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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17673 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Sounds like a better plan

You want better plan how to raise birth rate?

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, it was perfected long ago by Amish, Mennonites, Orthodox Jews and similar insular groups defying the modernity, groups found in rather unexpected places.

The plan includes early marriage, but it absolutely does not include anime, and all known examples require supernatural beliefs and practices.

Benefits of such life summarized here.

Unlike membership in an outlaw motorcycle club, being part of normal Haredi society brings benefits beyond a meth habit, jailtime and dental issues. For instance, if you minimally have your stuff together, you’re guaranteed gainful employment or a sinecure. Unless you have severe physical or mental issues, you’re gonna get married off to someone with whom you are basically compatible.

You’re going to live in a place with very low crime. When you have many kids-!כן ירבו-they’ll grow up in a place that’s full of kids, where kids and their behavior are normal and expected, not a bizarre imposition. You can have a high expectation of seeing those kids grow up to follow in your footsteps, to aspire to live as you lived in the ways that both you and them see as important, to marry early and have lots of children.

You will not be lonely, uninvited to the party, because the parties are all simchas-kiddush, weddings, engagements, circumcisions-to which everyone is invited, and they happen constantly.

(well, this part would be seen by many not as paradise, but hell on earth)

You will always be in places where you belong. When you die, you will be buried and mourned by your children, nephews grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, instead of by a dwindling and sad bunch of your equally old siblings and cousins.

Because your community is ruled hierarchically, has a high median IQ and pools its resources towards explicitly defined and concrete political goals, you can punch way above your weight in politics, ranging from primitive block voting and mass protests to filling important positions with your members who are actually qualified to fill them instead of being Somali congressional diversity hires or whatever. All of this leads to political success (until Tucker gets his Harbor Freight pitchforks and torches shipment delivered.) The spoils of this success are distributed to the community.

Here is the sales pitch, the benefits. The drawbacks: you have to follow all your life lots of very detailed rules, and live in equivalent of cosplay, including costume designed to look maximally ridiculous to outsiders.

Is it price worth paying? It is up to you.

ranging from primitive block voting and mass protests to filling important positions with your members who are actually qualified to fill them

Indeed and there's a dark side to this. They can take over local school boards. Busses full of Hadids show up with however many are needed to win the school board election. They then loot the school district for their benefit in opposition to everyone who sends their kids to public schools. Their kids don't attend public school, so ruining public resources like this isn't their problem. I'm shocked some of things they do are even legal. Such as shutting down public schools and then selling the buildings to themselves at ultra low prices in order to make yeshivas for cheap.

Infamous and well documented example at the East Ramapo Central School District in New York. Great radio report about it.

Maybe public schools should win more loyalty from the normies.

You want better plan how to raise birth rate?

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, it was perfected long ago by Amish, Mennonites, Orthodox Jews and similar insular groups defying the modernity, groups found in rather unexpected places.

Living like 19th century peasant farmers is a terrible solution.

Nybbler, come on. You know the Haredim do not till the earth. Food comes from the grocery store, as far as they are concerned.

The Haredim are not a useful model; they are parasites. Perhaps you could set up another society which as efficiently exploits a welfare system made for the bottom 10% and the 50th-percentile social workers who administer it, but even if you could, it would be ipso facto dysfunctional.

(and the apocalypse grows ever closer, as I agree with @MadMonzer again)

Yes - the alternative for such groups to living in voluntary (real) poverty is parasitism, which notoriously doesn't scale. In Kiryas Jorel, food comes from the store, and is paid for with an EBT card. Haredim in both the US and Israel live off the government teat.

We cannot get society-wide fertility above replacement group by encouraging high-fertility parasitic subgroups for the same reason that cancer victims don't gain weight.

With Mormons succumbed (possibly due to an inability to keep men in the Church - fertility is calculated per woman and allegedly there is a problematic number of TBM spinsters for this reason), Modern Orthodoxy is the only culture that still has above-replacement fertility and a tech sector.

Tradcaths do lots of tech work, law, trades, other jobs that are Basically Necessary and Useful for a Functioning 1st World Society and have a TFR above 3. Even Mormons still have a healthy 2.5ish fertility rate(they hamstring themselves discriminating against converts, but so does everyone else).

Yes - the alternative for such groups to living in voluntary (real) poverty is parasitism, which notoriously doesn't scale. In Kiryas Jorel, food comes from the store, and is paid for with an EBT card. Haredim in both the US and Israel live off the government teat.

At least on paper, that's true. My sense is that the Haredim have a large off-the-books economy. So for example, every few years there is a large welfare fraud bust in the NYC area. Quite often the cheaters are married couples who live in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, who work off the books while collecting welfare.

Of course, you might respond that probably they are working in businesses which are themselves bilking the government in other ways. So really the ultimate question is what would happen to the Haredim without government support.

Quite possibly they mooch off the government because it's easier to do that, consistent with their lifestyle, than to make a living in other ways.

If they couldn't mooch off the government, the Haredim (if they continued to exist) would have to change in significant ways; we cannot know if those changes would also result in blunting their fertility.

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