coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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23d ago
Israel has already moved their goals from “destroy nuclear sites” to “destroy ballistic missile capabilities”. But it isn’t easy to destroy all of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, perpetually. This is something that Cruz would know if he had even a passing curiosity in the country which his funders want destroyed. A 1 minute YouTube short would inform someone that it has a topography uniquely suited for hiding missile development and launch sites, with 370,000 square miles of mountainous terrain.
The “Iran is almost out of missile launchers” is eerily similar to “Russia is almost out of missiles” of 2022. Except the difficult part of launching hypersonic missiles is not the launchers, it’s the missiles, and they already have those in abundance.
coffee_enjoyer
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29d ago
It does not appear to be truthful reporting. American officials took the unusual step of announcing on several occasions that America is not on board with the attack. The IDF is telling reporters that they are coordinating with America. Unless the journalist is lying about what the IDF stated to them: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-expects-operation-against-iran-to-last-for-several-days/
Please consider the possibility that not every Jew everywhere is following the master plan of the Elders of Zion all day long
The “you’ve said something about Israel? — how dare you criticize every Jew in the world, I can’t believe you just quoted the elders of Zion!” that you see by the Israel crowd hasn’t been persuasive to normal people for many years, and has been used for decades. At this point it just signals your support for Israel. It is more dignified to just post the 🇮🇱 emoji.
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28d ago
Given that Israel hides their military command center under the heart of Tel Aviv, their most densely-populated city, how many Israeli civilians is Iran justified to bomb in their attempt to destroy this sprawling system?
This room is the nerve center of a bunker dubbed the “Fortress of Zion,” a new Israeli Army command post deep underground beneath its headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv. It is designed to command the kind of high-tech air wars that have supplanted ground invasions fought by tanks and infantry battalions.
When Israel decided to launch its air assault on Gaza, thousands from military headquarters above ground joined the bunker. Also present were members of intelligence agencies like the Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, and Foreign Ministry and police representatives.
Obviously, it is not Iran’s fault that Israel hides their command center among civilians; neither is it Iran’s fault that Israel does not publish the exact coordinates of each room of the base. It would appear that Iran is justified to inflict somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 civilian casualties in Israel in their pursuit to reach the Israeli leadership. At least, going by the normative Hamas:civilian casualty ratio which Israel has defended since the Gaza war began.
coffee_enjoyer
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20d ago
”undeclared” is doing a lot here
Not at all. The Symington Amendment and the Glenn Amendment forbid America from providing aid to countries which have no IAEA oversight.
coffee_enjoyer
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10d ago
The suffering of bees may be important to mitigate (I think that’s true — wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?) but the author must convince us —
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the suffering of bees is of such high importance that it is worth writing on it to convince people to place a burden on themselves. (Unlikely. There is worse suffering taking place even if we consider only bees, like the effects of pesticides. It’s not worth discourse hours).
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that writing something so unintuitive that people ignore what else you write is morally worth the future drawbacks of loss of influence.
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that the suffering of bees is so important that we should forego the very term of pleasure. This is problematic to his utilitarian ambitions, because our motivation to live well and expand our wellbeing is tied to whether we are able to experience wholesome pleasures in life. If people feel better from a spoonful of honey, not only does their own suffering decrease, but (1) they have energy to reduce the suffering of others and (2) the reason to love bees over wasps is brought to mind.
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bees are not designed to be destroyed by mammals, given that bears and raccoons destroy them in the wild, and given that fish are designed to be eaten by other fish. If the author does not believe that nature’s design should be respected, then his interest should be ensuring that killer whales aren’t able to kill dolphins in the ocean. But wouldn’t only a senseless person have a problem with the killer whale enjoying his design and eating dolphins, who significantly more intelligent than bees? So the suffering of bees is within our design — we should only guarantee that the suffering isn’t excessive, like with some easy regulations about whether all the young bees are killed off after the honey is made.
There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.
coffee_enjoyer
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23d ago
The promises to Abraham which Cruz references are interpreted in the New Testament as applying to Christians as follows:
Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as referring to many, but rather to one, “And to your seed,” that is, Christ. […] All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.
I think the easiest argument against any kind of dual covenant is that the first recorded preaching by Peter is to Jews in Israel, in Acts 2. They are told to repent, be baptized and believe in order to be saved.
coffee_enjoyer
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29d ago
Channel 12 and two separate journalists reporting what the IDF told them makes it more probable that the IDF told them something than that these three journalists are lying
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself. They are citizens; they have more in common with you if you are a wealthy white person; for evolutionary reasons, it is natural to have an interest in uplifting those that are similar to yourself; for reasons of national security, you do not want so many citizens who believe that the American project is not worth investing in; they may have a higher IQ than Hondurans; they may have different levels of compassion or a different taste in aesthetics which may be informed by genetics.
Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party
College-educated White males lean toward Trump. It’s just women who shifted a lot toward Harris.
Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor
This may have something to do with the millions of migrants brought in to undercut wages, the exact thing we’re talking about. No, you can’t ever compete with them, because —
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Remittance payments mean that they can afford a higher quality life while temporarily living a lower quality life in America
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They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will
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They often live in illegal accommodations, requiring less funds, and these require a network that natives aren’t a part of
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They live within a culture where the women expect to marry laborers
I’m also not sure if you’re agreeing with him that it would increase wages, and just disagree that this is important, or if you think it won’t increase wages.
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
Not only that, but there’s “pleasant suffering”, as in a boy playing a game with friends that roughs him up, or a climber scaling a mountain. There are people who live weeks or months of their life with a negligible amount of “pain signal pain” and zero “traumatic pain”. To deny that we can live with less pain is to deny essentially any motive for a human to do anything. It governs everything we do.
coffee_enjoyer
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20d ago
If the argument is “Iran is a religious extremist country”, then we should see religious extremist TFR, which coincides wherever there is religious extremism, always. In such diverse places as
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Minnesota, where the Salafi-infused Muslim households have a TFR of 5, and the women wear niqab with more frequency than Iran
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Brooklyn New York, where the Haredim have a TFR of 6
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The rare regions of traditional Catholicism in France
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TLM-attending Catholics throughout America (simply represents the most extremist branch of Catholicism)
If you’re telling me that Iran has a religious extremist problem, and yet they can’t manage to get their women to have more than 2 kids or wear a veil property, I am going to conclude someone has lied to you. Because this is the hallmark, textbook sign of a society filled with Abrahamic conviction. Especially among Muslims, where the particular sphere of women has always been greatly delineated. Religious extremism means “clerics tell me what to do and I obey”, and if not even the women obey then no one cares. So I conclude that there is no extremism, based upon this fact in addition to other facts.
coffee_enjoyer
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29d ago
It’s reported that the IDF is claiming they are coordinating its actions with America
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
As our resident holocaust expert: have there been any cases of elderly camp guards admitting to the holocaust? We should expect that some percent of elderly camp guards would admit to a bunch of traumas and atrocities once they develop age-related declines in inhibition. I imagine most of this is written in German, but I could only find cases of the opposite: elderly camp guards losing their inhibition and then expressing a denial of the event.
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
Is there a new cheating epidemic?
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Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree
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High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI
coffee_enjoyer
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20hr ago
So your answer to the question of how White Americans can compete with semi-slave illegal workers is
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Go ask around a Waffle House
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Look around on Craigslist for illegal housing
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(Ignore remittance payments)
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(Ignore cultural and early life influences involving manual labor, eg that some of these Hondurans have been doing it since 12)
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(Ignore crucial cultural factors related to social wellbeing like finding a wife)
coffee_enjoyer
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20d ago
That’s too anonymous; I’m opening myself to embarrassment if I’m wrong.
coffee_enjoyer
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26d ago
There is some good here. But the problem with over-prioritizing symbolism is that it weakens the power of the original meaning. For instance, making “Lord” into only an imagined presence we speak to weakens the significance of talking to your Lord. In antiquity, talking to your Lord was a big deal — the Lord controlled your entire realm, not to mention your destiny. For Christians, Lord was the established authority with maximum culturally-informed value judgments which were deeply internalized (to describe it as scientifically as possible). If the Lord is defined as a presence we imagine, and this presence is only an abstractly conceptualized ground of being, then we have lost considerable motivation to pray or act righteously. We are just playing pretend — and perhaps we always are — but the pretend isn’t even dramatic. The dramatic pull is gone. The totalizing, moralizing vibe is gone. And it risks becoming woefully subjective, and it also risks toppling like the Tower of Babel — we can’t build upon the rock of Christ if each person’s Christ is different.
I mean imagine you’re at some mystical Christian gathering, and you’re crying because the weight of your sin is too strong and you don’t want to betray your savior — how can the “mystic” answer? “Whoa, you’re taking this imagined presence thing really seriously…” Or who is going to donate their wealth over an “imagined presence”? It lacks force.
What I think is a better solution here, is not to say “Lord is imagined”, but to say that these words are the only way we can access reality — particularly a socialized, moral, emotional reality. By socialized, I mean both “discussing complex spiritual reality within a shared language and framework” and “with the cooperative presuppositions which answer myriad collective action concerns”. These words act as an interface by which we access the divine. On the human-level, then, you really do have a Lord with whom all the poetic elaborations of creation and judgment are solidly true. On the material-level, there is no Lord. Is this such a difficult leap to make? I don’t think so; after all, the Christian must believe that the bread (material) becomes the flesh and blood of the Lord (spiritual) within a shared social ecosystem designed toward moral reinforcement.
Now, a pious Christian does use imagination in prayer: perhaps they kneel, perhaps they look up, perhaps they repeat some words which cement His dominion over all things (the earth is God’s footstool). But they use imagination only to elaborate and feel the beliefs or dogmas that they hold. They are hallowing the name of God and bidding the Kingdom come. They do this because they believe the consequences are important. If everything is symbols all the way down, then what is the importance of it all? You need something which roots the urgency and significance of the quest. Otherwise you’re just satisfying your own limited ego or whim, you’re not actually involved in making the world better or anything good. Why not just play Dungeons & Dragons, or WoW? Why not just talk to ChatGPT? So any religious quest needs to be rooted in a totalizing importance. And there are actually decent ways to combine it with secular importance, but traditionally what religion does is get you into an environment where they can propagandize their root concerns to you: the wrath of God is coming, we slew God’s Son; God’s Son came to forgive us and save us from evil; there is an eternal punishment and an eternal abode for the righteous. Etc. Maybe they have the children sing about the earth burning in smoke. Maybe you are peer-evaluated by your perceived faith and banished for your doubt.
A purely symbolic religion will not get martyrdom like this:
I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body; so that when I have fallen asleep [in death], I may be no trouble to any one. Then shall I truly be a disciple of Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my body. Now I begin to be a disciple. And let no one, of things visible or invisible, envy me that I should attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.
All the pleasures of the world, and all the kingdoms of this earth, shall profit me nothing. It is better for me to die on behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth. For what shall a man be profited, if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul? Him I seek, who died for us: Him I desire, who rose again for our sake. This is the gain which is laid up for me. Pardon me, brethren: do not hinder me from living, do not wish to keep me in a state of death; and while I desire to belong to God, do not give me over to the world. Allow me to obtain pure light: when I have gone there, I shall indeed be a man of God. Permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my God. If any one has Him within himself, let him consider what I desire, and let him have sympathy with me, as knowing how I am straitened.
My love has been crucified, and there is no fire in me desiring to be fed; but there is within me a water that lives and speaks, saying to me inwardly, Come to the Father. I have no delight in corruptible food, nor in the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became afterwards of the seed of David and Abraham; and I desire the drink of God, namely His blood, which is incorruptible love and eternal life.
I like Jonathan Pageau but his writings suffer this same problem. A person just isn’t moved by knowing symbols, or poems, or anything clever. If you have 1000 symbols versus 1 “this man died to save the world and now waits for you”, you are going to be changed from the simple non-symbolic thing. And I enjoyed Jordan Peterson’s thoughts on the Old Testament, but again this has the same problem — JBP can’t even admit to being a Christian in an argument with a teenager. And lastly, around Christ’s time you had the Alexandrian school of Philo, and they also doubted the real body of Christ, and they wrote thousands of pages allegorizing the Old Testament with symbols. And it’s a pleasant read, but it’s worthless and doesn’t actually do anything.
coffee_enjoyer
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20d ago
What metric would you trust?
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TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam
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Hijab is becoming less common. The requirement is for the veil to fully cover the hair, but from watching any video of Iranian streets most women totally ignore this — it just barely covers the back of their hair
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a majority of Iranians use VPNs
coffee_enjoyer
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20hr ago
You’re missing the entire substance of the argument, which is that the reason the QoL of agriculture is too low for natives is because of the migrants. If you deport them all, ag needs workers, ag must increase QoL, it looks more like WOOFing which white people love doing.
If I could immediately hire foreign English-speakers as paralegals, importing them in and keeping them in cramp accommodations and ensure they are afraid of leaving the job because finding work as an illegal is tricky, the paralegal market in America would implode. There would be no American paralegals left. So the American paralegal cannot compete with the migrant worker driven paralegal industry.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
I think uplifting the in-group by getting them jobs sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain is pathetic.
Why? It works incredibly well for China, who has seen consistent gains in QoL. It worked well throughout the history of the West. Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf. Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity. In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history. Not for the slaves, of course, but for the non-enslaved.
I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.
Well you ignored all of my points regarding this. If I also ignored all of the points I would agree with you.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Iran could threaten the use of a salted bomb on the grounds of the Temple Mount, maximizing radioactive contamination. The ultra-religious have enormous political influence in Isael. This would act as deterrence in a way that targeting a major city would not, while minimizing loss of life. Al-Aqsa isn’t super important for Shia Muslims, but the Temple Mount actually needs to be the place of construction for the Third Temple.
coffee_enjoyer
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21d ago
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
Where is the line you draw in biological sophistication when you begin to care? A mouse? A bird?
coffee_enjoyer
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26d ago
The substance of prayer is cultivating a disposition, salience / sensitivity, and object of thanks. I mean I’m sure there are Christians out there praying to win a lottery ticket, but this is not the sophisticated method of prayer. I think most traditional churches would advise that you pray for spiritual benefits and basic needs. You could argue that Christ even advises a person to pray only for the kingdom and righteousness and not even basic needs. However I think there’s room to pray regarding all feasible goal pursuits with undue confidence, because that’s beneficial for a person.
Arrogance and narcissism
Arrogance and narcissism are bad because they are antisocial. If a person believes that a loving God cares about everyone maximally, this would have prosocial behavioral consequences. Calling this narcissistic or arrogant is a category error of sorts. It’s just a mismatch of terminology.
it’s far more invested in preserving its own status and influence than in any genuine truth. Most of the people at its core seem more concerned with hierarchy and control than with the transcendental.
I see a lot wrong with nearly every church so I can’t disagree here. But that doesn’t mean that we should throw out all the developments of Western religion.
coffee_enjoyer
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27d ago
It would be like saying there’s a sprawling tunnel system beneath Manhattan which America uses as their primary war room. The Pentagon isn’t even in the middle of DC, let alone under the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
What can we learn about optimal cultural leadership in light of the 2013-2021 social justice period?
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement. Although many conservatives see value in religious institutions as a cultural defense, mainstream Catholicism and Protestant denominations did not substantively address the social justice craze. In some cases they placated or even promoted it.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men. Yarvin, Peterson, Weinstein, Scott Adams(?). My memory of who was most dominant in this period is somewhat hazy, maybe someone with a better memory can correct me. There were more psychologists among critics than philosophers. You had people like Stefan Molyneux passionately criticizing the proto-movement well before its zenith. His Twitter attests to his neuroticism.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
It’s difficult to come away with clear takeaways. IMO: (1) it is beneficial to increase anonymous discussion, as this laid the groundwork for future criticism, and allowed for arguments to spread which would otherwise be banned. (2) It may be essential to increase the number of passionate and neurotic men, over men with other skills, as the major critics were more often passionate and somewhat crazy. A “passionate” temperament is occasionally inaccurate, and may result in behavior that leads institutions to weed them out — but their utility in sensing and addressing threats compensates for the occasional bout of craziness.
There is a funny review of Jordan Peterson from 2013, possibly the first time anyone commented about his personality online. It was made on the anonymous literature board of 4chan in 2013, long before his rise to fame.
Editing for clarity
The question is geared toward users who believe that wokeness constituted a threat — to institutions, America, truth, etc. I suppose there are some users who do not believe that wokeness was a threat. I can’t recall seeing such a comment in years on this forum, but if you’re such a user, you are of course welcome to comment and critique in any way that you’d like. Feel free to comment on the premise, the points, a tangent.
Why were the individuals leading the fight against wokeness outside of the traditional framework of understanding and designating cultural authority? The study of philosophy, the study of history, the study of great works, the study and authority of religion — these things did not create any of the influential “fighters” publicly arguing against wokeness. If they couldn’t detect, grasp, and eliminate the threat, then how important should we consider these pursuits and domains? Why did they fail when they were needed? Are these pursuits less valuable in moral formation than generally conceived? Many conservatives believe that these mainstays of Western education are important to study; yet the students of these were impotent against the threat. There are conservatives who studied these, and who teach these.
”Institutional capture” doesn’t factor in here because there are non-woke members of these domains, perhaps a few percent or a few tens of percents, but none of them were to be found among the influential critics of wokeness.
It appears to me that temperament played a larger role than anything else in deciding who was instrumental in tackling the threat. Do you agree? Do you disagree? From Peterson to Musk, the great “defenders” against it were passionate and somewhat crazy personalities. They cried publicly. They had strange personal lives. If that’s the case, should temperament be considered a greater deal in the selection of authority?
I think this clarifies. There’s a mismatch between “the study of Western things leads to great moral conduct!” and the reality of how everyone behaved during a mass movement which veered toward moral hysteria. “Traditional education” did not avail anything. This is interesting, provided of course that you agree with the premise.
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