HereAndGone
2mo ago
Well, sorta the other way round. Modern social justice movement grew out of Catholic beginnings. But I was more amused by Barrett being excoriated as a liberal when she was being excoriated by the liberals for being a fundie.
Don't make me quote "Orthodoxy". Oops, too late! Chesterton is talking about Christianity as a whole, but I think it fits the case of the Church as well:
I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre.
It's not totally senseless, it's the equivalent of rich people and celebrities having private security and bodyguards today. "You're the guys likely to be robbed, have some defences on your ships or hire some private contractors". Something like ex-military or ex-cops setting up as private security nowadays? "Hello, you're a former privateer with a ship, a crew, and no war going on for you to plunder foreign navies. What do you do in peace time? Write to MERCHANTS-R-US for exciting new job opportunities in the field of civilian fleet protection!"
As you point out, though, in times of war this affair falls to pieces. That is when you need a professional navy with proper warships. Though maybe Paine wasn't anticipating that America would need to be going to war with anyone else after kicking out the Brits?
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I don't know why I am always surprised when someone is surprised to discover "Catholic is, indeed, Catholic".
Her policy is just the policy of the Catholic Church, some kind of generic progressive social democracy except opposed to abortion.
I honestly have to laugh about this, because remember back when she was being confirmed and the rumour-mongering was about her being a member of a cult? A traditionalist cult that treated women as second-class? I don't think Dianne Feinstein was complaining about her being too liberal when she went off about the dogma lives loudly in you.
Yeah, weirdly enough the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is not a right-wing American institution. Or a left-wing American institution. But now you guys have the pope, here's your chance to get it Chicago-style!
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Okay, so it's the Theosophists are the bad guys in the secret global occult plot stakes this time. Unusual, I don't generally see them hauled out (usually conspiracy theorists stick to the Rosicrucians).
He's right in that Theosophy does have its own interpretation of Jesus, angels, etc. which diverges in very large part from traditional Christian beliefs, and that they do like to celebrate traditional festivals (like Michaelmas) with their own spin.
And there has been a resurgence in devotion to St. Michael, generally with the promulgation of the prayer and sort of in a "right wing young guy warrior wannabe" style devotion. A modern American Catholic revival of muscular Christianity, as it were, as well as a sort of adoption of the Evangelical notion of demons under the beds everywhere, though that leans more to the Rad Trads.
Hmm. Thanks for the link, I'm always interested in strange new weirdness I haven't seen before!
HereAndGone
2mo ago
They'll spend four years fighting with their parents about their internet friends and then run away, if necessary.
That anecdote is what I meant about her being stupid for being so smart. She wasn't good at working out loopholes around the rules; an ordinary kid would have figured out a way to notify her friend that "I'm grounded, can't see you" without using the computer (because expressly forbidden to use the computer and if found out it'll be bad). Aella didn't - maybe she didn't have another way, but anyway she headed right into the trap. Then spent four years running her head into the same brick wall of "gotta use the computer to talk to my friends - get found out - get grounded - finally work off the punishment - do the exact same thing to get me punished all over again".
That's not stupidity because of lack of intelligence, that's a blind spot of personality that indicates she will always make things harder for herself because she won't be able to figure out the signals.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Eh, Steve Rogers is the son of Irish-Americans (not noted if they're Protestant or Catholic) so he's the exact type the Know Nothings were objecting to (even though he's literally white, blond and blue-eyed):
The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855 and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothings, or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.
Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values. The Know Nothing movement is remembered for this theme because Protestants feared that Catholic priests and bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, the ideology and influence of the Know Nothing movement lasted only one or two years before it disintegrated due to weak and inexperienced local leaders, a lack of publicly proclaimed national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In parts of the South, the party did not emphasize anti-Catholicism as frequently as it emphasized it in the North and it stressed a neutral position on slavery, but it became the main alternative to the dominant Democratic Party.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
trying to convince people that Auron MacIntyre and the DR were running some conspiracy to bring Archangel Michael into this world
Well dang, this is the kind of bait that grabs my interest. Any details? I'm sort of accustomed to hearing about immanentizing the eschaton, but I've never heard of involving the Archangel Michael before, though yeah okay maybe I can see it... in his role as the Weigher of Souls, if you're gonna bring about the end of the world, you need him to appear first.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Yeah, it is instinct. But instinct can be harmful, and the outcome there is that being unable to over-ride instinct resulted in her getting eleven beatings instead of two.
It's horrible and the father should have been punched in the face, but it's what having the ability to reason also tells us. "I don't want to go to the dentist, because my jaw hurts afterwards. But if I don't go, then this problem will get worse, and I will end up in much worse pain later than the smaller pain now". She describes it as eventually her brain broke and over-rode instinct and that stopped the beating, but if she had been able to break voluntarily earlier, she would have been out of pain sooner.
I'm not saying it was right! I'm saying she doesn't seem to realise what she's describing, because she is still in that mindset.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
she just felt embarrassment due to social anxiety or something
That's what I took away from the anecdote; it just happened that the other kids were toddlers (it was a beginners' class after all) and she had the hyper-sensitivity that she describes as crying because other people looked at her at a party. So to put it in CBT terms she was catastrophizing - "if I'm in a toddler class, everyone will think I'm only as good as a toddler!" There's no indication there were other people there than the teacher of the class, maybe (but not for sure) other parents. She was convinced other people were thinking about her, paying attention to her, being critical of her - and that's all down to the lack of self-confidence that being made go to a class like that is addressing. Well, and from the home environment where her parents were constantly watching and being critical, but that's another matter.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
because for all her whoring she doesn’t seem all that damaged
'The most valuable things about me are my tits'? That's not striking you as unusual for a smart woman? I don't know, I get from that short piece about her upbringing why she wants to retreat into merely the physical and shut off her mind, because of the early experiences of constantly being hyper-sensitive and also having to be hyper-conscious and in control of every word and action - reverting to animal instinct is a welcome relief and I understand that part of the benefits people find in being submissive is sinking into that state of not having to think or do or be in control, just be a body moved about and reacting to stimuli under the direction of another.
But even there, she wants attention for her sexuality to be seen, to be desired, to be valued. And if she thinks that "I have until I'm 35 to enjoy being hot, then when I'm 35-45 I'll have to work at it" - then what? 45 and there's nothing there anyone cares about in her anymore, because her tits are no longer perky and there are other sets of 20-30 year old hot tits out there? That's kinda sad, and I hope she has more going on once her sexual attractiveness wanes. I hope she has people who like her for being Aella, not for being "hot tits girl".
HereAndGone
2mo ago
As to my own opinion, I don't think she's damaged, because for one, she doesn't think she's damaged.
But something is off-kilter where she admits her hygiene habits changed because someone said "I don't wash my hair" (and now we have Aella happily revealing that she has had more sexual encounters than showers in a given period). That's... extraordinarily vulnerable to suggestion, where I'm sure the person who said they didn't wash their hair never meant it to be taken as "and so you should stop getting washed at all".
Is that due to her weird abusive upbringing, or to some quirk of her psychology where she was an over-sensitive child who imagined catastrophic outcomes? I have no idea. But I don't think that can be parsed as "oh it's perfectly normal and fine".
HereAndGone
2mo ago
“aella is dumb, because child aella was afraid of pain”,
That's not what I meant, and I expressed myself badly. I'm saying that she was old enough to work out that refusing would only lead to more beating, that this is exactly what happened, and that she was unable to motivate herself to grit her teeth and accept immediate pain in order to avoid future pain. That probably ties in with the "I used to cry when hitting the pinata because people were looking at me" part about over-sensitivity and over-thinking. Yes, it was a horrible choice. Yes, her father was wrong.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
No no no, you're forgetting the very vital sub-plot of the Former Love Interest showing back up! The ex-fiancée, the old flame, the childhood sweetheart - the threat who is hot and sexy and successful and a tigress and everything the main female character is not, and the male love interest either diverts his attention to her and it looks like they'll get back together, or the old flame does all she can to break up male love interest and female love interest.
That leads to the satisfying set-up where male love interest shows up, demonstrates his scorn for old flame because she has shown herself to be untrustworthy/only trying to use him for status and wealth/he was only trying to make female love interest jealous, and reaffirms that he has chosen female love interest over hot successful tigress, and then the ripping off clothes with his teeth scene follows 😁
The sub-sub-plot to that one is the distaff version of new/former love interest showing up for the female love interest. A nice guy (and I don't mean that ironically); someone supportive, different to the male love interest in not being dismissive and curt to her, a guy who is handsome and successful and desirable in his own right (but still not quite the equal of the alpha hot guy), someone who genuinely cares about her. Alas, he is destined to be friendzoned because he just doesn't have that spark, but he is understanding and bows out courteously because he realises that she and alpha guy are destined to be together. This is comforting reading for the consumer of such novels, because it demonstrates that the female love interest (who is the vicarious stand-in for the reader) has options, she's not just doomed to be dumped by the hot guy, she don't need him after all she can always get another guy who truly wants her for who she is.
Writing a romance novel, even a formulaic one, is a lot tougher than you think - way back I was part of an online group that tried doing the traditional tropes in an ironic way and we didn't get very far because writing is indeed hard. I'm given to understand there's a lot more sex in modern romance novels because times indeed change, and waiting for the wedding bells ending isn't enough, so the female and male love interests can get it on a lot earlier and indeed more frequently (while still going through the 'will they, won't they/he loves me, he loves me not' travails until the happy ending).
Cap is the Marvel version of Superman. The idealism is the point. Whether it's starting out as 40s literal "punch a Nazi" or 60s "Vietnam is not what we're about" or 00s Civil War "this is authoritarianism", or whatever they're currently doing with the character, the ideal of Captain America is what is best about America, its foundational myths, its aspirations, the shining city on the hill. The land of opportunity. The nation of immigrants, where you can leave the shackles of the Old World behind and have a fresh start, work hard, succeed on your merits, with nobody holding you down because of out-worn social classes like nobility and peasantry or because your lot in life is predetermined.
If you make the character dark'n'gritty Punisher type, you fundamentally misunderstand what it's about and you wreck it, so you either create a new different character to be the new dark'n'gritty pragmatist, or (as the development seems to have been with the John Walker character) retcon the retcon so it fits the ideals better (maybe our current ideals are feminist anti-racist pro-woke Cap, but the character is still a representation of idealism and not 'shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out' pragmatism and cynicism).
HereAndGone
2mo ago
For instance, you could pay someone to actually have sex with you while telling you you're a loser.
I believe that is the sub-type of kink known as humiliation kink? And the ultimate humiliation, I guess, is that you're not even good enough to use as a disposable fuck toy. Look, I dunno, even normal vanilla sex is not my thing so I have no idea how the wiring for the kinky stuff goes. Maybe it's all by degrees: you start off with having sex while being insulted, but after a while that's no longer good enough so you need more.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
given how insane of a concept it is to pay a sex worker to aggressively not have sex with you
Kink is not rational insert shrug emoji It's like the old joke:
Masochist: Beat me, beat me!
Sadist: No.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Maybe using capitals? anti-Woke Right is different to anti-Woke right? Though I agree, it's confusing all round.
As to the videos - I don't know the guy, it's cheeky of me to put forward opinions on his personal morality, but it's a tough one. The gay acceptance/gay marriage movement pushed hard on mainstreaming as representing "no, all that stuff about gays being degenerate is propaganda, they just want to get married and have kids like you".
And then the guy has his sex tapes released and oops yeah gay widower with kids is engaging in kink with prostitutes. Well, just like straight guys too so I suppose that is true equality!
I have to agree that this particular kink isn't the worst example of perversity that it could be, just second-hand embarrassment for anyone who doesn't share those kinks. I think we as a society probably are gone past any surviving standards of "public figures should behave decorously" never mind "private citizens shouldn't be frequenting prostitutes".
I still don't understand why the hell people make sex tapes (or take nudes for their partners) in the first place, though. We have plenty of examples of how that goes bad - the tapes get leaked, you break up and your ex uses the nudes for revenge porn, or even in the first place while you're still together they're sharing those private images around with their friends.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
but frankly I'd hardly be less skeptical of any mother pushing a ten-year-old into a modeling career.
I am definitely in agreement with that. What I find repugnant is all the cheerleading by the media coverage over it. We have more than enough stories of modelling being a career that can be destructive for adults, but shoving a ten year old into being a LGBT role model in an industry that devours and spits out young hopefuls is meant to be a heart-warming success story and not one of "here's a parent willing to throw their kid into a meat grinder so the parent gets attention and head-pats".
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Some eight year olds do. Some learn to do so. Some have parental duties shoved on them. The perversity in that situation was that to avoid pain she had to volunteer for pain.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
It's not conditioning, I understand why she didn't want to go over and be beaten. But she was old enough to figure out "if I hesitate, I'll get beaten again; more beating is worse every time; do relatively small pain now and avoid greater pain later".
That's hard! Of course it's hard! But she's smart, and wasn't stupid as a child, she just was stuck in the moment and it wasn't until her brain shut down that she finally broke the cycle. It was abusive, but people in abusive situations learn to adapt to avoid the worst outcomes. "If I go over I'll be beaten, no no no" is the natural reaction. But it's like the stupid gom-jabbar test in Dune: learn to shut down the animal reaction so you can survive. I think she did learn to do that later. Her father wasn't pointlessly cruel, he stopped beating her as soon as she obeyed (that's deliberate cruelty, I'm not trying to claim it was anything but that). The worst abuser is the one who doesn't need an excuse, one who would have beaten her even if she obeyed. When there are rules in place, you learn to game the rules.
I realise I sound like I'm being very hard on a young child in pain, and that's valid. But I think there's also a real question of nature versus nurture: how much of her current psychology is the result of reaction to the way she was raised, and how much was a very over-sensitive in a pathological way state that would have reacted badly even in conventional parenting situations?
Her description of her childhood rearing is indeed terrible, but I can see ordinary not-terrible parents deciding that an over-sensitive child who (for instance) is reduced to fits of tears at a birthday party simply because "other people are looking at me!" needs something to toughen them up a bit, and that the kid has to be compelled to do this for their own good (cruel to be kind). "If you don't do X, you won't get Y" is part of ordinary child-raising. If you gave up on "oh no, they hate it, they're crying and begging, we won't do it" and let the kid off, then there's a good chance they'll just become ever more introverted and sensitive, won't learn how to deal with adverse events or "I don't like this but it has to be done" and you'll end up doing more harm in the long run.
The parents didn't force her to keep doing karate, and I think she doesn't understand why. It wasn't "oh they weren't totally cruel after all", it was that the aim had been achieved: she learned to power through and do something she found personally unpleasant. That was the lesson: no, even if you are 'burning with shame and have tears pouring down your face' the dreaded outcome isn't that bad after all. You didn't die. People were not laughing at you. You got through it and the world did not end. Think of exposure therapy. It needn't have been karate class, it could just as well have been a dance class and young Aella was working herself up into imaginary fears of "the others are toddlers! people will think I'm a toddler! they will be laughing at me for being so stupid and dumb and useless that I have to go in with toddlers!"
That doesn't mean that beating a child eleven times is a good thing after all, but rather that some of the treatment was normal child-raising. My parents made me do things as a kid that I loathed, and in the long run they were right. I have to do things even today that I hate (going out in public and mingling with people, for one) and that early experience has given me the tools to cope. If my parents had let me off because 'burning with shame and tears pouring down', I'd be a news story by now about "hoarder hermit had to be rescued by social services, never set foot outside front door in thirty years, house is condemned as unfit for human habitation".
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I haven't been following the comics but my impression was that Walker was kind of a proto-Homelander (starting out as Super-Patriot, a villain or at least anti-hero). So Bucky/Winter Soldier, who was there at the start with Original Cap, surely has a lot of opinions about pretenders to the title:
The character of John Walker was first introduced as the supervillain Super-Patriot in Captain America #323 (November 1986). Mark Gruenwald created Walker to counter the general message in Captain America of patriotism being invariably good, describing him as someone "who embodied patriotism in a way that Captain America didn't—a patriotic villain." He said, "Basically, I just wanted to do the opposite of Steve Rogers. Okay, Steve Rogers is a poor northern urban boy. So I'll make a guy from rural middle-class south. Cap is now old, so this guy'll be a real young up-and-comer. Cap has lofty ideals, so I'll make Super-Patriot be more realistic and more pragmatic. So, I put together his background and character traits by playing the opposite game."
I do like how the general aura of Cap means that even the grittier reboot version gradually becomes more heroic to fit the ideal 😀
But yeah, that would have been too deep for this kind of movie.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
The "I'm totally bi even though I've never done nothing about it" if confined to silly girls (and women) is relatively harmless, it's when they start trying to make this An Identity and pushing it on others that it becomes a nuisance. No, you're not queer. No, I don't care. No, don't try and tell me you are being persecuted because you are 'straight passing'. The fun part of the irony there is that they're doing this about the LGBT++++ set being insufficiently falling over themselves to celebrate the wondrousness of the "so bi it's invisible" lot; now they have to deal with the obnoxious 'I am so a real queer' types the way straight people had to deal with the obnoxious 'I'm the only gay in the village' types.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Aella did have a weird and indeed abusive childhood, but mixed in with it there's bits where the parents were not being unreasonable. A kid that is so sensitive they burst into tears because "people will be looking at me" does need to learn how to handle being in public. When one of my nephews was a kid, they were very sensitive and lacking in confidence, so his parents signed him up for a taekwondo class. And he did like it, and it made a huge difference in coming out of his shell. So for "burning with shame and tears streaming down my cheeks" Aella, the parents were not in fact being cruel to insist "you have to do this or else".
Also for someone smart, she acted kinda dumb. "Oh no, if I do this thing, I'll be punished" but she can't figure out - e.g. with the spankings - "okay, grit my teeth, suffer this one, and then I'm free". Instead it took eleven beatings until she worked out "do it and get it over with". I'm sorry for her, but she definitely was not the sharpest tool in the box when figuring out how to deal with the situation. Probably because she was so over-sensitive and over-emotional, hence the karate lessons were the kind of outside distraction she did need to learn how to toughen up.
I know that sounds unsympathetic, but there really are parts of her story where I can't help but go "okay, this thing here? this was in fact good for you". Like this little anecdote:
And I had very normal hygiene habits for many years after leaving home - it was only after meeting a girl with gorgeous hair who told me “oh my secret? I just don’t wash it” when I started experimenting with weird stuff.
Yeeeeah. Someone who stops washing because somebody else said they didn't wash their hair (probably meaning they didn't wash it every day, or didn't use commercial shampoos rather than their own homemade blend of eggs and beer) is someone way too easily influenced and without any sense of "is this going too far?" I probably would have forced baby Aella to go to karate classes, too.
I see you've missed the recent "the new pope is actually black" discourse elsewhere, you lucky person you! And yes, they're invoking the one drop rule: hey, if under slavery/Jim Crow laws he'd be considered black due to the discriminatory one drop rule, then yeah he counts as black now.
I don't know about Trump, but I think it would be hilarious. Especially in light of the John Oliver "Drumpf" stuff - he's not just descended from a recent immigrant, he is the Second (Just As) Black (As Obama or Kamala) president! 😁
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