SSCReader
9d ago
Without the context of how common arson is generally it may or may not be substantial. Plus we'd have to know the relative ratio of Catholic churches to other churches in order to know if half those being targeted means Catholic churches are at greater risk than churches generally (so Catholics are being targeted specifically for being Catholic).
SSCReader
28d ago
Or perhaps more generally, what makes you think they're even capable of rationally evaluating fears in the first place
Exactly. People aren't generally rational, especially about their fears. And especially not people who have been shown not to be rational about their fears. So condeming them for not rationally comparing fears and thus saying they are operating in bad faith is just double dipping.
Fighting climate change and nuclear catastrophe are not about improving lives. They are about stopping them getting worse (or ending entirely!). Teslas are nice..but they are still (in my view) inferior to a similary luxurious petrol car. If climate change is a real problem, then the deal may be tackling it at a cost. Lives may not get better. It entirely depends on how bad it will be and what the cost would be. Maybe we would have to spend 10% of world GDP on some huge geo-engineering project INSTEAD of making peoples lives better in the short term.
Now, are people hypocrites? Do they struggle to make the sacrifices their principles tell them they should? Do they fail to rationally compare their dislike of Musk to whether his cars help their ideals? Yes to all of those. So it goes.
SSCReader
2d ago
Well Hobbes believes the natural state is war of all against all. So the idea here is that everyone is really such a killer if left to our own devices. And war (or other catastrophes) just removes the oversight we would normally fear.
SSCReader
2d ago
Essentially (to my understanding) that people assume our rules and norms are self-enforcing whereas in actuality (as per this theory) without significant effort we would exist in the "state of nature".
So thinking that men would revert to such a state when deprived of the social efforts to repress our base instincts means you are noticing the hole in our current (mostly Western) mindset.
It doesn't have to be. If you pick up the right prenatal classes there are a number of helpful things you can do. supporting her physically (depending on position), massaging her legs, feet, back (useful if she is prone to cramping), to more esoteric things like counter-pressure. Your wife may also not be in a position to advocate for her needs. Which isn't a problem if your medical/birth team are good, but its always possible you get an issue, you'll have to go to bat against.
In my case for my third child, the midwife waited too long to decide on an episiotomy and I had to tell them my wife was prone to a tear and if they didn't cut it was going to be much worse (a lesson learned from births 1 and 2).
Your call of course but I think you can plan find ways to be useful.
SSCReader
15d ago
I've had this exact experience going both directions. When I decided not to believe any more, I have a strong memory of watching all the valences flip, and the same happened the other way when I decided to believe again. In both cases, it was absurdly obvious how good the new arguments were, and how ridiculous all my old commitments had been. It's definately not an experience one forgets.
I agree with that, except, it wasn't something I made a conscious decision on, but it was very much an overnight thing. Thing that had made sense no longer did and things that did not, now did.
I've seen this a fair bit in my marriage, and now that I'm a father. I love my wife; she's by far the best thing that's ever happened to me, hands down, not even close. I am confident that the case for her excellence could be made objectively, but I don't actually care: things happen, and sometimes I get annoyed or frustrated with her, and when that happens I actively work to grant that frustration and annoyance as little space in my mind as possible. My goal is to love her more perfectly, and I make an effort to actively encourage thoughts and behaviors conducive to this goal, and actively prune thoughts and behaviors that impede this goal. Likewise with my children; I may not be able to control my emotional reactions to a situation, but I can certainly control how I feed or starve those reactions, allowing or denying them self-reinforcement.
I also agree here, while I don't think we (I'll use we for myself and may other's here, but not everyone clearly) can control our feelings or beliefs, we can control how we act on them. I get angry at my wife or my kids, and I think you can choose not to actively dwell on them, or to go do something else with that time and energy.
Dump your entire current social network, and surround yourself exclusively with Christians. Actively cultivate deep, meaningful relationships with them. Adopt the axiom that Christianity is correct, and apparent incorrectness is a problem with your perspective or assessment. Consume high-quality Christian arguments, actively work to adopt Christian perspectives, seek status from fellow Christians, focus on all of Christianity's good points and on all of non-Christianity's worst features. Actively work to contemplate your life and experiences through a Christian lens, and actively work to develop an understanding of Christianity that fits with your understanding of life and the world. Do this all day every day for several years, and see what happens. My guess is that if you did so, at the end of those years you'd be a whole lot more Christian than you are now. Do you think otherwise?
I do think otherwise, yes, because I was in that position, and that didn't stop my belief set changing and then I stayed in that network for years after with no sign of it switching back. I visited pretty much every church I could get my hands on (well except Catholic, back in those days in Northern Ireland, that would still have been an issue), from Quakers to The brethren, from Methodist to Pentecostals. I devoured Christian apologetics, talked to my parents (both Sunday School teachers), to vicars and deacons. None of it made a difference to my belief set. Things i had believed now appeared silly and superstitious. Arguments that made sense now had holes big enough to drive lorries through. And I don't think I am alone in that. When I moved to America I dated an ex-Jehovah's witness who recounted similar struggles to the extent she was shunned by her family after leaving the church, and how she had struggled and prayed and fought to, in her words "stay in the light" and that was within an insular community where she was immersed even more than I was back in the day.
I have observed my own feelings of what is true shifting significantly based on media consumption and social desirability, among other influences.
I would agree that media consumption and social desirability can have an impact on my beliefs of what is true, but I have not been able to observe it happening in real time, I have just seen it happen in other's so it seems arrogant to assume it doesn't happen to me.
If people have no control and beliefs simply self-reinforce, how do people change their minds about a thing? More generally, have you not observed yourself choosing between available reactions to a disruptive event? Have you not observed yourself choosing to adopt one attitude over another in response to a given situation?
To an extent I think most people's mind is changed for them. Not by an outside force but by their own inner workings. for example I had an online argument a long time ago, where I argued point A and someone else argued B. Some weeks later I realized B to be true and no longer A. I didn't choose to change my mind, but presumably below the level of conscious thought my mind was still churning away on that argument and was convinced. I can certainly choose my actions, by managing my emotional state, but that doesn't mean I can control what emotions I feel in the first place.
My argument is that people have considerable control over the trajectory of their minds over the long-term, and they steer that trajectory through choices, some acute, some chronic, through exercise of their own will, decided by their own internal deliberations and competing desires and values. Those desires and values they choose to feed grow stronger, those they starve grow weaker, and through this process their mind changes as a consequence of their choices. How could it be otherwise?
Some of this I certainly agree with, and to be clear I am not advocating that people do not have responsibility for their beliefs still. The sub-conscious is still part of us, and who we are as a person, no-one else can be responsible for our actions based upon our beliefs whether or not we chose what to believe consciously or not. IRA bombers still chose to kill people even if they didn't consciously choose their belief system.
SSCReader
21d ago
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine.
I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it. What you had was a coalition who wanted slightly different things, one part wanted gay sex to be accepted, another wanted women to have more freedom outside of marriage, another wanted men to have more freedom without getting married, another felt sexual urges in general should not be shamed as much, etc. etc. There were few would if you asked would have said for example, should we stop shaming sex with animals or corpses? Almost no-one wanted to remove shame from sex entirely.
To be clear almost everyone is shamed under the old model. They just use that shame to behave differently. Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.
Now as for why Puritan America did not change, well Puritan America was a result of people fleeing from cultures that shamed differently. There is a reason we call them Puritans after all! So they in fact are a product of a "Revolution" of their own (among other things of course). But even more the 20th Centuries Sexual Revolution I would say the sexual norms of the Puritans did not last, they were relaxed within decades. It's just in the New World there was a lot of space for people who felt differently to just..go somewhere else. And practice things differently. But that isn't the case in the US anymore.
Just to point out, I do think shame is important, as is empathy. They are evolved mechanisms given humanity is a social species. And they are important in ensuring societal stability. I'm not saying that shaming sex is bad, or that not shaming sex is good. I am saying that our history shows that shame has limits and ANY society or culture that wants its beliefs and conditions to continue is on a tight rope. Can't shame to much for too many, can't shame too little. Both will result in the destruction of your system. The good (depending on your point of view!) news is that also is true for whatever comes next. I think there are signs that the shame mechanisms invoked by "wokism" are also going too far and will fail.
Social dynamics mean we are not good at simply arriving at a pretty good spot and just staying there. We almost always push too far, or not far enough.
SSCReader
9d ago
AI search says 33 odd churches, CBC says 24 of those are confirmed arson, and approx. half were Catholic. So 12 or so by the look of it.
Hope that helps!
SSCReader
10d ago
The average creative writing major should expect to get a mostly-unrelated job or need more education. The average screenwriting major should expect to essentially not get into the film industry at all.
But most people in almost every field except STEM, don't end up working in their degree field anyway right? A lot of white collar jobs are gated behind a degree, but it doesn't really matter what degree you have, as getting the degree is the signal. There simply are not many actual psych jobs or politics jobs, so most people getting any of these are going to end up an office manager or something similar. Might as well study something you are interested in at university level unless you have a very specific plan, and even in a lot of those instances there are simply not going to be enough jobs in that field and you will end up doing something else. And my experience (and I work in academia) is that applies to most of both men and women.
Once you realize the majority of people are going to end up working in a field unrelated to their major then creative writing isn't much worse off. The truth is the vast majority of graduates are going to end up in some kind of mundane office dronish position, unrelated to whether they want to become a writer or an astronaut or a journalist.
SSCReader
15d ago
Again, you don't choose to accept it or not. You just do. Or at least I do. So possible inferential distance here. Someone tells me something and I FEEL whether I believe it or not instinctually. Way before I would try to work through why I do. And then wouldn't you know it, my rationalizations always support what i felt to be true. Quite the coincidence huh?
I didn't choose to not believe in God. One day I did and the next I did not. Suddenly all the contradictions and holes loomed large. The day before they did not. I didn't make a wilful choice. Now maybe somewhere in my subconscious evidence was being weighed but I don't seem to have access to that process.
Most people aren't rational from what I can tell, and what we believe isn't either. We build our beliefs off what feels true, not from rationally evaluating them. I am pretty sure this is how it works for myself and somewhat confident this is how it works for most other "normies". And acting as if this is true turns out to predict peoples actions better than not.
And indeed I think some of what you are saying actually supports my position. Why do people when weighing evidence weigh some more and discard some or going looking for more? So that the evidence supports the position they already hold, the position they already believed, before they started examining it "objectively". And the same for axioms, they pick those which support their pre-existing conclusion. Which is why people can hold beliefs that are contradictory, because the critical thought is downstream of belief. And why when confronted with contradictory believes they do no simply evaluate and change their axioms. They waffle, they prevaricate, they deflect. What they don't fo generally is willfully decide they are wrong and change their beliefs.
Indeed if they did, I would suggest there would be little need for the rationalist project at all.
SSCReader
8d ago
You should see me injecting butter under the skin..My wife thinks I could give BBLs down in Mexico.
SSCReader
9d ago
Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes.
Again this may be true for very high end employers but for most all they look for is a degree and they don't care how rigorous that degree was. I did recruitment for both private and government organizations, and while the civil service did care, no-one else did, including blue chip communications companies and local government. And the reason for that is they are not getting to pick from Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard grads or wherever in the first place. Your middle of the road office manager type can easily get a job with a non-intellectually rigorous humanities degree. Sure they might not get into Wall Street or quant jobs, but they were never going to. Your point only applies for the very top slice of jobs, for all the others, just need to have a degree to tick a box on the form, you will be fine with a degree in basket weaving or creative writing or musicology.
SSCReader
25d ago
He is suggesting you are blaming the victim. Though really the analogy would need to be: Someone walking in a bad neighborhood was raped, so their lawyer suggested showering afterwards, not calling the police and simply hoping the perpetrator was caught.
I think it would be reasonable to criticize the lawyer, while still being aware that the rape was bad in and of itself as well.
SSCReader
28d ago
If CO2 emissions really as as catastrophically dangerous as they are made out to be, then nuclear is the obvious, guaranteed-to-work, 100% solution that would completely have already solved this problem by now
Unless the same people also fear nuclear power to roughly the same extent. And unfortunately many people who drive environmental concerns grew up in an era where fear of nuclear power was rampant. The Cuban Missile crisis, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. In other words if you think A will be a catastrophe and can be solved by B, which will also be a catastrophe then it becomes easy to see why people look for options C through F.
The real test is once those people die/retire/age out of leadership roles will the movement reorient itself.
Same as generals still fighting the last type of war instead of the next one.
Notably, they can of course be wrong about how catastrophic A or B might be, but from direct exposure to very many high level "climate alarmists" it is my opinion they are absolutely sincere in being worried about the climate. They are just also worried about nuclear catastrophes. And a whole bunch of other things. In fact I would say the thing that connects them (or most of them), is they worry way too much about a lot of things.
After all if this fear of climate change is driven by hysteria, what makes you think their other fears are going to be rationally evaluated against climate change in order to solve climate change?
SSCReader
8d ago
I like Alexa in the kitchen only, then I can set timers, play music, get recipes and the like while I am wrists deep in a turkey. Just saves a bit of time is all.
That's about it.
SSCReader
13d ago
Ahh the horseshoe (bearshoe?) theory strikes again. Introverts, misanthropes and feminists/misandrists, all would rather be stuck with a bear than a man. They don't agree on much but on that they find common cause.
(Not claiming you are any of these things, just that "I don't want to be disturbed by a person" pattern matches to introverts/misanthropes).
SSCReader
22d ago
Also as per the article the figure they are giving is per migrant household not per migrant.
SSCReader
5d ago
Eh, we've lost of interesting posters over the years, but obeying the rules is mostly easy. Given the purpose of this place it has to select for people who can decouple , and not post angry. If you tell the mods you aren't going to obey them whether you think you are right or not, that needs to stop. No matter how interesting a poster you are. I like FNE but she pushed and pushed and pushed and struggled with not responding to people saying her ideas/pov was not correct, as if they were saying she was a moron. And using nuclear levels of sarcasm doing it.
It has to be interesting posters who are willing to voluntarily toe the line. Honestly i still feel like moderation is not harsh enough. Habitual line steppers should be gone after 3 instances. They clearly aren't going to learn.
SSCReader
8d ago
They were what? Note some of the non-Catholic Churches burned down were on reservations/native land as well. So how much increased risk Catholic churches have over churches in general still isn't clear.
SSCReader
27d ago
/* Don't @me, you know it's a safe assumption on this issue!
I'm confused because the answer to your question seems to be no, it did not take urban liberal Jewish lawyers to deploy it, because the lawyer in question seems to be a Catholic black latina? Whom you quoted. You don't need to make an assumption at all!
SSCReader
15d ago
This is not to say that reality is as we wish it to be, only that our beliefs about reality are under our direct, willful control, and always will be.
Interestingly I think it is the exact opposite. We don't choose out beliefs about reality by act of will, they emerge from our sub-conscious (our "true" self) and then rationalized thereafter. I think you are right they are not driven by evidence, but I have never ever in my life made a willing act of choice in my beliefs. I simply realized that I believed X, or didn't believe Y (sometimes after someone made a point and I argued against only to realize weeks later, that my belief had changed). I don't know how I would even go about choosing through an act of will to just believe something to be true.
I might also go so far as to say that almost by very definition beliefs cannot be under our conscious control. I cannot choose to believe in God, and I should know because I spent a lot of time trying so that I would fit in. I just could not do it, no matter how I tried.
SSCReader
22d ago
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.
So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.
My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?
In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.
SSCReader
13d ago
Thats because for a few years she was much much more famous than who she was dating. Prior to that there were interminable articles when she was dating Tom Hiddleston, and Harry Styles and Joe Jonas and Calvin Harris etc. Kelce is significantly more famous in the US at least than Matt Healy or Joe Alwyn (accounting for about the last 6 years before Kelce).
Hard to sell a power couple most of your audience couldn't tell who one of the couple is. But a pop star and a sports star? That is simply PR gold, covering multiple demographics. I'm honestly surprised they aren't on even more.
Interestingly 1) is basically the conservative Hobbesian view right? That all of civilization is just a skin over our inherent natures. Women it appears are aware of the Leviathian shaped hole, even if they have never heard of Hobbes.
Which probably aligns with memes where men threaten their daughters prom dates with guns. They believe an 18yo man can't be trusted with their daughter without some fear being involved.
The question is are they right or wrong. I might suggest the large amount of rape during invasion and conflict might point to an underlying truth many men are uncomfortable with.
That more men than we might think would rape when the social order is not there.
Of course that is just a subset of the idea that more of us would murder or commit violence in general in the absence of a restraining force. The state of war of all against all.
"It follows that, in such a condition, every man has a Right to everything--even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural Right of every man to own everything exists, there can be no security to any man--no matter how strong or wise he is."
In a Hobbesian view there may not be a lot of difference between a bear and a human unburdened by societal restraint. We both exist in a state of nature.
Of course the bear is atill stronger and has better natural weapons. Is it better to be hunted by a bear or a human (assuming the human only has what they can cobble togerher in a forest)?
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