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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17669 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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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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