HereAndGone
2mo ago
Well, I'm taking "pro-single motherhood" to mean "don't have an abortion, have the baby" even if giving it up for adoption. The lesser of two evils. I wish Alexander would be clearer about what he intends to communicate, rather than just flinging some insults around.
Well, we got free love and contraception and abortion and divorce, and there are still plenty of prostitutes in London, and seemingly increasing amounts of young women selling sex for cash as a signal of empowerment or something. Schopenhauer plainly could not envision OnlyFans.
I do wonder where he got that figure, and who he was including in that. Did he mean "if only men could marry several women, there would be fewer women having to sell sex to survive"? Or did he mean "if living together without marriage was tolerated, many of these women would be in stable relationships"? Because uh, we got that, and we still have prostitution, escort work, sex work, porn, etc.
EDIT: Yeah, looking it up a little, those figures seem debatable. Schopenhauer could be including "poor women who sold sex from time to time, women living in irregular unions, women in temporary relationships" and the likes:
Although London police reports recorded there to be approximately 8,600 prostitutes known to them, it has been suggested that the true number of women prostituting during this time was closer to 80,000 (Rogers).
During the Victorian Age, prostitution did not subscribe to any one tradition; some women lived in brothels, some with soldiers or sailors, and some worked on the streets. Judith Walkowitz, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, highlights the different avenues available to prostitutes in her book Prostitution and Victorian Society. The most common form of prostitution during this time was streetwalking. Women who performed this act were most commonly those who supplemented their daily income with money they could earn by prostituting on occasion, but there were also some who used streetwalking as their primary source of income.
...During the Victorian Age, the number of prostitutes who actually lived in brothels was considerably low. Despite this, customers that behaved inappropriately towards the prostitutes that did inhabit such places were normally unappreciated and unwelcome (Walkowitz, 23-25)
I would tend to go with the police estimate for "prostitutes who are street walkers or in brothels" rather than "80,000 genuine no other income or relationship prostitutes". The link for the 80,000 figure seems to go "I got this from Rogers" "Hi I'm Rogers and I got this from Mayhew" and where did Mayhew get it?
To understand the mid-Victorian perception of prostitution we must appreciate the scale of the concern. Mayhew tells us that in 1857 there were 8,600 prostitutes in London known to the police but that the true number may have been nearer to 80,000 (Mayhew p. 476).
Mayhew, H. London Labour and the London Poor. Penguin, London 1985
Digging that one up gives me this source:
To show how difficult it is to give from any data at present before the public anything like a correct estimate of the number of prostitutes in London, we may mention (extracting from the work of Dr Ryan) that while the Bishop of Exeter asserted the number of prostitutes in London to be 80,000, the City Police stated to Dr Ryan that it did not exceed 7,000 to 8,000. About the year 1793 Mr Colquhoun, a police magistrate, concluded, after tedious investigations, that there were 50,000 prostitutes in this metropolis. At that period the population was one million, and as it is now more than double we may form some idea of the extensive ramifications of this insidious vide.
And here I stop, because I am not going to chase down Dr Ryan and the Bishop of Exeter.
But another writer cautions that Mayhew is not the most accurate for data:
Mayhew seems not to have corrected the errors in his text, even when he was willing to acknowledge them. (The long list of errata at the end of Vol. I is mostly taken up by inaccurate calculations.) E. P. Thompson’s conclusion seems reasonable: ‘Every single table and set of statistical data in Mayhew must be scrutinised, not for dishonesty or manipulation, but for sheer slipshod technique and haste in getting to press’, ‘The Political Education of Henry Mayhew’, Victorian Studies, 11 (September 1967); 41–62 (p.58).
Anyway, be it 8,000 or 80,000, contra Schopenhauer the problem was not monogamy but rather poverty: the lack of secure employment and good wages for working and lower class men, and the lack of employment for working and lower class women (street sellers of everything from flowers to vegetables to small items was the fall-back if no steady employment in domestic service or elsewhere). So it's the economy, stupid, not sexual politics that was driving women into part-time or full-time prostitution.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I am not trying to speak for you, I said that was the impression I took away from previous encounters.
If you feel that this mischaracterises your position, then please state what your position is, including how you define "far-right" and why you think most people on here are far-right, because so far as I can see, your definition seems to be "not as enthusiastically pro-infanticide as me".
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Yeah. I mean, it's possible that after achieving immortality and becoming the most powerful being anywhere ever, this guy will then kick back and devote the rest of eternity to drinking tea, writing poetry, and having pleasant salons to discuss literary and philosophical topics... but I wouldn't bet the house on it. Particularly if everyone else can now see that holy crap, it is indeed possible to achieve immortality, you just need to be a total asshole about it. A lot of wannabe gunslingers coming after him is the least bad outcome, because can you have more than one "most powerful being anywhere ever"? Won't they all strive to defeat each other to be the cock of the walk? Can people who have spent centuries scheming, plotting, and doing whatever it takes to get to that state really all live in harmony and peace alongside the knowledge that there are two/five/twenty others like them out there, all wanting to rule the world (or whatever)?
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Okay, non-religious rightists only disapprove of women having premarital sex.
I think Alexander would qualify that by "having premarital sex and getting pregnant", he's not anti-sex or anti-right, he's anti-the wrong people having too many babies. He wants the lower classes to strive to emulate the middle class, where responsible parenting means girls aren't sexually active in their teens because they're encouraged to concentrate on school/college, if they are sexually active in their unmarried twenties they are not promiscuous, they use contraception and avail of abortion if the contraception fails, and once married their husband is working, maybe they have a job too, and they have two kids whom they can afford to pay for to raise themselves. Any girl who deviates from this by getting knocked up and insisting on having the kid with no partner is shamed and ostracised.
He thinks the right in America has been taken over by the Moral Majority types who insist on being anti-abortion and pro-single motherhood, and are then bleeding-hearts about paying out taxpayer money to support those single moms and their babies.
At least, that's the impression I've got from past arguments with him. I admit, I don't know where he's getting "far-right" from, but I wonder if he's conflating the "right being contaminated by the pro-lifers" with that and not strictly the Not to love Der Fuehrer is a great disgrace types.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Alexander and I have broken a lance on each other over this before. He's advocating for abortion not so much as pure eugenics but in a class sense: we don't need or want the underclass to reproduce, and to elevate decent working-class people to the middle class they need to embrace the habits of the middle class, which includes no babies for teenagers, no babies outside marriage, and only a limited number of kids within marriage, preferably but not always after education and establishing a career. He has no objection to "get married at twenty, have kids" as long as it comes with "have a decent job, maybe even both of you, and only have two kids spaced appropriately apart and not immediately after you get married".
He can't or won't understand that for someone who genuinely believes abortion is wrong, that while getting pregnant outside of marriage is bad, it is worse to kill the baby. Better a single mother than a sexually active woman who avoids motherhood by infanticide. To be fair to him, he does think the right should dump the religious conservatives who think abortion is murder and instead start selling the message that you need to be productive, get a job, get married, and have the right number of kids that you bring up with the right values so you aspire to the middle class life and drag yourself up by your bootstraps, and that means shaming girls and women who get pregnant and don't get an abortion.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
"That sweet enemy France" 😀
Google AI will say that there is no specific author of that phrase, it mentions a book by that title, but I know better, having first encountered it mentioned by Chesterton:
"Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line; "Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France."
And looking up Sir Philip Sidney, it comes from a poem:
Astrophil and Stella 41 By Sir Philip Sidney
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtain'd the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town folks my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man of arms did make.
How far they shot awry! The true cause is,
Stella look'd on, and from her heav'nly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.
So sorry, Google Gemini, but you're wrong; the book gets its title from "a direct quote from a specific individual":
The phrase "sweet enemy" is not a direct quote from a specific individual but rather a thematic encapsulation of the book's central argument.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision.
Except (Protestant) Germany had the problem that since Luther, monasticism and religious life was strongly downgraded in favour of "God wants you all to get married, have kids - 'be fruitful and multiply'" (Luther did a lot of writing about how there was in fact no right to take a vow of celibacy and nobody could impose it on you or punish you for breaking it).
So if you have a lot of single women and no husbands for them, you have a problem as to what you do with them. If they get pregnant outside of marriage, then if you need the rebuilding of the population, you can't afford to shame them. Discreet (or not so discreet) abortions of future citizens in a country that lost a lot of men during the previous war is going to leave you weak, particularly if the people in charge have a shiny new ideal of being the Master Race and conquering all of Europe by right.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
What, you mean we're not already a mystery cult? Dang, that takes all the fun out of it!
HereAndGone
2mo ago
That's the kind of "a djinn grants you three wishes" ending, because we all know the genies put a twist in the tale. Sure, you'll be immortal - which means you will exist after the destruction of the earth and the heat death of the universe, just floating in emptiness slowly going insane, have fun with that!
HereAndGone
2mo ago
HereAndGone
2mo ago
He's not at all enthusiastic about standing still and getting small children to be still for three hours
That is tough, and I think nowadays whatever denomination, people are more prickly about kids being kids. In my day, crying babies were normal (and unless they kept howling and wouldn't stop crying, there was no taking them out) as well as small kids climbing around the pews because they were bored. You just kept them from running amok - though there was always going to be one kid who escaped corralling and made it up onto the altar 😁
How else are they going to learn, if they're shut away in a separate room while services are going on? Mind you, three hours is a lot longer than Catholicism's "an hour tops and if you get a fast priest it's only half an hour". Is there the Orthodox equivalent of "eh, as long as you make it in the door before the Gospel, you're fine"?
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I think what holds back Orthodoxy spreading in the West is the ethnic churches. You have the church for the Greeks, the church for the Bulgarians, the church for the Russians, and so on. It's bound up with particular cultures as much as faith and that makes it harder for a Western guy to walk in and understand what's going on.
Catholicism, while it does devolve into "all the Irish live in this parish and this is their church, that parish over there is the Italians, and the black Catholics are way over there doing their own thing" is much more universal. The Mass is the Mass is the Mass, while it might now be in the vernacular there's nothing stopping you from going to a Spanish parish if that's your first experience and seeing that what goes on is the same as the Vietnamese church is the same as the Irish or the Germans or the Italians.
I do get a kick out of the Diocese of Orange, which bought the former Crystal Cathedral, being majority Vietnamese now because that's the natural progression of the changes in immigrants coming along; it's still the Universal Church even if it shifts from white Europeans to Hispanic to East Asian. I don't think a comparable Orthodox diocese could transition like that.
The Diocese of Orange was erected in 1976, then grew rapidly with immigrants from Asia and Latin America.
The current diocesan bishop is Kevin Vann, who was installed on December 10, 2012. Diocesan offices are situated at the Christ Cathedral campus in Garden Grove. The diocesan patron saints are Our Lady of Guadalupe and Andrew Dũng-Lạc.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Honestly, if we could invent a time machine I'd go back and kick the stuffing out of the Second Vatican Council. Yes, there were stodgy abuses that needed correcting. Yes, people had no idea what was going on at Mass and just prayed the rosary. Yes, yes, yes. Reform was needed, a refreshing of catechesis so people understood and didn't just learn off by rote and then forget. Urging people to a living faith and piety. All that was indeed true.
But we threw not alone the baby out with the bathwater, but the bath, the fittings, the plumbing, and demolished the bathroom along with it. The brave pioneers decided that emulating Protestantism was where it was at, and whatever architects persuaded bishops that "what the modern congregation wants is a church that looks like a warehouse", yeah they're number two on the list for the kicking.
We had mysticism. We had folk piety. We scrapped it all in the name of relevance or some damn thing, and this is what we ended up with.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I truly truly do not understand why these people don't just go be Catholic.
Well, mostly because "aw nah you're telling me all my fun stuff I can't do that anymore? I have to go to confession? I have to believe - or at least say I believe - that stuff for real?" Even if the majority of average Catholics don't know, don't believe, and don't live the religion, and even if you get a liberal priest who will tell you during RCIA "look, just cross your fingers and say 'yeah I believe this' but I don't expect you to really do so", you still have to sign up to "yes, Transubstantiation" and the rest of it. There are still The Rules. The pope is still the boss of you. You can't go wandering through the aisles putting a bit of this, a pinch of that, oh and let's have this thing here from the ranks of world religions to suit your tastes.
I've seen some examples of pick'n'mix taking the shiny mystical 'ooh look icons' part from other traditions within a particular Protestant denomination and it annoyed the heck out of me, because it was taking Serious Theology and playing dress-up with it. I'm not going to name any names because I'm not a member of that denomination but I'm not even Orthodox and I think you cannot just go "oh this is so mystic and foreign and quaint and not like traditional Western Christianity in its forms" and play dress-up with it.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
reports are citing support for abortion as the through-line of his target list and a history of Conservative Christian involvement in his social media trail
Yeah, but so far the reports seem sketchy - not the actual list but one typed up and given to the police? I don't know how much credence to put in anything, though his sudden turn (if I believe the alleged LinkedIn page on social media claimed to be his) from a history of generally working in the food industry/retail industry to saying he was CEO of Red Lion and working in the Congo sounds very odd - maybe he had some kind of mental breakdown?
According to Boelter’s LinkedIn page, he is listed as the CEO of Red Lion Group, which is based in Congo, and he’s listed as a part of the leadership team at Praetorian Guard Security, which provides armed home security in the Twin Cities area.
It appears in the past, he’d worked in food production for several companies, including Del Monte and Nestle.
According to his bio on Praetorian Guard Security Boelter worked security situations in Eastern Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East “including the West Bank, southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.”
So maybe he was shooting or planning to shoot pro-choice people, or maybe he had some other reason, or who knows what exactly was going on. I'm waiting to hear more. He seems to have had a mixed background, to say the least.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
The elven rings were not corrupted by Sauron, but their own risk was the tendency of the Elves to want to hold back time so they could recreate the immortal conditions of Valinor in Middle-earth (to have their cake and eat it, as it were). They did comparatively little damage because they were mostly around under war conditions, so first hidden and not used openly until Sauron's first defeat, and then used defensively against him. But if they had been used from the start as Celebrimbor hoped, the Elves would have fallen into that trap of trying to be little gods in their own realm.
Gandalf didn't think much of Bilbo's ring, although he was somewhat suspicious of it, because it didn't seem to affect Bilbo badly and he never imagined that this was or could be the One Ring that everyone had been searching for since Isildur's death. There were a lot of lesser 'magic rings', apparently, because everyone including mortals tried their hand at creating magical items, but how much power any of them could have would have been limited.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
That's what Sauron set up on Númenor with the worship of Melkor. And what a lot of people try to do in the world with "but surely this time I can claim the ring and it'll go okay" (be that the rings Sauron gave the Ringwraiths, who probably never anticipated that outcome, or the One Ring itself) even after seeing the disasters that happened before.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Yeah, in the world as described, if he does obtain immortality, then there must still be something higher (whatever forces empower the Gu insects, the gods or spirits or just magical energies of heaven and earth) and how can he ascend to that level? The traditional tropes are about the calamities that come to test (destroy) you if you try to cultivate to immortality, and that only if you survive them all will you obtain the goal. So if our guy becomes the single most powerful being on the earth, what next? try to become the most powerful being in the universe? keep dodging the mounting and increasing set of calamities trying to reduce him to dust?
I do think if he achieved a station akin to that of Sauron, he'd be bored: yeah he's got all these mindless slaves under his thumb, but he's spent so long plotting and scheming that what does he do now? He doesn't strike me as the type to decide he'll take up tea ceremony and calligraphy and pondering the secrets of the universe (unless said secrets give him more power). The sweetness of victory is in overcoming this set of impossible conditions; once there are no more obstacles to overcome, what happens next?
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Oh man, you missed the best things from 2006!
"Scientists explained" the miracle, you see, that it wasn't a miracle at all. No, just freak weather conditions that happened to line up absolutely correctly for the events in the Gospels to happen like they did (the ice did not prematurely melt so Jesus fell into the water and it didn't last long enough for Peter to continue walking to shore).
Jesus may have appeared to be walking on water when he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice, formed by a rare combination of weather and water conditions on the Sea of Galilee, according to a team of US and Israeli scientists.
Their study, published by the Journal of Paleolimnology (the study of prehistoric lakes), argues that salty springs along the Galilee's western shore can stop surface water circulating at cold temperatures and there were unusually cold spells lasting up to 200 years in biblical times.
Such "unique freezing processes" would occasionally have allowed a crust of ice to form, a phenomenon the study calls "springs ice", in patches on Lake Kinneret, as the Sea of Galilee is known in Israel. One set of such springs is found near Tabgha, an ancient settlement that is traditionally the site for the New Testament's multiplication of loaves and fishes.
"The chance that there was ice on the lake is very, very high," said Doron Nof, professor of physical oceanography at Florida State University and the study's lead author. "It's almost guaranteed during those cold periods, 100 or 200 years long, that there was one such event at least, maybe four."
I do so enjoy a good "scientists explain miracles" story, they're so comforting in their naive optimism about 'we totally understand everything becasue we're so much smarter than the stupid people back then who believed their lying eyes'.
The "Mary the virgin who was raped" story came out of something way back when in the days of the Anglican wars, when discussing the liberals versus the conservatives in theology. I can't point to a particular source because it was swirling around, but the progressive Christian set do love them some "Mary was raped" tales (ironically, adopting the sceptical views of the Talmud that Jesus was really a bastard borne out of wedlock to a Roman soldier by Mary) because uh something something patriarchy colonialism feminism something something.
The re-interpretation of the scriptures that really raised my eyebrows, though, came during the reign of the first female Primate of the Episcopalian Church, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who gave a sermon that, em, changed the focus of the story of St. Paul and the slave girl possessed by a spirit.
Now, the fuddy-duddy dumb old traditional interpretation of this story is that the girl was a slave whose owners made money from her being possessed, since she was able to tell fortunes, and that St. Paul set her free from being, you know, possessed by a demon and exploited as a money-making machine. Not so! says Katie, nope being possessed by a demon and exploited by your owners as a money-making machine was a beautiful instance of spiritual empowerment and Paulie was just jealous.
No, I promise, this is what she said. The original text of the sermon seems to have been scrubbed, so the only quotes are from traditionalists not too happy with this novel exegesis, but a sample of the sermon is this:
Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does -maybe more so!
Yes, kids, remember: if a demonic spirit wants to set up shop in your head, go right and ahead and let it do so, because that's a beautiful holy gift of spiritual awareness! Honestly, every time I look at the fruitcakes and nutjobs in my own church, something like this comes along to make me go "well at least the current pope isn't this out to lunch, thank you Holy Spirit!"
HereAndGone
2mo ago
most of them would spontaneously reinvent Arianism, and have no idea they were committing a heresy by doing so
You would not believe the effort I'm putting in to bite my tongue here and not be mean about the Heinz 57 varieties of American Protestantism.
But I can't just laugh about the Protestants, the state of modern catechesis nearly everywhere for the past forty or more years has been abysmal. An awful lot of "Jesus wants us to be nice because being nice is nice", much much less "here are the Ten Commandments and this is what they mean".
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Edit: I just read your post below about Arianism - are you actually directly talking about me?
No? It was our pal the Imaginal Christian as quoted? 'Here's a bit of Adoptionism, here's a bit of Theosophy, here's a bit of....' in regards to understanding of the nature of Christ, the sense of the Bible, is God personal or a force (immanent or transcendent) etc.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I don't have a strong opinion on whether anointing people with oil from a shrine does something in particular or not, but still think that kind of thing is a good tradition.
Here I have to quote one of my favourite poems by Yeats, it's very short but full of rich imagery:
Oil And Blood
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Oh, not just Arianism, it's a nice mish-mash of the Greatest Hits of Christological heresies plus the late 19th/early 20th century craze for spiritualism and mysticism investigating magical, occult and Eastern traditions, topped off with the liberal Christianity of the post-Biblical Criticism era (well of course we can't believe in literal miracles anymore, now we have science and Darwin and all that!)
I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water", followed by the "so the Virgin Birth wasn't but here's why those silly billies thought she was a virgin" attempt.
I honestly love the ice skating one. A very convenient, very temporary, very localised mini-ice floe on the Lake of Galilee so Jesus could appear to be walking on the water, but when Peter jumped overboard poof! gone! melted! which is why he sank in the water, plus the fishermen with him in the boat - who had all been fishing this lake their whole career - had no idea about the very convenient weather conditions to bring about mini-ice floes that (must have) regularly happened so Jesus knew there would be one so He could fake 'walking on the water'.
Dude, an actual miracle is easier to believe than this pile of wishful thinking.
Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too. See, obviously we are all modern adults who know how sex works, so we know virgins can't get pregnant (unless they've had sex and are now ex-virgins). So why did people talk about the Virgin Mary? Well clearly she was pregnant by rape. And to avoid the stigma of her being pregnant outside marriage (because that's the one bit of the Scriptural story we can take on trust as correct), people in her village would refer to her as "Mary, the virgin who was raped". And over time, that became shortened to "Mary the virgin" and hence - ta-da! - the Virgin Mary.
Yeah, sure. Totally believable, if you turn off your brain to everything but the current Zeitgeist.
I don't even know what "BASED" subculture is supposed to be. Can we at least get some sort of card of runners and riders to keep straight who is supposed to be what on the boo-list?
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