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User ID: 3534
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56m ago
I’ve never made a video.
But tangential to the latter, I met Young Woman A at Male Friend B’s wedding; we had a short fling as she had just broken up with her boyfriend. It ended when they got back together.
A year or so later, at Male Friend C’s wedding, Young Woman A was a maid of honor. Neither of us had apparently spoken about our fling, as I was seated next to her by-then financée at dinner. I was polite and made no mention — wouldn’t have under normal circumstances and especially so at someone else’s wedding where taking any attention away from the celebration would be inexcusable. But I could tell Young Woman A was sweating a little bit.
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1hr ago
I enjoyed Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Mailer was part of the New Journalism, and his work’s novelty may well not be apparent to readers from Gen X, onward.
I loathe Norman Maclean’s work, in the vein you mentioned.
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5d ago
In reality the relationship between making money and society's tolerance is the opposite of what you seem to think. The more something is tolerated, the more people are open to doing it, and therefore the supply goes up and the money that any one individual can make goes down. If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.
To be a bit more specific regarding doing the same thing… Bonnie Blue makes as much as she does through relentless self-promotion. Doing something degrading like having sex with dozens of men in a day, and then winding up in the discourse for it, is how she’s been able to stand out from the glut of wouldbe porn stars.
Only fans, etc. has millions of content creators and millions of women who are fine with showing various amounts of themselves. There is not an under supply of women open to being porn actresses/OnlyFans models. It is, rather, an attention economy. The top earners on OnlyFans make a lot of money while the overwhelming supermajority of women who expose themselves online will never earn enough to replace a minimum-wage full time job (but would certainly like to earn that much).
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20d ago
The conservative imprint Encounter Books has released the first volume of James Hankins & Allen Guezlo’s Western Civ textbook The Golden Thread. It’s a warts-and-all history of Western civilization, designed to be attractive to both students and casual readers, that is nonetheless a rebuttal to oikophobic, postmodern academics who genuinely dislike the West. I’m only a couple hundred pages in but am very much enjoying it.
I’d differentiate between different types of immigrant groups. Minnesota, IIRC, has the nation’s largest Hmong and Karen (not Karens, but the Karen) populations and doesn’t see the same kinds of issues that it has with the Somalian expat community.
The Somalis are far more insular. You have clan loyalties solidified by cousin marriages. And also, Islam. Thinking aloud, the Hmong also have clans, but aren’t insular and have integrated fairly well. It helps many of them love fishing and Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
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21d ago
The Somali-associated government fraud is bad. To steel man, set aside the Feeding Our Future and housing stabilization fraud schemes, and focus just on the autism assistance scheme. Compliant doctors were found to diagnose Somali-American children at a rate three times that of other Minnesotan children, multiple fake LLCs were set up to assist lower income parents with their supposedly-autistic children, and these LLCs paid kickbacks to the parents out of the state and federal funds they were getting and pocketing. In what is much more of an indictment of the Somali-American community in Minnesota than particular fraudsters who are Somali-American behind the other schemes, in the autism assistance fraud, numerous families where shopping among the LLC fronts based on how large of a kickback they were offered by each, and switching between them. This in particular is widespread corruption within the community.
But also to steel man, the original report cited by the NY Post doesn’t fully make the case in the way Rufo frames it for maximum offense. It didn’t actually track any specific funds. And cites only retired feds. It just notes there was massive fraud, and remittances going on at the same time. And as /u/DradisPing points out below, Somali is so fucked up, and its civil war run through family/clan ties, that Al-Shabaab is going to get a taste of pretty much any money than reaches those clans sympathetic their half of the civil war. And as /u/hydroacetylene added, the other half of the civil war is probably, also.
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25d ago
For analyzing American Christianity, the First and Second Great Awakenings tend not to get enough attention. Protestant typically has a quasi-negative definition — all the Christianity that is not Catholic or Othrodox (or some of the very old, small denominations like the Assyrian Church). Maybe you get a positive definition based on the Bible having more authority than the church.
You get Methodists out of the First Great Awakening. And then the Second produces the Restorationist Movement. The Restorationists break with mainline Protestantism, with the mainline still tracing its theology to the Reformation. Most Baptists become Restorationists (the ABCUSA being a notable, mainline exception). The Pentecostals are born. Non-Denominational churches come about. Etc.
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25d ago
Luther, because of his own struggles with despair and doubt, specifically argued against looking to one’s personal experiences as a means of salvation, as he viewed them to be unreliable; do not look inward, but rather to Christ’s righteousness and the authority of the Bible.
I think it’s quite the opposite, and in terms of non-ideologues, physician heal thyself.
Crooks wasn’t political. He didn’t post about politics. No one who knew him described him as political.
Tyler Robinson? Sophie/Nicholas Roske? Joshua Jain? Luigi Magione? Etc. Etc. Etc. — We have messages on shell casings, manifestos, social media posts, text messages, and interviews with acquaintances that all confirm motive, or even at a minimum a basic political leaning in the opposite direction of their target. Where is anything like that for Crooks?
You’re asserting he was looking up the distance of Trump appearances to his house for a different reason than doing the same for Biden — there’s nothing pro or anti Trump or Biden from Crooks that’s been credibly reported or discovered that he voiced prior to setting out to assassinate his target. Where’s anything as small as following a campaign account?
On the contrary, absent any of the usual evidence we have accompanying political violence, the response to Crooks reminds me of the immediate response to Jared Lee Loughner — that he shot Gabby Giffords was treated as evidence enough, alone, that his motivations were political. The press made the assertion, blamed a Sarah Palin mailer, tried to find anything that could link him to the right, broadly, and came up blank.
Give me the bare minimum that the press couldn’t on Loughner. As small as one high school classmate of Crooks’ that said he watched Hasan Piker Twitch streams. Anything.
My hypothesis is that a guy, for whom there has yet to be produced a single piece of evidence that he expressed an opinion on either Trump or Biden in any direction (before or after the shooting, via manifesto or the like) who didn’t just search for Biden, but specifically both Biden and Trump campaign stops in relation to their distance from his residence, picked Trump as his target for assassination, because Trump’s campaign stop in PA was indeed the closest to his residence made by either candidate.
Yes.
I strongly suspect if Biden had made an announced, scheduled public appearance closer to Bethel Park, PA than Trump did, that Biden would have been the target.
As opposed to what other evidence, including any Crooks had expressed about politics? With what evidence we have, depressed loser who came to prefer infamy to life seems as probable as any hypothesis.
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1mo ago
Thomas Mathew Crooks’ computer had search results for both Trump and Biden campaign stops, presumably to see which would occur nearer to Crooks, and Trump was the unlucky recipient of that horrid game of chance (and, even more so, the now-deceased Corey Comperatore).
I’m guessing on Earth Beta, Crooks is still a nihilistic malcontent who takes a shot at whichever candidate forces him to spend the least amount of time in the car so he can make national news and have his posthumous 15-minutes of fame.
Unless they don’t have social media and irony poisoning on Earth Beta, then Crooks eventually dies alone in anonymity.
…the same way HBO shows are more popular than the broadcast ones that can't show tits and guts and incest…
It’s hard to compare broadcast-network show ratings to HBO’s because the latter likes to report both live and on-demand as a single number (and you also have to take streamers at their word to a larger extent). But, the biggest broadcast-network scripted series are pulling between three and four million live-viewers for average, mid-season episodes. One just isn’t going to read or hear much about Tracker, and every NCIS and emergency-services genre spin-off because they aren’t made for an audience that does much reading, writing or podcasting.
There’s also — in-between the aforementioned — the very popular offerings of Taylor Sheridan’s middlebrow Boomer-crack ouvre on cable. These shows can get a little grittier, but there’s still nothing approaching incest, and the nudity is capped at the occasional glance of buttocks.
”I’m the Landman! I’m here to tell people younger than 60 how the world really is! I’m tough but fair!”
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1mo ago
It goes hand in hand with discipline and frugality, but a level of income such that relatively-unexpected expenses are not a great source of stress will significantly improve your quality of life.
Do you have enough in an HSA to cover your health and dental insurance deductibles? Do you have enough in savings to replace your washer and dryer if they conk out? Specifics will vary for different people, but the general idea stands.
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2mo ago
On a tangent, the EPA kind-of expects some of this at scale, and requires environmental standby trusts. While Noxious Chemical Co., Inc. is operating its plant making substances that for-the-love-of-God will hopefully never leak out, it has to put money aside in a trust that it can’t unilaterally withdraw without the EPA’s joint consent.
This way, if there’s a catastrophic explosion loosing horrid material at its plant, Noxious Chemical Co. can’t just file Chapter 7 and leave the rest of society solely responsible for the cost of cleanup.
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2mo ago
A lot of those communities were pretty left-wing and peace-minded and I don't know to what extent that position changed after the massacres.
The violence of the Second Intifada wiped out the electoral-viability of Israel’s left. I would be surprised if issuance of work permits resumes anytime in the near future.
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2mo ago
I was raised ELCA. My best friend from high school is now an LCMS pastor, and my wife was raised WELS.
I don’t think the ELCA is quite what’s described above. The Lutherans, even the ELCA, at least started from a comparably-confident theology. The ELCA still includes the Book of Concord as one of its guiding texts and creeds. And the ELCA still holds the most stereotypical Lutheran theological belief: real presence (say it with me: “IS MEANS IS!”).
My wife and I are church shopping and are having a heck of a time. We both feel too conservative for liberal churches and too liberal for conservative churches.
One really sad thing is that there are cultural trends not inherently and inseparably wed to any theological difference that shape liberal and conservative Protestant denominations.
Namely, the median conservative Protestant (and not just Lutheran) church uses contemporary worship music that, for us, turns a Sunday into an aesthetic ordeal.
And particularly so having been raised Lutheran. Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn were all devout. Some of Bach’s works are deliberately Protestant in composition, designed to allow his congregation to sing simple lines that combine to create complex harmonies. Per capita, Lutherans are the undisputed champions of worship music.
Which is why the number of acoustic guitars and tambourines found in LCMS churches hurts.
The WELS are one of the rare exceptions, anywhere in American Protestantism, of very conservative churches who still insist upon traditional worship music. It remains as a part of their insularity. Also as they’re not on trend as a conservative Protestant church, their numbers are declining.
Conversely, and even aside from theological disagreements, the depth of theology found in the sermons of ELCA (and other liberal mainline churches) sermons, in the aggregate, is wanting. I agree it is wonderful God sent Christ to die for our sins, and that I should be kind to others. Hearing not too much more than that in almost every sermon doesn’t really help me, as a layman, grow in my faith.
My wife is a hard no on returning to the WELS, as the church she grew up in dealt… less than honestly… with one of her elderly relatives in convincing the latter to make a sizable bequest. She also attended a private WELS school which didn’t prohibit non-WELS children from attending, as this is a big source of revenue for the WELS. A high school classmate and friend of hers who wasn’t WELS died, suddenly, of a heart problem. And her school pulled all its students together to remind them they were not to pray at the subsequent funeral.
The LCMS (and even the smaller LCMC which sits ideologically in between the LCMS and ELCA) churches in our area all make use of drum sets, guitars and keyboards. Plus we both disagree with the LCMS on young-earth creationism.
And our local ELCA churches have followed the national organization’s postmodern, progressive tendencies, and offer shallow, redundant services.
We’ve branched out and are currently, desperately searching for a church among other Protestant denominations, even if it is an outlier in relation to the views of its national organization, that has traditional music and theological depth in its sermons.
We were very impressed by the pastor at a PCA church we visited, but infinitely less-so by the cajón behind him. And, there were no bibles in the pews at this church — some things even if we leave for another denomination, having been both raised Lutheran, we just can’t accept.
The search goes on…
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2mo ago
Non-proper noun, that’s a claim of adherence to basic, fundamental Christian beliefs; not membership in a proper-noun Orthodox church.
I guess if you wanted to grill him, you could ask whether or not he believes in the Apostles’ Creed, and whether or not he believes the filioque clause belongs in the Nicene Creed.
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2mo ago
I going to say, 99.9% joking, that Thiel may be WELS-Lutheran. My wife was raised in the WELS, and the latter believe that — not the individual — but the seat of the Pope is the Antichrist.
(The WELS are also exceedingly unecumenical, and are instructed not to pray with anyone outside their synod.)
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2mo ago
That’s fair and I should have specified potentially incoming.
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2mo ago
How would, or would you at all, add a differentiation between the state and private organizations pursuing the above?
I would suggest including the practice of jaw boning as an action that is considered done by the state, where a threat from the state suffices. Examples: (1) the Biden administration motivating multiple social media companies — ostensibly competitors — into all suspending the New York Post’s accounts on their platforms within short order of one another, in response to the Post publishing the Hunter Biden laptop story, and (2) the Trump Administration motivating the owners of large numbers of ABC broadcast affiliate stations to pressure the network to bring Kimmel to heel.
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6mo ago
Your hypothesis is that we were close to civil war in the late 60s/early 70s? Disagree. Most young people weren’t hippies, let alone militant radicals. In the book Days of Rage it’s noted most NYers regarded the large number of bombings of mostly empty buildings as nuisances. The crazies can’t do it on their own.
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6mo ago
I cannot see most of the events you mentioned causing a civil war. If the J6ers had stopped the certification of the vote, kidnapped some congressmen, etc. that would rank the most probable. And they didn’t. The Zizians? What societal fault lines are the Zizians setting in motion? Who is calling for armed rebellion to avenge the landlord they killed?
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7mo ago
That’s a great reference. ❤️
A small but invaluable aid this time of year I want to pass along: property tax records.
Not sure if your friend’s or acquaintance’s spouse has the same surname? Or, how exactly someone on your Christmas card list spells their name? Once you have their address, this information is available online for individuals and married couples if they own property.
Has spared me the minor social faux pas of having to ask these questions multiple times this month.
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