Stellula
5mo ago
I don’t fantasize about being a warrior or a poet. I like democracy, and I think I live in the most peaceful, best time in all of human history. I think both of these fantasies are stupid.
Stellula
5mo ago
That’s not what they’re fantasizing about.
The poets are not fantasizing about being depressed trying to think of poems, failing, being rejected from journals, being told their poetry sucks etc. It’s a fantasy. They’re thinking about being the alpha poet who everybody adores and looks up to.
The warrior-fantasy guys are fantasizing about being Rambo, or whatever. “Against all odds Chad thundercock saved a village of poets by single handedly fighting off a barrage of barbarians all while severely injured and survived only by a thread and by pure determination” etc.
It’s not a perfect symmetrical set of fantasies because the fantasy is coming from a different ideology.
Stellula
5mo ago
Sure a small segment of the population. The warriors are putting their lives at risk so that the poets can write poetry.
Stellula
5mo ago
Tattoos are a way of giving a piece of your body, permanently to a tattooist. He is literally branding your body, and it is permanent.
This is a disgusting form of submissive behavior.
Granted there are situations where a tattoo is designed by the recipient and the “artist” is passive, but those are rare.
To make this point: NONE of the art that tattooist brand their donors with would be in any way notable or memorable if it was simply put to canvas. The “art” is the act of convincing somebody to donate their body to this. It’s notable because “I have permanently disfigured my body with this”, but that’s the only reason why. It’s also why tattoos have gone through a progression from a simple bicep tattoo, to full sleeves, chest plates for women, face tattoos, and in the most “interesting” cases, a full blackout of the donors body parts.
Go to a tattoo convention and you won’t see small artistic things (if you could call them that) getting attention or notoriety, you’ll see the treadmill increasingly self destructive things. It’s why tattooism is adjacent to other “body mod”/mutilation cultures, and the further into tattoos you go, the more you converge with the mutilation side.
(To be clear, I have tattoos, I don’t regret them, they are my own design. I just recognize this behavior for what it is)
Stellula
5mo ago
The reason that this is mocksble is that the leftist fantasy is mostly: everybody else will work for me and I can do nothing, and the rightist fantasy is: I will be able to do as much work as I want to.
Yes stupidity exists inside of both of these, but they’re not equivalents.
“I will be a warlord” is a very different type of fantasy than “I will be a poet”. Both fantasies, both silly, but silly in different ways.
Stellula
5mo ago
Trump supposedly sent a letter to Epstein saying how they both find attractive women to be the key to happiness.
Trump has said this before. This isn’t new.
Stellula
5mo ago
You’re wrong. Epsteins schtick was to find young troubled girls as young as 11 or 12. He would even get them to find more girls for him:
Stellula
5mo ago
Epstein was raping 11 year olds (allegedly): https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/1/15/lawsuit-alleges-epstein-trafficked-girls-as-young-as-11
Stellula
5mo ago
I think you’re getting into some semantics here.
Repetitive prayer certainly exists in Catholicism (and its online offshoot: Eastern Orthodoxy), as does meditation.
The belief that Buddhists have discovered some mystical magical thing in meditation, or “mantras” or “breath work” is just orientalism.
https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/prayers-and-devotions/meditations
Stellula
5mo ago
All of those things exist and are practiced within Catholicism.
There is a sortof eastern-mysticism/orientalism that is left over from the 70s where westerners seem to think that eastern versions of this are different, but they're not.
Luckily, that is fading quickly, perhaps largely because of social media/travel. People have been able to travel to the places where these things are popular, and the picture is...not pleasant.
Stellula
5mo ago
Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century.
What things do you think that Buddhism offers that Christianity does not?
Stellula
6mo ago
Lauren Bezos is not exactly my cup of tea aesthetically, but she’s probably really fun to be around. She’s also likely pretty smart, or at least smarter than most other women. She’s a helicopter pilot, for one.
Jeff is also extremely white trash coded, and has a very strange apparent short man complex. “Hey look at my hot wife with her huge tits and huge ass and huge lips and she gets all these things out for the world to see all the time when we’re in public” is pretty normal for a man his age who just went through a divorce. He is human, just really rich.
Stellula
6mo ago
People are contrarian signaling over “why should he know the population”
Because it shows that he has a general idea of the makeup of the country. Compare a country like Iraq (45M) or Afghanistan (41M) with Iran (90M).
It’s twice their size.
Iran is also a space-faring nation. They started launching satellites in 2009, they have advanced hypersonic missiles.
It’s just a very, very different country than our previous Middle East adventures, and Tucker quizzing him on this was to elucidate the fact that Ted’s primary driving motivation to get the US involved is (as Ted himself admitted in another section of the interview) a doomsday prophecy based on a hilariously absurd (and Israel-serving) misreading of the Bible.
Go get those kids baptized! Use it as an excuse to throw a huge party.
I keep seeing photos of Pope Leo and the patriarch of Constantinople together. I really pray that there is something unifying coming soon. Lots of the EO stuff is beautiful, and in my mind these are the same church, just different forms of the mass. EO occupies a similar space in my mind to the TLM.
A very very common story is:
“I kindof like the architecture” -> “I guess I’ll send my kids to Catholic school since they’re good schools” -> “praying the rosary is kindof nice” -> “confession is cathartic” -> “I believe in one god, the father almighty, the maker of heaven and earth”
The positive feelings you are experiencing in these places are you interacting with grace. That’s good, keep following the things that feel good in that way, and if there are things you don’t like, don’t do them.
Stellula
6mo ago
I truly truly do not understand why these people don't just go be Catholic.
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It's ancient, and mysterious (it's 2000 years old)
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It has nearly unlimited "aura"; home to the most beautiful buildings and art on earth
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There is unlimited amounts of "mysticism" if that's what you're looking for. Most churches hold something called "adoration" where they open the tabernacle and allow people to sit and pray in what they (we) consider the true presence of the body of Christ.
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Continuing on the mysticism, there are things like The Rosary, and holy water.
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If you want to try and get "Buddhism but Christian", you're in luck. We have prayer beads (the rosary), mantras (prayers), monks, ancient philosophy and meditation.
I don't even know how to properly address the "science" question that people seem to want to throw at religious people as a Catholic. There is nothing in Catholicism which is incompatible with wanting to pursue science and we Catholics would consider scientific inquiry a good thing. The big bang, evolution, whatever els, etc. these things are all not just "allowed" within the doctrine, but encouraged.
I think there's a weird thing happening where the new atheists did a good job of attacking the absurd claims of evangelical protestantism, but somehow lumped the Catholics in with them. I think people are waking up to this, but the contrarianism that led them to atheism to begin with doesn't let them just return to the obvious answer (the Catholic church). I think that's basically also why you see some of these people gravitating towards the Eastern Orthodox church. They can't just go be OG Christians, you see, they have to find this other offshoot thing so that they can maintain some sense that they were always right, and that the "real" church was hidden or something.
Just go be Catholic. It's annoying how obvious the answer to all of this is. There's nothing clever or surprising, it really just was the most obvious thing all along.
Stellula
6mo ago
As I have said, you really need to reevaluate the claim that you are "2 sigma" beyond the depth and breadth of emotions that most people are experiencing.
My wife does not "grant me access to her body", sex is an act of mutual participation, and a physical manifestation of the love that we have for one another.
What you are describing is sex with a prostitute; a simulacra of sex inside of a loving relationship. It is the Polynesian cargo cultists constructing bamboo control towers and runways hoping to summon back the western airplanes, but without an understanding of what they were doing.
In the analogy, Aella and her compatriots have noticed the cargo cultists and started selling them bamboo. They have realized that there are men who recognize the aesthetics of a loving relationship, and that they can simulate this and charge for it.
Stellula
7mo ago
This was your original claim;
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
Elaborate on this. I have never traded resources or services for sex.
Stellula
7mo ago
I, along with perhaps billions of other people will tell you that they are in love with their wives/husbands and children, and that yes it is subconscious.
Your frustration with this is because you haven’t personally experienced it. You should reevaluate your belief that you are experiencing a wider range, more intense set of emotions than most people, because you apparently have no experience with the emotion that much of the world feels most intensely, and you apparently do not feel at all.
As to your question: the harm that people like Aella have done to society is to convince people of the incorrect, unhealthy, anti social framework of understanding that you are presenting here.
Yes, love is real, yes it is healthy to love your wife and children, and no this is not all transactional. You, nor Aella, nor the red pill people, nor the pickup artist people before them, nor any of the other people of that persuasion have discovered something unique insight into human emotion. Aella et al have figured out an exploit in the human psyche that enriches them, at your expense and the expense of the rest of their customers.
Stellula
7mo ago
I really want to explore your claim about feeling more emotions than other people, but also imagining a romantic relationship as purely transactional.
Can you expand on this?
I do not understand the point of this post in the “culture war roundup” thread.
This just reads like a travel blog. What are you getting at here? This seems like a lot of words to say: “I am Indian. I went to London and it was more expensive than last time. There are fewer English people here than last time I was here.”
What would your ideal follow up comment to this look like?
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