coffee_enjoyer
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coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
The passages I selected are mainstream, discussed openly by Orthodox Rabbis, hosted on the official Chabad website, and even part of Schneerson’s recommended reading for all Jews (he chosen the Mishneh Torah). So I don’t see how that is “nutpicking”. It seems like normative-picking. Same with Ben Shapiro; he is the most well known Orthodox Jew in America. If you think that the Talmud actually recommends compassion for Christians, then you are welcome to trace down a source in the Talmud which references compassion and love for idol-worshippers.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Maimonides is not obscure esoterica, he is considered a top 5 important Rabbi to be consulted in Rabbinical rulings, and the passage I quoted comes from a renowned book still taught to this day, not from the Bronze Age but from the 13th century. If the Jews don’t believe it, they don’t have to teach it. The medieval Catholics made them expunge the verse on killing Christians and cursing Christ, but they reinserted it. And today it is taught in most Orthodox schools. I can find you more quotes from the Talmud regarding the ban on showing mercy to idol-worshippers (a category in which they universally and firmly place Trinitarian Christians). But I don’t think you would be able to find me a counterfactual verse in the Talmud or Mishneh or major redactions. I would be very surprised if you could find me a verse that said “be compassionate to idol-worshippers”, as I cannot find such a verse in the Talmudic literature.
There’s an interesting rabbinical controversy that will give a good idea of how important Maimonides is. Are Muslims idol-worshippers? The Rabbis debate this. They debate this because, while dozens of important rabbis and most councils have ruled that Muslims are idol-worshippers, there is one Rabbi who singularly disagreed with them all: Maimonides.
Many graduates of Israeli Orthodox Jewish schools attest to being taught the same message; many American Orthodox Jews similarly have been taught that Islam worships the same G-d as Judaism and is not idol worship. However, it appears that a legal opinion based on only one source (the Rambam [Maimonides]) is being presented as the accepted mainstream position of the religion. […]
And there is one more way for us to discern the importance of Maimonides. Chabad’s Daily Torah Study website includes only five sections of study. One of them is dedicated exclusively to Maimonides (Rambam). And if you happened to read this daily study on March 15th of this year — as tens of thousands of Jews likely had — you would read a Chabad-summarized lesson from Rambam:
We are not to show mercy to idol-worshippers, nor are we permitted to praise them. It is even forbidden to say about an idol-worshipper, "Look at how attractive this individual is”
It would be nice to believe that this is just one “nut”, or just one “nutty passage”, but it’s a bit more serious than that.
Jews are actually that evil and slimy
I’m not judging a collective of individuals here, but rather the lessons they receive as part of their religious indoctrination. The lessons of Orthodox Judaism are kind of antisocial, and this could carry over into other spheres of life. As an example from this week, Ben Shapiro was criticized for asking his viewers to donate to the infamous Kars4Kids charity over the years. This is an Orthodox Jewish charity that rakes in hundreds of millions in revenue under the pretense that a donated car goes to “kids”. In fact, the money mostly goes to Orthodox Jews, and a small amount goes to Orthodox Jewish kids. The donation page (code: Ben) doesn’t tell you this, only slime-ly tells you that it’s a Jewish charity. Ben Shapiro very likely knows this given how confroversial this charity is, but doesn’t care, just like he didn’t care when the orthodox schools in New York misappropriated 1 billion in educational funds (Shapiro called the NYTimes exposé “a war on Hasidic Jews”). Certainly in this case, there’s a lot of slimy evilness afoot.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
The nuance is that for Christians, what Jesus says on a topic supercedes everything to the contrary in the Old Testament. The “law” of the Old Testament is very specifically abrogated (though the word “fulfilled” is insisted). For instance,
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
This supersedes Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:19-20, Deuteronomy 19:21. The abrogated / fulfilled Old Testament Law is kept by Christians for reasons of historical and symbolic reference, because Christ is held to have satisfied and completed the Law. This is an important nuance to make and not at all an evasion; the “1st primary” text of Christianity is the New Testament, which specifies how parts of the Old Testament have been deprecated; the “2nd primary” text is the OT, understood only in relation to the 1st. But what Christianity lacks is the rich orthopraxic secondary literature like you find in Judaism and Islam. I say “secondary”, but really these works are orthopraxically primary.
If an Islamic “Sahih Hadith” in a given jurisprudential tradition specifies something, then it simply must be held by all adherents of that school of jurisprudence. It’s just how Islam works; the “sunnah” as clarified by the authentic transmissions of secondary literature have authority. It’s what Muslims spend most of their time reading. The Muslims who do not believe in the secondary literature are called Quranists and they are as insignificant as the “Kairites” of Judaism who only believe in the Old Testament. The only real case of orthopraxic literature in Christianity akin to Hadith or the Talmud is if you’re a priest engaging in a mass, or if you’re being advised on when to do something at a mass or which sins must be confessed.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I’m just using the example of “taxes to pay for redistributionist policies” of the OP, with special attention to Somalians because of the recent scandal this week. Redistributive economic policy, even in the absence of fraud, is bad for White people, as Quantum notes, as it benefits the Black/Hispanic cohorts disproportionate to the taxes they put in. In regards to welfare fraud generally, it’s not the case that White people do the sort of organized fraud that you find in “collectives”, though of course there are still White people committing welfare fraud.
Young white men are being taken advantage of because we aren't individualist enough
Every problem you proceed to mention only remains unsolved because of a lack of White political organization.
taxes, to pay for redisributionist policies
Somalians can exploit welfare because they are collectively organized. Black activists can secure welfare by guilting Whites for the same reason. Whites do not have the collective which allows them to fight back on this front. One White person complaining on the internet is no match for an activist putting out sophisticated propaganda attacks, working as an appendage to a dedicated hundred-person activist network, where they are being paid to literally plan and plot propaganda all day long, after going to school to learn propaganda techniques. There is a total asymmetry here. I don’t think people realize the extent of the power imbalance. What is an “individualist” to do? You, as a hypothetical wise person, may understand the propaganda they are doing, but the average white person has no idea what they are doing, and so they fall for the propaganda. The propaganda acts as a virus that turns each infected person into a carrier of the message, as we saw with BLM. A small activist network of trained agents — yes, even if they are Somalians — will always “outgun” you in the politico-cultural arena and win.
You cannot effectively organize “individualists” together to promote “individualism”, as there is no underpinning evolutionary energy that encourages such a formation. The Somalians are organized instinctively in a way that humans are designed to organize, tribally, using the same instincts of their earlier hominid ancestors. (Ironically, they just sent a billion dollars to Somalia to fund a tribal civil war — go figure). This gives them an enormous motivational and social advantage. A singular individualist can’t compete, and he can’t draw other individualists to his cause, and he can’t recruit funds from a wealthy individualist, or anything like that. But the activist network can make Jeff Bezos’ ex wife donate half a billion to HBCs, because their propaganda works, because they have hundred-person teams coalescing around the same attack strategy.
Would you play chess with one piece? How often do you think you’ll win? Okay, so you have one queen, awesome. You’re against an opponent with all his pieces. Some of them are stupid pawns, but the stupid pawns are taking centralized orders from someone who went to school for chess and plays it all day and studied all of your past games. You’re going to lose every single game, forever. This is the individualist versus a collective. There is no winning anything, ever, in any scenario.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
The Talmud includes many thousands of prescriptive and proscriptive rules. It also includes other stuff. But if you’re a kosher-keeping Jew, the rules from a book like mishnah chullin are absolutely binding, though modified according to sect / kosher process. It’s not accurate to say that the Talmud is only a collection of opinions and debates. If you walk through Williamsburg or imagine Ben Shapiro’s daily life, these are the most rule-following people in the world, and all of the rules are in the Talmud and accompanying literature. And you can’t just not follow them, as that would get you ostracized and banned.
The criticism against the Talmud is as follows: among the very many authoritative rules which religious Jews follow with extreme care, are also rules that appear evil. The evil rules are not currently followed, but for what reason? Is it only because they can’t get away with it? Are they just biding their time until they can? For instance, if you read chapter 10 of Maimonides’ Avodat Kochavim in the Mishneh Torah, which is a Talmud redaction (highly authoritative and taught at most Yeshiva), you’re going to find rules about being merciless to outsiders:
You may not draw up a covenant with idolaters' which will establish peace between them and us and yet allow them to worship idols. Rather, they must renounce their idol worship' or be slain. It is forbidden to have mercy upon them. Accordingly, if we see an idolater' being swept away or drowning in the river, we should not help him. If we see that his life is in danger, we should not save him. It is, however, forbidden to cause one of them to sink or push him into a pit or the like, since he is not waging war against us.' To whom do the above apply? To gentiles." It is a mitzvah, however, to eradicate Jewish traitors, minnim, and apikorsim, and to cause them to descend to the pit of destruction, since they cause difficulty to the Jews and sway the people away from God, {as did Jesus of Nazareth and his students, and Tzadok, Baithos, and their students; may the name of the wicked rot.}
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
An AI facial recognition model trawled through 1.5 million mugshots and determined that the Hispanic crime rate is underestimated by 30%
We scraped 5.5 million criminal records and 1.5 million mugshots from 39 states. 29% of Hispanics are being misclassified as White in official Department of Corrections databases.
We trained a multinomial logistic regression on 18 features: DeepFace racial probabilities from mugshots; Census name demographics; First and last name racial statistics; 92.76% accuracy distinguishing Black, White and Hispanic. 29% of predicted Hispanics were officially classified as White.
Even at 95-100% model confidence, 22.4% of predicted Hispanics were still assigned White. Median confidence for these cases? 91.7%. Hispanic criminal record rates increase 20-31% [in our model]
The Hispanic crime rate has been discussed in the context of the immigration debate. I recall that the relatively insignificant difference between the White and Hispanic rate has been used as an argument in favor of migration from Hispanic countries. The math changes if the Hispanic crime rate is 30% higher than previously believed, and the White rate ~6% lower than believed.
Additionally, the analysis above needs to be supplemented with an analysis of the crime clearance rate. Not every crime is solved, meaning that not every crime is logged. If the Hispanic clearance rate is lower than the White clearance rate, due to myriad factors like documentation issues and hesitancy to work with police, then this must be factored into the crime rate too. Indeed, there is a substantial 19% difference of clearance between murders where the victim is Hispanic and murders where the victim is White, with more “Hispanic victim” murders going unsolved. What to do with this information is a little bit tricky. Most homicides are within-race and gang homicides are especially likely to go unsolved. So it’s reasonable to assume that nearly all of the 19% difference in homicide clearance are homicides committed by an Hispanic offender (we can only tell the race of the victim here). This is somewhat complicated by the possibility that unsolved white victim homicides may be more likely to have an Hispanic offender than the solved homicide rate, but figuring that out is annoying.
Putting this all together: the Hispanic crime rate is likely 50% higher than expressed in the official and common crime data. This weakens the argument that Hispanic migration would be a net economic positive, given the high cost of crime via secondary / tertiary effects.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Bach just dropped a new banger www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXWPqjAEwy8
It is not so complex for Maimonides, although interestingly, he considered Islam purely monotheistic. There may be other rabbis who have said differently, but what matters is what is being taught as authoritative to the community, not what a less-significant or insignificant rabbi has published.
What is “modern Judaism”? Reform Jews have reformed the tradition. Conservative Jews might have never studied these works. I’ve specified that I am talking about Orthodox Jews, the ones who take the Talmud seriously. There is no “modernization” of Orthodox Judaism. If you believe that it has been modernized since the time of Maimonides, you should be able to find a statement from an important council of Rabbis to that effect, or a book that they consider to be more authoritative than Maimonides. In fact, the most important Rabbi of orthodoxy of our age, Schneerson, who some even believe to be the messiah (really), held up the work I quoted as required reading for all Jews. Did his work have a commentary attached, which described how these rules are no longer in effect? No.
One of the issues here is that Jews aren’t supposed to teach gentiles the Talmud. As, per Maimonides again, if they study the Talmud they deserve to die (Melachim uMilchamot - 10:9) by the hand of God. So the Orthodox are probably not going to share with you everything in their books. But as an experiment, you can write a convincing email to an orthodox authority about these questions, writing in Yiddish as if a yeshiva student, and then see what they reply with, as then they would reply honestly.
I doubt an Orthodox authority would tell you that you’re allowed to attend Torah study unless you are maternally Jewish.
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