100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
I think you're right.
This sets up a whole other piece about how they were hoodwinked into it. Probably something about the false promises being hard to see before 2008, as well as a lot more social pressure from Boomers to conform.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
The entire idea of "disposable" income is, to me, the biggest mismatch between Boomers and today. We all agree on the "necessary" expenditures; housing, food, basic clothing, and utilities. Then, we have the modern additions to utilities; internet and cell service. It is not even possible for me to even search for a job if I don't have one or both of these things. Yes, yes, economists will tell you that the relative value or marginal utility or whatever of a cell phone is so much better than land line service in the 1970s. But I'm paying for it because I have to.
Then, however, we have things like clothing, consumer electronics, restaurants, and "cheap" entertainment (subscriptions). These seem basic but stack up and stack up in recursive ways (like I mentioned above) that aren't captured in traditional methods of inflation. Are these truly optional goods that I am choosing to spend on?
"Well sorry, snowflake" Bruno the Boomer says, "Maybe in stead of watching your TikyToks and Netflixes, you should just read a book!"
And Bruno the Boomer is right in that specific circumstance. These are, purely speaking, "optional" purchases. But it leads to much trickier problem: What am I supposed to do with my time if the jump between "basic" living and comfortable spending is so high? Incentives matter. You can find many interesting graphs out there that show how, in some cities in the US and many countries in Europe, there exist harsh tax cliffs that _DIS_incentivize making more money. If I lose $10,000 in benefits after increasing my income by less than $10,000, I've given myself a pay cut by earning more (yes that sentence is valid).
This same logic applies to marginal consumption and disposable income. If I can pay for all of my basic necessities, but leveling up to dinner out once or twice a week, guilt free streaming service subscriptions, a new-ish but not top of the line car, and a couple home goods (big couch, whatever) necessitates another $15,000k in annual income (on which I will be taxed substantially) .... then why even bother? Cheap beer, free or pirated porn movies and YouTube clips can sustain my entertainment needs and living in a shitty apartment is .... what all of my friends do. People are being asked not to take the next step on a steep trail, but to leap across a valley of income for ... marginal benefit.
And I think this is the common cause behind things like quiet quitting, the massive rise in the permanently non-working (disabled and NEETs etc.), inceldom, and the various flavors of nomadic forever-festival going weirdos, permanent expats, and semi-grifter YouTubers. It's interesting that I posted a top level comment on Shagbark earlier this week. Being a semi-bum in 2025 does seem to have roughly the same life satisfaction of every group up to about the top 20% income. And this is because we've eliminated real poverty -- not having enough to eat, being so unstable in housing that death from exposure might actually be on the menu.
Was consumerism really so different in years past? YesChad.jpeg. People forget that real, true poverty did exist, at least in pockets of the US, well into the 1970s. In extremely infrastructure-isolated places, it persisted even longer. After WW2, the consumer economy actually functioned as a compounding system for people to get out of poverty. Buying an electric oven meant a household was saving meaningful time and effort. The ever increasing reliability of cars (while maintaining price relative to inflation) meant people could get to and from work with high confidence - and, therefore, earn more. A television meant actual awareness of the outside world and a source of information that could lead to better decision making. A telephone allowed for the creation and sustainment of social relationships and communities outside of face to face interaction, which also meant the ability to generate more business relationships (i.e. find new jobs, find local customers etc.).
Today, my new oven has fun little chimes when it pre-heats. It's also more energy efficient (so I am told). New trucks are less reliable because of fuel emission fuckery and mostly cost more because the seats are heated and my phone connects to the radio for some fucking reason. My TV has a resolution I can't comprehend, with unlimited semi-AI slop available for consumption. It stays off unless sports are on. And my telephone, which lives in my pocket, mostly harasses me with beeps and dings to remind me to interact with apps so that my data can be sold to hedge funds.
Consumerism, today, has inverted its relationship with consumers. Before, consumer level products really did make your life better. Today, consumer products are like carnival rides; it's fun for a while and only costs a few dollars. It doesn't improve my life.
The Vibecession, to me, is a reaction to some harsh nonlinearities that have developed over the past 40 years. Before, you might never get into the upper class, but you could see your life improve just a bit almost every year. Now, we're asking kids exiting college (which didn't teach them anything and saddled them with debt) to live like a monk for 10 - 15 years so that, on the other side, they can move into a home they still can't afford. In the interim, they can enjoy consumer products that help dull this drudgery, but don't act as compounders. Who in the hell would take this deal?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
And I can see where people may be coming from on that, in that the downsides of discipline - the consequences of overdiscipline - are dramatic and immediate. Too much harshness leaves people shattered on the spot. The downsides of nurturing, though - the consequences of overnurturing - are comparatively dull and delayed.
I like this framing because I think it highlights just how pernicious overnurturing is.
Overdiscipline is easy to spot. We call it abuse. If I steal from the cookie jar and my mother gives me a sharp crack about the ear, that's discipline - perhaps harsh and a bit pre-1972, but still within the acceptable definition of discipline. If, however, she wails on me with a wooden spoon for 10 minutes, that's abuse.
Grown up abuse is often called hazing. If I am at Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina and I screw up my locker inspection, the Senior Drill Instructor may respond by making me do pushups for some amount of time or repetitions. Discipline. If he throws the locker at me, that's hazing (if it seriously injures me, that's actually illegal, but it'll be covered up.)
Abuse or hazing, that it is fairly easy to draw the line makes it easier to manage, imho.
Not so with the over-nurturing. Returning to the cookie jar example, after my mother has caught me red handed, she takes 15 minutes to "gentle parent" me about how stealing is wrong because it makes other people sad and that too many cookies might make my tummy hurt and she knows I just like cookies, which is great, but right now we (why are we using the plural all of a sudden?) just can't have any cookies. Now, I don't even know if I did anything wrong. I don't know if I was just subjected to that ... event ... arbitrarily or in response to something I did directly.
Fast forward the tape and now I'm being arrested because I stole a couple doze iPhones with my friends from the mall. The cop is placing me into the back of his squad car because ... why? I wanted the iPhones so I took them. I'm not thinking about Apple, Inc. or the employees at the store because nobody (like, for instance, my mother) ever told me to do that much less associated direct consequences with the failure to do that. It's as if the entire concept of causality has been so watered down in my brain that I am an observer of my own actions instead of their source.
Sound familiar?
Every police interaction video online where the person who is obviously resisting arrest shouts "I didn't no nothin!" is, perhaps, a person who literally cannot associate their actions through time with a chain of causality. If it weren't so socially destructive, I'd feel bad for them -- like they're forced to watch a movie of their own life that's nothing but jump cuts.
Overdiscipline can lead to a damage deficit that may take years for a person to overcome. Extreme enough and it may never be totally overcome. But there is still the potential to overcome it and people will have the ability to work to do that. With overnurturing, it seems to me, they are utterly robbed of that ability to overcome. It's a complete short-changing of some core developmental pathways that turn children into adolescents into young adults that lack even the vague concept that they have control over their own actions which then influence the outcome of life and circumstance around them. If I drop you into the middle of a Japanese accounting firm and tell you to reconcile the balance sheet of Hashimori Corp in 90 minutes, you're going to laugh, throw up your hands, and just kind of let the world roll over you. You don't even have a sense for where or how to begin because you have zero contextual history or familiarity with this environment.
And that's a non-trivial part of younger millenials, Gen-Z, and whatever laboratory goo babies follow after them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I'd pay good American greenbacks for that effortpost! (Not really, but I still encourage you to write it)
In your mind, what are the things people miss when thinking specifically about the "full remote white collar work, live rural" fantasy. I've had a number of friends who've done this but only to the fringes of exurbs or small cities (10k - 50k population). I don't yet know someone who is literally living the rural J.D. Salinger life way off in remote West Virginia, Montana, West Texas.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
You're breaking your back tilling a field that will not bring forth the harvest.
You must understand that I am directly disagreeing with this. "The harvest" is that you will experience the joy of parenthood even in such trying circumstances. You will experience profound love. That's it. That's the point.
You don't believe that people who are already bad parents, and are only made more resentful when saddled with a child who will remain a toddler for decades, exist?
I do believe they exist. I also believe there are awful parents of amazing children who go on to do wonderful things for all of society. Why should parents being bad only come into play when talking about a disabled child? Bad parents are bad parents period and should be called out as such. Think about what you're saying here; "Oh, these parents are so bad that we should kill a child so that they don't have a tough time of it."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Even the online world is a very, very small place.
Any interest in nudging him towards looking at The Motte? If nothing else, he's going to have an interesting perspective on, well, everything.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Unfortunately, I think Shagbark's threshold for "high rent" is quite extreme. It seems like anything over about $600 / month is out of the question.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
-- certainly not the scolding types gloating about talking down to their transphobic uncle at thanksgiving.
This made the rounds on my Xwitter feed. I was wondering if it was going to show up here as well.
This can't be earnest, right? Like, this is some sort of meta-trolling post-irony in-joke account. Pepe The Frog but for weirdo progressive women to chortle about while wearing Pussy hats, right?
If you spoke to another adult like this in a corporate setting, even the most blue-haired of HR reps would have a meeting invite waiting for you by the time you got back to your desk. In a social setting, this would be suicidal, unless, as I said, you're actually just trolling a person in your outgroup for the lulz.
Alright, I found her on the White Women for Kamala Zoom Call. Here, she comes across a lot more normal - though still grating - HR style corpo speak. Healthy doses of progressive self-flagellation but nothing beyond the pale. This makes me think her gentle parenting schtick is just that; schtick.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
productive lives
Small to zero.
enriching
Anywhere from colossal to infinite.
Actual true story: my first best friend in childhood had something like severe downs syndrome. It wasn't actually downs but something very specific and rare. Her verbal ability was close to zero but because of kid brain plasticity or whatever, I could figure her out better than anyone besides her parents. We didn't have conversations per se, but we emoted, we played, we had a friendship. Around the time I was 12 or so, she and her family moved away.
I kept in touch with her and her family for 20+ years until she died very tragically and unexpectedly. My entire life was made better by knowing her and being her friend.
This is a common story for all special needs / developmentally disabled / retarded kids' family and friends. While measuring life quality in net GDP contribution is, charitably, overly metric based, imho, many to all of these kind of people have outsized contribution in terms of joy, fellow felling, and the nurturing of higher virtue emotions in others.
"But, but, but!" some will say, "Raising special needs kids is actually so fucking hard on the parents! You got to go home every day and didn't have to deal with the screaming fits and toilet mishaps etc." The challenges are indeed unique (and, on a practical level, I believe in generous subsidies for families dealing with them), I believe that any family who puts in the effort will find the rewards substantial. And the families who decide to murder cancel the body and soul in utero will, maybe, have a somewhat materially more pleasant life at the expense of another human's entire existence.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Good recommendations for an Einstein biography?
I realized, over Thanksgiving, that all I know about Einstein is second order stuff and, even that, vaguely. General vs special relativity. The atom bomb. He has bad at math in grade school (allegedly).
So, Mottizens, can you point me in the direction of a biography that does a good job and not a hagiography of "the smartest dude who ever smarted?"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Was 100% thinking of the island.
Also you might like this ArcGis story map about the Mon Valley @Rov_Scam
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting
person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this
one
being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good
news is that I'll be using a real, live very online person that we can all
directly reference instead of an example from my own life.
And that person is Shagbark.
Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.
Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:
- Early to mid 30s
- Coast Guard Veteran
- Homeless for, IIRC, 8 years - by choice.
- Devout Catholic (is he a Trad though? This is a point of controversy)
- More or less a self-confessed luddite or neo-luddite. Hates not only AI, smartphones, and the usual list of "bad" modern technology, but also airplanes, cars, and objectively good modern building advancements like air conditioning.
- A New York State hypernationalist. Specifically, very far upstate New York around areas like Plattsburgh and Messina. See this tweet about upstate NY
- (Related to the above) Has a penchant for desolation. Often writes poetically about the harsh beauty of derelict old steel towns (Utica) and little, out of the way villages no one has a reason to go to (Elko, Nevada).
- Is married to a woman and, of late, has a child. The woman has her own twitter and is proudly undocumented. Note that she is not an immigrant, but, from what I can tell, part of a line of weird conservo-hippie-anarchists. Her parents never got her a social security card.
Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.
In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.
The Culture War Angle
Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:
Utica, Las Vegas, El Paso, STL, Montreal, St John's NL, Brownsville, Yuma, Barstow, Ojinaga, Fargo, Houma, Wheeling, Atlantic City.
Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.
Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:
There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo.
Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap
neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and
High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough
bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know
, sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around,
nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about
random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first
encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing
ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of
talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real
intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you
mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own
weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different
thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug
through the dirt and mud and found gold.
Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.
Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.
The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?
Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.
Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Modern American commentators(like most of this forum) tend to forget how heavily Catholic American religiosity would have been in the 50’s
Yup. It definitely tripped me out when, several years ago, my Dad told me about Fulton Sheen's radio show and how you could find a national broadcast of the rosary at least once a week.
I have also heard anecdotes that some of the midwest catholic strongholds (Cincinnati in particular) had things like fish in public schools on Fridays in Lent. Imagine the blowup that would have today.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Secular humanism.
Tracing Christianity from the reformation through the enlightenment, all the way to Vatican 2, you see a lot of theological "innovations" that reinterpret divine revelation as allegory instead of literal fact. Faith, including theological virtues, becomes more of an elaborate world-building around classic virtue ethics; be honest, be kind, don't lie, etc. etc.
This kind of thinking gets a lot of traction because it demands less of the faithful. It's a lot easier to feel like you're a good person (and also a good Christian) if life is more about trying your best to be a "good person" and isn't full of pesky zero-or-one rules for sin.
Layer on top of that that secular humanism explicitly rejects the supernatural which is inextricable from, at least from the Catholic tradition, the doctrine of faith:
And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
To your original post, the only thing I have to add that others haven't done a better job of commenting on is in regards to this part:
People on the left are by and large much more focused, in my experience, on experiential states, following the heart, and of course contemplative, mystical spiritual practice.
Problems arise when people on the left, or, anyone, really, resists admitting that their experiential states, following of the heart etc. are subjective and not objective truths. "Living your truth" is a nonsense statement. Truth is one thing, it's objective. Your personal experience is absolutely your own, but there are objective facts embedded within it; you're a man or you're a woman, you are old or you are young and so forth.
I'm not an expert on the Catholic church's responses to mysticism around the reformation, but it would seem to me that's always going to be a sensitive subject. If anyone can just run around saying they had a vision of Christ or The Virgin Mary and we're all expected to take it at face value, then we've lost the plot, haven't we? This is exactly, literally, exactly! what's going on in the culture war at present. Both all sides are fighting over facts, which isn't necessarily new, but at least one major faction (wokes / progressives) is, while fighting over facts, also rejecting the premise of objective truth in the first place. Which means they're fighting for ..... ?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
Is Zorba competent?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Rough summary:
At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
This type of experience is often mediated by external barriers such as discrimination, limited access to gender-affirming care, or lack of support—not by changes in identity or self-understandings.
There are a couple of perplexing things here. First, and most pedantically, the mention of "external barriers" implies the possible or likely existence of "internal barriers." What would that be? Not yet reconciling yourself to the fact that your trans? What If a person has never thought they were trans? Is this just "internalized" something something. This is one of my biggest epistemic problems with the Trans people and the Woke people; they posit to understand everyone's true, latent motivations better than the individuals do. They're saying the can read the 'true' mind inside my mind and, furthermore, that their generalizations in this recursive mind reading are broadly applicable to society. "Everyone has, to some extent, internalized racism. They may not know it, however." Wow. What an assertion.
Second, if "external barriers" like discrimination, limited "access" to gender-affirming care, and (the very non-specific) lack of support cause a person to totally halt their transition, am I allowed to question their commitment in the first place? If I have a strongly head opinion on any issue, I'm probably going to try persevere even in the face of resistance and lack of support. I can understand the healthcare argument where a cancer patient, for instance, fails because they're just too weak. But the whole thing about transitioning is that there are no maladies in the body, just a desire to change it.
If we open the aperture to say that "emotional strength" is required to transition and that the actions of others can damage a person's "emotional strength" and, furthermore, that this is a valid reason for interrupting or quitting a course of action then how in the actual hell is anyone ever responsible for anything?. If "It made me feel bad so I quit" is acknowledged as "valid" then every deadbeat dad is forever absolved, every addict in recovery who relapses is a saint, every smash-and-grab thief is an understandable hardship case.
I do not think it is hyperbolic to say that much of society rests on the idea that everyone will, at multiple points in their lives, feel bad but that good behavior is still required even with the reality of negative emotional states. By medicalizing this "experience" (as the report explicitly does), we're opening pandora's box to the medicalizing of subjective emotional states. As I've written before:
If we ever get to the point as a society where we really deeply subsidize mental health services, we're going to be broke overnight. Think about that - that's creating a free service for when you feel bad. Absolutely uncapped demand.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
Thank you for this. I'll be reading everything you listed. And I'll try to come up with an intentional effort post response.
Side note: You do realize that linking to your paper does self-dox? I assume you do, but just want to double check.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
Here's a prompt (heh):
To what extent is the field if AI Research a new means to do "real world" or applied philosophy? Academic philosophy is notoriously obtuse and inscrutable and, therefore, often of very limited real world / non-academic benefit. You will occasionally see academic philosophers who publish successful mainstream books, but this is the exception rather than the rule. In a different direction, hard analytic philosophy that uses propositional logic gets towards something that looks like a "system" of thought but, to me, seems to get blown out of the water in terms of practical application by the hard math and science people doing applied research (CERN comes to mind as an off hand example).
Does this deck of cards get reshuffled with AI?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
Material assertions can be settled empirically¹
To what extent?
The whole of philosophy of science and epistemology grapples with exactly this. Karl Popper's problem of induction, Bayesian inference, and the entire rationality sphere online (as insufferable as it may often be) are all oriented towards trying to determine the limits of empiricism.
This line of thinking, taken too far, gets towards scientism and "trusting The Science (TM)." It wraps back around the horseshoe and becomes a faith all it's own. "The men in the long white robes (scientists) said it must be so!" Even though the entire idea of the scientific method is that everything is held as, at best, the current state of research and theory and, almost never, and iron law of the universe.
In terms of policy and legislation (to speak to your Bob and Alice example. Thank you for using the canonical names, BTW) policy is even more fraught because of capital-C Complexity and second, third, fourth, nth order effects. Our ability to predict these things is approximately zero. The Yellowstone Wolves example is legendary in this regard.
I am hyper suspicious of anyone who makes some version of the statement "this legislation is good because X will happen after it passes." Perhaps X will absolutely happen, but the entire system of laws will necessarily adapt because of it as well.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
If this is how one thinks of the Christian ban on euthanasia, then it makes sense to say "sure, as a Christian, your faith forbids you from performing euthanasia; but surely your conscience still allows you to see that had God not forbidden it euthanasia would be a good thing?".
"canst neither deceive nor be deceived"
In the one, true, Catholic faith, God's laws are not arbitrary. They may be impossible to fully comprehend in our limited mortal brains and may, very frequently, be exceedingly frustrating. They are not, however, arbitrary.
Turning your argument around just a little bit, it would be very refreshing if people of faith could look at atheists and secularists doing atheist and secular things and simply go, "lulz, enjoy hell." But we are called to love all men and to strive to look out for their benefit. Now, don't take this to an extreme and propose that all good Catholics start trying to hand out rosaries at San Francisco BDSM dungeons. But, in terms of voting for legislation, it isn't enough to be a Catholic in San Francisco and go "yeah, okay, they can make fentanyl legal. I just won't do it personally." No, you have to vote your conscience (i.e. against sin) and, to the extent you are compelled, try to organize the best you can even if it is an obvious losing effort. Remember, starting with Roe V. Wade, Catholic America waged about a 50 year campaign to over turn it. It is not as if, during that time, millions of Catholics were aborting babies left and right.
All of this is to say that faith and conscience aren't really separable if you take them both seriously. "Cultural Catholics" (Biden, Pelosi) aren't actually Catholic. Secular pro-lifers might have really ornate and air tight arguments against abortion, but they aren't operating in the realm of metaphysical faith. This does not make their arguments somehow more "valid" in a political context than people of faith. If that were the case, we'd have a weird situation where everyone would be in a rush to prove how atheist they are while also borrowing heavily from moral theology. It's actually kind of comical to think about - "Look at how excellent my purely rational reasoning is. DON'T LOOK AT THE GOD SHAPED HOLE"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
This makes sense to me. Can't say I've been to many protestant services.
I see this, however, as potentially a theological failure mode. Is the service really about God, or is it a highly ritualized potluck? Again, this is a theological argument. Having a good, regular social interaction within the context of a moral values system is something I am highly in favor of.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
30d ago
They always seem to want to tell me about their awful exes, in detail.
This is a massive red flag in one or both directions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
30d ago
Great post.
so much of what they do would have been explicitly Christian.
I don't follow. Perhaps this was a typo?
It’s really in its social form that religion successfully improves people; today it is essentially antisocial.
One of the non-theological differences I've noticed in Traditional circles vs "beige Catholicism" circles is how much the former genuinely enjoy hanging out with one another. When we have a social after Mass on Sundays, people will hang out for hours. At the Novus Ordo parish I grew up at, the "social" felt like a non-required extension to the Mass. You go and get a coffee and a donut, shake hands with Father Friendly, awkwardly make small talk with some randos for a few minutes, then give up and flee back home before NFL kickoff.
How much, and I'm requesting you express it quantitatively, more happy does this make you in terms of whole of life satisfaction than an ipod with an aux cord, or a collection of CDs?
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