urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3d ago
In the 1800s, this really was the case. Unitarianism was historically signified by its view that the Trinity was an irrational and nonsensical doctrine — hence “Unitarian” rather than “Trinitarian.” It applied that same rationalism to most elements of its doctrine, and believed in putting rational analysis above traditional or doctrinal fidelity. Hence, the reputation you referenced.
Unitarianism had that reputation about up until the point where public atheism became acceptable for intellectuals, at which point both it and deism collapsed in numbers and the Unitarians began to align themselves more with religious humanism to survive.
I’m just echoing other posters here, but any church more conservative than the Methodists is going to be very insistent on the literal resurrection of Christ. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, well, I wonder seriously what would even compel you to find Christianity interesting.
If what you’re looking for is a vague sense of belief in a higher power that doesn’t ask you to sign on to any specific dogma, well, I agree that the Unitarians say that’s what they’re offering… but obviously they’ve found a different set of dogmas to promote. There’s no such thing as a church without dogma.
The reality is that most churchgoers are moral busybodies, and either you agree with the things they’re busybodying about (whatever they are) or you don’t. Churches with any sort of vitality, whatever side of the culture war they’re on, are anything but vague.
People often talk about church as a place to find “a sense of community”, but I couldn’t disagree more: if you want community qua community, you’d be much better off going for a walk, reconnecting with friends, talking to family members, or joining a hobby club. Depending on your local culture, you’ll still face some level of moral policing. But if religious convictions aren’t your thing, maybe you’re better off finding a place where the topic of conversation is your thing.
I like to think of church as a hobby club, where the hobby is “having particular moral and supernatural beliefs.” If you have strong convictions on those, it’s great. If not, it’s like joining a DnD group when you don’t like imaginative play.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
They're not "demanding" it by protesting, they're demanding it by choosing to attend one university over another and therefore sending tuition dollars to one university instead of the other one. It's demand in the economic sense, not the political sense.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
Video game speedrunning really isn't my thing, but I've definitely enjoyed Summoning Salt a few times. He has a nice delivery.
I won’t claim the video editing is out of this war, but Summoning Salt’s leitmotif, We’re Finally Landing, might as well be.
While it's certainly associated with him, I'd assert that HOME (the artist) is seriously underrated and deserves consideration on his own for his excellent music. He's the best of the synthwave/vaporwave craze.
This really dates me, but HOME's Resonance is deeply associated with my time graduating from school, and I listened to the track the night I graduated. The album Odyssey is worth a listen, if you like electronic music or chill beats.
Wow, really brings me back to listen to this stuff again. Very strange to feel nostalgic about music designed to appeal to nostalgia.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
Has this been the case for a while? This is such a strange euphemism.
It’s been a stock journalistic phrase for as long as I can remember and doesn’t seem strange or euphemistic to me at all. You never heard on the nightly news in the 2000s, “Lawmakers on capital hill are proposing a new bill to…”?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
9d ago
Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades
Is this a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing, since the PRC is the strongest force in east Asia and both are concerned about their sea lanes and territorial integrity because of Chinese moves to expand its territorial waters and claim on Taiwan?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
I fortunately do not have any personal friends or family members who are literally celebrating
I've also been fortunate that the people I've spoken with in person have been horrified by what happened. But my friends are generally conservatives or moderates. My mother, who really liked Kirk and occasionally tried to show me some of his videos, cried. The moderates are in shock and are terrified we've created a culture of violence.
I know a few people who are progressives of some description, but overwhelmingly they're straight-laced people who abhor violence. I'm sure there are some people I've been friends with at some point in my life who are being terrible right now (I can think of names), but outside of work I don't know any hardcore progressives right now. And people at work haven't brought it up.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
To be fair, much of the text of that post was pulled from a draft for something I had written before the shooting happened and fit well. I have a digital notebook full of unpublished effortpost drafts that I never posted, usually because I felt that it wasn't a good idea to post or the original idea got away from me and felt like something that needed a longer exposition or just became too broad for the context. Sometimes I pull something out of there if it's relevant to something I want to post.
Socially lower-middle class, economically upper-middle-middle-class, intellectually upper-middle-class. I'm from a low-density part of flyover country, and religiosity is as normal for people I grew up with as liberalism is among university professors. Even the feminists described themselves as Christians. My parents are both college graduates, my father has a post-graduate degree and is a teaching professor at a religious university and my mother is an administrator at a small company. (Guess who makes more money?) I grew up in a lower-to-lower-middle-class neighborhood, and it was a frequent drama in my childhood that kids I tried to befriend saw me as a piggy bank because my parents were better off than most of my peers and occasionally tried to steal from me. I'm a college graduate and work in IT.
I once wanted to go to graduate school and had multiple professors who thought I'd be a good fit for it, but I didn't feel that I would fit in well with university culture because of my conservative views and interest in religion, and I felt the career prospects were extremely limited. When I attended formal events at the university I always felt horribly out of place and embarrassed myself a few times by acting uncouth. More than that, it was a massive culture shock when I attended university and met people from cities for whom hookup culture, party culture, underage drinking, and drug use were normal parts of youth culture. I had some crises in college because I struggled to fit in, and I often felt like I didn't belong there. My favorite part of college was taking classes. I think I got inculcated into the intellectual habits of the upper-middle class -- albeit without adopting most of their views, but I can speak their language to criticize them -- but got shoved down to the middle class based on my social habits and unrefined tastes.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
Apparently someone called out that "Notices bulge uwu" line is a sign he was a MtF chaser.
It's a more broad meme in the femboy/gender-non-conforming gay community, particularly the furry subculture.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
While he's reported to be academically gifted
Academically gifted zoomers are often some of the most brainrotted. It's a verbal IQ thing. I have dozens and dozens of those damn vines stuck in my head that replay randomly. "Look at all those chickens," (they were geese), "they were roommates", "freesh a voc a doo", etc.
Not a zoomer, but a good example of the type is gwern. He's obviously very intelligent, but I find it hard to read essays of his because they're so dense, and filled with javascript pop-up hyperlinks to various things that are connected to the core topic of the essay in his mind. I remember reading something by him and being astounded at the sheer number of hyperlinked references to unrelated anime phrases. I felt like I was getting a firehose of his mind rather than a focused essay. Smart people collect phrases, anecdotes, factoids, data points, and it's entirely conceivable for a smart person to get fixated on things that aren't useful, like internet memes.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
I wish people had a greater sense of propriety, and of actual (and not weaponized) empathy. I'm not sure we're capable of having devices that can broadcast our immediate thoughts about some major news event to the entire world. If I let myself be on social media and used it actively to spout random thoughts without a great deal of reflection beforehand, you could absolutely find moments where I reacted to something callously or wickedly, in ways I deeply regret. I usually get to the right place in the end, but I think often about what would happen if I didn't have a great system of friends and loved ones who are grounded and empathetic and draw me towards peace rather than intensity.
Now, if you selected for young, college-educated people among those D voters, especially women, among the modal D voters, then yeah, I'd probably take the under on a millisecond.
I'm not convinced that progressive women would be more likely to enact political violence than progressive men. That would just be woefully unintuitive to me.
I think there's simply fewer straight-laced party-line progressives among men, and my experience of liberal/progressive men is that their views are either normie and passive (and thus unlikely to make them feel a desire for violence) or weird in a way that doesn't fit the "habitual democrat" mold even if it were to drive them to extremism.
So you might find the guy who hates racism, but thinks women are stuck up; or the guy who thinks Che Guevara was awesome; or the guy who gets conspicuously upset about school board corruption; or the Soviet Union defender; or the guy who loudly insists people call it the "CPC" and not the "CCP." Not really woke capitalism, IMO. Male leftists have more of a tankie image to me. And the important bit is in the name.
That said, I do remember a few male friends I've had that I'd describe as by-the-book progressive -- but they're all gay. Straight male progressives are just weird.
I'd put Mangione in that category. And the Trump shooter whose name doesn't deserve to be remembered and also I just don't remember it. Pretty unidentifiable motivations, general grievances, not a twitter full of clapbacks. Probably this latest guy will turn out to be a dateless loser who was crushing on a trans girl and wanted to impress her by DEFENDING HER HONOR, or something really stupid like that.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
I don’t care for Cenk Uyger, but if a 20 year old Republican killed him in front of a crowd at a college I would be just as terrified and just as horrified if people celebrated it. I don’t think bringing up a nonviolent activist’s views is even necessary in the first 24 hours after he was publicly assassinated. They’re irrelevant.
I guess I just don’t feel burning hatred for my political opponents, even if I accept conflict theory as necessary. The main reason I’m not a mistake theorist is I don’t believe most people make decisions based on reason; you can’t make a mistake based on reason if you didn’t use reason in the first place.
Sometimes politics has serious divisions that reflect competing interests, needs, and views of the good. But even if I had to use political power to restrain someone from opposing my interests in a zero-sum game, I wouldn’t feel glee, but sorrow that they forced me to do that, that we couldn’t come to an accommodation. I would much rather turn an enemy into an ally than defeat him, but I accept the need to win and the reality of defection and evil. (I’ve also never felt the urge to cheer at a sports game, so maybe I’m just missing an element of tribal psychology that most people have.)
I don’t know. I just hate that people feel psychological glee at the death of an activist. It’s not that they’re saying it, but that they’re feeling it that hurts. I’ve said a lot of vile things in the heat of the moment, things I deeply regret. But people are doubling and tripling down on their glee like death is a game. That’s some serious desensitization to suffering. I just happen to think that schedenfreude is sadism, and it corrupts the soul.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
I'm also reminded of a friend I once had who was MtF and believed, somehow, that they were better off not flagging their status on dating apps since in their mind the chances of somebody specifically luring them for violence due to being trans was greater than somebody not realizing and then taking it badly when they learned in person.
I think the big problem here is that they're assuming the people they're talking to mean them harm and trying to extrapolate how to minimize that when crafting their profile. Rather than thinking about what the most relevant details about them are and how to attract someone who likes them or is open to them.
That said, I suspect the "danger of violence" frame is tied up with the "I want to avoid chasers" frame, but the reality is that a trans person on a dating app can't avoid getting some level of attention from people interested in trans people specifically, just like women on dating apps can't avoid getting some level of attention from men who want to hookup with them.
There are very few heterosexual men who want to date a trans woman, so being up front about it in order to filter heavily for bisexual or heteroflexible men who are open to transgender dates just seems like a much better filter mechanism than assuming that you're going to be violently attacked if you divulge the info. Revealing your gender identity at any point after someone has already formed a connection with you just sets you up for anger, frustration, or wasted effort.
But I also thought MathWizard was smart for putting D&D on his dating profile, so what do I know, dating apps aren't my thing. But maybe the whole concept of meeting strangers off the internet is just not a great plan.
It's true that the way Kirk phrased his comment on the tradeoffs between preventing violence and protecting the rights of citizens to own guns was politically inopportune. But the actual argument he made was indistinguishable from the "the optimal number of murders is not zero" argument.
Thinking that "he phrased it without a dozen hems and haws so he doesn't care about people being murdered, so its ironic he himself was murdered and I don't care about it" is a fair argument is a huge part of what's wrong with democratic politics. No one can talk seriously and frankly about tradeoffs, because anytime you do, you create political hay for your opposition, who jumps on every slightly-inopportune phrasing in your commentary and turns you into a monster. This kind of thing is why politicians are so fake and their lines are so rehearsed.
Part of having empathy for your fellow man, and especially for the opposite tribe, is not to accuse them of murderism or callousness based on a single comment when it's just as easy to think about their words in the context of their entire person and life, and read them charitably and rationally. Empathy ceases to become empathy when it becomes a weapon to use against your enemy, and my biggest problem with the political left is they so often use it in this way.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
You’re reacting to his comment as though he asked specifically about ideas for violence, but the way gattsuru worded his original comment I had no clue the specific things he was talking about not speaking on publicly were in that category until he clarified.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
You thought the week was boring? We had NATO jets shooting down Russian drones last night and you thought it was a boring week?
Chill. I was referencing the comment down below about how people were saying the culture war thread was boring.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
As with most shootings, the "crazy guy with a gun" frame is probably accurate. It's pretty definitional that someone who does something like this is crazy, likely to harm their cause and accomplish little while giving up their freedom, possibly their life, and certainly every element of their reputation.
That said, white boomers are the one group that shifted towards Harris in 2024, and progressive/liberal boomers seem to be the most intensely focused on norm-violations by the right and have a particular contempt for Trump. Younger progressives are more in the camp of "yes of course conservatives are fascists," older ones show this kind of feeling of betrayal that perhaps can form into a stronger grievance.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
Well, when you thought the week was boring...
Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.
I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.
I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.
We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.
I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
25d ago
Heartland. I grew up in the Bible Belt, and have never lived in a major city.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
25d ago
Alright, I'll quit while I'm behind. Best of luck to you.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
25d ago
As someone who’s struggled with “I’m weird and that makes me cool,” I learned the hard way that the best thing you can do for yourself is to develop the ability to bridge your personality and values to normies. Making yourself a permanent outcast just perpetuates feelings of ostracization. I know you feel like an outsider, but I assure you that from your posts, you’re much more relatable and typically human than you think.
Even in your hypothetical rant, you’re attributing to her thoughts and values that she didn’t share. “Whatever happened to the Hellboy quote that I put in the book”, in that context, doesn’t sound like the description of a betrayal — it sounds like you’re upset she isn’t actually what you imagined her to be. You’re accusing her of betraying your perception of her.
That’s why she reacted so harshly to the kissing: you were a fun buddy to her, not a romantic interest. Unfortunately, she seems to have a big problem with actually vocalizing her thoughts and needs, and either accidentally or intentionally flirting as a form of social bonding, which is why you get anger only in texts. It’s genuinely possible that this is the dark side of my anecdote about asexuals not understanding the difference between sexuality and friendship — maybe she honestly doesn’t realize some of actions are clearly flirting, just sees people responding positively and so it’s positively reinforced.
Everything else makes sense and doesn’t seem like BPD or even craziness when I think of it that way: the “friend hug,” the invitation to hang out but aversion to dinner (which would be a date!), and the cold shoulder. I’m not sure she ever thought of you as a potential partner. Maybe she flirted in ways that were honestly ambiguous, but you’re both neurodivergent — are you certain she was acting and you were reading social signals correctly?
I’m still trying to solve the mystery of why I never ended up in a situation like this, and have had generally positive romantic experiences. Probably what I would have done with this girl is awkwardly ask her out in explicit terms, she would awkwardly say no, and even our friendship would fizzle out. I don’t make grand romantic gestures and I only rarely flirt first.
I guess I’m lucky that occasionally women have made their interest known explicitly, and understandably women who’ve liked me enough to go out of their way to make me know it had little trouble with ambiguous interest or attraction. Looking back on your initial thread, I realize I’m basically implementing @gorge’s advice: “It's easier if you go for the girls who are crushing on you, without you having to put in extraordinary effort.” What’s really tough is if you don’t have anyone crushing on you. But women who clearly state their attraction to a man don’t realize how powerful and important they are in the current social context.
I’m sorry if I made you feel judged. My goal was solely to try and relate to your experience and reassure you. I guess I overstepped. But I do think after reflecting that this isn’t a case of “crazy feminism ruins good romantic prospect,” I think it’s that you made a geeky friend and misread her friendship as attraction. I’ve done that many times, and probably would have in this situation, too. It’s very relatable.
It would have saved you both a lot of drama if you’d have clarified your relationship before you kissed her. The current social environment just makes ambiguity too threatening to everyone.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
25d ago
squouse
New furry name for intimate partner just dropped
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
25d ago
I’m sorry about this. From what you’ve said, you didn’t do anything wrong.
Unfortunately, I think the truth is that people who reach their 30s without marrying or being in an LTR on the way to marriage are often that way for a reason. She’s in her 30s, and going back to college for a degree with a tenuous relationship to direct employment — that points to aimlessness. That’s understandable in your early to mid 20s, much less understandable in your 30s.
I’ll counterpoint the cynicism by saying that I’ve never encountered this kind of instability from “geeky neurodivergent asexual” women. Of course, when I found about the asexuality things ended because of the obvious incompatibility. For what it’s worth, your interlocutor does not at all sound to me like their behavior matches the cluster — that cluster of people is usually more shy, reserved, and actually confused by sexuality, not manipulative about it.
It's hard to describe the anecdotes without context, but the asexual people I've met just didn't understand the concept of how a relationship is different from a friendship. I've been asked what is supposed to differentiate them by someone in this category before. I wasn't convinced about the existence of absolute asexuality when I first encountered it, but meeting a few of these people and seeing how absolutely bewildered they are by sexuality led me to the conclusion they they really don't have the sexual feelings that most people do. I've never met the "asexual but romantic" people, which seems to be the identification of your friend here; every asexual person I've met has clearly been as confused by romance as by sexuality, or talked about it analytically and outside the frame of direct experience.
But perhaps what's going on is one of two things -- she has relatively normal sexual feelings, but has general identity instability that makes her uncomfortable with it unless lubricated by alcohol, which seems most likely to me. Or, alternatively, she is asexual, and her confusion about the concept of sexuality manifests as an intense conflict resulting in the craziness you've encountered. Your choice quotes, "I'm so tired of straight guys assuming I'm not asexual, anyways I already have a crush," and "pretty people dont light their own cigarettes" just read as woefully neurotypical and narcissistic in a normie way. This is perhaps a case of a neurotypical person with identity instability latching onto concepts like asexuality and autism and queerness as validation for her weirdness. I'm not a psychiatrist, but this has what is coloquially called "BPD chick energy" all over it.
I run into her again a few weeks later (this is 2024) and she gives me a big ole body hug and invites me to hang out, making me internally panic. There's other people around so I can't really have a frank conversation with her. At the end of the evening, I ask her if she'd like to get dinner sometime, so we can talk in private and I can hash out exactly how she feels about me. She reacts poorly.
Talk about mixed signals! That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me think you're just dealing with garden variety crazy. "Let's hang out, but no I won't go to dinner" shortly after "you ruined my birthday"... especially combined with the "made me feel not okay about you" thing you got a year later, makes it extremely likely that this is a person with serious confusion about her romantic identity and desires, who over time built a positive or neutral situation into a decidedly negative one.
You said in your hypothetical rant that she said something like "all us freaks have is each other." Well, that sounds like someone that has made an identity out of weirdness. And I don't think it's healthy. I've certainly bonded with women in that way -- you know, "we have this in common and we understand each other like other people don't." But there's a time and a place, and calling yourself a "freak" when you do that just makes them sound like they're committed to weirdness not as an obstacle, or as a healthy part of personality, but as an active aversion and identitification with rebellion from the norm for no reason.
I'm sorry that a connection that meant so much to you at the time became so negative. But unfortunately the connection you had was always fictive, time-limited. This is not a person capable of stable bonds. There was no relationship to be had with her. And though she holds the power to destroy aspects of your life in her hands, she also seems much more interested in destroying aspects of her life -- including the connection she made with you, which may well have had the capacity to be incredibly meaningful to her, too. You're collateral damage in the mess she's made of herself. I don't say that beacuse I think you should sympathize with her, but because I think you should remind yourself that her own life is hot garbage, and certainly seems lonely. It's not like she rejected you for bigger and better things; she rejected you for smaller and worse things. She's the one who lost.
I also definitely experience it, although most ASMR videos don't do it for me. I usually encounter it when vaguely sleepy, relaxed, and then a pleasant stimulus happens, like a soft speaking voice (the "being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class" story seems about right) or a gentle, repetitive noise.
If I do encounter it from an ASMR video, whispering or crinkling does it more than anything else.
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