more immoral than Israel” if Israel would do the same to them all things being equal. This doesn’t imply that international law is suddenly abolished or that the actions can’t be censured by some third party nation. I’m only making an assertion about morality relative to the two. So an application would be that neither Hamas nor Israel get to claim righteousness or moral high ground.
It’s unknowable but we can still consider things that are likely.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Extremist Jews consider their homeland to be Israel which nullifies your example
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Is Joe more immoral than Fred if the action Joe takes is of the same quality Fred would take, were Fred in Joe’s position? The weight of moral philosophy says no. At worst they are equally immoral. But Joe can’t be worse than Fred, if Fred would do the same thing. Joe is only morally worse than Fred if he would behave worse than Fred.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
How would Zionists behave if they were in the Palestinian position?
This is a key question for determining the moral severity of the terrorist attacks we saw this weekend. A common criticism of Hamas is that they engage in terrorism against civilians whereas their morally enlightened (ostensibly) Israeli cousins only attack military targets. But I think this ignores the fact that Israel has the luxury of successfully hitting military targets. Israel can kill just as many civilians as Hamas by targeting military sites, while also killing relevant military leaders and defending against unwanted criticism. Yet at the end of the day, the same if not more civilians are killed, and the same terror is instilled in the enemy’s civilian population. Regarding an Israeli missile attack in May which killed ten civilians, Amnesty writes:
They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.
The idea that it is morally acceptable to kill civilians when you also kill military targets at the same time is often brought up when American bombings in Japan during WWII are discussed. However, I’m not convinced that there is a clear moral difference between Hamas actions and, say, the firebombing of Tokyo, where as many as 100k were killed, the vast majority being civilians.
Back to the question at hand, we know that Zionists had no issue bombing embassies and killing non-combatants in order to colonize the land of what is now called Israel. In the 40s, they notably bombed a British embassy, and in the 50s the Israeli government pressured Britain and Italy not to investigate the bombing. Recently, an Israeli historian has claimed that Zionists were responsible for the bombings targeting the Jews of Baghdad in order to pressure Jews to migrate and settle Israel. So, back when Israel’s position was more similar to Palestine, they did in fact engage in terrorist activity. If Israeli militants would behave as Hamas militants were they in that position, then the immorality of Hamas conduct is greatly diminished in severity.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I have various Israel-Palestine questions for people more informed than me:
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What do you think Israel will do about the hostage situation?
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What’s the likelihood of Hezbollah becoming involved?
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What is the significance of Saudi Arabia and Qatar blaming Israel on the attacks?
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How do Israeli settlers factor in here? Were they the primary subjects of violence yesterday or no?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Agreed on reasons below, and also: their mind is elsewhere, they don’t want to be put on someone’s tik tok feed and potentially insulted by tens of thousands (you see this happen all the time), there’s a chance they are getting pranked and the shame of that may outweigh the potential of $500 in a post-Putnam university setting.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Palestinian birth rates are decreasing, whereas Israel’s is stable + 20% have extremely high birth rates which will overshadow Palestine in 60 years
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
This would result in the Palestinian people losing their homeland forever. A one-state solution would mean the eventual replacement of all Palestinians because of Israel’s soft privileging of Jews and the extreme birth rates of the Hasidim. Given that the Palestinians seem earnestly to value their culture and peoplehood, this simply isn’t viable.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The value of brevity is that you can scan many comments for valuable information in the same amount of time as reading a single long post. And I actually enjoy the long posts that are filled with dense/valuable information, when that’s the simplest way to convey complex information. So maybe there should be a rule to encourage brevity because it’s better for the reader.
I don’t know if it’s just me but I would be interested in more original / creative ideasmithing related to culture, even if that’s not an original intended purpose of the forum.
I still think there’s room for a Link Roundup. Maybe a thread one day a week that’s only open for one day a week would be a good balance between the concerns of “not wanting to discourage effort posts” and “y’all have some interesting links saved I want to read”. We can call it the sunday sneaky link thread or something.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Part of the national mythos is that all Americans are mysteriously created equal. This narrative is pushed in early education and probably also pushed by our intelligence services who want a hyper-stable culture against foreign influences. But this naturally leads to a more sympathy for Marxism than racism. Racism is saying “actually, I chiefly identify as my bloodline and not as an American citizen”. Marxism is kind of just saying “all Americans must be made equal”. America, as a unified state, can survive Marxism, but it would fracture if people began to chiefly identify as their ethnicity.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think this is a totally valid fear for some additional reasons: China, Russia, and the Arab world have men running things behind the scenes who have no qualms about using a surge of low IQ immigrants to destroy rival nations in the longterm. They are likely already funding pro-immigration and anti-nationalist rhetoric for this reason (obviously behind sevenfold proxy orgs and middlemen). The threat is not just “West with smart immigrants” versus “worse West with dumb immigrants”, but “dominant West on global stage” versus “weakened West with globally dominant Han Chinese, Arabs, and Slavs”. China has shown no interest in diversifying their mostly Han nation state. There’s also the domestic lobbying effects of ethnic-exclusivist communities that do not see a threat in a weakened America because they chiefly identify with their bloodline or the state of Israel. As most Jews in America will be ultra-orthodox in the next century, this is going to pose an issue.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The Odyssey and the Iliad are more than just entertainment IMO because they work motivationally for a culture where war is constant and winning dictates quality of life. The Greeks lacked any heaven-like construct in their vision of their afterlife as everyone is sent to a boring and unpleasant underworld. In order to motivate men to die in battle without a conception of a Heavenly Judge who rewards your fate (the mystery religions and Christianity introduced this) and without a civic religion centered on a march of progress for the human race (American civic religion), the best way to reward men is to privilege valiant warriors and permit pillaging and rape. So, a boy listening to the Iliad will be looking up to these characters and modeling their relationships to each other, all of which are based on warrior-status.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
This is the default world chat for the game, similar to an old WoW Barrens Chat. Imagine if Barren’s Chat was just girls spamming their OnlyFans and simps bending over backwards to give them attention
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think the misogynists were on to something in the 00’s when they would bully women out of FPS games. There’s a regional chat room in the game I currently play when bored and disenchanted with the world. The chat is filled with women whose names link to their OnlyFans — one audacious women even made a clan with her OnlyFans name and the clan is comprised of her subscribers. The chat is men trying to win the attention of these women, offering to buy them cosmetic items or carry them in matches. The worst misogynistic chat has more dignity to it than what unregulated gender-inclusive lobbies look like in this game.
But not every social judgment and censure comes from the “progressive stack”. The reason that Jews can exert the influence they are exerting right now re: Israel is that they have an ethno-centric culture built around self-love which doesn’t care an iota for the progressive stack. That’s why we see Bill Ackman asking for the name of every Harvard student who signed a petition (blaming Israel for the violence) so that he can prevent them from ever working on Wall Street. It’s why Jewish donors can prevent human rights leaders from getting positions at Harvard because they criticized Israel. This exists independently of any progressive status hierarchy.
You can make a religion tomorrow provided that you earnestly believe in the religion. It doesn’t have to be 6000 years old; Talmudic Judaism is no older than Christianity. Mormonism isn’t even 200 years old.
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