coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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3hr ago
I recall reading about an interrogation tactic of PoWs (maybe in Korean War?) where the prisoner is gradually made to relinquish his patriotism through very gradual criticism of his country beginning at a microscopic level (“well, there is one small thing wrong with America…). Actually I think this was posted at one point here. What is this interrogation tactic?
coffee_enjoyer
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13hr ago
Certain domesticated dog breeds are much better at complex pattern recognition and sequences than a wolf, like the border collie. This requires training beforehand, but so do humans (all socialization from infancy is training).
coffee_enjoyer
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13hr ago
I think there is an element of self-domestication somewhere in European prehistory. It’s noteworthy that blue eyes are unheard of among wild mammals yet are found in domesticated goat, dog, and fox breeds. (See: Morgan Worthy’s obscure 1970s writings). Similarly, blonde hair is uncommon but found in the amicable golden retriever. While Asians have neotenous features they lack other features that go with high-trust animal domestication like wide eyes. There’s even a study showing that when Asians are evaluating faces they don’t normally look at the eyes but the middle of the face, although this may have to do with default mode network differences
Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot
Re: Morgan Worthy mentioned above, in his “eye color: a key determinant in behavior” he talks about how light eyed hunters across species more often “lie in wait” before engaging in a ”self-starting” hunting action. Dark eyed animals are more likely to hunt by chasing and reacting. Worthy then looked at sports and found that blue eyed athletes performed better at non-reactive, self-regulated actions like free throws and golf (Tiger Woods an exception that did not exist yet).
coffee_enjoyer
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18hr ago
Black Americans want to date above their social rank, and lighter skin is normally preferred for female mates. So these are big factors that also explain the phenomenon of black Americans wanting a mate from a foreign country.
complain about Western women: how third-wave feminism ruined them, how modern women are masculinized, hypergamous, promiscuous, etc. etc.
All of these could be true, while white American women are still preferred generally for other factors (eg beauty, status). I highly doubt the online cohort you are speaking of would be averse to marrying a Western European or southern European woman. But I think they look at Jordan Peterson’s daughter and think, “even he couldn’t stop his daughter from sleeping with celebrities and getting divorced?”. Then they look at Lauren Southern and say, “even this ‘trad’ paragon married a foreign police agent who divorced her and left her as a single mom?” And then you look at, like, any given devout first gen Muslim student or a raised-Mormon girl and see how different things are as a product of adolescent environment.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Could technological society cause the proliferation of “inhuman” behavioral traits? And could such an outcome be unfavorable even if it were a technologically-utopian society? When I imagine the end goal of human existence — when all obligations and all unnecessary stresses are eliminated — it’s something like an eternal state of playfulness and “deep” emotion. The deep emotions are friendship, love, awe, wonder, tranquility. These to me are intuitively terminal. So the optimal end goal of human existence is to optimize for these propensities. These traits or propensities are superior to, say, an eternal state of playfulness where people do combat sports for fun. A terminal enjoyment of striking another for fun is inherently inferior to a terminal enjoyment of singing odes to beauty, love, and peace. If we imagine two paradises, the fighter’s paradise would exist on a lower level.
But what if industrial society causes the proliferation of traits whose terminal values are something like “neurotic competing over social superiority” or “enjoying puzzles”? These are selected for today, and if you have both of these traits you can make loads of money. And that’s all well and good when they are instrumental to keeping the economic engine churning. But what if if changes human nature? A paradisal state where people do puzzles and aggressively fight and subvert each other to obtain the highest status also strikes me as an inferior paradise. While instrumentally useful right now, it can change human nature for the worse.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
“There’s no realistic white nationalist movement in the country” could very well be due to the propaganda against it for more than a decade. In other words, it is as much evidence against my point as for my point. The “unite the right” event was catastrophized in the media specifically to destroy the threat of similar rallies; Nick Fuentes was de-person’d, forbidden to fly and having his bank accounts cancelled, not to mention banned by all social media giants. Literally, anti white nationalism was a major news plot point for years during the beginnings of Trump admin.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
a serious possibility of civil war
America has shockingly little threat of civil unrest for a 333 million strong country that is globally hegemonic. It’s our endless catastrophizing against potential unrest (an example of hyper-defense) which leads to our civic equanimity. When some people made vague gestures toward the possibility of legitimate civil unrest on January 6th, which was never actually a threat, their punishments and social shame were maximal simply as a way to deter even future gesturing.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Not to prevent a threat to the agency but to prevent a threat to American security and territorial integrity.
Every example you posed can actually be considered thoughtfully (“does affirmative action harm black people? In what capacity? Can it both harm and help different cohorts of black people?”). I think it’s a poor cognitive choice to opt out of thinking about questions which lack easy empirical data. This would mean that you can’t think about the most powerful agencies in America (or Russia), as they are necessarily clandestine. “Reverse arguments” is a fictitious category which cannot be uniformly swept aside. For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up. (Remember how the FBI for some reason had drone footage of Rittenhouse?)
it seems extremely weird to argue that elevating racial groups in discourse is supposed to prevent civic disunity along racial lines
The propaganda which has been fully imbibed by the PMC class is not that they were elevated, right? What the PMC exemplar believes is that some racial wrong was rectified and that white solidarity is wrong. This created a fear about group solidarity among whites (right now the only group that can actually threaten a risk of balkanization). Various black advocacy groups are appeased, though it’s not like black people can be an organized threat to the state (especially with gang culture and consumerism completely depotentiating them). What the BLM et al stuff effected is a class of high achieving young people who fear having an identity apart from harmless anti-cultural things (LGBeTc) and consumerism.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Could American social progressivism be (in part) an intelligence operation to create “defense-in-depth” against America’s weak points, akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy?
In cybersecurity, valuable assets are hyper-protected with multiple layers of security, so that if any layer fails the others may still hold. The idea being that the assets are so important to defend and attacks could come at any time (and with novel stratagem), so it is reasonable to over-defend it in many different ways. In the military usage, layers of physical defense are established so that one may retreat into another defense upon an assault, ensuring reduced losses and longer periods of defending. Another somewhat ancillary idea is “fencing the Torah” in Judaism. It is so important not to violate a Torah prohibition that “fences” are established to make even the chance violation impossible. Eg, the the rule to not even pick up a tool lest you accidentally use it which would violate the sabbath prohibition.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security. Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious. Along the same lines, see how valuable transgenders have been as a layer of defense: millions of conservatives hours are spent arguing against something that has a surprising level of state support, and millions of progressive hours are spent defending something that is historically and intuitively off-putting. Those are hours that are not spent on something actually valuable; transgender stuff is simply the most outer layer of defense against a possible Balkan threat, and if conservatives win there’s nothing valuable lost from a state security perspective.
As outlandish as it seems, I think this is possible. It would be par for the course for how intel agencies behaved historically — well before they had enormous databases of information and AI to help them decide state hyper-protection. We could imagine the team of hundreds of some thousands employed toward this objective at some intel agency: “how do we protect against the most cataclysmic threat for America?” They look at the cost and benefit with history in mind, with WWII’s staggering death toll and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in mind.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Roman religion was centered around vows to gods, however; obligational relationships which mirrored the Roman culture of patronage. Hence the gods were feared
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
A number of researchers have commented that hunter-gatherers, in general, are highly practical people, not much given to magic or superstition (e.g. Bird-David, 1992; Thomas, 2006). Shamanic healing might be seen as an exception, but such healing may actually work to the degree that diseases have psychological components. In general, hunter-gatherer religious ceremonies have more to do with embracing reality than with attempting to alter it. As an example, Thomas (2006) describes how the desert-dwelling /Gwi people use their rain dance not to bring on rain but to welcome it joyfully and partake in its power when they see it coming.
The sound of the molimo is deemed sacred, and women are supposed to be frightened of it and to believe that it comes from a terrible animal spirit. According to Turnbull, when he observed the ceremony, the women played their parts well, staying in their huts and acting frightened. But they were not really frightened; they seemed to know perfectly well that this was all a grand game instigated by the men. Other anthropologists have likewise contrasted the playful attitudes of hunter-gatherers toward their deities with the fearful attitudes of neighboring sedentary people (e.g. Endicott, 1979; Tsuru, 1988).
If we think of social life as a grand human game, then the religious beliefs of a society provide a context for understanding the goals and rules of the game and for making decisions. The religious beliefs both reflect and help to support the society's socioeconomic structure. From this point of view it is no surprise that monotheistic religions that blossomed in feudal times portray a hierarchical view of the cosmos, with an all powerful God, "king of kings," at the top, and a storyline focused on requirements of obedience and service to lords and masters. It is also no surprise that hunter-gatherer religions reflect an egalitarian view of the spirit world, populated by a multitude of deities, none of whom has authority over the others or over human beings.
The hunter-gatherer deities themselves are playful and even comical beings, not stern judges. Their interactions with people can most often be described as whimsical. A deity may hurt or help a person just because he or she feels like it, not because the person deserves it, and in that sense, at least, the deities are personifications of natural phenomena such as the weather. A common character in the hunter-gatherer spirit world is what mythologists call the "trickster" (Guenther, 1999).
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I had picked up Zweig’s Beware of Pity a long time ago, actually seeing it on a hotel table in Germany, but it lost my attention. I liked his Chess Story though.
how savage war makes men
I felt this way reading about Napoleon recently. Half a million involved in the battle of Leipzig? And how much did Napoleon actually aid France at the end of the day? It’s a comical loss of life. And the amount of rape was surprising too. I actually wonder if his aggressive campaigning wasn’t halfways motivated by rape alone, with the other half mostly novelty-seeking. Like why the fuck did you invade Egypt?
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I would figure the newest one will be more fun than the older ones, even if older ones have reprising aesthetic features. Nostalgia may make one recommend a Morrowind over a Skyrim, but “fun and nothing demanding” would probably be latest installment.
The best and most cost-efficient way to reduce recividism rates is to incentivize the playing of an RPG game and to make various rewards contingent upon its progression, even going so far as to pay the prisoner per progression
An RPG game is uniquely capable of changing the character and knowledge of a criminal because it contains elements of movies, novels, art, and social life, while requiring participation with leads to forced identification with the story. RPG gameplay can make criminals hate crime: stories involving the risks and stupidity of committing crime, stories involving guilt and shame at criminality, having a criminal villain character come in and “steal” the character’s progress, etc etc. RPGs are particularly good at memory formation because of their variety of locations and characters and cues. Real life skills can be mirrored in the game (eg applying to jobs, paying child support), as can emotional regulation strategies. Lastly, this solves the problem of criminals socializing with other criminals within a social hierarchy where the hardest criminal sits up top (literally the worst thought out punishment for criminals lmao). More of a criminal’s free time will go into the game, and prisons can also separate criminal cohorts by progression in the game.
Just imagine: you are Joe the prisoner, you are bored, you are told you can get paid to play a game. You start up the game and your character is Joe and looks just like you. The game traps your attention at first without any indication that it is about morality. But over time the storyline gets more and more moral. Suddenly you are playing as “Joe the reformed prisoner” who is starting a new life in some kind of Fable/Stardew/FF setting (but hyper-moral), all the while growing in wisdom and practical skillset, while every so often the game purposefully makes you afraid of committing crime.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
This is an interesting question. On one hand, were I tyrannical dictator of the universe I would ban all spectator sports, so I don’t think the playoff game is important. On the other hand, what is very important is that a man fulfill his responsibilities to his friends and supporters. So while the game itself is insignificant, the social relations on top of it are maximally significant. So the player would be in the wrong if these social relations are more important than being at the birth of your child. And now the final layer of complexity: is it actually important for a man to be in the hospital room while his wife gives birth, and is this contingent upon the significance of one’s social obligations? To the first question, history says men usually were not present during the birth of their child, except for elite families. To the second, I think yes — when more people are relying on your husband, this means a lessened or eliminated obligation to be present during childbirth. Lastly, there’s the unique situation here where the NBA player’s entire livelihood relies on playing the game, and this livelihood allows the wife and child to live amazing lives, so I think it would be wrong for the wife to complain.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Kaplan and Aguiar: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/prodigal-son
Kushners are modern orthodox, hence why Haaretz writes “It might seem odd for a Modern Orthodox Jewish family to join a Chabad synagogue”. But sure, are we only counting atheist Jews?
Why did you ignore Kolomoisky? He was secular until his 40s. This is a trend, where secular Jews start associating with the orthodox when they acquire age and income.
Then there’s Sheldon Adelson; JPost writes,
https://m.jpost.com/opinion/article-691444
SHELDON WAS not an Orthodox or halachicly practicing Jew, in the strict sense of the word. Yet, in other ways he was ultra-Orthodox. If being an observant Jew means believing in the destiny of the Jewish people and safeguarding a vulnerable nation from harm and valuing the infinite worth of every member of our nation, then Sheldon was off-the-charts religious.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2006/12/08/Billionaire-plans-donation-to-Jews/48901165618085/
https://m.jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-news/billionaire-adelson-to-boost-birthright-organization
He has also built a Chabad center there. Adelson, a major funder of Republican candidates, is also involved with the Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
What exactly am I supposed to glean from the rare cases of non-religious Jewish journalists investing Haredi? When I know that billionaire Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire Guma Aguiar, the billionaire Kushners, the billionaire Lev Leviev, the billionaire Ron Perelman, the billionaire Tevfik Arif, the billionaire Israel Englander, and even the Ukrainian former billionaire Kolomoisky, are all either funding ultra orthodox schools and organizations, or have funded them in the past? You wrote “it’s often secular Jews at the forefront of anti-Haredi policies” — no, they are at the forefront of funding them. And a journalistic website is not a “policy”. You are showing me a puddle in the concrete and telling me that it’s the forefront of water in the area, while I look behind you and there’s an expansive ocean with waves crashing against the pier.
Did you mean to write, “some Jews write about things against the ultra orthodox”? Well, sure. You’ve missed the best ones though, like the guy who writes the FailedMessiah blog, or the writer who wrote “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America”. But these guys don’t matter when they are a puddle, and the ocean = secular Jewish billions and literal Mossad.
The aggressive pursuit now is arguably because the largely progressive Jewish donors who funded Bragg's DA campaign care about it a great deal
If you have a source I would be interested in reading it. When NYT “aggressively” wrote a front page piece on ultra orthodox corruption in schools (which was honestly great journalism), nothing actually came from it.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
I would wager that the point of this story is to shame Australian men in such a way that they fear male camaraderie. The story creates a fearful negative association with male solidarity, as when men get together they often discuss women. If men in a Western country decided to form male-only groups, this poses a problem to feminism — which then poses a problem to globalism and progressivism. The act of men getting together to judge women would greatly reduce feminism, promiscuity, all sorts of things, which may be seen as problematic.
Anyway, if Australia wanted to tackle gender violence, they need to do something about their aboriginal problem, because they are “32x more likely to be hospitalized due to family violence”. Next they would want to study their Somalian population, and possibly reduce all migration from that country. After that, eliminating alcohol culture would be the best big step.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
We ought to interpret “unrapeable” more charitably as “even a driven (evil/damned) rapist would pass up the opportunity because of how ugly she is”. There is no indication that the boys have formed some some crypto-pro-rapist organization which hides their aspirations by including the word “unrapeable”. That is too uncharitable to consider. It’s like, if I say I wouldn’t eat your cooking even if I’m starving, I am not making a positive value claim about the state of being starved.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Hasidim and Chabad have alliances with non-Orthodox Jewish groups and leaders. Some non-orthodox Jewish billionaires will help fund Hasidim or Chabad organizations. ADL and other Jewish advocacy groups never touch the Haredi issue. Chabad also has close ties with the Israeli state (Mossad finds them to be a key ally), and thus the secular Jews who promote Israel politically. Secular Jews may want some of the Haredim to become more secular, but by and large they are allied politically, culturally, and religiously with them, and do zero to combat their corruption. Meanwhile, Chabad houses are becoming the center of religious life for non-orthodox Jews in America.
secular Jews at the forefront of anti-Haredi policies
This statement is the oppose of evidenced. They were nowhere to be found when Kiryas Joel, Ramapo, or Monroe were dealing with issues of Hasidim. The campaigning, journalism, and documentaries were almost exclusively driven by white Christians.
secular Jews said and did very little when eg. black people were attacking the black hats
That’s again not true. Their secular advocacy groups made it a national news story. There were statements made by every politician. Their politicians secured them more security grants. They have a constant security presence outside. Task forces on antisemitism were made. The attacks entailed a younger black pedestrian punching one out of nowhere — this literally can’t be “policed”. They policed it maximally by actually releasing footage and dedicating police units to the area.
Recently they’ve accused secular Jews of coming after the ultra-Orthodox by targeting the landlords/slumlords who finance a lot of the community.
Okay, so are you referring to the slumlords that have gotten away with corruption / discrimination so far? What helped them get away with it for so long?
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Fuentes is entertaining, funny at times, and has a social media army of teenagers. This can be influential in the same way that the 4chan --> Elon Musk pipeline was influential. Charisma is important (why Musk’s persona is more influential than Zuckerberg’s, why Trump won the presidency). Jared Taylor is too old and outside the current memeplex to affect culture now; maybe he is the most well-spoken person on the far right, but being well-spoken doesn’t really do much. Remember how influential Jon Stewart was? Stephen Colbert? These were dumb personas that made jokes but IMO were vastly more influential than their knowledge or raw intelligence should allow. Fuentes has 10 more years of being a “youth influence” (going by Asmongold’s age) and putting him back on Twitter is a way to grow his audience.
I disagree that Tucker is 10x more influential. IMO Tucker is more like 50x more influential.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Right, but — if you are a critic of Fuentes(?) — you now have to argue that his doing that is bad, while asserting it is okay for Hasidim to do it in the middle of Manhattan; and you have to argue the latter while Fuentes cites stories about billion-dollar tax evasion, discrimination, whatever. Or, if Fuentes doing it is bad and Hasidim doing it is bad, Fuentes can press on why you and other ostensible progressive organizations do not seem to care about their enclave or crime. I’m just saying that it’s surprising the far right hasn’t latched onto this discussion point.
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
I think the argument would fail in this case, because there is clearly no greater evidence of power than the ability to steal billions for your group and go unpunished — indeed to have your reputation unstained. Only the most propagandized progressive would fall back to the “powerful tautology”, if you will — so about 5% of them.
lol I actually just found it! https://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/2021/02/02/what-interrogation-american-pows-can-teach-us-social-media-polarization/4334685001/
Difficult to find via googling
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