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coffee_enjoyer

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4 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 11:53:36 UTC

					

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User ID: 541

Texas Governor Abbott signs law attempting to ban free speech at universities whenever the speech criticizes Israel in certain ways (described below).

The Executive Order requires all universities to —

  1. Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.

  2. Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.

  3. Include the definition of antisemitism, adopted by the State of Texas in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.

Section 448.001 reads

Examples of antisemitism are included with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's "Working Definition of Antisemitism" adopted on May 26, 2016

And this definition includes (among other things) —

  1. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis

  2. Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

  3. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

  4. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

These examples are intentionally ambiguous and can be weaponized by politicians or the judiciary against critics. The first example simply bans anyone from criticizing Israel in the same way that Israel routinely criticize others, by comparing them to Nazis. This cuts off a whole spectrum of political comparisons from ever applying to Israel. The second example could imply that you are antisemitic if you criticize Israel for things without also criticizing other nations in the same breath, however culturally and politically distant the nation. The third implies that an ethnostate cannot be considered racist if it is Jewish. The fourth implies that no one — not a single politician who is Jewish — can be accused of being more loyal to his self-defined homeland than America.

IMO this is a clear affront to freedom of speech. I find it embarrassing that any conservative in America would sign a law like this. The ambiguity is dangerous because it could be used by biased politicians or judges in its broadest application. While I don’t think it’s good public rhetoric to compare Israel to Nazis, that should be legal because (1) Nazis are everyone’s go-to villains, (2) Israel was recently the subject of an ICJ inquiry regarding genocide, (3) ethnonations should be extra scrutinized for genocide, (4) ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts. The holocaust, like it or not, has no actual relevance to the current conduct of the Israeli regime. In real life, multigenerational ethnic groups do not swear off the same violence that their grandparents were victims of. So comparisons are fair game, if usually in bad taste.

I don’t think I care. Huberman (afaik) has never offered moral advice or implied moral superiority. He’s a neuroscientist who gives professional advice, which is different from a Jordan Peterson or a conservative podcaster who gives moral advice. If he’s lying to women to have sex with them (not a new phenomenon in the history of Man) that’s a personal matter. It’s more effective to just warn women not to dedicate themselves to high status men without assurances, as that is literally what marriage is for. Huberman is 48 by the way, that’s probably the more surprising aspect of the story. Impressed by both his time and testosterone management.

“Dopamine detox” in the sense of abstaining from hyperstimuli and distractions and lesser pleasures is something everyone should do. It’s a spiritual practice in every religion. There are basic psychological reasons for how it works: the mind is limited, so learning something undesirable takes the place of something preferable; the mind is efficient, so it will choose easier pleasures over difficult pleasures; the mind is habit-forming, so it will form habits around easier pleasures rather than difficult pleasures; the over-justification effect will reduce your motivation to do difficult things after satisfaction from easier things; the difficult pleasures in life are vastly more satisfying than the easier pleasures, but we can’t easily grasp this with our limited mind, so we have to accept it on faith until we are mystically resurrected from the dead presented with these high experiences.

Trivial examples:

  • two bored kids in a math class, and one can use his phone. The bored and abstaining one will eventually and sporadically have his interest piqued by math, because that’s the only interesting thing going on. The one with the phone has no such motivation to ever pay attention in the classroom.

  • A man’s friends and crush are on the other side of a mountain, while he sits bored in a cabin. He will, one day, trek the whole mountain out of sheer human need. If he instead has a ton of distractions and drugs, he will never take those steps on the narrow path.

  • One person’s friends are reputable and wholesome. They give each other attention and affection for their good works. Another person’s friends are disreputable and corrupt. They only have fun being edgy and doing drugs. The former person’s character will change because only prosocial activity is reinforced; the latter person will be dragged down by his comrades, and wind up ”learning” that deleterious things are important — some of his mind is essentially worthless now, those months were a write-off.

  • One man is captivated by a virtuous crush, and molds his life so that it is aligned with what the crush wants. Another man is captivated by promiscuous women who just want to have fun. The former is going to be better for the longterm character and life of both.

The term “dopamine detox” is misleading, I think everyone here knows that, we can just call it mental purification or something, or mental detox. It’s not so much about longterm lowering of dopamine as purifying and filtering cognitive expenditure for that stimuli which leads to the highest reward. There’s no reason at all to bring in neurotransmitters here especially when we barely understand how dopamine and serotonin synergize.

like when you remove sugar from coffee

Agreed. Alas, I must confess that even coffee is a superstimuli which staves off the boredom.

True Crime satisfies the mostly female need for wives’ tales and gossip — women evolved to keep their bodies and character safe from bad men. It’s true that some women also fantasize about serial killers but this is because of the paradoxical evolutionary desire to fuck really good killers who also happen to be handsome and charismatic. Why is this not found in Latin America? Their culture still has good old wives’ tales and gossiping, and they have soap operas where the characters’ continually fall into calamity.

If I can quote a speech from everyone’s least favorite 20th century antisemite, not to be edgy but to demonstrate three separate points:

The Jew, who is himself a nationalist more than any other nation, who through millennia did not mix with any other race […] this same Jew preaches every day with thousands of tongues, from 19,000 papers in Germany alone, that all nations on Earth are equal, that international solidarity should bind all the peoples, that no people can lay a claim to a special status etc., and, above all, that no nation has a reason to be proud of anything that is called or is national. What a nation means, he, who himself never dreams of climbing down to those to whom he preaches internationalism, knows well.

This speech was made in 1920, two years after Hitler received his “punch a Nazi” treatment for giving a similar speech on German nationalism by a crowd disgusted by his extremism. The history of “white identiarianism” or whatever we wish to call it is not linear. Americans as late as 1960 overwhelmingly believed that “white” was a primary identity marker and wanted a white majority in their country. Yet Germany went through a period of progressivism in which German national identity was attacked, only to swing the complete opposite way, only to swing again in the complete opposite — and today it may be swinging once more with the rise of the AfD. Russians, too, went from nationalism to internationalism and back to nationalism. I think this precludes any possibility of a genetic explanation and instead shows that ideology and culture are what shapes these things. And I think this is also an antitode to doomerism because we can’t predict the future based on the past.

The content of the speech is interesting because it highlights the disconnect between American Jews and white American gentiles. I would argue that Jews are the most nationalist people on earth today. They engage in ancestor worship on a weekly basis, they are obsessed with bloodlines, they unite Race and Religion together and choose the former whenever questions of membership arise, their very nation bans religious intermarriage and protects the priestly bloodlines even from the (rare) convert. They put barriers in the way of orthodox conversion yet welcome any “born Jew” with ease. Secular Jewish culture has cross-pollination with religious Jews, and so secular Jews receive an implicit influence of positive racial identity.

As such, it may be hard for even a secular Jew to imagine what it is like growing up in a culture with no such positive identity indoctrination. A white gentile can’t get a free meal at his local university Chabad house where a racial leader talks about how important their DNA is and how the universe has specifically chosen their race to lead the world. He doesn’t go to a church that talks positively about the history of his people. And the stories told in school are not about the triumphs and glories of “the whites”, as a Jewish school teaches about the great Jewish sages and advisers. While his school does teach about great American figures without mention of race, when race is mentioned he learns that his are the villains, the enslavers and the oppressors. The Jews, of course, believe that they were the slaves and the oppressed, in Egypt before God freed them, in the Middle Ages despite opulent wealth, and in the holocaust, that “burnt offering” which established the state of Israel.

Now, to disagree with Adolf Hitler, I do not think that most of the Jewish internationalist voices both a century ago and today are involved in an explicit conspiracy to aid their race by reducing the solidarity of other races (although they would have every motive to do this, it would be morally permissible in their religion and perhaps even morally obligatory given that it helps Jews). Instead, I think it’s easy to push for greater immigration when you know that your host country is not your real home — your real home is every Jewish community and Israel. The Jew’s neighbor is never going to be the new Guatemalan, because the Talmud specifies that “love your neighbor” means only other Jews. So these voices don’t realize that they are blinded to many of the drawbacks of immigration, because their implicit or explicit identity protects them from ever considering the prospect of assimilation with potentially deleterious low-culture migrants. Dan Gertler may fund the Chabad House of Central Africa, indeed he may siphon off their blood diamonds and become a billionaire in doing so, but never in a million years would he consider assimilating there. And the wealthiest billionaire gentile families who push immigration for profit have a similar bias because they know full well that their childrens’ elite boarding school is far from Haitian gangs and Honduran cartels.

Finally, to answer the main question: why do the whites harm themselves? Because they are indoctrinated at a young age from the propaganda which (ironically) the arch-villains of the 20th century warned against. The neural circuitry of in-group preference is the same as familial love: you need to raise children up with positive identity, otherwise they will never truly establish the communal bond. It’s like how an abused child that doesn’t form a bond with his parents will grow up to be avoidant of relationships; even if he rationally understands that his impulses are illogical, they are still there. This is why — as you write — even the conservative Brits are too polite. They logically know something, but the instinct is not developed in the heart. Identity is not primarily rational but instinctive and emotional. And the religious Jews know this, so they fiercely protect their right to indoctrinate their children, such as by launching an international legal effort when Sweden wanted a Rabbi’s children enrolled in a public school.

Large companies have zero incentive to reduce prices when they know that their competitor will do the same. McDonald’s has actually sued 12 of the major national meat suppliers for price-fixing simply based on the fact that each supplier knew the others’ pricing due to a shared analytic tool. All it takes is one reasonably intelligent analyst at the meat supplier board room to ask “so what happens if we lower our prices” for all to realize it’s an unprofitable move.

https://www.fooddive.com/news/mcdonalds-sues-meat-companies-pork-price-fixing/637572/

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-ferguson-s-price-fixing-lawsuit-nets-105-million-washingtonians-tyson-foods

https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/agri-stats-sued-by-DOJ-for-role-in-meatpacking-antitrust-scheme/695196/

If you are McDonald’s and there’s a Wendy’s across the street, you have two options. You can both keep your prices high and split the pool of consumers 50/50, knowing that stressed American consumers will continue to buy your slop because it is time-efficient and they have formed a habit to your addictive slop. Or you can lower your prices, which the competitor will do next week, which leaves you back to the first option only with less profit. Of course they don’t do this. But if a brand new competitor moves in who doesn’t play ball, perhaps they will do this to squeeze him out — no new competitor can compete with the supply chain and the institutional knowledge of McDonald’s.

It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world. There’s no reason, for instance, for OnlyFans to rake in billions of dollars when anyone can create a similar site. But OnlyFans isn’t profitable because their service is better, but because the pornographer who operated it made the site a meme among the public (a kind of psychological rentseeking), because he had the previous institutional knowledge and capital to do this. And you see with car dealerships, there’s no reason for any used car dealership owner to make tens of millions. But in an intensive competition what they do is compete over psychologically manipulating the vulnerable, so the car dealerships compete over misleading pricing plans, overpriced itemization that the customer doesn’t have the knowledge to dispute, etc. It is horrifically inefficient and immoral as a system and it is only maintained due to various mythologies in the public imagination.

I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans. The forum does not (yet) have the userbase numbers where permabans are favorable over longterm bans. If there were hundreds of users who ate bans and who would be expected to participate again, then permabans would be preferable, because no one wants to read one horrible comment every day from the returning exiled. But we don’t currently have that problem. Were Hylnka to be banned in 6month increments, we (1) sufficiently stave off the problem of bad content, because one bad comment every 6 months is entirely acceptable, and one bad monthly from ~6 banned longterm users is also acceptable; while importantly, (2) we benefit from the (perhaps) 20% chance that upon return the content follows the rules, especially because people generally become more pacified with age which increases the percent every iteration. If that 20% chance occurs, it’s a longterm supply of valuable contributions which are worth the few one-off bad comments you have to read before the correct dice roll. There’s also a unique benefit to forum culture for retaining those invested longterm.

An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period. And an alternative safeguard for good content upon return would be to automatically delete every comment by the user upon hitting -2 points after 10min, for a set duration of time proportional to number of times automatic deletion of comment occurs.

This is my analysis, deontologists may disagree.

screed

This is my favorite thought-stopping word. It gives me some nostalgia for when it used to appear all the time in progressive editorials. It doesn’t really signify anything except that the reader was insulted by the writing (which also doesn’t signify anything).

intermarriage

This is complicated:

  • the influential and regenerative kernel of Judaism is the orthodox/conservative, their billionaire funders, their political influences, their attachment to Israel. This cohort creates all the rabbis and most of the leaders of the Jewish community, eg run all the Chabad houses. Orthodox Jews do not intermarry, I think like 1% do. They have the highest birth rate and are inheriting Judaism. There’s lots of articles on this.

  • It’s true that reform intermarry, but the data is still more complicated, because what counts for “intermarry” may be Jewish+JewishAtheist. I have yet to find data on the number of Jewish+OtherReligion marriages but maybe someone smarter can find that. From Tablet: “The Pew study offered respondents who were parents a wider range of possible responses. Among respondents with a non-Jewish spouse [[61% as of 2020, 53% when this article was written]], 20 percent were raising their children Jewish by religion, 25 percent partly Jewish by religion, 16 percent Jewish not-by-religion, and 37 percent not Jewish.” So 37% of 61% are being raised without Jewish affiliation, or about 22%. I would like more clarity by demographers on what the intermarriage rate is for “Jewish+non-Jewish-ancestry”, as this gives us a better picture on intermarriage given how many non-religious but self-identifying Jews there are. The question the polls ask is “do you have a Jewish spouse” which doesn’t really tell us the future of Jewish affiliation. From Tablet again: “Admittedly, the secret of Jewish survival may be the propensity to panic about our fate. The grim predictions made in the 1990s may have proved wrong because Jewish organizations, federations, and private foundations did what they needed to do to turn the tide. They funded massive new investment in Jewish summer camps, Hillels, Taglit-Birthright Israel, and innovative startups—all programs that reach a fairly wide spectrum of Jewish children and young adults”.

tell me you don't know anything about Judaism

Everything I have read indicates that the Orthodox love to convert by-birth-Jews into their conservative flock. This is why they do the man on the street interviews Jewish outreach campaign by asking Jewish-looking people if they are Jewish. Heck, this is why they fund Chabad centers all over the world.

This is the inevitable consequence of an individualistic society continually preyed upon in consumer capitalism. We are not organized hierarchically by wise leaders from our own in-group who have the common good in mind.

  • Music and visual media companies sell narcissistic fantasies to the youth, that they will have their “break” if they continue trying regardless of evidence, that life consists in consumerism and sex.

  • Scrolling social media companies show you incessant content about social competition, to get you glued to the app, but has the consequence of devaluing a modest and reasonable lifestyle.

  • Companies use the illusions of feminism and freedom in order to get women to be buy their products, yet this also makes women delusional about their social obligations and their time-sensitive life choices.

  • Companies want female employees because it helps them lower wages, even though this may be worse for the whole of society because of fertility and hypergamy-related reasons.

  • Universities promote themselves as necessary to the young, and high schools promote universities as necessary, because this helps both of their exclusive interests — universities get more applicants, high schools look better in statistics.

You “bring it back” by forming or joining an in-group social ecosystem that is organized hierarchically according to wisdom, and disperses wisdom from top to bottom. There is no permissible way to change mainstream society at this point because the interests of lobbying groups are fundamentally at odds with the common good. These lobbying groups have more “voting power” than you, because money allows them to manipulate the voting preferences of the population.

Not only does every guy want to go to college because it is shilled to them, but our femino-promiscuous culture makes it an important factor for finding a wife, because they promote female college students and hire so many women in well-paid roles. (This is obviously controlled for looks, the very attractive are outliers for both genders so your story of a hot garbage man doesn’t matter.)

A good comparison point is, as always, the Amish. The women are not raised to believe they expect the best and are better than men, the men are not raised to take advantage of women, they work whatever job and get married early and are generally happy. The sexual ecosystem is tightly controlled to maximize the number of marriages, versus an anarchic system that doesn’t.

Anyone have any thoughts on the 2001 anthrax attacks, particularly whether the accused perpetrator was truly guilty? If this is something you have researched let me know.

We have to take on the prompt with the fullness of its details:

inexperienced

forced

A person with a knife who has never fought, and who is forced to fight, is unlikely to understand that he needs to zerg rush his opponent in order to win. He will hesitate, he will fail to commit. The only way to win against a man with a bat is to rush him and hope that he doesn’t swipe your knife away. This is possible, but not probable.

The batter, on the other hand, simply needs to stay two feet of distance away and hit his opponent. The opponent — again — would need to understand that he needs to commit to something in order to win, in this case commit to grabbing the bat all while carrying a six inch knife. This is an unreasonable level of difficulty for an inexperienced person forced to fight to the death.

In most cases, the batter will win. And the batter only needs to batter his opponent twice before he is made ineffective with a knife.

Your essay is way too long for how little point you are deriving. I read four paragraphs before deciding it’s more efficient if I just briefly argue why hip hop is harmful in a comment, than divining what your argument is.

Music is about producing a spirit in a person, a social emotional-behavioral orientation. Music can produce approximately any emotional space, from the felt sense of eeriness, to grief, even to tones that connote honor, duty, profundity, you name it. We do not need to prove how it does this, as we all agree it does this. This means we can judge music not just by how well it accomplishes its intended emotional result (its technical skill), but whether the resultant emotional space is beneficial or harmful to social life.

Rap, a normal selection of popular rap, focuses on self-aggrandizement, pride, antisociality, and lust. If you were to literally ask yourself, “what is the worst emotional orientation to promote in the youth?”, you would come up with a litany of themes that occur in rap. What would be worse for the youth than to hyper-focus on lust, consumerism, killing people who slight you, and narcissism? Okay, well that’s most popular rap songs. Were satanists to be producing good music (again), it would probably wind up more prosocial than hip hop.

But don’t take my word for it. If you had a teenage daughter this month there’s a good chance has heard

Head so good, she a honor roll. She ride the dick like a carnival. Way too rich to drive a Rove'. Made a milli' off the stove. She like to put it in her nose. Pretty bitch with white toes. I'm all about business, I'm mindin' minе.Pull up in the trenches like Columbine. Pull up with the rocket like NumbaNine

You haven’t “discovered” anything special when you notice that your most debased and primitive animal self enjoys the fantasy of power and sex. Every 10 year old can imagine this. Someone who thinks this music is good is as tasteless as a foodie who tells you sugar is the most exquisite because it makes his mouth feel the best. The music is bad, because the spirit it produces is bad. Yes, it may be pleasurable, but you wouldn’t say the best medicine is heroin, would you?

The lyrics are only one aspect of music. The BPM and rhythm can also induce in a person a sense of patient thought or a sense of urgency. Rap combines sin with urgency.

An unwise person may reply, “okay, but like, The Beach Boys also sang about hooking up with girls…”

In a totally different phenomenological space that promotes delicate emotion, love, fidelity, and not lust, which is communicated via the slow beat, the instrumentation, and vocals.

This is a good point: what does a white American care if recent Indian and Chinese have raised median wages? It factors in zero to their lived experience, except perhaps in a negative way. Since 2018, white wages have decreased, Hispanic and black have increased, and Asian has stayed the same (after a considerable increase since 2012).

https://www.pgpf.org/sites/default/files/income-varies-widely-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-in-the-united-states.jpeg

I don’t think Jesus should be quoted in a post* reminiscent of the prayer of the Pharisee

”God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I [do good things]”

type of person who decides society to judge you

This is every single person on earth, we are all influenced by our social ecosystems. A social ecosystem can influence families toward good or for bad. Few boomers grew up believing that they should maintain a strong community network for the express purpose of finding their child a spouse.

A random selection of old moralizing history books with salient and exaggerated examples of the consequences of leadership. Start with Roman histories and go through medieval histories, only using the best anecdotes selected with wisdom. Like passages from an old book on Napoleon that specifically relates his personality deficits and biases to his campaign failures, with none of the irrelevant factoids that modern historians wrongly believe should be in history books. They must internalize the Great Man theory of history writ as large as possible. They should have an idea of which Byzantine emperors resulted in their people being overrun by Ottomans, and also which Muslims were able to conquer so much territory and with what means, etc etc.

Large-scale history is important because an ambitious man should see that wasting his talent selling overpriced shitty sneakers will eventually — over many iteration of souls — result in the complete destruction of his nation, and means that all of the efforts of his people were for nothing, which history proves time and time again. If the people/nation do not have the right hierarchy and orientation, that’s problem #1 to solve. History teaches that well. The riches of Baghdad meant nothing when one of their leaders decided to insult the Mongols. Who remembers the wealthiest Iroquois? Where are the riches of Mansa Musa?

Great Man theory is essential because it’s the most effective method for information internalization. Man is a social creature who naturally comes equipped with disk space that is only allotted for social information. Our memory for other people is naturally superior than other memory for statistics and rules. And so what you do is you represent human nature as people, dramatized, so that a reader can store as much information as efficiently as possible, imitating and revering some examples, afraid of other examples, and so on. Great Man Theory is the only cognitively correct way to study history for a leader. Academics are too dumb to realize that. It’s something like 1000x more useful to know the narrative of Napoleon in relation to his personality and those of his advisers and foes than to know any date, or any location, or even how to spell his name. At the end of the day what we aim to take away is something that can be applied in our own lives.

So after the highest hierarchy of history, you can move down to lessons about companies and how companies thrive and fail. Because this is probably where an ambitious young man will end up, anyway. So like, essays or passages from essays on IBM, Yahoo, Google, etc. Then I’d suggest an “inoculation against liars”, so some readings about how mainstream news lies about stuff, how to glean truthful information.

Lastly, readings from the Bible and readings from psychology

The recent attack on Moscow has me thinking: the best anti-terrorism measures against Islamic terrorism is to do everything possible to make the terrorist an apostate, and then to record him stating his apostasy without duress. This is the only thing that would fully counteract the motivation to commit terrorism; the terrorist is motivated by a reward from god, but apostasy is an inexcusable sin. This, more than any physical retaliation or sentence, would make a Muslim terrorist afraid to commit terrorism in your country.

Hence

without duress

Plenty of ways to genuinely convert an unintelligent terrorist.

In no previous conflict has the Gazan Ministry of Health overcounted mortality figures — they have proven reliable in their counting based on history. You need to prove that Hamas has taken control of the ministry of health when we know that the leadership of the ministry is more affiliated with other groups like Fatah and Palestinian Authority. If the ministry has a finite number of trained officials to verify deaths, which is probable, then the number of verifications has a ceiling. They would not be pulling random Hamas fighters in tunnels and putting a white coat on them and telling them to verify deaths.

the Shifa bombing hoax

Run a google search of my comments on that if you want. Did you forget that a month after this hospital bombing, the NYT put reporters in another hospital and were able to verify Israel bombed that one? Or did you forget that the hospital administrators — a hodgepodge of anglosphere Christians — confirmed that Shifa was attacked by Israel days before and warned of an impending attack? Israel and US claim it is a hoax, there has been no evidence that it was a hoax.

appeared to actually be a comparatively small explosion in a parking lot

The parking lot which we know, from tweets made before the event, hosted sleeping refugees. I made an archive of that tweet and you can find it in my original comments on the event.

30k

DNI disagrees with you

violently

In the year of our lord 2024, we should not believe political activists when they claim an event was violent without videographic evidence. Given that the event was hosting an IDF soldier and director of the Kohelet Policy Forum (the think tank responsible for Netanyahu’s judicial changes), it’s reasonable to assume many of the students in attendance were Jewish/Israeli ethnonationalists — so, political activists in the purest sense of the term. The group hosting the speaker, Tikvah, explicitly “espouses the repatriation of Jews to their homeland, Eretz Israel,” so these students don’t even believe that America is their home, showing their extreme political stance.

The Kohelet Policy Forum collaborates with the Misgav Institute, which writes stuff like:

We arrive at the clear conclusion that claims of ideological and political distinction between Hamas and the people of Gaza are baseless.

Israel must transfer as many Gazans as possible to other countries; Any other alternative, including PA rule, is a strategic failure. Therefore, Gaza's population should be transferred to the Sinai Desert and the displaced absorbed in other countries.

I looked at all the videos on Twitter and see no evidence of any violence.

Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data? Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity. Many happy monogamists who find polygamy disgusting would never subscribe to her or follow her. Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied with monogamy, and her polygamy followers are preselected with finding polygamy satisfying (hence why they are following a promiscuous woman who talks about it all day). Her most die hard followers are the most likely to take the survey, even just because they see the link more often, and the followers are those who have found the most benefit regardless of how it affects the median polygamist. “Just in, atheists are unsatisfied with atheism, as proven by a survey of atheists who follow Bishop Robert Barron on Twitter.” Am I missing something?

The 1950s and 1980s were different eras, and you haven’t argued at all why we should see them as identical to today. Americans, even the progressive ones, used to have a healthy amount of trust in white identity and white civilization. Post-2010 progressivism does not. I mean assuming we are conflating liberalism with progressivism as everyone does today, then —

Liberalism is [akin to] a hamfisted fable about Anglo-Saxons perfecting the universe by killing off fascists and commies in outer space while flying starships staffed by every race and nation in the galaxy

is incorrect. There is nothing the modern liberal hates more than the neutered ghost of WASPs and their perceived control over institutions which, statistically, does not exist. The current liberal fable is more like: Anglo-Saxons have ruined the country that black slaves mostly created, are predisposed to racism, and they will be saved by people of every race and nation unless we happen to stop liking Asians.

They knew the results of the system they proposed in advance

All the negative consequences of an immorality fall on the person who instigated the immoralty. If meritocracy is the morally correct way, then whoever introduces the notion of affirmative action bears the shame and guilt of having supplied immoral benefits to millions of people. The party which corrects a moral deficit in society is often wrongfully blamed for its negative effects. We see this with the issue of slavery and discrimination: despite every race or tribe discriminating against other races or tribes, enslaving them or worse, it’s white people who are solely blamed for black slavery in America. Yet, given that the blacks enslaved came from a culture which practiced much worse slavery, this is an absurd and ridiculous attack: the whole word bears the same “blame”, or in other words no blame at all. White people, being perhaps the first race to decide that other races do not deserve eternal subjugation, should be praised for their moral advancement, not shamed for the immorality of everyone else. This is an attribution fallacy: the bad luck of the blacks enslaved does not entail that they are victims at the hands of whites, because the blacks themselves came from a culture which believed slavery was permissible and did not have a moral argument against it. The feeling of pity for bad luck is misattributed as a harm against a group by another group.

No one buys an answer like this, or should

I buy it. I’ll do one better: the ivy’s are stocked with 1st to 3rd generation Africans, not the descendants of former slaves, which means we can tell the descendants of former slaves that the descendants of their original enslavers are no longer getting wrongful benefits.

The African American community of the late 1950s and early 1960s felt, with justification, that they were a humiliated underclass inside America

Segregation was actually a way to correct this, by completely separating the races and then putting black taxes toward black things and white taxes toward white things. But in actual fact, white funds and white resources went disproportionally toward the benefit of blacks, due to a collection of factors like military security / better policing / better development / cities etc. Were blacks actually given their own nation they would be Haiti or Liberia, but America attempted to effectually give them their own nation and allow them the fruit of white labor where it didn’t interfere with white civilization. Yeah, maybe you wince when you read that, but then I’d like to hear your argument against it: there was nothing stopping blacks from building their exclusive towns and cities in segregated America (look at the Mormons), yet they chose the obviously advantageous position of living in segregated sections of cities built by people 1000 years more developed than them. I would do the same! To get back to the point, segregation was supposed to allow blacks to compete with other blacks and whites other whites, not to put the races against each other. They were supposed to be totally separated social hierarchies (hence: segregated), not one social hierarchy. IMO this failed mostly due to really really bad argumentation on half of the segregation side, not due to anything necessarily immoral about segregation provided that one side’s majority wishes to live out their destiny separately (after all, this is literally the basis of every single polity with immigration restriction, aka most countries).

What does he mean by "freedom of association", "reservations" and "power-sharing arrangements

I think I see where he is going — we can effectively have white-only communities by going extreme on freedom of association, thus decreasing the social neuroticism about race. I pretty much agree that this would be good, total freedom of association for any descriptor one wants solves all the hysteria. But you will still have to face that eternally leftist voting block, the unmarried women of America who once consumed Uncle Tom’s Cabin and now consume Te Nehates Coates (sp), who believe that when people exclude other people based on heritage they are committing a racism. You need to solve that issue before you can implement some kind of extremism freedom of association policy.

almost metronomical linearity

is what you would expect if the total number of daily deaths exceed what can be confirmed by a finite number of personnel in a given day. If a week-long heavy wind wipes out 3000 poles a day, and I only have the personnel to confirm 2000 a day, then we should expect almost metronomical linearity in the reporting of fixed poles. The article states that “the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%”, and that’s enough variability to align with the above.

on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported”

This only make sense if boys those under 18 are not sent by their mother to obtain goods. In fact, these boys are much more likely to be targeted by Israel when they are gathered in a group without women present. Additionally, per the above, there may be separate areas for corpses based on age — usually they try to keep the children alive as much as possible, or rescue them first, etc

Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low

There has never been any evidence that Israel is targeting Hamas fighters. They may very well be targeting the extended families of those who they believe could possibly be Hamas fighters. Israel has dropped 30,000 bombs just by December, whereas there are only 20,000 Hamas fighters. They could literally be targeting whoever they think are the smartest Gazan residents and we would have no idea because there is no evidence or verification of their attacks’ successes.

There’s a concept called “profit” and we look at profit when determining whether things are overpriced, not just gross expenditures

many companies that could've succeeded fail due to bad leadership

This has always happened. Even very highly paid corporate CEOs screw up companies.

Dockworkers rightfully fight automation because they know that there are not other jobs for them with high pay as many other jobs lack unions; the “efficiency” goes to just a few at top. This is different from a scenario where unions are the norm across industries — suddenly the benefit of being a dockworker would not so large as to prevent them going through with automation. But even if for some reason dockworkers maintain a disproportionately high salary, we can imagine a system where the union of one industry negotiates (and can be overruled) by a broader “related-industry” or “affected industry” greater union body. There are many ways to incentivize efficient economic decisions which involve unions and cross-union negotiation.

cup of water for free

This just evades the point, try again but for soda