coffee_enjoyer
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If an event in Hebron satisfies the conditions of (1) state sponsored (2) terrorism (3) which expelled the native inhabitants or owners of the land (4) evidenced by solid historiography, then yes. I see that the 1929 riot was preceded by —
hundreds of Jewish nationalists marched to the Western Wall on August 14, 1929 while British authorities were on leave, shouting slogans such as "The Wall is Ours" and raising the Jewish national flag
And at least three Israeli historians assert that the riot began when three Arabs were killed. This makes the historiography fuzzy: obviously, if you move in from Poland and New York and declare with a flag that someone else’s land belongs to you, and then you kill three Arabs, a violent retaliation for that can’t really be considered “terrorism”, even if the retaliation is disproportionate enough to charge men with crimes. And evidently both Arabs and Jews were charged. Which is good that they were charged.
Is this what you mean? Do you just want to discuss Hebron in depth? You can just specify your argument.
you say that what is now Israel has been "Palestinian Land" because some subset of Palestinian Arabs has can be shown to have genetic continuity with those who were there thousands of years ago
Because all Palestinians have more genetic continuity than Ashkenazi, but especially the Christian Palestinians.
At the same time, you seem to agree that at least some subset of the Jews also has such continuity.
Yes, the Mizrachim, from what I can tell, especially Iraqi Jews.
Therefore, it follows -- based on YOUR reasoning -- that the whole area is Jewish Land.
Well, no. When you sell property, the property no longer belongs to you. Similarly, if you vacate property, it no longer belongs to you. I think the confusion here is that you believe that Jews were displaced from Israel. This is actually a myth. Jews continued to live in Israel after losing the war against Rome, synagogues continued to be built, and it was largely due to economic reasons that Jews voluntarily left the land of Israel for Babylon in later centuries. Zvi Eckstein has a great paper showing that the travel to Babylon and beyond makes sense in light of the income that Jews could generate thanks to their new religion (Rabbinicalism) which essentially demanded literacy. The illiterate Jews were despised by the Rabbis, and they wound up shifting to Christianity.
While the Jews volitionally left their betrothed land to, well, serve Mammon (poetically speaking), a remnant of the Chosen People who recognized Christ remained in the land (why would a farmer or shepherd leave?). Volitionally leaving land is irrelevant here.
coffee_enjoyer
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13hr ago
What is colloquially called “Palestinian Arab” encompasses the descendants of the House of Israel who stayed in the land and converted to Christianity and later Islam. They have the strongest direct continuity to ancient Israel according to available DNA distance tools. One study in Nature found that Ashkenazim are majority Italian in ancestry, but all available comparisons show that they are further away than the indigenous Palestinians.
coffee_enjoyer
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14hr ago
you agree that any area depopulated of Jews due to a terror campaign is Jewish land?
Sure, and that happened with WWII reparations, with Germany paying some high number of billions. What’s wrong with that? If there is some ancestral quarter for Jews in Baghdad and the government made them flee through terrorism, they should have that back or be offered compensation.
you are claiming that (1) DNA analysis of Palestinian Arabs connects them to what is now Israel going back thousands of years; and (2) DNA analysis of other groups, including Jews, does not do so?
I provided some links in this comment. The Palestinians (particularly the Christians) show direct continuity with DNA of Ancient Israel. Samaritans show the closest link of course, which makes sense, and then there’s the Iraqi Jews showing a close link. Ashkenazim are somewhat far away in terms of genetics.
coffee_enjoyer
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15hr ago
You seemed to imply that international law has always been vae victis. If that’s so, then America can simply do as she pleases based on her sense of justice, being the most powerful nation globally.
coffee_enjoyer
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15hr ago
An international body of third-party experts should decide what constitutes Palestinian land, based on informed estimates of the areas depopulated due to the terror campaign. In the same way that one person didn’t decide the outcome of Germany after WWII, it would be silly to speculate the exact parameters of what is owed to Palestinians. A solid rule: if Israelis used terrorism to cleanse the land, that land should be returned to Palestinians.
how did that land get to be "Palestinian land"
At least around the Iron Age, based on DNA. The Christian Palestinians even have a Biblical claim to the land, being descended from the agriculturalists who “converted” to Christianity, and staying put as the Jewish community migrated to Babylon and then dispersed globally to pursue higher wages. There is no reason to think there is significant Arab admixture given how close their DNA is to Samaritans.
coffee_enjoyer
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16hr ago
Indian partition violence was the result of mobs, not a top down military policy. But the violence of Israelis against Palestinians occurred as part of a conscious military policy involving ethnic cleansing and terrorism, which is shown in the documents. This makes them qualitatively different events.
coffee_enjoyer
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17hr ago
Under vae victis, America could force Israel to hand back Palestinian land tomorrow. Vae Victis does not legislate that the winning power must act without morality, it merely states that the winner’s dictates are the established reality. America could simply dictate tomorrow that Israel hand the land back to Palestinians, which would satisfy the feelings of the global hegemon while promoting regional stability. That is also Vae Victis. Why shouldn’t the winning nation opt to feel good and promote peace?
coffee_enjoyer
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17hr ago
How would you apply the “living memory” rule to other conflicts, actual and hypothetical, so that we know it’s not just an ad hoc rule? Eg, if China took control of Japan for 80 years, should no Japanese ever try to take it back? Should Europe have given up on retaking Spain after 800ad? There are Israelis currently living in homes built by Palestinians; is that not sufficiently “living memory”?
they’re really not that different from Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese
Christian Palestinians appear to be more similar to ancient Israelites than Ashkenazim. While an Englishman might be .018 away from a German using g25 coordinates, a Russian Jew is .09 away from an ancient Israelite while a Christian Palestinian is .032 away. They’re about two Samaritans away from an Ancient Jew, which seems pretty close.
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19hr ago
It may go against the 1907 Hague Convention (IV) in the following ways:
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rights, the lives of persons, and private property, as well as religious conviction and practice, must be respected. Private property cannot be confiscated. Pillage is formally forbidden.
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It is especially forbidden to… kill or wound treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army [interpreted at Nuremberg to apply to civilians]
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It is especially forbidden to… kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion
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The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.
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No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible
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the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from the laws of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience.
The Nuremberg Court notes that by 1939 this was “recognized by all civilized nations and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war”.
coffee_enjoyer
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21hr ago
Haaretz recently reported on a trove of new documents pertaining to the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians by Jewish Zionists. They are quite interesting, as they provide evidence toward the disputed claim that the Zionists used a conscious strategy of terror to expel the Muslim and Christian inhabitants.
The most important documents for closer historical examination were those that dealt with the War of Independence. One document that stood out among the papers that had been tossed into the garbage was written by Yitzhak Broshi, commander of Golani's 12th Battalion in the war. It was an order from July 1948 that Broshi sent commanders of the brigade's companies that were engaged in combat in the northern part of the country, titled "Conduct in captured villages where there is a population." The contents of this document are not the type of material one finds in Israeli history books. Broshi informed the officers that after an Arab village was captured, identification certificates were to be issued to the inhabitants. If someone transferred their certificate to another person, both were to be shot. If someone did not report on time for military inspection, they were to be shot and their home was to be blown up. If an "outside Arab" was found in a village, according to Broshi's directives, he was to be shot immediately. In general, the rule was to shoot "every 10th man" in a captured village where outsiders were found. In addition, all the men in any household in which property stolen from Jews was found were to be executed.
Moreover, while there was an order to raze villages, in some cases that was not enough. For example, when it came to Arab a-Zabah, a Bedouin community in the Lower Galilee, not a soul or a trace was to remain. "Every Arab among the Zabahim is to be killed," the order stated. These were not vague directives conveyed by word of mouth. This one and others appeared in "black on white" and were signed by Broshi in his handwriting. In another order dated July 1948, Broshi instructed his troops to mount a search for Arabs who might have hidden in the Mount Turan area of the Lower Galilee, after the site had already been conquered. The order was: "Kill anyone who is hiding."
Among the documents is one stating that "Arabs in a small number are wandering about in the [captured] villages," apparently to collect possessions and food. As per the instructions in the document: "The area is to be cleansed of Arabs." Under the heading "The method," the document adds that "every Arab who will be met with is to be annihilated."
Kotzer's vast collection, some of which was quoted above, is part of a trove of thousands of legal documents from 1948 that were declassified by the military courts due to recent procedures initiated by the Akevot Institute. This rich resource, which was approved for publication by the Military Censor, sheds new light on the history of the Palestinian refugee question. Moreover, it completely dispels the Israeli narrative according to which the country's Arab inhabitants fled of their own volition at the behest of their own leaders. Although some such instructions were indeed disseminated, and some people left at their own initiative – it can now be confirmed, on the basis of an impressive range of evidence, that the IDF expelled Arabs systematically and violently during the War of Independence. The expulsion was effected by massacres, murder and a variety of moves aimed at terrorizing this civilian population and expediting its flight.
There are a number of insightful things here that are a bit too long to quote. It mentions one Shmuel Lehis who massacred 40 Palestinians, becoming the only Israeli convicted of a war crime in this period. He received just one year in jail (in practice: hanging out at a military base) before being pardoned. He went on to work with the World Zionist Organization and became the president of the Jewish Agency in 1978. He later won the Chairman of the Knesset prize, the highest honor bestowed by the Israeli Parliament. Another interesting file involves the commander of the most prominent brigade at the time conveying the dominant expulsion strategy: "How do you expel a village? You lop off the ear of one of the Arabs before everyone else's eyes, and they all flee. In practice, no village was evacuated without stabbing someone in the stomach or by means of similar methods. We won thanks only to the fear of the Arabs, and they were fearful only of deeds that were not in accordance with the law."
I think these documents will be influential in future discourse about the Palestinian Question and the Israel Question. How justified is the Palestinian drive to take back their land from forces of terror (or their inheritors)? How justified is the existence of Israel? Should the world reward a state for taking land through ethnicity-targeted terrorism? Or are these events simply too old to inform present opinion? Comparing these events to Ukraine, we might ask: if Russia were to begin a strategy of terror bombing civilian homes, so as to lead Ukrainians to flee en masse, in how many years should we forget they they’ve done this and welcome them into the World Order?
(1) Three dead American servicemen confirmed by Centcom
U.S. Central Command said Sunday that three American service members were killed and five others were seriously wounded during Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran
(2) A disinformation war is happening in regards to whether a school in Iran was hit, and if it were hit, whether its destruction was caused by Iran, Israel, or America. 100+ Iranian girls were killed.
(3a) It isn’t clear why negotiations failed with Iran. A day before the attack, the designated Omani mediator asserted that Iran conceded fully on enrichment and nuclear weapons: “The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb,” said Albusaidi, describing the understanding as “something completely new” compared to the previous nuclear deal negotiated under former US President Barack Obama. He said the negotiations have produced an agreement on “zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, and full verification” by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), calling it a breakthrough that makes the enrichment argument “less relevant.” On existing stockpiles inside Iran, Albusaidi said that “there is agreement now that this will be down-blended to the lowest-level possible … and converted into fuel, and that fuel will be irreversible.”
(3b) It appears that Witkoff and Kushner were instrumental in the decision to strike Iran: ”Witkoff and Jared Kushner, U.S. officials said. They told him the talks had gone badly: Tehran wasn’t willing to end its nuclear enrichment or dismantle its missile program, the officials said. That further confirmed for Trump that he had one option left, the officials said. The U.S. also had intelligence that Iran considered attacking American targets before Trump authorized strikes, a senior administration official said, adding a sense of urgency to the president’s decision. U.S. casualties and damage to American interests would be higher unless the U.S. moved first, the senior official said.”
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
If you are a user of LessWrong, what is the most insightful two things you’ve read on LessWrong in the past year?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Trump is 80 years old and easily impressionable. Jared has an outsize influence on his thoughts. I don’t see why Jared Kushner wouldn’t sacrifice millions of Americans for Israel, which is the homeland he pledges allegiance to in his prayers, and which he believes is God’s favorite place and people. Kushner runs American foreign policy according to Rex Tillerson via one FBI informant (Chuck Johnson), and there are some reasons to believe he’s telling the truth here, although he’s otherwise totally unreliable:
Renda is the wife of Rex Tillerson (Rex), former Secretary of State for Trump. Renda told CHS [Confidential Human Source] about smears in the New York Post and how Jared was running a rival State Department operation. Rex affirmed Renda's claim. Renda was introduced to CHS by Daren Blanton (Blanton). Renda and Rex both told CHS they had been under intense surveillance. Renda told CHS she can't wait for the FBI to call her, so that she can tell them everything she knows
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00090314.pdf
The Ellison Family has already been shown to be conspiring with Israel proper for the purposes of influencing America: https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/david-ellis-benny-gantz-anti-bds-black-cube . The “12 wealthy donors meeting in a council for secret influence” is similar to the structure of Wexner’s Mega group.
”Benny meet david. David meet Benny," opened a purported email from Berkowitz on December 23, 2015, before Berkowitz added that he "told david briefly about your [Gantz's] 12 tribe idea which you can expound on to him which he seemed very interested in." Other slide decks and text documents in the leaked Handala archive include proposals from Gantz from a similar time period for a "Counter-BDS Initiative," which he hoped to have funded through 12 prominent Jewish donors.
"Funding for this initiative shall be provided by an exclusive group of the twelve most influential Jewish philantropists [sic, emphasis theirs], symbolizing the twelve Jewish tribes; Israel's government shall act as a thirteenth, facilitating 'tribe'," read the June 10, 2015 proposal purportedly drafted by Gantz's spokesperson, Melody Sucharewicz. The two primary slide deck summaries of the CBI concept coupled the donor analogy with a popular pictorial representation of the 12 tribes, with each of the 12 lead donors being asked to commit $1 million over a five year period.
The slide deck for the Counter-BDS Initiative promised that the effort would be "unprecedented in the use of state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon against BDS & Co," including through employment of "former IDF intel & cyber officers."
Institutional Judaism’s greatest strength is the seemingly bottomless naïveté and gullibility of the goyim, or at least the eldergoyim, who fail to comprehend that the people who behaved as a cohesive tribe to pursue their self-interest for 3000 years would continue doing so into the future. They fail to learn from their own culture’s history, where they would find the clauses of the Magna Carta that specifically curtailed the influence of Jews who had aligned with the ruling dynasty of England against the common people, and may notice the resemblance to the way Jews operate in America vis-a-vis Trump and Ruling Party. They fail to learn from the opening of the Gates of Toledo, and in fact they do not even believe it when they read it, that Sephardic Jews opened the city walls to allow foreigners to genocide the Germanic ruling families, and so they have no connection to draw when they witness the Sephardic Jew Mayorkas smile next to Joe Biden as he promotes an “unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop” with the purpose of ending the White majority, with the key enemy of Mayorkas’ activism being “white supremacy”. They will read about Epstein trafficking hundreds of gentile girls and women (having no memory of the centuries where the Jews trafficked Slavic Christian slave girls), being funded by the world’s most influential leader of Jewish life, whose Foundation literally selects the elites of Israel, and his innumerable meeting with the former intelligence chief and PM of Israel, at least 60 times in-person meetings within a decade, while working as an agent of the Rothschilds and demeaning the “goyim” dozens of times in his emails (sprinkled with Yiddish), and they will conclude that Epstein was a lone actor. All the while, a Jewish journalist at CNN with no such memory loss writes —
The timing of the US and Israeli attack on Iran bears symbolic meaning in Judaism. Ahead of the upcoming Jewish holiday of Purim, worshippers read the specific portion from the Old Testament, known as Zachor. The passage from the book of Deuteronomy commands the ancient Israelites to remember an unprovoked attack by the nation of Amalek and to eradicate the memory of Amalek once the Israelites are settled in their land. The passage is read publicly before Purim to fulfil the mitzvah of remembering Amalek as Israel’s achetypical enemy.
In a phrase: the goyim have gone insane. They have no immune system, no cultural memory, no threat detection. They have forgotten everything that their ancestors painstakingly wrote down for them. They cannot conceive of the possibility of people putting tribe first, and if you told them what is in the authoritative Jewish holy books, or that the Jews pray thrice a day for community informers to be slain or thank Hashem each morning “for not making me a goy”, they would accuse you (!) of storing hate in your heart.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
The women of Syria / Iraq / Libya were not better off after our interventions, but substantially worse off.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The NSA: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-flagged-top-spy-threat-us-new-snowdennsa-document-262991
The term "manipulation/influence operations" refers to covert attempts by Israel to sway U.S. public opinion in its favor. In this, Israel has dubious company, according to the NSA: Other leading threats were listed as China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, France, Venezuela and South Korea.
Also, American-allegiant scholars like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, and John Kiriakou the CIA insider
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I don’t think Larry “we will do everything we can to support the country of Israel” Ellison, who says regarding Israel “we have a country we can call our own”, who has donated $26mil to the IDF, should have so much influence on American culture and politics. He is not fully allegiant to America. It’s not difficult to find people who are fully allegiant. Those with pure allegiance should be the ones owning the biggest social media algorithm + the biggest movie company + the biggest streaming services + CNN. When you type it all out, doesn’t it seem reasonable? “The guy who is in ultimate control over how the masses think — I don’t want that guy being loyal to a country that is considered one of America’s top espionage and influence threats”. The cost isn’t trivial, it is tens of thousands of lives in a war with Iran. We can easily fall into an Iraq again due to media and political influence, and the cost of that was genuinely insane. I think the 3 trillion dollar price tag alone is insane.
It’s not strictly-speaking a Jewish thing; someone like Michael Dell or Mark Zuckerberg is fully allegiant to America while being Jewish. You just have to pick the guy who doesn’t say “I will do everything to support Israel, our homeland” while donating millions to their army. If a Palestinian businessman said this in Israel he would be thrown in jail on false charges within the hour, and then probably tortured.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
But no branch of Christianity claims the New Law supplanted the Mosaic covenant
I’m not sure about this. There is a natural law which is found in the Decalogue, and in this sense there is still a “law”; but this is still fulfilled in Christ, in the sense that faith / obedience will wind up satisfying the natural law.
Against those who urged the Galatians to obey the precepts of the Law of Moses, Paul replies that the Law was always in the service of God’s Covenant with his people. The Covenant was itself based not on the observance of the Law but on faith in the fulfilment of God’s promises. Now that God has definitively fulfilled those promises in the paschal mystery of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, those who believe in the Gospel are set free from the demands of the Law. The newness of the Christian life, then, is born of our response to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who brings the Law to fulfilment in the new commandment of love.
AFAIK the majority of early Christians believed two things: that the law was given to Israel because of the hardness of their hearts, and that the law was a “tutor” until Christ came as a Law unto Himself. Eg, Justin Martyr:
we know that the ordinances imposed by reason of the hardness of your people's hearts contribute nothing to the performance of righteousness and of piety.
Regarding natural law:
"For [God] sets before every race of mankind that which is always and universally just, as well as all righteousness; and every race knows that adultery, and fornication, and homicide, and such like, are sinful; and though they all commit such practices, yet they do not escape from the knowledge that they act unrighteously whenever they so do
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I feel the Christian Zionists are just an Israeli op. Contributions to churches are private and it’s in Israel’s interest to fund them. You would need only one goy middle man, and even the pastors would have no idea that they are funded by Israel. Megachurch leaders always seem sociopathic, so this would be an easy to op to accomplish. Remember Israel once donated a jet to Jerry Falwell Sr.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Huckabee actually lobbied for the release of Pollard from 2011-2013, despite Pollard costing an estimated 3-4 billion dollars in 1990 dollars, so almost 10 billions dollars. The pardon encourages spying among would-be spies, who now have the hope that they will be released as well. And they will see the hero’s welcome afforded to Pollard.
IMO Christian Zionism falls apart on every important level. It is absent from the writings of early Christians, who more often see the destruction of Israel as the wish of God (Justin Martyr); Constantine turned Jerusalem into a Christian city and forbid Jews from entry; and Paul writes in Hebrews 8:13 that the first covenant is “obsolete” and “near-vanishing”. More importantly, Zvi Eckstein’s economic analysis of the Jewish people argues that poor Jewish agriculturalists after the first century converted to Christianity, with most of them later converting to Islam. But Christian Zionism says that the Christian Palestinians — the very people who stayed in the land for generations, whose DNA are nearly as close to Iron Age Israelites as Samaritans, the literal descendants of the extended kin of Jesus — they do not deserve to return to their land. Would Jesus really support the descendants of the Pharisees living in the homes of the expelled descendants of the very first Christians?
Huckabee also does adverts for an organization called the Fellowship of Jews and Christians. It is very exploitative (great documentary), essentially just guilting and nudging poor Christians to send all their money to Israel. And they do!
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
I would prefer to give zero cents to a system which takes the money of my working neighbors and hands it to an insular non-assimilating tribe, only because they’ve cleverly arranged a charitable system where the wealthy members provide food and clothing as tax write-off “donations” while the young men refuse to work (and in some cases refuse to learn English in school). “Measured child poverty” is simply a puzzle that they have gamed; you can walk around Woodbury Commons and see crowds of “measurably poor” Haredi women buying expensive clothing.
Your argument doesn’t address the empirical evidence of SNAP fraud, like the half of Somali Americans using it or its high rate in Haredi enclaves. One example, another example. Your argument isn’t for the ideal charity distribution system, but for an unvetted system run by people I will never meet with a terrible track record of punishing fraud. It may even be a corrupt system designed specifically to be used by fraudsters. When I read that millionaires were getting benefits and their only punishment when caught was repaying the benefits back, I lose all faith in authorities administering the system forever, and no longer support the system.
For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue
In most cases, Jesus required pistis in return for charitable healing, and in those areas without pistis, no healing could be done. We translate this word as “faith”, and take it to mean a vague, confident belief in a set of facts. But its original meaning entailed a whole social dimension of allegiance and faithful loyalty. Jesus healed His allegiant followers, those who had fidelity to His new Kingdom of Loyalists and all that this meant. This is important to keep in mind. When Jesus praised the faith of the centurion, it wasn’t because he was especially certain of a set of facts, but because he said, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does.”.
We also find in the Didache an exhortation to give freely to members and a condemnation against anyone who takes without need. And this is in a pre-selected group of Christians: they have already pledged full allegiance to the cause and there are elders leading them with the ability to excommunicate.
Give to every one that asks you, and ask it not back; for the Father wills that to all should be given of our own blessings (free gifts). Happy is he that gives according to the commandment; for he is guiltless. Woe to him that receives; for if one having need receives, he is guiltless; but he that receives not having need, shall pay the penalty, why he received and for what, and, coming into straits (confinement), he shall be examined concerning the things which he has done, and he shall not escape thence until he pay back the last farthing. But also now concerning this, it has been said, Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give.
I think this all makes sense from an instinctive basis. We have an instinct to give to those in need, and we have an instinct to hate those who take advantage of us. The ideal system maximizes giving and minimizes fraud. It’s probably not a good idea to have a national system of administering benefits, unless you are willing to investigate and heavily punish fraud. I mean, I highly doubt you would be fine with me just stealing $20 from you, right? Could I justify this theft with “charity does not demand moral virtue?” This is the same thing on a population-wide scale.
Some criticisms:
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People in cities don’t report their car being broken into, and this rate of reporting will decrease as social trust decreases. So the property crime metric may not be accurate.
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The National Crime Victimization Survey is a mail-in survey. People living in low-trust (high-crime) areas of the country increasingly have no interest in filling out government surveys, having no trust in the government and having less familiarity with filling out mail. It would not be “an extraordinary coincidence if they exactly matched the proposed reporting bias to police”, as Scott asserts, because habits follow environment — those raised in a high-trust environment will fill this out at a higher level, and high-crime areas gradually reduce in trust.
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One reason for the decline in car thefts may be that, on average, they have been more difficult to steal and get away with the theft due to omnipresent surveillance.
It’s strange to me that people trust surveys from phone calls, emails, and the mail. Academics must have zero familiarity with how the lower class and lower middle class feels. It would be better to go to Walmart and run a survey, or hop on voice chat in a popular video game and ask the users if they would ever in a million years fill out a mail survey. They really think someone smoking weed every day in a high crime area is going to fill out a government survey or answer a government questionnaire (in their mind no distinction between an institute and the government)? These are not accurate assessments of a bulk of the population, and they are increasingly inaccurate. You are surveying the most productive remnants of the common flock who still possess the time, trust, sense of social duty, attention, and conscientiousness to answer your survey.
This would be a good study: go to a lower-income school and and make them answer some questions from someone who looks to be in the same class. Ask them if they would ever fill out out a government surcey or answer a phone number they don’t know or answer an email survey. Some second-gen Asian students who happen to live in the area will say yes and everyone else will say no.
With that said, I do think crime is decreasing, and that the crime rate is a red herring wrt what people about (“is there a menacing person playing his music loudly on my commute”)
I wonder if we have data on the average response rate for such surveys? Are they getting as many responses back in 2025 as in 1990? If that’s the case then my hypothesis is disproven, but if it’s the case then they have to narrow it by income and test hypothesis
The steelman, in my view, is that a “warrior personality” is required to make positive changes in a nation which result in more wellbeing, especially longterm positive changes involving non-intuitive and complex moving parts. Trivial examples are “courage to tell gay men to stop having sex early in the aids epidemic”, “courage to tell people not go to Chinatown early in the coronavirus epidemic”, “courage to research the social contagion model of transgenderism”, “courage to tell the teachers’ union that the phonics approach is superior” —all of these trivial changes require an aggressive man who can bear social reputational costs, ie a warrior. But there are even greater and more important social changes, with issues pertaining to IQ, TFR, and genetics. Someone with a non-warrior personality will never even ask these questions, whereas we need men who will ask the questions and then follow-up with an aggressive campaign to conquer all the relevant organizations so that the truth actually prevails against sweet but poisonous lies and errors.
The non-warriors will waste trillions of dollars in educational funding if the alternative is shamefully insisting that IQ is real. They would be fine seeing 10% of youth cut off their genitals if the other option means promoting a novel etiology and answer to gender dysphoria. They would be fine with American TFR going down to 0 and literally no descendants of Americans left if they otherwise have to question feminism and women’s rights. So it is very beneficial for a society to find a way to produce “warriors”.
It is not illegal to massacre civilians and ethnically cleanse populations through terror? Nuremberg disagrees with you, as does probably every expert of international law not from Israel.
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