urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
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User ID: 226
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2d ago
Wow, that's interesting. I have limited imaginative capabilities, but not to the point of aphantasia. Mostly, when I think, I see words in my head almost like this site, and I feel punctuation and formatting, italics make me want to lean and semicolons make me feel a slight thump. Images are hard to muster, and even when they appear they tend to flash away or fade into blackness.
I have two thoughts:
- My limited imagination makes reading fiction hard, especially fiction with lots of descriptions, which gives me a headache and I lose track of my place. I find it much easier to read nonfiction or fiction where the main point is dialogue or monologue. Do you think your aphantasia affected your ability to read fiction like this?
- It's weirdly easier for me to imagine things after I wake up, possibly a similar phenomenon to hypnagogic hallucinations. Do you notice anything like that?
If you have a lot of full quality photos and run out of space, you can pay for more storage or compress them. That seems completely reasonable to me. I haven't heard about difficulties in using Google Takeout.
The complaints about Takeout may have been overblown. I recall this hacker news thread about the problem, but people there are disagreeing with each other about the issue, and I've never personally used Google Photos so I don't know who to believe. Maybe there was something about EXIF data being stripped? And I recall there was also something about it being difficult to mass delete photos too, making it hard to get back under your storage limit without just wiping everything? That may also have been exaggerated, I don't know. Fair enough, I rescind that part of my description.
But while I understand why they did it, Google going from "you can upload unlimited photos!" to "your photos count against your limited storage quota" does illustrate that you're at the mercy of the provider when you use cloud services, and you need to have a plan for what to do if your prayers they do not alter the deal further ultimately fail.
That's true, but I'm just not convinced that it's rational to swear off their services because of that alone.
I don't think it's so much that people think they're bad for that sole reason, and more that I think there are a lot of little reasons why people don't trust them to act in their best interests in the long term. I wouldn't advise anyone to swear off all big tech services without exception, but moreso to be judicious in how they use them and have an exit plan. The corporate version of this is "multi-cloud" or "hybrid-cloud," and it's growing for the same reasons I think people ought to carefully consider their consumer cloud strategy. It certainly saved Unisuper's skin in the story from the OP!
Google, in particular, I am just incredibly skeptical of because of their long history of killing off services people loved due to the management culture that disincentivizes maintaining existing products. I don't trust that anything Google does for consumers will exist in 10 years, except Search (though that one looks more concerning every day), GMail, YouTube, and Drive/Docs (because of its enterprise use). And hence those are the only Google services I use!
Further, I deactivated my Facebook account a long time ago not because of privacy concerns (though I have them) but because they enshittified the algorithm and force-fed me a bunch of toxoplasmosis-filled viral content that just made me angry, instead of the updates from friends and family I signed up to follow. They made the product worse to the point where the tradeoff in the data and attention I was giving them wasn't worth it, so I stopped using it.
Personally, of course, I love self-hosting things. But I certainly don't expect others to share in my self-hosting dreams, and I use third-party and cloud services to share data and communicate with other people.
I think there's an ideal balance to be struck with self-hosting, where you self-host services that are largely self-focused (personal notes, photo libraries, etc) and then judiciously use other services -- yes, even ones with terrible privacy practices! -- to mindfully share some of that data with others. The point is to be mindful, judicious, and self-aware of the choices you make, and weigh costs and benefits. Trying to get your friend to create a login for your nextcloud is decidedly not mindful, judicious, or self-aware, and when people talk about folks like that I make this face. Actually, publishing personal web services on the open internet just seems like an incredibly terrible idea to me, except in very specific circumstances.
The threat model for why people should consider self-hosting is decidedly not privacy from the government, which is a fool's errand. Nor is it, ultimately, privacy from data aggregation, which is almost certainly unavoidable, although I maintain it is a morally respectable stance to try to minimize your personal contribution to it, just as a vegetarian might choose to minimize their consumption of animal products because they oppose factory farming.
The point of self-hosting, for me, is not really about privacy but about control. The dream of the personal computer revolution was putting the power of computing in the hands of the everyday person, giving them autonomy over their own computing to use according to their wishes. I see self-hosting as an evolution of that dream.
Hard agree. Time has shown that Stallman was right. I'm glad we can still compile our own OSs from source. In a lot of other areas, I think the battle is lost. I'm living and teaching my kids to deal with the world we're in, and I don't think abstinence-only can work if you want to have a healthy social life. I won't be the guy who refuses to open the menu from a QR code when out to dinner with friends.
People refusing to open menus from QR codes is another confused Nick Young moment for me. That seems to be a clear area in which using companies' web services makes perfect sense; you're at their establishment already and want to find something to eat. You don't, like, plug in your hopes and dreams into the menu website, you're just looking for the filet mignon. Now, I hate online menus, but not for any techy reason: I just find it a lot harder to browse a menu on a phone screen than on a piece of paper in front of me. In a lot of ways I actuallly want less tech in my life!
Abstinence-only in regard to third-party web services just isn't possible, as you say. You need to access services to communicate with people, just as you probably need a LinkedIn to advance your career (as much as I hate it...). What I don't like is the attitude that you should just mindlessly use every random cloud service that advertises itself to you without thinking about their incentives, privacy policy, reputation, and quality. People should make wise choices with their computing just as they do with their automobiles or houses. If anything, my total computing footprint is more important to me than either my car or my house, and certainly more irreplaceable. I don't think you can get an insurance policy to restore your precious thoughts and memories. That can definitely be an argument to use cloud storage, but I also think it's a good argument to use multiple offerings and not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Computers have done a lot to empower governments and corporations in modern times. My goal is just that they should also empower families and individuals too, while they're at it. Of course, the dark fear is that things turn out much more somber, and the Digital Society and its Future looks very much like a tiny elite running machines that rule the world. Not that we live in such a world, of course.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2d ago
I think what it means now is “we’ve used a thing and we’re damn clever for having done so.”
I appreciate the rundown on your file storage strategy, this sounds thorough and fair. I especially like your strategy of using cloud storage and your local storage pool as redundant backups of each other. That seems to me to be a judicious use of cloud storage, while maintaining personal autonomy and avoiding lock-in. I'm not anti-cloud, but I do think being smart with how you use it is the right call. This goes for autonomy as well as cost; I have tens of thousands of family photos stretching back decades, and it became pretty clear to me that any cloud photo provider would cost an insane amount of money to store all this uncompressed.
TheMotte, weirdly, is one place on the internet I go where people are strongly in favor of personal cloud vs. the build-your-own old-school hacker mentality. Then again, the only other places I go on the internet are open source forums, where that mentality is very strong. I'm guessing since the rationalist community drew so heavily from FAANG employees, and the motte drew so heavily from the rationalist community, we have a lot of people who place a great deal of trust in FAANG. It's not so much that I don't think they take security seriously, and more that I think their incentives are misaligned with people's data autonomy. Like when Google decided to make Google Photos not unlimited any more, with it also being somewhat difficult to do a mass-export of your original, full-quality photo data. And Google's usually not too bad with making takeout possible, so that made a lot of people pretty mad.
We put a lot of our lives on our computers, I think having control over them and the ability to make our own choices with how we use and manipulate our thoughts and memories is important. It's not the government I'm worried about -- like you say, they can get whatever they want if they really want to -- but the profit motive, and the random account deletions for inscrutable reasons. Enshittification is real. That's why I really respect your balanced approach and my guess is your strategy is that of the majority among home server enthusiasts. Keep us informed on what you decide for your ZFS backups, I've been looking for a place to store compressed file backups.
I have my own theory for why your post took off: to the side of it, unlike most posts, is an image. And that image isn't something abstract or ineffable, but the image of an attractive young woman.
I think your post took off for the same reason TikToks with young women take off, and YouTubers put cringey faces in their thumbnails: human faces attract attention, and women's faces especially so. I don't think it's anything more complicated than that. My eyes are still automatically drawn to this image and I'm desperate for your post to drop off the front page (sorry) so I can stop looking at her mug.
So what we've learned is, if you're going to make an effortpost, make sure you're actually linking to something that contains an image of a hot woman.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
6d ago
If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.
This is what always bugged me about Star Trek, I understand they have this complicated lore that is basically Raelism before it was cool, but still. By the common definition, the frequency of inter-alien reproduction made it clear that all the humanoid species in the galaxy were one species. Vulcans are humans are Klingons are Romulans. Ignoring the fact that they're all just humans in various kinds of prosthetics, of course.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
9d ago
Personally, I felt that Rittenhouse would have been a prime example for progressives to use, to persuade conservatives towards a greater skepticism of police and especially of prosecutors.
The point has never been skepticism of police, and especially of prosecutors. The point, at least for the largest bloc of the Democratic coalition, was that the police hate black people. I suspect many on the center-left who boosted these ideas, especially the elite ones, would be shocked to encounter police in a negative interaction. Many middle-class+ white people have no fear of police. And somewhat ironically, it was these types who boosted "defund the police."
Because their history of no or positive interactions with police contrasted with the stories they hear from civil rights activists about black interactions with police, they assumed the problem really must be racist police. They assume it was not a broader problem of police misconduct, necessitating the racially-sensitive reforms they were told were necessary by activists. (And there's also a reason these were the people who turned immediately from defund the police as soon as even the slightest crime problem emerged.) This is why something as mainstream as Family Guy had the skin color police chart as a gag. This is "common knowledge," really a common belief.
There is a contingent of further-left people who hate police more generally, from anarchists to activists. This comes either from ideology or experience. And there's also a group of white conservatives and libertarians who are incredibly skeptical of police, and hate things like no-knock raids. This could form a coalition for real, enduring police reform if reform were made as a government power issue, not a racial issue. But it's been massively polarized along racial and tribal lines, and I now know people with thin blue line stickers on their trucks who hate the police and think they're bumbling idiots who are having a good day if they're just being stupid, not malicious. You had natural allies and you alienated them, making them believe your reform proposals were a call for literal anarchy. The "fiery but mostly peaceful" protests didn't help one bit. And I'll say one thing about libertarians, at least they aren't anarchists.
I read an article by a black activist once, who was frustrated that, despite cases in which white people were mistreated by police, there was no large contingent of white people won over to the police reform cause. "Don't you care that police are going after you guys too?" I recall him asking, to paraphrase.
And I wanted to scream at him: this is because for seven million years you've been screaming at the top of your lungs: "This is a Black Issue! This is a Black Issue! The racist cops hate us! Our equal rights are being violated! This is a legacy of slavery! White people could never understand what we're going through! You can never understand how it is to be mistreated by the police as we have been!"
And white people, especially those inclined to sympathy for the plight of African-Americans, took you at your word. Negative white interactions with police don't register to them, because the civil rights movement has spent forever describing the problems with policing as a racial issue, not a broader issue with police misconduct. The bailey of BLM, or at least the cry from terrified activists on Twitter, was "Black people are being hunted down like escaped slaves by police and systematically murdered." This is decidedly not a message conducive to expressing police reform as a cross-racial issue, especially when the rallying cry was "Black Lives Matter" and not "Police Misconduct Matters," and even "All Lives Matter" was considered an insult. The goal was "centering the Black experience of mistreatment," not talking about the issue as something that could, even in theory, impact whites. What has been sowed is being reaped.
Police reform and accountability would be a winning issue in the US if the left would stop making it exclusively a racialized issue and the right would acknowledge that at least some police corruption hits black people worst.
But hey, at least we have more body cams.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
9d ago
A week isn't long enough to see the effects from an SSRI. But since you've been on SNRIs and tricyclics, my completely layman's opinion is that an SSRI is not likely to be much different for you. But it could. All this stuff is a black box, I don't think we understand how any of it works.
One thing I don't see there is buproprion. If your problems are focused around low energy and interest (so very monopolar, lethargic) my understanding is buproprion is helpful and works quickly. It did not help me, but it definitely helps some people.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
10d ago
You know, I used to be one of those westerners staunchly opposed to matchmaking, but the more I read about people seemingly unable to match themselves up, and the more I see how, while compatibility is valuable, love and commitment are choices that can build upon even basic compatibility to build a strong partnership, the more I think maybe my preconceptions on matchmaking were wrong, and having external people you trust provide insight on fundamental compatibility can provide incredible value.
But social trust is really the solution to everything. The solution to getting men and women to think of each other as members of their sphere of concern, worthy of respect and consideration both romantically and more fundamentally, is to put them in a community where they know each other and are embedded in meaningful, integrated social networks. I think there's a weird way in which some past societies were more "gender-integrated" than ours, despite having many single-sex spaces.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
10d ago
The big problem with modern dating is everyone hates it, sometimes for different reasons and sometimes for similar ones, and absolutely no one, not even one, not a single soul, is willing to work cooperatively to improve it. The only people willing to acknowledge the problems respond almost to a man with attempts to use insights into the situation for personal gain, like the red pillers and FDS people. Few express even a morsel of empathy for anyone struggling on the opposite side of the fence, and everything is framed in a zero-sum, adversarial way. It is no wonder to me that people who think like this don't have any satisfaction in relationships.
Looking at the problems and collectively going, okay, let's improve this, let's make this better, let's build a system in which more people get what they want and are happy is apparently out of the question. It would require too much honesty, too many tough questions, it would threaten people's status. We'd have to be real with each other and also ourselves, and it's simply psychologically easier to become enraptured by hate and contempt. The system of love has been transmuted into a system of hate.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
11d ago
I think the only solution to sexual morals is purity culture enforced and maintained with equal passion for both sexes -- actually, even stronger for men, as has been understood in Christendom for a very long time.
This isn't in the culture war thread. So I'll try to be restrained in my views here. But I see the author's post as a distinct demonstration of the utter failure mode of Islam, that it does not teach sexual purity to both sexes but hammers home the impurity of sex for women while maintaining the significance of having many sexual partners for men.
What Christian purity culture done right does, what it's always done, is insist that both sexes are placed with the burden of avoiding sexual sin and seeking righteousness. And this is not a purity that is eternally lost, but something that can be regained through repentance and a change of heart. The Christian tradition is full of sexual sinners of all kinds who made the active choice to change their behavior and are celebrated as just as holy -- maybe even more, in some ways! -- as the saints who never struggled with such sins. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." (Heb 12:11)
I also resent the repeated insistence that Western sexual mores are in any way equivalent to the ones from her background. The "husband stitch" is equivalent to full-on removal of the clitoris? Really? I'm open to this being a bad practice, but in any case I don't see this as equivalent to FGM, just as, while opposing it, I don't see male circumcision as equivalent to FGM.
I'd also note that the purity-based murder in London she recounts, from 2002, was not a native English father, but a Kurdish man, according to her own citation, weakening her view that this is a pervasive problem in the West because of Western values:
In 2002, 16-year-old Heshu Jones, from the Kurdish community of West London, was murdered by her father after allegedly failing a virginity test. Her father slit her throat and then jumped off a balcony in an attempt to kill himself.
My stance on this issue is somewhere between her and her mother. I think she's right that the double standard for men and women, the teaching that God is "the type that’s supposedly the arbiter of justice, yet puts its thumb on the scale for women," is bad. I also don't believe in that God. Instead I believe in the God who teaches that "no fornicator or impure man, or one who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance." (Eph. 5:5) May the fuckboys live in as much shame as the sluts -- perhaps more.
I agree with the author that there are many cases in which women choose to have sex when they'd probably be better off making a different choice. That's baked into the pie of my fair-minded views on sexual mores, and is the same for men. But I also think this particular person may be doing that thing where people project their own understanding of their sexuality onto other people, and then recoil in horror with an inability to understand how other people's legitimate sexual desires differ.
While I'm not the biggest fan of BDSM's existence in the world, I think she, like many radfems, has utterly no understanding of the actual and real women out there who legitimately and in the deep recesses of her desire want some sort of kinky sex life. I have known women like this. Fifty Shades of Gray did not become a best seller because of the patriarchy.
As with all radical feminists, I'm not sure she's the best person in the world to make a full determination as to the state of play re: women's sexuality. I believe she still has a lot of her mother in her, though she doesn't realize it. In her feminism, I think she may have become a raging sexist, denying equal agency and humanity to women. In pinning blame for all of the sexual revolution's failures on men, she ignores the actual reality that many women do want sex, even promiscuous sex, even kinky sex, and in that way falls deeply into her childhood beliefs that "it's different for boys."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
11d ago
I've seriously considered voting for him, should he be on the ballot in my state. (Is he going to be on all the ballots or just some of them?)
His voice is bizarre. And the brain worms thing is genuinely concerning. But I feel like we're at a point where the big two options in this election are so clearly and obviously not good for the job that I'm desperate for something I can do to signal my total displeasure at the direction of my country.
I'm a pretty conservative guy, and have become more conservative over the past few years. But I've also never voted for Trump. I have seriously, seriously considered it, not because I think Trump has magically become a better candidate, but because the ways in which lawfare has been invoked in an attempt to limit his influence is totally shameful, an insult to the democratic process, an obvious refusal to follow democratic norms on behalf of a party which continually claims its opposition has abandoned democratic norms.
It's the fact that this hasn't worked, and even backfired, that has made me back off from my initial intention to vote for Trump. Even him winning 45% -- which I think he's likely to do -- would be a solid and profound rebuke of the attempts to use weird lawsuits and criminal trials to bring down a major political candidate. But I am still much more incensed by the Democratic party's use of overblown criminal trials, especially the "hush money" one that seems like nonsense upon stilts, than I am by anything Trump has ever done. The Democratic party is the real threat to democracy in this country, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm also angry about the OSHA vaccine mandate, and Biden's general inability -- especially before the election year -- to actually assert control over the executive branch. He promised he wouldn't mandate the vaccine and he did it. People I know were forced to receive a medical procedure of limited benefit to them, on the basis of shoddy (or outright nonexistent) evidence, pursued by an authority that had no true right to make such a sweeping regulation, and required to continually present evidence of receiving this procedure, which has had utterly no value for at least the past couple of years, in order to maintain employment.
It's clear to me that Biden doesn't control his party, his party controls him. And I'm certain that has always been the case, even before he became senile. And however moderate Biden may have presented himself, his party is anything but moderate or restrained.
And what's worse is they're not even radical in the areas where the country desperately needs radical change. I agree with the tankies: the Democratic party is a party of woke capitalists. They'll talk every single day about "equity" and "diversity" and "racial justice" and "sexism," but when it comes to making real change in the real country, and doing things that help real people on the ground instead of boosting the status of various NGO officials -- they're a fucking joke. When's the last time you heard mainstream Democrats actually taking about real healthcare reform? Or making changes to employee benefits? Or consumer protection? Probably just a few times in the past few months, as the Biden administration has rushed to do a few things at the administrative level in an election year. But it's too little, too late. They burned their political capital on woke signalling and not actual policy, and the country has suffered for it.
Say whatever you will about him. But RFK seems to actually care about the direction of the country. I watched a speech he gave about our lack of direction, how medical debt and economic disparity has damaged our country. I heard him talk about how our young people lack direction and our society gives them no reason to have any. His message resonated with me. He's probably farther left than me, but I don't care -- he's passionate, he seems to my eyes to care about ordinary Americans regardless of their spot in the oppression olympics. He looks like the adult in the room to me, the guy who looks at the state of the country and cries out in the wilderness: something needs to change. I look at all the candidates, and the one who actually seems to care about Making America Great Again is RFK.
I think some of the extremes of his vaccine skepticism are kooky. But I admire the fact that he still seems to care about the crazy stuff we did during the pandemic. He hasn't allowed the mainstream to let him forget about all of our grave moral errors during COVID. I myself was infuriated that the red wave never materialized in 2022, after two years of injustice based on false facts. And I'm infuriated that our politics has devolved into culture warring, or whining on both sides about foreign wars, or paranoia about China, when it's clear to me that this country is facing a demographic implosion, a massive and unprecedented loss of meaning, and a rapid, unstoppable loss of national identity and values. We're re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and pointing to explosions on far-off iceburgs, when the ship is sinking, taking on the water of anomie, while our young men and young women are sharpening their knives ready to maime each other. We need transformational leadership, and a positive identity.
And I'm not sure RFK will give us that. But I'm damn sure Trump or Biden won't.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
13d ago
Yup, I think that’s exactly what’s going on. The mainlines have collapsed.
I also would add that Catholicism, unlike mainline Protestantism, forms a strong cultural block unlike other forms of Christianity. I’ve known many Catholics who hate the Church and are essentially apostate, but if you ask for their religion, they’d say “Catholic.” What’s funny is the only person on the Court known for attending mainline Protestant services is Gorsuch — who was raised Catholic and is often still called Catholic, despite being lapsed and attending Episcopal services!
There’s a line in Leo DiCaprio’s Catch Me If You Can, where the main character, who repeatedly creates false identities, is caught by his fiance, whose immediate response to realizing her life had been totally manipulated was to ask, in tears, “You’re not a Lutheran?” Such a thing is unthinkable today, and was played for laughs in the 2000s even.
So it’s no wonder the court is considered made up largely of Catholics and Jews — they’re both faiths with a large cultural/ethnic component. That means the identification outlives the practice. The other member of the court is a Black Protestant, which is its own ethnic/religious fusion.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
13d ago
I believe the scotus size was set by statute, meaning that the house is required to consent to an expansion of the court size. If only the senate and president had to conspire to add additional justices, I figure it would have happened already.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
13d ago
How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination?
To me it seems very simple.
Conservatism in America is deeply connected to religious conservatives, especially Christians. Of those, excepting very small groups like Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Anabaptists, you have essentially three subgroups: confessional Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics.
Confessional Protestants are often very engaged in ideas (they love their long confessions full of them, of course), but they're, relatively speaking, a rather small group, even compared to the shrinking mainline Protestants with whom they have a shared history. Think the Presbyterian Church in America (not Presbyterian Church U.S.A.), the Lutheran Missouri and Wisconsin synods (not the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), and perhaps even the Anglican Church in North America (not the Episcopal Church). I'm not from the region of the country where this form of Christianity is very large, so I can't speak to their absolute numbers, but they're relatively small as far as I understand.
I have ancestors who were members of these churches, but in my family, which is pretty standard for the religious right, evangelical Protestantism predominates. Baptists, Pentecostals, and non-denominational Christians (who I consider, from personal experience, Baptists-in-denial) make up a majority of conservative Protestants in the United States.
So what is there to say about evangelical Protestants? Well, I'm very fond of them. They're a large part of my family. But they also -- and I say this just to be brutally honest -- have a very poor track record when it comes to fostering a culture that values higher education or elite status-seeking. They have much in common, I think, with the pietist movements of magisterial Protestantism, which stress direct experience of God and simplicity in faith, rather than scholasticism, education, and learning. Put more bluntly, their cultural and biological ancestors are mostly the Borderers (Scots-Irish), who never valued education and were associated with anything but book learning.
Today, you look at Pew Research's table of educational attainment by religious affiliation, and you find evangelical groups like Baptists and Pentecostals filling up the bottom. This is simply not a group that produces Supreme Court justices, who are universally elite and educated persons.
This leaves, of course, Roman Catholics. Catholicism has a long and storied history of higher learning, being associated with many of the major historical universities of Western Europe. It also has a strong focus, at least among conservative and traditionalist Catholics, on deep knowledge of faith and resistance to common patterns of behavior. It has institutes of higher education in the United States, like Notre Dame (which another poster discussed), which are considered elite enough to possibly matriculate a future federal judge. And, as others have pointed out, Catholicism has a long history of legal scholarship and a rigorous tradition of religious law that makes legal interpretation a rather natural choice for a smart Catholic to study.
While as a whole, Catholics are middling in their education attainment, this is largely determined by the large numbers of Latino immigrants. Native-born, white Catholics (if I understand correctly), have rather high educational attainment, even if most are liberal or lapsed Catholics. But those who remain in a conservative understanding of their faith -- like Harrison Butker noted above, often have a well-developed and intellectual understanding of their religion and a desire to put it into practice in broader society. This is the right combination to produce elite jurists.
You could of course ask, what about non-religious conservatives? And I would simply respond: "who?" While I have a great deal of affinity for right-wing atheists and know some, this is not a large group by any stretch of imagination. I am inclined to believe there are more Jews keeping the strictest interpretation of Torah in the United States than there are atheists who would even consider voting for a Republican.
So, if Republicans are going to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, and they've gotten to do that quite a lot lately, they've got to be Catholics. It's the only group in the United States that produces large enough numbers of educated, elite, status-seeking, but traditional and conservative, people.
It also helps, of course, that a large ethnic minority in the United States are Latinos who are often Catholic, which means that Democrats also have a reason to appoint certain kinds of Catholics to the Court, as they did with Sotomayor. It's notable also that the one clear, life-long Protestant on the Court is Ketanji Brown Jackson, who identifies as a non-denominational Protestant but doesn't seem to have a strong connection to her faith. There are, as far as I'm concerned, no committed evangelical Protestants on the Court, and plausibly there have never been.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
18d ago
By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.
Interesting, so what is the main cause now, if you don't mind my curiosity? I'm not familiar with this situation at all, so I'm now just intrigued.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
21d ago
Is the economy better because Biden is a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?
You can turn this one around, too, though: was the economy better under Trump because he was a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?
Or was it because the establishment republicans like tax cuts, and Trump was happy to oblige?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
21d ago
I mean, you know who you replied to, right?
And I guess we lost a cath recently, maybe not so trad but certainly conservative. Hope she comes back.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
21d ago
It’s still fascinating to me we got the people who investigated money to be the presidential guard. I guess all around they’re there to make sure the presidents’ face stays intact.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
21d ago
Bill McKinley
I definitely had to look this up, you’re talking about William McKinley. I didn’t recognize the name from the list of presidents stuck in my head, I thought you were talking about some other politician.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
23d ago
I'm not an economist and I don't understand much about it, so I wish you and @LateMechanic would have a discussion to illuminate this a bit. He seems to be pro-MMT and you seem to be against. You two have any thoughts on the other's view?
Not only is the idea of students leaving for lunch unheard of, but using devices was strictly limited until I got to high school. It was a revelation actually being able to use my iPod at lunchtime when I entered high school. Maybe it's different now.
And once you were old enough to drive, you could technically schedule your classes with free periods at least in my area and leave during those, although it's strongly discouraged to leave gaps in the schedule. In my senior year of high school I had a free period in the morning and got to sleep in part of the week, which was heaven for a night owl like me.
Public schools are incredibly liability-averse and letting kids loose just isn't in their vocabulary. The US values freedom, but is terrified about children's safety to the point of neurosis. To some extent this reflects the safety profile of the US being different than Europe, to some extent it reflects the lower density and car-dependence of the US, to some extent it reflects our tortious legal system, but to a great extent I think it just reflects the neurotic substrate within American society.
How do they even stop you or know what you're doing?
Once the school day starts, almost no one is allowed in or out except in specific circumstances and those who are allowed have to be screened. In that way, schools are kind of run like airports.
Why do they care where you eat lunch?
They care because between the hours of 7am and 3pm, they're responsible for your welfare and if they let you leave and something happens to you, there might be civil or criminal liability. Parents would also be pissed, because the primary function of public schooling isn't education but daycare.
There's also the fact that if they let you out they'd also have to let you back in, and that opens a whole can of worms about random people strolling into the school or setting up a huge infrastructure to screen students returning from lunch.
I'm trying to parse that translation you offered, but it's very dense and I'm having trouble making sense of it. Could you summarize the point of view Quenstedt is offering here? My guess is he's saying Christ's humanity deserves latria ipso facto, which would be fair, I get that, I'm actually rather uncomfortable with the whole presupposition here that we can separate our worship of Christ's humanity from that of his divinity, even in thought, I'd rather not even conceive of categories here, let's just worship Christ the Incarnate Son of God.
That being said, while there's clearly a strain of theological opinion here, I don't actually think there's a dogmatic definition on the matter even in Catholicism. I know of no teaching authority in the Catholic Church that focuses on this issue, though maybe one exists. More solemnly, Church councils have resisted talking about Christ's humanity and divinity separately, probably because talking about offering different worship to each hypostasis is incredibly misleading and dangerous.
I think it's enough to say that Christ deserves to be worshipped as God because he is God, and also to be devoutly honored as the greatest among men because he is the greatest possible man. Delving too deep into where both things come from and how that relates to the hypostatic union and such strikes me as perhaps scholasticism delving a bit too deep into the mystery of the Incarnation in a way that could easily lead someone who's not incredibly careful into serious error. This seems like something where a non-Chalcedonian could easily say, "see, look how Chalcedon is misleading!" Let's just agree not to send this to the Oriental Orthodox, hm?
I was on mobile when I typed my comment so I didn't see the hyperdulia reference in the Summa. Good catch! This is something that's never talked about in lay theology, I have never seen hyperdulia in reference to anyone but the Virgin Mary. It's generally treated as a gerrymandered category for her alone. But saying that Christ deserves hyperdulia with respect to his humanity makes a lot of sense, it puts it as essentially "dulia intimately connected with the incarnation of the Word."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
25d ago
I'm guessing this will mostly blow over, a relatively small number of contributors and slightly larger number of users will leave, whether publicly or silently. I suspect people on both the left and right will do this, thr left being louder and the right being quieter. Then the project will continue, but with less enthusiasm from evangelists.
The technology has a lot going for it (hence why Anduril wants to use it!) and it'll probably move more into a "used as a tool professionally" space rather than a "get excited about it personally and make it part of your identity" space. I'm not sure any side of their community, such as it is, trusts anyone else. The community will die but I'm guessing the technology will live on.
This is probably a "you should reverse any advice you hear"-type thing. I suspect it's also like psychotherapy, where a minority of the population really struggles with emotional regulation and needs to work rationally on their perceptions of the world, while most people do OK and would probably just be harmed and paralyzed by a more psychoanalytical approach to their life.
Some people probably desperately need to be told to stop worrying about the dumb things they think people care about, while others probably desperately need to be told they're screwing up and they need to start worrying about the way people perceive them. These two groups just need different things, and would be harmed by following advice necessary for the other.
@DuplexFields's advice last week is probably judicious for the first group, while @MaiqTheTrue's rejoinder serves as a necessary corrective for the second:
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