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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • This is both true, and not entirely accurate.

    Israel spends something like $24 on their defense. The $3B that the the US gives them (and it’s $3B, not $4B, based on what I can find) is largely in the form of military materials: ammunition, bombs, air defense systems, etc. So what we give them is about 20% of their total defense spend, and yeah, that’s a lot.

    But the flip side of that is that American workers in American factories are the ones building the bombs, missiles defense systems, making the bullets, etc.; the money that the gov’t gives Israel ends up creating a benefit for workers in the form of work that wouldn’t otherwise exist. I’d have to see a real economic analysis, but this might be a case of each dollar that the gov’t spends creating more than a dollar of effect. (And yeah, I know that a lot of that effect is going to e.g. Raytheon shareholders rather than line workers. But still.)

    BUT

    The fact that we see an economic benefit in terms of jobs and growth by giving Israel aid doesn’t mean we should. Because we’re directly funding the genocide of the Palestinians.


  • I don’t know that my parents were ever the kind of person that bitched about paying taxes. They might have privately, but i don’t remember it ever being a big deal. Me, I understand that my taxes are too low for what I expect the gov’t to be doing.

    And you’re exactly right about the social experience. One of the enormous struggles for atheists has been building a community. Churches fill that need, even though they cause real harms in other ways. If you go to a church, it’s easy to meet people and make friends when you move to a new community. If you don’t, well, good luck because you’re going to need it.


  • Honestly, this is why I don’t discuss Mormon history and the massive, gaping chasms in their claims of Truth with my parents. My parents are old–old enough that the family is talking about who is going to call the coroner, who’s going to deal with tying up finances, etc.–and knowing that they’ve wasted an entire lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tithing on a con isn’t going to do anything useful at this point. Fifty years ago? Sure, they would have had plenty of time to come to terms with it. Now? Meh.


  • The low birth rates aren’t just rampant capitalism though; it’s also SK women having a choice to not get married and have children, combined with a culture that’s almost rabidly misogynistic. If I were a Korean woman, I absolutely would not want to get hitched to a Korean man and have children with him, because I know that it would be very unlikely that I’d treated like a real person or an equal partner. But the culture–much like Japan–seems to prize people that put in horrifically long hours, and even if you fix the cultural misogyny, you’re still stuck with not having much time to spend with your partner.