Hieronymus
AAQC-winning posts:
User ID: 419
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I couldn’t disagree with the author’s framing more. That said, I am not a First Things subscriber, and my take necessarily ends where the archived article does.
The author frames this as a faction on the right discovering human genetics and deciding to jettison family values as a consequence; he emphasizes this with the label “genetic determinist.” This is backward. These are people who already occupied the secular center left to center right and weren’t adherents of family values in the first place. They were already okay with premarital sex (and occasionally adultery); they were already okay with divorce; they were already pro-choice, or at least not so pro-life as to have reservations about IVF. They are part of a right-wing coalition, and they have common cause with social conservatives, but no one was under the illusion that they were social conservatives.
I hold (loosely) that nature and nurture both matter and that the nature-nurture ratio is different in different areas of life. But I am not a consequentialist: if I thought that all life outcomes were 95% genetic, I wouldn’t cease to be a social conservative. It’s good to do the right thing because it is the right thing; positive consequences are frosting on the cake. (Even if you are a consequentialist, you should consider the implications for childhood happiness as well as adult outcomes.)
Looking up the author, Schmitz believes that social conservatives should make common cause with social democrats, not with libertarians or the pro-business right. If he has laid this out clearly and dealt with the difficulties in that position, I’d be interested to read it. In America most social democrats are also social progressives, and they have a history of leveraging the welfare state to promote social progressivism and oppose social conservatism. The current political alignment follows in part from that.
As it is, the piece comes off as a disingenuous attempt to find a label for right-wing social liberals that won’t also stick to left-wing social liberals. I expected better from First Things.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
I think that we in the modern West struggle to understand these things because we have lost the understanding that intentionally tempting someone is a sin, and we have lost the ideas we need to discuss two people sinning against one another.
This can result in some unexpected and kind of weird Shiri’s scissors. Take the Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse: As the song is written, the male singer is trying to convince the female singer to stay the night by offering her a series of plausible excuses to do so; she kind of wants to but knows she shouldn’t, or at least that she’s expected not to. His tone is best described as playfully predatory.
That breaks people’s minds. Since there is no longer any socially acceptable category for culpable seduction, everyone tries to collapse the wave function into either “cute coming of age story” or “rape.” About ten years ago I heard a middle school choir (ages 11–14) perform the song with cigarettes and booze removed but sexual implications left altogether intact. On the other hand, people have been decrying the song’s radio play for years now on the grounds that it glorifies rape, which is the only moral category many people have for predatory sex.
Much of the yes-means-yes advocacy seemed to me to come from the same place. College girls had sex that they came to understand on some level was Not Okay. They (often correctly) accused college boys of exploiting them, and the boys (often correctly) pointed out that the sex was consensual. There is a natural temptation for everyone to claim innocence by projecting all the guilt onto the other party, but in this case the kids didn’t have a fighting chance: Their elders had robbed them of any moral categories outside “rape” and “not rape.”
So yes, I have known the Christian woman who sleeps with her boyfriend and, when asked, points out that this is what is expected of her to continue the relationship, and I acknowledge that this a real temptation placed upon her. I also know that she has a normal libido, and that on some level she was using the expectation as an excuse to do what she wanted to do. Her responsibility doesn’t render him innocent, and vice-versa.
I will certainly not claim to know how socially conservative secularists should navigate the current landscape. Both men and women have said that trying to do the right thing often feels like a sucker’s bet, and I believe them. I think that we in conservative churches can start by dating and marrying only sincere fellow believers, which we should be doing anyway. But that doesn’t address the underlying issue.
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
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
11mo ago
enemy areas
This is, on one level, my actual impression of many places. I live in a blue state, so casual pride flags happen. But once you get above a certain threshold of rainbow density in a nominally public place, it’s clear that there’s a dynamic of deliberate hostility to those of us with other convictions.
Still, I’d not open with that phrase on the Motte. Mistake theory is not altogether dead here, the way it usually is there.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
They are making a legal argument, not a political or moral one; the first amendment to the U.S. constitution calls out religion specifically. This is the flip side of a related issue, that the Constitution (or at least constitutional jurisprudence) does not sufficiently limit the imposition of irreligious totalizing ideologies because they are not an “establishment of religion.” In the same way, violating a philosophical commitment is not “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Applying the religion clauses of the first amendment is already complicated in a country as socially and religiously diverse as America has become. Consider Masterpiece Cakeshop, whose proprietor’s sincere religious beliefs are not in doubt: He won at the Supreme Court on the grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was motivated by demonstrable animus against his religion, and even then the decision was 7–2.
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
7mo 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
8mo ago
No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash.
A principle that has served me well for twenty four years: If he calls someone a coward who isn't, don't trust him. This applies regardless of his target's other vices.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.
If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.
The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Maybe it's because I was a teenager, but it sure felt like there was a gray tribe in the '90s. The mores of Slashdot weren't blue tribe mores, but the mores of Reddit now are. The Eich affair and CoCs in open source made it clear a change had taken place.
I'm enough of a red-triber that I don't know how it happened, only that it did. And I think we lost something important.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Come on, man. I know that creationists are one of the traditionally iconic outgroups in rationalist-adjacent spaces. And I find Hegseth pretty frustrating myself. But if you asked Pastor Doug Wilson (de facto leader of CREC) whether there have ever been any peoples without metallurgy, what do you think he'd say? Do you really think it would bother him at all?
One of the issues to first spark debate among evangelicals after our definitive split with the mainline in the early twentieth century was how to relate as evangelicals to non-evangelical communities. Originally the question was how evangelical churches should relate to the mainline churches. Another question followed about how evangelical churches’ worship should relate to evangelism, which is often addressed to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with evangelical culture. But more pertinent here is the question of how evangelical Christians should conduct ourselves in fields like academia and politics.
Some people are able to win respect in both worlds. And that can be a very valuable role, able to accomplish things that few others can. But there is always a risk of “going native,” claiming to be more sophisticated than those rubes who hold to their evangelical convictions because you have accepted your field’s secular norms on the Bible, property, sex, abortion, other religions, etc.
There is a widespread perception within evangelicalism that David French has compromised more and more of his evangelical convictions to be seen as “one of the good ones” by the secular commentariat. I think that this explains his position on transgenderism in the public square, for example, better than principled classical liberalism does. So I don’t see French as an exemplar of classically liberal evangelicals.
To an extent Trump makes sense as a result of the evangelical absence of institutional leadership and embrace of charismatic leaders - if they're going to have a political vision, it will be grounded in dynamic individual leaders hostile to traditional institutions, like Trump himself.
Evangelical support for George W. Bush was much earlier and more heartfelt than evangelical support for Trump has been. Bush’s faith is, as far as I can tell, sincere. But while he himself may have had sympathy for the religious right, he also shared his father’s neoconservative convictions, and virtually all of his political appointments reflected the latter rather than the former. Bush didn’t move the needle much for conservative Christians during his terms: His political capital was spent on the War on Terror.
The Obama administration, by contrast, saw a flurry of progressive activity. The president did not shy away from using either the federal bureaucracy or the judiciary as a weapon against social conservatives. His administration issued a series of Dear Colleague letters threatening schools and colleges into complying with progressive norms on discipline, sexual assault accusations, and gender identity. He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception and the (Evangelical Protestant) owners of Hobby Lobby that it wasn’t enough to pay for several forms of contraception, they had to include those with abortifacient effects. Thankfully the Supreme Court forbade this, basing its decision on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 rather than the Constitution. At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state. In reaction, the legislature passed another law effectively gutting the RFRA.
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
The more that evangelicals continue to feel that they're doing badly, or that their fortunes are sliding, the more seductive such leaders will be for them.
Yes! When it becomes clear that certain institutions are only used against us, why would we want leaders who leave them lying around?
I had hoped that Pence would come out of the first Trump administration with an awareness of the threat from progressive-controlled institutions and the need to fight them. Combined with his strong evangelical convictions and his small-government conservatism, that had the potential to make him a fantastic future president. But it’s not the lesson he took from his time under Trump, and maybe January 6 would have cut off that opportunity anyway. It remains to be seen what lessons (Catholic convert) J. D. Vance will take from his term as V.P.
They use a number of different names for it - Deneen's 'aristopopulism', Vermeule's 'common-good constitutionalism', and so on - but what unites this group is the conviction that it is both possible and desirable for the United States to be governed in conformance with Catholic social teaching. Liberal democracy should be limited in its scope, fundamentally reframed, or (in the most extreme cases) abolished entirely.
I am not sure what happened here. One moment, several Roman Catholic thinkers were exploring various critiques of American liberalism and alternatives to it; the next, they all fell in line behind some version or other of integralism. It’s like there was something in the water.
The obvious criticism to make of this option is that it is a counsel of despair - it takes for granted that the public is lost. While Dreher himself denies that he calls for any kind of 'retreat', this denial has always been unconvincing at best. … The Benedict Option itself is primarily a plea for evangelical Protestants and Catholics to try this. You can indeed find people in those traditions taking an option like this, though so far it's too early to see how generative their efforts are. I don't predict entire evangelical or Catholic communities taking this approach, though, until it's clear that they have no other choice.
I would call it a semi-retreat, or maybe a fighting retreat to a more defensible position. But the question is: Is it defensible? I think the lesson of the Obama presidency is that socially progressive activists will not tolerate enclaves that do not submit to their norms. If you built such a community – and you were successful enough to be noticed – you could reasonably expect to face creative applications of the laws on land use, housing, health care, education, employment, and so on, to impose progressive values.
There is a fourth approach bandied about, but it’s almost as unlikely as Catholic integralism. When “Christian nationalism” became a vague talking point among some Democrats, a few different evangelicals decided to claim the term. One wrote a book on it, which I haven’t read. What they seem to have in common is that they want an arrangement like that the one that existed in America before the progressive movement, with evangelical Christianity in the place of mainline Christianity as normative, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tolerated but not normative, and non-Christian religions legal but marginalized to one degree or another. (This last in particular varies by thinker.) It would take some pretty radical social shifts to make that even vaguely plausible. And while radical social shifts have happened before, that’s not the kind of thing you can accomplish with a political program.
Those are a lot of words to say that I don’t know the best path forward. But hopefully they contribute to understanding the situation.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Taking this idea seriously, it's hard to see how it manifests in the US.
At best it manifests in a dictatorship where the victorious side murderously purges the other from any position of leadership, civil, military, or social. At worst you get something like the Spanish Civil War, but in a much larger country.
But it’d be a mistake to take it seriously. It’s a bit of dark humor from Scott.
Hieronymus
3yr ago
Those places exist, but not as conservative communities. Cities are consistently the most progressive places in their regions, so it's hard to see them as the way to work out conservative values.
It is strange how the the author glosses over the diversity of opinion among those quoted. Someone who thinks that changing the word “race” to “species” will do the trick has a very different critique from someone who thinks that neither the character’s species nor its culture should impact character creation. When Paizo¹ published Pathfinder 2 it used the term “ancestry” instead of race, but the article is wrong to say that it dropped racial ability modifiers altogether. It did change them to make playing against type less disadvantageous.
Over the years I have come to a particular view on the purpose of RPG rules: their primary function is for the gamemaster to communicate to the players how things work and what is possible within the game world; they establish a shared understanding. The GM is free to violate the rules, but he should do so selectively to preserve that shared understanding.
So if someone separates race from culture, I want to ask, “How does that fit your setting?” If it communicates the world better to the players and lets them situate their characters better within it, that’s great! Maybe your elves have several very different cultures, or your capital city has a cosmopolitan culture shared by the men, elves, and dwarves who live there. But if your elves are a reclusive people clinging tightly to their shared traditions, rules that let the player create an elf character from a dwarven culture are going to lead to confusion and frustration.
I think the article fundamentally objects to the givenness of these game mechanics for the character. That explains why the author is concerned not only with race (in either sense of the word) but also with multicultural characters or a 1976 Dragon magazine piece (!) trying to model sexual dimorphism. The player chooses the character’s race, sex, culture, background, and class, but the character only chooses the last one² or two. If you believe that real-world people are fully self-defined beings, I can see how that would rub you the wrong way.
[1] For non-gamers, Paizo is the company which publishes Pathfinder, another branch of the D&D family and a competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s current, fifth edition of D&D.
[2] I wonder how the author feels about sorcerers who inherit their powers through a bloodline, though D&D 5e leans into this less than D&D 3e did and far less than either edition of Pathfinder does.
If pastors preaching chastity can get handsy, it's not the values being taught, it's the power and the hierarchy.
I think it’s just normal human sin. I don’t know the base rate, but as I recall pastors are significantly less likely to abuse children than school teachers.
That list was a weapon in the culture war. There are some progressive (by evangelical standards) people and organizations whose M.O. is to ignore base rates, ignore any exculpatory evidence, and accuse denominations or institutions of being shot through with sexual abuse, then demand checks and balances that subvert the denomination’s polity. The people they want to grant new power over doctrine and practice are consistently from the progressive wing of the denomination, and they always think that the right way to address sexual abuse is by moving the denomination closer to the broader culture.
Hieronymus
10mo ago
Aspects of Encanto are great, but central plot elements are treated in a very unsatisfying way.
The magic of the setting appears in several different guises: Roman Catholic folk miracles, brujería, Disney princess magic; but it doesn't behave consistently with any of them, doing instead whatever the writers thought was dramatically appropriate at the moment. The movie collapses the object and meta levels of its major symbol in an unprincipled way that feels like a cop out. And even once it's established that the symbolism of magic = family love is all that matters, the backstory revelations undermine it: Was it grandpa's death that brought about family love?
Great animation, good songs, exasperating writing.
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.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
The Reader’s Digest condensed version: The Old Testament ritual for purifying Jewish priests to serve in the temple requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. Rabbinical tradition adds a bunch of criteria to the biblical law (as rabbinical tradition is wont to do) such that qualifying cows are absurdly rare.
Some Jews who want to restore the temple would like to breed qualifying cattle. A few eccentric dispensationalist Christians, who believe that the rebuilding of the Jewish temple is part of the unfolding of biblical prophecy, want to help them. This isn’t a common thing, but it has geopolitical relevance, as rebuilding the Jewish temple would require tearing down the Al Aqsa mosque.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Close the loopholes and make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law. Have more of their executive orders get shredded in the courts like DAPA did during Obama's tenure, and like a lot of Trump's EOs always do.
I don't think this is possible, either in principle or in practice. The president has wide discretion not to enforce laws for a variety of reasons. And federal judges, who are routinely blue tribe even when right-leaning, will mostly be looking for reasons to allow a Democratic or neocon Republican president to skip out on his side of the bargain.
We've tried things like this before, and the pro-illegal-immigration factions have successfully defected at the first opportunity. I don't see any reason for optimism that the compromise will be honored in an even more divided country.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
As a Protestant, I agree with you that the papacy is no guarantor of doctrinal fidelity. But the core question is this: The pope is said to be the vicar of Christ – is he? Flawed historical assertions and doctrinal contradictions count as evidence against the claim, but the claim itself is true or false and should be addressed as such. (Whether this is the right forum to go deep on that question is a separate issue.)
The same is true of claims about the president of the Mormon church: Is he a true or false prophet? Having a true prophet may be useful, but that doesn’t determine whether Joseph Smith and Russell Nelson qualify. Flawed historical assertions and doctrinal contradictions count as evidence here too. And I think it’s audacious to say that the LDS score well.
What about the Mormon history of pre-Columbian America, which doesn’t jive with any historical source or archeological finds? Or the book of Abraham, whose source manuscripts turned out to be Egyptian funerary texts once we could read hieroglyphs? Or the edits to the Book of Mormon regarding the nature of the godhead? Or the doctrines which were said to be unchangeable but were nevertheless changed, like plural marriage?
Hieronymus
1yr ago
The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW. I don’t know a ton about either, but I remember Men Going Their Own Way as a neighborhood of the broader manosphere, when the blogosphere was more of a going concern. It was generally made up of men who had been burned hard.
I also don’t know if the causes are similar – men mostly seem to come to MGTOW when they are looking to explain and contextualize bitter personal experiences. Is 4B an actual backlash in the West, or is it just that some journalists want to cultivate a backlash? When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?
Hieronymus
3yr ago
Some of us are déclassé enough to appreciate it; I thought the reminder that some in the UK already saw the connection was well placed. And if it introduces somebody new to The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that's great too.
The classical liberal chamber of my heart grew three sizes today. A move that simultaneously targets overregulation, the illegibility of the administrative state, and strict liability? I hope that the president can find a way to parlay this into lasting change.
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