popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Watering holes with similar discussion norms: DataSecretsLox, /r/theschism (slowly dying)
Blogs: I interpret 'similar to here' as trying to understand the cultural moment at least one layer of abstraction deeper than Current Thing, and making observations besides the most obvious talking points from their political perspective. AstralCodexTen (obviously), PSmith's bookshelf, Ecosophia, Scholar's Stage, EXIT podcast, Richard Hanania's Newsletter.
The tricky thing about WW2 is that, from a reactionary perspective, all three sides of the showdown were bad — communism, fascism, and new deal democracy all represented a flavor of progressive managerialism attempting to mobilize and rationalize their citizenry in a grand unconstrained-vision project. Of the three, democracies may well be the least bad. However, from a narrowly American or British perspective, our corners of the globe might perhaps be nicer had we not gotten involved, and the fascists won a grueling victory in Eastern Europe that completely exhausted them. (Keep in mind I don't countenance the possibility the Axis could have conquered the world afterward; if you do, this perspective may seem alien.)
The Greater American Empire created in the wake of the Allied victory destroyed the sovereignty of its member states, then birthed a technocratic antiracist transnational ideology that is, as we goof around on the motte, desperately trying to flatten the world and reshape all nations in its image. I think this was inevitable in the same way that, once complex multicellular organisms formed, it was inevitable that individual cells would lose autonomy and act according to a nervous system's command. This is the version of "bad" reactionaries live with.
Naïve moderns with a reactionary bent perceive that the winners of WW2 created the regime they live under. Thus, there is a natural tendency to contort oneself into seeing the other side of that conflict as a great lost cause, and to project one's values onto it.
If competition holds no appeal to you, we're too far apart in natural inclination for me to offer anything of use.
Males typically enjoy competition provided they have some chance of winning. I've never met a male who continues to enjoy a competitive activity in which they consistently lose. (For footraces this means near last-place finishes.)
To find meaning it's important to find a competition within an arm's length of your competency. See: eudaimonia, or flow state.
So let's concede that your faith is not Catholic, Orthodox, or Lutheran-adjacent but a personal interpretation of faith that allows unbaptized Hindu children into heaven. You probably have a lot of theology to do, but put that aside.
The common Christian response to the problem of pain is a wonderful meme attached below. Suffering is God's chisel to sculpt us. (It is a great meme.)
Can you think of a type or manner of suffering that would falsify this hypothesis? That is to say, a Job-like situation of suffering so meaningless that it could not be didactic? And that if you found it to exist, your current paradigm would have to update? If you can't think of one, what does that rationally mean?
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Since we're on the topic of peer pressure against small rules violations
Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not in the thrall of your particular sect?
Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not
in the thrallof your particular sect?There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece your credulous butt would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead.
There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece
your credulous buttyou would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead.
The only difference between these two sentence pairs is the insertion of scorn. Would it be so bad to tone this down please? If you're modded you might feel vindicated for proving The Motte is too soft for ingroup criticism, well done, but if so this will be the reason. While your instinct now is probably to go hunting for examples of scornful language elsewhere on the Motte, you're delivering scorn here in distilled juice concentrate.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
@bfslndr @curious_straight_ca Guys I figured it out, it's the old reddit link conversion. Just copy+paste 'reddit.com/r/196/s/Qimfce7wOf' into your URL bar.
As for the link, one of my favorite genres of internet content is "Smart autists derive social rules even social butterflies don't know except on an instinctual level". Yes, friend groups are status alliances, and you endanger your own position by trying to bring a low value add into the mix. Never read Diary of a Wimpy Kid though, can't say whether the character descriptions are accurate.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all".
Isn't there an entire strain of christian analysis of history that chalks the rising of the roman state and later the expansion of the european powers as this?
Yes, but there were definitely people left behind in the last chopper out of 'Nam, so to speak. Christians posit an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity; thus, even small edge case exceptions are highly damaging to this claim. Why did God not do 100 AD Malaysians the favor he did for Saul on the road to Damascus? Or even just send a missionary or two?
Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.
You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.
Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.
A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.
Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.
High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.
More likely is at least another century or two continuing the current trend of slow, grinding defeat, combined with slow decay increasingly held at bay by the consumption of the civilizational "seed-corn" that would be essential to rebuilding.
The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed. A good analogy to watch is South Africa, which got a late start on multicultural technocracy but then speedran tribal spoils and the competency crisis well ahead of us. The analogy isn't perfect (and leans more heavily into ethnic conflict than I think a fair assessment of our predicament would), but by SA's timeline the USA and Europe aren't even close to a breaking point. But this does assume a closed system.
If you want to be more optimistic, you can imagine the situation is more like 1848, where the geopolitical order everywhere is being propped up by a few Metternichs, and if they lose power, all the creaky structures in the periphery will collapse all at once. Once the hegemony of one ideology falls, we enter a Warring States-like period and some pragmatic, ruthless Qin(s) (or Prussia if we hold to the analogy) will sweep up all the statelets running insane inefficient systems.
Of course, this Qin/Prussia probably won't be running a system you like. Just not our current one.
Did something about this discussion make you like Merry from LOTR less? That's a steep handle downgrade.
Or in the armor of Divine Command Theory, or in the armor of your understanding of salvation.
Let me quote C.S. Lewis:
"When Christianity says that God loves man it means that God LOVES man: not that He has some 'disinterested'; because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory, not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring"
I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all". If someone offers me a version of Christianity that doesn't talk about God in terms of this extreme love, then I will address that religion and their theodicies in another way.
It all goes back to the universities. All methods of recruiting skilled workers except credentialism were made de facto illegal in the 60s, and then the left took over the institution that issues credentials.
Texas can have their own state run teacher's training programs separate from the research universities. They probably do. Nearby states do, along with alternative licensure that doesn't require a teaching degree. Community colleges aren't even all that leftist for the most part, just kind of pragmatic.
I contend that if Texas made serious strides towards a parallel credentialing infrastructure, it would come under attack by selective enforcement of disparate impact — disparate impacts in the existing mainstream universities notwithstanding. If it didn't succumb to entryists first. Outright conservative credentialers for knowledge jobs are tolerated so long as they remain in the JV league (eg Liberty University).
We respect each others' beliefs regarding the supernatural (including the beliefs "It exists" and "It doesn't exist"), even when we know Our Beliefs are Objectively Correct and Their Beliefs are Objectively Wrong, because when we don't, Bad Things tend to happen.
Who is "we"? This is a thread about Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism, which is hard to talk about because no one agrees what it means, is hardly guaranteed to impinge on Westphalian tolerance. The Peace of Westphalia enshrined cuius regio, eius religio (in other words, a state religion) but prohibited ius reformandi (the ability of the state to regulate religious observance).
In other words, the principle of Westphalian tolerance is fine with the state being overtly pastafarian and funneling tax dollars to pastafarian temples; it just can't punish people for converting to baptism, building baptist churches, or saying the church of the flying spaghetti monster is hogwash in their capacity as private citizens.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
But a supremely benevolent being would give all his creations at least of a chance of accepting grace. This is a chink in the armor of the theodicy, because Christians' omnipotent benevolent God did not lift a finger to give 100s AD Malaysians even a shot at accepting grace — they could not have heard Christ's ministry. Nor, indeed, does God give us moderns the benefit he was willing to extend to 20s AD Near Easterners, who saw tangible miracles to guide them to God's kingdom.
This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. [...] But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.
Examples? I've written and seen written posts that treat Christian beliefs with the same rough treatment as "I think [X] are just delusional, and [Y] are just confused and mentally ill", and none of them ran afoul of the mods. This thread has some examples of posters (including me) saying in passing that 'yup, the factual claims of the bible are unsupported and faintly ridiculous on their face, and I think bible-thumpers are just [insert euphemism for confused simpleton'].
I can say from 30 years of living here with a fair amount of certainty that, regardless of tribal sympathies, the entire Northeast US would need to be pacified as that region would never consent to permanent rule by "the worthless hick scum" south of the Mason Dixson.
You're describing the attitude of southerners towards yankees before reconstruction. One amusing thread in Colin Woodward's American Nations was the apparent universal revulsion of each USA regional culture toward the northeast puritan-descendants; everyone hated the yankees, everyone wanted to avoid being ruled by them. It's a powerful demonstration of how total conviction in one's cause beats virtually any other advantage: economic, strategic, or diplomatic. The Christians in the late classical period are another.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
An NSA analyst who was in debt sold the secrets of this multi-billion dollar program to the Soviets for a $5000 payment. (The analyst received a total of $35k for other secrets as well.) The analyst wasn't even recruited by the Soviets, he sought them out because he was in debt.
"Pelton was tried and convicted of espionage in 1986 and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences plus ten years. He was also fined $100." Real life continues to beat comedy skits.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
It all goes back to the universities. All methods of recruiting skilled workers except credentialism were made de facto illegal in the 60s, and then the left took over the institution that issues credentials. What more do they need? Personnel will always be in their favor. Everything in American history since has been an endgame where checkmate is guaranteed for the right unless the left bungles its moves, allowing a stalemate; in other words, an ending where both sides lose.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I'm surprised at this reponse, register me as thinking "lurch" is a neutral word for "unexpected change in direction/acceleration".
So others have written the obvious reactions to this poll (including pointing out that the stats are massaged). But to go a bit lateral: a common take I hear from the dissident right is that the West declined into tyranny as the franchise expanded. I often see tweet threads from @KulakRevolt implying that the cause of modern ills is that people without a fixed interest in the system started getting a say in its regulation. In other words, they side with the Grandees in the Putney Debates.
What the hell happened to European civilization? Getting rid of Aristocracy was a fatal mistake. Whether its democracy or communism the landless have no business in the governance of the land. (link)
This idea sounds plausible on its own, but it co-exists in the DR with a ravenous hatred of "elites" and "globalists". How does that make any sense? For all its faults, this poll does expose a fundamental truth: ideas like racial/gender quotas and open borders are coming from the top of society, the "aristocrats", not the middle. If you were to limit the franchise to the modern equivalent of the Second Estate, a far-left social and economic planning program would be implemented by Thursday.
Many of us would strongly prefer Rat Park be true. The moment I heard that explanation I adopted it as my default view of addiction — the idea is too good to check. And it's one of those rare too-goods-to-check that transcends political faction. Are you a bleeding heart progressive? Rat Park morally pardons the downtrodden. A small government libertarian? Rat Park makes drug repression and imprisoning people for bodily choices unnecessary and barbaric. A political extremist of any variety? Rat Park condemns our current society as dystopic and in need of correction.
Sadly, it seems I (Party B) must admit that true bodily autonomy does actually create a class of useless junkies, who must either be supported or left to die in the street. It's a hard pill to swallow.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. This is the perfect novel to reread. Short, not an ounce of fat, and I have a different interpretation every time. Haunting of Hill House casts a longer shadow culturally, but horror stories where the supernatural embodies secret trauma have been done to death since — heck, even in video game writing.
Castle's story of already isolated, broken people drawing into greater isolation and delusion when on the brink of opening up is really special. I've seen the novel described as a class commentary or a reflection on mental illness, but I think the act of stating an interpretation reduces it. Also, boy could Jackson spin a sentence together.
Not that anyone is obligated to play along, but I'm not getting many answers to my question. There's lots of "no, women don't do that" and lots of "preach, king!" but the question stands. How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
To be honest, I took the question as rhetorical garnish to the meat of dunking on groups of people and ideas you disapprove of.
The run-of-the-mill progressive does not consider striving and can-do attitudes an important part of success, but an ex post facto justification of privilege, so they wouldn't see your concerns as a problem. 'We don't need to convince Blacks to try hard, Blacks are already trying just as hard as anyone; we just need to dismantle the systems of oppression to unleash their human capital' would be their framing.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I think by now a lot of people have understood that there's no point to debate.
At the very top of the CWR, for as long as I can remember, it says 'Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds.' The goal is mostly to clarify one's thoughts.
@ThisIsSin's problem seems to be in this line — his ideas aren't being challenged and refined, not that he's frustrated talking past people or whatever.
We're even getting Carl Schmitt Friend/Enemy distinction videos for boomers now. So there's not much of a point talking about any of it.
And yet, as far as I can tell, the NRx ideas are filtering down into the commons because they spread in the realm of internet debate. So clearly debate has some useful function, assuming NRx ideas are actually useful.
An internal locus of control gives you better outcomes, regardless of how valid a particular complaint is. Even if it is insanity, it's a useful insanity.
How positive can we be about the correlation/causation here? For reasons described elsewhere in this thread, people who succeed attribute it to their own agency, while people who fail blame circumstances. The cross-sectional cohort studies I see with a quick search don't impress me with their rigor in dismissing that explanation of LoC/outcome correlations. They seem to assume that if a 4th grader has internal LoC and experiences better outcomes later, then internal LoC was the cause; as opposed to that 4th grader having developed an internal LoC by age 10 due to having more friends, a likeable personality, having demonstrated demonstrated competency in the past, etc. The studies might include a line about controlling for IQ, but that's about it.
I dislike psychology as a field and this always sounded like one of those "just so" stories, to my biased ears.
I wouldn't provide value to the group, nor do I think the group would provide value to me (I'm not much of a cancel target). If one of these two variables changed I'd consider giving it a shot.
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