coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
hard to make a rational case
There are economic benefits to keeping women out of work but they have never been robustly measured due to ethics and feasibility. Studies show that primates separated from their mother early receive lifelong mental illness and worse learning outcomes, and we are arguably in a mental illness crisis nowadays, so it’s reasonable to assume it has something to do with the eradication of the mother-child bond. Early life is important for future outcomes, and women are inherently invested in teaching their children lessons unlike Random Bureaucrat #183729, so we are impairing the learning of our whole population. There are important emotional and social lessons that only a mother can supply to her child at a young age, and a mother will supply hundreds of such lessons a day with very salient terms of reinforcement and punishment (for a child, nothing is more reinforcing than love, or punishing than alienation thereof). A child is supposed to be breastfed for 3-4 years, and this is good for their future health. Stressed women produce worse kids with worse health, and work stresses women. Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home. When women stay with their children all day it keeps them occupied and away from the computer where they might promote really bad things that destroy civilization like affirmative action. Keeping a woman at home and away from work means that everyone in the family can eat better and has clean living conditions, which affects health for the next generations.
Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies, ripping twins away from mothers and measuring the outcomes unto the third generation. Stress and poor health are exorbitantly expensive. Antisocial behavior is expensive. This comes from working moms. And if we were able to make pronatality a status symbol, then the smartest people would have the most children (as they would see it as a mark of success, and a smart choice, maybe even a problem to solve, and they could afford it). So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!
coffee_enjoyer
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12hr ago
If life isn’t fair, and we shouldn’t care that it’s unfair, then how can anyone criticize —
women surrendering their bodily autonomy for nine months,
as there is no longer a basis for arguing against it on moral grounds? How could you criticize the policy goal of, say, making women the property of their fathers and then husbands again, if we no longer care about unfairness? It can’t just be unfair for men because life is unfair, sorry men, as there are many cultures where it is unfair for women because life is unfair, sorry women, yet these cultures have children.
coffee_enjoyer
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21hr ago
what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like
It looks what we were doing before the mid 20th century. Young women are handed specific literature and media at a young age which makes them want to be mothers. In school, they take classes to help them to be mothers. They are told to behave in a way which is conducive to being mothers (meek, sensitive, humble, loving, &tc), and if they stray from that they are shamed. As they get older, they are looked down upon for not settling down. They are shown anti-spinster propaganda in female media. There were many Victorian guides for women penned, filled with pronatal propaganda. Women are sensitive to shame and so you don’t actually have to do a draft, you just have to successfully moralize natality. But that’s also a big difficulty, with all of our secular cultural institutions captured.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Is there a way for Hamas to get the same desired outcome [reduce Israel support] without the potential negative effect on their own morale & recruitment? If there is, then it is not reasonable for Hamas to make this lie, because there is a better lie available. This means that they did not take time to consider the outcome of the lie [unlikely, it involves sodomy], or it means Hamas is probably not lying. Here are some easy lies that Hamas could have told which do not come with any serious drawback, but which would still succeed in their goal of reducing Israel support:
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IDF is raping boys in Gaza, and/or using dogs to do so. This would have no downside for Hamas, and indeed it would push boys to seek out their protection.
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IDF is raping girls in Gaza, and/or using dogs to do so. No downside for Hamas, only upside.
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IDF is torturing Hamas soldiers in a way which does not reduce their honor. Crucifying them? Hitting them while they pray? Preventing them from praying? Drowning them? There are unlimited options. “IDF shows prisoner a video of his child being suffocated by IDF soldier”. No downside for them, only upside.
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IDF is using dogs to kill children in Gaza. No downside for Hamas, only upside.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Good point. Not sure if the study I read controlled for that.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I think it should be noted that the non-promiscuous women may still be in a “talking stage” with the more promiscuous men, or they may be in a situationship with the more promiscuous men, and thus not necessarily on the market. The top 1% promiscuous men have many more unique partners than the top 1% promiscuous women, and my theory is that this has been exacerbated by social media. (These men, though, may be so busy that they have no time to fill out surveys, so tremendous skepticism should be placed on optional unpaid fill-out surveys).
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
One problem I see with trying to prove God is that it pushes Christians into reading a lot of theology in the hope of trying to finally find a satisfying answer. But this satisfaction never happens. And if it does happen, the God they have proved is so abstractualized that it doesn’t bear any resemblance to the personality of the Christian God. It also shames the sub-110iq or those without a lot of leisure time because they evidently do not really know God (you think God has emotions? Hah!).
My opinion has shifted and I think that this is fruitless. “Believing God” should just be a state you enter into through rituals and an environment of beneficent social contagion. God is spirit, in the non-philosophical understanding. This saves the most promising Christians several thousand hours of inquiry, speculation, and doubt.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Hamas does not have an interest in telling lies for the sake of lying, even in the strawman Zionist portrayal of Hamas. Their interest is in doing things that are advantageous to their organization. Many kinds of lies are indeed advantageous to their organization. But a globally-known story that their militants are punished in prisons by sodomy from dogs is not, ultimately, in their interest. Because they need to recruit from a pool of non-Hamas males, constantly, who will become aware of this story. And these males consider male rape the most aversive possible experience, being the ultimate dishonor in the honor culture.
when lies of Jewish atrocities are commonly used to rally support and incite hatred
If there are one million possible ways to incite hatred, why on earth would they pick the only one that harms them? The notion that Hamas planted this story requires one of these three things: that they did not think about the consequences of the story; that the story would not hurt morale and recruitment; that it must be the only way to harm Israel to such an extent which overrides any hurt for morale and recruitment. But they likely did think about the consequences of the story. The story likely harms morale and recruitment. And it is not the only way to harm Israel to such an extent.
any Israeli with half a brain knows that to actually conduct such torture (beyond the traditional kinds) would be to risk enormous blowback.
Or does Israel know that targeting their honor is one of the only ways they have left to destroy Hamas, given all of their other methods failed?
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
This is a lot of text to say that you are unwilling to have the focal question in dispute judged by some third party AI. At the end of the day, one of us is willing to put their skin in the game, and one of us is not. The focal question — whether the story is likely to harm Hamas recruitment and morale — is something you were extremely confident about in your last replies. To quote:
It is extremely unlikely to decrease morale or enrollment of new recruits--what, they're not afraid of being imprisoned or bombed or run over by tanks, but the rape-dogs will terrify them? Come now. Atrocity propaganda almost always serves to increase morale and recruitment by representing the enemy as unspeakable monsters. Lying about it also serves the very valuable function of generating more propaganda to be repeated by people who hate Jews.
Really? Do you have some deep insight into the Palestinian mindset? Do you have any evidence that fear of being raped by Israeli dogs is actually impacting their morale? As someone who's been studying Palestinians longer and more deeply than you have (you only care about them because of who they are fighting, not because you have an actual interest or understanding of their culture, history, and language), I am very, very doubtful that these atrocity stories would do anything but inflame them more
So you have no evidence. You have no evidence that it is happening, only what you assume must be true (but you don't actually, you are just constructing arguments as soldiers, so let's say, what you are presenting as a self-evident truth) based on axioms you also assume.
Do you actually know anything about Palestinians and Muslim culture besides what you have gleaned from the Internet about dogs and "honor culture"? No, you do not. Do you have an explanation for why these dog rapes are being publicized, if they are so devastating to morale and recruitment? No. Do you have evidence that Hamas recruitment is down and would-be fedayeen are now staying home for fear of Israeli rape dogs? No.
You are not modeling the modal recruit accurately.
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The 13 known rape cases are not the minimum bound of rape cases, as the author notes.
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The chance of being captured is at least 2,350 out of 20,000, given figures on the number of Hamas militants.
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Humans respond to stories more than statistical probability. Humans will decide not to swim if they hear a story about shark attacks. The chance of a shark attack is much less than the chance of being placed in an Israeli rape dungeon, where there is the continual fear of being raped.
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You are not imagining being a human in a social ecosystem which values familial honor more than anything and where rape is shameful, such that some families would kill their own child if they were raped. You are not imagining being a 75-90iq Hamas recruit. We live in “mattress girl” country where being a rape victim gives you support and arguably honor. It is very hard for us to imagine the mindset of an Islamist in Gaza.
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All the rape stories are aversive. The dog rape is just extra subversive.
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I keep having to say this: they do not need to be riled up in a demoralizing way when they are already riled up in better ways. The starvation, the land grabs, the grandmothers killed, the aid workers killed are all better focuses. This is why nations in history have never used “they’re raping our POWs” as their propaganda of choice, even in non-honor cultures. When Caesar was sent off to another king, the rumor of his being raped stayed with him his entire lifetime, harming him. And Islamic culture is even more rape averse than Ancient Rome, by a lot.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Israel has captured more than 2,350 Hamas affiliates, so it is a real outcome possibility for the militants.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
It’s not sufficient to say that the story vaguely increases anti-Israel sentiment in the West; it needs to be argued that the increase in anti-Israel sentiment is worth it for Hamas when it comes at the cost of enrollment and morale. Which it likely is not. The social norm against starving hundreds of thousands of children is stronger than bestiality rape in the West, anyway. They don’t have such an absence of atrocities which would warrant harming themselves to make up the story.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Your entire position from the start has been to deflect and screed about these two points I made in my first comment:
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that Hamas is a Islamic honor culture where male rape is shameful and aversive, especially involving an unclean animal. To this, you claim I have no evidence. That is a wild response. You apparently didn’t read the original linked article where this was specifically noted, by someone who is a double Pulitzer Prize winner. (Let me guess: he hates the Jews).
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that Hamas already has enough atrocities to show to the West, which means adding a dog into the mix does not help them over and above how it hurts them.
That’s really it. Because if you had to admit that a story of being raped by dogs is bad the morale and enrollment of Hamas given all available information, which is an intuitive argument, then your screeds no longer make sense. This is why you are afraid to plug the query into an AI of your choosing, which I suggested to you (but the AIs are antisemitic?). This would literally be the easiest way to determine whose intuition is motivated. Ask it to read all the available sociological literature on Hamas or relevant Islamic militant groups. I’ll wait.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
It just reads to me that you have a deep-seated personal reason to defend Israel at all costs. This is why you’re resorting to a litany of ad hominems rather than just explaining your position and why you disagree. I can understand why “the IDF is using dogs to rape prisoners” would be a horrifying thought for someone who loves Israel and who is eager to call critics antisemitic. After all, if they’re doing that, it would mean that there could be something wrong with Israel, which would prove the critics directionally correct. But we should still think dispassionately about the accusation. If Hamas does not stand to gain from the accusation, then it is unlikely that the accusation is manufactured. If the accusation is not true, then it is likely manufactured from the top brass, because the journalist interviewed the family members and friends of all the alleged victims, confirming their reports, and the Palestinians would not randomly decide to lie at the same time about the same thing undirected. As such, you are insinuating a widespread Palestinian conspiracy theory orchestrated by Hamas. But Hamas does not stand to gain on the whole from the accusation: (1) it will decrease their enrollment and morale, (2) there are already an abundance of horrible things that Israel has done to Palestinians, like mass starvation and other rape cases, which thus makes it unlikely that they would sacrifice their enrollment and morale in order to negligibly increase their messaging abroad. You disagree, but you don’t really articulate your disagreement to these points, you just kind of name call. I still have no idea why you think that a story about Hamas militants being raped by a dog would not harm the enrollment of Hamas militants and their morale.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
You have no evidence that it is happening
If I have evidence that humans behave a certain way, then I have evidence that Palestinians will behave a certain way. You were just unwilling to consider the Fallujah Dog Rape Thought Experiment. I know saying “it’s common sense” won’t do anything here, but this is common sense that most guys who would die for their country, or even be torture, would be averse to serving their country if it brought the possibility of being raped by an animal. Because this reduces their honor when the whole reason to fight for your country is honor. Islamic martyr honor culture does not extend to being raped by a dog. This is all quite clear to me. But instead of your explaining your own intuitions, you ask for the impossible, as if I could present a written affidavit from LinkedIn Hamas CEO with a nice bar graph of their quarterly recruitment figures. The absence of evidence here just means that we use what evidence we do have to infer probabilities. Maybe you can ask your favorite AI to gauge the likelihood that an Islamic militant group would face reduced recruitment after a viral story that their militants are getting raped by a ritually unclean animal. I would think it would agree.
Confident, socially adept well put together men with good jobs and a vision for the future, as desired by the author, are not going to spend their time wallowing around an Orthodox commune filled with incels being bossed around by babushkas. It's just ridiculous to expect successful well adjusted people to saddle themselves with such things in the modern world. Same goes for well put together women that know how to attract men. The real world operates on a 9-5.
You’ve provided here the perfect argument for why the West needs Christian communities, even though they are difficult to get right. Humans do not naturally help anyone below them, because that’s instinctively ridiculous when they can maximize their own pleasure. But if Westerners continue acting this way, they will be replaced by an endless hoard of immigrants and also different Abrahamists (Amish, Haredim, maybe Salafists in Europe). Not only that, but everything is just kind of ugly and silly, so we’re not even going out in style. So the options are to ignore reality and die, or to try to understand the social technology that our ancestors left us, which worked in the past and works in certain variations today.
One of the ways that social technology worked was by reinforcing that “ridiculous” idea of someone “saddling themselves” with the sins of the deplorables beneath them. That could pass as a working formulation of Christianity. It’s very much about throwing maximum social reinforcement at the prospect of doing this, so that people do it. But this is also why a lot of churches fail IMO: they are very bad at reinforcing this. The ritualism and theology-nitpicking of Orthodoxy does not accurately shape human behavior to turn them into little Christs. It’s too distracted, not powerful enough. The stupid evangelical dance concerts that get tens of millions of views also do very little. You’d think it wouldn’t be this hard, in a culture that gives so much reinforcement to people for grades and haircuts and video games and fashion, to provide them reinforcement for the longterm prosocial things.
They also meet and make families living as radical left/liberal/progressives, for example.
Statistically not, though, which is part of the problem. Progressives have a low TFR and declining.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
What fun thing are you doing with AI?
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
If the the criterion has predictive value then it’s a good reasoning tool. You appear to not want to provide an argument as to why it’s not predictive. There has been atrocity propaganda since time immemorial, yet never have men admitted to being put in such a humiliating position for that purpose. We actually find a trend of humiliating stories being hushed aside so that the nation and soldiers don’t lose morale. Why would the trend be bucked and broken today, just now, in 2026? Why should this be the first case in history of atrocity propaganda where the alleged victims — from a fierce honor culture nonetheless — stand to gain only immense social humiliation, losing all morale?
Do you have any evidence that fear of being raped by Israeli dogs is actually impacting their morale?
Because men all over the world fantasize about dying for their country. Men do not fantasize about being raped for their country. A Hamas militant who dies gains honor for their family. A Hamas militant raped gains dishonor for their family. Unless you think that Palestinians are the only people in the world who bypass basic human motivational thinking, they will be averse to signing up for Hamas if the outcome is rape as opposed to torture. Notice how in action movies, the protagonist may be tortured, but is usually not raped. Do you need a source on the stigma of rape in Palestine?
Your hypothetical "What if you could save your comrades by being raped by a dog?" is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest. No one asked a Palestinian to get raped by a dog for Hamas.
How would you have felt today if you didn’t have breakfast? The Fallujah Dog Rape Hypothetical informs us how humiliating rape is for men, that it is maximally aversive, and thus necessarily reduces morale and recruitment, especially so in an honor culture. The known outcomes of an activity influence the willingness of people to engage in an activity.
If you really want to pose analogies, the equivalent would not be "Volunteer to be raped by a dog" but "Volunteer to claim you were raped by a dog," or if you believe the dog-rape really happened, "Volunteer to fight an evil enemy who might rape you with dogs if you are captured."
Well no, the story is now publicized widely, so Palestinian would-be militants will learn about the story. Hamas telling them they won’t be raped by a dog will not be very convincing, and as they are not yet recruited, they have no reason to believe Hamas once that story has sunk in.
It explains their motive if you think "reducing their morale" is an Israeli objective
Yes? Of course that’s their objective. How could you think that’s not their objective?
if you think they have failed to achieve their objective
I thought this was common knowledge. Hamas is still out there, and they haven’t been able to exile the native Gazans.
You are, as usual, just imagining an fantastical "Evil Israelis who do Evil Things because Evil (Jews)”
Is it your opinion that Israelis have not previously committed evil acts?
It's pure made-up atrocity porn
If they already raped Palestinian prisoners, and the chief lawyer of the IDF had to leak the video to try to bring the soldiers to justice, and then they dropped the charges, then I’m not sure why you’d think it is beyond the Israelis to rape prisoners with dogs. Because the last thing is already 80% evil, and adding a dog is only 20% more evil. Unless you think that this didn’t happen, or would prefer not to think it would happen. Do you think they killed aid workers and hid their corpses? Do you think they destroyed statues of Jesus with a sledgehammer in Lebanon? Did you know there’s a holiday where some Israelis throw puppies on a bonfire?
it's like claiming Abu Ghraib was part of a systematic plan by US forces to demoralize Iraqis and make them stop resisting. Maybe you believe this was the case, but then you have to believe that from the top on down, the entire US chain of command was not just sadistically evil but extraordinarily stupid.
But I pretty much believe this, except for the demoralization part. Abu Ghraib was extremely evil. People were tortured with dogs and there are accounts of rape by guards. This is actually a good argument toward my view I hadn’t even realized: unfathomably evil torture facilities have existed in recent memory.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
If they are attempting to persuade a Western audience, why would it matter that the dog is contaminated? We don’t have the social norm. And if this is the most horrifying event they can imagine, why would they want every young Palestinian learning that this could be their fate?
This only helps Hamas in a two-dimensional reading. Hamas is not in need of fabulous tales of torture when there are already real tales of torture. Yet Israel stands to gain an aversive threat that could actually make young Palestinians wary of signing up for Hamas. Americans are concerned about children starved and bombed, aid workers killed, land taken in Lebanon. Arabs might care about the dog part, but this was published in the NYTimes for a Progressive readership which already learned that Israel dropped the charges on that rapist a few months ago. It is not clear that this story is in Hamas’ favor, it requires a dozen men to destroy their family reputation forever, and it is actually more useful for Israel to have this story out than Hamas. If you’re Israel, you realize that you you can’t get to Hamas in any past attempt, so why not use psychological horror?
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
It has very limited usefulness elsewhere
For this to be the case, there would need to be a lot of cases in history where someone lied about something which would lead to overwhelming personal and familial shame. Do you think that’s true?
It is extremely unlikely to decrease morale or enrollment of new recruits--what, they're not afraid of being imprisoned or bombed or run over by tanks, but the rape-dogs will terrify them?
That’s exactly how it is. “What, as a teenager you fantasized about dying a heroic death to save your family or nation, but not being sodomized by a dog?” You can easily socially reinforce males to die in war through patriotism. That comes out of instinct. You cannot make them eager to be sodomized by dogs. There is nothing in Palestinian culture which would allow such a thing. (Imagine you’re the USM commander of the battalion ready to begin the Battle of Fallujah. More than 100 Americans are expected to die. You’re preparing your troops. But wait! Due to unforeseen circumstances, we can actually win the battle if just one soldier is sodomized by a dog and talks about it publicly. Who is the heroic soldier willing to save 100 lives by being raped by a dog? I think every few would raise their hand, maybe your intuition says differently. But now imagine they were all Muslim fundamentalists from a culture where women will not find husbands if their brother was raped and who find dogs ritually contaminated. And this explains the Israeli motive, given that destroying all of their dwellings and starving their children did not significantly curtail their morale. It makes sense why Israel would use dogs for rape because nothing else has reduced Palestinian morale.)
There is a very obvious benefit to Hamas lying about Israelis raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs
How much more important is the “dog” element compared to the previous, evidenced cases of rape in Israeli prisons? Does the “dog” element move the needle?
Atrocity propaganda almost always serves to increase morale and recruitment by representing the enemy as unspeakable monsters
This is 100% true, but you will not find a case of atrocity propaganda in history where a man writes publicly “yes, it was I who was raped by the German Hun when they took Belgium! It was my backside which suffered!”
Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.
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