popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
6mo ago
There are plenty of desperate 30 something single women in Catholic circles.
Single, and honest-to-God never married despite being Catholic all that time? Huh. I suppose I'll believe you, but it seems wild. My thoughts were that @Capital_Room's best bet would be to date a secular woman marrying late, then either convert or get special permission. But given he's not actually Catholic I suppose these concerns are moot.
You'll see the same thing here among the more predestination-leaning Roman Catholics (like those following Thomas Aquinas)
Predestination-leaning Roman Catholics are just "Roman Catholics". God perfectly foresees the free choices men make within time, and thus has perfect knowledge of who will be saved. This, in the Catholic view, does not infringe on the agency of the sinner in responding to/failing to respond to grace. Some people see this as a logical contradiction: "If God already knows I'll steal cream from the office fridge on Tuesday, how do I have a free choice?" But the teaching makes good sense to me, as God exists outside of time; an easier way to conceptualize it might be to imagine that we made choices at the beginning of time, but are now experiencing them linearly.
Which leads to the core difference:
For everyone, if they were to repent, would be saved. Not everyone will in fact repent, but only those whom God predestines.
Per Total Depravity and Irresistible Grace, the very choice to repent is motivated purely by God, and the choice not to repent is likewise compelled by God. Agency does not exist. The sinner who will not repent was never free to repent, and the elect who repents was never free not to repent. The universe is a clockwork contraption devised for a glorious divine drama.
If God designed it that way, Lily Philips could never not sleep with 100 men, nor repent for sleeping with 100 men. It was all a plan, scripted by God, for God's greater glory.
I do not see the calivinist view as inherently ridiculous (or even monstrous, as people often describe it), but it is a real difference from other denominations.
Now try finding that meaning when you're a 43-year-old unemployed man who's never managed to go on a date
Your purpose is to fix this. Are you sure there's nothing else you could be doing to improve your standing with regards to these problems? Truly nothing?
Gotta be frank. If he's going to be Catholic, he can't marry divorced women, or any non-Catholic (EDIT: you can get bishop permission), and the lower end of his strike zone is about 32 as of today. It may be joever for the married vocation.
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.
Are you able to expand on how you achieved that? Particularly how you got from suspending materialism to (a) and (b)?
Sure!
I didn't know the word at the time, but the technique is something Catholics call "active recollection". Periodically throughout the day, I would perform a kind of rapid partial body scan, thinking 'Where does this there-ness in my hand come from?' or similar. And then I would close my eyes and ignore everything external, and "push" my mind's watchfulness inward, looking for someone looking back.
According to a prayer manual I read later, this is one method of 'putting yourself in the presence of God', which is precondition to mental prayer. Unfortunately, according to prayer theory, God initiates contact and you merely respond, so I can't promise this technique will work for anyone reading this.
"As the soul being diffused throughout the whole body is present in all parts, so God penetrates our whole being and dwells in its every part, imparting to us life and movement. And as the soul resides nevertheless in the heart in a more special manner, so God is in a most particular manner in your heart, in the very centre of your spirit, which He vivifies and animates, being, as it were, the heart of your heart and the spirit of your spirit" (St. Francis de Sales)
I performed this mental ritual especially in the morning when waking up. The awareness, or perhaps the fear, of God continued for ten, twenty minutes, an hour afterward, and eventually started riding with me as a constant companion, like a depersonalized super-superego perched on my shoulder.
What does God feel like? It is changing as my prayer life develops, and it changes within prayer as I go deeper. God (the Father) feels like an ocean: he does not seemingly come to greet you, but you descend into Him, where it is cold and dark and you fear for your safety. And then there is what Christians call the holy spirit, which is like rain, and it washes you towards the ocean. Depending on what it wants from your prayer, it can fall on you as tears, reconciliation, and immense catharsis (this is what most people want from religion); other times it is intellectual, and ideas will arrive fully formed in your mind, accompanied with a "gentle breath" of overpowering peacefulness, often at odds with the content of its ideas. (A few months ago, the holy spirit pacifically informed me that heaven is somewhat like being tortured to death.)
Come to think of it, here's something else.
When I was age 12, I learned to masturbate. I started creating a "wall" around my mind. I would imagine a small point in the center of my mind and "push" everything out, to a 5 foot radius around me. I would put my force field up whenever I was doing the deed or having sexual thoughts. To anyone observing me, I would say they weren't allowed, they weren't allowed.
I forgot I even used to do this until a few months ago. The universe felt dead and my thoughts "alone" for twenty-odd years between then and now.
In retrospect, my early meditations were unconsciously about breaking "the wall", and allowing for things "beneath", "between", or at any rate very intimate with my thoughts. (Psalm 139 relevant: "If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, there you are.") Before, I had unconsciously felt there was some "private room" I could withdraw to and consider the world freely, from an spectator's remove. Ironically, I even assumed this when meta-contemplating my own thoughts and desires from a materialist perspective. Of course, whether one accepts the framework of materialism or theism, no such room can exist.
Yes, that would be entirely legal. (Though difficult to imagine in practice, because a large part of the GOP is still legacy republicans). What Vance suggested, though, was "when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
Why wouldn’t this work?
I do not believe TPTB will allow the populists to win through the normal methods. This is just a prior, not a position I have proof of, besides observing Lucy pull away the football on many occasions. If the above program were seriously approaching accomplishment through legal methods, the establishment would throw a coup of their own.
I agree that normies love stability. the problem is a bland democrat is the same is a bland republican.
Can the GOP front a bland republican? It seems to me the Democrats are fairly successful at channeling their radical wing's energy into bland-seeming manager politicians. By contrast, the MAGA wing will veto non-MAGA candidates, who in turn spook the normies; this is to my eyes what happened in 2022 with the red wave that never materialized.
The core difference is that, for all of BLM and antifa's blustering about the revolution, the American red tribe is a whole lot angrier about the state of politics. Psmith is only somewhat exaggerating here when he says 100% of the revolutionary energy in our own society is on the right today. Blue tribe meanwhile knows it's playing defense.
Just this week in the UK, the MAGA equivalent in Britain blew up 14 years of Conservative rule to vote for the radical populist Reform, allowing Labour to waltz into power with a laughable third of the vote. This is what I expect in the US if 2028 Republicans try to field a Nikki Haley or Mitt Romney-like.
Like Scott, he obfuscates a few specific descriptive beliefs about black people. Are you mad he doesn't provide a neat framed quote for the decentralized cancellation and lawfare apparatus to hone in on him?
The dissident right makes no bones about the fact it's distinct from the mainstream right and will list out the ways they differ. There is no "pay no attention to the party behind the curtain, I don't know what you're talking about, it's just called being a decent regular person" routine of the woke left. The fact they have a name for themselves should make the difference abundantly clear.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
Anyone here know anything about Catharism?
For a quickie, I enjoyed this blog, and thought it gave a good ELI5 view of what they believed vs. other spiritual traditions.
popocatepetl
8mo ago
Internet speak for "self-indulgent extreme pessimism".
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Though the lens of US politics: In recent days the Biden admin has been pushing hard for a Gaza ceasefire. (My interpretation sees this as part of the fresh burst to win the 2024 election now that Biden has withdrawn.) Does this keep Israel-Palestine a live issue through election day?
popocatepetl
11mo ago
By this standard Biden has couped too. The border and student loans would both be considered illegal actions.
As I understand it, Biden accomplished these by slithering through legal loopholes, not disobeying the courts. When the Supreme Court overturned student loan forgiveness, the Biden team did not say "Screw you, Clarence Thomas, let's see you stop us" and strike the ledgers anyway; they set lawyers to find every technicality on the books. Same with opening the borders.
Of course, I am not implying moral superiority on the Biden side. Merely that, as Scott wrote about populism vs. the deep state in Turkey:
"The populace can genuinely seize the reins of a democracy if it really wants. But if that happens, the government will be arrayed against every other institution in the nation. Elites naturally rise to the top of everything - media, academia, culture - so all of those institutions will hate the new government and be hated by it in turn. Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic"
Coups are necessary for anti-establishment side of a populist vs. establishment showdown. The establishment side can just let the systems run and get their way.
popocatepetl
19d 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
19d 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
Why are the first two things beyond the pale, but the second two aren’t?
There's no hard reason. Christian ethics are the water we swim in, so people don't bother to provide counterarguments for things that are clearly wrong in the Christian tradition.
- "Outright race-hatred" - Christ commissioned his disciples to baptize all nations and commanded love of other peoples on the sermon on the mount.
- "Theocracy" - Ambiguous evidence. There is some scriptural evidence for separation of church and state, but on the other hand, the civil power of Pilate comes from God, and theocracy was tolerated for a least 1500 years in Christendom.
- "Monarchy" - Literally the default system of government commended. 'Christ is king.'
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.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds
I would think that the plan would be to fire them based on lack of merit?
He's not saying to fire bad bureaucrats or incompetent DEI hires; he's saying to fire democrats.
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
19d 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.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.
So you'll need to signal flip the political content in the thought experiment to stuff you profoundly disagree with.
It's hard to think of content that arouses in the anti-woke right the sense of a priori absolute evil that Tate does to the feminist left. Maybe MAP advocacy? Children-targeted sissy hypno?
Sure, righties "hate" BreadTube, but it's not quite the same hate.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
'Authoritarianism' is equivocal. Sometimes it means a strong executive leader overruling the bureaucracy and consensus-making institutions to implement policy. (This sense usually comes from the blue tribe.) Other times it refers to a reduction in civil rights for private citizens. (This sense is used by everyone, but different sides disagree about which rights to complain about.)
A good example: 2020 Republicans decrying the 'authoritarianism' of government Covid policy, while 2020 Democrats were decrying the 'authoritarianism' of Trump trying to interfere with government agencies implementing Covid policy.
I don't understand this. We had this system for nearly two hundred years and nobody called it a coup when the old guy's people got cleaned out and the new guy's people got installed.
And then we passed civil service reform acts, which are still on the books. If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds, and then ignore the courts ordering you to reinstate them, you have made an illegal power grab and set the constitution aside. In my mind this can reasonably be called a coup.
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.
There aren't that many interesting regular season narratives this year. "Will Aaron Rodgers succeed with the Jets?" "The Bengals are a dumpster fire despite Joe Burrow." Most of the rest I can think of are playoff specifics. (eg "Can the Bills/Ravens stop choking?")
My gut says this a growing problem. With expanded playoffs, every high Q-rating quarterback will almost certainly get into the dance. This leaves the regular season feeling a bit like a formality.
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