Entelecheia
1yr ago
Goodbye to one of the last great men of Christian Europe, an apostle of being to a nihilistic world, and one of the few contemporaneous people I look to as a genuine example for my life. I am sad that he is no longer with us, but more sad for us than for him. For as the pagans recognized, "all who have duly purified themselves by philosophy...pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough." (Plato, Phaedo)
I'm not sure if this needs a statement of culture-war relevance, but Benedict XVI is the closest person I can think of in our age to really living out the west's classical paradigm of an excellent human life: to be a wise, cultured, orthodox Christian gentleman. The value of this paradigm will likely be discussed and debated within the coming days.
In truth--one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone--the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness. From this point of view, it is possible to understand why the Old Testament has only one word for hell and death, the world sheol; it regards them as ultimately identical. Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is--hell.
This brings us back to our starting point, the article of the Creed that speaks of the descent into hell. This article thus asserts that Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness, that in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it. Now only deliberate self-enclosure is hell or, as the Bible calls it, the second death (Rev 20:14, for example). But death is no longer the path into icy solitude; the gates of sheol have been opened.
(Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity)
Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.
We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.
(Ratzinger, homily, Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice, 18 April 2005)
I have a very annoying medical mystery that I would appreciate some help with. I've had acne since my adolescence, not just whiteheads but the uncomfortable hard ball underneath the skin, and my nose would get very red and inflamed. I had no idea how to get rid of it and tried lots of dermatological interventions that did not do much. A couple years ago I was experimenting with ways to improve my athletic performance and tried a carnivore diet (only beef). I was surprised to discover that the acne and redness completely went away almost immediately.
Since then I have eaten a diet of mostly beef and a few other very simple things (a starchy carb like potatoes, some basic green vegetables, even some dairy now and then). When I'm on this diet, my skin is pretty much clear. When I try to introduce other things, even very basic ones, it tends to lead to a big problem. I tested some salmon last Friday and am currently dealing with another one of those hard balls that I otherwise never get.
Based on the testing I've done over the past 2 years or so, I am completely confident that this is related to food. It only occurs when I deviate from the basic diet that I have confirmed works for me. The difference is visible and dramatic.
I need to find a better solution than just eating beef for the rest of my life. It's expensive, a hassle, makes traveling and socialization difficult, and I'm not sure how healthy it is for me in the long term. But I have not been able to find any medical or scientific knowledge related to this phenomenon. It seems like I'm dealing with some kind of highly idiosyncratic intolerance to vast groups of food and nobody knows what might have caused this or how to help with it. Is there any medical specialty or institute that might be able to help me get to the bottom of this?
Note that the only other human you have mentioned in your description of your quality of life is your child. The rest of it is all stuff. SUVs, guns, fences. If that’s what you care about, American suburbs have a lot to offer you. For people who want to experience natural and spontaneous human connection (that you don’t have to fight against the environment of huge yards and parking lots to obtain), they don’t, and most of the cities don’t either.
Entelecheia
9mo ago
Yeah, I'm getting to the point where I just can't stand the crushing boredom and isolation anymore even though my tech salary would take a big hit to emigrate. The stuff you listed is table stakes for living in any number of European capitals so it makes my current approach (tough it out in US HCOL to make more money but spend a lot of it on rent and cars and be miserable) feel like I'm getting scammed. Maybe I'll try it for a year and see how it goes.
Philosophical classical theism along the lines articulated initially by the high metaphysical philosophers of ancient Greece would be the main alternative. Christianity is a synthesis of the scriptural tradition and this philosophy, but the philosophy itself is not inherently connected with any particular religion. In fact it was developed initially in opposition to the prevailing pagan religious mentality as a more pure and theoretically coherent conception of what we might call an absolute, unconditioned reality than the gods portrayed in the Homeric myths. This tradition developed arguments for the existence of said absolute, unconditioned reality that are much stronger (taken on their own terms) than many people are aware of or give credit for. In particular, refined versions of the cosmological argument - as opposed to popular apologetics versions - are very strong.
I say "taken on their own terms" because they require a fairly robust conception of the metaphysical enterprise to get off the ground - that is, the idea that metaphysical concepts describe real features of the real world. This ability of metaphysics to grasp real features of the world is what enables the inference from effect to cause even in the case of inferring a supersensible and transcendent cause for a sensible and physical effect. In contrast, if one believes that metaphysical concepts have to do with the way we think but not the way things are - so that causation is a question of how we organize and conceptualize phenomena rather than a real mind-independent relation between beings as such - then we cannot use causation to infer the real existence of something beyond what we could possibly experience.
I am still a novice in these matters but I suspect that this kind of meta-philosophical controversy is why theism remains controversial today in philosophy. In other words it's not coincidental, or due to anything like social pressure or force, that the whole philosophical world was theistic until relatively recently. Within a "realist" metaphysical framework of the kind that the ancient Greek philosophers are the chief examples, theism more or less tends to be the natural conclusion, and that framework is what is called into question today.
That's not to say that there aren't still controversies over the validity of theistic arguments even within that framework. The technical issues in the arguments are complicated and difficult. However this shift may explain, from a historical perspective related to the general philosophical atmosphere, the differences in the baseline perception of plausibility of theism and atheism.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?
I'd say that if you diligently investigate the merit of classical philosophical theism then you should arrive at a place where you consider it philosophically formidable and worthy of respect if not actually true. The best introduction to this tradition that doesn't require you spending an inordinate amount of time reading Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas is probably Edward Feser, who has a couple books that distill a lot of the classical argumentation into a more approachable format.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I was ok with "safe, legal and rare"
I mean, we were never okay with that. So it seems like this is less about "mask off" and more that we just started winning for once, and then people who don't like that noticed and decided to react accordingly.
So from our perspective, we can either (1) do nothing and lose every battle, or (2) do something and win some battles but cause people who disagree with us to push back and potentially lose some or all of what we won.
2 seems strictly optimal in comparison with 1.
Probably the most compelling example of a UFO encounter, the Nimitz incident, has multiple corroborating sources of information (sensors and human visual identification) suggesting behavior outside the bounds of known technology. From Fravor's testimony:
The air controller on the ship also had no idea but had been observing these objects on their Aegis combat system for the previous 2 weeks. They had been descending from above 80,000ft and coming rapidly down to 20,000ft would stay for hours and then go straight back up...
As all 4 looked down we saw a small white Tic Tac shaped object with the longitudinal axis pointing N/S and moving very abruptly over the white water. There were no Rotors, No Rotor wash, or any visible flight control surfaces like wings. ... As we pulled nose onto the object at approximately ½ of a mile with the object just left of our nose, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared right in front of our aircraft. Our wingman, roughly 8,000ft above us, also lost visual.
As we turned back towards our CAP point, roughly 60 miles east, the air controller let us know that the object had reappeared on the Princeton’s Aegis SPY 1 radar at our CAP point. This Tic Tac Object had just traveled 60 miles in a very short period of time (less than a minute)...
We returned to Nimitz and mentioned what we had witnessed to one of my crews who were getting ready to launch. It was that crew that took the now famous approximately 90 second video that was released by the USG in 2017...
Here you have 4 people (the original crew, Fravor et al) and radar and the FLIR video the second flight crew took (after the object appeared to go 60 miles in under a minute), all indicating that something very strange is happening. Obviously that doesn't prove it's aliens, but I think it makes the sensor glitch/camera smudge theory untenable given the multiple independent systems that interacted with the object.
I’m a SWE making big tech rates. But I am early in my career, have a huge amount of student debt from bad decisions I made in the past, am paying a lot of rent, and kind of hate working and want to retire fast. So it’s not actually over my budget or anything but it doesn’t feel good because I’d rather invest that money to get out of the system faster than spend it on something that feels like a waste. That said the high rent is definitely more of a burden than the car expense.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
Are you sure the constraints on science are not actually constraints of reality?
Yes? If only what is scientifically demonstrable is knowable, then we have no way of knowing that science is a valid source of knowledge, because a scientific demonstration of the validity of scientific knowledge would be circular.
these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them.
But this person says that "I want abortion available as an option". We don't. To the extent this is directional agreement, it seems quite weak and not really worth preserving at the expense of giving up on our actual policy goals. I guess you could say we might be alienating people who are willing to agree to a 20 week abortion ban or something, but not an earlier one, and sure, that's possible, but I'd just say the terms of that compromise are unacceptable to me so that's okay.
So, fair, my initial statement might have been a bit of an oversimplification.
The problem with this position is that it's precisely contraception that enables people to think about sex in a way that makes abortion seem desirable. As long as sex is something that is done primarily for fun, and only incidentally, sometimes, if it's desired, for procreation, then the "what if the contraception fails" argument for abortion will always loom large in the background.
Now one might respond to this point with resignation, "the cat's out of the bag", but the point is that this cat creates a gravitational pull toward liberal abortion laws. Because when you have a culture of people who believe they are entitled to have sex for fun, it doesn't work to tell them, "if you forget to take your pill, or if the condom breaks, etc. etc. then sorry, you're out of luck, you have to have that child." That runs totally contrary to the way they understand sex and so it seems unlikely to me that they will accept that state of affairs. Why should they have to give up that entitlement to consequence-free sex and accept a dramatic change to their lifestyle simply because they made a little slip-up one time?
So sure, who knows, maybe we'll never be able to undo the sexual revolution...but in that case I really don't see how we'll ever shift the landscape conceptually and fundamentally away from abortion, such that abortion loses its gravitational pull. Success, if it's obtained through political wizardry, would always be an unstable imposition on a culture that would naturally incline the other way.
Entelecheia
6mo ago
Most of my English speaking friends have switched to remote working for American companies
Do they make American salaries? I'm an American developer but I don't like living here. I dream of moving somewhere like France or Spain. But the wage disparity is so high that it is hard to justify. If there is a way to make a US salary and live there, that would be perfect.
Entelecheia
7mo ago
I got Windows auto HDR to work with it by copying the executable, renaming the copy to farcry5.exe, and setting the steam launch settings to
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Starfield\farcry5.exe" %command%
Entelecheia
8mo ago
Have you spoken with a dermatologist in person?
I have, but I guess only before I discovered the dietary "cure". But I tried lots and lots of creams, gels, antibiotics, etc up to but not including accutane and some of it worked okay but the diet change blew all of that out of the water. I could try again, but from some basic research I don't have a ton of confidence that the sense that dermatology knows much about the food-acne connection yet, and even if it did, my reaction seems abnormal and idiosyncratic and not along the lines of "okay, sugar and/or dairy may influence acne" that I've read in articles here and there.
Could you have rosacea?
I think they've used that term for it before, yeah.
It was a good movie but I did not like it as much as John Wick 4 or the previous MI movies, maybe it is just action movie fatigue setting in.
I thought it was noticeably worse than 6 and 5. The plot did not seem compelling and was hard to follow. The character decisions were bizarre, specifically the sidelining of a quite captivating female lead character in favor of a less interesting and more annoying substitute. The spectacle at least was fun, so there's that, but overall it was missing the other factors that make Mission Impossible feel like a fun adventure you get immersed in, rather than just a sequence of cool set pieces you're looking at.
The places that are most well designed to further spontaneous interaction with relatively normal and stable people like Boston or NYC are some of the most exorbitantly expensive places in the whole country. So clearly there is much more demand for that sort of lifestyle than there is supply of housing to accommodate it, which suggests that’s a luxury too.
The commenter above has a wife and a kid. What does he need to find out in the wild, another wife?
Community and making new friends. Or are you supposed to just be done with that once you have a wife and kids?
Entelecheia
9mo ago
That seems plausible - too much demand for housing in safe, clean, walkable areas and not enough supply so the rent is through the roof.
I’m not sure what you’re objecting to in the statement you quoted. There’s nothing spontaneous about having to drive for an hour to see people, so it sounds like you’re agreeing rather than disagreeing, you just don’t mind it. If you’re okay with that, that’s fine. I’m not. But I’m not agitating for some sort of political change that would require you to live differently. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to live the kind of life I want to live.
Entelecheia
9mo ago
driving is a strictly superior means of transit for distances over a mile or so
Strictly superior to what? Walking? Sure, but that's because long-distance walking can be tiring, not because driving itself better than other modes of non-walking transit. To safe and well-kept public transportation of the kind that exists in, say, Switzerland? If your destination is along a rail route then that seems false, because you can sit and do what you want to do instead of having to keep your attention on the road, and you don't need to find a parking space, you just get off the train. If it's not then that's an argument for better rail coverage.
If you're talking about non-urban locations where there isn't enough demand for infrastructure to build sufficient rail coverage, then sure, driving is a fine option for that.
Probably Five Proofs for the Existence of God. I thought that one was fantastic and pretty easily digestible. It also doesn't aim too high, it's not trying to make you a Catholic, just a theist.
Since you have more experience with the classics than I realized, let me say - I have been reading through a series called A History of Ancient Philosophy by Giovanni Reale. It's translated from Italian in a way that leaves it a little difficult to get through at times, but if you can manage, it's a major hidden gem that connects and unifies the strands of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the Neoplatonists into a profoundly satisfying narrative centered around Plato's discovery of supersensible being as the fulcrum of classical thought. Very long but very strongly recommended if you have an appetite for that sort of thing, some of the best philosophical work I've ever seen.
The theists making arguments in this thread seem to consider "What observations of reality indicate that your beliefs are true?" some sort of crazy question that shouldn't bear any weight as to whether their beliefs are true.
Well, we might reasonably think that the relevant question should be "What evidence indicates that your beliefs are true?" - the prickliness you're experiencing is a suspicion that saying "observations of reality" rather than a more generic term like "evidence" might amount to smuggling in an assumption about the validity or non-validity of certain forms of evidence with the effect of arbitrarily ruling out valid arguments.
There are plenty of theistic arguments from the history of philosophy that are interesting and worth thinking about. They cannot really said to be narrowly observational in nature; that's not to say they don't depend on certain observations, but the observation they rely on will be something like "There exists at least one contingent being," and the essential content of the argument is deriving what logically follows from the existence of such a contingent being based on an analysis of contingency, necessity, and causation, embodied in metaphysical principles like the principle of sufficient reason, ultimately aiming to establish that contingent being implies necessary being.
So in a strictly precise sense, the theist would respond to your question with: any observation at all indicates that my beliefs are true, because any observation is an observation of a contingent thing, and (the theist argues) the existence of any contingent thing ultimately entails the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality that explains the being of the observed contingent thing, and the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality is what theists are trying to establish.
The exact chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion is not something I've set out here, both because I'm just trying to explain how the argument works to clarify the basic sort of claim that is being made, and because my philosophy is a bit rusty so I probably couldn't explain it here remotely as well as an academic work on the subject. I recognize that tends to kill discussion because who wants to be told to go get a book on something, but oh well.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
It means that if we have any knowledge of anything, then we can be sure those are not the actual constraints of reality. Either our item of knowledge K is not scientifically verifiable, in which case the point is proved, or it is scientifically verifiable, in which case in order to count as knowledge, the scientific method must be known to be reliable, which cannot happen by scientific verification.
Entelecheia
1yr ago
I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted
I don't think this is true unless you mean on the level of popular discourse. As a theoretical matter, I don't think New Atheist argumentation was ever particularly respected in, say, the world of academic philosophy, which is dominated by atheists, so it's not a question of bias. And the need to respond to New Atheism prompted a re-engagement with classical philosophy among religious thinkers - see people like Edward Feser - that made their position much more theoretically defensible and less vulnerable to New Atheist arguments.
If you mean as a popular matter, then sure, I could see people thinking (incorrectly) that that whole episode sort of settled all these questions, because the sophisticated religious response to their claims turned out to be rather less of a popular phenomenon than the original claims were.
There is a lot of paper wealth in the US but if you want to buy back a comparable quality of life to a middle class European (i.e., live in a safe, walkable, clean city with good public transit and little crime or disorderly behavior) a lot of it evaporates pretty fast, so the differential ends up being less than it looks on paper. I could be wrong but my sense is that there's just about one city in the US that meets those specifications and it's Boston (very expensive).
If you can compromise on one or more of those factors (safe, walkable, clean), then yeah you can make and save some money here at the cost of potentially living the "American lifestyle" (commuting and driving everywhere with all the cost, time-sinks, and social alienation that entails), which may or may not be a problem for you. NYC is I guess decently safe in a statistical sense and walkable, but not clean. A lot of others are safe and clean but not walkable, and there are cities that are walkable but not particularly safe.
I'm seriously considering leaving the US for London for this reason.
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