coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
The process in the 2010s went something like this:
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The mainstream media, and sub-mainstream outlets, would craft an emotionally-poignant faux-tragedy out of an event related to race, eg Michael Brown.
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Political operatives would boost these stories by sharing and responding to them online, treating these events as an intimate and civic tragedy of totalizing emotional importance. Some of these operatives just wanted Democrats to win, some of them wanted to grow their account. And some of them were actual die-hard antiracists (a tiny minority with a distinct origin in academia, coming out of Soviet anti-American Marxist tactics to weaken America).
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Normal youth in America, absolutely starved of any civic or collective-religious ritual or belongingness, and not understanding anything, would imitate the operatives in mourning the faux-tragedies. This is something that seems important to do unless you know the game being played, and it is also cathartic in the same way watching true crime or a tragic drama is cathartic. This also brought them attention.
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Because the faux-tragedies targetted the empathetic, the mourners were often young women, which means that young men would engage in it driven by pure desire to have sex with them.
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With each additional sequence of catastrophizing an event, the grievance seems bigger and bigger and more legitimate and pressing, and the operatives etc were racing to develop the most “sticky” narrative because by making your message stickier you get more attention online, then your message was imitated, etc.
If you do this enough, “antiracist” becomes a desirable thing to signal within the cohort affected by this messaging. If you totalize the importance of racism, then you are also totalizing the importance of anti-racism. And it feels good to put that identity label in your bio.
It’s fun to draw a comparison between BLM-era ritual mourning and the Khameneist ritual mourning in Iran, and indeed there have even been cross-over episodes. They both have the intended aim of recruiting political allegiance by lazer-focusing on an ostensibly sorrowful, unjust, dramatic death, identifying with the suffering victim, and then embodying a sort of repented or amended spirit which comes out of it, especially within a space for collective effervescence.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
I think Psmith misses some context in the metaphors. Leaving the 99 sheep to find the lost is reasonable because the 99 have herd instinct. It’s not likely that the 99 will wander individually and get lost, as that’s not typical sheep behavior. It is possible that a wolf comes to snatch one, or someone comes to steal one, but that’s not an hourly concern. We shouldn’t interpret the shepherd as leaving for multiple days to find the sheep, because a shepherd of 100 sheep would be counting his flock at least twice a day. So we’re talking about leaving the herd intact and perhaps posing a little danger to them all, in order to try rescuing a lost a sheep by retracing steps over the past few hours. The lost sheep will certainly die; the flock is probably not in danger although maybe there’s a 5% chance a wolf comes to kill one. This stuff would be well-known in an agricultural country, but nowadays we’re never around sheep.
The decision of the vineyard owner is not something Jesus claims is normative (it’s not a “which of you wouldn’t…” style metaphor), but you can reasonably intuit that the vineyard owner felt mercy on those who were waiting to work all day:
And he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’
It is in the vineyard owner’s right to pay his workers what he thinks is good to pay, and that could involve compassion on those who can’t find work. This would be like Elon Musk paying a programmer full days of work even though he’s stuck at an airport due to a delay. Does Musk need to? No, but he can decide it’s right to do that.
This is someone whose perhaps most famous command is to love your enemies, and that plainly is not human moral intuition
Sure, but he does justify it with reminding us of our intuition. He doesn’t just say, “do it because I am telling you to and my ways are unknowable”. He says:
[…] so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
This is ~3 calls to our intuition to justify why we should “love our enemies”: because God shows His favor even to the evil and we want to be His sons; because we need to be exceptional as sons of God; because we want the greater reward. Jesus tells us new things, but in talking about these new things he uses plain reasonable intuition.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
A consistent perspective on the problem of evil would be that God defines good, and if we don’t understand his actions to be "good" that is a fault (a mis-calibration) of our fallen nature. The fact that Barron does not take this tack hints that he believes humanity’s desire for a "good" God is compatible with humanity’s definition of "good". This runs the grave risk of putting ourselves as a "judge" or external arbiter of God’s behavior.
Jesus affirms the accuracy of human moral intuition. His parables compare the reasoning of God to the reasoning of man. His sayings are based on a sensible person’s intuition. For instance:
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What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the pasture and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders, comes home, and calls together his friends and neighbors to tell them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep!’
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Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him
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And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? As you go with your accuser before the magistrate, make an effort to settle with him on the way, lest he drag you to the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer put you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.
As does Paul, eg:
- Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?
The problem of evil is a thorn in the side of modern Christianity. A benevolent God would never allow something like childhood brain cancer; there are obviously better ways to test the sons of men than to inflict a random child with maximum pain before they have the cognitive capacity to understand what’s going on. Such a thing is evil, and if we say “it is God’s will”, it corrupts our image of God as perfectly loving. And we will be throwing all of the morally sensible and sensitive people out of the churches if we are adamant about this. In my view, the best answer is that God does not have the power to heal certain evils in the world, which are simply destined to happen because “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” The benevolent God does all He can for the victims of Satan in this world, but until the Second Coming there are some things that are inevitable. Perhaps this is because God, though all-powerful, gave mankind some of His omnipotence, which they disobediently misused to create a powerful evil. And something like this is suggested in the Wisdom of Solomon:
God made not death, neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living. For he created all things that they might be: and he made the nations of the earth for health: and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor kingdom of hell upon the earth. For justice is perpetual and immortal. But the wicked with works and words have called it to them: and esteeming it a friend, have fallen away and have made a covenant with it: because they are worthy to be of the part thereof.
And they knew not the secrets of God, nor hoped for the wages of justice, nor esteemed the honour of holy souls. For God created man incorruptible, and to the image of his own likeness he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death came into the world: And they follow him that are of his side.
I believe this is correct because it is conducive to the greatest wellbeing. This is most comforting to the people who need the most comfort: Satan selects some of the best souls for torment, and these souls will one day be infinitely compensated, and at death already rest in the Bosom of the Lord. This is palliative to both the sufferer and the loved one. The alternative explanation is only palliative to a person who is, I don’t know, unthinking and insensitive or just uniquely submissive to authority. It will lead a person to either discount what happens in the world together or hate God.
I am also partial to my explanation because it elevates evil to a near-Godlike power, which… it is. Why else would Christ be waging a war in the heavenly realms unless it was? Why would his death be needed unless it was? Why else would He call it the ruler of the world? And I think our era needs to see evil as an insanely powerful ruler over the world — this is also conducive to wellbeing.
As is obvious from what I’ve written, I am way outside of Christian orthodoxy, but I think Christian orthodoxy is way outside of what Christ wants, which is the wellbeing of our neighbor, who works too hard to labor our theological treatises in a failed attempt to understand the spirit of God through reason. The earliest form of Christianity was spirit-based, or vibe-based. Spirit + a well-developed intuition. The endless speculation and articulating just empties the Cross of its power.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
That’s how I read it as well, a cheeky Straussian implied reductio ad absurdum. Especially because they choose to articulate it as “marginalization”.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I wish there were more reliable surveys on the rate of sexual assaults in the Gulf Arab countries. If it’s true that their rate sits at < 2 per capita (Oman reports essentially zero) then we’ve found the social policy that can actually solve the Rape Problem. And maybe their reported stats are correct, because in Qatar 83% of women feel safe walking alone at night, while in Italy it’s only 44%
https://www.gallup.com/file/analytics/695138/Gallup_Global-Safety-Report-2025.pdf
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I think the female college-grad graph may be a little deceptive here. Now that getting a bachelors is the minimum expectation in America, we should expect the vast majority of able-bodied and healthy-minded women to pursue at least a bachelor’s. The non-degree holding cohort now has a higher rate of the unhealthy, physically or mentally. So what we’re seeing may not be a causal effect of education on marriage (“getting a degree now increases a woman’s chance of marriage”) as much as a selection effect where all the previously marriageable women are now getting degrees (and would have been married without the degree). And I think it’s probable that these women would be more likely to be married had they not pursued degrees, or at least high status degrees, but that this is obfuscated because of the selection effect in who is receiving degrees.
I also don’t think a cohort of women born in 1980 will tell us about the recent (and ongoing) shift to put as many women in high status professions as we can fit. That really took off post-2008 and, iirc, peaked around the 2010s and MeToo. It’s one thing for a woman’s status to increase upon getting a BS in anthropology and going into debt, another to be doubling their proportion of finance internships and other such things in the past 20 years. That will have a huge effect that we can’t see in the 1980 birth cohort.
Lately, I just saw that this was published online today, and it addresses some of the problem from an Ev Psych approach: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/toward-individualistic-reproduction-solving-the-fertility-crisis-could-require-a-further-marginalization-of-men/F26A4750B666344157278B72CFC5D223
This article argues from an evolutionary perspective that many men’s utility to “free women” has been so diminished that solving the fertility crisis by increasing pair-bonding rates seems unfeasible. A viable means for aiding the survival of low-fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless. Such policies would likely exacerbate male marginalization, but new technologies are on the horizon that could offer men reproductive equality.
we argue that the modern world’s uniquely resource-rich and gender-equal environments have triggered what we term a Mating Equilibrium Shift—possibly a main driver of today’s declining pair-bonding and fertility rates in many nations. Female freedoms and material prosperity seem to motivate women to place greater emphasis on short-term strategies (non-bonded mating), but in terms of reproduction, these strategies are rendered maladaptive by contraceptives. Low-fertility societies have thus entered what we call the Post-Pair-Bonding Fertility Trap, in which too few stable couples form early and durably enough to sustain replacement-level fertility. This trap is a consequence of the Female Choice Fertility Paradox: when women’s free mate choice is combined with economic independence and effective contraception, it systematically favors mating strategies that undermine pair-bonding and, in turn, realized fertility
Not only do women now have free mate choice, but their professional empowerment has reduced men’s utility to them, meaning that women have less need for the material resources men bring to a relationship. Consequently, women exclude more men from their pool of potential partners (Buss, Reference Buss2016; Goldin & Katz, Reference Goldin and Katz2002; Grow & Van Bavel, Reference Grow and Van Bavel2015; Lichter et al., Reference Lichter, Price and Swigert2020; Nordin & Stanfors, Reference Nordin and Stanfors2024; Trimarchi, Reference Trimarchi2022). Empirical research supports that when women are less dependent on men for resources, they partner up to a lesser extent (Cancian & Meyer, Reference Cancian and Meyer2014; Cuesta & Reynolds, Reference Cuesta and Reynolds2021).
There is a strong association between the freedoms a nation grants its women and how high its fertility rate is. The Pearson correlation is r ≈ 0.81, while the rank order correlation is r ≈ 0.86, N = 172.
It goes on and on; pretty enormous paper. I am partial to their analysis but not to their conclusions. They argue that we should maximize female single motherhood and reduce the stigma attached. In the coming years I imagine this will be a popular talking point.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
The reason to hide the real cause of death would be: to not alarm the public; to not accelerate a hot war with China; and lastly, to not make your own priceless talent fearful of working on government projects
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
is the recent spate of deaths among American and Chinese scientists the beginning of a -hot- warm war with China?
From Newsweek: Chinese Scientists Have Been Dying Mysterious Deaths Too
The star of China's booming artificial intelligence defense sector had been working on Taiwan invasion scenarios—until he died in an unexplained car crash in the early hours of the morning in Beijing, aged just 38.
Many questions remain over the July 1, 2023 death of Feng Yanghe, a professor at the National University of Defense Technology, who had won national competitions with his pioneering "War Skull" platform. Such as, why did an obituary in the state-run science news website, Sciencenet .cn, say he was "sacrificed"? Why was the brilliant scientist from Gansu province buried in a special cemetery in Beijing for the Communist Party elite, state heroes, and revolutionary martyrs?
The phenomenon mirrors the wave of disappearances or deaths among American scientists that is now being investigated by Washington. In the U.S, there have been 11 cases, in China at least nine. It's prompted a disturbing question among some military analysts: Is there a silent "scientist war" going on?
”Feng was a mastermind behind AI simulations of potential Taiwan scenarios and it's very odd that the accident happened in the middle of the night," said an experienced researcher of the Chinese military who works at a Western think tank and who has been monitoring the situation.
The author is a senior reporter for Newsweek, with publications in the NYT and some other major publications. She is also a former senior fellow in the Asia Program at the German Council on Foreign Relations and a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Not a crackpot contributor as might be expected from the insane premise! She seems to have connections within the Chinese circle of influence.
If there’s really a tit for tat of targetting each other’s scientists, then I think our immigration policy will prove to be a grave mistake. There are 265,000 Chinese students in America, and probably hundreds of thousands of Chinese who own or work in the huge nationwide Chinese restaurant industry. The CCP would be able to place agents around America with complete ease. America would have a difficult time doing the same. We saw recently in Iran how effective it is to place drones around an enemy country, and Iranians were so afraid of threats from their immigrant community that they deported 1.5 million Afghans.
This theory would explain why America has had disappearances and not just deaths:
Also missing is William Neil McCasland, a retired Air Force major general, who hasn’t been seen since he walked out of his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home on February 27, leaving behind his phone, prescription glasses and wearable devices […] McCasland was at the center of some of the Pentagon’s most advanced aerospace research and once commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Months after the 68-year-old went missing, officials still can’t say where he went, why he left or whether someone else was involved.
The above sounds to me like a VIP being escorted to a safe area where he can’t possibly be targeted, hence the leaving behind of electronics.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
IMO, (2) is not really going to move the needle wrt birth rates / relationship rates. The sociological finding that women prefer a higher status male is robust. Whether the man is unemployed or whether the man is doing drywall is not going to make much of a difference. (And yeah, being very beautiful or very charismatic will negate the negative occupational status effect, but if we want to fix an entire national trend, we have to think realistically about the statistically normal case). And the finding is really about status and not work per se. In every city there are deadbeat arts types or popular social media figures who make no money but have their choice over women in finance. That’s because their status is higher. Or in Haredi culture, women are expected to work and men are expected to study all day, but the men have innately higher status than the women + studying is high status, so women don’t mind it. This is not so in American culture. Women believe they are higher status than men as a default, and many of them believe that typically-male beliefs are low status (ie conservatism). The easiest fix to this is literally just to prevent them from working in high status occupations. That’s easy in the “fix everything button” sense, but difficult in the “and who will bell the cat” sense.
The theory that “they began funding the only Shia they could find near Israel” because of “antisemitism” is falsified by the fact that they only began funding proto-Hezbollah mere days after Israel invaded Lebanon. The antisemitism theory would make sense if they funded the Shia from 1969 to pre-war, but that isn’t so. Their funding was in direct response to an Israeli invasion which was supported by America.
The theory that Iranians chose to antagonize America, rather than vice versa, ignores that America orchestrated the Shah, which is a pretty big deal, and then that America supported Iraq’s mass use of chemical weapon against Iran (200k casualties iirc), despite Iran’s protest to the international community. Again a pretty big deal. It also ignores the 2003 "Grand Bargain" proposal where Iran sought better relations with America and were willing to offer —
Bush declined this offer, probably because the Neo-Cons, most of whom at the time Jewish Zionists, wanted America to eventually invade Iran.
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