ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
Blogger, Christian convert, general strange one. https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/
User ID: 3709
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
1d ago
Eh I'm like 50 pages in and stalled. It's interesting and I like his arguments but yeah very dense.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
1d ago
I like Hobb! What are your favorite fantasy series out of the many you've read?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
1d ago
What norms? Basically the most common norms of all - the "cool" people run the group, and whoever they decide don't vibe with the group, goes. It's the oldest rule in the book.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
1d ago
I'm reading All Things are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2d ago
At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).
If you look at the general progressive mindset as religious, this behavior starts to make a lot more sense. Government bureaucrats are a protected priestly class, similar to but lower status than academics.
Therefore all blame must be shifted away from them, towards the hated enemy: billionaires, conservatives, or whoever the outgroup happens to be at the moment. I don't say this as a sneer at progressives, conservatives do the exact same thing as well.
But as @coffee_enjoyer and others here have pointed out, there's no getting away from religion. Using the religious worldview to model politics has opened my eyes and explained quite a lot of this seemingly incomprehensible behavior.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2d ago
The conservative tends to favour an education similar to aella’s, but detests what she has become (“damaged”).
Conservatives absolutely do not tend to favor educations similar to her, you are attacking a caricature. No conservative I know would beat their child twelve times in a row as they're crying in pain. That's very tail-end behavior for EXTREME religious conservatives, and religious in the weird Southern Baptist sense.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2d ago
There's a big post on Substack making the rounds talking about similar ideas:
It is not healthy for children to be locked in their homes, only to leave it to go to school and come back. It is also not fair to children to keep them away from society on remote farms and homesteads in order to safeguard them from criminals and sexually corrupting media. But this is what parents have been reduced to offering their children in the modern world. Residents of the city of Birmingham report on conversations on X that when they were children in the 1970s, they could walk around the whole town perfectly safe, but now, their grandchildren cannot go beyond one block or even leave their own backyards because, practically, it is just not safe anymore. Children can no longer enjoy the vibrant culture of cities like London, Paris and New York as they could even in the 1980s because the people who run such cities have more empathy for criminals than for children.
Foremost, it is children who have a right to cities.
Cities should be constructed to be safe and hospitable to them primarily. When children have access to safe cities, they develop more independence, courage and can develop more maturity. They can make friends and do projects in the real world. They can be more involved in their local community and therefore exist more in the real world which they stand to inherit. Instead of this, however, due to the leftist concept of “rights” for homeless crackheads, children only have the right to play video games in their bedrooms and develop toxic social media addictions.
I like this conception, especially with regards to child independence. I think the fact that we care more about the rights of gay and trans people to express themselves in public than the rights of children is very telling about our priorities as a society.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2d ago
Those work now! Weird. Also man Scott is way more instrumental than I thought.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2d ago
Most of publishing is different sub genres of bdsm werewolf erotica, so I don’t think ‘entertainment industry thinks relationships are a dead end’ is the explanation.
As I said in another comment, it's not that they are dead ends. It is that treating romantic partners as disposable leads to a more shallow exploration of emotional depths you can reach via deep connection in relationships.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
Even so, there's more romantic relationships now than ever. Maybe it's so common audiences lost interest in seeing them on the big screen. Maybe there is such a discrepancy of expectation from growing up with ideas about romance, that when confronted with the reality personally, people are just not interested. Seeing so many divorces, breakups, cheating or other such behaviors while growing up on "Love conquers all" is cognitively dissonant.
Yes there are "more" romantic relationships in that people date serially. My point is that these relationships aren't as deep in terms of depth of emotion and connection than they were in the past.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
Heard! Thanks for letting me know. I'll tone it down.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
Something has to be a little bit wrong with you to be a conservative in a time when their sentiments are flatly unwelcome at our various employers' pride networking corporate events. When I meet someone with conservative leanings I have to determine what that guy's specific deal is, because there always is one. Redneck? Really religious? Too-clever-by-half contrarian? Socially retarded?
This is very boo outgroup. No thanks bud.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
Yeah I was mistaken for some reason I had him tagged in my head as a conservative. Idk.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
Those are all much easier to imagine and less complex than deep human relationships.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
Oh weird I always just thought he was conservative. Never paid much attention to him tbh lol.
Yeah nevermind I retract my statement.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
I actually just wrote a post yesterday touching on some similar points.
One of my theories is that modern relationships and friendships have been so hollowed out that writers just don’t have material from their own lives to work with when it comes to deep romances. It’s something you have to actually live in order to recreate in your characters.
Sadly modern connection has been extremely flattened for a variety of reasons, and it reflects in our art.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
I mean they’re mostly calling him out for being a hypocrite. Which is totally deserved.
Why does it seem like so many conservatives in the public eye are degenerate perverts? Lord have mercy on this wicked generation.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3d ago
I'm enjoying all the content on kids! Feel like I'm learning a lot. (Don't have kids but want them.)
What are some of the most important things you've learned since having kids?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
4d ago
Hmmm these are reasonable points. But as someone else pointed out, part of the fact that we're in this state is that the government has strong incentives to keep the unemployment rate down.
Then again government dysfunction is increasing too!
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
4d ago
Ok fair! I don't know the formal definitions of indie. They're small though for sure.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
4d ago
Absolutely. Agreed on all points here. Even if we do get mass automation, social pressure won't allow for mass unemployment.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
4d ago
Yeah Clair Obscur is amazing. I also do see this but that being said, most market share is still with massive games. There is more room for indie but these behemoth business aren't going to go under overnight.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
4d ago
I do think that disruption is happening, but again it's much more difficult than it seems. Startups typically take a few years just to get off the ground with a viable product, and then it takes like a decade for them to eat a whole industry.
And often before they eat the whole industry, they end up getting acquired by big Corpo and their value gets absorbed and spread out to all the people not doing a super efficient job lol.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
4d ago
My gut feeling is that this AI wave will be a short panic and then basically blow over. To predict massive job loss you have to assume that jobs are already distributed rationally, and that companies are good at adapting to and using new technology efficiently. Neither of these are even remotely true!
If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have. On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?
So the idea that just because there's a new technology coming out that can do a bunch of fancy new stuff, does not convince me that we'll have massive job loss at all. What will likely happen, and what has already been happening for a while, is that the people in white collar roles who can use these tools will just shift off more and more work to them privately, and pretend they are still just as busy. The roles might get a tad more competitive.
But we're not going to be in a doomsday scenario where everyone loses jobs, even IF AGI comes out tomorrow.
Hah I have read almost all of these except for the Black Jewel. And never finished WoT rip. Thanks for answering though. Malazan is the bomb.
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