coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
USAID found no evidence of that. AFAIK no evidence was ever presented to journalists or the public. No international organization has supported Israel’s claims. And note the infeasibility of Hamas members (20,000) stealing ~1 million unique aid packages daily or weekly in refugee camps monitored by drones with facial recognition software. Any widespread theft and redistribution would be trivially easy to record. And if this were happening, Israel would have gladly allowed aid simply to be able to target and track Hamas militants. The whole area is under constant surveillance by the most advanced aerial surveillance system in the world. Meanwhile you have prominent Israelis in Netanyau’s cabinet who have promoted the idea of starving them: Gallant, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Eliyahu, Katz.
This event is significant to the overarching question of whether the whole world holds a bias against the Jews or whether the Jews hold a bias against the whole world. Their most consistent historical stereotype is that they lack compassion for outside groups. You find this in Tacitus, in early Christians, in medieval writers, in Shakespeare. The basis of Western religion is the the split between the mercy-laden story of Christ bringing in outsiders and the hardness of heart of the Pharisees, the forebears of modern Rabbinical Judaism. The occupation of note in Jewish history is moneylending, something the Jews made impermissible to do to another Jew because “one should not swallow up the wealth of his friend without his [even] feeling it, until he finds his house empty of all good, as this is the way of interest, and the matter is well-known”. The most beautiful passage about mercy in the whole English language is literally someone trying to persuade a Jew to be merciful to an outsider:
PORTIA: Then must the Jew be merciful.
SHYLOCK: On what compulsion must I? tell me that.
PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there
SHYLOCK: My deeds upon my head!
I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond.
So maybe there is a peculiar lack of compassion for outsiders in the Jewish worldview. This has explanatory power. If this is so, then it’s something they can work on in order to repair their reputation in the West globally.
coffee_enjoyer
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9hr ago
We can make reasonable extrapolations from this poll:
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A family with limited food is not going to single out their youngest child to go without eating; the human instinct is to feed the youngest and most vulnerable. If children under 3 are going a full day without eating, then this is at minimum how long every child is going without eating. The youngest is who needs to eat the most frequently.
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This poll wasn’t conducted on a day with a particularly limited amount of food, but sampled on a random day. This means they are continually going full days without eating.
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Doctors who worked in Gaza have confirmed this: Mark Brauner, Tom Adamkiewicz, Nick Maynard, Joanne Perry. (These are the non-Muslim names).
Do you deny that this is starvation?
coffee_enjoyer
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10hr ago
Polling indicated that 1 in 3 children in Gaza during the height of the blockade went full days without eating. There are 600,000 Gazans under 10 years old, meaning that 200,000 children were consciously starved by the Jewish State during the food blockaid.
coffee_enjoyer
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20hr ago
The point of being vocal is to change something that you can affect in the world. Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan. But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving. That would have been cool.
I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack. I do remember, however, the posts about how the Rabbi who died had a habit of spamming X with calls of “Amalek”. (Amalek being the enemy of the Jewish people whom the Jews are mandated to blot out from existence, including the women and children). So, for instance, he often called the Hague Amalek, because the Hague was shown videos of IDF soldiers cheering the slogan “there are no uninvolved civilians [in Gaza]”, and I suppose he didn’t want the goyim to know that, so that made the Hague Amalek. Then he called them Amalek a couple other times, and in response to a video of a starving Palestinian woman who hadn’t eaten for five days, he simply called that AI. I think this sort of merciless disregard for the good of others does not engender the sort of sympathy normally allocated to victims of horrible tragedies, even though it was a tragedy all the same.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Young men are primarily motivated by sex and superiority over peers. In the new social media age (and I mean the new new one), attractiveness spells the difference between obtaining unlimited sex + positive female attention and being relentlessly bullied by anonymous strangers online. It is believed to be extremely important because it is extremely important. Social media is now about posting videos of your face online and yapping, so the stakes of facial attractiveness are enormous. If you ask a young man, “do you want lots of intercourse with the most attractive women in your vicinity, or do you want the more expensive PC / car / apartment / vacation”, they are going to choose the former option. That’s just the reality of young male biology. So they are making a rational choice based on the prevailing social conditions. This is exacerbated by: male fitness culture causing many males to judge other males with a homoerotic standard; rap music, which glorifies nothing other than sex and influence; changes in social media that reduce “peer checking” of behavior; shows like Euphoria or whatever else which glorify bad decisions.
the importance of balancing other skills and traits in order to achieve social success
That’s not really a thing at their age. They will suffer longterm consequences if they don’t focus on their career, but that will only impact them later down the road. You don’t actually need any skills to acquire the kind of social success than young men are chiefly interested in, which is sex and esteem from other men.
Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?
You would have to join up with an insular social ecosystem: a very serious Mormon church, a mosque where the girls wear hijabs and niqabs, or convert to Modern Jewish Orthodoxy. Ask: does the ecosystem control sexual behavior through shame and guilt, and does it allocate esteem for prosociality?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
If I have any amount of alcohol I can’t sleep, it gives me a stimulant effect for some reason. So I don’t drink except for the rarest extended family occasion.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Those who insist that White people are natural “individualists” have no knowledge of the history and spirit of Europeans, and their inability to intuitively see their error should make you suspect of everything they say about cultural and political topics. I mean, you can pick any decade of Western history from before the late 19th century to see that White men have never construed their identity as individuals first and foremost, but as belonging to male organizations of civic, political, and religious natures — and that these comprised their whole identities, that they seldom had a thought of their individuality beyond collective affinities, and that they willingly and even joyfully gave their lives up for the interests of these collectives. Charitably, these people are using a definition of “individualist” that is so far removed from what any normal person would understand as to make its usage utterly worthless, like insisting on using the word “big” to refer to something small. Or perhaps most charitably, they are engaged in a psy-op to make you believe that White people are inherently slave atoms divorced from collective enthusiasm in a bid to make you a permanently powerless slave consumer, and they are doing this on purpose, and this is most charitable because it means they aren’t just incapable of perceiving the theory of mind behind any historical era. (Barring a few exceptions, like Emersonian Self-Reliance et al). I cannot understand how someone can read about the communist movements and fascist movements of the 20th century and come away with thinking, “oh yeah, this part of the world is individualist, they are chiefly interested in themselves”.
The tribes that White people have formed in history have been uniquely based on fraternity, or brotherly love. This separates them from the oriental whose tribes have been based on pure genetic similarity or submission to authority. Western men gathered to drink alcohol, distribute honors, and sing songs together; there is hardly a note in Chinese history of a volitional organization involving group singing like you find all throughout the West. This might be why people mistake them for “individualists”. But medieval guilds, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, monasteries, political alliances, communism, early Christianity, Greek mystery cults, fascism, etc etc were all about collective identity. White people are naturally collective-oriented, just like every other type of human. But their penchant has always been brotherhood, and especially brotherhoods based on just distribution of resources. Because, like many primates, if the leader of the primate band is hoarding resources we would very much like to form a coalition to destroy them. This is all natural, primitive. (In Christianity we wait joyfully for God to destroy them, while shaming them while they live.)
Anyway, the reason you do not have a tribe in Western culture is for the following reasons:
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The psy-op that tricked you into including women in you social organizations, which immediately destroys the capacity for brotherly love by making everything about seducing whichever girl is prettiest. Absolute vibe-killer.
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The psy-op to make you associate “brotherhood” and “collective purpose” and “glory and honor” with traumatic imagery from the holocaust
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the psy-op to make you deferential to the rich, when the power behind social organizations has always been the loosening of resources from the wealthy, either through shaming them or honoring them for their endowments
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the elimination of brotherly love from educational literature, unless it is portrayed negatively, like in a separate peace. Similarly, the elimination of coalition building in literature
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The eradication of European patronage networks, where Patronage is the wellspring of social love. (Minorities of course can continue doing this)
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I don’t think anyone would think that this woman is Jewish; I assumed she was pure Anglo. These two examples were chosen because they were at the top of their respective competitive fields, while having a dishonest disposition, and it’s reasonable at this point to think that dishonesty is somewhat mediated by genes, probably via guiltproneness and neuroticism. Maybe she came to mind to me because her lover was a South Asian man. There are low-trust people in every culture, but not at the same frequency.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
I am skeptical that Hindu and Muslim immigrants will remain homogenous over time. Muslims seem to marry other Muslims from wherever (see Mamdami) and Hinduism may be uniquely weak when transported (Brahamical prohibitions on traveling overseas are for a reason: it’s one thing to persuade your kid to worship the gods in front of a three thousand-year-old temple ground where everything has lore and pedigree, another when it was built 10 years ago across from a Burger King in a town named after the wrong kind of Indian). Sikhs will probably be a bit more resilient as they have an ethnireligious component, and “Sahaj” is indeed Sikh. The issue I see with Indian migration is rather that the country seems dysfunctional, corrupt, and unaesthetic, and it’s not wise to bring its population into America when the relationship between quality of country and quality of immigrant seems to track well in most cases. The addition of a high IQ individual is not necessarily good if it comes with other bad traits as the history of American corruption attests (Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, etc). It’s probably the case that a high-trust and high-empathy 90iq is better than a corrupt 110iq. And this will be an even worse problem in the AI age as meritocracy becomes increasingly difficult to instantiate. At the same time, India is so diverse that I imagine there are probably sub-populations that are the highest trust in the world (what are the Jains doing? Can we bring Parsis here?) but I doubt anyone is looking into that properly.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
As in, he’s not Ed Harris in the Truman Show manipulating the reality around us with control and insight behind the curtains. (There was a funny meme going around of Trump getting orders from Ed Harrison, but unfortunately I can’t find it again)
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
His strategizing on social media has just been bad. There’s no excuse. The sort of mistakes that would take a normal person hours to devise on purpose in a room with high ceilings. “Criticize the Pope while the cultural moment has conservative influencers drifting to Catholicism… now depict yourself as Jesus. Make sure to put a demon figure in the background”. “Write the first presidential Alhamdulilah… on Easter. Then don’t write another tweet for Easter. Then post another Alhamdulillah a few days later”. “Call for civilizational destruction, to remove America from the moral high ground. Post it widely so military service members know to refuse your orders”.
There is no 4d chess happening behind the scenes. These mistakes are in his area of mastery, which was messaging and reading the room. I assume the mistakes he’s making with the war and negotiations are even worse.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Compared to Israel, which is a territorially-ambitious religious state that condones the rape of prisoners and the incineration of the homes of minorities, and was literally founded on acts of terrorism to expel minorities, Iran comes across like a Sweden or Norway. Israel consciously starved the women and children in Gaza, causing 40% of the population to go days at a time without eating, which is quite costly and immoderate. Shouldn’t Iran be able to defend themselves from such a state?
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
The word “civilization” is never used to refer to just the political faction currently in power. If you google “Chinese civilization”, you will not find anyone using this term as a stand-in for Xi’s current regime. So this would be a brand new use of the term. The content of the tweet also goes against your interpretation as Trump claims there already has been total regime change:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?
So he can’t just be referring to the regime, as there has been “complete and total regime change”.
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
They had a growing nuclear medicine program, while facing sanctions which had the practical effect of limiting their medical imports:
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/12/iran-sanctions-medicine/
https://dw.com/en/iran-sanctions-mean-life-saving-medication-in-short-supply/a-74825554
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/iran-unveils-new-nuclear-medicine/
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
It’s worth noting the extent to which America has exported terrorism:
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We pressured Saudi Arabia to fund Wahhabi mosques globally as part of our fight against the Soviet Union
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We supported the Mujahideens to the tune of 4 billion USD
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We produced millions of violent jihadi textbooks for the youth in Afghanistan (lmao)
Of the ~100 Islamic terror attacks in America since the 90s, virtually all of them have been Salafi-Wahhabi and none of them have been Shia (Iranian).
If you make the bottom workers too poor to buy stocks, then of course most stocks will be owned by the super wealthy. What is this argument intending to communicate? It’s not a preferable outcome for the wealthy to own most of the stocks rather than the poor, neither is it preferable to take wealth that could belong to the poor and place it in stocks. Because when they sell the stocks they waste the profit, whereas the poor can transfer the profit to wellbeing. The question is who gets the wealth as represented in the ownership of stocks. I mean, even the point of GDP is wellbeing, and the point of technology is wellbeing, so if you’re trading suffering for Metric Go Up then you’ve kind of missed the point of why humans are even interested in development in the first place.
so has the demand as the immigrants were on both sides of the transaction
No, and it’s important to understand why this is isn’t the case. The demand does not decline commensurate to the decline in supply from the restriction of the labor pool, because the low wage worker does not use Amazon at the high rate of the middle class and wealthy. There are many, many services that are used by the well-off and not used by the poor, and if you have to pay the poor more, you will not see a decline in demand among the lowest income brackets due to the price increase. Fitness centers are a great example of this — a very profitable industry which employs the poor but which the poor infrequently use. What happens if the gyms have to pay their poor employees more? Well, they can’t price the gym membership more — it’s already priced at the highest amount the consumer (middle class and above) is willing to pay. They can’t go out of business, because it’s a profitable industry, eg Lifetime Fitness making the founder half of a billionaire. So what happens? Profit that would go to the owners simply goes to the poor, there is literally nothing else that can possibly happen. And this is how it should be, because the idea of someone becoming a half-billionaire by creating a line of shitty gyms is insane.
Additionally, the case of Amazon, if the low wage class as a whole makes more money then they are more likely to use Amazon. Because all of the speculated (but incorrect) price increase of Amazon is, literally, just going to pay the poorest workers.
If you're amazon where do you cut services first? In the expensive places where rich people live and will pay high prices or the run down towns you're so concerned about?
As per above, if the low wage class is earning more, than they will use more of Amazon’s services. Right now they use much less of Amazon. They would use more if they are paid more. All of the cost increase goes to the wages of low earners while the cost is shared equally among all the classes. In your theorized example, lower, middle, and higher class may have to spend an extra $1 on a package, and that $1 goes only to the lower class wages, which means that Amazon will actually make more in low wage areas than before. It’s just that middle and upper classes pay more, which they should. But in actual reality, Amazon is already priced as high as they can make it for the middle class and higher class. If they could price it higher, they would have already. Any cost of labor increase will affect Amazon more than it affects, say, CostCo, or any other warehouse-style model.
recession in 1920
That’s because of the addition of a surplus of workers the following year. This proves my point. The recession began after the period were looking at.
Attributing the gains from the scaling up of the ford assembly line to Immigration Quotas is silly and breaks with your whole theory
You just have to look at the areas most affected by immigration disruption: https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/research-working-papers/immigration-disruptions-and-the-wages-of-unskilled-labor-in-the-1920s/
“All four analyses support the same conclusion: during the 1920s, low-skilled workers in labor markets who experienced larger adverse shocks to their labor supply as a result of the disruptions to immigration were being paid higher wages.”
The mechanization came after. (Also, there was still too much immigration in this period, from Mexico and Canada.)
The illegal immigrants with literally nothing to their name do it
The illegal immigrants have their own illegal immigrant job network and sometimes illegal housing network. And even if they didn’t, the argument “but the poorest people in the hemisphere live on the streets until the find a job” would not be a compelling option for Americans who do not want to risk homelessness. And remember that the illegal makes more in “wealth” because of the difference between their purchasing power here and of their family back in, say, Guatemala.
Do you have any clear evidence you can present that restricting the pool of low wage workers makes their lives worse off? Literally every study shows them having greater wages and QoL when this happens.
coffee_enjoyer
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10d ago
You know that people invest in order profit later. And you know that the category “frozen assets” includes a lot of frivolous waste (large properties, private jets, art, watches, jewelry). And you know that, were these business owners compelled in their business career to pay workers more, the money they put into frozen assets would have went to these workers.
Where is the redistribution coming from because of preventing immigration?
Because you have to pay workers more to retain them; they are more valuable; the owner cannot reduce the QoL and wages as much as possible. Workers can bargain for a greater share in the profit.
Almost all of higher labor costs are passed on to the consumers
This is essentially saying, “Jeff Bezos would keep increasing the price for Amazon if he had to pay workers more so that he magically makes the same amount of profit as today.” This is incorrect and it should be obvious why it’s incorrect. Amazon cannot raise their prices so much that people stop using their services. At a certain point it becomes too high for the consumer to pay. There is a ceiling to the price of Amazon that cannot increase, and if you pay the low wage workers behind Amazon more, eventually most of his excess profit transfers to these workers. Because there’s a cap on the pricing of Amazon.
Again, this has been shown repeatedly in all real world scenarios. After the 1920s Immigration Quotas. Higher wages after the 1918–1919 Spanish Flu. After the Bracero Program ended. You realize that if your theory was right, you should be able to find a real world example where there was a significant artificial restriction in low-wage labor which reduced the wages of the lowest wage earners? Doesn’t it make you suspicious that this… doesn’t exist? And it has only ever been shown to increase their wages and bargaining power? And shouldn’t this be sort of obvious?
You don't need to take months off to find a job
There are two things to this: (1) when low wage earnings are sufficiently high that a laborer can actually quit in between jobs when dissatisfied with his conditions, this is excellent for the bargaining power of their class, as it penalizes companions with a low QoL. Wages are not high enough for low wage earners to do this without risking financial catastrophe. (2) It’s not realistic for a low-wage earner today to pick up and move across the country to wherever they can make more, even if they know they can make more. They don’t have the wealth to do this. It’s expensive to do it, they risk immediate homelessness if it fails, employers will not help them relocate and they may not be able to find someone willing to lease to them.
If the wealthiest top 1% of households in America have at least $14mil, and the class as a whole possesses 55 trillion in wealth, then there is necessarily a lot of wealth wasted on things that are not required for the happiness of these 1% of households. And so we can improve a comical amount of lives in America by simply halting immigration. If this wealth were originally compelled to be redistributed annually (because no surplus of workers), we are talking about 1-3 trillion to be distributed. That’s giving the bottom 100 million working Americans (the bottom 60%) between 10k and 30k annually. We are also talking about lower housing costs and lower stress-related healthcare costs. We are also talking about a more efficient economy as the workers are actually able to pick up and move for greater wages (simply not realistic for many working Americans right now, and they can’t bargain if they can’t afford to quit for a couple months). We are also talking about less educational waste as people see that they can live comfortably without a college degree. Then we will see gains in civic participation, with all of its myriad benefits. &tc
It’s a big deal for me that this wealth is wasted because, at the end of the day, we are trading the blood and lives of the poor so that the flooring in a wealthy person’s bathroom is more colorful. We are looking at the mangled corpse of a child in a drunk driving accident, knowing of course that alcoholism and life stress are linked (and in any case treatment costs money), and we are saying “this is just the price we pay so that an investment banker gets a yacht”. This is not a rational trade for the statistically-informed looking at the predictable cofactors of misery. I think this is just allowing the poor to die so that the rich are more comfortable.
coffee_enjoyer
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11d ago
destroyed 80% of missile industry
Where are you reading this? Is it Caine’s remarks here? https://youtube.com/watch?v=aCCkrjlfyVk
There is a difference between “destroying 80% of the industry” and what I’m hearing from General Caine:
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“attacked 90% of weapons factories” does not tell us what percentage of their total weapons’ industry has been degraded
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80% of missile defense facilities being “gone” does not tell us about their ballistic missiles, or even what percentage of total missile defense has been gone, as their significant facilities are all below ground and only the numerous less important small-scale facilities are above ground. (Theoretically, you can destroy 80% of the missile defense facilities while only damaging 10% of the total missile defense production line).
coffee_enjoyer
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11d ago
These things comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich in America. Is it possible you resent the poor for having a genuine moral claim to the resources that the wealthy waste?
coffee_enjoyer
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11d ago
Too many houses, houses that are too large, too many private pools and other unnecessary amenities, expensive overseas luxury good purchases, too many cars, too many vacations, too many private jets (15k), etc etc etc
Just extraordinary waste which we know, scientifically, does not measurably influence happiness. It is entirely reasonable to design an immigration policy which forces the rich to depart from the resources they waste, so that the resources are necessarily transferred into the lower and middle classes.
coffee_enjoyer
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12d ago
I am otherwise fond of everything Leo has said, fyi. It’s just that the migrant / deportation issues are cataclysmically bad in the longrun for what I value.
Do you mean by being the world police? I don’t think the progressives upset about world events want American soldiers to police these places, they just don’t want America to throw their support and money behind them.
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