urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
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urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2d ago
Ah, I see what you're saying now. Sure, his ideas should be judged on their own merits, regardless of what his conduct in his personal life is.
But to be clear, I don't find findom offensive because it's degenerate, I find it offensive because it's stupid -- there are much more efficient ways to pay people to get your rocks off, even if your thing is being humiliated. For instance, you could pay someone to actually have sex with you while telling you you're a loser.
It's an economic waste, is all. Like someone investing their fortune in beanie babies. I just couldn't look someone in the eyes or think them intelligent if I found out they did it.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2d ago
It's these people that suddenly decided that boosting leaked videos showing you're a paypig findom-enjoyer is a valid angle of attack on someone.
I mean, given how insane of a concept it is to pay a sex worker to aggressively not have sex with you, I do consider doing that to be a major red flag for someone's judgment even in non-political terms.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4d ago
Something is just off in the first world, and COVID and AI accelerated it. I don’t know what exactly died. But the US, in particular, seems to be dealing with the kind of crisis Western Europe did in the previous century, a loss of faith in all institutions and the massacre of all meta-narratives. Neither my progressive or even conservative friends care much about the Constitution or the framers or the civic religion any more. I don’t know anyone who’s optimistic about the future. I certainly know some people who have optimism about their own future, or who are making the best of their lives as they exist, but about the social fabric people feel… trapped, like we’re already six feet under and there’s no escaping it.
People want to put this at the feet of wokeness, or Trump, or communism, or atheism, but I don’t know what it is. Even those narratives seem snuffed out.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4d ago
Woah, that’s stunning. So we need puberty for brain development to reach its full potential?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4d ago
As such I tend to be skeptical of trans diagnosis simply from my experience of being diagnosed adhd — it took ten minutes and I didn’t even go in seeking a diagnosis.
Really? I thought it was very hard to get an ADHD diagnosis, especially as an adult.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6d ago
I don't think it's sour grapes; my understanding is that HereAndGone identifies as asexual. Asexual people, having known multiple as friends... don't often understand just how little they understand about how sexual attraction works. You can see that in how none of her criticism is actually about attractiveness -- she's judging their personal style and how they come across in a social-presentation manner, not whether they're hot or not.
But also people can be very critical, especially when evaluating people as romantic partners, and especially when doing so as an exercise instead of actually dealing with a real person. Men can be similarly critical of women, if you put them in the right context, or if they won't tell you about the labor dispute at Starbucks. This is a big reason why dating apps enable and drive some of our worst instincts -- people are caricatures and not people.
That being said, the turtleneck is a bit silly and the photos do look overly polished, but standing out by dressing slightly oddly and taking overly polished photos is basically what you have to do. If you're going to be a caricature of yourself, you might as well lean into it.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
12d ago
· Edited 12d ago
You didn't pick the topic -- but you did choose to engage it, and in a particular way. And I believe there is no such thing as "just a philosophy discussion" when we're speaking of God. Every word we say about him either reveals or conceals his love. "Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light."
You say that you're just "picking a fight over a specific word" -- but I think that word actually matters. I do affirm God's omnibenevolence. Not because I misunderstand divine simplicity or want to anthropomorphize God, but because the Christian tradition at its best has always taught that God is not just good by analogy, but that his very being is love -- and that love is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. God anthropomorphized himself, "in a plan of sheer goodness," out of love.
The god of the philosophers cannot be the Triune God, precisely because of the apophaticism that you're defending! The God who is unknowable, ineffable, utterly perfect, cannot be grasped in his essence by philosophical categories. And pure reason would never imagine a God who is communion, who is Father, Son, and Spirit in an eternal relation of love. The Trinity is not the culmination of metaphysical logic. It is a revealed mystery that overturns what unaided reason would expect from the Absolute.
When someone comes asking whether the God of Christianity is morally trustworthy, the absolute wrong response is to retreat into terms like "God wills the good according to nature," as if that settles it. That may be defensible in scholastic language, but it's interpersonally and evangelically devastating, and empties the Christian message of the relational content that is its essence.
I think the fundamental problem with your position is you've emptied the concept of "goodness" of its volitional, transcendent, and glorious attributes, as though "well-behaved" exhausts what it means to describe someone as "good." You're affirming the universal love of God and yet denying the fundamental omnibenevolence of God -- as though "benevolent" is not a wonderful and precise way to describe willing the good for all things according to their nature!
Look at how Merriam-Webster discusses the history of the term 'benevolent':
One who is benevolent genuinely wishes other people well, a meaning reflected clearly in the word's Latin roots: benevolent comes from bene, meaning "good," and velle, meaning "to wish." Other descendants of velle in English include volition, which refers to the power to make one's own choices or decisions, and voluntary.
In other words, to be "omnibenevolent" is "to voluntarily will the good for all things"... which is exactly what you just said about God!
If God is love, then we should be able to say he is good -- recognizably good. Good in a way that people can see, and praise for his goodness. Not just metaphysically perfect. Not just consistent with his own essence. But gracious, merciful, near to the brokenhearted, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. That's not a mistake of sentiment. That's the Psalms. That's the saints. That's the Cross.
So I don't think this was just a fight about a word. I think it was a moment when someone asked whether Christians actually believe God is good, and critiqued a motte and bailey in which God's goodness is affirmed in analogical terms -- but then, more deeply, denied as something humans can actually recognize or trust. You affirmed his view, by saying that Catholic Answers is an apologetics outreach and not a theological article, and thus that its answers are misleading or incomplete! You've been distracted by the term 'omnibenevolent' to the extent that you've affirmed exactly what he was arguing in a way that makes Christians appear untrustworthy and dissembling.
If we answer questions about God's goodness with hedging, precision, or tone-deaf abstractions, we've not preserved orthodoxy -- we've made it unbelievable. That's what I'm indicating here: that your vision of God's goodness is thoroughly orthodox, impeccably scholastic, and philosophically integrated... and yet utterly uncompelling, even horrifying. No one who was not raised in the Church would look at the vision of God you've outlined and say, "wow, sounds like someone I should worship." They would walk away thinking: "These people are clever. But their God? He sounds like a narcissist."
You can try to protect God from accusations of malevolence by retreating to apophaticism, but that is not the mind of God on the matter. God's answer to those who would accuse him of evil was to enter into evil, to experience suffering, to face death. God's answer to Job was not "my goodness is unfathomable to you," it was "my omnipotence is unfathomable to you." But his goodness and his love he demonstrated in his body on the Cross.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
12d ago
· Edited 12d ago
Therefore the claim "The phrase 'God's goodness' means no more or less than 'Orcus's goodness', and refers to being a perfect fulfillment of His own nature" is a motte, and everyday discussion of God by Catholics is frolicking in a bailey where God's "goodness" encompasses positive moral qualities.
Yes, that's the reaction I had to the claims being made as well. But I want to reassure you that the Catholic, and broader Christian, tradition does affirm the benevolence of God, as shown in the person of Jesus Christ, who healed the sick, forgave the penitent, judged the oppressor, and died for the ungodly. Any account of God's goodness that doesn't center on the person of Jesus simply isn't a representation of the Christian approach to the divine nature.
In particular, the unique Christian claim of a divine trinity is often seen by theology as a rebuff to God as pure will and impersonal power, and instead reorients him as pure love: the Father loves the Son, and thus "God is love." (1 John 4:8) God's moral quality is known through his nature, which he enacts in the world with his will; and that nature is perfectly loving, serene, self-giving, and joyful. While it is true that Christian theology is ultimately apophatic and analogical, those analogies are often viewed as evidence of God's goodness and not merely nice things we're comparing to him. The Christian tradition insists that those who know God will be "known by their fruits," and so it is with God himself:
Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man—though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. (Romans 5:7-8)
I'm sure you won't find that to be a good enough answer to your questions, and probably creates more questions than answers, about how the wrath of God interacts with or seems often in human perception to counteract the goodness of God. Those are real questions, and they require a real answer. But your questions are good, your intuition about what would be a satisfying answer to them is good, and your ability to perceive mottes and baileys in the severe differences between the God of the philosophers (and theology journals) and the God of the Christian revelation is very, very good.
Christianity does not proclaim a mere abstraction. It proclaims a Father, a Son, and a Spirit who loves, gives, forgives, and indwells. Any Christian view that does not ground everything about God's acts in the world in his steadfast love for humanity is not mine, and it is not the Christianity of the saints, who found God in encounter with love and not in the perfect recitation of scholastic categories. As Teresa of Avila once said, "It is love alone that gives worth to all things."
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
14d ago
That whole industry of self-help
womenpeople who write books on how awesome they are and then promptly fall apart makes me very sad.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
15d ago
She likes the attention of a man being sexually interested in her, but not the risk of actually having sex with him.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
19d ago
It would have been better if it'd happened differently, but I think Bubbles is better off. I know I found it really freeing when I realized the competitive and performance-focused environment of WoW wasn't for me and started playing other games.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
20d ago
Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time.
The credentialist thesis is that the function of college in society is to demonstrate the ability of a person to perservere doing boring work and run to completion a program that requires multiple years of effort. Both of which are important capacities for an employee.
I recall that psychometrics can't find a way to measure someone's industriousness and ability to perservere doing hard work except by asking them, or by actually observing their behavior over a long period of time. We don't have a "hard-worker" test the way we have an IQ test. So college operates as the best thing we have to attest to a person's capacity for sustained effort, and it throws in an IQ-loaded element and the ability for young people with little experience to make connections with people who have lots of knowledge or experience in a specific field.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
20d ago
In my own view, universal love is at worst incoherent, and at best it's a particularly tepid form of love.
I think the difference is you think of love as primarily an emotional experience, while Christianity thinks of love as primarily a willed action. That being said, I think the idea of deep, intense love directed at many different people isn't inherently incoherent, it just doesn't scale well for finite humans because we can't hold the intimate understandings of more than a few people before we stop keeping track.
Jesus Christ is often described as having a particularly extreme emotional love for all human beings (in addition to the willing-the-good kind of love), because being human he experiences emotional love and being divine he is omniscient. A pretty common idea in Christianity is that Jesus is not only the savior of all men as a generalized mass of human beings, but that a part of his passion involved personally pondering the lives of every person and mourning the ways in which their sins did themselves and other people harm out of a unique love for them personally. A ubiquitous statement is that Jesus would have died for you, even if you were the only person ever. You might even call him the trope namer for wearing your heart on your sleeve!
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
20d ago
· Edited 20d ago
I’m not from Indiana, but certainly from flyover country. I became aware of polyamory through the internet, the same place where I read Scott’s essays and am talking to you now. I do not identify as a rationalist, have never identified as a rationalist, but I enjoyed a lot of Scott’s writings in 2014 about the culture war (as I am a relatively conservative man from flyover country, and he was criticizing the left), and discovered them from a Reddit recommendation on a subreddit recommended to me by a high school friend, also from flyover country.
Polyamory is also widespread, yes under that name, among gay zoomers just about anywhere, so if you’re young and know anyone who’s gay (and there’s a lot of zoomers who identify as gay), you have a good chance of coming across it.
This is a second-hand anecdote, but my mother does hiring at a small organization here in flyover country and had a hilarious, if disastrous, job interview where the candidate told her he was polyamorous. He did not get the job.
This stuff is spreading. It’s not just in San Francisco any more.
I disagree with Tree, but what he said isn’t entirely false about where the criticism comes from. But all the gory details definitely suggest some of the posters are insiders.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
20d ago
There's been a weird narrative push here lately to blame Christianity for the worst parts of leftism (see the similar "akshally Communism comes from Christianity" upthread).
There’s a broader schism in the right-wing over whether it should be religious or irreligious. “Your ideas are actually the foundation of our shared enemy’s ideas” is a great line to use in that kind of conflict. As is, “your ideas are actually indistinguishable from the shared great evil everyone hates,” which was the Hlynkian thesis.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
20d ago
· Edited 20d ago
Youre not supposed to derive worldly rewards from it.
Correct. You’re supposed to derive heavenly rewards from it. Which is why I’m talking about a hierarchy that is not of this world!
I see what you're saying, and I agree it is a serious problem people often have with Christianity, but the supernatural and cosmic justice elements are load-bearing. There are elements of Christian moral teaching that I believed before I converted to Christianity and would doubtless still believe even if I apostasized, but the whole scope of the Christian doctrine about holiness, martyrdom, charity, and asceticism is founded on the principle that Heaven exists and there's treasure there.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
20d ago
This isn’t true for fentanyl, but illegal fentanyl is so dangerous that the only people who use it will be stupid/impulsive, so you can’t draw conclusions about the general population from them.
Fentanyl is often laced into other illegal drugs to make them more addictive — or in other words people are being poisoned with it without their consent. A lot of the moral panic over fentanyl is about that aspect.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
20d ago
The kind of status you describe christianity as bestowing is managers authority, and it often seems to be opposed to anything but its particular management authority
I’m not actually talking about the formal hierarchy of the Church here — which I agree is a manager’s authority — but about the hierarchy of the saints. The hierarchy it’s replacing isn’t the hierarchy of government, but the more nebulous, albeit extremely real, hierarchy of informal status that drives people to compete for praise, attention, and mates.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
Ok, you activated an "urquan has too many theological opinions for his own good" moment, but I remember a research project I did for my historiography class in college on Anglicanism in America that gave me a decent answer to this question.
My original question was asking about how American Anglicans on the eve of the Revolution dealt with the idea of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of their Church: the British Monarch. Perhaps this was a silly question to ask, but I seriously wondered how you could deal with the cognitive dissonance of belonging to a church whose governor -- not "head", that's what Henry VIII called himself before someone told Elizabeth that calling yourself "head of the Church" sounds like usurping Jesus Christ -- was the very King you were calling a tyrant. I was aware that many of the Founding Fathers were Anglicans, so this seemed like a fruitful area of study.
I focused my research on Anglicans in Virginia (where several of the Anglican Founders were from) in the 1700s, to narrow in on that question.
And I found that, not only was the exact question "how did the Anglican Founders deal with the cognitive dissonance of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of the Church of England" had never been posed in the historical community, but that actually the subject of intense debate among scholars was the much more alarming question, Did Anglicans in Virginia actually care about their religion at all?
I recall one researcher, who wrote an entire monograph about a specific Anglican lady who had a Bible and a journal where she wrote devotional texts about God. And the researcher treated this like she'd found the Holy Grail -- look, everyone, I found an Anglican woman who seems like she had a heartfelt faith in God! It was a revelation. Stop the presses! We have to rewrite the textbooks! Maybe at least one Anglican in Virginia actually did believe in God!
That underscored to me how serious the rot was in the Anglican Church in America, even back then; it really did seem like Anglicans saw the church as a social club, and took or left portions of their faith as it served their other interests. Actually taking religion seriously just wasn't something in the vocabulary of most Anglicans at the time. That was something for those weird revivalists or those Wesleyans with their method.
Having met some Episcopalians, I really do feel like I can take their approach to faith and just push it back a few hundred years, and get a good sense of the scorn or bewilderment with which their WASP ancestors would have viewed intense religious devotion. Or worse, expelled basing your morals on an unchanging read of the Scriptures instead of just doing what's high-status.
Relevant to the subject of morals, and to the larger topic at hand -- about racism -- many American Anglicans at the time were slaveholders and it was very common for churches to be racially segregated, or for blacks not to be allowed in the church at all. So there's a bit to the Episcopal Church's posture that really is a "we know we were the epicenter of this, we're really sorry."
As far as I was able to discern, in this very limited research project (that included little to no primary source work), the only effect that the American Revolution had on the American Anglican Church was that they changed their name to "The Episcopal Church," to get rid of the whole "Anglo" thing. ("We promise we're good patriots!") Or wait, was it the Protestant Episcopal Church at that time? I think the "Protestant" got nixed at one point because it sounded too much like having a solid theological opinion.
It's also true that a huge number of Loyalists were Anglicans, and so I'm sure if I devoted myself to a more serious investigation of the time period I could find evidence of Anglicans' religious affiliation influencing their views on the American Revolution. Many of these people fled to Canada as it became clear the patriots were winning, so a true telling of the story of Anglicanism in North America (not to be confused with the "Anglican Church in North America", a modern body, that split from Canterbury over gay marriage and is essentially a missionary project of African Anglicans, because as much as Episcopalians like to talk about their tight links to Africa, the Africans think they're apostate for their strong support of SSM) would have to talk about Canada too.
I'm pretty mean to Episcopalians, but really, I guess I'm just as bewildered about them as they would be about me, God bless them.
If you really want to get me started on things that are interesting about Anglicanism, ask me about the Oxford Movement or the "Anglican Continuum." That's where the story becomes fascinating, in both the way that a plane crash and a mathematical equation are fascinating. But you have to find the Anglicans who barely want to be Anglicans before I start getting really interested. (The ACNA people I mentioned above are continuing Anglicans, they're trying to be more Anglican than the Anglicans, and some of them ordain women. Confessional Protestantism in America has had two big waves of schism, once in the 60s-70s over women's ordination and now in the past 10-15 years over gay marriage, and I'm sure at this point all the Catholics and Orthodox in the audience are going "man am I glad we have The Tradition.")
All that to say -- I think Anglicans ~300 years ago had all the seeds of their present situation already planted, in British America more than in Britain. Anglicanism to me has always seemed like the Church of the Compromise rather than a church with a strong set of beliefs, and the American Anglican Church was so eager to compromise with the prevailing winds that they changed their name to obscure their origins. There's an old quip of Oscar Wilde that seems apropos: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do."
In that sense I don't see their collapse into social liberalism as particularly surprising, in the way that I find the descent of mainstream Presbyterianism and Methodism (which, to be sure, was an Anglican revival movement at first, though it's always had a more independent nature in America) surprising, given the history of those churches in firm confession and rigorous devotion. But I'm sure that's another story for another time, one that you're no doubt more well-equipped to tell than I am.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
21d ago
I have often conceived of Christianity as a belief system that replaces the hierarchy based on strength with a hierarchy based on moral goodness. "My status hierarchy is not of this world." But there still is a status hierarchy. (Just like there's still a kingdom -- just one that God rules personally.)
Of course, that's what Nietzsche said -- instead of badness, inferiority, Christianity criticizes evil, moral turpitude. But unlike Nietzche I believe this is both a positive development and a necessary one.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
21d ago
I won’t be deceptive about my belief that Mormons are not Christian. There is no hidden “meat” (to use their “milk and meat” framing) coming next.
Unfortunately, "milk before meat" is just a common feature of religious apologetics in general. Actually, it's a part of persuasion more generally -- you get people to agree on common ground before you talk about things they might find objectionable. Just like you probably shouldn't begin a first date by talking about your worst traits.
And there is a dishonesty about it, and I have been personally affected by it before and felt betrayed, but it's a practice that everyone does. There is nothing really unique in the way the LDS church does it. Christians do it to each other all the time; Catholic apologists do it to Protestants, Protestant missionaries do it to Catholics, Baptists do it to Lutherans, Lutherans do it to Calvinists. Everyone wants to persuade.
It's notable that you're saying "general consent" is the definition of who gets to use the term "Christian" -- because I can present to you many Protestants, and many more in the past, who said that Roman Catholics should not be described with the term "Christian." They set a defininition -- "Christians are people who believe justification is by faith alone" -- and then they applied it. You're doing that, too, but with a slightly more expansive definition.
And so that's the fundamental problem I have about your point of view -- you're saying that the definition of "Christian" you use is the true one, that all others are simply false scotsmen, and in so doing you're fighting over words instead of doctrines. But we cannot know what is the true Christianity a priori. We have to, as the apostle wrote, "test everything; hold fast what is good."
I even see in the Mormon faith things to praise, things to find common ground with, things that could lead to an actually fruitful discussion where we both come away with a greater respect for each other -- which, if you believe someone should convert to your religion, is the only way to begin. Milk and meat, and all that. It is for this reason that when St. Paul went to the areopagus, he began his preaching by praising the Greek pagans: "Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious."
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
21d ago
In fact, if you follow through with their logic, it’s basically: “we’re Christians, and you’re not.”
Correct. And in fact, this is exactly what you're saying to them.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
21d ago
tl;dr: if we define virtue in terms of things that men do, men are more virtuous than women
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
Many mothers believe that becoming and being a mother is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to them.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking about bearing, breastfeeding, and raising a child as a "bare biological function" rather than something that is, yes, biological, but also deeply tied in to people's social, emotional, and spiritual sense of who they are -- in other words, to the elements of life that lead to eudaemonia.
"Eating food" is a bare biological function, but it's loaded with social and spiritual meaning -- think about "who sits at what table" in High School, about dinner dates, about feasts and holidays, about Thanksgiving dinner, about gourmonds who learn to savor every bite, and even think about many ancient religions (including Christianity) where "having a meal with the gods" is the fundamental principle of sacrifice.
Sex, too, is a bare biological function, but think about how many ways in which it has emotional meaning for people: not just as a reinforcement of status (which men experience intensely, and thus see sexlessness as utterly wounding to their value as human beings), but as reinforcement of connection, as a means of bonding, as a means of play, as something more than the sum of its parts.
And into this I have to assert: bearing, feeding, and nuturing a child is about more than biology. It is social, emotional, and spiritual. And many -- though certainly not all -- mothers experience it in just this way. Not as a denial of eudaemonia, but as true eudaemonia, flourishing so flourished that it nutures another being's flourishing. Hail, full of grace!
Fathers experience this too, though to a lesser degree. My girlfriend likes to visit old churches to appreciate the architecture, and a common feature of old churches is the church graveyard. What I have often noted to her is that, on almost all of the graves of men, what it reads is not "high-powered lawyer," or "statesman," or "had a bunch of money," but rather: "Husband and FATHER." The greatest legacy of almost every man and every woman, the great evidence of their flourishing to the world, is not what their career looked like or how aggressively they "chased their dreams," but the children they brought into the world, and the way they nurtured them. Your children, not your coworkers, will tend your grave.
I think maybe this is an agreeableness problem -- your argument here is essentially that women are too agreeable and too neurotic. Sure, neuroticism is always a danger, and both men and women with neuroticism struggle a lot. And women are statistically higher in it. But agreeableness is a strength of women, not a weakness: men's great honor is low neuroticism, but women's great honor is high agreeableness.
It can be hard to see on the motte, where disagreeableness is common, but agreeableness is necessary for the maintanence of society. Not only because it is the necessary lens through which to nurture a child, but because it is the necessary lens through which to care for anyone who needs caring for, and to build systems of social harmony that tie people together, that build and maintain social bonds. We could not live in a society were it not for the social bonds maintained by agreeable women.
Some studies have suggested that, in the general population, people maintain stronger connections with their maternal grandparents than their paternal grandparents. Researchers sometimes argue that this can be attributed to the social bonds maintained by mothers.
I speak from experience here: that rings very true to me. In fact, not only am I closer to my maternal family than my paternal family, but my mother is closer to my paternal family than my father is!
Maintaining social bonds is extremely important; this is how social capital is maintained. Societies where these bonds are not maintained are impoverished by it. As we are, in these days of atomization and rootlessness.
So your lens strikes me as incredibly limited: you're saying that 99% of what's important for the maintanence of society is done by men, while not even fully noting the importance of things that women do. You're asking for what would make women valuable without even acknowledging the value they do have.
While you apologized, the fact that you posted this on mother's day without realizing it was mother's day says quite a lot. Did you not speak to your mother yesterday? Did you spend any time with her? Send her flowers?
Because, for what it's worth, that's what maintaining social bonds looks like. And you devalue it to your own peril.
But also, if you’re trying to describe disability in terms of mechanical action rather than experience, both of your first examples are about the inability to experience things most people can experience (inability to experience light, inability to experience sound).
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I don’t really see what you’re describing as a coherent rebuttal.
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