coffee_enjoyer
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coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
The NYT proposes an interesting metric to gauge Israeli misconduct in Gaza: the amount of one-shotted Palestinian children.
65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza
I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total. At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. “I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,” I told him. To my surprise, he responded: “Yeah, me, too. Every single day.”
Using questions based on my own observations and my conversations with fellow doctors and nurses, I worked with Times Opinion to poll 65 health care workers about what they had seen in Gaza. Fifty-seven, including myself, were willing to share their experiences on the record. The other eight participated anonymously, either because they have family in Gaza or the West Bank, or because they fear workplace retaliation.
44 health care workers saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza. 9 did not. 12 did not regularly treat children in an emergency context.
Quotes from the doctors:
“One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”
“I saw several children shot with high velocity bullet wounds, in both the head and chest.”
“Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”
“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”
I think this is a brilliant bit of journalism. First, they specify preteen children who are killed, a hugely important qualifier for a conflict which may see 16-year-old boys plant IEDS. Second, they queried a range of doctors, some of whom have no association with Palestinians or even Arabs (or even Muslims for that matter). Third, the data uniquely sheds light on possible Israeli misconduct. Blankly informing us about the number of dead Palestinian children tells us very little: are these combatant-aged? Did they die because of a nearby explosion targeting a combatant? The metric they chose is as beautiful as Abraham Wald’s famous WWII survivorship bias statistical work.
Looking specifically at the number of one-shotted children relative to the number of total shot children is an amazing way to determine intent on behalf of the Israeli soldiers. We should expect that, if these children are shot because they have caught stray bullets aimed elsewhere, that most of the children would be shot in places other than their head and chest. We should similarly expect a higher number of cases of multiple bullet wounds, as in the case of their being shot due to crossfire fighting. In gang-related shootings in America, we don’t see a high number of one-shotted adolescents, but wounds on arms and legs, abdomens, and multiple punctures. (Think 50 cent). Note that any Palestinian child shot or grazed by a bullet is going to be sent to the hospital, so there is no survivorship bias in the presentation of children to the hospital. These doctors have been presented with all bullet-wounded preteen Palestinians, and they are shocked at the high rate of one-shot critical hits — including the author who “volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti and grew up in Flint, Michigan.”
So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza? IMO, the most likely answer is that they want to. Israeli culture is not Western culture, neither is Israeli military culture identical to Israeli culture at large. There is an undercurrent of supremacism and extremism in Israeli military culture. When Israeli soldiers were found to be sexually torturing Hamas prisoners, extremists gathered to protest the soldiers’ arrests. These extremists included an Israeli politician, and the current national security minister publicly condemned the arrest of the soldiers. A Rabbi who specifically teaches orthodox military recruits alongside Talmud studied has specifically advocated for the killing of women and children in Gaza.
There is also a religious component to the Jewish extremism of the Israeli military, which I think is difficult for a naive Westerner to wrap their head around. When a Christian or post-Christian Westerner thinks about Judaism in Israel, they assume they must be worshipping something that is approximately the moral equivalent of Christ. “Sure, they don’t have our Jesus dude, but they recognize the same attributes and moral conduct in other ways”. But this is really not the case. With the same attention that Christians allot to Christ, Judaism allots to the practice of ritual rule-following. When Christians look at their God being tortured by sinners like themselves, Jews look solipstically at their own torturous history by outside threats. The attentional focus of the religion is different, and the moral focus is different. These are qualitative differences. When you combine this phenomenon with the independence of Rabbinical academies, you are going to see some extremist branches rise up in some Jewish academies, especially among the conservative and non-ultra orthodox. These extremist branches are most likely to pour out students onto the Israeli military. In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel. Don’t forget that it’s Israel under attack, not “secular country I happen to be citizen of”. They pray to Israel daily, it is their Christ, so for a Zionist extremism it is as if their deepest value is being terrorized.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Iran originally decided to pursue 60% enrichment after Israel attacked their nuclear sites in 2021. This attack happened 3 years after Trump ended an agreement to inspect Iranian nuclear sites, which was criticized by NATO, EU, France, the UK, etc, but was clearly requested by Trump’s Zionist funders. Iran’s radiopharmaceutical industry is genuine — they commercialize isotopes that only Germany has been able to produce. Iran needs to pursue its own cancer treatments because sanctions prevent access to state of the art treatments.
I hope Iran gets a nuke now. We can’t have religious extremist states have nukes — Israel is well on its way in becoming majority Haredi, whereas Iran is on a clear secularization path. A nuclear Iran would counter the power that Israel exerts in the region and may even prevent the genocide of Palestinians.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.
So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory
That’s not how the expression is used. The expression is used with the implication that the feasible locus of control in obesity is our willpower in regards to caloric intake.
conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy
The significance is in the extrapolation. The takeaway is to not have babies in winter in Japan (that would be silly), but that we may be able to modify obesity significantly through pre-conception cold exposure, the limit cases of which are explored in the study. Japan is probably not even a top 100 place in the world where residents experience genuine cold for prolonged periods, due to their urban living and wealth to buy clothes.
You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.
Only if you ignore the hundreds of millions of times it has practically failed. (I have a photo of a plane with a lot of red dots to show you.)
I don’t think it is ideologically extreme for billionaires’ wealth to be forcefully taken from them. They violate the spirit of society (as well as capitalism) by lobbying Congress to bring in millions of laborers to strip Americans from high wages. Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos, and a few pet progressive projects. They are vermin and I believe it would be better if they were eaten than allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. They are the single class most responsible for the destruction of the West because the artificial deflation of white collar wages reduces entrepreneurialism (risk-taking and business creation increases with wages/employment to fall back on), and thus they are responsible for reduced development of technology, in addition to reduced fertility and lowered happiness. You violate no ethical principle by wanting to take their wealth forcefully, but violate many by submitting to what they do.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
The same European countries who sided with Zelensky after his insulting comments against Vance (insinuating he doesn’t know enough about Ukraine to comment, then interrupting him) are now aghast that Vance demeaned their relatively irrelevant militaries? These are unserious leaders. Perhaps we should actually consider allying with Russia.
Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact. I would rather America have one now, when White people are in charge, than in 100 years when White people are ~20% of the population. And who made a better product: Steve Job’s at Apple with his monarchical approach, or the bureaucratic IBM / BlackBerry / Xerox? Jobs was, well, rage-filled and vengeful.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Looks like they are stopping that (Zionist) student from recording the faces of the protestors, by preventing him from entering into the protest square with his phone recording. This would be evidence that Zionist students want to harass the protestors, but not evidence of protestors harassing Jewish students.
Alec Baldwin, the Lab Leak, and punishing maximal negligence
Alec Baldwin has been charged with manslaughter. We don’t know the nitty gritty details yet, but let’s consider the following possibility. Baldwin, as someone who funded and produced the movie, was ultimately responsible for choices in hiring. He hired someone insufficiently skilled at risk management on set. In addition to hiring and retaining someone whom a reasonable producer would consider insufficiently skilled, he acted negligently on set through pressure, which led to the death of an employee.
Whatever the actual details, there’s a plausible avenue by which Baldwin has serious moral blame in regards to manslaughter. The details that come out later will obviously dictate whether this occurred, but we can imagine a case in which a producer possesses moral blame for the system of failsafes failing. Importantly, in cases where the risks are high (a gun misfiring), greater care is morally warranted. Our expected duty to exercise care is proportional to the potential of harm.
Following from this example, I assert that we should develop a legal principle to maximally punish anyone involved in catastrophic lab leaks (those resulting in millions to tens of millions of death). [paragraph edited for clarity] We should do this regardless of the material facts of individual responsibility of a lab leak. This is because the risk of leak is of such significance that it belongs to a new category of risk:care ratio concerns. It is the principle of reasonable care and deterrence but amplified to the amount of harm involved. The amount of harm that a Covid leak created (implying that the lab leak theory is true) is more than what inspired the Nuremberg Trials. Playing with genetically modified coronaviruses, specifically enhanced for virulence, constitutes such a threat against the human race that every single person involved should have been made to underwrite their life as a guarantee in case of leak. Not for a lifetime in jail, or capital punishment — the guarantee should have been that the State would use medieval punishment on you for the rest of your life. The scientists who worked and funded and stamped the research should have been so certain that a leak would never happen that they literally stake endless, limitless torture for the rest of their life if it leaked. Only this level of deterrent punishment would befit the level of care required to deal with the potential harm of COVID. I am suggesting a moral principle that would prevent future leaks, applied to future cases, to stave off the risk of leak catastrophe.
If Baldwin, in acting unreasonably in hiring or setting workplace culture, can be responsible for one death, how much more care should scientists who work with virulent viruses exercise? Viruses that will kill 200 million by the end of the century are inconceivably more risky than anything that can happen in normal everyday business life. The risk to care ratio must be maximal because only this level of deterrence is sufficient to encourage a reasonable level of care. The whole point of Law is that foreseeing punishment deters behavior. It’s not just that Baldwin ought to have practiced sufficient care; it’s that everyone in Baldwin’s place should foresee a punishment from failing to exercise sufficient care. Baldwin deserves a punishment in accordance to his level of negligence, and everyone in Baldwin’s position must foresee a similar punishment for similar negligence.
Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
All of your comment reads “I am unwilling to consider any other viewpoint or my opponent’s arguments”. Seriously, you just ignored my assertions completely and boldly. Maybe even heroically!
https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/mystery-volodymyr-zelenskiy
https://amp.spectator.co.uk/article/who-is-ihor-kolomoisky-/amp
https://twitter.com/ReflectionsV2/status/1581954021039869953
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1579541849240670208
The linchpin is Israel: a country with an undeclared nuclear weapons program in violation of international law, who some speculate killed our President in 1963 in order to secure nuclear weapons, who stole our own uranium to create their weapons, and a country that we provide aid to in violation of our own laws which prohibit us from providing aid to countries with undeclared nuclear programs in violation of the IAEA.
Israel’s illegal nuclear weapons and behavior in the region compels every sane country to pursue nuclear weapons, especially when they see what happened to Iran, a country which could have pursued but did not pursue nukes. Saudi Arabia apparently has some agreement with Pakistan to obtain nukes whenever requested, because they originally invested in its nuclear program. According to Russia yesterday, there are other countries interested in supplying Iran nukes, perhaps China, or perhaps this is a bluff.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I can help you imagine. If a group of BLM protestors have sequestered themselves into a square to do their BLM chants and so forth, then someone dressed in a police uniform with his phone out to record is clearly the provocateur if he attempts to enter the zone when there is clearly no interest in the zone other than provocation. (Notice the square is densely packed and it is evening.) It is crybullying to call it harassment if the BLM people hold their arms to prevent your incursion. Of course, I’m saying this as someone who thinks BLM was the height of American stupidity. This is why it’s ubiquitous during protests to separate the two sides, and the police will often prevent a member of one side from entering the other side.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
You believe heroes can have offshore banking accounts paid for by corrupt oligarchs now hiding in Israel which comprise a permanent “nest egg” to fall back on. That’s great! I disagree. So what we have is a disagreement, which this forum was made for. Claiming that my entire post boiled down to “sounds like nothing but I am ideologically on the pro-Russian” is asinine and unproductive.
Ban porn, subsidize prostitutes: a modest defense of whoring
The popular view is that masturbating to porn is fine, and using the services of prostitutes is not so fine. Porn is not a poor man’s prostitute, but instead a cleaner acceptable method of sexual satisfaction. You might joke with a friend, like Markiplier on the Logan Paul podcast, that you gave up porn because the two-hour wank sessions got old. Were Markiplier to say he recently gave up prostitutes, which he had been using for a decade, the conversation would have taken a somber tone. Yet for most of Western history, this moral calculation was inverted. Masturbation was seen as worse vice than than the vice girl. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, and Richard Wagner all thought the solitary vice more dangerous than the sex worker. Why would this be?
We don’t need to get too bogged down in the historical miscellany and theological glosses. For starters, our ancestors noted that fucking a woman is more natural than fucking a hand. But this was not haughty naturalistic phallicy. This is complex. Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself. Let’s flesh this out. On the first level, once you’ve completed the intended act with the harlot, a memory is formed in which all preceding sensations cue for satisfaction of the urge. There’s [urge -> satisfaction from woman], but we can go deeper. There’s [urge -> WOMAN -> satisfaction from woman], with all the sensations of a woman encoding sexual satisfaction: pheromones, tone of voice, clothing, mannerisms, and importantly socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages. There is one more social benefit, which is that the [dressing up -> traveling -> paying] is more prosocial than opening a tab on a laptop, and associating sex with money is great salience on the value of money.
If sex were the Milky Way and the earth were a wife, prostitutes would be Venus and porn would be Pluto. It’s very far away, and it’s not even a planet.
But the argument is yet to reach its climax. Prostitutes are seen as dirty, and this again betrays our modern misunderstanding of psychology. Going out, away from your home and work, to purge your desire with a woman is a way to keep your home and work life free from the cognitive “stain” of sex, because the whole sexiness is entrenched in its own unique context. The home and office, and the home office, are clean of memories and cues of intercourse — you have ejaculated these cues far away from your “pure” life. There’s no risk of Toobin-ing all over your keyboard after a zoom meeting, because your computer has no cues related to sex. Instead, your conception of sex is caught up in a web of strong cues, all of which are related to real life women.
coffee_enjoyer
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18d ago
Our greatest ally is now putting American lives in danger by publishing that America was complicit in the attack
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Re Dean’s highlighted comment for
”but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies."
Just for the record, @Dean was never able to provide any evidence that Hamas uses pre-teen child soldiers. In fact he refused to even supply a link. You can read the follow up exchange here where he writes —
If someone is actually interested in whether Hamas uses child soldiers, they can very trivially google "Hamas Child Soldiers" and find multiple reports on the history by organizations including Amnesty International, Child Soldiers International, and the United Nations, among others. This doesn't even include self-publicized material such as from the Hamas Youth Wing. These aren't even 'new' reporting- there are easily observable reports from the early 2000s during the tail end of the Intifada years to late last decade, well before the current conflict. Any observer of the conflict with any significant experience has read any one of these over the last few decades- they are old news, not particularly controversial, and numerous.
— after someone noted that he refused to post a source. He actually made me go looking for his own unevidenced allegation, yet I could find zero evidence from any organization that Hamas utilized pre-teen child soldiers in the past decade. The closest was:
that Hamas once used a 17yo but that they made commitments to not recruit below 18. That was back in 2004. Something similar was published by Amnesty in 2005.
So I’m still waiting on Hamas’ “sordid history of child soldiers”. I’m surprised you can get a quality contribution for an empirical claim that you flatly refuse to supply evidence for.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
It was a manipulative question. It’s akin to, “does calling for the rape of women violate Harvard’s rules on domestic assault?” Of course it wouldn’t, because inappropriate statements against the values of Harvard are not in the category of domestic assault, but a different category of infraction. In the same way, bullying and harassment are targeted actions against individuals or groups of individuals, and not every infraction is in the category of harassment. So Gay’s answer was correct, and also morally correct. The pressure of billionaire Jews and the World Jewish Congress to make people lie in front of Congress is a horrible look. Calling for the genocide of Jews would be against norms of every major university in America, but that doesn’t mean that it constitutes “harassment” any more than it constitutes tax fraud. Not to mention, it’s a new type of crime that hadn’t had time to be adjudicated. (“Miss Gay, does calling for Armenians to eat so many hot dogs that they internally implode violate Harvard’s rules on harassment?”)
(1) Making America complicit in ethnic cleansing is a moral stain on us forever, occurring in the 21st century where every nation should know better — this is not the mid 20th or 19th century; as Trump’s continual 1.7 million remark tells us, there are 500,000 dead in Gaza, and if America goes in these bodies will be placed on us and not Israel — the history books will surely be written so that we the ones who did it; (2) Hamas is still in operation, so American blood and resources will be spent on Israel again; (3) if you think Western culture bears the blood guilt of WWII, consider how Arab people will look at us for the next few hundred years — meanwhile, Jews being responsible for displacing* Palestinians would at once delete the holocaust from our whole collective storehouse of political metaphors, as it almost has now for the Left; (4) it’s naive to think America will ever “own” it, we will be responsible for trillions in rebuilding it for Israeli settlers, and then a president will come along whose donors / influences push him to give it away to Israel.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Feasibility aside, what are the arguments against a culture of widespread euthanasia in the old? I find it an attractive option provided there’s the right cultural infrastructure. I’m thinking something like, “once you cease to be of value to others or once you experience too much pain, you willingly die, which is honorable.” By value to others, I mean that you can no longer relay to the young any worthwhile stories or wisdom, can no longer provide any emotional warmth to others, your redeeming personality traits have decayed, and you have too many costly medical problems. The way in which this occurs is also important. I find euthanasia by injection in a hospital disgusting and barbaric and aesthetically displeasing, whereas something like a speedy decapitation in a beautiful natural environment is preferable, and in fact how Samuraii died and similar to how animals are killed in kosher law.
I’m unpersuaded by the typical religious argument that life is so sacred we cannot take it. We do take it, all the time, in war and executions. I’m unpersuaded that this reduces the dignity of man. This increases the dignity of man, by giving him power over when he dies, and by serving as a reminder that life is about wellbeing and benefit rather than selfish clinging to the flesh and absurd quantitative metrics (“how long you live in days” is a silly metric). There is, with that said, an economic incentive to do this: the money that is spent keeping the old alive is transferred to the young, the living root of life, which has a compound benefit, increasing quality of life and education.
Scott’s fantastic who by very slow decay, and a recent experience involving a distant relative, is what truly motivated my thinking that our culture of death needs reform. Dying is a horrible experience for everyone who witnesses it. Dying itself is not the pain, watching the death slowly is the pain. The amount of psychological stress and pain and burden that my relatives experienced as a relative slowly died was significant and impossible to ignore. Were the death to have occurred one night in sleep, a huge amount of pain would have been avoided. But we can’t will ourselves to die peacefully in sleep. The best we can do is pick when we die, so that we die before we increase the sum total pain in ourselves and others.
I am considering this from the standpoint of “how I would like to die”, not “boo old people”, to be clear. Death is inevitable and mundane. Our hospital culture hyperfixates on continuing life for its own sake and on clinging to life, and this reifies the mistaken impression that personal death is a catastrophe. Were we to truly care about life, we would forget the old (who start to decay well before expiration) and instead focus on the young, the living root of life, and we would focus on increasing their health so that human life flourishes. That’s where life resides. Why take care of an old flower when you could nurture young seedlings? It’s the same life, it is just found in the young and not the old. So, when I imagine the most enjoyable way to die myself, it’s that it occurs right before the worst of age-decay sets in. I have an enjoyable weekend with loved ones, we celebrate living, and then they give me the Marie Antoinette treatment and everything is quite peaceful. It actually doesn’t appear to be stressful or anxious or sad at all, though (we should all hope) there are some loved ones present who will miss my presence.
There's a strong scientific reason to be against H1B entirely, even if it increases GDP:
- Humans only developed the ability to form social groups because it benefitted gene proliferation. Community, society, and civilization are intrinsically tied to what benefits human gene proliferation.
- H1B and other forms of immigration actively damage the reproductive success of Americans because (a) our national fertility is low, (b) rival nations have a comparatively enormous population and take in few immigrants, (c) they take the highest wage jobs, (d) they take up physical space in the territory and (e) they accrue political power.
- H1B violates the only reason we are able, as humans, to form countries and organize socially at all, making it a rare case of an objectively bad evolutionary decision.
A funny hypothetical illustrates the point. Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success. We have lost in the deepest sense, because we have betrayed the whole purpose of cognition. Rather than making America competitive, we would have forever lost the evolutionary competition which designed our very minds. Probably because evolution selects for intuitive prosocial genes like empathy (flip-side: out-group prejudice) and not just raw abstract pattern recognition. We would have lost the game of life, and gained a small footnote in the future Hindi history of the world. We would have even reneged on the first words God ever spoke to us — “be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth”.
Obviously, 200 million is excessive for the point of a thought experiment. But this just means that the damage occurs to a lesser degree. Indian Americans are 1.5% of America, the highest paid group in America, and the fastest-growing demographic. Let’s say that a generous .1% are geniuses who have aided American military might. This reduces American reproductive success by at least 1.4%, arguably more because of the higher socioeconomic position. The greatest risk is that they begin to use their high earnings to lobby for more Indians, which seems to be happening presently.
I find it hard to believe that this arrangement is even in the evolutionary interests of “elite human capital”. If you are Elon Musk, you have more genes in common with the average American than the average Indian. If Elon is crowned Eternal King of India and begins the genetic proliferation that befits a medieval royal — along with a haram of beautiful nubiles — it’s doubtful that he would ever reach the level of similarity that he already has with Americans generally, and Northern European Americans specifically. So what is even the biological point? It makes no sense from a scientific point of view. It is a form of biological self-harm.
It’s weird that no one actually brings up the science in these discussions, only the economic studies. But the economic studies are only valuable when subordinated to and weighed by biology. Okay, economists are saying that if we add the Indians then the CEO gets another ski home… but the biology is quite clear that this is ultimately not in anyone’s interest, even the CEOs, and goes against natural design (both evolution and God). If you guys really want the ski homes then we can invade the Himalayas.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Because Israel was (and IMO still is) the most likely culprit given the blast size, the fact that they were bombing Gaza at the time, the fact that there have been tens of thousands of rockets fired and misfired by Hamas that never look like that blast size, and given Israel’s history of bombing health centers over the past 10 years. It’s actually amazing so far that they have managed to reverse the narrative entirely. But that’s why it’s important to see all the evidence of the event and consider it in full.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Right. This would arguably be worse than the holocaust. The holocaust took place when Germans were being killed in the millions and civilians were starving in the hundreds of thousands. But this atrocity would take place after the moral lesson of the holocaust, by a people who were victims of the event, and when Israel is facing zero threat to its continued existence and territorial sovereignty.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Great write up.
Is there any major group in America that is more of a collective than religious Zionist Jews? It’s a combination of nationality, bloodline religion, singing odes to their ancestors in the Temple, praying for their bloodline, remembering historical slights… So, any criticism against white people as a collective applies some 60 fold to “collectivist” Jews, IMO (namely those who are deeply self-identifying, religious, and Zionist).
There exists a kind of Victimhood-Oppressor dynamic which is the lifeblood of Judaism since antiquity. You can read it in the stories of the Israelites against the Canaanites, and you can hear it in psalm 137: “for there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth […] Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”. This psalm is 3000 years old, and yet you can see in it how the Jews depict themselves as a collective. In a way, it reads like a scene from Schindler’s List. The threat of, let’s say, Jewish extremism is not something to be laughed at. Consider what happened in the 2nd century, when the Jews waged an insurrection and massacres hundreds of thousands of innocents:
Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators. In all, consequently, two hundred and twenty thousand perished. In Egypt, also, they performed many similar deeds, and in Cyprus under the leadership of Artemio. There, likewise, two hundred and forty thousand perished. For this reason no Jew may set foot in that land, but even if one of them is driven upon the island by force of the wind, he is put to death. Various persons took part in subduing these Jews, one being Lusius, who was sent by Trajan.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
We should probably figure out how to hyper-specialize people by the age of five
It’s known that to be the best chess player or instrumentalist you need to start at a young age, with ~5 being a common age to start for the best in the world. If you’re a chess prodigy or world class cellist, you hyperfocus on these skills throughout your childhood, and it’s accepted that you sacrifice normal schooling and extra-curriculars to pursue your skill. But why do we only allow this for the most worthless skills? There’s nothing unique about chess or cello — to be the best at any skill you need to start at around five. The Olympian Yuto Horigome started skateboarding before he could walk; Mark Zuckerberg started making apps before he was a teenager; Noam Chomsky joined political discussions as a child when accompanying his father to the newspaper stand; Linda Ronstadt learned all the genres of music she would later perform before 10; Von Neumann and Mozart had legendary childhood specializations.
But every skill is like this. If we want the best therapists, they need to be practicing conversation and understanding people by five, hours every day. If we want the best philosophers or practical thinkers, they need to be arguing and testing themselves by five, hours every day. Similar for movie directors, novelists, designers. This even applies to skills that are essential but not economical, like being a good mother, or being a good friend. And to skills that are essential for implementing political change, like writers and representatives and propagandists and moralists. Imagine if your teacher in school were a master at motivating, disciplining, and explaining, and had training in these skills like Mozart with music? Imagine if everyone’s gym teacher or exercise trainer had training to be like Jocko Willick and Tony Robbins? How much more accurate would your doctor’s diagnosis be if he had trained in medicine since five, instead of 21? (By five, a child can learn 5 different languages without accent. By 13, Magnus Carlsen’s skill equaled that of a 40yo Garry Kasparov). We all enjoy Scott’s writings — now imagine a version of Scott that is a better writer, specialized in writing, who outputs even more?
I think we are wasting enormous potential for social improvement by corralling every child into the same mandatory (and inefficient) skill-training, instead of specializing them at an early age. Would Mozart be more valuable for knowing biology? What if Caravaggio knew calculus? What if Einstein took a Spanish class for 2000 precious childhood hours? What if George Washington knew what an atom was? We would have just made them worse, and the world worse by consequence. We are raising up a generation of woefully mid professionals — a whole society of sub-perfect workers across every industry. Everyone a jack of trades, master of none.
And this is more serious than just “they aren’t as good”. It’s also that they can’t perform as many work iterations in a day, their working years are shorter, and they are more stressed (which has multigenerational effects). That little kid you see at the Chinese restaurant ringing up the order for his parents hasn’t just learned to perform that specific skill well, he is also able to perform it for more hours in the day, he can start at a younger age, and he incurs less of a stress cost. That means he is happier, which means you get happier, and it also means his stress is reduced, which means his kid is healthier, and so the cycle goes on. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t apply to a number of industries.
Lastly, I wonder if the “wasteful hobby specialization” among Western youth isn’t due to our denial of their specialization instinct. Boys love becoming experts at something, and today they become experts at video games, or their hair, or some entertainment product, or memes. We have excluded them from any useful specialization, and so they specialize in uselessness, forming a perverse “pair-bond” with a hobby instead of a career. This is a grave evil. How many Asmongolds have we brought into the world, experts at a fantasy world because they have been denied real life’s RPG? This element can’t be ignored. A world where everyone you meet is as passionate in their work as a WoW player would be close to perfection.
Folklore for White Folk: stories for wypipo to meet the world?
Humans are driven by stories. Stories establish the legitimacy of rulers when hearkened back to legend, they establish sympathy with average voters via fictionalized humble origins, they motivate soldiers to fight against impossible odds and bind solitary faces into a single fasces. No nation or people have ever been able to cooperate or dominate without apportioning huge sums to the Storyteller Class: poets, priests, historians, dramatists, civic artists, on and on. The wars going on in the world today show the necessity of storytelling. When the Russian president had time to propagandize to the American public in his Tucker interview, he starts with half an hour of storytelling, selecting an arrangement of events to best suit his purpose. When the Ukrainians needed to motivate their countrymen to fight, they recruit the cosmic Star Wars actors to drench themselves in meaning. In the Holy Land, stories and religion meld together to incentivize soldiers and martyrs.
Stories legitimize and empower a group’s existence, and not just their present existence but their future. The Arab world, the Chinese and Japanese nations, the African tribes, the Native Americans, the Black Americans, the Mexicans — every group uses stories. There is no need for them to justify their use. So what of the children of Europe? What should we make of their folklore today?
Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it— racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the "racial stamina" to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to "racial triggers"—the show "Dear White People," the term "wypipo"-with "emotions such as anger, fear and guilt," DiAngelo writes, "and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation." [White Fragility, the New Yorker]
The white story today is the one told in the classrooms of the elites, found in the the popular books and documentaries, and hawked by the newspapers. There is no need to overwrite and overwrought what has been written for years: slavery, colonization, oppression, and unearned privilege characterize the relationship between white people and others in the mainstream view. (Every story defines the relationship between the group and those outside of it. To the Romans, the others were barbarians in need of subjugation and command; to the Ancient Jews, the "nations" were in need of a light to enlighten them on G-dly matters. To the Chinese today, the Chinese are particularly ancient with superior cultural developments.) The white story is the only story in history which both subjugates a people to an eternally lesser reputation and yet believed by those it subjugates. It is an anomalously demotivating story.
But can we say that the white story transformed into something more global? Can’t the white American story, for example, just be the American story? Nope. If you relinquish the use of a powerful tool while the other groups around you continue to use the tool, you have permanently reduced your ability at a pure loss to yourself. Wokism has died down in public discourse, but it has not diminished its institutional potency, and there’s no guarantee it will not return in double force. There are still hundreds, thousands, of ethnocentric advocacy groups which promote their own empowering story from middle school to the halls of FAANG. Relinquishing your power can work when everyone else is on board, like with nuclear weapons, but it does not work when others are writing you in as the bad guy in their book. Black Americans will continue their storywriting, new Indian managers may continue to favor their own caste, the decades of liberal Reform Judaism are coming to an end, and China will continue trying to influence the Chinese Western population.
Relinquishing your power as a white person isn’t a noble deed when virtue is written by stories and you have burned down your library. No one will remember or care for your innoble sacrifice — certainly not God, the great storyteller who commands his children to write the best stories, even sacrificing their own children in the process. Neither will your non-white great grandchild care, who will despise you because of a story they read, and who — like the Brazilian — may have their craniums measured to see if they are non-white enough to secure a university spot. You may identify yourself as “merely American” or “merely a man”, but the Americans around you do not feel that way and neither do the mass of man on earth. Show me a successful nation in history filled with men — there is none, only those filled with particular peoples with particular stories.
Failing to establish a story means that white children will be passed up for jobs by both non-white and white employers. It means that the person who judges his college application will deduce points in favor of (perhaps) a wealthy Nigerian scion. It means that he will be disinherited even from “secular” storytelling institutions, as we see with the recent Disney leak by Project Veritas. If your kin happens to be trapped in a warzone, a Sikh leader of your country may direct the military to save foreign Sikhs rather than his own countrymen, as we read in Canada today. The stakes are significant and concrete.
“Isn’t it sufficient to dispel the bad stories?”, it may be asked, and the answer is a clear negative. Which restaurant would you patronize, the one which shows you its great features, or the one that stammers about how the rumors of rat infestation and food poisoning are exaggerated? Who would you rather go on a date with, the one who presents their best self or the one who tells you that they certainly don’t have AIDS? Even to attempt to dispel a bad story puts you in a significantly worse position than before. This is a dark art of discourse, typified in the old question asked of politicians: “how often do you beat your wife?”. Attaching a bad story to a person’s connotation, even when obviously false, harms the connotation. There’s a whole world of irrational but potent emotional alchemy that occurs when one stimuli is associated with a different stimuli of positive or negative valence. If I have you smell lavender and then scream at you, you now slightly dislike lavender even if you don’t realize it. If I do this repeatedly, you will learn to hate lavender. You say “white people were not the only slavers”, your children hear “white people as a conceptual space are associated with oppression and are implicitly negatively evaluated”. If you don’t believe me, tell your girlfriend “you do not look fat and disgusting” whenever she wears her favorite dress.
Whypeople
The cure for this social disease is for whites to rediscover their birthright as storytellers: to write their why, proudly and independently. Storytelling is their manifest destiny, a great continent that awaits their traversal. It is territory uncharted, constellations yet connected. It’s the plot to reality’s RPG and your bloodline’s DnD campaign. It’s the story old men tell their children as a sense of security and motivation shines from their face. “What is the story that most motivates my kin” is the story that must be told, for no other reasons than that it can be, because others do their own, because now it’s a competition, and because it’s ultimately fun.
The best story, IMO, wouldn’t focus on the deeds of white folk. Claims of having written the best literature or music, or having erected the greatest architecture, did not stop the Romans from asserting superiority over Greeks while appropriating all of their own inventions. Wars and conquest are also insufficient grounds for a story. The best story is captivating and shows the protagonist overcoming adversity to secure something they rightfully deserve. There are a number of ways to weave a purely secular story for the children of Europe. Does the European first domesticating dogs show his unwavering loyalty to his brethren? I don’t know, but it is pleasant to imagine. Did White people flee Africa because of oppression only to bear with the brutal cold and develop a unique nature through overcoming nature herself? It’s something you can imagine. Does their ability to drink milk show their unusual innocence and love for women? Sure, why not. Have white people the spotless reputation that has been wrongfully blackened by corrupt and wicked people? These are ingredients, I am not a chef. But any positive story — no matter how insane — is better than a lack of story and certainly better than a negative story. All of the peoples of the world when saying their own name feel a sense of pride, and it’s absurd to imagine that there should be an exception to that rule.
Some of Zelensky’s appearances strongly suggest he uses a green screen. With technology it is trivial to place Zelensky anywhere you want in Ukraine. I do not believe for one moment that he spends a majority of his time in Ukraine. But that’s neither hero nor there, because it is a smart choice to base your operations in Poland.
What makes Zelensky not a hero is that nothing he does is heroic. It is not heroic to be the figurehead for NATO operations in Ukraine. It is not heroic to be the darling of an oligarch who already fled to Israel, who boosted him up to Presidency. It is not heroic to sign someone else’s children up to die or to command to shoot defectors when they leave. Zelensky has only moderate skin in the game, no matter what he will be safe in NATO territory.
Ask “if Zelensky were a coward, what would he do differently?” Here we have to rely on the claim that he spends most of his time in Ukraine. Everything else he would do is identical. Even a coward can be secretly bussed into Ukraine from time to time for a photo shoot like in Bucha, and the claim “Zelensky is in Kyiv!” is suspect given the nature of 21st century warfare and technology.
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