coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I think this is pretty nitpicky. In America, everyone pursues status according to financial success unless they belong to a cult or a university. It can be called any term you like. Your point above that the Haredi would compete over wealth upon entering the workforce doesn’t really make sense, as (1) Haredi in the workforce have lower status than the Rabbis and (2) such a competition wouldn’t harm TFR any more than the already-fierce status competition over learning the most Torah. It would need to be argued that participation in the workforce for the Haredi would somehow harm the status competition around having large families.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Right but today we just throw our mentally ill and drug-addicted onto the populous streets to haunt the low-wage workers who take public transportation. Intermittently they spend an expensive night in jail or take an expensive ambulance ride to an expensive hospital. Sometimes they kill each other or give each other AIDs or just die. It’s very costly as is. I imagine the religious extremist would just confine them somewhere for their own good, which results in a fraction of the social and economic costs and is also morally superior.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Capitalism enforces a zero-sum status competition, regardless of whether it is positive sum in its economic consequences or not; actors compete over obtaining more wealth than their peers and a greater position than their peers. As you said, “enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status”, that’s a relative position which is zero-sum; having more wealth and prestige = more status = better marital outcomes.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
This wouldn’t be unusual for Europe or America before the 20th century, though. Problematic people were normally shunned from the community. This was done either through shunning them from polite society (simply never invited anywhere) or literally kicking them out of the town. Christians would have a certain place where the lifelong penitents would stay during mass, in some eras. Also, don’t we shun them now? We just put our mentally ill on the street. Why is this an argument against copying the Haredi TFR scheme, and more precisely, why would you believe this criticism weighs against civilizational catastrophe? When nations face civilizational catastrophe from war, they postpone freedom and force men to be warriors and then force them at gunpoint to march to certain death in the most degraded condition. Surely we can expend 0.01% of the stress and just orient culture toward pronatality.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions, something that commends a man more status than being even a billionaire. That’s part of the reason the older guys still continue to study. Yet even with this ruthless competition over status, the TFR remains high, because of the aforenoted confluence of pro-fertile cultural attributes. The Haredi man with a lot of money has worse marital odds than a poor Haredi man at a good rabbinical school. But both are getting married and both are having children.
Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.
If everyone focused on this alone then it would cement the ruin of the entire civilization. Though I agree that’s the best advise for normal people, you actually do need people obsessing over TFR because our elites are lowkey retarded and senseless.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The set is unrelated to 10 hours a day of studying. That is outside the set and something which they just happen to also do. When people possess the true set of pro-fertility cultural properties, like the Mennonites who do back-breaking labor in South America, or 1930s Germany which had enormous TFR gains due to cultural policy, then they also have more children, without having to study for 10 hours a day. And when Haredi stop studying or stop studying early, they continue having high TFR.
Unfortunately, the only two good proofs of the necessity of pro-fertility cultural elements are religious Jews and the Nazis. This makes it very difficult to persuade normal people to follow your line of argument, because it makes you sound like a genuinely insane person. But consider the Nazis saw a 40% gain of TFR and the shift was highest in urban areas, not rural areas.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768366
Preliminary vital statistics for 1934 show that in the Western world there was a general arrest in the decline of the birth-rate which had been going on for a decade or more. In Hungary the birth-rate decreased from 1933 to 1934 less than half as much as it did a year earlier, and in Norway only one-fifth as much. In Poland the rate of 26.5 per 1,000 in 1934 represented no change from 1933, in contrast to a decline of 2.2 from 1932 to 1933. In Great Britain the birth-rate in 1934 is estimated provisionally at I4.8, slightly above the 1933 rate of 14-4, which in turn was well below that of I5.3 in 1932. In the United States the rise from 16.4 in 1933 to 17.1 in 1934 almost brought the birth-rate back to the 1932 figure of I7-3.? These changes are dwarfed, however, by Germany's experience. There the birth-rate was 15.1 in 1932, I4.7 in 1933, and 18.0 in 1934.
According to Nazi leaders, the suppression of abortion, the restrictions on giving birth-control information, and the offering of the various economic inducements have had less effect together on the birth-rate than the psychical revolution which has followed the Nazi rise to political power. They say that formerly the individual was considered the important unit, so it was natural that each person should think he should control his own body and decide the question of parenthood from his own point of view. Under Nazi leadership, however, the predominant importance of the state has been empha-sized. As a result it is claimed that a large proportion of the population already has come to feel that the body belongs only in part to the individual, and that the need of the state for children is the first factor to consider in deciding on the proper size of family.
The Nazis say that under the individualistic point of view a pregnant woman was treated with a certain amount of derision and scorn; she was foolish to undergo pregnancy; she and her husband would be more sensible to buy an auto or spend money on themselves in other ways rather than to incur the expenses connected with raising a family. This general attitude has been changed, the leaders claim, so that now child-bearing is considered holy and a pregnant woman is shown the utmost consideration as one unselfishly doing her part for the good of the state. Children are extolled as worth far more than material comforts. Even in the schools the youth are being incul- cated with these beliefs. Most important of all the psychical changes, according to the Nazis, has been the reviving of self-respect among the German people, and of their faith in the future of Germany. They claim that both feelings were dying out under the previous regime, and that people were becoming increasingly unwilling to raise children in such an atmosphere. With the change in policy under the present government Germany has again taken her place as an equal among neighboring nations and has indicated that she will maintain it. This has led to an emotional rebirth of the German people, for the future now appears rosy to them where before it was black. They feel again that theirs is a nation with a mission-one in which it is worth while to raise a family.
In the larger cities the birth-rate of I933 was above that of I932 for the first time in the third quarter, and the differential has steadily become larger up to the last quarter of I934. These turning-points in the birth-rate correspond to changes in the rate of uninterrupted conceptions nine months earlier, for the nation in the quarter following Hitler's accession to power and for the larger cities in the quarter preceding
the twelve states with the higher proportion of Catholics had an increase in birth-rate of 17.3 per cent compared with 21.1 per cent in the other thirteen states. [subtly important stat here; Catholics were less likely to be on board with Nazism, and so if the cultural elements of Nazism increases TFR, then we should expect that Catholics would not see greater gains; they are in a slightly different cultural ecosystem]
On the whole, therefore, it may be said that the forces tending to raise the birth-rate had least effect on Catholics and agricultural people-those least affected in previous years by the forces tending to lower the birth-rate [another subtly important stat. The agricultural were far less likely to be in an area where Nazi propaganda was present and powerful]
Berlin is well in the lead with a I934 birth-rate 48 per cent above that of I933, while at the other extreme Beuthen (in Silesia, very near the Polish border) shows an increase of only I2 percent
The birth rate continued to rise until the advent of war. Now consider that the Nazis, despite loving propaganda, probably had little idea how to create really good pro-motherhood culture, or that most of the larger effects would be delayed to when the indoctrinated come to age. Even their shoddy attempt at increasing TFR through culture worked, and they only got to see the smallest prelude of the TFR gains before extenuating circumstances nullified our chance to measure the gains.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
It probably does give them +10 points in allegiance and +20 in conformity, but you have very allegiant evangelicals all over America who do not have such TFR because they don’t have the pro-fertile cultural requirements
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I’m so not persuaded on this. Of course you can’t replicate the Haredi one-to-one, nor would this be desirable. But you can replicate the high TFR aspects of their culture. The young men might spend 8-16 hrs per day studying the Torah, and then they spend probably 90 minutes of their time doing rituals. In exchange for this strenuous labor, they receive welfare benefits which still amount to a low income lifestyle. We can totally imagine a Haredi culture where, instead of spending 8 hours learning all the laws about separately eating milk and meat, they spend 8 hours at an Amazon Warehouse. When they are done working, they still exist in a pro-fertile culture where status is judged by number of children &tc. And there are Haredi who work, they are big in Amazon fulfillment and places like B&H cameras. There working Haredi still have a high TFR. And they had a high TFR when they worked at Agriprocessors. So, while they do have a lot of schemes that give them benefits, those benefits are less than the money they would earn were they working for the same amount of time that they study.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I find Anglican Chant underrated. It descends from traditional European liturgical chant, the Gregorian chant, but adds harmony and new melodies. The text used is often an old rendering of the psalms in 17th century English or earlier. It is the music of America’s beginnings: not only was the first song ever sung in America from an Anglican psalter (a song of thanksgiving, which you could still sing today if you so desired), but more than half of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were Anglican and three of the first five presidents.
Sometimes the chants sound like they would fit well in a supernatural and dramatic RPG like Bloodborne, if you were to slow them and add reverb some effects. (Some imagination required). They can be delightfully pitiful, and few music settings can capture this spirit well, certainly no settings still in use today outside of well-endowed Cathedrals.
Turn thee, O Lᴏʀᴅ, and deliver my soul;
O save me, for thy mercy’s sake.
For in death no man remembereth thee;
and who will give thee thanks in the pit?
Other settings are glorious and joyful, of course:
He hath made the round world so sure,
that it cannot be moved.
Ever since the world began, hath thy seat been prepared:
thou art from everlasting.
The floods are risen, O Lᴏʀᴅ, the floods have lift up their voice;
the floods lift up their waves.
The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly;
but yet the Lᴏʀᴅ who dwelleth on high is mightier.
My favorite is from the Queen’s funeral, I think.
Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? • or whither shall I go then from thy presence? • If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; • if I go down to hell, thou art there also. • If I take the wings of the morning, • and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; • Even there also shall thy hand lead me, • and thy right hand shall hold me. • If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me; • then shall my night be turned to day. • Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day; • the darkness and light to thee are both alike. • For my reins are thine
Now a lot of the musical settings are bad, sadly, but when they’re good they’re really good. And it’s an acquired taste, as they insist on fitting each line of variable size into the same steady melody.
The psalms are interesting because they’re so… self-absorbed. Almost narcissistic. “For I have heard the blasphemy of the multitude, and fear is on every side; while they conspire together against me, and take their counsel to take away my life.” So dramatic! It’s like the most dramatic teenager telling you about drama in their school (they all hate me… they want me dead…). The psalms were always designed to be communally-sung, even if ascribed to David, so this is interesting to dwell on — songs that are communal while conveying so much individualistic conceit. But I guess this isn’t unusual in popular music, where people rap along to gangster rap about opps and triumphing against them.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The first Hasidic settlement is more like a town than a city, in contrast to urban Jewry at the time, unless I am mistaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medzhybizh
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Maybe not for Haredim but there are others ways to create adherence and allegiance if you were going to copy Haredi TFR values.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
The so-called National-Religious having a consistent TFR of 4 actually proves a lot.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
The Haredi have always had a high birth rate, and there is no period in which they moved from the Ukrainian villages into the cities (1940s?) where they lacked a high birth rate. So there was no evolutionary selection or anything like that. And it’s also too little time for the Haredi to have evolved for it anyway. And we don’t even know if TFR has substantial genetic correlates.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I’m aware of every criticism against the Haredi but their TFR isn’t related to their welfare beneficiary status. The reason for their high beneficiary status is that the men insist on studying for an exceedingly long time. (That and they lobby well). Very little of their studying plausibly impacts their TFR because only like 1% of the readings are about having children or getting married. If they had normal education and normal work, but retained the pro-fertility cultural elements, which is possible, then they would still have a high TFR. In Israel you have the conservative / modern orthodox who have a high TFR while living a very productive technology-forward life.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I still haven’t seen a reasonable counter-argument to “learn from the Haredi”. They are the world’s most urban population, living in the costly areas of NY and NJ, often in poverty. They are as diabetic, unhealthy and sedentary as any American, and ingest as many microplastics as any American. Their lifestyle is a similitude of the American graduate student or office worker. If I were to comment about the high TFR of the Amish in Beliz or today’s increasing TFR in rural Afghanistan, there would be a ton of confounding variables, but there are no non-cultural confounders for the Haredim. What do they do? Number of children is a mark of status, as a commandment and blessing; girls are taught to value motherhood as their glorious purpose and value in the world starting at the youngest age; they pride-maxx about their heritage / peoplehood; they privilege men over women. We don’t have the studies to disentangle which of these elements are causal, but it’s going to be at least one of these things and possibly all of these things. Their lives are biologically and environmentally the same as ours, in fact they might actually be less healthy on average.
Also, any TFR strategy has to consider the longterm eugenic / dysgenic outcomes. What sort of Swedes are you selecting for if you offer a lot of money to have children? Probably not the most loving or the most interesting Swedes. Why not make giving birth an act of love and ultimate interest? Then you are selecting for the prosocial and intelligent Swedes.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
You can plan ways to influence billionaires who will go on to buy platforms and pay for influencers; Elon’s purchase of x demonstrates the efficacy of this strategy. That is the only “mainstream” solution because everything in culture is ultimately decided by a billionaire. You actually need one of your billionaires to own a platform before you can even create counter-propaganda, because as we saw in the 10’s, anyone trying to combat left wing propaganda with their own propaganda would be banned upon getting too popular. And it really is just a propaganda war, because (1) the activist Left’s insistence on highlighting their views from the PoV of a pitiable minority is indistinguishable from the conscious development of propaganda, because it’s just as predicated on influence eg exaggeration and sympathy; and (2) the effective way to combat propaganda isn’t “telling the truth”, as that doesn’t lead to engagement and influence, but actual propaganda or counter-propaganda, otherwise you just lose. You might say, “but can’t you still boycott?”, but no, because the only place people find out about boycotts and are reinforced to boycott is on social media. Which is owned by a billionaire. Even if you have a zealot running social media, as in the case of Gab, no one is going to join it unless they see reason to join it which again requires propaganda in the dominant social media ecosystem.
What I think is the more resilient longterm solution, though it would require decades of development, is the formation of a parallel culture built upon rituals and stories of allegiance which create an abiding in-group preference. This would just be taking the most powerful civic and religious rituals of Western history and tailoring them so that they create a in-group preference among adherents whilst inoculating them against those myths of progressivism that inevitably lead to ruin (“everyone is the same”, colonialism, racism, slavery, stolen land — these need to be reproved before someone starts hearing about it in their teens). Only this is enough to combat the influence of algorithms and social media. Theoretically with the right “cultural-ritual infrastructure” you can develop a perfectly fine parallel community which will run on indefinitely.
I don’t think there’s another solution.
Those blaming old white men or women have lost the plot IMO. For around a decade, anyone consuming the news was exposed to stories designed to increase concern and love for minorities while increasing only disgust and anger at White men. This was done through daily news consumption which acted as a series of repeated trials, not dissimilar to how a psychologist can train a reflexive emotional behavior in an animal when a neutral stimuli is repeatedly paired with a conditioning stimuli. These repeated trials or iterations were variably scheduled and cross-contextual, by changing the subjects and locations but retaining the same desired response, to maximize the strength of the reflexive behavior. They used emotionally-potent stories to enhance this response, because the pitiable and unusual increases the strength of the memory. They also, perhaps unknowingly or perhaps knowingly, structured these trials like the “misinformation effect” studies, where a person who remembers an event in detail before learning new information about the event will have his memory of the event altered to encode the new information over the old. This was done using the typical format of “you might have heard… here’s why you’re wrong”, and “the rumor… debunked”.
The people who ran the news at this time, and organizations like the SPLC and the ADL who policed the news, effectively brainwashed the public into hating White people and loving minorities. Brainwashing is a real thing. It’s not just a movie trope, it’s an actual phenomenon. If you were to enter North Korea, the citizen’s reflexive response to hearing about America or capitalism may be the same as a 2016 liberal girl’s response to hearing about White men, and this was inculcated in the same exact way, which is repeated trials where something is paired with an emotionally potent “conditioned stimuli”. Except actually, the 2016 person’s response would be stronger because they received more trials.
You wouldn’t blame your sheep if they were eaten by wolves, because they are sheep, they can’t help it. Similarly you shouldn’t blame the average American for falling victim to a highly sophisticated decades-long propaganda operation by those they were supposed to trust. If you always saw through it, congratulations, you’re a news-obsessive or an autist or really neurotic or are just built different. But the average person isn’t like you, they conform to their social superiors. This is the usual mode of human living. You cannot change the fact that most people are conformist, you need to make sure that the people who control how the public is molded are not evil or stupid.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
There were many Jews who opposed the Iraq war, and indeed the polling showed they were more likely to oppose it than the average American. But the issue remains that within the group are a wealthy and influential block who rally around being Jewish, recruit within the Jewish general population, and tie their religious identity to defending the “Jewish State”. For decades they have accused anti-Zionists of anti-semitism because of course criticizing Israel is criticizing the Jews. These bad apples have hidden themselves amongst an orchard of perfectly good apples, using them as human shields, and if current standards of warfare apply to the culture war, then it is acceptable to malign 15 innocents if it leads to successfully critiquing 1 bad actor.
Bari Weiss’ father was a regional head of AIPAC and nationally-influential Zionist. After Ellison’s takeover, all four major CBS hires have been Jewish, which is statistically improbable even if Jews are 10x over-represented in the field: a 0.3% probability, assuming such an over-representation. (Weiss, Gutman, Weinstein, Dokoupil). If you include Ellison himself in the list, it’s about a 1 out of 1000 chance that all five key positions just happen to be Jewish. (Again assuming 10x over-rep, otherwise it’s like 1 out of 100 million chance)
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
If Mearsheimer is correct that Jewish groups were essential in bringing America to war with Iraq (let’s say they were half the cause), then they are responsible for half of the 3 trillion dollar cost of the war plus 2,250 American lives. This should factor into your ad hoc economic calculation regarding the value of our alliance with Israel or the Jewish people. You mention Qatar as “undermining Western values” and promoting our collapse, but Qatar has pledged 1 trillion dollars to America and Israel has pledged 0 dollars. I do not see a rise in Islamic influence in America, which is regrettable because I think conservative fashion norms are good for society. We also have more immigrants who come in from Israel than we do from Qatar, by like, a factor of 100. It’s our own lack of nationalism and in-group preference that has caused us to bring in low-performing immigrants, and Qataris deserve no blame for that, as they had no influence in America when this occurred.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Fuentes likely has a girlfriend (if not multiple) but hides this to prevent their doxxing. He has a loyal female fanbase that calls themselves groypettes and they pay to have their superchat messages read on his livestream, where he unceremoniously declines their advances.
On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work. Vance and the couch for instance. Humans really are that base. I recall reading that the 12th century Peter Abelard couldn’t be promoted at his monastery because he was castrated and thus deemed unmanly. That’s a monastery, in the Middle Ages. And the recent insult that Trump fellated Bill Clinton is no different than when they called Caesar “Queen of Bithynia” per the accusation that he slept with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia in his youth. Something that annoyed me with Kamala Harris is that he have actual evidence that she behaved in such a prostitutional way, as she was the girlfriend of Willy Brown at 29 while he was 60 and he proceeded to hand her a comfy no-show political job. This was so ripe for insults — the guy’s name is literally Brown Willy — but no one was willing to stoop low for it, though they were all on board with the Russia prostitute stuff. I think the reason for this is man’s innate philogyny, and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men.
coffee_enjoyer
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12d ago
That’s an odd example because of the elephantine alternative explanation as to why there are settlements built in that particular country. Is there another example?
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
It’s still a far cry from an American suburb. They can walk 5-15 minutes and find a restaurant, subway, pleasant bench near a Shinto shrine, etc. In much of suburbia you can’t do that.
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
Suburbs good, cars good
Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car
How much of this is a factor of American suburbs being preferable to American cities, vs American suburbs being preferable to what cities could be, eg more like Tokyo or Bergen or Reykjavik or etc?
What is even going on there in 2025? The political board has been unusable and IMO totally botted since maybe 2018
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