Hieronymus
AAQC-winning posts:
User ID: 419
Hieronymus
6mo ago
... because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes.
Okay, this is a nitpick.
There was the MtF bartender at the Afterlife with the street racing line of sidequests, and that did feel preachy. And there were the gay romance options. Did I miss anything else?
On the other hand, you have Fingers, the ripperdoc who has made himself androgynous and is unambiguously a villain, in a way clearly tied to his sexuality, in a major quest. I was pretty surprised they'd go there. I felt like they did a good job of preserving the setting's themes even when they were in tension with the mores of the current year.
Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.
The way they handled religion was pretty bad in general, but I can only speculate as to motives there.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
I’m not sure this is culture war, beyond the degree to which Emacs vs. vim is culture war. That said, Rust has never really appealed to me. It strikes me more as a B&D C++ alternative than a C alternative, and I was somewhat surprised when Linus decided to allow it. I think that there is room for a systems language with the spirit of C but fewer undefined behaviors and better ergonomics around things like array bounds and bit bashing, but I don’t think any of C’s would-be successors has quite found the niche yet.
More on topic, I think that @FistfullOfCrows’ observation about Rust’s leadership is apropos. I usually take a code of conduct in open source projects as a statement that this is a self-consciously progressive space and that even relatively tactful (for programmers) dissent is unacceptable. Consequently I assume that I am not wanted there; I may still use the software depending on what it does, but I am not likely to provide bug reports, patches, or donations.
How seriously I take that depends on context. In Python I think that Guido, while a progressive sort of guy, is a restraining force; but since he has resigned the role of benevolent dictator, things have gotten messier. The FreeBSD CoC generated enough backlash and reassurances that I still take its implications with a grain of salt. SQLite’s code of ethics, by contrast, countersignals the code of conduct trend quite strongly, and it even managed to get lots of positive comments on HackerNews doing so.
For Rust, though? It’s not lost on me that Rust used to be a Mozilla project, and everything I see suggests that the culture that pushed out Brendan Eich lives on there. They’re not hiding their power level.
Hieronymus
7mo ago
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
I think that’s key. The church needs to teach men to do their part, even when women sin against them, and it needs to teach women to do their part, even when men sin against them. But it’s fine for a parachurch ministry, or a church’s men’s or women’s ministry, to focus on just one of these at a time.
I do think that such a ministry needs to be willing to frankly discuss the other side’s duties. But it would be odd if that were the primary focus.
Hieronymus
8mo ago
Have you not seen critics of the COVID vaccine (any COVID vaccine) consistently described as anti-vaxers? The only time I recall a serious offline conversation about this, an old friend took my criticism of the social dynamic as criticism of vaccines in general despite my explicit words to the contrary.
Hieronymus
8mo ago
If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.
Could you explain this? I don’t follow. Also, it would help if you could clarify what you mean by tradwives here; there are several very different ways the word is used, and I can’t figure out which you mean from context.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
… the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.
I think that this is a reasonable characterization, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re demanding right-wing commissars to shoot the left-wing commissars. It’s commissars all the way down. As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the conservative movement and how its idea of the relationship between private organizations and the state has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. (That’s not to say that the Trump coalition is identical with the conservative movement, of course.) We’ll see if those thoughts ever become solid enough for an effortpost.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Hieronymus
3mo ago
I wonder if you are significantly older or younger than I am, because I take the historical context very differently. I've laid it out at length elsewhere, but I perceive the acceptance of Trump as a discontinuity in response to the behavior of previous conservative politicians, not a continuation of the same.
Politicians in the Reagan tradition claimed to embody conservative principles; some got closer than others. But they were pretty consistently willing to sacrifice everything in exchange for an extra 0.2% GDP growth. After years of that, and the experience of a resurgent progressivism seeking to impose its social mores, the conservative right had to choose between a leader who was personally conservative and a leader who would fight – hence Trump.
I'd hoped that Pence would evolve into a leader who could do both, but that's not how things played out.
Hieronymus
10mo ago
I don't know. Absent a revival, which is an act of God, I think by far the most likely outcome continues to be decadence as a state-enforced right.
Government policies that respect the natural law and seek to make obedience to it easier push back against this, and they have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom. They also facilitate human flourishing, which is no small thing. The state can't solve the problem, but it can do better than it has done. I am not optimistic about achieving this as a political matter, but I've been surprised before.
Hieronymus
11mo ago
Man, if you're right and this is HIynka then that explains some things, but it makes me feel like we're losing out. There were meaningful insights in his post, but they were buried in a structure that prioritized flame-counterflame rather than laying the groundwork (which was mostly in the post!) first and then discussing the arguments clearly if passionately.
If the style and structure of this post had been within a standard deviation of peak Hlynka, it would have been excellent. Why did the mods switch from year-and-a-day bans to permabans? Were too many folks returning in the style of Darwin, with the bone to pick dominating everything else? Hlynka, when he could discuss his experiences openly and not be cagey about ongoing disagreements, was usually better than this. Yeah, there is a risk of spiraling again – we're all human, and he has a temper. But peak Hlynka was irreplaceable.
Clearly I don't follow meta-level Motte issues the way mods do, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Call this a tentative request to reconsider permabans in general and his in particular.
Inner city crime ridden areas. Not sure what to do when you have too high of a prevalence of violent people. I am willing to say that civilization has broken down in those areas, and then reiterate that gun rights are civilizational rights. If you don't have civilization, you can't have that right.
Since I haven’t seen any comments on this, I want to note how far it goes. It is a fully general argument against liberal democracy in those places. You may or may not be willing to see Los Angeles as a colony ruled by an appointed, authoritarian governor, but the principle points there.
Violent people don't always stay violent people. Testosterone is a hell of a drug, so young men are often more violent than older men. Not sure if ex-convicts should be allowed to have guns, but maybe if you don't trust them to own a gun you shouldn't trust them to be out of prison.
I am extremely sympathetic here. Reintegration of former prisoners into society should involve the restoration of as many rights as possible as soon as possible, rather than keeping them second- or third-class citizens forever. I am ignorant of a lot of details, so I wouldn’t want to present an uncompromising principle. My casual take is that if you trust him to vote, you should trust him to have guns, and if you don’t trust him to have guns, you shouldn’t trust him to vote.
The common thread is one of respect and trust. Gun control is intended to be, in a very literal sense, disempowering: If you are armed you have the power to do these things; we do not trust you with that power, and so we will disarm you. I think that living in a bureaucratic society has desensitized us to this, because respect is inefficient and illegible to the bureaucracy.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Thanks. Reported as AAQC.
Fr. James Martin is 100% serious and a true believer. He doesn't actually compromise on abortion, he just thinks gun control is an equivalently serious pro life issue.
I know that OP brought up abortion, but I wasn’t thinking of abortion here: I was thinking of Martin’s approach to sexual sins, particularly homosexuality but also various kinds of cohabitation. He seems to prefer having a group of massgoers in unrepentant grave sin over the kind of call to repentance that would split them into a smaller group of repentant massgoers and a larger group that eschews the faith entirely. If that reading is correct, it’s hard to see how he isn’t at odds with the gospel.
I suppose that your understanding of Martin’s motives is much better informed than mine, which is largely limited to social media and reading him in quotation. But man, the pattern match is strong.
… and the college of cardinals retains a conservative plurality large enough to maintain a functional veto.
Interesting. I did not know this.
These are institutionalists who see gentlemanly behavior as very important; liberals know that setting a precedent for hardball will blow up in their faces and conservatives know that there's no real need to play hardball.
The contrast to the evangelical experience in twentieth-century America is really striking here. In the early twentieth century, evangelicals in many denominations realized that all of their institutions – seminaries, universities, missions boards, denominational leadership – had come to be controlled by modernists. They fought back, still not realizing how badly outgunned they were, and in all the big denominations they lost.
But of course we evangelicals aren’t permanently tied to any hierarchy, so they were free to build new institutions and leadership structures. In the middle of the century there was a renewed debate about how those ought to relate to the mainline churches, which still had some orthodox believers in them. In 1979, conservative Southern Baptists realized that modernists were beginning to gain control of their denomination and used the convention to begin their own march through the institutions. After his appointment to lead the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993, theological conservative Al Mohler famously (and controversially) purged the faculty.
Different evangelical institutions have taken different stances over the years. Those that accommodate liberal theology in their ranks usually have an easier time dealing with secular institutions, and their leadership may be able to stave off mission drift for a generation or so. But those which play hardball with theological liberals have done a much better job staying on mission across generations. As evangelicals have come to realize that we live in negative world, the Southern Baptist approach has become more popular.
In the first draft of my reply to Sloot, I began to speculate that evangelicalism will become more theologically and politically conservative, and that it will at the same time shrink to become less politically relevant to the secular right’s interests. But of course I cannot say for sure.
Traditional Catholics who actually matter simply do not think in terms of years or decades and so the current pope is viewed as a temporary and ineffectual roadblock.
A dear friend of mine is Roman Catholic, though by no means a traditionalist. It is remarkable to me just how many things her social environment within the RCC accepts as valid Catholic positions because of the lack of disciplinary boundary drawing from the hierarchy. It’s an ongoing source of temptation to her, made all the more subtle because she doesn’t recognize it.
Of course, I hope that you all come to your senses and convert tomorrow. Failing that, I hope you are right that theological liberalism in the Roman church is just a passing phase. But if the time to wait it out is measured in generations, then the cost must also be measured in generations.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I am curious to hear your reasons for this. My state seems to be moving dramatically (and for me, quite disappointingly) in the other direction.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
What would that look like? Some of the things he's done, notably on migration, necessarily involved picking fights with Brussels. Are those issues no longer salient for the EU leadership?
Hieronymus
3mo ago
How many priests are Right Wing Icons?
There’s Marcial Maciel, but he’s an outlier.
I was going to leave well enough alone, but I want to partly push back on your post and partly on FtttG’s. I am working from memory and partial understanding here, and I welcome corrections.
It’s important to note that a supermajority of Roman Catholic sex-abuse cases were sexually active gay priests canoodling with underage teenage boys. There were other cases and other victims, but those set the tone. So part of the coverup came from networks of sexually active gay priests, and some sexually active straight priests, who were already accustomed to covering for each other, and whom an investigation might implicate in adult but compromising sexual activity.
The other factor I can see is the social mores downstream of Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Rome teaches that, ordinarily, salvation is mediated by the church defined by properly ordained hierarchs in communion with Rome. To their credit, many of the hierarchs seem to take this seriously; it’s not just an excuse to gather power. One of the consequences of this is that anything with the potential to alienate someone from that hierarchy is a threat to his soul; even the R.C. bishops not involved in sexual immorality sought to lesson the scandal, in both colloquial and theological senses, and that often looked like a coverup. When Pope Benedict tried to restrict Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s public activities, McCarrick defied him, because – well, what could Benedict do without exposing his misconduct?
To be clear, this does not contradict R.C. ecclesiology, which would take a biblical or theological argument and not a pragmatic one. But I think the scandal is a strong practical argument against clerical celibacy, which led to such an overrepresentation of gay men in Catholic ministry, and which is a discipline imposed by a decision of the Roman Catholic church and not a dogma it is bound to.
It would be straightforwardly consistent with R.C. doctrine for pope and councils to allow the ordination of married men, as is routinely done in the Eastern Rite Catholic churches and occasionally done for married Lutheran and Anglican pastors who convert. I suspect that Rome could also allow already-ordained priests to marry without any change in doctrine, although I am not certain of this, and it may be unwilling to accept the hit to ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches. (To my outsider’s eye, Counter-Reformation statements on marriage played pretty fast and loose with the distinction between illicit and invalid, and I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions.)
Hieronymus
6mo ago
Do we know that compensation was the motive here? Based on the article it's possible that they were trying to give the child up to someone who could raise the baby better than they could and that the token compensation was just that. Obviously this would be an egregiously irresponsible way to do it, but that makes belief in one's unfitness for parenthood more understandable, not less.
I don't have any knowledge of the case, and this is all speculation. But I think it would explain the actions of everyone involved, prosecutors included, better than greed does.
Hieronymus
8mo ago
... many don't let you give anything lower than a 50.
I don't understand why this policy is so often compared to awful ones. It is the same as averaging the student's letter grades to come to a final grade, instead of averaging percentages. It makes missed work a normal F instead of a super-duper F. As an unknowing-ADHD kid who struggled with getting homework done, especially when I knew the material already, that would have been an incredible blessing that hurt my learning not at all.
There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse.
That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.
An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.
Hieronymus
11mo ago
Fornication was usually punished with a fine, though it could be punished with whipping when the fine was too far out of reach. Both men and women were prosecuted, with an exception that took me embarrassingly long to understand: When accusing a married couple (for conduct before the wedding, naturally), it was common to prosecute only the groom. This is an unspoken discount for the couple out of respect for their subsequent marriage, without having to admit it and undermine the social norm.
Even if we assume that most fornicating couples got away with it (a fair assumption, I think), it still reflects a very different set of norms than those of modern dating.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I usually wonder about this kind of thing in a different sense, because men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves. And also if they're offering to respect their (prospective) girlfriend's desire for virginity until marriage and would indeed marry her without having sex.
I am reminded of a pastor who praised a groom during his wedding for bringing his bride to the altar a virgin. The pastor’s homily was kind of tacky, and his exegesis wasn’t great, but I think his heart was absolutely in the right place.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
A big change happens in the social environment when you achieve a critical mass of family, friends, and neighbors who will hold you to what you and they believe to be right.
If you are a social conservative in a progressive setting, you can expect that a majority of your friends are more liberal than you, even if they are very conservative by local standards; a majority of their friends are more liberal than they, and so on along the gradient until you hit the local norm. Difficult sacrifices are always difficult; but they get a lot harder when your friends don’t respect them, instead encouraging you to do the easier thing that they sincerely believe would be good for you.
An example:
A couple of my college friends got married. They weren’t a great match in terms of temperament, but they genuinely loved each other and could have made it work. They were on the socially conservative end of their church. They were gender egalitarian, but that’s true of almost their whole denomination, and it’s one of the rare churches where for historical reasons this is not a predictor of broader liberalism. The wedding was consciously traditional in a way that expressed the joy and solemnity of the occasion and acknowledged the givenness of the institution.
They had a kid. ADHD, and later a stroke, made it difficult for him to hold down a job. Eventually he found a crummy job that he kept for a long time. If you knew him, you would know that this reflected heroic effort on his part out of deep love for his wife and child, but most people just saw him being less flaky. It wasn’t enough to provide a middle class lifestyle on a single income as your family and I might prefer, but she didn’t expect it to be. She is very type A, and she made more money than he did in a customer service job, later landing a manager role until stress caused her to step down.
They fought. She obviously felt for years that he wasn’t doing enough for the family, but it’s not clear to me how much of that was fair and how much was his failing to carry out her orders; I suspect some of both. Eventually she left him and got a tattoo symbolizing it as a rebirth. She told him (as I found out later) that the divorce would be good for the kid. To her credit, she tried to follow through with good-faith co-parenting. Without his family, he lost his job and his living situation made joint custody impractical; child support has not made things easier. Now she is planning to remarry.
Now, I don’t know what concrete advice she got from her friends. Knowing some of them and knowing her actions, I suspect it was often, “You don’t have to suffer like this.” But I have to wonder: what if they’d had friends and a church that were more conservative than they were?
Maybe someone could have explained that the relationship dynamics that were cute when they were dating would keep them from communicating love and respect once they were married. (I wanted to beat this into them so badly for years, but I wasn’t close enough to either one that a bachelor’s unsolicited marriage advice would be listened to.) Maybe somebody could have convinced them of the goodness in headship and submission and shown how to apply it in a way that recognized her gifts while encouraging him to take a more active role in leading the family. Maybe a friend good with family finances could have run the numbers to see if she could work part time and invest the rest in ways they could live more frugally. Maybe a sympathetic business owner could have found work that suited his abilities and let him provide better. Maybe she’d have heard, “Divorce is not good for your child!” until she either listened or went deaf.
So, a couple of thoughts:
I don’t know how things are in your community. It sounds like they are by and large better off, and I am grateful for that. In mine, the friend gradient toward the norm makes this kind of thing sadly familiar. I hope to figure out what I can do to make the situation better.
Social conservative “converts” are usually in an even more difficult place than my friends when it comes to support. They don’t have the social encouragement to do the hard, countercultural thing; they don’t have someone to help them fit the pieces together in practice; and there is no one to explain the next step in muddling through. I suppose the exceptions are those literal converts lucky enough to find themselves in churches that can provide these things to get them reoriented while it is all fresh and new.
In some cases the possibility of child support can keep men from just cutting and running or give them some skin in the game. But in my friends’ case its function is to make it easier for a woman to leave her husband because she thinks he’s a drag on her, while still demanding some of the (modest but heroic) financial support he provided as her husband. I doubt that the availability of child support caused this divorce, but it has made things worse, and it’s patently unjust. I wonder what socially conservative child support reform would look like.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Yes, but Catherine was obviously lying. The kings of England and Aragon had scholars go through her first marriage with a fine-toothed comb looking for a reason to annul it so that Catherine could marry Henry and maintain the alliance. When they came back saying that the only way to annul the marriage was if it hadn’t been consummated, Catherine said that she had never slept with her husband. That’s not terribly plausible under the circumstances, and if it were true all of the canon lawyers would have been unnecessary in the first place.
The pope actually refused to annul her second marriage for political and military reasons.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I am not sure if you mean to imply more depth than you give explicitly, but the version you wrote is not the same as Magusoflight’s. I think it’s misleading to say, “This is fine,” without qualification, at least where kids are involved.
Consider teaching children about paraplegia. You want children to respect its victims and to be aware of what they really are and are not capable of. You want them to understand that disability is not a moral failing. But you don’t want them to think that being wheelchair-bound is just as good as being able to walk, that it’s no affliction at all, and that given a choice between being healthy or paraplegic there is no reason to prefer one over the other.
I think that the folks adding intersex conditions to the preschool and grade school curricula are trying to say that there is no reason to prefer not to be intersex; they are looking to deconstruct sex and gender in the minds of children as young as they can get them. To teach that this is an affliction, to add that little bit of complexity, would undermine their goals.
Hieronymus
3yr ago
I have no objection to rolling back the Sexual Revolution, but it needs to apply to men as well - it takes two to tango, after all.
I’m not the GP, but yes, of course. As you point out, restraining the sexuality of one sex implies restraining the sexuality of the other. I want a world where both sexes value chastity, understood in the classic sense of sexual virtue.
It’s great that so many denizens of the manosphere (or whatever it has turned into) have come to see the effects of feminine promiscuity. It means that they have found an important piece of the puzzle. It behooves those of us who see the other pieces to help them fit it together. And some of them do get there! The former pickup artist Roosh is a famous example.
I’m not old enough to remember the years before the pill. But it’s easy to see that the relationship between marriage, sex, and children was obvious then in a way it isn’t now. The relationship was important for more reasons than pregnancy, but pregnancy was a reason that any horny doofus could see.
I keep seeing Christian kids who should know better sacrificing their principles to their libidos and calling it nuance. It’s refreshing to see secular people who notice the burns on others. It raises my hopes that they will come to see how marrying the only woman you will ever sleep with at twenty could be a joy and a blessing.
I don't share historic OpenAI's or Anthropic's concerns about being paperclipped by an accidental AI god, so I disagree with many of their positions on AI ethics. But both Microsoft and the DoD made business agreements knowing and agreeing to respect the other party's principles, and both reneged the moment it was inconvenient to keep their words. I can't really respect that, any more than I can respect the business leaders who appealed to their people's ideals as long as it was convenient and then sold them out for money.
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