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One of my thoughts on this issue is it highlights I am not a free speech absolutists. A quote from Godfather 2 highlights my view on this:
“Michael: The soldiers are paid to fight, the rebels aren't.
Hyman: What does that tell you?
Michael: They can win.“
When we had campus protests a decade ago I did not care. College kids being silly and they will grow up and take the corporate job and pop out a couple kids. Now I watch the protests and I see a future Supreme Court Judge, the executive team at Disney, and at worse a future HR executive whose rules I need to follow or I end up unemployed.
I do not care about your speech when I think it will just stay in academic circles or in fringe communities. Today I am increasingly pessimistic that it will stay only speech and instead fear that it will become the government. How does a liberal Democracy protect itself if it’s very values allow it to be attacked? Pacifism seems cool until the Mongol horde is outside your door.
It’s also made me greatly admire the Jewish community which seems capable of defending themselves while white people seem to just rollover when their interests are attacked. Judaism at its core is a people while White America’s core is the slave morality of Christianity. Conversion to Judaism in Christian white spaces is starting to become a small thing. Antonio Martínez García converted. There are rumors Milei wants to convert but has not for political reasons as the leader of a Catholic nation. If I was not a believer in Christ I would convert.
Becoming Jewish if not born one is a headache of all sorts, starting with what type of Judaism are we talking about:
https://imgur.com/U4XUYxL
Look at that flowchart. I mean reaaaaly look at it. If Jews are interested in not being thought of as a secret society that rules the world, would it hurt them to begin by making the process of becoming one of then a little simpler? Not even Masonry is that complicated; I was offered to become part of them without asking them just by knowing the right people!
That’s largely for determining the circumstances of your birth, though. For conversion you just need to find an orthodox rabbi who is widely accepted by other orthodox rabbis (the vast majority of them; easily discerned by visiting even English-language orthodox messageboards) and then convert under him. Not that I particularly recommend becoming Jewish, but still.
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I mean, you could probably make a similarly complicated chart for Christianity to be fair. Make branching paths for Arianism, Nestorianism, Filoque, Transubstantiation, Marian and Saintly devotions, Apostolic Succession, Mormonism, etc.
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What if white people would have retained their tribalism in the absence of Jewish anthropologists and social scientists who promoted the elimination of white identity? Would this change things?
A singular former Goldman Sachs analyst converts to Judaism and this is supposed to be a “thing” among white people? I don’t think so. What does Shia LaBeouf tell us, who has a much larger cultural influence?
Glad how you ignore my Milei comment who is a conservative icon. Who is a much bigger deal than the “Goldman Sachs analyst”. Whose accomplished more than that now.
https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/article-790350
I guess I did not give supporting evidence but here it is.
https://www.jta.org/2024/04/11/global/speaking-at-miami-synagogue-argentinas-javier-milei-reveals-he-has-jewish-heritage
He says he’s planning on converting.
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I suppose that depends on whether you consider the defining cause of the loss of white tribal identity to be those
rather than something that precedes them.
I don’t think it tells us anything, but historically Jews converting to Christianity has been much more common than Christians converting to Judaism.
Was Shia even Jewish? I know he had some Jewish ancestry but thought he didn’t have much to do with it.
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Nietzsche also considered Judaism slave morality, I just think that innate tribalism acts as a safeguard against the worst excesses thereof, in the same way there have been plenty of nativist Christian groups over the millennia with high levels of in-group loyalty.
And there are failure states. If Israel is doomed, it is because the secularized elite have completely failed to forcibly secularize and integrate the ultra-orthodox, who are feckless, work-shy, subsidized by the rest of the population, do not serve in the military and consider the highest occupational calling in life to be studying torah and talmud commentary for 70+ years until they die. Ethnic loyalty often leads to a failure to hold your own people to account.
One can fairly reply that unlike the Swedes with the Somalis and Syrians, at least the welfare users the Jews in Israel are subsidizing are actual co-ethnics.
But that does not change the fact that Israel is surrounded by ethnic and religious enemies and always will be (even if accommodation with the Arab elites is secured, common Arab Muslims will never like Israel or Jews) and will scarcely be able afford to stay ahead of them when 40/50/60% of the population are ultra-Orthodox in a few decades.
I mean it seems like it has to be pointed out- ultra-orthodox Jewry can in fact do productive work, even with the incredibly annoying religious rules governing their lives. They’re less productive than an equivalent gentile, sure, but ultra-orthodox Jews in the USA don’t live entirely off of welfare fraud. Israel can push to make workplaces more accommodating for the Hasidism and have counter part of the problem by getting them to work.
Okay. So it is not 100.0% parasitism. But are they economically net positive? The US East coast ultra orthodox communities that I'm vaguely aware of are net negative if I understand correctly. As you say, they subsist on welfare fraud and have large families of severely inbred special needs children.
It doesn’t have to be net positive. Getting the haredim to pay full freight and become Mormons is probably not doable; being able to take them from economically nonproductive to borderline productive is a much smaller and more achievable goal.
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I've heard that in the original days of Israel, just after the Arab war, the ultra-orthodox who spent all day just studying the Talmud were an extreme rarity because they almost all died in the Holocaust. So Israel gave them funding as a sort of living museum piece/out of pity for an almost lost culture. But then they kept growing since they had such a sweet deal, and what was reasonable when they were a few hundred people was not reasonable when they are a few hundred thousand.
I’m curios what did Hasidic Jews used to do? Well fare is a pretty new invention, where they just like Amish who did subsistence farming?
Yes, like @hydroacetylene said, when the yeshivot were in Eastern Europe back in the day a family might send only their most intellectually gifted son (out of many) to them. Adult study in a full time kollel (for married men) was even more rare, it’s largely an invention of the last 75 years. Previously yeshiva students would graduate, become rabbis, and then marry and have children and become the religious figures in their communities. The idea of a large population of married men who were not community rabbis but who studied all day and were paid for it is modern.
Modern abundance, not just welfare but even the ease with which, say, one very rich Hasid can fund a thousand students indefinitely is a failure state of modernity. Most people don’t want to live off welfare because it provides a much lower quality of life than working, especially if you’re an intelligent people. But if you think Torah study is the highest calling in life then you can override that impulse.
I noticed this tension all the time in old Jewish novels, where characters are very proud his son is studying with the rabbi, and of course everyone else in the family is happy to work extra shifts to pay for it, oy
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Historically? They worked, and the people who studied torah all day were a minority like Catholic priests or nuns. But once you could get paid to do torah studies, an obvious incentive structure developed.
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Yeah, that’s pretty much it, there were a few thousand left between Israel and New York, a few thousand in Britain and the Netherlands together, smaller numbers scattered in some other countries. A remnant population survived in Hungary that left for Israel in 1956, and there were some in the Soviet Union who survived the holocaust. But it’s fair to say likely 90%+ of Hasidic and Litvak Orthodox Jewry was killed in the Holocaust.
Since the 80s a lot of ‘mainstream Orthodox’ Jews and even some secular ones also changed to being ultra orthodox, and there was a purity spiral in Arab/Mizrachi Jewish circles in Israel that led to them adopting a lot of Hasidic customs.
Lastly the Chabad ‘Rebbe’ (Schneerson) became a figure of great importance to the vast majority of religious Orthodox Jews in the late 20th century and he was also responsible for a lot of the Baal t’shuva movement of increasing observance. So what was once a whole spectrum of Judaism with many varying gradations of practice has essentially separated into secular/reform/conservative judaism, “mainstream” and modern orthodox movements which are closely related to religious Zionism, and then ‘ultra orthodoxy’.
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