MayorofOysterville
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User ID: 3800
MayorofOysterville
10d ago
I mean, I noted that women left to their own devices have gotten fat, covered in tattoos, and do weird things with their hair.
So have men. This is just a large part of Western culture at this point.
MayorofOysterville
25d ago
English would get you farther in most of Sub Saharan Africa then it will in Japan.
MayorofOysterville
25d ago
Father learns Mandarin and we're back to the happy case. The US foreign service estimates 2200 class hours to learn Mandarin. Father doesn't need to speak Mandarin, he only needs to comprehend it, but he's also not taking classes, he's trying to pick it up from "immersion" that happens whenever the family is all together. This is rare. Mandarin is among the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn, so maybe this could work for, say, Spanish, but I doubt that this works in the long run. It's easy enough to pick up ve a bañarte ahora but I doubt that you can work your way up to actually substantive conversations as an adult with such minimal exposure.
If you are not trying to read and write and just speak basic "kitchen Mandarin" you can get that in six months self study. With pretty much any language it's not THAT hard to get to a basic level about household topics.
MayorofOysterville
25d ago
If your a non Orthodox Christian you have much more freedom to practice your faith under the Western Liberals. Look at the Amish and Hasidic in the US. America lets weird hyper conservative religions exist the Netherlands and France both have small but thriving communities of conservative Christians.
MayorofOysterville
30d ago
He makes the same cultural noises every European leader does. But he's no more Christian then the liberal Western Europeans. Nor are Russians anymore religious then Western Europeans. Putin suppresses quite a bit of Christianity as well, Evangelical missionaries are not welcome in Russia。 America is a far more religious society then Russia.
MayorofOysterville
30d ago
Only for foreign guys who marry the female equivalent of Chad. Guys move half way across the world for a "traditional wife" and then are shocked when marrying some girl they met in a bar ends in tears.
Defacing churches in Russia and LGBT behavior is treated very seriously indeed.
That's because these things are perceived as against the state not because they are against Christianity. Homosexuality is mildly suppressed in Russia but so is Evangelical Christianity. Because both are perceived as foreign Western ideologies. And homosexuality is at most mildly repressed not "treated very seriously" There are open Gay bars and clubs in Moscow and St. Petersburg, gay men from all over the former Soviet Union move to Russia for it's tolerance of homosexuality. The whole reason Russia passed those gay propaganda laws is because they have enough organic western liberals they needed to suppress them.
And all of this flows from the state. When Russia was more open in the 90s they were more open to both Protestant missionaries and gay activists and now that the state is stronger both have been curtailed as foreign ideologies. Defacing churches is illegal but so is defacing any state approved religious house of worship Mosques included.
MayorofOysterville
30d ago
However cynically Putin may use Christian rhetoric he's 10x more Christian than the average Western leader who's mentally redefined Christianity to mean 'more leftism but with cross aesthetics'.
Vladimir Putin who swore he was an Atheist to join the KGB for decades and is on record (via hot mike) of hoping tech not Jesus will make him immortal? That Vladimir Putin? He's against western Liberalism and LBGTQ+ sure but that doesn't make someone a Christian. By that standard Joseph Stalin was a Christian.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
But people being "entitled to reproduce" was never an actual issue in Marxist societies?
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Because even under Marxism with Chinese characteristics, you can't make women WANT to settle for just any dude.
This issue is even more present in hyper-capitalist Korea and Japan it doesn't have anything to do with Marxism. It has to do with Asian family social structures being traditional while the economic structure has become more egalitarian along with small family size. Women don't want to get married because they are expected to work, take care of the house hold, take care of the children, take care of her husbands parents and take care of her parents. It's gotten to where Asian families are attempting to unload the entire social burden of an extended family onto one 28 year old woman it's not sustainable and is a big part of the collapse of birthrates and marriage in these societies.
China under Mao didn't have these problems. Many other more horrific ones but not these ones.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
But unfortunately I can't readily point towards a more effective strategy that he could implement on his lonesome.
Spend 10% of what US college degree costs to go live in the Philippines for a year or two and marry a Filipina hottie? He should have definitely at least tried that first.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country
So why don't you leave? This probably sounds harsher then I mean it too. But I did. Life outside the US can be pretty good you are right. So why not go to a first world country like Singapore that's business friendly, or some cheaper country, you could choose a place like Georgia where most people are Orthodox ot as you say Thailand. Those doing NGO grifts probably make less than you so it'd be a downgrade materially and morally. But leaving? You should seriously consider it the rest of the world is fine for an American willing to work with it. Jump on in the water is fine.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
There's an oversupply of adoptable foster kids, but an undersupply of adoptable babies. Most people who want to adopt want a baby.
I feel like they are nutpicking. I live in China and just looking out my window I see plenty of happy people and have hung out with many Chinese enjoying their lives. China does have a lot of grinding jobs. it also has a lot of opportunities to carve out a niche if you can resist social pressure. Rent is cheap which allows young people to go to Yunan and open boutique coffee business and live off of it.
It's not that it's unrealistic it's just it's a very specific profile. I could profile a failing town in rural Virginia, Amazon warehouse workers, and medical residents and paint a pretty grim picture of America. China has a lot of people grinding themselves to the bone and a lot of people enjoying life, these aren't necessarily the richest either.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
It would be easy enough to just limit wees legalization to edibles. Weed is way to socially acceptable to properly ban. No one wants to see bright young college student Becky sent to the slammer for having a dime bag.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
If you prohibit weed it creates the wedge issue for tolerating drugs, because something like 60% of US college students smoke at least semi regularly nobody really wants to punish Chad and Stacy for a few bong rips.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Yes I do. But a lot of people are then arguing that Gnosticism inherently trends to anti-natalism which I don' think it needs to philosophically and I think the fact that we have incredibly ancient extant Gnostic religions prove it.
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
Most Gnostics don't/didn't believe we were maliciously incarnated by a demiurge. The Cathars did syncretizing the concept of a demiurge with Satan and other aspects of the Catholic church. The Nag Hammadi creation texts and the extant Gnostic religions have a much more complicated cosmology and a concept much closer to original sin in the sense that in some of them the material world becomes irrevocably tainted after the rape of eve but not before. In others the world is created bad as an act of rebellion or irrevocably tainted because it's creation was not authorized by God and Yahweh lacked the authority. In some Yahweh is evil, in some he is simply fallible and overcome by lust or pride. and in some the world is created by other entities. But it's a very broad concept I think we have something like five Gnostic creation myths of which we can read the full texts of.
Anyway Gnosticism is a broad category which is a lot more than Cathars, and I wish people on the internet would say Cathars because most of the common internet use of "Gnosticism" is essentially just referring to them.
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
Which is entirely accurate but a lot of these things are specific the Cathars rather than all Gnostics in general. I don't mean to be too nitpicky but its was one of my pet peeves because the internet in general seems to view all of Gnosticism as just the Cathars when it's a much broader category.
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
Gnosticism, a dualist offshoot of Christianity which held that each of us are immaterial souls who have been cruelly trapped inside our flesh prisons by a wicked deity called the Demiurge: thus, in the act of having children, we are condemning yet another soul to be trapped inside a flesh prison against its will.
This is not inherent to Gnosticism anymore than it is to Christianity. Some sects believed this but not all. It's not conceptually different then believing we are inherently flawed due to original sin in fact it basically is this except they view the sin as being different and invert the garden of Eden story. In different gnostic traditions the original sin is the creation of the world or alternatively the rape of Eve by Yahweh in any case this does not inherently lead to antinatalism or nihilism and the two extant Gnostic religions are not such. Foundationally it's far more about inverting the Garden of Eden story and dualism （though usually more functionally polytheism). Of course just as in Christianity there's a winnowing effect where the antinatalist sects quickly die out.
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.
They weren't and the two existing moder Gnostic religions aren't
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
The Gnostics were anti-sex, in the sense that they believed that a celibate lifestyle was morally superior to the alternatives for everyone, with marriage being a second-best compromise. If taken seriously, this becomes anti-natalist in practice.
The currently existing Gnostics the Yazidis and the Mandaeans are not particularly anit-natilist.
Paul spends a lot of effort in the Epistles trying to convince the early Church that marriage (and marital sex) were okay, suggesting that the uncorrected early Church tended to agree with the Gnostics on this point.
Paul's views were pretty complicated on marriage, he says this in Corinthians 1 chapter 7
Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is well for a man not to touch a woman Verse 2 I wish that all were as I myself am. (That is unmarried and childless) Verse 6 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. Verses 8 and 9.
Now while he does exhort the married to stay married this is hardly a full throated endorsement given than he says the unmarried should not become married and he wishes everyone be unmarried and childless. There have been plenty of anti-natalist Christian movements based on versus like this just as there have been plenty of anti-natalist gnostic movements. The Gnostic concept isn't inherently anymore anti-natalist then verses like this and the idea of original sin. All Abrahamic religions value the spirit over the flesh.
If Russia attacked them sure. And I doubt those 90% are in the Army now and even so when the first Russian missile hits Berlin that number will change real quick.
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
But didn't invade. Starting a war with dozens of first world militaries would be a horrible idea for Russia they can't even handle Ukraine. The modern fighters in the EU alone would doom Russia's Ukrainian adventure. Not to mention the EU's almost two million active duty soldiers.
There's a huge number of marriagable women that meet your standards if you expand your search globally.
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