Felagund
7mo ago
Fair. I imagine offering a good product would probably be a good selling point for an insurance company, but that might not hold up if there's not enough competition (see, especially, if it's provided by workplaces), or if consumers prospectively (rather than looking back) prefer lower prices and better-sounding promises to actually good coverage.
Felagund
7mo ago
Does the fact that this is insurance, rather than, say, a drug company make a difference in that?
(I do agree that there are a bunch of ways that our health care system is bad.)
Felagund
7mo ago
Liberalism, historically, meant something more like libertarianism (though probably a little less anarcho-capitalist than libertarians will get). It is sometimes still used in that sense. You'll see people calling themselves classical liberals from time to time, and these are pretty much always right-leaning people.
Felagund
7mo ago
Look into the old-style Protestant denominations. Not the mainlines, those are all got captured by the liberals, and most of the conservatives fled. And the evangelical megachurches won't have the sturdiness you're looking for. But look at an OPC, URCNA, PCA (though a bit less trad) and several others in the Reformed world, and LCMS or WELS for things in the Lutheran world. There's also ACNAs for anglicans, but my sense is that they're more hit-or-miss. (If you direct message me your area, I could look up some maps and find you some local churches.)
Why? I could get into details of theology, but I don't get the sense that that's currently the sort of thing that you care about. But the institutional Protestant denominations are certainly more American of a thing than e.g. Eastern Orthodoxy, if that matters to you at all. I imagine it's worth looking at, at least.
The publication that James Lindsay hoaxed, American Reformer, is actually pretty great. (See, for example, this recent gem.) You'll probably have trouble finding Protestant churches that are quite as based as American Reformer, but you should certainly be able to find some that are solid, if you know where to look.
I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?
Ideally, nation-scale repentance and belief, that expresses itself in reformation of life. Love of God and neighbor. Zealousness for good works. Piety. Striving to put to death the sin within us.
If you mean to ask whether your turn towards Christianity is legit, well, it sounds like you're not just doing it for the cultural benefits (you think God might exist). There's more to Christianity than the bare fact that God exists, but that's certainly a start.
I do affirm though, that our thoughts would suffice to send us to hell—Jesus is pretty clear, for example, that lusting breaks the law against adultery—but for those in Christ, his death atones for our sins.
Felagund
7mo ago
I can consider myself Christian intellectually, but except through a miracle I will never be able to have the true faith that others have, and my little faith will never console me or sustain me against the secular gods that I worship despite myself. So it goes. I can only try to do better for the next generation.
Well, fortunately, if you consider yourself a Christian intellectually, then miracles are possible.
Felagund
7mo ago
American Reformer, the publication he went after, is great, and fairly serious (fairly niche, though).
My sense is that there is genuinely some shift towards Christianity. Certainly some of those are only memeing, but not all.
Felagund
7mo ago
Why would it be any less than in any other situation? Wouldn't the usual arguments on behalf of capitalism apply here?
Felagund
7mo ago
I haven't seen it myself (thankfully), but it looks like people are saying that it's Destiny and we don't know who the other guy is.
Kind of disappointing. Killing off Fuentes' influence woud have been nice, and without something stronger, I don't know that this will be enough.
Felagund
7mo ago
Are you really suggesting that, in the example I suggested, you'd have equal crime rates?
Felagund
7mo ago
But that's just not true. If we imagine that there's only a 50% chance of getting caught, there'd be a vast different in attempts with a 1 week cap on sentences vs. a 1 year cap on sentences, I'd think?
Felagund
7mo ago
Am I remembering correctly that @ZorbaTHut is a dev for video games? If that's right, he might have opinions on the things in this thread.
Felagund
7mo ago
Felagund
7mo ago
If you want an easy explanation of why they should be told, I know pro-trans activism likes to talk about elevated rates of suicide among people with gender dysphoria/trans people (even though suicide is a social contagion, and we elsewhere try to avoid doing that, but whatever). Do you not think that parents should know that their child is in a group with a vastly higher suicide rate?
Felagund
7mo ago
What life advice do you have?
(Yes, this is a very generic question. Make it as narrow or broad as you like. It does not at all need to be tailored to me.)
Felagund
7mo ago
If you know people well enough that you think that you've found something that fits what they like, and that they would buy, but they don't know about, that's good too. But that can be tricky to do.
Felagund
7mo ago
I find it interesting that you put flat earth in a different category than a fusion-powered sun.
Anyway, I think there are clearly at least some voluntary components to religions, which are plainly choices. Religious people do also talk about having struggling with doubts.
But yeah, Christians do literally think that God died and was resurrected 2000 years ago. Doesn't mean that that's always going to be fully internalized, of course, but we do think that. If you asked a Christian "Was there someone 2000 years ago named Jesus, who was crucified?" "Did Jesus rise from the dead?" "Was Jesus God?" I think you'll generally get some pretty sincere yeses, especially if you ask the questions in that order.
Felagund
7mo ago
Presumably some teachers think wearing Goth clothing leads to some things they disapprove of (Satan worship, depression, arson, whatever) but they would still be rightly reprimanded if they called home about these things.
I guess I don't really see a problem with informing parents of that either.
If parents want to impose some special conditions under which their students are watched, that's something for private and not public school, which should cater to the general public as decided by the government's education department.
I imagine the relevant component to you isn't the government's education department? That is, if they decided that the guideline was that parents should be informed, it seems like you'd be disappointed, not happy that they're catering to the will of the general public.
Felagund
7mo ago
What would a "relatively neutral" presentation look like to you? How positive would things be posed as?
Felagund
7mo ago
Maybe see if you can find out from Trace what the old questions were?
I'd be interested in knowing religious composition, and whether the person is a convert to that tradition.
If someone would consider themselves a rationalist, rat-adjacent, rat-adjacent-adjacent, etc.—how many degrees people are out.
Whether/how many people on here they've met.
What other social media people use.
What their social security and credit card numbers are.
Find a list of questions, and then instruct people to answer a bunch of questions in a section with the answer they think most likely to be the most popular option (so, a Keynesian beauty contest), or, if you prefer, choose a prolific user, and have people try to answer what that person would answer. But people would want to see their results for that one, might be tricky.
What's one old user they wish were began frequenting this place again or were unbanned.
Number of siblings (and where in order). Number of children.
Felagund
8mo ago
He likes data, and is good at stats. Here's his substack: https://www.cremieux.xyz
Felagund
8mo ago
In practice, though, disparate impact is often used not only for concealed racism, but for any policies that does not produce the desired ratios, where desired means "at least as many nonwhites as the population that we're drawing from." But that can mean that simple hiring based on competence means that people can fall below the definitely-not-quotas, and so they would be legally vulnerable.
In theory, it's a nice feature to capture concealed racism. In practice, it's a generic cudgel that can be used to punish ordinary behavior, should you get out of line. And legally (assuming we're talking about Title VI here), it's a complete fabrication, and is used to make people break the text of the law itself.
The term, I believe, is mottizen, from denizen.
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