urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.
Hm, interesting. I get an intense sense of aggression from that stare, far more than I've ever gotten from any other youtube personality I've ever watched.
I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.
Hm, I guess you could see that in some of his clips, but I've enjoyed his longform lectures quite a bit, where he just sounds like a confident professor than a scold. Politics are the worst thing that ever happened to Peterson, and he would have been much better off as a person just remaining quiet about Canadian law and being a quirky psychology professor a little bit too into Jungian archetypes. He was much better as an academic than a surrogate father.
I think there are leftists with the same sort of aggression that appeal to young leftist viewers; intensity appeals to politically-inclined people. And I know of a lot of right-wing influencers with a softer style. But just like Twitter rewards clapbacks, the algorithms reward intensity and anger.
His manner of speaking doesn't come across as right-wing principaliter to me, it comes across as uncoordinated and aggressive. I think that's where your feelings of "this is like a drunken man" come from. It feels like he's rocking around and can't sit still. It comes across as sketchy to me -- I'm don't know the man, I'm just expressing what my snap judgment of his presentation says.
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average." The feature that distinguishes a lot of the young conservative men I've met is they just feel calmer and pursue traditional milestones (marriage, children, etc). While there are lots of tells that this specific video creator is a right-winger, if you took the hat away I could easily see him being a Democrat, or a Libertarian, or a radical Socialist. He just feels like "angry man with bone to pick", not so much "proud conservative."
“It’s annoying when ‘I am very careful about not creeping out women’ gets interpreted as ‘I am a bad boyfriend risk’.”
In most domains of life, the only way to credibly demonstrate capability and low risk is to have a track record of actually undertaking that activity successfully. If you were in a place to loan out thousands of dollars to a stranger, you’d want to see a credit history too.
Sure, but that seems terribly unlikely to me.
But really I don't think Trump thought this through, he wouldn't know Christianity (or the LDS flavor of it, for that matter) if a Bible smacked him in the head. This was pattern-matched without evidence to other recent attacks that could plausibly said to be related to anti-Christian animus and became the subject of an immediate Trump tweet. I thought it was frustrating when I initially heard it because it immediately politicized a brutal attack that seemed to have very murky and mostly clinically insane motivations. Both sides of our politics have a pretty bad time diagnosing the actual motivations behind mass violence, even if they're obvious.
The interesting, albeit strangely impassioned, arguments we've had recently about Christian creeds and the LDS faith has really just been a sidequest; not the sort of thing I'd bring up outside of the Autistically Debate Nuances of Ideas Free Speech Zone that is the Motte. People were lit on fire, I'm not sure it matters in the first 24 hours whether the guy who did it did it because he thought Mormons were Christians or Mormons were the anti-Christians, though that might eventually become important. Does the LDS church commemorate martyrs?
You’re entitled to your spirituality, but “I tell you comforting things I don’t really believe if it helps you feel better” is a point that’s pretty incompatible with truth, and truth-seeking. I respect sincere atheism more than I respect therapeutic moralism that decides what is true based on what feels good.
I also am guessing I was correct in arguing you’re mainline, or at least come from a more modernist/liberal theological tradition.
I’m not sure we’re going to see eye to eye. That’s fine. But I strongly disagree that the point of religion, or irreligion, or ideas in general, is to make people feel good and not cause harm — sometimes the truth hurts, and that’s good! Living in accordance with truth is the highest duty of man, even if it hurts.
I guess I should begin by stating I’m not making an apologetic for young earth creationism — only for Christianity understood as a set of creeds, period.
The larger context of your post was that the Bible is not reliable, the existence of Jesus is flimsy, and historic Christian creeds are not reliable. That kind of language is rarely limited to purely views on Genesis, and taken to an extreme leads easily to the deconstruction of the whole religion. It’s more that general viewpoint, rather than any particular belief, that I find it hard to believe religious women are interested in. But it’s possible you hail from the more mainline/theologically modernist traditions, where those views are common — in which case, boy, should you hear what evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics think of them. If you think what they say about the LDS is bad, you should hear how they describe Episcopalians.
My view, fundamentalist as it is, is that a faith should live or die based on its truth claims, and if historic creeds are false, the faith should crumble into dust and be buried by history. So perhaps we bring a different psychology to the table, which explains are tension with each other’s viewpoints. I’m actually a big admirer of empiricism, and I suspect we agree far more than you may think — but I do think ideas deserve to be taken all the way, and have a great deal of respect, actually, for the classical liberals who said, “death to religion,” and started forcefully disestablishing churches. I respect a strong opinion held strongly.
I see how a reader could read my earlier comment as a direct discussion of age of the earth or heliocentrism debates — but my point is rather that “the Bible is not reliable and religion must bend to empiricism” isn’t exactly a popular point of view in Christian circles, and I have an inherent suspicion — which may well be untrue and unnecessary in this case! — of people who try to join religious communities to try to get with religious women, while avoiding actual commitments to the community and joining in the beliefs that shape and ground it. I dislike milquetoast or opportunistic religion about as much as you dislike fundamentalism — but I am, after all, a child of evangelicals who went atheist and then back to Christianity… taking religious ideas intensely seriously and deconstructing and reconstructing them to the fullest possible extent is rather my thing.
It’s not really relevant, but I do have a friend who’s a flat earther, and believes that NASA was founded to cover up the conspiracy. Boy, is he wrong… but boy, is he fun to talk to!
And, indeed, when the empirical evidence made it clear certain creeds of classic Christianity are false
And yet you’re insistent on dating women who are part of communities dedicated to those principles, and considering yourself a part of them.
More like I think people who drink excessively (i.e. drink to get drunk), use drugs, and engage in promiscuous sex are engaging in a lifestyle which leaves them feeling very empty and lifeless. My issue with the illiberal radical Left is that they not only enable but encourage that kind of behavior.
Right -- they're your outgroup. If they started to describe themselves as "classical liberals", you'd balk: you've just called them the "illiberal radical Left", which contains just as much condemnation and othering as "Mormons aren't Christians!"
I agree with @Corvos's take: my view on what you've written is that religious distinctions aren't very important to you, and you don't believe a person's choice either way on the matter makes much difference to the outcomes of their lifestyle. So long as they avoid drinking excessively, using drugs, or engaging in promiscuous sex, of course.
But Nicene Christians of the sort who would say "Mormons aren't Christians" disagree with you: they believe that following the LDS faith to its endpoint leads to eternal conscious torment, or in other words is a lifestyle that "leaves them feeling very empty and lifeless." You can disagree with their point of view on this, and perhaps you should, but that's their point of view which motivates their feeling.
You're frustrated that people are writing online articles encouraging women to have promiscious sex, and see that as harmful... well, the LDS literally sends its young men to go door to door actively encouraging people to become Mormon! If you believe that's a harmful path to go down, as many Protestants do, you would feel the same level of concern about it. They'd argue that abstaining from promiscuous sex, drinking, and drugs does you no good, if you don't have the right set of beliefs. You disagree, and invert the importance, but that's not their view.
Furthermore, plenty of people disagree that excessive drinking, using drugs, or promiscious sex leads inevitably to lifelessness and emptiness. To make that determination, you have to actually take a step back and look at evidence, listen to anecdotes, read statistics, as I'm sure you've done. But because the truth claims of the LDS and Nicene Christianity are cosmic, we can't use the same kind of empiricism on them, and so people who believe these things are important rely on their own epistemological standards for what's cosmically true: sacred texts, ancient creeds, community consensus, personal testimony -- all of which are vitally important both for Nicene Christians and the LDS. When people say, "Mormons aren't Christians", they're making the exact same claim as "the radical left is illiberal," applying personal values and epistemology to a category problem.
Classical liberalism did not emerge out of a sudden singing of kumbaya, and many of the world's most fruitful democracies have histories as twisted and bloody as the religious wars that led to religious tolerance. You can handwave away that similarity, and say that of course the democratic revolutions in France or America or the English Civil War or the revolutions of Latin America was violence that led to good things, but the people who killed the Huguenots and the Calvinists who stripped altars in grand riots believed they were doing the very same thing: eliminating pathways that lead to feelings of emptiness and lifelessness in the long run. You can believe they were horribly mistaken about this, and many people do, but simply saying "these feelings historically led to violence, therefore I am revolted by them," seems to miss the point that the classical, classical liberal archetypally holds a musket pointed at the head of an aristocrat.
I think the important thing isn't to refuse to draw category distinctions or recognize outgroups, but consists of how you treat them. Even in the moral teachings of Jesus, he presupposes that one will have enemies -- "a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household" -- but that one should love them and pray for them and do right by them. I don't agree that refusing to do the former automatically achieves the latter.
since we believe virtually everyone will be
If I don't have to become Mormon to be saved, why should I become Mormon?
That's the pretty obvious question that every religious tradition that starts endorsing soft or hard universalism has to grapple with. Becoming LDS would require an extensive set of sacrifices, like giving up hot drinks and taking on certain tithing practices, and also requires submission to a strong institution of religious authority. If that's not actually necessary to achieve the same goal that Mormons hope to achieve, why not "eat, drink [coffee], and be merry" now, and let God sort out whether the LDS are right or not?
I'm in Australia, not America, but anecdotally all of my in-person interactions with Mormons have been incredibly polite, and the Mormons have almost been falling over themselves to emphasise, "We're just like you, we believe in Jesus too, Jesus is at the absolute centre of our faith, we have so much in common", and they never bring up any disagreements.
This is my tension with the LDS as well -- the "we're just like you" thing backfires for me, not because I think Mormons are bad people, but because I think it waters down -- quite literally, "milk before meat" -- the elements of Mormonism as a theological tradition in ways that make it genuinely less interesting. A lot of the wild cosmological speculations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are really really interesting, really unique, really cool. It just is slightly frustrating when the things that are so distinctive about Mormonism are downplayed.
It very much is like Catholics watering down the cultus of the saints or transubstantiation -- this is your thing, guys, this is what makes you unique, this is what distinguishes you from your competitors in the marketplace of ideas and makes me want to learn more. I think attempts at Protestantizing both faiths weakens them: the only way the Papacy or the Presidency can survive as an institution is by offering unique religious experiences, values, and beliefs that support and validate the intense level of religious authority you're presenting. If what you're offering is equivalent to what they're offering down the street, but joining you comes with a measure of social ostracization from the religious mainstream and asks a lot from me in terms of religious obedience, why shouldn't I just go to the chill southern baptist church down the street, where they'll have a similar service and sing similar hymns?
But obviously the Mormon strategy is working for them in important ways, and I think they're very explicitly going for normie, straight-laced kind of people and not people like me, who are spiritual seekers with high openness to experience. They want to be a church for normal, well-to-do, kinds of people. But when I read the writings, speeches, and accounts of Smith, Young, and the early Mormon movement, they really do strike me as intense spiritual seekers with high openness to experience, and a lot of the elements of Mormonism that seem most fascinating have slowly been pushed to the sidelines or rejected altogether and the idea space of American religion is worse off for it. If you have a mystery cult, don't dress it in khakis and pretend it's just another sermon. Own the mystery.
They have what might be described as a Newer Testament, which they see as a subsequent revelation to the Christian one, which is, you guessed it, now also closed.
The LDS church famously has an open canon, though the current books are considered the "standard works" that make up the existing canon. But it's perfectly possible in Mormon theology that the church could, by "common consent," add a new work if there was an overwhelming consensus that a text should be added to the canon.
Well, that’s why this is a point of confessional faith. Saying “x is a Christian, y is not” is another way of describing what you believe to be essential to your religion in one way or another. It’s a faith statement of boundaries, not an attempt at a dispassionate analysis.
It’s painfully obvious to me that Mormons are Christians in a sociological sense — they’re very concerned about Jesus Christ (as they like to remind everyone constantly) and believe in their own interpretation of the Bible. Historically it’s evident that LDS doctrines have much in common with 19th century restorationism, but with a unique spin.
But I would also argue that their beliefs are about as distinct from other forms of Christianity, in terms that are seriously important to those other forms, as Christianity is from Judaism.
The big tension between Judaism and Christianity is that Jews believe Christians have fundamentally altered the nature of G-d by proposing the Trinity and associating Jesus of Nazareth with absolute divinity. And the big tension between Nicene Creed stans and Mormons is the former believe the latter have fundamentally altered the nature of God by rejecting the Nicene model of the Trinity, and insufficiently associating Jesus of Nazareth with absolute divinity!
It also goes almost without saying that the big accusation of Muslims against Christians is they believe Christians have lessened God by proposing that God can have a son who bore flesh, just as the big accusation of Nicene Christians against Mormons is they believe Mormons have lessened God by proposing -- at the very least, in the personal views and sermons of essential early LDS leaders like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young -- that the father of Jesus Christ once bore flesh. These are the kind of weighty debates that have always raged within and between Abrahamic sects, and divided one from another.
So it seems to be entirely predictable that Christians for whom the Nicene concept of the Trinity is the absolute most important element of their faith would look at the different LDS doctrine and go, “absolutely not.”
It’s also important to remember that the origin story of the LDS includes the belief that all other forms of Christianity underwent a Great Apostasy, which means that the authority of the apostolic faith and the associated priesthood were lost from the earth -- and Joseph Smith was tasked with recovering and restoring it. (Hence, discovering the undiscovered sacred texts written on gold plates.)
So it’s written deeply into the self-understandings of both Mormons and their Christian opponents that the other has broken in an important way from the truth about Christianity, even if Mormons are nicer with how they state it nowadays. But it’s embedded in the very name of the LDS church that it believes its membership to be uniquely the Saints of these Latter Days; “Christian”, as a term, just has less exclusive meaning to them. The actual equivalent question to “Are Mormons Christians?”, posed from the other side, is “Are Protestants and Catholics Saints?”
So, all that to say, of course Mormons are sociologically Christians. But Christians who are wary of applying the term aren’t idiots, and they know exactly what they’re doing, and why. And their position is far from unique among Abrahamic religious perspectives.
Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.
The angels being subject to saved humans as a result of their union with Christ is pretty basic Christian soteriology, and an early form of it shows up in 1 Corinthians (chapter 6:2-3):
Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels?
Angels are also never described as being "in the image of God" the way humans are, although they're considered to have a certain resemblence to the divine glory.
As for the "they shall be gods" part, well, that's also in the Bible, famously quoted by Jesus as an unbreakable line of scripture (John 10:34-36):
Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came (and scripture cannot be broken), do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
While there's a difference in the kind of divinity being ascribed, it's also fundamental to Catholic and Orthodox understandings of salvation since the early middle ages that the ultimate destiny of man is to partake of the divine nature by grace. The phrase appears across Christian history that a person who has achieved perfect sanctification could be said to "have everything that God has," to be divinized. What you've quoted is actually the least distinct element and phrasing in Mormon soteriology, from the point of view of analyzing historical Christianity in its broad scope.
I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think attempting to evangelize was part of the motivation, but an even bigger part just seems to be that this is what people liked back then, especially for poorly-catechized mid-century American Catholics who were living through a period where their religion seemed to be changing by the minute in ways that were unprecedented and unexpected. Catholics at the time didn't know how to deal with such radical change, so they defaulted to things that they knew from the outside or felt good to them. Happy clappy songs among them.
My understanding is they're still a market leader in sports games, like the yearly basketball or football tie-in game. Those don't have a great reputation among hardcore gamers, but the gaming market as a whole snatches them up.
Given the Saudis' love for buying up sports franchises, it's likely this had to do mostly with those titles and not a newfound passion for Mass Effect.
I also definitely experience it, although most ASMR videos don't do it for me. I usually encounter it when vaguely sleepy, relaxed, and then a pleasant stimulus happens, like a soft speaking voice (the "being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class" story seems about right) or a gentle, repetitive noise.
If I do encounter it from an ASMR video, whispering or crinkling does it more than anything else.
In the 1800s, this really was the case. Unitarianism was historically signified by its view that the Trinity was an irrational and nonsensical doctrine — hence “Unitarian” rather than “Trinitarian.” It applied that same rationalism to most elements of its doctrine, and believed in putting rational analysis above traditional or doctrinal fidelity. Hence, the reputation you referenced.
Unitarianism had that reputation about up until the point where public atheism became acceptable for intellectuals, at which point both it and deism collapsed in numbers and the Unitarians began to align themselves more with religious humanism to survive.
I’m just echoing other posters here, but any church more conservative than the Methodists is going to be very insistent on the literal resurrection of Christ. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, well, I wonder seriously what would even compel you to find Christianity interesting.
If what you’re looking for is a vague sense of belief in a higher power that doesn’t ask you to sign on to any specific dogma, well, I agree that the Unitarians say that’s what they’re offering… but obviously they’ve found a different set of dogmas to promote. There’s no such thing as a church without dogma.
The reality is that most churchgoers are moral busybodies, and either you agree with the things they’re busybodying about (whatever they are) or you don’t. Churches with any sort of vitality, whatever side of the culture war they’re on, are anything but vague.
People often talk about church as a place to find “a sense of community”, but I couldn’t disagree more: if you want community qua community, you’d be much better off going for a walk, reconnecting with friends, talking to family members, or joining a hobby club. Depending on your local culture, you’ll still face some level of moral policing. But if religious convictions aren’t your thing, maybe you’re better off finding a place where the topic of conversation is your thing.
I like to think of church as a hobby club, where the hobby is “having particular moral and supernatural beliefs.” If you have strong convictions on those, it’s great. If not, it’s like joining a DnD group when you don’t like imaginative play.
They're not "demanding" it by protesting, they're demanding it by choosing to attend one university over another and therefore sending tuition dollars to one university instead of the other one. It's demand in the economic sense, not the political sense.
Video game speedrunning really isn't my thing, but I've definitely enjoyed Summoning Salt a few times. He has a nice delivery.
I won’t claim the video editing is out of this war, but Summoning Salt’s leitmotif, We’re Finally Landing, might as well be.
While it's certainly associated with him, I'd assert that HOME (the artist) is seriously underrated and deserves consideration on his own for his excellent music. He's the best of the synthwave/vaporwave craze.
This really dates me, but HOME's Resonance is deeply associated with my time graduating from school, and I listened to the track the night I graduated. The album Odyssey is worth a listen, if you like electronic music or chill beats.
Wow, really brings me back to listen to this stuff again. Very strange to feel nostalgic about music designed to appeal to nostalgia.
Has this been the case for a while? This is such a strange euphemism.
It’s been a stock journalistic phrase for as long as I can remember and doesn’t seem strange or euphemistic to me at all. You never heard on the nightly news in the 2000s, “Lawmakers on capital hill are proposing a new bill to…”?
Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades
Is this a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing, since the PRC is the strongest force in east Asia and both are concerned about their sea lanes and territorial integrity because of Chinese moves to expand its territorial waters and claim on Taiwan?
I fortunately do not have any personal friends or family members who are literally celebrating
I've also been fortunate that the people I've spoken with in person have been horrified by what happened. But my friends are generally conservatives or moderates. My mother, who really liked Kirk and occasionally tried to show me some of his videos, cried. The moderates are in shock and are terrified we've created a culture of violence.
I know a few people who are progressives of some description, but overwhelmingly they're straight-laced people who abhor violence. I'm sure there are some people I've been friends with at some point in my life who are being terrible right now (I can think of names), but outside of work I don't know any hardcore progressives right now. And people at work haven't brought it up.
To be fair, much of the text of that post was pulled from a draft for something I had written before the shooting happened and fit well. I have a digital notebook full of unpublished effortpost drafts that I never posted, usually because I felt that it wasn't a good idea to post or the original idea got away from me and felt like something that needed a longer exposition or just became too broad for the context. Sometimes I pull something out of there if it's relevant to something I want to post.
Socially lower-middle class, economically upper-middle-middle-class, intellectually upper-middle-class. I'm from a low-density part of flyover country, and religiosity is as normal for people I grew up with as liberalism is among university professors. Even the feminists described themselves as Christians. My parents are both college graduates, my father has a post-graduate degree and is a teaching professor at a religious university and my mother is an administrator at a small company. (Guess who makes more money?) I grew up in a lower-to-lower-middle-class neighborhood, and it was a frequent drama in my childhood that kids I tried to befriend saw me as a piggy bank because my parents were better off than most of my peers and occasionally tried to steal from me. I'm a college graduate and work in IT.
I once wanted to go to graduate school and had multiple professors who thought I'd be a good fit for it, but I didn't feel that I would fit in well with university culture because of my conservative views and interest in religion, and I felt the career prospects were extremely limited. When I attended formal events at the university I always felt horribly out of place and embarrassed myself a few times by acting uncouth. More than that, it was a massive culture shock when I attended university and met people from cities for whom hookup culture, party culture, underage drinking, and drug use were normal parts of youth culture. I had some crises in college because I struggled to fit in, and I often felt like I didn't belong there. My favorite part of college was taking classes. I think I got inculcated into the intellectual habits of the upper-middle class -- albeit without adopting most of their views, but I can speak their language to criticize them -- but got shoved down to the middle class based on my social habits and unrefined tastes.
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Reading Iris's about us page, my impression is this is likely a transgender person, both from the pic and the picture-perfect set of male hobbies, any one of which I know women who are into them, but put together is pretty strong evidence of not being a natal woman... and of course, "most of my recent focus has been on transgender rights, especially in the workplace." (Read: I came out as transgender recently and now that's my pet cause.)
Either that or the most masculine woman I have ever heard of in my entire life. So, in that connection, "trans woman in tech is extremely progressive and doesn't like transphobes," isn't exactly a wild outlier. They believe this is an existential fight for them; I'd probably call my enemies fascists too if I believed as they do. As it is, I just find their intensity of feeling a little silly, and so it's easy for me to shrug it off.
But really I have a more specific pronoun problem with the website. I find it hard to take the website of a professional seriously when all of the pronouns are "we", and it's obviously just one person's consultancy. Just say "I," please. Don't pretend to be plural. (Wait.......)
(EDIT: Also, there's a publication "Published under my deadname.")
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