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.
7mo ago
A big part of Trump's appeal is that, behind the spray-tan and the money and the political ambition, he just seems like a dude. There's an odd charisma to that. During his first term, sometimes you could tell he was just chilling in Cedar Rapids the White House watching cable, because Fox and Friends would be discussing some issue and the President of the United States would just... call in. Or tweet about the issue.
Trump's tweets themselves were a big part of Trump!45's appeal, as he just said whatever he was thinking about unapologetically. He felt raw. You talk to Trump supporters, and the number one thing they'll tell you is that Trump "tells it like it is." I'm not so sure about the epistemics of that, but certainly Trump frequently sounds like an actual person, he has the kind of political conversations people have with friends and family in private, but just in front of other people. That's why people go to his rallies, it feels like home!
Even back when I hated Trump, I acknowleged the rawness of his tweeting and speaking and found it impressive -- not in terms of his diction, but in terms of how he just communicated like some guy, just a guy being a dude. He contrasts so powerfully with the obvious fakeness of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, whose every word you know was focus-tested. Kamala Harris is terrified of verbal blunders -- that's why she falls into word salad, she's afraid of making a mistake and so just repeats the talking points she knows are safe.
By contrast, the big thing Trump's hilariously, ridiculously bad at is giving a prepared speech. He stands there and reads the teleprompter like a 10th grader reads their assigned sentence in Great Expectations. Sometimes you get the sense he's never heard the very words he's speaking before (and he probably hasn't), and you get Donald Trump live-tweeting his own speech, which is hilarious and strangely charismatic. I was just watching his victory speech, and he reads:
we have taken back control of the senate
And then, looking away from the teleprompter, goes:
Wow, that's good.
He's reacting to his own speech! He's not figuratively but literally going, "wow, we did? We took back the senate? Wow, that's great!" It makes you follow along his thought process, which makes you feel closer to him than you are. He combines this with frequent references to "we," and even infamously talked about himself in the third person at times during term 1. The point is that he makes people feel like they're up there on the stage with him: he makes people feel empowered. These are absolutely the sort of skills -- creating a sense of intimacy and power -- that come up in all sorts of interpersonal domains, like sales, friendly banter, and even flirting. The man is rizzing an entire country.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
NPR has been a joke even among liberals for a long time. Parks and Recreation had a running gag about public radio being obscure and pretentious back in the early 2010s.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
Speaking of pattern matching, I also noticed that every election year ending with ‘4’ has been a big year for Republicans since Reagan’s victory in 1984.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
There are certainly people I know who are fired up, but the majority I know are fed up. I know some people who moved from column B to column A because they believe Trump's survival in Pennsylvania was supernatural in origin.
I've talked to several people I know or suspect are moderate-to-conservative in politics who are apathetic because they don't think Trump is a good leader. Liberals and progressives seem more fired up, because of their dislike of Trump, and because of the abortion issue. In contradiction to what I see here and in right-wing spaces, I believe we're well past the point where Trump alienates his opponents more than he energizes his supporters.
Like someone at work said today, "No matter who you're voting for, I think we can all agree it'll be good to get tomorrow over with."
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
What is a "non-naturalistic moral fact"? Like categorical imperatives that aren't related to facts of the world?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
... am I the only one satisfied with threescore and ten?
I have no plans, and I'm hopefully young enough that I won't have to make serious plans any time soon, ojalá.
But I would very much like a traditional church funeral, where everyone dresses up, wears black, they play sad songs on an organ, and a traditional sermon is preached. It'd be nice if something was said about what I left behind in the world, but I would prefer if the focus of the funeral is not on myself but on the transcendent values I believed in during my life. I have never had a particularly intense fear of death, but I do very much fear the death of my ideas, my worldview, my way of life, my values. I would consider it the most meaningful celebration of my life if the focus were not on me, but on God.
I realize that sounds rather entitled, but my perspective is that very strict, formal funeral rites make clear the gravity of what's happened and provide order and familiarity to the horribleness of death. What I want for my family and friends is a participation in that, as well as a reflection of my values.
I have the same beliefs about weddings -- I think a big problem with Western culture is how flippantly and casually we treat everything, how businesswear has been eroded and even at funerals and weddings people don't put on their Sunday best. We apply the same flippant attitude to people dying and people making a solemn promise of commitment to each other -- is it really any wonder that people just go "bury me in a ditch," or don't get married? Where's the meaning and significance?
I want my funeral to be a funeral, and my wedding to be a wedding. These are not times for creativity and individuality, they're life scripts -- often literally scripted -- and the point is that it's not just random people doing random things, but the participation of particular people in a larger whole, a solemnization of something that many have gone through before and will go through in the future. You're not alone.
There's something about major services in our culture that's so empty, so lonely, so disconnected, that even at the times we are most vulnerable, dead or grieving, engaged and married, there's nothing to actually hold us up other than our own thoughts, our grief at a funeral or our hand-written cringey vows at a wedding. Big, important, meaningful things are happening, and instead of supporting people with the weight of a thousand years of tradition, we tell mourners or the betrothed to fly, bitch. I don't want that for either my wedding or my funeral.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.
This is not my experience at all. Aside from the vanishingly small minority that is flat-earth for religious reasons, most of the flat earth people very much do not seem like PMC types, they're fiercely independent, self-reliant men with libertarian leanings who don't like appeals to authority and believe in seeing things for themselves before they're satisfied.
In other words, I think it's much more likely we'd see a flat earther here on the motte than in any PMC office, even if everyone made their beliefs completely transparent.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
As part of a Catholic family we don't believe in any particular sanctity of the body once the soul leaves it. Accordingly, we don't visit graves, because nobody is there to see.
You can believe what you wish, but this doesn't align with my understanding of the approach Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) takes towards the dead. In fact, it rather startles me that you would present this set of beliefs as typical of a Catholic family!
In particular, my understanding of the Catholic tradition is that Catholics are all about believing in the sanctity of dead bodies -- if not, what's with all the relics, and pilgrimmages to the burial places of saints?
What I was taught as an evangelical mirrors this, that dead bodies needed to be given respect and a Christian burial as Christ promises not just a spiritual resurrection but a resurrection of our mortal bodies like his body. Furthermore, I always understood that Christianity viewed the body as a fundamental part of the person, not a mere vessel for the soul, a view which I was taught was gnostic.
In confirming my suppositions, I came across this Papal letter by Pope Francis discussing the Catholic view of burial:
"By burying the bodies of the faithful, the Church confirms her faith in the resurrection of the body, and intends to show the great dignity of the human body as an integral part of the human person whose body forms part of their identity.... Furthermore, burial in a cemetery or another sacred place adequately corresponds to the piety and respect owed to the bodies of the faithful departed who through Baptism have become temples of the Holy Spirit...
With some minor quibbling, this also represents the evangelical view of death and burial that I learned as a child. I certainly knew, and know, Catholics and Protestants alike who believe people's bodies are simply vessels and 'prisons' to be escaped from, but this was always more of a folk belief than the Gospel, and when I was a theologically precocious evangelical kid I understood it to be incorrect. The one big thing about which Jesus and Paul agreed with the Pharisees was the resurrection of the body!
I respect that you have your own views about the meaning of death and burial, but I wanted to make it clear that what you said doesn't reflect the way Christian tradition has generally understood the meaning of the body and of death.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
I believe the point is more similar to the Jewish take than people are making it out to be. The key element of Christian theology on Satan is that he’s considered the leader of all demons, who are believed to be fallen angels like Satan. Further, Christians hold Satan to be the “father of lies” (John 8:44) and tie back to him the whole concept of a demon pretending to be a helpful being in order to deceive.
When Christians say, “X pagan religion is Satanic,” they generally don’t mean “Y pagan god is literally Satan.” They mean either that the false deity is a demon, a fallen angel who followed Satan out of heaven, playing pretend; or the whole religion is a deceit, entirely false, a fake god, an “abomination,” as Claude put it. As St. Paul put it in 1 Corinthians, “what pagans sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God.”
For instance, Beelzebub (a Hebrew name for Baal, insultingly meaning “lord of flies” or “lord of dung”) seems to get conflated with Satan in the gospels. The religious teachers claim Jesus was performing miracles “by Beelzebub” and Jesus responds with the “a house divided against himself cannot stand, how can I cast out Satan by the power of Satan?” thing. But in contravention to the normal interpretation, I hold this was more of a reference in the vein I’m discussing, that Jesus was suggesting all the demons (including Baal) are in league with Satan and copying his playbook, which is why he describes “Satan” as “a kingdom” and “a house.”
So by saying “Satanic,” Christians often mean something closer to “characteristic of Satan” rather than making a direct insinuation that the followers of some cult are literally worshipping Satan directly, which I agree is incredibly rare but not unprecedented. I’m sure there are a great many Christians who say stuff like “Krishna is literally the devil!!!!!” and I agree that’s silly, but there’s a more nuanced point in the tradition.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
The 2012 senate election in MO was complicated by Todd Akin being an idiot and talking about "legitimate rape," during a time when such a scandal could actually bring a candidate down. McCaskill's margins were much smaller in 2006, and when her seat came up for re-election in 2018, Hawley won handily. A more apt comparison for the 2012 Missouri senate election would be the 2017 special election in Alabama, where Doug Jones (D) beat Roy Moore (R) because of accusations of sex abuse (which he essentially admitted were true) against Moore, and then in the very next election lost his seat. Although the margins were much smaller, because we're definitely more polarized in the past 8 years than in 2012!
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
I'm surprised the conversation has gotten this far without anyone bringing up that his middle name is "Hussein." As in, the same name as Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown by the US at the beginning of the war in Iraq.
America elected a man named "Barack Hussein Osama Obama" in 2008. This is like France electing a man named "Hans Goering Hetler" in 1953. I don't have a problem with Obama's name, but I find it genuinely hilarious he managed to win the presidency at the time that he did with the name that he has.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
Smart people have been praised for their intelligence for a long time. Everybody since their third grade teacher has probably told them how smart they are. Add in the success they get in their domain, and you believe it. They’re smart and can figure it out. And they actually are much more vulnerable simply because their ego won’t let them notice that something is off. In fact I would consider this an advantage for the less intelligent. They know how much they don’t understand about stuff they didn’t understand at school.
To be clear, I've also run into less intelligent people who commonly make bizarre mistakes, people so dumb they're actively destructive with their foolishness. And some of those people notice I'm kinda smart and try to play the know-it-all game with me, making up stuff that sounds vaguely plausible to sound like they know what they're talking about. My favorite was in a technology class where I wondered aloud why the Internet Protocol skipped from IPv4 to IPv6, and a guy I know is this type started telling me all about how big and important IPv5 was. I looked it up on my phone, and an IPv5 did exist, but it was a special-purpose experiment that was never in common use -- obviously not something this guy knew anything about. Instead of having curiosity with me, and going, "yeah, that sounds like a good question, we should find out!" he took it as an opportunity to fake insight.
When I first started meeting people like this, I found it very surprising, because it confused me why people would actively fake knowledge instead of being straightforward -- you know, "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt." But once I met a few, the pattern became clear; once someone starts being like this, you'll notice them doing it all the time. I usually let people get away with a few of these moments simply because I'm interpersonally trusting, but once I realize someone's doing it I lose all respect for them as sources of advice and I tend to assume anything that comes out of their mouth is just noise.
Maybe this is just something people do to me, or maybe they think I'm bullshitting all the time and they're just mirroring it, but long story short, it's not always the case that people who did poorly in school understand, or act in accordance with, their limitations. Dumb people are just as capable of intellectual overconfidence as smart people, especially when they believe it will ingratiate them with someone smarter than them. But someone who says, "I don't know -- but I'd like to find out!" presents intellectual curiosity and actually increases my perception of their intelligence.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
It's like how men are irrationally terrified of false rape accusations.
Don't forget irrationally terrified of being seen as a creep because they asked a woman out in the wrong way/in the wrong place.
Or women's fear that their date will turn out to be a creep. Or worse, a Trump supporter.
Something in the water supply's just trying to get men and women to fear each other. And what we fear we often end up resenting, even hating. Women are convinced that men have it easy and waste their privilege playing video games and jacking off while doing things to hurt women ("patriarchy theory"), while men are convinced that women have it easy and waste their privilege eating hot chip and lying putting on makeup and getting railed by Chads ("gynocentrism theory"). These two sides aren't completely symmetrical, and one may have a point in some connection where the other doesn't, but they do reflect growing resentment by normie men and women towards each other.
In that sense, it's no wonder so many people are going, "wow, it must be so much greener on the other side!" and gender-transitioning.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
People who are smart in one area aren't always smart in another, especially when values, tribes, and deep-set fears come into play. There are vanishingly few people I trust to provide level-headed insights into politics, even people I respect in other areas. It requires an extreme level of intellectual humility to look at such emotionally-fraught issues even-handedly -- something that, understandably, very smart and insightful people often struggle with.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
I have no idea what's going to happen. But I do think there's a real chance of a Harris blowout. Trump was underestimated in 2016, but the previous 8 years have not been kind to his reputation among low-information voters. The abortion debate and Harris's gender have joined revulsion to Donald Trump as factors polarizing a lot of female voters to the left. I suspect we're going to see unprecedented gender splits on the ballot.
Whether anyone likes it or not, Trump is uniquely polarizing, with 40% of the population loving him, 50% hating his guts, and 10% trying to figure out what to do. As someone who moved from column B to column C, I don't see how Trump gets over the hump of how many people believe he's deeply evil.
I'm going to vote for him for the first time ever, but if I had any money to put down, I'd bet on Harris.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
OK, now that we know some elites are bad and incompetent, who gets to decide when the public is owed an explanation? The elites themselves? The ones you just said are "hit or miss"? The Dalai Lama? Some Guru? The Bishop of Rome? Greta Thunberg?
The decision that was reached in the enlightenment is that the public does; the actions of elites who serve the public are accountable to the public. And I'm all ears for criticisms of the enlightenment, but you're coming right up against the very reasons people even wanted democratic rule in the first place.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
A better way to fix the Ivies would be to ban legacy admissions.
But really, that would just eliminate the Ivies, as the whole point of them is for the children of uber-elites to network with other children of uber-elites (and a few token minorities so the brochures don’t look too white) in the company of experts who can connect them to major industries. They’re not looking for smart people, specifically, they’re looking for high-IQ go-getters who are so type A that their type A-ness is literally more pronounced than their IQ. They’re not looking for nerds, they’re looking for chads. That’s why they cling insistently to “holistic admissions”, because it’s important to them that their admits aren’t just smart, but gifted in many other ways.
I would much rather we separate the finishing schools for elite children from our institutions of knowledge, but things are they way they are for the simple reason that knowledge isn’t power; power is knowledge. Everything is kayfabe and the humanities are word games, which is why the only fields who have major institutions that are looking for nerds lay in STEM, where “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
I think Elon’s just had a thing for the letter X (the unknown variable) since the nineties, when the original x.com failed.
Also, missed opportunity there for Elon Musk to have named the site 'Y.com' -- then he could have trademarked 'Yeeted'.
Y.com should be like Twitter, but only for biological males.
So Reddit should just buy Y.com.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
I'm now even more confused. He graduated from Liberty with a History/Theology degree? I'd expect someone with that background to sound much more like me than like whatever it is he sounds like. Graduating from Liberty with a degree in Theology and then down the line saying that not every human should be a Christian? Harvard Divinity I could understand, but Liberty?
Perhaps we're just looking at another one of those Christian-moralist-to-progressive-moralist conversions, like the VeggieTales guy. I certainly know some goody-two-shoes Southern Baptists who probably sounded like me 15 years ago but nowadays sound like progressive twitter. Maybe he started to see the limitations of his Liberty degree and swung the other way to try and challenge the low prestige.
It's too bad, I guess.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian,” said Luke Bauman, a Westerville resident. “It is the goal of LifeWise, tied closely with Project 2025, to dismantle public education from the inside out."
A "Westerville resident" said this? Just like a guy on the street?
"Hey, we're with this organization, do you have any thoughts on Westerville City Schools' policy that allows LifeWise to educate Christian children during school release time?"
"Oh, let me think about that for a moment. Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian..."
Clearly this was a public-relations type statement, it's incredibly disingenuous to attribute it to "random resident" as though this is just what some guy who lives in the community thinks.
But as an aside, I really don't know where the "Christian Nationalist" slur came from, particularly how it's been applied to just about anything Christian. I know there were some idiot influencers a few years ago talking about something like that, like requiring a religious test for public office or something, but c'mon people, this is not representative of the mainstream of Christianity in the US, even in the most Christian parts, which are Baptists who come from a long tradition of church-state separators. I guess the idea is something like, "These people are Christians, they're also nationalists, so huh! They're Christian nationalists!" But I don't understand the idea that mainstream Christians are fascists or something. They're not. It's your chill grandpa who reads bible stories to the grandkids, or your cousin who has a 'homestead'. Brownshirts these people are not.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
I seriously wonder if the bitter lessons of ca. 1800 to ca. 2200 will end up being around the power of nominally-materialist ideologies to mimic religious warfare and wreck society, just as the bitter lesson of ca. 1500 to ca. 1800 was the power of religious wars to wreck society. Perhaps we'll find our own treaty of Westphalia to resolve the bitter ideological conflicts of Communism v Capitalism, Fascism v Liberalism, Conservatism v Progressivism, Globalism v Nationalism... or maybe this just all ends in us nuking ourselves out of existence. I hope not.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
7mo ago
This, as well as a lot of the argument in this thread, can be explained simply by realizing that many people mistakenly confuse “introversion” with “social anxiety” (which typically goes along with awkwardness).
They aren’t the same. Though they can occur together, and often do, especially as emotional stability and extraversion are positively correlated.
I agree with this.
Even relatively feminine men will absolutely roast each other in male-only spaces. Playful teasing, joking boundary-pushing, and obviously your momma jokes are everywhere, when you get men together in a space that doesn't include women.
This is why Trump's "it was just locker room talk" defense for the pussy tape in 2016 seemed to work for him: that kind of horny bravado is just what men get up to with each other.
But when women come into the space, everything changes. Women very much seem to hate the idea that men alter their behavior when they come around. But they do. And the reason why men chill out when women come in isn't because they are ashamed of their behavior, or are trying to hide something. It's a mark of respect: they acknowledge that women aren't into it and find it discomfiting, and respect this preference by choosing not to engage in it around them. It's sort of like how I might use profanity while talking to my friends, but would never do so when visiting my mom.
I'm a big defender of male-only spaces and organizations, because we very much need for men to have an outlet to bond over this stuff. Bottling it up or refusing to give men the ability to bond with other men doesn't help -- in fact, it makes it more likely that guys will try to use it to bond with women.
And bonding with women over this stuff sometimes works! 'Negging', as a complaint, gets a lot of airtime. But there's a great deal of the phenomenon that's simply a part of how people flirt. Contrary to the popular interpretation, playful negging isn't about trying to genuinely hurt someone's self-esteem. What it does is create a sense of intimacy, by making statements that would be totally uncalled-for if made by a total stranger, and playfully dancing around the contradiction that the people are strangers. And it in fact presents a theoretical possibility of threat! But the point that's being made is that the man is so unwilling to pose a threat to the woman that the idea of him posing a threat to her is a big joke. He playfully insults because he's profoundly not interested in really insulting or threatening, and if it really is playful and there's chemistry, healthy, well-adjusted women enjoy the game. I have flirting level -100, so I'll refrain from giving an example.
This is fundamentally what men are doing with each other when they bond like this: they're accentuating the intimacy they feel for each other by demonstrating that they're so close and their bond is so tight, they can insult each other and engage in dominance behavior without any real threat. It's an indication that these men are so utterly far from threatening each other that even the concept of threatening each other is a massive joke that people find hilarious because of its implausibility. (This is the same reason why straight men engage in boundary-pushing claims of homosexuality -- they're so straight that even the concept of having sex with each other is an implausible joke. I presume this is one of those things that would really annoy a gay man if he happened to be present.)
The phrase I've seen to describe the differences between male and female bonding is that "men will insult your mother and have your back, women will tell you that you're beautiful and stab you in it." 'Toxic positivity', insofar as it exists, is mostly a phenomenon of female bonding styles being applied to broader social environments. 'Toxic masculinity', particularly the old complaints about angry gamer boys making puerile jokes, comes from these forms of male bonding being taken too far, and applied by skill-less idiots to environments of actual competition, or brought out in mixed company.
That's not to say that men can't engage in very positive, productive conversations with a lot of affection -- or that women can't be openly insulting. But there are differences in communication styles that reflect how men are theoretically threats to each other and to women for social power or attention, and this conceptual threat must be managed and minimized by close friends to the point of humor. The big problem is when this humor escapes the male-only and flirting contexts where it's effective, or is received poorly by people who don't want it or find it alienating.
If you think I lack for evidence for this just-so story, go look at the youtube comments for a male-oriented video and witness the "bro really took this too far," "least addicted gamer," "it's not that deep" comments, and then go look at a female-oriented video and witness the "OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL," "Dr. So-and-so is so warm and helpful with such a great bedside manner ," "awwwwwww Butter the cat is such a cutie" comments.
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