Felagund
1yr ago
This feels to me a like a sort of post I don't like seeing others make. It's criticizing our common outgroup (generally speaking), progressives, and is kind of just irritated. It doesn't provide too much more value or insight than "hey, bad thing happened over there." I agree with it, of course, being its author, but I want to do better. Any thoughts about how I could talk about the same topic, while holding the same view, in a better way? Or is the answer just find other things to bring up?
Felagund
1yr ago
I don't think this is right. Or if it is, the "on a deep level" is doing all the work there.
It really isn't that difficult to believe that water was changed to wine or that Jesus was born to a virgin when you keep in mind that Christians believe that God is omnipotent.
And I was about to cite the passage of 1 Corinthians on the Resurrection, before I saw that I had been preempted.
Felagund
1yr ago
Also, I was wrong, it wasn't Ecclesiastes but actually Hosea, which is certainly pre-Greek. (this is what I get for going with vibes instead of checking)
Felagund
1yr ago
You can see the artist at the bottom (Magali Villeneuve), but that doesn't mean that the artist didn't have orders from above.
Felagund
1yr ago
Right, it would have been much better if they or the Rings of Power people had done it in a way that they could justify. Caring deeply about the internal consistency of Tolkien's world is important, and if they are going to make changes (which, of course, is not preferable), it would be best if they cared enough about what they're doing to do it in a way that makes sense and that they can defend.
Felagund
1yr ago
In the case of race-swapping everyone, I would still probably mind, but I think I would mind less, since it's shows more respect for the overall world, I think, by keeping things working in a relatively consistent manner. Maybe it would be a less egregious, but more far-reaching change.
Felagund
1yr ago
I think I'm not easily seeing a way to categorize it into your categories if they just think that representation of minorities is good, and care about that more than faithfulness to the source material. People can do bad things in a non-selfish, non-vindictive way. And that's at least a possibility of what's going on here behind the scenes.
Felagund
1yr ago
The respectable protestant intellectual tradition is still around, it's just a bit smaller. You see splinter groups from the mainline branch—OPC from the PCUSA, ACNA from TEC, LCMS from ELCA (I think? although is LCMS bigger?), etc.
Felagund
1yr ago
Is it basically the same post, though? Same target, still kind of derogatory, but this time it looks like he's actually making arguments.
If I read it correctly, his argument is as follows:
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A decent amount of Aella's following is probably due to sex appeal
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People who are following people due to sex appeal are probably in worse marriages on average
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The people in the polls probably disproportionately consist of people following Aella
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Conclusion: the people in Aella's polls probably have worse marriages than average
And then (the step further)
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It seems plausible that consuming Aella's content might hurt marriages
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The people in her survey seem in kind of a worse state than one would expect
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Maybe stay a little further away from Aella if you want a healthy marriage
(Okay, this was presented significantly less after the manner of a syllogism than the first)
This second part seems less well supported, and since it follows the data the opposite way from the first set, it might be hard to disambiguate effects (how can we tell the direction of causation here? How do we even know that there is a difference, aside from anecdata and a priori sorts of things?).
It wasn't exactly the most courteous way of saying things, but there was definitely more substance to this than in the linked post (well, the directly linked one. His further reply had more depth, but wasn't quite saying the same things as this post, if I'm reading it rightly).
Felagund
1yr ago
I'm curious about how this relates to biblical institutions with similar qualities. There appear to be at least two things of that sort: levirate marriage, and maidservants, who would have children in the place of the other wife.
So something like this has been around for a while. That does not, of course, mean that it is great.
Felagund
1yr ago
Just noticed that there's a cool new mod, presumably a bot, posting these posts.
Anyway, I'm college-aged. As I'm imagining is generally the case on the motte, my strengths lie towards intellectual things.
Are there any good professions to look into, where I'll be doing things I'm good at, but where I also would be comparatively unlikely to struggle with job security due to AI in the near future?
Felagund
1yr ago
The fact that the child counts as the offspring of the dead brother, though, seemed analogous—people having sex with the intention of having children but not intending the children to be considered theirs.
Felagund
1yr ago
I'm relatively new to MTG, and mostly play commander, which I think was much smaller then, and might play relatively differently from two player formats, so I don't know exactly what things will be comparable to older sets.
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You certainly don't have any obligation to add planeswalkers to your decks. I wouldn't care for it if I had some in one of mine and you complained, but I don't have any anyway. It's not like they're a vital part of deckbuilding the way that creatures or instants or lands usually are, they're more optional things worth adding if they seem to go well with the deck, like enchantments.
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Well, the actual removing of cards for cultural reasons was in 2020, so pretty recent. I can't speak to how their culture as to what designs were acceptable changed over time, though. Why does this matter?
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I'm not actually familiar with this, I've only bought cheap singles for some commander decks off of tcgplayer, so someone else will have to answer this.
Felagund
1yr ago
I'll have to wholeheartedly agree with the comments of people about the sense of some great past that we now have only remnants of. Tolkien's really good at writing nostalgia. But then that also heightens what remnants we do have. Elrond, who has walked the earth for thousands of years, is lord of Rivendell, and the older still Galadriel of Lothlorien. Gondor still stands, the sons of the men of Numenor, and Aragorn, its heir, we are told is far more like the kings of old than any ruler has been for a long time. The civilizations are fading, a thing of the past, but what is left of them both shows the heights of what the elder days must have been like in middle earth, but also maintain a present dignity of their own. If you eventually decide you like Tolkien's worldbuilding, I can definitely recommend the appendices.
I think the other thing big thing that is a love of the things that are wholesome and honest and good. It is no accident that Tolkien is writing about hobbits, people who live essentially ordinary lives, doing ordinary things, until four of them end up on this journey. And it is no accident that songs occur in the book, even though they might often be seen as a slog by the readers, (and I suppose, often support the previous point), and that the book talks about laughter the way that it does. The hobbits are a homely and a hearty people. The fellowship, being nearly half hobbits, put the humble plainly on a level with the great.
I think it's in light of things of this sort that a lot of the things in Lord of the Rings should be seen. I think the delight in the book is maybe more in the people and peoples who are accomplishing things than in the things they accomplish.
I'm wondering if this could be some of the cause of the stilted dialogue, as you put it. Tolkien is not trying to write the way that we talk. If he were, he would be wretchedly failing. I think he is trying to make it poetic instead, and to give the right feel. Tolkien is attempting to describe characters and a world who delight in friendship and in song and in the good things of life, as they struggle onward with courage and earnestness towards a great danger, and also to portray loftiness, dignity among the great. He's not trying to imitate our world so much as make a better one. (although maybe that's put badly, as I'm quite confident he would think our world better than his.)
I think because of all this, because so much of the value in the book lies in the character of the people and places rather than in the barebones architecture of the plot, that it can be vulnerable to the problems that @OracleOutlook was talking about, and that taking care to not let that happen might help.
Oh, also, I've always found book 4 (the second part of the Two Towers) to be a drag anyway, but it sounds like you're not there yet.
I'll add also that I'm talking about the Lord of the Rings here. The Hobbit is pretty different in tone. There's clearly much less at stake in that—just a quest they're going on vs. a threat to the whole of middle earth.
Let us know if any of our thoughts affects how much you like it once you read a little further!
Felagund
1yr ago
I think it's not just that they're ambitious goals with tricky details, it's also that I'm not even sure we want them, due to opportunity costs.
New cities: what's wrong with the current ones, and why can we expect the new ones to be better? I don't see why this wouldn't just be a big waste of resources.
Flying cars: What is wrong with the current system? Proliferation of private flying cars, if they can be made to work, seem like they could be pretty dangerous, both to the people in it, anyone else in the air, and the people on the ground. Is there a reason that wouldn't be true? I suppose also the numbers would have to be run on how much development costs vs. benefits could be expected to behave.
Rural industries: This will require some care as to what exactly "revitalize rural industries" means. If they are doing economically worse than they should because of government regulations or due to externalities, that's great. But if the market is the cause in an unbiased way, then aiding them is at the cost of better use that that money could be put to elsewhere in the country. Subsidies and similar seem dangerous.
Baby bonuses: this one might be worth it, but the numbers would have to be run.
Beautification campaign: the previous comment was good about there being a somewhat lesser value to ornateness now, although I agree it is uglier. But improving everything would be expensive, and I would imagine it would have to be done judiciously to be worth it. So I suppose here it is more clearly an example of the devil being in the details.
Felagund
1yr ago
Maybe a balance would be wise? Yes, things can just be expanded by an LLM, but if there is a lot to say, more space is often required. If the density is kept high enough, then length is more strongly correlated with value. And length can often filter out low effort comments.
Of course, on the other hand, that does require us to use more to measure quality than just length, and short comments can still be good, as this one hopefully is.
Felagund
1yr ago
cities
Good points about economies of scale and so on, obstruction by the current status quo, and so on. I'd still have to be persuaded whether or not is sufficient to outweigh the infrastructure already built up in cities, but it now doesn't seem entirely pointless.
flying cars
Maybe that's true now, but if flying cars became normal, there would be a much fuller airspace. I would find it hard to believe that that would not adjust the insurance rates. If a sizable amount of the population owned flying vehicles, crashes and near misses would become much more likely. Of course, 3 dimensional space would help, but desired destinations would concentrate traffic, at least at beginnings and ends of flights. There's probably a stronger case for some usage of flying cars making sense than widespread usage.
Rural industries
That's a good point. I suppose that doesn't account for it needing to be rural, but I think you're right.
Baby bonuses
Yes, I think aiming to raise fertility would be good. There might be more effective options, though.
I think the policy recommendations and critiques found in pronatalist.org's FAQ might be worth looking into. (under "what pronatalist policies are most effective")
Among the things mentioned is more doing cultural things. A tax cut gives financial incentives, but doesn't necessarily convey the message it's trying to send on a cultural level very well.
Felagund
1yr ago
But advice that requires a great deal of discernment to know whether it's applicable.
The first two sections of the Silmarillion I found hard to get through. The rest of the Silmarillion I enjoyed much more. But it definitely requires careful reading—continual consulting of the maps and family trees found at the back of the book so as not to get lost between the many people and keep track of their relationships with one another. If this isn't regularly consulted, you will in all likelihood get lost.
The Silmarillion reads much more like a history textbook than does the Lord of the Rings (not a perfect comparison). The style is very different. It's probably comparable to Appendix A of Lord of the Rings, per my recollection. Both are great.
Felagund
1yr ago
You can get other views if you're careful about which subreddits you go to, and you can also find less politicalizable topics (though good luck avoiding it entirely). But even then, the left on Reddit is far more left than the right is right, and subreddits that you would expect from the name might lean rightwards don't necessarily. (see, for example, that the median /r/Christianity voter seems to be pro-LGBT)
As to the effect on the site, I would imagine that it's big enough and has enough information on niche topics that it will stick around. There's no real replacement out there, since forums are no longer as active, and places like discord aren't public to the internet. Reddit remains the best place for certain aspects of what it's trying to do, even if you hate the politics.
Felagund
1yr ago
Yeah, /r/Reformed is the only Christian subreddit I routinely peruse.
Felagund
1yr ago
That seems a plausible factor. Is there any reason to think that it being due in large part to culture (which you mention) is wrong though? I suppose those are compatible, since individual preferences also shape culture.
Felagund
1yr ago
Even then it might not in many cases, since there could be other benefits to having human doctors aside from the ability to provide diagnoses (e.g. human interaction would probably reduce anxiety about whatever illnesses and diagnoses and treatments are occurring).
It looks like tildes.net found out about themotte.
They seem to mostly have negative takes, but that's not terribly surprising.
Edit: I don't know that this in particular is terribly important, but it's good to see that there's some small amount of discovery going on across the internet, in the interest of keeping themotte alive and well. I found this by searching for "themotte" on reddit.
Well, Wizards of the Coast is making Aragorn Black.
This doesn't even make sense storyline wise. What with Aragorn being descended from the kings of Numenor, it's not as if he could be from some distant land. I suppose there is still the possibility that all the Numenoreans are black, but, Arwen's white in the same picture, and she, being the daughter of Elrond, is closely related to the line of the Numenorean kings.
It's clearly for the sake of diversity, but couldn't they just do things in their own intellectual property instead of messing with what belongs to others? There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.
But at least, could they have gone with someone who it would not mess with the backstory, like Gandalf, who has no national origin? I suppose that would make the moniker of "The White" a little ironic, but that's still better than the current state, to me, at least.
This significantly decreased the chance that I get cards from that set. I play, (but I don't spend very much on it), but if this is supposed to appeal to a fanbase, whether to get them to start playing, or get them to spend more, it would probably be wise not to alienate them. Why not put your diversity where it won't hurt your bottom line?
Rings of Power had some questionable things racewise (and a whole lot more unquestionably bad things in other domains), but at least it wasn't doing this.
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