aaa
6d 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
16d 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
23d 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
16d 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
22d 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
23d 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
22d 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
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
1mo 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
4mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
7mo ago
Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline
Kazakhstan fertility rate is declining. You are thinking of Mongolia and Georgia. I already talked about them two months ago they are very unusual countries and the reversal in TFR is probably just a fluke.
The reason for the fertility rate decline is simple: the cost of children greatly outpaced growth in wealth for various reason deeply rooted in how modern western societies are organized. It can't be fixed without some deep changes nobody is willing or capable of making. Telling people something is high status doesn't work, you actually have to make them perceive the high status and in a capitalist society high status roughly correlates with more disposable income, therefore you either have to abandon capitalism or shower parents with so much money that having a child is a cash positive decision at any level of income.
aaa
7mo ago
I did look into some of those:
Stock market hits record high Bitcoin hits record high EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
These are true.
Hamas calls for end to war
This is true but highly misleading, they want Israel to surrender, basically.
Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
This is unclear, Israel says they did, Qatar says they didn't.
China wants to work peacefully with us
This is true but they say it after every election.
aaa
9mo ago
There was some talk previously, here, about the "manifesto" of Audrey E. Hale, the 2023 Nashville Elementary School Shooter. The shooting happened in 2023-03-27 and the FBI hid the "manifesto" for well over a year, with only a few select pages leaking here and there.
Because the shooter was trans (female to male specifically) people speculated that the "manifesto" contained all kinds of nefarious ideological reasons.
Well, it's all out now. You can get it from The Tennessee Star or, if you don't want to give them your email, from the Kiwifarms.
Basically, there's nothing interesting to it. Alas, the mystery box strikes again: fantasy was better than reality.
A few observations in no particular order:
- the "manifesto" is really just a diary
- Audrey was 28 years old but reading the diary you would probably guess 14 instead, it's really immature (the spelling isn't great either)
- she initially wanted to do it on 1/17, then 2/17, then 4/17, then 3/17 and then finally settles on 3/27.
- she got scammed on the internet while looking for freelance designer work (think logos, illustrations), multiple times
- she hated her father, and also her mother, but mostly her father
- she wanted to have anal sex with a black girl but couldn't because she didn't have a penis, nor a black girl
The backstory is that she was in love with two (black) girls, Sydney Sims who died in a car crash in august of 2022, and Paige Averianna Patton, who is a local radio personality (as Averianna The Personality). Syd never reciprocated, Paige only briefly in high school. On the 27th of february Paige had her first live show (I'm not sure what kind of live show that would be), which coincidentally was also her birthday, so that's probably why the shooting happened on 3/27. This is what Audrey writes about said live show:
She knows who she is, and all the rest of the world in time will too, she's famous to me; a star to many, little does she know how we will soon share the same fate. She will live a legend and I will die a shooter - hopefully to become infamous (I will make history too). No one will forget neither of us. She will be the blessing, and I will be the horror to inflict pain.
aaa
8mo ago
as far as I can tell based on my ideological prejudices (yeah), the children most likely to want to transition are the children, especially male children, of left-leaning single mothers
Your ideological prejudices are wrong, the increase in trans youth has been concentrated mostly in females:
Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth
(...)
In October, researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine published a paper showing a 389% increase in gender-affirming chest surgeries performed nationally from 2016 to 2019 on patients under age 18. The total of 1,130 procedures during the period, nearly all of them for chest masculinization, represents a weighted estimate based on records from more than 2,000 U.S. medical facilities.
(...)
The predominance of patients assigned female at birth is a reversal from the past. For years, when very few minors sought gender care, those assigned male at birth accounted for the majority. But about 15 years ago, that began to change as care became more accessible and the overall number of patients started climbing, according to studies and interviews with gender-care specialists.
For example, at Amsterdam University Medical Center’s gender clinic, a pioneer in adolescent gender care, the proportions flipped. From 1989 to 2005, 59% of its adolescent patients were assigned male at birth, the Dutch clinic reported in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Since 2016, about 75% of the clinic’s patients have been youths who were assigned female at birth.
aaa
6mo ago
Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").
I think opinions on DST vary a lot among fans of SI given that includes almost everyone on earth except citizens of the united states, the united kingdom and aviators.
Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you
There's nothing less human-centric about the SI the meter is just a standardization of the toise (also known as fathom, klafter and many other names), a measurement approximating the distance covered by a human's outstretched arms. If you wanted a unit of measure that wasn't human based you would invent something like the nautical mile, not the meter.
The other argument people make along these lines is about units of temperature but firstly nobody actually uses the Kelvin outside of scientific papers and is brine really a more human substance than distilled water?
Besides length and temperature nobody ever talks about anything else. Nobody ever argues that the pound is more human because the roman libra just exists in nature but the french bushel, precursor of the liter is an inhuman monstrosity. Or that the inch of mecruy just gives them a better intuitive understanding of pressure than the hectopascal.
aaa
3mo 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
4mo 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
5mo ago
It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality
I wonder if someone's going to dig up that one issue of the sandman with the transexual to cancel him. I haven't read it in 15 years but if I recall correctly it had something along the lines of "moon magic won't work for you, YWNBAW".
aaa
1mo 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
9mo ago
Why do people put any stock in happiness statistics? To me it looks like what it would be if we measured national temperature by feeling before the invention of the thermometer. Is Il Cairo very cold, cold, hot or very hot? In fact, it's even worse, because you have at least the possibility of moving somewhere else and experiencing another climate while you don't have the option of moving into somebody's else's head.
aaa
8mo ago
satanic religions of old
There is no old satanic religion. Satanism was invented in the 60s by a topless bar manager.
aaa
2mo 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
Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?
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