aaa
11d ago
In any with strong religious norms, a childless woman was seen as beneath a woman who had many kids. Religious communities do a good job at redirecting social status
In any place with strong religious norms children were also very cheap, nearly free, or possibly even negative cost. The two things correlate that one wonders if it isn't religion that produces high fertility but the reverse: high fertility produces a religion that promotes high fertility. If you look really hard at christianity, for example, there's a lot of antinatalist messaging in there that almost nobody uses: yes be fruitful, yes onan but also "For there are some eunuchs who were so born from their mother’s womb, and there are some eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it".
Are religious communities redirecting social status or getting bent around by what people consider social status anyway? Look at how many churches display pride flags despited that being a far more clearly condemned practice than just not having children.
In America you have the enormous problem of capitalism / consumerism which will need to be fixed for any national solution to occur, because you have some of the smartest people continually telling women that their social value is determined by buying and experiences things
Yes, but surely we can agree that buying and experiencing things, and that having lots of free time, is something that is pleasurable in itself, that it isn't all just a big psyop.
with universities (effectively all of them behaving as businesses) telling them they need to be educated
But do they go to university because they are told to do so or do they go because it's not their money (either it's coming from mom and dad or from a loan) and they get to party for 5 years? Are they doing it for the status or are they doing it because they expect to be fun and they are correct?
If you’re at a party and there’s a poor artist, a prestigious academic, and then a plumbing company owner who makes $400k yearly
Being a rich owner of a plumbing company is not so much a job as it is a wish. It doesn't matter if you think something is beneath you if it's also unavailable to you. What's available to you is being an employee of a plumbing company and that makes little money and is phisically draining on top, hence nobody wants to do it.
Their leaders are engaged in a holy war but the average member is just a normal person doing what their culture says to do, and in this culture the number of children is prized over everything. Both men and women are judged harshly or celebrated strongly based on their fertility. It’s seen as both a commandment and a blessing. The average member isn’t having kids for a nefarious reason, they are just taught through custom that it’s prized.
I think the Haredi are in a position similar to the lifelong Seaorgers: the community is so closed and dependent upon itself that leaving is not just discouraged socially but it's also economically very difficult. Nevertheless the percentage of people that leave that lifestyle is growing.
Unlikely now that Gypsies are forced into schools in Europe.
You're overestimating the mighty power of europe here.
And look at historical figures: Ben Franklin’s father made candles, was his 17 children necessary for the candle business in an era with slaves and indentured servants? Of course not. Albrecht Dürer‘s parents were goldsmiths, did they need to have 18 children?
Some people are just weirdos.
aaa
11d ago
judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood
As if you can snap your fingers and just do it. As if you can make women incapable of looking around them and seeing every large family poor and miserable. How many instances throughout world history can you find where social status was not tied to material wealth?
The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this
Is that the cause? Or is it that they are a welfare class engaged in a holy war?
The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this
Is that the cause? Or is it that gypsy children are an economic resource to gypsies?
aaa
27d ago
I have this half formed theory that woke is currently undergoing its own Failed Prophecy event. They expected diverse casts to improve movies and games and they are accumulating blunder after blunder, MCU is in shambles, dragonage and concord cancelled, etc... That big landmark study that said diversity is good for business has been found to have used manipulated data. Biden really turned out to be senile, they lost the US presidential election badly (they lost the popular vote!) and studies are coming out of denmark proving immigration to be net negative. Empirical reality caught up to their escatology.
It's normal than in this context people are going to peel off.
What this is going to mean long term remains to be seen, plenty of religions survive failed prophecies.
aaa
2mo ago
I see that you've been answering like this, but to me this means absolutely nothing. How is moving beyond a "mechanicistic paradigm" going to help us? What are you suggesting in concrete terms?
aaa
2mo ago
Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?
aaa
2mo ago
The only religion that I am aware of that has a thriving secularized branch is judaism. I think it works for judaism for two reasons: 1) it was always more rule-following focused than other religions, 2) they have the (very recent) memory of the holocaust to help them form a sense of community.
Belief in christianity is very important, how are you going to reconcile all the passages that say something along the lines of "salvation only happens through faith" with "actually it's all a bunch of baloney"? More broadly you will encounter two problems.
The first one is theological. You have started cutting things off the bible and off tradition, where do you stop? Christianity had an answer to this: you stop when the church tells you to stop, only they have the power, through apostolical tradition, to know what to cut.
The other problem is more practical, how do you get people interested in this? This thing has already been invented, it's called the Church of Humanity, it was invented in 1859. Nobody cares. People like to think of the societal benefits of religion but to be adopted and spread, just like genes, it needs to be useful to the individual here and now. The "magical" aspects of religion give real, immediate returns on investment in psychological terms. Saying "trans women are women" gives real, immediate monetary returns in the right career. What's your cultural christianity going to provide? What's your church going to do for me tomorrow?
aaa
2mo ago
I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water",
In all of the years I've spent following the mythicist discourse I have never encountered this explanation. Usually what is offered as an explanation is that it was a magic trick: walking on a submerged plank of wood (maybe a deck or something). The criticism on Peter falling is not really biting, since a single gospel has it and you wouldn't expect a detail such as that to be omitted or forgotten, if it had happened. A much better one is that they are clearly supposed to be too far from the coast for it to be a trick of that sort.
Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too.
I've never heard this one either. To be onest they both sound like strawmen to me. Usually the explanation for the virgin birth is that it wasn't even there in Mark, the explanation for the "specialness" of Jesus was initially his Davidian genealogy and the virgin birth was developed later, when the story moved into the hellenistic world, where people didn't care about David and stories of vigin births abunded.
aaa
2mo ago
It's a little counter-intuitive how cars are far more likely to kill us, but we get more angry at cyclists.
Why is it counterintuitive? A car weights 175x the weight of a bicycle, of course it's more deadly.
aaa
2mo ago
You can go on his channel and judge yourself, this is his last pre-hiatus video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mVGRAD10cYs.
The "I've been a taliban prisoner for 17 months" beard goes a long way but I think he'd still look aged without it.
aaa
2mo ago
The first step towards walking in h spiritual path is reducing stimulus substantially. Luke Smith release a good video on this perspective yesterday.
Tangent, but if I ever wanted to make a meme about "religion bad' I would pick Luke Smith, he's gone orthodox and has aged 15 years in the space of 2. It's the kind of rapid aging that I've only ever seen in vegans before. That copypasta about falling for every meme needs to be updated.
aaa
2mo ago
If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007
That's not what I see. I see it starting in 1997 and peaking around 2012.
aaa
3mo ago
Historians of Jesus Christ run into a peculiar contradiction when it comes to trying to figure out the precise circumstances of his death. On one hand they need him to be a minor figure of the time that he wouldn't attract the attention of contemporary historians, on the other hand they need something egregious enough that it would lead to extraordinary application of the law.
aaa
3mo ago
I don't recall, good point! But if they were never going to use them as a carrot, I don't understand why they are still "frozen" – the "give the frozen assets to Ukraine" idea has been floating around for a bit but as far as I know hasn't even partially materialized
It's illegal, there's articles about this. Russia would sue and win and get the assets back. The current idea is to give profits from those assets to Ukraine but AFAIK that idea hasn't gone anywhere either (and it is also legally dubious).
aaa
4mo ago
No. The conclave system is designed to insure political continuity: cardinals can be made and undone by the pope at will and Bergoglio took full advantage of this, of the 135 cardinal electors that will participate to the next conclave only 17 were not invested by Bergoglio.
The reason for the crackdown on the latin mass is that a lot of congregation that practice it are borderline scismatic, see also thinking that Vatican II is in any way in question.
aaa
4mo ago
Pilot suicides might be less bad than ramming attacks... but it's an open question about whether they are less common, or if the security doors enable more suicides-with-all-aboard than they do mitigate ramming attacks.
They are much more common but the right comparison would be between pilot suicides and ramming attacks if the latter was still possible. But the safety doors don't really matter for pilot suicides, they happened just as much before and logically you don't need a long time to crash a plane. You couldn't do it the way the germanwings guy did it but the SilkAir way would still work.
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_control_of_whole_flight
aaa
4mo ago
Roe v. Wade was a decision of the supreme court, not a law. They decided that it was not appropriate for them to make such a decision, therefore returning the issue to individual states.
aaa
4mo ago
It was already slop. I still can't understand to this day how they managed to spend this much money on what was essentially a less interesting Bioshock at every level. Especially after they managed to make 2 so good.
It was endlessly rewritten during production, with ideas being constantly implemented only to be scrapped because Ken Levine kept changing his mind. I'm pretty sure it's been talked about extensively, but I don't remember where.
You can even tell from the finished product, how the story doesn't make much sense in many points and how even the powers of Elizabeth are inconsistent (the first time you meet her she's opening a portal to another town but later she's only able to open portals to alternate dimensions of the place she's in).
Pretty common failure mode.
aaa
4mo ago
The Waymo in California thing is such a small experiment and the upside of fudging with it is so high that if it turned out in 5 years that actually it was mostly indians in a warehouse doing the driving I wouldn't even be surprised
aaa
5mo ago
I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events
I don't know about the blue tribe normie but if we're doing alt history I vote for not doing the mail-in strat in 2020. Without it Trump would have eeked out a meager victory in 2020: Trump 1 was lame and an immediately consecutive second term, with Pence VP and no Musk would have been much of the same if not even worse.
The post-covid immigration surge would have been smaller because of Trump and the post-covid inflation would also have been smaller because the war in Ukraine would have probably ended through diplomatic means 2 months in. Nevertheless with no immigration platform and a bad economy whoever would have run as a republican candidate in 2024 (Pence? De Santis?) would have lost badly, possibly historically so. And the dem republican would have not been Biden, possibly more radical and capable of running whatever agenda they had for 8 years (or more!) uninterrupted.
Second best would be picking a different date as the presidential debate in 2024. Had Biden not been sunsetting that one fateful day his poll numbers wouldn't have crashed, there wouldn't have been an assassination attempt on Trump and he could have won with a small margin. Then in 2028 Trump would probably have been too old to run again. It really was just a little bit of bad luck.
aaa
5mo ago
For example, kayaking doesn't seem to have any immediate 'practical use', but I can tell you with full confidence that it's a much better hobby than playing Donkey Kong Racing on repeat.
At this point many speedrunners are living off of it, so it's more like a career path.
aaa
6mo ago
There is something different going on with China, either it's much harder to translate or the output is just much worse
The chinese government was heavily censorious for a long time, maybe it still is. It doesn't necessarily have an effect on quality but in practice it does. Look at US cultural output, ever since the creative milieu has gone censorious, as a grass roots effort, the quality of its production has fallen off a cliff.
aaa
6mo ago
did the transgender opera in Columbia like, actually happen?
It did, it was "As One" it was performed three times in Bogotá on march 16th, april 22nd and april 28th of 2022, in three different theaters. It was even announced on X (then twitter): https://x.com/OLA_opera/status/1501640790988275721
aaa
6mo ago
I dunno: it may include the morbidly obese, but also the senior citizen health nuts
The point is that a lot of people who die each year already look like they are about to die and Trump doesn't.
Gundam and Star Trek had rabid female fanbase?
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