pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
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User ID: 464
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
1yr ago
You don’t have to choose a side, actually. You’re an American, presumably, you live far away and have no way of knowing.
If I had to advocate for my side, though, I’d say this - in 2005, when Israel unilaterally left Gaza, the gazans could have simply chose to declare a new state and live their lives. They could have been a middle-eastern Singapore. Instead, they chose to eliminate all of the PA’s presence in the strip (by throwing PA officials from high-rises, if memory serves) and double-down on rocketry. I think that says a lot. (Also, numerous other atrocities and the fact that post ‘48 there was a mixed Jewish-Arab side of the armistice line, and another judenfrei side)
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
1yr ago
They send robots down the tunnel. When the tunnel is cleared, they map it and blow it all up. There are a few specialized units in the IDF for that.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
1yr ago
Those have all been cut. Projections are that Gaza runs out of fuel by Wednesday.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
1yr ago
We’ve had enough rockets, but thanks for the offer.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
1yr ago
This requires a competent, long-term thinking government, which we currently do not have. We haven't had the luxury of non-idiots in government for about 15 years now, with a few minor breaks in-between.
The PA was supposed to be just that, but they didn't play along at first and then our internal demographics beat us.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
I’m not sure I understand the difference. What matter does it make if the tax is used for one purpose or another?
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Do you have a gas tax in the US? If so, what’s the difference?
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
There are probably more examples of low TFR with good healthcare than high TFR with good healthcare. Other than Israel, I can't even think of any for the latter.
That said, I think the general direction of causation is both (modern country/culture) --> (low TFR) AND (modern country/culture) --> (good healthcare), rather than (good healthcare) --> (low TFR). I do think you can increase TFR with better healthcare policy, but I admit I have no empirical data to back that up, only personal experience. I'm also not familiar enough with the actual workings of European healthcare, so I don't know if their policies actually match my suggestions or not.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
I agree. It is also worth noting that doctors will recommend limiting births after a c-section, since a woman can only have a limited number of them (2-3, depending on doctor and the hospital's policy from my limited experience) and one c-section increases the chance of needing another c-section dramatically. Some places don't even risk vaginal birth after c-section (VBAC) and will automatically schedule a c-section for women that already had one. On the margin, I do expect a higher c-section rate to decrease TFR, then, even divorced from birth trauma - which is also very very real.
However, I'm not sure how much of that can be credited to the healthcare system, rather than other factors. C-sections IIRC are more commonly needed for older mothers. In Israel, a large portion of births are from the ultra-orthodox community which starts very young. That alone can explain some of the difference. Some more of it might be explained by the stricter monitoring pregnant women undergo here, but I'm not familiar of any data on that specifically.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Israel has a great many advantages in terms of parenting that we can export to the rest of the world! Not just culturally, but also in terms of policy:
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A healthcare system using the voucher system, paid by the government, rather than tied to employment. This is more related to the US than anything.
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A voucher system for maternity wards. Hospitals compete to get the most births, and as a result the maternity ward in most hospitals is really nice.
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Healthcare includes a large battery of tests & information kits during pregnancy.
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Facilities to monitor & help with babies' and toddlers' growth, and vaccinations (Family Health Centers / Tipat Halav).
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Pre-school and elementary school operates 6 days a week, leaving parents with 1 day / morning a week to make more kids.
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We don't do this in Israel, but it's really important - build more housing units. High prices seem a-priori bad for fertility.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Assuming American Jews will do a traditional Jewish funeral:
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Heads up, there’s no casket. The body goes in the ground in wraps.
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The ceremony is mostly just a Rabbi saying stuff and some prayers. It’s not long. In some parts other people will join in, but it’s not expected of you if you’re not Jewish - you’re not excluded, it’s just not an issue either way.
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Men and boys should have a kippa (yamaka) on, even if they’re not Jewish. A hat will do as well. Women and girls don’t wear kippas.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Trump's proposed division kind of proves my point.
Yes! I agree with your overall point. I included both trump's map it as well as a map of the settlements since they make the same point without pretending that all of area C is annexed to Israel.
I mean, if Israel were to relinquish all the settlements and put the settlers in the position of keeping their homes but being subject to Palestinian sovereignty, or giving up their homes, that would be theoretically workable. But I don't see them ever agreeing to that, since it would screw over the settlers so incredibly hard.
It's a better, and more likely acceptable offer than a one-state solution. It also shows some good will, in that maybe Palestinians aren't so terrible that they literally can't stand having a single Jew in their territory. This would be a change from their position in '48, when they (but primarily the Jordanian army) did cleanse every last Jew in the territory.
And if you have a state of Palestine which is separate from (and likely at best on cold terms with Israel), you'd be talking about a very small minority that would likely be subject to a lot of discrimination and attempts to take their land. And assuming they retained their Israeli citizenship also you basically have a recipe for open warfare.
They would be analogous to Israeli Arabs - a large ethnic minority with strong cultural ties to a different state.
What I don't understand is how you can both think that Palestine cannot tolerate a small minority of Jews without discriminating them or taking their land, but at the same time think Israel should accept a one-state solution where all Israeli Jews become such a minority.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
The issue is the settlements. Israel has used decades of de facto control to swiss cheese the West Bank to the point where establishing real borders would create an enclave hell that is completely intractable. There is no way for those borders to work. And making them workable would displace a million+ Israelis in a way that is politically and probably militarily impossible. Due to a deliberate policy to make it so, there is absolutely no way to physically separate the Jewish and Arab populations of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with a real border.
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That's a dumb map. It acts as though Area C = Israel, Area A/B = "Palestine". It's one of the few things I'd actually label "misinformation". Here's a map that get the point across, but is true (green = settlement bloc). Here's a map of trump's proposed division.
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A possible offer for a two-state solution would be to offer the Israelis in would-be Palestine citizenship. Why must they be cleansed?
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
No, actually. The Jordanian king doesn't want any more Palestinians.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Items eaten include earth, paper, chalk, feces, glass, paper and other nonfood items.
Huh, but what about paper?
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
The worst thing we (Israel) did was conquest of land but not people in 1967. In 1947-48, our war of independence (and Palestinian catastrophe) we transferred many Arabs out of our conquered territory - by force and fear. Those who remained had marshal law imposed on them, gradually released until finally it was cancelled in 1966, but they were citizens with voting rights at least. Their current situation is not perfect, but it's leagues and miles better than the situation of their fellow Arabs across the 1948 armistice line.
When we took the land up to the Jordan river (Judea and Samaria, aka "the west bank") and the Gaza strip, we did not annex that territory and did not grant the Arabs there citizenship. You see, there were simply too many of them. Had we granted them citizenship, we would have annihilated ourselves. We also did not kick them out (well, not enough of them anyway), what with them being innocent civilians and all. So since then and up to today, these people live in limbo - they weren't given the final word on their status. They belong to no country, they are not masters of their own destiny and land, they basically have nothing. They can't even surrender, since they've already lost.
Meanwhile, various governments in Israel started building in the conquered (but not actually annexed!) territory, making separation ever harder. At this point in time, the whole thing seems lost without drastic action. Someone has to get out. Either we, or them. They don't have the power to move us, and we don't have the heart to move them. It's a quagmire we can blame only ourselves for.
Say that the year is 2043 and condition on no end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: what does the conflict look like then?
"Low intensity conflict", at least until something really bad happens. All-out war that will see most Arabs moved to Jordan is probably the best-case scenario, but I don't see it happening.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Yes, exactly. It’s all really basic redpill stuff (well, OG redpill at least). If women were told all of it to their face, at a young age, maybe we’d have less bitter, lonely men and women around.
Your friend is one among many, of course, and even if she does settle down with someone now she’s well past her best child-having years. She won’t have many kids, if any, and will be an old tired mom if she does. Multiply that by a whole bunch and low TFR is an obvious outcome already.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Is a strong central authority necessary to deter the catastrophe of health and fertility?
No, but some kind of positive governance is required, rather than an incompetent or malicious one.
Take obesity, for example. People get fat when they ingest more calories than they burn - this isn't rocket science. Having cheap, calorie-dense food everywhere makes it nearly impossible to keep a good calorie balance without going hungry, or without planning and measuring your food (which most people don't and won't do). So a good place to start would be to not subsidize corn, and thus high-fructose corn syrup. Instead, incentivize the cultivation of tasty vegetables (as opposed to good-looking ones, e.g. sherry tomatoes vs. the large ones at the supermarket) and low-calorie fruit, like strawberries.
For fertility, notice that you can't have TFR > 2.1 if families don't have more than 2 kids on average. So, what are the barriers? High housing prices are the first to tackle, in the places that people actually want to live. This is also not rocket science - build more. It doesn't even matter how or what, if housing stock will increase then the prices will decrease. Couples detached from their family will have almost no spare time - so young kids should be in some kind of schooling for 6 days a week (or 5-and-a-half, like here in Israel) to give parents time to make more kids.
Giving birth should not cost the parents money - cost is a very obvious disincentive. Instead, compensate the hospital directly for each birth and charge the parents nothing (again, this is what we do in Israel. The result is that the maternity ward is one of the nicest places in the hospital, as hospitals compete to get as many mothers as they can. Sort of a voucher system). Car seat laws in Europe and the US are just insane, creating a hard barrier at 2 kids per family with a normal car, or spacing the kids out too much so that at least 1 doesn't need a safety seat.
Most of this requires less government restrictions, some of it is just moving things around, but you don't really need to get big-brother on your populace.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
As women mature, their demands from a man monotonically increase. She keeps "getting ahead" in a man's scale of life, and must always find a man that exceeds her own achievements. As she gets older, the pool of potential husbands decreases. Therefore, she must settle down early - if she went to college, then that's a great place to find a husband. If not, then quickly after or even during high school.
The man's role in all of this is to put a ring on it, then provide. The woman's role is to accept the best offer, quickly. Society's role in all of that is to enable the man to provide, and to not delude women about their available time.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
Yeah, I could have phrased that better. I didn’t mean to say that the black/white divide in the US isn’t deep, I meant that the Arab/Jewish divide is even deeper, so it’s not exactly like the Black/White divide.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
I didn’t listen / watch this. I just want to register my dislike of emojis, and doubly so in a title. Petition to remove emojis from thread titles?
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
True, true. I didn’t think of that, since Sylvester celebrations are more akin to American new-year’s than Christmas (no tree, for example), but for the religious opposition to hosting an event of the sorts it’s roughly the same.
pm_me_passion
אֲנָשִׁים נֹשְׂאֵי מָגֵן וְחֶרֶב וְדֹרְכֵי קֶשֶׁת וּלְמוּדֵי מִלְחָמָה
2yr ago
There’s a lot to say on this. It’s true that many Haredi men don’t work, but most Haredi women do, and a smaller percentage of the men also do work at least part time. The official statistics are also necessarily false, and trend too much towards unemployment, because that’s one way for Haredi men to avoid conscription (without getting into the details of why that is).
Even so, there are business owners that cater specifically to the Haredi market, both from within the community and from outside. It’s a very organized market, so securing a deal with them or even with a specific sect can be very lucrative. As an by anecdote, I used to work for a Haredi Spharadi man doing security for the Lithuanian Haredi population. He had plenty of steady work.
Officially, the great majority of Haredi are poor, but it’s not the same as being poor in the states. Health and education are practically free, public transport is cheap, basic food is donated to them from abroad, and they get very good deals from the aforementioned businesses owners who compete for the Haredi market. They also wield considerable political power, so they can get cheaper housing on the tax payer’s expense. Still, divide their income by the number of family members and they’re deep below the poverty line.
We just saw what happens when Gazans aren’t stopped from breaking the border fence and going into Israel. I think live fire was fully justified, both at the time and in retrospect.
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