OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
That is not my heuristic.
He liked me first. I figured out that he liked me and then I signaled to him that it was ok to ask me on a date using an indication well-known in my social circle. He read that signal successfully, indicating he belonged in a compatible social circle.
Then he identified a common activity we could do together, set a time and place, and summoned the courage to risk the wrath of HR and the rejection of the girl he liked. These all demostrate the bare minimum agency, risk tolerance, and self-confidence (which of course would continue to be vetted during the courtship.)
Your rebuttal seems to mostly be that this would rule you out. I'm sure you're nice to hang around, but based on what little I know, I wouldn't want to marry you even if we were both free to marry. I'm sure the feeling is mutual. Another win for the heuristic.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I think most men ruled out my my heuristic are not men I would have wanted to marry. My heuristic means the men I dated had the bare minimum risk tolerance, agency, and social graces.
"Doesn't abuse you" is such a low bar. I selected for a man with the agency to pull over on a highway and yank away a ladder blocking a lane, while other drivers just passed it. I selected for a man who will volunteer to reboot a router when the local coffee shop has trouble with their POS system. I selected for a man who is familiar with the social norms my friends and family share.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Historic flooding in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Whole towns washed away. People retreating to their attics as water levels rise. People losing everything.
Tragic. Horrific. But this is the Culture War thread so I am going to ask the insensitive question, what does this mean for the election in <40 days?
My first thought is that there is a certain irony that these states are among those that just limited the forms of ID allowed at a voting booth. Someone who has lost their house is less likely to have all their documentation, and getting new copies will take longer than the time before the election.
Rural areas that were wiped out will have a harder time finding their polling location under the mud and timber. Mail-in voting will be difficult without a mailbox.
People are going to watch the Biden-Harris's administration to see how they respond.
Do these factors make it more likely for these swing states to turn Blue or Red? Buncombe County, one of the hardest hit, went 60% for Biden in 2020.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Sample of four kids, they tend to eat everything when they are under 2.5, then start to balk at things that they liked previously.
I have one kid who will skip every meal except breakfast if we don't offer at least a serving of bread/crackers/tortilla that has not been contaminated with anything.
For every other kid, I have one rule that works. Everything the grownups are eating goes on their plate. They have to smell the food at the least. It they want seconds on a food they like, they have to take one bite of the food they are avoiding.
For the kid this doesn't work with, she has a higher than average aversion to lots of things. Every floating object is a bee, every thing that touches her unexpectedly is slimey and disgusting, finger paints are a reason to screech.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
It worked for me.
because jerks are more likely to not care about the woman's intent and just go for it.
That's one good reason to avoid being alone with a guy for the first several dates and to save sex for marriage. Helps weed out the jerks.
All the traditions work together, we can't just throw away one and expect it to work.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Is the woman saying this while batting their eyes? Acting bashful or coy? Are her hands clasped behind her or is she leaning forward? She might actually want you to flirt back. But that doesn't mean she would accept a proposition. She might want a proposition, to stroke her ego, but she wouldn't accept it.
It's about posture and context. "I would like to spend more time alone with you" is way different from "I'm glad you were the one assigned to this task" or "I like to hang out with our group of friends, of which you are one." It's the woman's job to figure out how to get across "I would like to spend more time alone with you" without crossing the line of plausible deniability (because if she has to throw herself at a man, he's probably not invested in her.)
Is it fair that it's this way? Women have the more vulnerable role in continuing the species. She needs a man who will actually support her, and that is generally a man who seeks her out.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Some of the split might be terminology then. For me, "asking out" means to set the time and venue for a date.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
It's the same picture.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
If a man has not already asked a woman out, it's either because she has failed to entice him with visual signals and flirting, or he is too socially incompetent or low self esteem to be worthy.
If batting your eyes and saying, "You know, I like spending time with you," doesn't work, then best to cut losses then and there. Guy isn't going to know the first thing about building a good life together.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Like I said, there is a huge difference between people who choose to be childless and those who are infertile.
I am making a distinction between biological legacy, which George Washington doesn't have, with his "effort" legacy which includes the country and his step children.
George Washington did not have kids. I kind of agree with you in general, that the recent trend of choosing fur babies instead of human children is alarming. But I think there is a huge difference between people who make a deliberate choice to go without kids and those who are infertile or homosexual.
People who cannot have a biological legacy seek other ways to leave a legacy. Many of the greatest people in history had no children. It's the people who seem to have no desire to leave a legacy of any kind behind that bother me the most.
I was reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which the Earth loses its biosphere, and reflected on the absurdity of a universe without intelligent life. Imagine a universe that existed, with particles bouncing around, planets forming, and no one to witness it the whole time before it crunched down to nothing again. It just strikes me as absurd! Intelligent life is an obvious good, and yet there are people who don't think so. People who think that humans have messed up nature, instead of being the salt that gave it value in the first place. People who want humans gone (even without us creating an intelligence after us.)
(Edit: I don't mean that most fur-baby people think this way explicitly. Most don't ever reflect on it. And that kind of makes it worse in my view. It's in the air they breathe.)
Sam Altman at least isn't like that. He does want to leave behind an intelligent legacy, just not a human legacy. And that is disturbing, but I don't think it's the same kind of disturbing that is afflicting the middle class.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
How many people tear open their lithium Ion batteries? Because that seems to be the location of the explosive here.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I am going to ask The Horrible Question. How do you know that the device you're reading this text on, right now, hasn't had a similar sabotage from China or [insert boogieman here?]
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
The administration of the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis is currently suffering from a MeToo witch hunt: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2024/09/10/everything-to-know-about-hogsett-administration-sexual-harassment-crisis/75148395007/
The city's human resources department is also conducting six other investigations into current and former staff, officials confirmed to IndyStar.
The mayor himself has not been implicated, but Republicans are calling on Democrats to call for his resignation. "Your rules applied fairly."
I think there is something to the idea that Democrats assumed Republicans would be the hotbed of sexual exploitation and that they would come out of MeToo relatively unscathed. I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I have two pairs of Thursdays and once they are broken in they are comfortable and will last for a long time. They have a line of leather sneakers with sheepskin interior lining: https://thursdayboots.com/collections/mens-sneakers-low-top
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Well, in most Western democracies its the exclusive conjugal union of two adults,
I don't think I noticed what you meant by this the first time. Two adults can only have a conjugal union if they are of opposite sexes. They can only have their organs work together and perform the action that produces offspring if they are of opposite sex. That is what is meant by conjugal union. I don't care that many countries are using an absurd definition of marriage. I don't believe in "gay marriage." Whatever they are doing, it's not marriage as the word is understood by myself and everyone in history before the last thirty years. It's like "Trans-women are woman" to me.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Firstly, the original question was how, as a Christian, someone could reconcile Jesus' teachings with being against Gay marriage. So the conversation from the start was religious.
Second, I don't see the distinction in my response. If the couple is not religious and never chooses to have sex, it's the same. They are married because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage. (even if they never want to)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
How would you feel if two asexual people got married and didn't have a kid through intercourse or adopt?
This would closely resemble a Josephite marriage, which still has the potential of one of the partners saying, "I feel called to have sex now" and then the other partner owes the marriage debt. It works because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I'm not the person you asked, but Jesus seemed to encourage sexual abstinence for those who could not handle the consequences of His strict teaching on marriage:
The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”
It's not very clear to me what the connection between loving your neighbor has to do with the definition of marriage. Marriage simply is the exclusive conjugal union of a man and a woman, open to life, vowed till death do them part. It is a vocation, one of the schools of love that only some people are called to. A vocation creates the conditions of heroic self-sacrifice, so obviously not everyone can do it.
Even from a non-Christian sociological perspective, there is no reason to have a codified sexual-partnership without the potential to generate children. This used to be widely acknowledged and uncontroversial.
Bertrand Russell wrote, “But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex.” He continued, “it is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution.” Renowned anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed that “the family—based on a union, more or less durable, but socially approved, of two individuals of opposite sexes who establish a household and bear and raise children—appears to be a practically universal phenomenon, present in every type of society.”
I once had a long discussion on this and still stick to what I wrote here.
That is the common canard, but when the issue is studied this is not the majority of cases:
The most common reasons for delay were that it took a long time to make arrangements (59%), to decide (39%) and to find out about the pregnancy (36%).
We can also find statistics embeded into other studies. This one was testing the effect of a drug duirng late term abortions. As part of the information gathered, Dr. Hern reports:
Pre-operative estimates of fetal age ranged from 18 to 38 menstrual weeks. Follow-up contact was obtained with 51% of all patients. Seventy six patients (6.3%) had a history of previous cesarean section, and 20.8% (N=250) of all patients sought assistance because of a diagnosed fetal disorder.
Both quotes align with all other studies I have found:
Why does this matter if it's only 1% of abortions? 1% of abortions is still 15,000 of deaths a year at a developmental age where they could have possibly survived outside the mother.
Compare that number to the 16,651 of people who are murdered by guns a year and you can understand the moral outrage that some people have. If approx. 15,000 gun murders causes a well-spring of laws, activism, protests, movements, then surely ~15,000 abortions of fetuses that share the same gestational age as the kids in the nearest NICU are also cause for the same.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Perhaps your acquaintances are just better at quietly getting rid of it. I never announced my pregnancies until the 2nd trimester because I didn't want to miscarry and have it turn into a Thing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
It's like I've attacked a religious belief of yours by citing very well-accepted stats.
About 5% of women make an enzyme that breaks down the hormones in birth control faster. This might explain a perfect use failure. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/genetics-may-explain-why-birth-control-doesnt-always-work-for-some-women
Condom failure rate was described by gattsuru better than I can.
These effectiveness numbers are so well known in my circle I hadn't even thought to cite them, but I assure you the Guttmacher Institute is not Christian propaganda. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-effectiveness-united-states
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
"Perfect use" condom is 2%, "Perfect use" Pill is .3%. Even "properly used" contraception means that there are thousands of women winding up pregnant from "perfect use." But how many people in a high school class are going to use it perfectly? "Typical use" is 14% and 7% respectively.
Things that are 100% like sterilization are unlikely options for teenagers. I suppose now IUDs might be more available.
I guess the idea is that, with education, "typical use' rates will go down? If so, my sex ed class covered explicitly how to put on a condom, the importance of taking a pill every day and that a single missed day means that the woman is more likely to get pregnant for the next month. Etc. They went very deep into the failure modes of each.
The biggest problem is that "Sex Ed" was one week. How many of your classmates on the internet are claiming that they never learned about the Vietnam war in school, or segregation, or whatever, when you remember very clearly that these topics were covered? I would prefer for Sex Ed to be a weekly thing all throughout Middle and High school.
Teens and young adults are going to fuck before getting married.
I didn't. My parent's didn't. My grandparents didn't.
That being said, in hindsight I think my Sex Ed was trying to encourage oral. They went deep into dental dams and things.
Most of these people do not live in places where hurricanes regularly cause damage, and many people were not expecting flooding until it was window-high.
https://x.com/smokiesvol/status/1840077470931832933
https://x.com/Rex_Williams/status/1840467637467574395
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