Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
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User ID: 2188
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
5mo ago
You might consider that you don't have a very solid grasp on what Christianity is, if that's your definition.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
There's a reason most parenting guides say "don't beat your kids". It really screws them up
Do you have any sources on this which attempt to control for the causation possibly running in the other direction? I.e. low-quality children simply more likely to be beaten.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
"No, you see, every time you say 'monkey' I immediately think of black people, so you need to stop using such racist language."
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
I remember being astonished to learn that Vietnamese tourists will generally bring their own dried food to eat during their travels. Asia really is a foreign country.
This could be fine with some commentary. As Incanto said below it would be good to enumerate some examples that occur to you, and ideally offer some additional insight beyond the quote itself.
Personally I think there's some truth to it. Arcane language certainly is handy for bamboozling the peasants. It even works on the managerial class, since they're often a particular combination of embarrassed to call the speaker out, thus admitting that they're ignorant of the subject, and unwilling or unable to go to the effort of educating themselves on the particulars. C.f. how few people have any idea regarding the basics of how the financial system works. It's just something for the professionals to handle, I guess. Hope they're competent, honest, selfless public servants!
One of my favorite words to hear in normie discourse is "the economy". It's fascinating to imagine what internal understandings people are referencing when they say that. Got particularly interesting during the covid crisis, which imo revealed some of the enormous gaps in popular understanding of such matters. Particularly frustrating to me was the notion that we need to prioritize "lives" over "the economy". One wonders what they imagine is responsible for producing things like modern healthcare.
So I guess the insight I want to add here is that higher-ups will throw such words around to keep their inferiors convinced that smart people are in control, sure, but also that those inferiors will do their best to bluff by mimicking what they've heard so as to bolster their arguments, all the while swallowing the fear that someone will call them out and force them to explain precisely what those words mean.
Try asking someone who complains about 'capitalism' exactly what that is, sometime.
Probably a much earlier antecedent would be religions, which were often founded on a model where the people in charge had access to special knowledge which justified their position and which would explicitly not be shared with the followers. Many exceptions, of course.
(EDIT to continue) Occurs to me that this dynamic is particularly troublesome in the sort of democracy-ish model most modern nations seem to be pursuing. How can an electorate be expected to make good decisions when the key to securing votes is a confident smile and the ability to plausibly throw out a bunch of power-words in pleasant-sounding ways?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
Idk about good but it certainly was eye-opening. Did you catch the username? I was confused about how cocaine comes from scorpions and wanted to follow up via PM.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
I like my rpgs to be as Tolkienesque and possible and have collected about all of the relevant systems, but I find that it's difficult to get a group together which shares that aesthetic taste. By and large, people really do seem to prefer pop-fantasy. Damn millennials. They ruined the millennium!
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
They'd be a deductible expense for me, so I chuckled and smugly looked them up to-
Yeah, no, not a chance.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
5mo ago
his amoral visions of conquest
What would you say made them amoral?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
11mo ago
Scylla has scales. Giant six-headed hydra-like thing. Is gonna make a solid run at your crew but only has so many mouths.
Charybdis is one giant mouth that will swallow the entire ship.
Much is made of intelligence and for good reason.
But I'd like to add:
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Parental investment
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Impulse control
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Self-confidence
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Time preference
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General aggressiveness
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Hormonal balances (e.g. testosterone)
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Industriousness
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Sexual fidelity
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Instinct toward hygiene
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Propensity to certain diseases
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Aesthetic preferences
And so many more!
Yes culture matters, but we have only to look to the animal kingdom for the obvious genetic underpinnings of all of the above.
My current working metaphor is something like, "Culture is a house built upon a genetic foundation. If the foundation, the capacity, is there then the culture can take hold. But for any individual, cultural constructs will collapse to their point of sound genetic foundation."
(And if you don't believe me, try teaching good financial habits to someone with a nasty FOXP2 mutation. Or for that matter a sturgeon.)
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.
If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.
the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.
Well, they're happy to do so in Western-public-facing matters. I believe they still have organ theft vans rolling around, yeah?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Good luck with your white whale.
Nailed my own a few years ago. When I was 15 or so, I downloaded this demo of a game called "Atomic Superball (The Chicken Edition)" and played the heck out of that thing. No idea how many hours. And then when I was 20 or so, it occurred to me: I could buy the actual game now.
Of course almost all traces of it had vanished. The website was still up but payment/delivery was non-functional, and no one ever responded to the email address.
More than a decade passed.
Still I thought about that game from time to time, and occasionally went digging for it. At long last, I found a couple of videos on vimeo or something of a dude playing with it. Commented asking if there were any chance he might still have his copy. Shared the story of how much I loved it and so on.
Surprise surprise, the actual creator of the game saw this and reached out to me. We talked about it back and forth over email for a while, and he was gracious enough to send me a copy.
It was... okay. The parts I liked from the demo were still awesome, but the rest of it, the levels, the unlockables, all that stuff, was kind of meh. After some soul-searching I decided to be honest with the guy about how I felt.
"Yeah," he said. "That's why we put that stuff in the demo."
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
Generally speaking, God's not into smiting people in the OT, though it's often read that way in the West. Mostly what we see is God removing His divine protection and letting people suffer the consequences of turning away. Yes, even the great flood. He pulled back His ordering of the primal chaos and it broke loose. Yes, even the people who get smoked by His presence in the temple. That's just what God's presence does to fallen humans (and also why He protected us by expelling us from Eden). He gives very specific instructions to the effect of "this is how you can live with Me safely" and people reject those and the consequences are what you'd expect.
Happens also with Ananias and wife in Acts.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
11mo ago
I'm pretty skeptical of this narrative. See:
http://www.anechoicmedia.org/blog/european_politics/
In short, it's a good takedown of the default, overconfident narrative of American migrant assimilation. If your idea of 20th century immigration is wretched refuse coming ashore, moving their way up, and merging economically and politically into the uniform White America we know today, that pretty much didn't happen. By most measures, identifiable European ancestries are still differentiated within America, and in ways that parallel their differences in Europe. The story of white America, then, is less one of assimilation, and more of selection bias and attrition.
There's not much selection pressure on Sweden's migrants if they and their children all get free rides.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
5mo ago
Not certain what he meant but I'm guessing white people.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
9mo ago
Gaston is by any measure the hero of the movie. He's a paragon, the absolute image, of his people, and they adore him. He is the bringer of benefit, the one who is capable of moving them to action as a body.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
One departure from realism was that they removed the ability for guns to jam. Happened all the time at first (realistic amounts) but pretty quickly they decided that letting a prospective recruit simulate being in mortal peril when his weapon inexplicably stops working wasn't great for numbers.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
11mo ago
It would be disingenuous to argue that Christianity is true because Constantine saw a vision of a cross. No one who’s studied the issues would hold that position.
Well sure. Because he saw a chi-ro. =P
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
11mo ago
The only way out is to stop producing so many dysfunctional people. We have so far failed to figure out how.
Seems to me that a good first step would be to stop subsidizing their production.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
About 18 months ago I rented a model Y for a few days to make up my mind about taking the plunge. Loved it. Picked up my own (but the sport model) about 10 months ago. Will definitely never look back.
At first a few things bugged me in the spirit of "why would you even reinvent that perfectly-functional standard?" but over time it's all grown on me.
And in the meantime, man, there's nothing else quite like a tesla. The passing power, the software, just the overall experience is fantastic. And when I'm on long drives (a couple times per week) it's lovely to be able to hit the autopilot and look out the window. This shines even brighter during traffic jams, where suddenly the mental labor of stopping and going has been eliminated entirely, and I can often even read a book.
Two things I'll complain about, because in both cases I thought I'd accounted for them but was wrong.
First of all, I thought I'd be saving substantial money on fuel, and I guess there has been a slight edge, but not nearly as much as expected and not enough to offset the higher cost of the vehicle. Even so it was fun last summer to be able to say, "Jeez, do you know what gas costs now? (Sympathetic nod) ...Because I don't!" lmaooooo
But secondly, insurance is really very expensive. I got a quote for like $130 a month, which is still high, but then it quickly shot up to iirc $203 per month, which is just... kind of absurd. And I have a decades-long driving history with zero moving violations or at-fault accidents.
So at this point I'm paying something like $1200 a month for the vehicle and still quite a lot for fuel/energy.
One thing that doesn't bother me, but which reasonably could, is the supercharging dynamic. I have almost always found that chargers are available where and when I want them, though a couple of the stations do set moderately abusive rates. (The menu in the car will tell you where the chargers are and what they cost, so those are easily avoided). But also, gas stations are everywhere, and superchargers are not. A few weeks ago I was driving down the coast having a fine time when my car warned me that I was almost beyond range of any charger stations. This was a pretty big surprise -- turned out the one I'd been counting on was down for maintenance that day (or something). Turning back would have been very costly in time and so I decided to try just driving slower instead and use the next one. This worked fine and I was sure to let everyone by who wanted to pass. Still, not a pleasant situation in which to suddenly find oneself. Presumably it will be rapidly less-common anyway as chargers are going up all over.
Oh, one more thing -- a lot of the places I go still have free electric vehicle charging for parked cars. Nice to take advantage of from time to time.
...
Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that Spider-Verse also featured a black main character. Seems like an odd comparison to make, given their narrative.
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