urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
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User ID: 226
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
1d ago
My girlfriend is actually the opposite -- raised by libertarians who rage about government corruption, she can't bear to be in favor of the consensus. She watches documentaries about government scandals, and has her own theories on historical scandals, like "Bush did JFK." She can't talk about politics without trying to dissect what's going on, and listens to political podcasts. Frankly I think it'd be devastating to her if I had normal opinions. I start railing against the government and she gives me puppy dog eyes.
That being said, she's more "normal" than this description makes her seem. If you met her, you'd probably think of her as just another politically disengaged young woman in jeans and a floral blouse. She says her coworkers watch their language around her, because "she's so sweet and pure"... oh, if they knew...
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
1d ago
My wife is the picture of ostensible progressivism, and it certainly causes tension, but it's not fatal. I always thought the red-pill message was that politics aren't usually dealbreakers even if they're stated to be - you can simply change the subject, agree and amplify, or simply be a compelling enough package that she'll find ways to make it work from her end.
My girlfriend is more progressive than me, but not by too much -- except for her feelings on Trump, she's a lot more like the average Republican than the average Democrat. She sends me random texts about immigration and gender transition.
But she was a lot more progressive when I met her: what happened is we got together, started talking about things, and respected each other enough that we started moving towards each other. I became more opposed to COVID restrictions, she became more opposed to immigration, I became more sympathetic to abortion moderates, she became more sympathetic to evangelicals. I guess at this point she respects me enough that I can make an argument for just about anything and she'll either start nodding her head and say it makes sense or she'll say something like "I don't agree but I see where you're coming from, I see how your views come from a place of trying to do what's right for everyone," which is a wild thing to hear after you've argued against a central pillar of contemporary feminism.
So I don't get the dichotomy between "progressive woman who can only engage in two minutes hate while loving a somewhat-effeminate guy" or "tradwife who won't respect you if you aren't a blue collar strongman indifferent to physical pain." I guess I got lucky and met "mildly traditional woman from rural America who likes discussing ideas" and I consider myself to have gotten the best of both worlds.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
2d ago
Massachusetts hates guns, and wants people with guns to leave the state. The DA charged the person who used a gun. The point is that they believe only the person who used the gun committed a serious enough crime to charge.
After all, the other guy was just involved in a fiery but mostly peaceful protest.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
2d ago
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
2d ago
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
2d ago
Yes, the Unicode consortium has no place developing new forms of communication, its job is to categorize existing glyphs into the Unicode format.
They never should have acceded to adding new emojis that weren’t already in the Japanese emoji characterset they were integrating into Unicode. And Apple never should have made the emoji keyboard available on non-Japanese iPhones. It was just a big mistake all around. Emoticons should be native to the messaging platform.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
4d ago
I like to bring up the old MTV sex ed ads: sex is no accident
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
4d ago
I believe the people who feel the most strongly about abortion, both pro- and anti-, are women. I feel strongly about it, and even my feelings don't compare to the female pro-life activists.
And that's not surprising -- the sides in the abortion debate can be summarized as "get your hands off my uterus!" and "save the babies!" which both seem rather female-coded.
But also, any man who expresses a pro-life opinion gets shouted down by "you misogynistic rapist pig, get your hands off my uterus!" So pro-life women, who can't get shouted down like that (though they can get shouted down with "you've internalized misogyny"), are more vocal and willing to stand up for their values. It's the same with, for instance, opposition to casual sex -- a man does that, he gets labeled an incel, a woman does that, she doesn't get hated as much.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
4d ago
Oh, ok. I don’t really use Twitter so nowadays I just get linked to a single tweet outside of any thread. So I just try thought he said, “you morons are just trying to dredge up your old arguments,” or however that last tweet put it, and that seemed rather passive-aggressive.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
4d ago
I’m not completely sure I’m looking at the same tweet, but that… wasn’t really a response.
The point of praying to Him is to build a relationship with Him. When we encounter suffering, we ask for his help, and when we encounter joy, we thank him for it.
Further, when you look at the teachings of Christian spiritual teachers, the point is very often that you shoudn’t be praying for random things you want, you should be praying for God to do what he wants. The Lord’s Prayer has no place for the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl; instead it says, “thy will be done.” I would argue that any prayer that goes “God give me this thing I want,” is a bad and spiritually dangerous prayer.
Instead you should be praying for strength, or peace, or any of the mental and spiritual gifts that can help you deal with whatever’s going to happen. The point of Christianity is not material success but spiritual growth. That’s why prosperity theology is such a dangerous heresy.
Also, I believe in a vision of Christianity where suffering is itself almost a positive good, because it creates closeness to Christ the suffering servant, and I believe the world was created in order that we could suffer with him. Or, at least, so that our slate of experiences and God’s slate of experiences could be the same — God’s passability and ours is the point of the world. So I find the classical answers to the problem of evil unsatisfying, though I understand their point.
I know that sounds nuts to non-Christians, but I don’t have a high view of folk Christianity and I think it very often misses the mark.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
4d ago
I recall a poster a while back talking about how non-Anglophone Western Europe has much lower rates of mental illness and higher life satisfaction among women, despite being even more sexual-revolution-y than the Anglosphere. I believe the sexual revolution is wrong, but not because it inherently makes women unhappy.
I think the far right has something to say about women’s unhappiness, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the sexual revolution.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
5d ago
No big gaffes, no notable zingers, no impressive new declarations
The Haitians eating dogs thing was a gaffe, I haven't heard anyone even propose that dogs were being eaten. He didn't have to bring that up, it's so up in the air. There's plenty he could say about immigration without basing it off strange rumors.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
5d ago
I had to tune out at the first commercial break, I can't stand any more of these two.
It's pretty clear Trump's lost this one, he made so many simple errors that he could have avoided by simply staying on message.
Outside of the highly online left and right, people generally think of Marxism as some boring thing from decades ago, not as an important issue.
Nah, the grass-touching right talks about Marxism too. Maybe not 20-30 year old rightists, but 20-30 year olds won't win the election for Trump.
This guy has always sucked at debates other than when he got to go up against Biden a few months ago
He swept the floor with the Republican field in 2016, and made Hillary Clinton look high-strung and out of touch. His debates against Biden in 2020 could have gone either way. He just seems tired and angry now -- Harris is making him look out of touch. There are so many good attacks he could be making, but he's rambling about other things instead of making his hits.
My thing with Trump debates is they always feel like watching a trainwreck when they're happening, but then when I go back to them I like them better. He does just have a thing for unforced errors, and it's hard for me to root for him during a debate.
I don't really like either candidate's performance in this debate, I'd probably like it more if they started just punching each other. There's nothing substantial going on here, no one has anything to gain from this, and everything to lose.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
5d ago
Yeah, that one was well planned. I knew when she said that that he was going to take the bait.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
5d ago
Doling Park? Close Memorial Park? Your second link goes to the Springfield in Missouri, not Ohio.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
5d ago
This is my response to most conflicts. There is very rarely an interpersonal conflict where all parties involved act perfectly, or even with complete good faith. The cases where someone's clearly wrong, and someone's clearly right, don't make it to the public consciousness -- they don't have enough toxoplasma.
Everyone wants to think in black and white and see a victim and a perpetrator. There are certainly crimes like that, crimes of random targeting and heinous violence. But my view is that we live in a world of victimized perpetrators and perpetrating victims.
I have a little prayer I think of whenever I come across a conflict online, and find it hard to decide the truth of the situation:
I will what is good, and I do not will what is bad. If someone has done wrong, I will that they receive their recompense; if someone has been wronged, I will that they receive justice. If someone has been falsely accused of wrong, I will that the truth is known; if someone has falsely accused someone of wrong, I will that they recant. If someone is in sorrow, I will them to have joy; if someone has joy, I will that they have compassion on those who sorrow. If someone speaks falsehood, I will the pursuit of the truth; if someone speaks truth, I will that their words reach those who believe falsehood. In all places and all times, I will the good, and I do not will the bad.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
6d ago
Possibly because you believe he won't be able to accomplish anything for it anyway, but will tar the idea for the future by his association with it.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
6d ago
I agree that'd be interesting to find out. And I also think you might be right, and if you're looking for firsthand accounts from xenophobic Japanese... you're going to have to read Japanese.
A good starting point might be to look into the controversies surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine, which Hirohito and his successors have boycotted because it enshrined some Japanese leaders convicted of war crimes. Politicians who visit the shrine signal affiliation with more nationalistic and far-right elements in Japanese society -- for example, Abe, and Kishida (who asked Germany to take down its statue commemorating Korean comfort women). I'm no expert, but really what you want to look into is Nippon Kaigi, which has as its mission to "change the postwar national consciousness based on the Tokyo Tribunal's view of history as a fundamental problem"... i.e. to not apologize for historical atrocities. If they don't hold a great deal of anti-Americanism... safe to say nobody in Japanese leadership does.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
6d ago
The influence of Confucianism on Japanese society is so great that they are culturally closer to China than the USA on the global scale of things. Though I suppose it is common throughout history for national neighbors to be similar while hating each other
From the sacred texts:
So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.
What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerd points out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.
Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill.
In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.
Evaluate for example the love of white progressive they/thems for Palestinians, and their absolute seething hatred for Trump voters.
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
6d ago
I had a trampoline with a net as a kid, and never got a serious injury. I also kind of liked having the net, you could jump up high and grab on to it like Spider-Man.
(Kids will do anything to make their play unsafe.)
urquan
Blessed is the fall that made you gaze up to heaven
6d ago
He'll have three some zingers
“Blowjob Kamala? More like spit roast Kamala.”
(If you’ll excuse me, I need to wash my mouth out with soap.)
Yes, that’s the case.
Because of the virulence of vaccina, the virus used to inoculate against smallpox, smallpox vaccines are more dangerous than most other kinds of immunizations. For example, I have chronic eczema, and so it would be a very bad idea for me to be vaccinated against smallpox — there’s a risk of vaccina infecting the skin and causing a major infection.
And it should be noted that we’re seeing a dramatic increase in eczema… so if there were to be a monkeypox pandemic, there’s a huge chunk of the population that couldn’t be safely inoculated with the old smallpox vaccine.
2013-14 was the heydey of whatever that wave of feminism was. It's when Scott wrote his most hard-hitting anti-feminist posts, the ones he's been coasting on ever since. Feminism was the first movement of the Great Awokening, followed shortly by Black Lives Matter, and the legalization of same-sex marriage and resulting ascendant LGBT movement.
If I were going to write a book about wokeness, and were a conservative grifter, I'd call it "The Second Term of Obama." This sounds vaguely ominous and gestures subtly at "The Second Coming," appealing to the "Obama is the antichrist" people who presaged the "Trump is Hitler" people. But I really do think something very bad happened in Obama's second term, progressives lost hope after they elected a Black Man to the White House and the color of the building didn't change.
(Well, not permanently.)
I can't escape also the possibility that the civil service under Obama just poked the bear. Things like the Dear Colleague letter did a lot to institutionally support major planks of grassroots feminism. Obergefell came down in 2015. And then when Trayvon Martin died and Obama cried on national TV...
It was just an era where the left got very angry, and the right got even angrier. And what do you know, we got a very angry, very unappealing-to-feminists president after that, and everything skyrocketed from there.
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