Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
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User ID: 2188
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.
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.
5mo ago
his amoral visions of conquest
What would you say made them amoral?
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.
7mo 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.
10mo 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.
5mo ago
Not certain what he meant but I'm guessing white people.
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.
6mo ago
Yes: That's what's necessary for God to be with us, and He loves us enough to do it.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
11mo ago
If Christians typically went out and executed people for mocking Christ, that would indicate that Christianity is dead.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
Is there protocol for that? Is he even eligible at that point? Does he reign from prison? Is he released? Can he release himself? Seems like I should know these things.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
4mo ago
Right, and, making transportation more expensive is going to have economic ripple effects that are hard to predict.
At the same time, we can see how 'tax people with good traits to subsidize the reproduction of people with bad traits' might get us into real trouble. It's the humane thing to do right up until the whole system collapses under its weight and we're back to third-world levels of wealth without the social cohesion which allowed us to climb out of that in the first place.
I like the metaphor of an oared galley. At first all the rowers are strong men. But over time, as the rowers tire out, they begin to be replaced by statues of rowers. This can go on for a while, even as it increases the load on the extant rowers. There comes a tipping point, though, where the boat is dead in the water.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
5mo ago
Well that would be a crime and could be deterred in the usual ways ("What if someone just gets drunk and gets behind the wheel of a car tho?") except that enforcement would be a political problem because of so many illegal immigrants who can't get insurance.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
6mo ago
To do the thing, He set up the rules to require Him to do?
Not following, here.
You don't get to be the omnipotent, omniscient creator God, then also want kudos for solving some problem you created. The sacrifice of Jesus is only required because God wanted it to be so.
Yes, that's what I just said. He wanted to be with us that badly. If He hadn't, He'd presumably have just not bothered with us or gone through that.
Still not sure what else you're implying. If God wants to marry us, which is rather what this whole thing is about, He wants a bride capable of choosing Him. That also means that we're capable of choosing to reject Him, hence everything else that happens.
Maybe you're suggesting that God could simply have created us capable of choosing Him and also incapable? If so I think your notion of 'omnipotence' is broken.
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.
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