WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
No, because that kind of critic actually believes that Tolkien truly on purpose wrote a secret gay romance that he had to conceal because of the sensibilities of the age.
I don't think this is true. Some people occasionally believe that, but left-wing media criticism really likes Roland Barthes and the Death of the Author (albeit a really simplified version thereof). "Queering a text" is usually thought of as a deliberate creative exercise, akin to fanfiction. Certainly there's hardly anyone who thinks Kirk/Spock was intentional, but they find it no less delightful to watch TOS with shipping goggles on.
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
The model you seem to be applying is that there's a problem, and conflict over how to fix the problem is driving the split, and so if the problem were removed the split would heal. You don't seem to recognize a values-level split between Reds and Blues, which is presumably why you think the categories the split demarcates are in my head.
I think the idea is more that the conflict over that problem creates far more day-to-day strife and personal animus than value differences do, in line with Scott's memorable post about people's shocking ability to get along even when they have, on paper, deep and irreconcilable value differences.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I think this works with one straight man and two bisexual women, but might not work with the average straight women and two gay men. I think jealousy is much more likely if your partner is having other sex to which, by definition, you're not invited - sex the very thought of which might enrage you. If you're all bisexuals, and your other two partners are doing nothing together that they haven't also done with you in the mix - who's counting? But a straight woman with no interest in watching Boyfriend One sodomize Boyfriend Two might get upset if they're spending too much time together instead of on her.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Oh, all sorts of configurations can work. But in your configuration the straight person might still feel jealous when one of the bisexuals is sleeping with the other instead of the straight one. The jealousy problem is however obliterated if everybody's screwing everybody.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I think polyamory works best if everybody involved is bisexual, and therefore everyone in the polycule can loosely be dating everybody else.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I actually think the thing about the selection is overstated. Most of the "apocryphal gospels" significantly postdate the four canonical ones; the process of eliminating them wasn't much more than "go back to the earliest available sources and discount the dodgy latter-day additions", without much consideration to their contents per se. (I'll grant you that John's Apocalypse being included, out of any number of visionary Gnostic-adjacent ravings, is a bit of a fluke.)
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Oh, I wasn't assuming the Gospels were the direct writings of the Disciples, but someone at some point needs to have originated the miracle claims; either they were later liars, or they were contemporary crazies.
Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time, since the Gospels themselves allude to contemporary speculation that Jesus might have been a resurrected John the Baptist - and/or that John himself may have been a resurrected Isaiah.
And then there's the thing where Mark's account ends at the mourning-women finding his tomb empty and having a brief, ambiguous encounter with a man clad in white (who is, TMU, generally interpreted by believers as an angel, not even the actual risen Christ himself). There are many plausible non-supernatural reasons for Jesus's body to have been removed from Joseph of Arimathea's crypt a few days after he was placed there; it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned, especially if Jesus himself had in fact alluded to a future resurrection prior to his death. From there, scattered eyewitness reports of risen-Jesus-sightings are no different from people claiming to have run into a middle-aged Elvis Presley.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
"The cruelty is the point" isn't typically used to describe people who believe cruelty is necessary to serve a greater good (eg as a deterrent) - nine times out of ten, the implication is that the target believes cruelty is desirable in itself. Ends vs means. Some people think we need to punish criminals "cruelly" to deter others, even if, in a perfect world, no one ought to suffer; other people think justice involves making criminals suffer as punishment, even on a desert island. "The cruelty is the point" is typically used to accuse the first kind of people of secretly being the second kind of people, but hiding behind more socially acceptable utilitarian justifications.
Not necessarily.
Jesus may have been earnestly delusional. We certainly get a lot of schizophrenic self-proclaimed messiahs nowadays; why would the original article need to be anything more or less than the most successful one in history? C.S. Lewis used to say the "Jesus was insane" hypothesis could be dismissed by looking at the overall coherence and sensibleness of his teachings whenever he wasn't declaring himself the Son of Man. But that doesn't track with my, or many others' experiences talking to the mentally-will but well-educated. (See Scott's "Professor T" story for anecdata that's at least adjacent.) Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.
Granted, it's likely that someone deliberately made something up at some point, but even then I'm not sure I'd call it LARPing if they were attempting to perpetrate actual fraud against would-be followers. A hoax isn't the same thing as LARPing.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament
Hardly. I am perfectly willing to believe that a lot of Christians - and certainly a majority of early Christians - sincerely believe in the objective reality of their messiah and his miracles.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Consider the simps moderating Pokimane's twitch chat for free or sending their money to onlyfans girls who provide a (often outsourced to low-paid Pakistani men) simulacrum of a relationship with a woman. On the female side there are those who fall into a Stockholm syndrome like infatuation with their rapist/abuser.
These all seem like social diseases of the disaffected twenty-something. I don't think it explains what is preventing high-schoolers from getting crushes on their classmates. (Of course, the pastor from the OP was talking about homeschooled teens.)
Fair dos on your opening disclaimer, but besides being very cursory, it's also addressing a somewhat different points. Many people nowadays wind up in loving relationships that started as casual dating not motivated by anybody having an organic crush on anybody else. That's fine, but not the same thing as relationships starting because one party falls for the other, and therefore gets sufficient motivation to ask their crush out from the prospect of dating that person alone. (And of course there's no guarantee that a relationship which $starts* this way will be a long-lasting, happy relationship!)
I never said anything about it being requited or demanding passion from both sides! What I'm talking about is one person (typically, the boy) developing an infatuation, and being motivated thereby to ask out the other one (typically, the girl). Hopefully, in the course of dating, the askee comes to reciprocate. Hopefully, if she doesn't, it's because the two of them don't really click in a romantic context, and this causes the initial crush to fade. Perhaps using the L-word confused things; I'm not speaking about the full bells and whistles, necessarily. Just about its precursor. A crush. An infatuation. Whatever you want to call it.
Of course, falling-in-love with/developing-a-crush-on someone necessitates already knowing them and hanging out with them frequently for non-dating-related reasons. Luckily, we have a social institution for locking largeish numbers of boys and girls together in a room for months on end until they are forced to get to know each other; it is called "school". By the end of any given year of middle school or high school I'd spoken to most of my opposite-sex classmates a few times, worked on class projects with several, and befriended a few platonically. Even without direct interactions, I'd seen enough of literally all of them to have a working sense of their vibe and personality. That's quite enough to develop a romantic infatuation that goes beyond the carnal (as it did yearly for me) and might motivate you to eventually ask one of these girls out on a date (as it did a few times).
Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love. Actual, passionate love, which can only be satisfied by entering a relationship with that specific woman. It's not a desire for the social status a relationship brings, and it's certainly not sheer undirected lust. The Internet didn't invent masturbation, and if that wasn't enough, brothels and prostitution were commonplace in the old world.
I myself have never asked a girl out because I generically wanted-to-have-a-girlfriend for nebulous status reasons, or because I idly wanted to have sex with her. That always seemed stupid to me, like forcing yourself to eat when you're not hungry. I asked girls out if and when I had crushes on them, because having a crush made me really want to spend time with her, and that in itself was a big enough reward to get over the rejection anxiety. Is that really so rare? Have people stopped falling in love? I'm not asking for sweeping fairy-tale romances, but even a flimsy, fickle crush would do. You just need a push of confidence at the crucial moment. Lust or social ambition alone can't get you there, unless you're exactly the kind of lecherous, materialistic creep which any sane girl would turn down as a serious romantic prospect!
('Course, in pre-modern times, another powerful factor you leave out was literally just money. If "figure out why boys don't fall in love anymore" is too hard a piece of social engineering, there's always that.)
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
This certainly describes a social technology that used to exist and has in large part corroded away, but I'm unconvinced by the claim that it's instinctive enough to resist attempts to replace it with some other social technology (or indeed literal technology, eg dating apps). Being afraid of embarrassment might be a spontaneous response, but I don't think it is written into the Y chromosome that being rejected is inherently embarrassing, and I especially don't think it's written into the X chromosome that being romantically or even sexually forward is inherently embarrassing. Sexual taboos are social. Women who were raised to have none, or in whom they didn't 'take', need feel no such embarrassment.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
It's @Primaprimaprima who went from "humans are in fact very easy to persuade" to "you don't even need to present any particularly persuasive arguments, you just need to be able to credibly present your position as the social consensus" at the start of this comment chain. That is the claim I meant to dispute (or rather, the claim which I disputed could be proven by looking at COVID responses).
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
No, because the average fad isn't really making a factual claim. Someone who adopts the latest fashion trend isn't really believing anything that objective reasoning would show to be untrue.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Yes, but the necessity of such techniques paints a different picture from the idea that humans are gullible in the sense of automatically going along with any social consensus. Buttons other than the sheer instinct to conform need to be pressed.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I don't think COVID stuff can really be used as proof of general human gullibility. "You should deal with COVID a certain way Or We'll All Die" has built-in life-or-death stakes, ie a much greater emotional valence than the average sweeping claim. There might even be specific drives about falling in line with herd behavior if there's a plague going around, if you want to get all evo-psych. To see how much weight the social consensus itself possesses, you would really want to look at something neutral, abstract, with no effects on people's everyday lives. A pure article of faith, divorced from any call to action or doomsaying.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
The typical retort is that what there is, is a chance of survival for the human race in the event of total catastrophe befalling the Earth, albeit in reduced circumstances. Now sure, this is such a remote concern that it would be unlikely to motivate nations to make the expense. But that may say more about nations than about the soundness of the idea (depending on how much you value the survival of the human race).
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Governing institutions in a democracy cannot survive by being only trusted by one political party.
I mean, if that's your thesis, surely the current MAGA strategy won't help even if it succeeds at its stated aims. Institutions reshaped by Trump in his image won't be trusted by the Left. Best scenario, you'll just flip the problem.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
While this wasn't exactly the language used at the time, it doesn't seem incoherent to say that the Civil War amounted to "well done, you've exercised your right to self-determination to become a nation of your own. unfortunately, judged as a neighboring foreign nation, we find you guilty of crimes so intolerable that we have no choice but to declare war on you and annex you".
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? (…)
This is the difference between a conspiracy and organic ideological affiliation. The bureaucracy, the media, and the educational system are in lockstep under the mainstream-woke banner, yes; but they don't think of themselves as following centralized directives. Every individual in the chain is acting according to his own conscience. Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest. Nobody regards themself as taking marching orders, and if someone tries to give them orders that go against their own judgment they'll be ignored.
It feels like there is a never ending game of (…)
I agree, but this sort of disingenuous behavior seems to me like another manifestation of the same lack of trust. It's game theory all the way down. You don't feel you can ask for what you really want up-front without triggering all-out war, so you go for salami tactics and artificially shifting the Overton window. There are other dynamics and incentives at play, like the unrealistic but alluring hope of total victory which means the respective sides pursue dangerous gambits which they dream might give them the edge once and for all, instead of working towards a stable compromise as the expected end-state.
Related still, but distinct, is the endless fool's-quest for the appearance of a total consensus. We as a nation and indeed as a civilization need to be more comfortable with overt compromise. We need politicians who openly say things like "I know 45% of you really want [A] and aren't going to budge. And personally I'm with you, but another 45% desperately want [B], and they aren't gonna change anytime soon, either. Here's what my administration and I are proposing to do to try and keep the peace", instead of pretending they've invented a magic solution that will make everybody happy except for a few meanies on the fringes. I truly think, to an unbiased observer, it would look nuts that so few political issues are phrased in those terms in speeches and think-pieces. Even when they don't actually believe in it, let alone advocate it, almost everyone writes as though the 170 million guys on the other side of the fence are just a temporary inconvenience who can be safely ignored, perhaps reeducated. And yet, this. Never. Works.
If it were easier for opposing sides to negotiate with all cards on the table, we could skip all that tedious, damaging business and skip to the begrudging compromise.
I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.
Oh, I agree with that, too. The dynamic I outlined was symmetrical for a reason. Alas, I'm not in charge of the Blue Tribe. FWIW, if I somehow was the Blue Tribe Czar, and had a Red counterpart at the negotiating table, there are a number of guarantees I would be prepared to give that differ from my ideal world-state (up to and including "it's the parent's choice whether their child gets to transition before their legal majority, and we will codify into federal law that refusing to aid transition will not, in and of itself, be considered parental abuse").
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
Far be it from me to defend WhiningCoil, whose demeanor and positions I find deeply objectionable, but if you will tolerate my nitpicking - I think that in "(Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words for the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)", the opening slur refers to the kind of guy who would post a lengthy verbose message instead of a snappy call to violence, i.e. to the persona reluctantly adopted by WhiningCoil himself - not to the people who asked for the verbose version. Note that, although you quoted it as a plural, it's singular in his post.
Of course, this still leaves "the slow kids in the back..." as being obviously directed at the mod team. As I said, not seeking to help his case, merely indulging my inner pedant.
Forgive the geekiness, but Sectumsempra is very pointedly a bit of obscure dark magic that a teenager had no business learning - the whole deal is that he finds it in what later turns out to be Snape's old diary, and uses it on Malfoy without knowing what it'll do. It wasn't something he was taught in defense class.
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