100ProofTollBooth
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
12d ago
Some of the best examples of this are the Millenial/Gen-Z Catholic YouTubers who post video monologues with clickbait thumbnails and have been cycling through the zesty topics of Porn, Exorcism, and anti-Feminism recently.
But I guess they have a point - The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius mostly involve sitting quietly for several hours. There can't possibly be an audience for that
100ProofTollBooth
12d ago
Some of the best commentary on dealing with (especially) old Testament literalism is from David Bentley Hart. The long and short of it is that the Old Testament should be read similarly to how The Odyssey and The Iliad are read. It's a highly stylized, almost poetic epic tale that uses vibrant language and imagery to convey its points. It's not a blow by blow catalog of facts. Add on top of this the translation-upon-translation issues and you can account for the fact that 900 year old men were popping out kids left and right when they weren't running away from Rapin'Burg after the Slip-'N-Slide from the sky overflowed.
100ProofTollBooth
12d ago
I mean, n of 1 here, but I became religious slowly over the course of years and it all started by getting deep into analytic philosophy and rationalism in an attempt to merely "be better at thinking." I'll spare you my superhero internet warrior origin story, but my path to Christ started in a firmly modern, PMC, intellectualist garden.
The ironic part is that I also agree with you. Use whatever version of "no atheists in foxholes" aphorism you want, but it is true that a lot of people turn to religion in types of trouble. You can cope by gesturing at placebo and self-serving cognitive biases if you like, but doesn't it remain knee-slappingly silly to imagine the idea of someone shouting "I"D BETTER UPDATE MY PRIORS" when they're on a plane with two blown engines.
100ProofTollBooth
13d ago
QuantumFreakonomics's comment did the most to influence my thinking. The car analogy is a good one to ponder.
Implement of mayhem aside, the issue of concern in my book is another small step forward to "lock up the crazies fast" but now expanding to the indirectly crazy - the parents.
Ever since the Virginia Tech shooting (possibly earlier) a steady mid-brow point has been "people with, ya know, really bad mental health problems, shouldn't have firearms ... and maybe knives ... cars could be bad too ... maybe we should commit them." The obvious slippery slope there is (a) There are plenty of well adjusted people who have mental health histories - what's to stop the state from arbitrarily deciding they are now a threat and (b) The obvious market adjustment that those with new mental health problems will simply conceal them and not seek help because of the risk of deprivation of basic rights. Where this gets especially dystopian is when known associates of any individual start to use "hey, you know he/she is really crazy right!" in vindictive personal lawfare. The best existing example of this is the weaponization of mutual restraining orders in divorce proceedings to try and secure an advantage in custody. I can see an easy early version of this in parents who, exasperated with a rebellious child, decide to inform "the authorities" that their angsty teen is, in fact, super coconuts and should be sent to one of those padded wall spots (while Mom and Dad enjoy some childless stay-cation time).
With this case, the message has been sent to parents of "troubled teens" that they might want to consider severely restricting their child's access to myriad things/activities/privacy/independence and, perhaps, even to begin involving "counselors" and other semi-state apparatchiks all to avoid personal liability in the event something drastic happens.
OR
The message has been sent to parents to not at all engage with their child's problems, and essentially hope they go away. But its important to maintain that plausible ignorance - again - to avoid personal culpability.
Being shitty parents has to absolutely remain 100% legal. If it becomes illegal to be a bad mom or dad, we're directly on the road to State-As-Parent, the elimination of privacy, and the enforcement of current political majoritarian monoculture at the nuclear family level.
100ProofTollBooth
22d ago
I'm with her
100ProofTollBooth
23d ago
(I should write the full story about this)
I once had a similar situation, except all of the info had to be filled out by hand on paper for every iteration of the same visitor parking.
At the time, I was dating a stripper (decisions were made!). She would roll over to my place after work, so 3 am on Thurs, Fri, and/or Saturday. Having to pretty much fill out an insurance survey every damn time got old for her.
Her solution was to flirt hard with the front desk guy, who proceeded to cut her visitor parking passes without so much as her first name filled out on the sheet.
The flirting involved what one could call a "free show" in the package room of that particular apartment building.
Everybody got choices, that's what I'm trying to say.
100ProofTollBooth
26d ago
Awesome. Thank you for the well articulated reply.
One more piece of anec-data to take or leave; It seems to me that my strength training (heavy compound lifts, think Starting Strength protocols) directly improve my runs as well. I'm sure there's a frontier to these when additional weight starts to retard progress. However, as of now, it feels like a free lunch.
100ProofTollBooth
27d ago
anec-datally, I worry about multiple decades of Long Slow Distance as a training base for running. So many lifelong runners end up nearly unable to walk. Joints just ... go.
To that end, a lot my cardio is based around doing the long duration stuff in low impact activities; swimming and rowing machines. But, I intrinsically like running and so pretty much only do intervals for it. N-of-one-personal-report, this has resulted in an increase in all of my short and middle distance race times.
Am I off base, tho? I truly would enjoy input.
100ProofTollBooth
27d ago
Unfortunately, I think there's strong evidence that, until the 20th century in the West, the overwhelming majority of sons were failsons.
The stat is common enough that I won't take the time to cite it, but something like 70-80% of human ancestors are female. This makes all the sense in the world when you think about hypergamy especially before the true institutionalization of monogamous marriage (and, in many parts of the world, including the west, its continuation today). Warlords and kings ffffuuuccckkedddd and most soldiers, peasants, military-age-males did not.
The fact of the matter is most men in history failed to reproduce. Now, you can make some arguments (with which I would agree) that that doesn't necessarily make them automatic failures. If they led honorable and virtuous lives, if they died fighting for a worthwhile cause etc. But inherent in all of that is a lot of value judgements that could shift based on the viewer. Something like passing on your genes would probably be close to a human universal "he done good!' criteria. I am open to disagreement here. I'm just trying to establish as objective and discrete threshold as possible for fail/urenot-failure.
I lean towards the idea that having a whore daughter at least feels intrinsically worse because of the inherent value placed in women. Things like dowry's exist across hundreds of cultures for a reason - sexual and reproductive access is important.
But there may be a little trick here. How many women, across history, have a "ho phase" followed by decades of monogamy and legitimately good performance as a mother? You can adjust "ho phase" sensitivity by time and culture - anything from "Mom spent some time as a ... waitress ... on the sunset strip in the 1970s" all the way to "Lady Kingsbury-Hampton-Bottomtooth once spent an unchaperoned weekend in Marseille. London society was quite atwitter!" The point is if we're looking to designate "whore daughter" with some sort of discrete event or events the same way we are for failson --- you might have a higher number of qualifying applicants than you'd like.
Porn and OnlyFans are a different spectacle altogether. People do things in private, enjoy them or don't enjoy them, and adjust their behavior and values accordingly. When you broadcast intimate acts to literally the entire internet'ed world it really smacks of a lack of awareness or a deeply narcissistic tendency that, to me, is far more worrisome than the dick coefficient of your life. And here's where I'll beat my favorite deceased equine; the sexual revolution made whore-dom cool and passed it on to young women utterly incapable of making sound judgement calls on actions that will impact them for the rest of their life. I'm empathetic to a teen girl who is angsty with her Goldman Sachs dad (yo, but, like, can you maybe slip him my resume lol?). If she decides to go off for a few months with the town badass (barbed wire tattoos, somehow got sent both to and home from boot camp, "knows a guy who can get us illegal fireworks") that's fine. Or, rather, that used to be fine. Now it's ... not enough? Now "sexual expression" is .... FacialAbuse (dot) com (don't google it, save your soul).
100ProofTollBooth
29d ago
I'll admit I may have written my comment with a little but of antsy in my pantsy. I'm only human, after all.
In general, if I ever throw out "Satanic," one can simply substitute in "perverse" or "inverted." It's not about being literally Of The Devil (i.e. the touched-by-an-angel christian boomer concept), it's about a sort of self-defeating backwards logic that also profoundly damages things around it. To put it in another context, I'd argue that the hardcore transcult logic goes along the lines of "we need to protect the children from possible emotional discomfort over all things. If this results in permanent physical disfigurement and sterilization, we will have accomplished our goal"
100ProofTollBooth
29d ago
Is there some sort of tactical school of thought on the efficacy or even purpose of early morning raids?
My suspicion has always been that the cops use them to literally catch crooks napping, but as @2rafa points out, it seems like the potential for "WTF IS GOING ON" violence really goes up.
I assume that surrounding the domicile would probably result in too many barricade events?
100ProofTollBooth
29d ago
Which generator (DALLE, MidJourney etc.)
And would you be willing to share the prompt? Fucking rad as hell, dawg.
100ProofTollBooth
29d ago
Perhaps I'm just becoming the new Hlynka
If you come at the King, you best not miss. Phrase different: Them boots ain't fit you.
I accept media animal welfare concerns in society because they are a good signally of generalized empathy. I believe it's safe to assert that anybody within the larger bounds of "normally functioning emotions" would be distraught to see a cat, dog, horse, other common domesticated animal be seriously intentionally hurt. And that's a good thing. It's a great signal that you would get really upset if a human (esp. a child) was similarly victimized. I draw the line at any sort of jail time for animal welfare offenses (perhaps with some exceptions around truly egregious cases that point to latent violent impulses).
The other line I draw, however, is any discussion of "honoring" animals or trying to devote serious financial resources to attempting to stop x species from dying. To me, this is a path to eugenics.
If you don't believe human beings are special, sacred, and/or divinely appointed in the universe, then I can't see how you stop yourself from taking these EA ideas to the extreme and eventually spouting things like "well, maybe we shouldn't breed as much so that kangaroos won't feel encroached" ... or something. If humans aren't a distinct class, does it not stand to that (satanic) reasoning that we ought to try equitably distribute resources and rights with our inhuman brothers and sisters? I don't know how this circle gets squared without the starting axiom of "humans are different, better, and more important than all other species. period"
So, again, if you're a cat person who desk-flips when you see a video online of kids terrorizing them - I'm with you and I agree.
If you think that we shouldn't build more hydropower because it might delete a turtle population - you're a killer.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I buy pants with those exact same dimensions and they are literally too skinny to barely fit my arms?
I know this is a typo, but it's a fun mental image. "Ahhhh, why don't these fit?!" as you shove your arms into teen girl sized skinny jeans.
You can get good results buying basic shirts online. Tee-shirts, polos, henleys, casual button ups. These can be bought size unseen.
Full on dress shirts - you need to figure out which brand / size / fit works best by trying a bunch on in person, but then you can reliably order direct from that brand online. Same for pants.
If you want to look good you have to do two things:
- Look good naked. i.e. be in good shape.
- As comment below says, tailoring. It isn't exactly cheap, it isn't exactly expensive. It's always worth it.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I will read the rest of your post if you can confirm that you’ve understood why you are incorrect per the above
I'm far too dumb to do that.
It’s not always possible to drive with an open cup of water in your car, depending on cupholders and road conditions
Is this why my pants are wet?
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
This is the way.
Relegation would also help to reinvigorate old rivalries that have been demolished because of TV contract led conference realignment.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
This just evades the point, try again but for soda
He "evades" the point by offering directly contradicting evidence to your assertion? And then you literally move the goalposts by shifting the object from water to the substance that is single most responsible for the American pre-diabetic and diabetes epidemic.
This isn't just poor argumentation, it's a lack of understanding of the nature of consumer demand and vendor supply.
McDonald's continues to exist and generate profit because American (and foreign!) consumers really enjoy, and therefore demand, their product. Every time I hear someone go on about "the corporate overlords" I get a strong suspicion they've never worked in one of these large corporations. They're bureaucratic, slow, with pockets of poor management everywhere. Often, they're coasting on brand recognition and incumbent advantage. Sure, they may still have top line growth, but they're not innovating outside of buying potential challengers (see: McDonalds and Chipotle). The idea that there are these Gordon Gekko greed machines with incredible ability to manipulate the public is laughable. The lizard people don't exist.
The sad fact of the matter is that McDonald's CEO is a former soap salesman who did the handshakeful path of Harvard Biz School to Big Consulting. This is the kind of dude who looks forward to "networking with the family" for 45 minutes of Christmas Eve before diving back in to the sweet sweet womb of quarterly reports. He is a business nerd.
But you know who aren't business nerds? Construction workers getting their morning coffee, single moms too tired to cook, stoned teenagers, and (years ago) my drunk ass at 2 a.m. And we all like the convenience, predictability, and location density of McDonalds. And so we spend, together, billions of dollars on their product.
It would be more efficient if, for super-sized corporations, an agency stepped in and “auctioned” off the corporate positions and ownership according to who will do the job for the least amount of money
An auction. Yes. Like, perhaps, at a market. Like where people would buy and sell assets they own - their "stock" you could say. A kind of "stock market" if you will.
If that’s too much government interference, then allow the employees to form powerful unions.
So we solve government interference by creating organizations that are intrinsically tied to the government.
primitive capitalism
What does this even mean?
we should have some kind of Honesty Regulation
Tell some undefined "truth" or you're committing a crime? George Orwell would like to see you in the hall.
But in an intensive competition what they do is compete over psychologically manipulating the vulnerable
This is just outlandish and I'm beginning to think I'm being trolled.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I agree with your sentiment wholeheartedly even if it looks like there is some distance between us semantically.
I would also say that your (again, God forbid) wife-in-coma scenario reveals what I believe to be the fact that all humans have a natural impulse towards what we would term faith. It may be utterly a- or even anti-religious and its often poorly developed and formalized, but the innateness of that desire remains. I think it has to to propagate the species. There are certainly times where things look forlorn and all available data might point to hitting your own off button to unalive yourself. You need either a strong intuitive volition to not do that (faith) ... or have the mental acuity of Mr. Big Brain himself Sam Harris to jiu-jitsu rationalize your way into it.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Religious epistemology does not have standards of evidence that satisfy science, or even other secular frameworks, such as law.
I agree. And I am happy about this. I don't think it makes sense to apply the rules of one domain to the evaluation of another. We don't evaluate basketball players with the rules of baseball.
It does tend to have special authorities and sources of knowledge.
Sure does. And I get worried when those authorities interject into other domains. For instance, Pope Francis is a communist and, therefore, I don't really like his political takes.
Religion can iterate and change
Some of them can, some of the chose not to. Much of the time when a big enough change occurs, some subgroup splinters off.
but it tends to be haphazard and so rarely results in more consensus on any given religious concept or interpretations of god’s will—even within one religion.
Building consensus in matters pertaining to the Lord of The Universe? That's how you get a crusade going. Forget consensus, we're looking for Truth (and not in your fiddle-faddle science and law concepts of truth. Space travel and infinite energy? Boring).
Religious beliefs have to be justified via a special religious epistemology because they cannot withstand scrutiny from an actually effective and consistent epistemology. It’s simply special pleading and inconsistent standards backed by tradition.
Again, I see this as essentially saying "Basketball players keep violating the rules of baseball! How dare they!"
You’re making a few major mistakes. One is that “existing methods” is basically “god of the gaps” and it ought to be embarrassing to invoke.
I'm too dumb and unread to know what you're saying here. Please clarify.
Two, “proven nor disproven” is to frame things wrongly. If good evidence sufficient to justify a belief probabilistically can’t be obtained, then saying “well you can’t disprove it so I can maintain my belief” is not a logical stance.
So, if it ain't Bayesian it ain't right? You say I'm framing things wrongly ... but I think you just propose a different frame than mine and then make a value judgement about the "rightness" of my framing. Could you maybe try to make an argument for why your framing is a better overall approach to the subject at hand?
I don’t need to disprove there’s an incorporeal dragon in your garage to dismiss it as extraordinarily unlikely.
Editor's pen here: "I don't need to disprove to dismiss." This is correct. Dismissing is a personal choice and I respect it.
Religious Faith has retreated enormously as science has progressed, because science actually worked no matter what your religion is.
"Worked" .... in which domains? What's the scientific take on the concept of justice?
Unfortunately, “souls” do not exist, unless they are somehow neither matter nor energy.
Say it with me .... Physical ...
The mind is what the brain does
... Materialism.
I understand the attraction of materialist philosophy. If that's your firmly held position, we're just not going to agree and that's fine. I would love your thoughts on the idea of personal responsibility, however.
Similarly, “prayer” as a way to communicate with deity or to seek causal impact or special knowledge is consistently shown to just not be a thing.
So you don't believe I can communicate with a thing you don't believe in. I am shocked, shocked!
The trick that worked for me was examining other religious beliefs and finding them sorely lacking (as encouraged by my religion). Eventually, those critical tools of logic and reason came for my own religious beliefs.
So you debugged the program from within it, eh? Pure rationalism triumphs.
I can't buy it. One thing even the most religious and most ... good at logic people ... agree on is that humans are emotional beings prone to all sorts of self serving cognitive failures. I'll admit that my belief in the Magical Sky Man is cooky but it somehow seems a better premise than 'I solved my own brain with my brain"
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Biden's rules will drown Detroit in a bathtub.
No, it will be a bathtub of blood. A bath of blood. A bloodbath.
It's going to be a bloodbath.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
Religious faith is believing things not based on evidence.
I respectfully disagree. This is a common strawman of "faith". Allow me to offer a better definition;
Faith is believing in something that can neither be proven nor disproven with existing methods.
Religious faith applies this to transcendental concepts.
Now, of course, making decisions and casting judgments based wholly on religious faith creates problems, especially in a pluralistic democracy. That's a different discussion. I'm scoping my comments only to a beginning definition of "faith."
The keen among you might realize that this definition of faith covers things that aren't explicitly religious. "Gut feelings", "intuition" and the like. I happen to agree with you. In fact, I believe that all humans must exercise some level and version of small-f "faith" in order to function. A purely rational optimization pattern of thought would make it impossible to get out of bed in the morning ("which foot should I put on the floor first, should I wait another 7 minutes to get up to optimize my post REM wakefulness, is there too much or too little light in the room")
Blind faith - believing in something despite contradictory evidence or simply never even allowing that evidence to enter into your calculations - is bad and exists in myriad domains outside of religious faith. Currently, there's a lot of it in politics. It's a common human cognitive failing based on confirmation bias and the need for belief-decision-identity consistency.
True faith (and True Faith) is a demanding epistemic situation. You have to hold multiple things in your head at once;
- I believe X
- I cannot prove X
- X cannot be disproven
- Y, which may directly contradict X, is also a possibility, but I deem it less probable than X
- Points 2 and 3 may or may not also apply to Y, and Z, and A, and B
- I choose to retain my belief in X, knowing that points 2 - 5 still apply and may, in fact, apply infinitely regressively.
Faith is not for the feeble of mind yet must only be held with a poverty of spirit (read: poverty of passion).
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
I mean, at some point you can't just keep feeling better with life adjustments. There are totally sober, in shape people with zero financial worries who are depressed.
Nevertheless, the best, longest lasting, and simplest ways to level up (in ascending order):
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Exercise. Start doing something you like (rock climbing, pickleball, softball (non beer league), whatever...) to build the habit. Then, use that habit to move to something maybe a little less intrinsically enjoyable, but more challenging (traditional weight lifting, etc.)
-
Diet. This doesn't mean diet as in "losing weight" but just being intentional about what you eat. Generally, people in developed countries eat crap most of the time or have very unstable eating patterns (binge to semi-starve cycles. For instance, "girl dinner" meme). You can really improve energy consistency and mood stability by building your own diet through experimentation. You find out what you're more sensitive to in the carbs/protein/fat breakdown and how different type of hunger hit you (yes, there are different types of hunger impulses). The only prescriptive advice I'll offer is that refined sugar seriously is the Devil.
-
Sleep. Simple to design and plan for, hard as hell to execute. There's no way around it; create and stick to a consistent sleep schedule. Some people need 6,7,8,9. Most people don't need more, everyone suffers with 5 or less over a long period of time. Polyphasic has always fascinated me and I'd love to commit to it, but I don't have that ability with current career. Sleep disruptors are as bad as sugars - put your phone in another room, no screentime at least 30 min before bed, don't drink.
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Social life that isn't stressful or require management. One of the most "holy shit" things I've seen in the past few years as my friends have started to move into middle marriage (first kids, heading towards mid 30s and 40s) is how often one or other of the spouses will start to turn into a Professional Social Lifer. Calendars booked months in advance, complex logistical scenarios for transportation to and from, several different apps used to build invites, procure gifts, create agendas, fucking prepared outfits for the other spouse. It is all, ostensibly, just "hanging out with friends" but it's really about creating the Instagram representation of career/family/social-ness to present to others. It's already obvious that in many cases, these kind of couples are heading to divorce. Anyways, what you want to do is develop a core group of friends that's always down for a casual hangout. Forgive the term, but you want a group of drinking buddies. On top of that, add in some activity specific groups - gym buddies, hiking buddies, car repair buddies ... whatever you choose. Then, you can be sort of opportunistic for making new friends through these groups plus your career. If you have a spouse, you've just squared (I.e. to the power of 2'ed) your options.
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Find and cultivate perfect self-actualization. Instructions unclear on this one, I'm sitting beneath trees and walking through deserts working on it, though.
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
This is a major issue with a lot of Christian writing in that it uses a lot of densely loaded language as well as assuming the audience is already hip to that language. The first time I read Poverty of Spirit by Metz, I thought, "this is woo-woo nonsense." Now, it lives as first among equals of my non-scripture / non-catechism prayer aids.
When the lay person reads sentences like "Christ calls us to open our heart to him so that we may more fully live in his Truth" it easy to eyeroll.exe. I won't expand this post to cover that larger topic. Let's get back to the steelman task.
You will get what you ask for in prayer because built in to genuine, honest, and devoted prayer is praying for the right thing. Prayer is a process with hundreds of subroutines, and one of them is praying for clarity in identifying the true and right object of prayer.
Say you are having trouble paying your bills, obviously you would start by praying for more money. Well, more money is not an end in itself. You would use the money to pay your bills. Well, ok, the envelopes with the big red letter stop showing up, what does that actually mean? It means you have less anxiety. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. The end you're after is reduced anxiety, more confidence in the future, hope ... faith (oh, look at that!). So then you start praying for a more well ordered object, specifically; faith that, with the help of God, you will find a just and honest solution to your bill problem that will allow you to reduce anxiety and build your capital-H hope in yourself, your life, and, as always, God.
That outcome you will receive through repeated devoted prayer. Is it a trick of mental exercise? Is it just heavily ceremonial Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Well, let's not turn the Sunday thread into more than it ought to be. (short answer: No. longer answer: Fuck no and the CBT people stole a bunch of their stuff from many different faith's prayer traditions.)
The main point here is that the sentence "And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith" builds in the assumption that you're praying for the right thing and that you are honest and genuine in your prayer for it (panic praying isn't good). More explicitly, the right thing is some version or compound of the core virtuous; Faith, Hope, and Charity (sometimes "Love" is substituted for Charity)
100ProofTollBooth
1mo ago
76 Days sober.
Jan 1 - present.
I didn't have a rock bottom moment or full on dependency, but I was undoubtedly drinking far too much and for not good reasons. My estimate is somewhere just north of 1,000 drinks for 2023.
Expected: Energy, mood, discipline, mental health all far,far better. Everyone says this and it is true.
Unexpected: Quitting was easier than I thought. After day 10, I felt genuinely confident I could maintain sobriety. After day 20, I started to feel proud. After day 30, I actively started thinking about how much it would suck to relapse. After day 50 .... I just don't think about drinking anymore. I've been to dinners, bars, and hangouts with friends where everyone else was drinking and have had to turn down offers multiple times in one night. It just hasn't been hard. This was very unexpected.
There have been zero downsides. Social life hasn't suffered. A (minor) additional unexpected - the number of people who genuinely give you a "Good for you" style response and mean it. Some of these people, I think, may be struggling themselves.
Agree with other replies but will offer one counterexample; to the extent they still exist, actual cowboys tend to have almost comically good physiques. The buff-but-not-puffy bodies to maybe "just" extremely wire-y (I.e. very trim or cut with ropey muscles).
My theory is that the specific nature of range work means that cowboys can't afford to tote around extra weight all day, so they naturally develop a leaner body composition, yet, the power / strength activities of handling livestock also mean they don't fall into marathon runner levels of non-muscle.
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