popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?
Some thoughts.
Over the past year, I've trained my brain to be Christian after two decades of hard materialism since age 14 or so. Miracles didn't play a role. Rather, I decided there was at least a plausible chance personal theism was true — this came from meditating on why I'm not a p-zombie, and why I have powerful aesthetic preferences which seem unmoored from selection pressures. Suspending my materialist assumptions, with great effort, I moved through life with the constant idea that (a) something was actively providing my existence, and (b) it was actively observing me.
Have I brainwashed myself? Possibly. But it feels increasingly obvious that that something is there, and it has been speaking to me for a long time.
After this 'religious revival' came the task of seeking the most plausible source of divine revelation. IMO the evidence for the legitimizing claim of Christianity is an order of magnitude above any other candidate, and its actual theology (try Mere Christianity and Problem of Pain by CS Lewis) matches what "something" was steering me towards as an atheist.
Perhaps these online anons larping "Christ is king" and parents pursuing churches for their kids will brainwash themselves to real religion, too.
But we want to find a sect of Christianity that isn't pussies. We don't want a sect of Christianity that will start inviting drag queens to teach Sunday school because they don't want anyone to feel bad, or they feel like they need to appeal to "modern audiences".
I had good luck with my local Catholic parish. From what I can tell, female ordination, accepting divorce, and gay marriage initiates the pozzing death spiral in any Christian denomination, so watch out for those. Or perhaps it's that only pozzed churches can reconcile those with the scriptural evidence.
Baptist upbringing, which seemed to revolve around what a piece of shit they were and that every single thought they have will send them to hell.
Unregulated thoughts do indeed lead to hell. "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Hateful, lustful, or prideful thoughts reinforce themselves in a vicious cycle towards a mind consumed by hate, lust, and/or pride — this is the death of the psuche (psyche, 'soul-life') against which God mercifully cuts short bios life to prevent a descent into infinite depravity.
Yes, it is a hard teaching, and not one for four-year-olds. No, you will not find a "non pussy" church that doesn't take the wide gate leading to hell extremely seriously.
Electoral college - 80% Trump
Popular vote - Cointoss
Polls show a close race, but pollsters underestimated Trump support in both 2016 and 2020, when he was supposed to lose soundly. (In October 2020, poll aggregators were showing him down by 10 points nationally.) I see a lot of people arguing "surely they've adjusted now", but if anything, my impression is the media has been trying to hyperstition a Kamala victory, and I wouldn't put it past polling organizations to be part of that attempt. Reports of a close race encourage turnout from an otherwise divided and demoralized Democratic base. The timing of the sudden Kamala swing in polls feels artificial.
Riots/violent coup attempts - 10%
For either party. The level of passion from Democrats is lower, and the sort of Republicans who would consider staging a January 6th again will, I think, have been spooked by the DOJ's level of political repression in the last four years.
Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results? Which side do you think will struggle more if they lose?
Neither side will contest the election. Republicans will bark about illegal votes if they lose, but not bite. Meanwhile, Democrats will kvetch about the electoral college if they lose despite a popular vote victory, but otherwise stand down.
MAGA Republicans will be devastated if they lose this one, woke Democrats merely irritated.
popocatepetl
15d ago
But reincarnation (not to speak of magic) should be a big proof that there is more to the world than material shit. Fang Yuan should have rather perfected his soul.
Yes. I do wonder whether there's hidden message here under the Daoist-flavored nihilism.
By analogy: there's throwaway worldbuilding in another cultivation webnovel, Zenith of Sorcery, that there are six afterlife planes you can be sent to after death. The character of the plane correspond to the choices you made in life: you can be send to a noblebright valhalla-type world of heroism and adventure, or a wireheaded-type plane of hedonistic pleasure, etc. Interestingly, the dead souls of each world think they've been sent to heaven. The "worst" is Red Prison, which is a constant state of warfare and struggle for power. My headcanon is that Fang Yuan got send to Red Prison.
popocatepetl
15d ago
Good writeup. While I enjoyed reading 600-ish chapters of RI, it suffers the webnovel problem of just being too long. The thematic juice has been mostly squeezed by the end of the first arc. With the revelation that the "righteous" "family" Gu Yue clan was actually
I put RI in the same category as Worm or Wheel of Time: I admire it, I'm glad to have read it, and while 'low status', it's a rare modern novel that speak to the reader, eternal themes, and the times at different levels. But it desperately needs to be about 30% its wordcount.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
Is it an AI video? If so, it's the best I've seen (well, subject to the 'how do you know elephants are good at hiding in trees?' problem). I can't find a single off frame or weird verbal cadence.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
"woe to him who has the full backing of the board—he is a dead man walking.”
It's the same with starting quarterbacks. By the time a head coach has to answer questions about benching them, it's over.
Just a reminder that Tucker Carlson is a proven liar and despised trump during his presidency.
Yes, this is what Reddit said about that. But I don't recall any Tucker segments from around then where he lavishly praised Trump? I consider Trump a narcissist and mostly a fool, and I thought his presidential term was horribly ineffective. Nevertheless, I agreed with Tucker segments at the time. I understand that many progressives learn third-hand that Tucker Carlson Tonight was the "Praise God-Emperor Trump Show", but was there actual lying here or just a clickbait insinuation of it?
popocatepetl
6mo ago
This is yet another condemnation of GDP as a metric for prosperity, then. Whatever the numbers say, starvation was dramatically less common in the New World colonies than the old world. If an economist wants to quote numbers to me, that tells you what an economist is worth.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
It's also a fascinating little read on medieval daily life. The inquisition flipped over everyone's mattresses, so you get a lot of the seedy details on what (at least one) 13th century community was 'really like'.
I wonder if the priest sleeping with half the village's women and girls was typical, or if that was due to him being a weird gnostic heretic.
popocatepetl
15d ago
The other problem is that the wordcount of these stories doesn't only come from bloated prose; it comes from the design of the story itself. In Wheel of Time, for example, Robert Jordan should have simply axed the Faile Shaido arc and the Andoran Succession arc, which would take a hundred pages to tell even were he writing efficiently.
Even putting aside the limitations of LLMs, re-writing this kind of flaw in a novel is like adjusting the amount of flour and yeast in a cake that's already been baked.
This is the problem a lot of ethnonationalist philosophy suffers from, it starts from the assumption that ethnos is primary.
People are still thinking on 1789-1945 terms. Ethnonationalism (really, it should just be 'nationalism') thrived then because the military meta made loyal mass armies the backbone of a good army. The only other period in history quite like it, as far as I know, was the infantry meta of the Warring States period 475 – 221 BC, and if you look at the institutions of Qin, the winner of that conflict, they sound exactly like something out of 19th century Prussia.
Absent this, empires frequently bring in outsiders to help them rule even their core provinces. The Mamluks had their Circassian slaves, the Turks their Balkan janissaries, the Roman emperors their freemen and barbarian-staffed administrations.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture.
If we're entering this politically impossible situation where @ArjinFerman gets these powers, it's fairly easy. Does he want to reverse the sexual revolution, as a random example? Illegalize over-the-counter contraceptives and abortion clinics. Mandate >90% male:female ratio in colleges and technical schools. Remove mandatory maternity leave and allow discrimination against female hires. End no fault divorce. Lower welfare benefits for single people (Edit: Perhaps this falls under 'economy', so nix this.) Done and dusted.
The CRA is a fairly modest law that radically reshaped American culture over time. With a literal culture czar, you could steer the country at least that effectively.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
or mildly competent bureaucrats in boring constituencies without major insanity. This last category is a GOOD category that the dems have, but theyre not gonna be winners.
Are you confident of this? I don't think Biden won in 2020 due to personal magnetism. At least until the boomers die, any politician that goes on the stage and says "I will be boring and keep the status quo, I'm not scary, no sirree" can siphon of votes from otherwise culturally conservative aging population — enough to win elections at least.
Even if boomers don't like guatemalans or transkids, the ones I know all have clay feet and spook at any politician seriously threatening to reshuffle the established order. They're winding out the clock on their comfortable retirements, after all. Consider that the democrats are still 40% likely to win according on betting markets, despite the last four years and their presenting an optically horrible candidate.
Wokeness — I refuse to use scarequotes as if it's not a real and easily definable ideology — took over all the real institutions of power over the last 30 years, and in a sudden rush in 2020. Major companies without DEI goals, universities that don't act as seminaries for wokeness, and media and information sources that don't assume wokeness as a foundational premise are as rare as hen teeth.
2024 Republicans (who include several anti-woke ideologies under their tent) have seized the political organs. This is because public office is the only part of the American power structure that takes input from the dalit and shudra castes, or to some extent even the vaisyas.
Whether political power will translate to real institutional change is yet to be seen. I predict that unless Trump is willing to be a Red Caesar, that is, to step out of the bounds of his legal constitutional authority and dare anyone to stop him, it will not.
"Authoritarianism" isn't equivocal; the Democrats were just wrong.
Perhaps StoneToss demonstrates the difference a bit clearer.
A common meme in the western world is that a strong leader not bound by constitutional/bureaucratic restraints and low personal freedom go together. They share the same word: it is all 'authoritarianism'. Whereas it is clear to me that oppression of personal freedoms is a possible for every node within the Polybius cycle, and if anything democracy tends to more restrictions and a more ant-farm-like society.
I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender
External Gender: People perceived as "female" get treated differently
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female".
This is self-referential. "The meaning of female gender is treating a person like a female, and a person who is of female gender is one who wants to be treated like a female."
popocatepetl
11mo ago
the main appeal is texture
This is the key. In some East Asian cuisine, while the flavor matters it's just one dimension. (Interesting substack. TW descriptions of disgusting food.)
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Wild take: Right-wingers don't dislike Kamala.
Not wild. I'm as opposed to DEI and representationalism as anyone. Here's (what I'll try to make) an unvarnished report of my feelings.
I feel no animosity towards her. From the catbird seat, she will doubtless say things to make me dislike her in the future. But for now, I see her as a minority actress who was chosen to play the wife of an rich white guy in an insurance ad, except instead of playing wife she was playing vice president, and the rich white guy wasn't her husband but Joe Biden.
My animosity is for the people who put her there, both on the supply and demand end. That animosity is fairly strong, more or less whenever I see a BIPOC/gender-nonconforming minority in a leadership position now.
If you have to ask, you fundamentally do not understand Christianity. [...] You appear to be using a model where forgiveness is for lesser sins, but too much sin means that this forgiveness is overwhelmed. In the first place, there are no lesser or greater sins
Also, from @SubstantialFrivolity: The girl who bangs 1000 dudes in one day is no worse, in God's eyes, than the sweet old grandma who snapped at her grandson in a moment of frustration.
It's hard to say uniformly "what Christians believe" about sin and hell because of denominational drift. The Catholic church certainly teaches different levels of eternal punishment exist for different degrees of unrepented sin. (And, correspondingly, different levels of virtue in life grant different amounts of glory in heaven.)
So yes, it's a mess. Even the most agreed-upon doctrines, such as that any sinner can repent and be saved; find dissent in at least a few churches, such as Calvinists with their TULIP.
(While I'm here, another denominational difference: a Catholic would say that Lily Philips loses eternal punishment for sleeping with 100 men by repenting, but the damage to her soul still requires purification, which can be accomplished in this life or after death. Eastern Orthodox Christians have a similar idea, but they have 'purification after death' rather than purgatory, and it varies in the particulars.)
popocatepetl
11mo ago
I'm curious if anyone has any other opinions.
It's nonsense. The LLM did a good job identifying the concepts and vocabulary people use when trying to say something profound about reality, whether or not they have anything substantive to say. (Which it doesn't.)
popocatepetl
11mo ago
What were the actual sharings-in-bad-faith or misrepresentations that he was worried about?
He never offered any explanation to my best research. About a year ago he updated the first essay with "I beg you to read anything else I've written other than this piece. I beg you", followed by deletion in December.
popocatepetl
10mo ago
So are you saying all subjective categories are self-referential? "Republicans are people who vote for other Republicans" and such?
That is a volitional category, not a subjective category. With volitional categories you can give the appearance of circularity with statements like "Christians are those who believe in Christianity" or "Military families are families where a father/mother has enlisted in the military." This superficial circularity is resolved by defining the second term. "Christians are those who believe Jesus of Nazarath (0-33 AD) was the son of God and his teachings result in eternal life for those who follow them." "Military families are families where a father/mother receives a salary from the government to train in the use of weapons and fight in the event of war."
This cannot be done with "A female is someone who wants to be treated as a female". Even if female is understood to be volitional, the second term goes undefined.
I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex?
With the exception of grammar? No. If gender is not sex, it is incumbent on gender theorists to provide a non-circular definition.
"External gender" is your term for "gender roles", which can be defined as the manners and expectations society has for the male/female biological sex. If you want to say "gender roles should be abolished", you have a coherent position. But trans advocates do not (usually) want this; they want the gender roles to remain even as they deny female/male (the real, definable concepts) as meaningful categories.
Honestly, I was nonplussed at how convinced The Motte was about a Kamala victory in the predictions subthread. Most picked Harris, and even those who picked Trump expressed less confidence than the prediction markets, which were about 65% Trump at the time.
My guess? I don't think you guys are susceptible to propaganda so much as addicted to the black pill. This is a very dour message board. So I agree with the second half of your post more than the headline.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Are those Archive links he links to in his Substack faithful to his original postings?
Unless he's in cahoots with archive.org, they must be. And the content doesn't seem different from what I remember.
I guess he should be applauded for giving a link, at least, even if he refuses to put the arguments under his own name for some reason.
The American elites don't have to deal with the problems of a black underclass. On the other side in the ledger, empires as far back as the Babylonians realized that ethnically divided provinces were easier to rule.
More options
Context Copy link