urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
This feels totally AI to me. And not just AI, this is ChatGPT. Especially the contrasting statements -- ChatGPT loves those. It's not a style. It's a fingerprint.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
28d ago
Yes, I’ve been to orthodox services.
And if we’re going to pedantically pick apart metaphors, most Latin churches these days don’t have an altar rail either.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
28d ago
I also heard he seems to have noped off to Hungary, but yeah, last time I checked in with him he said he was getting a divorce. I believe there was an argument about "whether the cross can be co-opted." But that's the last I heard of him.
While I really respect his struggles with Catholicism, and I know they were very personal for him (he said that a priest he was personally close with was credibly accused of sex abuse, which broke his trust in the whole institution), I also get the sense that they went full-steam-ahead into Orthodoxy as kind of a second option, the second-most attractive girl at the bar altar rail, and so there's a lot of trauma, conversion, and ideological flip-flopping involved in his personal journey, which reads to me more like desperation than divine ascent. I wonder if that just got to be too much for his wife, especially considering how famously repulsive Orthodoxy is to non-Orthodox women, something I've observed personally. He also just strikes me as quite a depressive, just a very moody and somber person whose view of life and the future is almost perfectly apocalyptic, and I can't imagine that makes a marriage easy to manage. When I think about Dreher, the overwhelming feeling is "sad." He doesn't feel like he's chasing the divine, he feels like he's running away from brokenness. Which is not a bad starting point, but far from anything that measures up to holy Benedict.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
I read it as: it's one spouse's duty to release the other's demons.
You should read it like this: It’s one spouse’s duty to help the other fulfill their sexual needs, so that they aren’t tempted to have sex outside the marriage. Millions of dead bedrooms, affairs, resentments, and divorces speak to the wisdom of this provision. If you hate the idea of a sexless marriage, like most people do, St. Paul is simply agreeing with you!
It’s true that Christianity places a high premium on celibacy. But the married have their calling and their vocation, which Paul, though he advises celibacy to those who will accept it, also praises in the highest terms, as an image of Christlike love. And the superiority of celibacy over marriage is also a provision confirmed by experience: not all wish for marriage, not all wish for the responsibility of a relationship. And where the celibate are not celebrated, they are vilified, rejected: see hatred directed towards spinsters, incels, communities not knowing what to do with single people with no interest in marriage, etc.
You can view the Christian approach to sex, particularly historically, as repression. You can view it that way, and even twist yourself into knots interpreting the holy text through the most uncharitable angle, rather than trying to grasp, with sincerity, what was meant and what is understood by it. You’re free to do so. But given what has happened — the conflicts, social upheaval, bitter divorces, mass loneliness, party culture, hookup culture that has resulted from unrestrained sexual norms — I would rather advise looking at Christian sexual norms as a bulwark against grave danger.
You can disagree, or you can even offer a more refined ethic that prizes sexual restraint without restricting sex to marriage, but what I often see is people criticizing Christian moderationism towards sex and offering as its alternative the spirit of the 60s, which is facing mass rejection because it holds up a carrot of free love and sexual pleasure, but gives few people what they actually want. St. Paul, by contrast, says: “you should love one another as yourself, and you should make it an important part of your life — even a duty! — to aid your spouse in fulfilling their sexual needs.” In what sense is this not wisdom?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
29d ago
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
29d ago
· Edited 29d ago
Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love.
Sure! But love is very rarely 'at first sight' and even more rarely 'at first sight' in a way that is totally requited. You have to have a base of initial attraction, interest, and liking for love to blossom. Seeing romance as something that just falls out of the sky and immediately demands passion from both sides is actually a big part of the problem -- it usually doesn't!
I'm as big an advocate for romantic love as can possibly be conceived, but I'm also a realist. Young people aren't falling in love not because they're "lecherous, materialistic creeps," but because they learn to silence the impulse based on frequent rejection or messaging that, as you do, tells them that "the worst thing she can say" isn't "no thanks," but "you're a creep!" As it turns out, people are responsive to operant conditioning and social messaging.
If I understand him correctly, @RandomRanger is talking about people not even getting to the stage where love can develop. That's the problem.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
People need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable.
No.
I disgree with you on veganism, but I don't go around calling you "vegan-brained."
I was giving reasons why people feel the way they do about cars, and instead of engaging with them seriously, you're name-calling. You can make the argument that cars are net-bad, but that would be a serious discussion that engages seriously with the value differences (for instance, the core of my post -- that people are more concerned about intentional than accidental violence) between you and the "car-brained" rather than calling them names. There's a serious balance to be struck, and I'm sympathetic to the needs of people who would prefer not to drive a car particularly in cities, but there are real, serious concerns people have about the security of public transit. Your post amounts to calling car drivers big babies whose concerns are entirely in their head, and totally disregarding their values and interests, and that strikes me as quite similar to the ad hominem attacks you were upset about earlier. Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them biased -- or wrong. (Doesn't make them right, either.)
I'm actually robustly pro-public-transit, and even sympathetic to the aims of ultimately reducing cars in cities. I just believe that the safety concerns about our cities are more real than you do -- we have a factual and values disagreement, and we should be able to discuss them reasonably without one side accusing the other of being insane, or stupid. I'm not pro-car -- I'm anti-crime, and pro-autonomy. Perhaps I didn't communicate that effectively enough.
On the topic of this being an AAQC -- I would agree this wasn't really one of my better posts; I actually think my response to you was a much better reflection of my values than this one, though I believe the best motte posts are those that offer a take that reveals what a worldview looks like from the inside, as I believe this one does. It's definitely true that my AAQCs have leaned towards the moments where I'm more partisan, or firmly opinionated, and less where I'm diplomatic or synthesizing, which is a fair critique of the AAQC system.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"?
This is probably just noise, lizardman's constant.
But there is a segment of evangelicals who don't identify with the "Christian" label, as silly as it may sound. When I was growing up, the cool thing to be was "a Christ follower" not "a Christian." The best steelman for the phrase is that it stresses the humility of the speaker and not their moral authority -- but a more realistic interpretation is that it served as a means of trying to escape stigma against Christianity in a world increasingly neutral, if not hostile, towards the Christian faith. "I'm not like those judgmental Christians."
In the seeker-sensitive movement, there was a big shift towards that kind of instrumental humility, where everyone's seen as -- to give you a direct sermon quote, no I'm not kidding -- "just trying to figure out this whole Jesus thing." Essentially the main source of growth for many, if not most, non-denominational megachurches is from people with some level of Christian belief but who had negative experiences in smaller churches in the past. Distancing from the "Christian" term serves as a signal of "we're not like those judgy people who gave you dirty looks for being divorced or having a shoulder tattoo." In other words -- it's memetically fit, in a certain context.
This group is also thoroughly evangelical, though unreflectively, without reference to the alternatives. If you tell them many Presbyterians don't believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God or that Episcopal bishops have openly doubted the resurrection of Christ, they struggle to believe you (I've done it). The idea that following Jesus is separable from Biblical inspiration wouldn't even strike them as possible, just like the practice of infant Baptism is a bizarre medieval Catholic innovation and not also the practice of many Protestant churches. In this culture "I'm a Christ follower not a Christian" can feel as subversive as 18th-century Deism, though my own experience is that the internet has taken a sledgehammer to that sort of monoculture and most with doubts or institutional grievances run straight for atheism.
In particular, the "Jesus was just a heckin' good guy who wanted everyone to love each other, he would have been a big fan of gay marriage" seems to be the apostatized, post-Obergefell evolution of the original concept. And many evangelicals even from traditional backgrounds are very suceptible to it, because they often have no grounding in the broader historical and theological place of their tradition and thus have no antibodies to counterarguments. Especially ones that appeal to concerns about "holier than thou" attitudes and Christian judgmentalism (because the Gospel is reduced to non-judgment instead of right-judgment).
There are also the "all the churches are money laundering fronts who spend all their money on fancy sound systems, my church is my household" prepper dad energy folks, at the very epicenter of Scots-Irish obstinance and skepticism of authority. These people feel a firm connection to Christian culture (though mostly in a reactionary way) and would affirm Biblical inspiration if you asked them, though they couldn't give you a verse any longer than a bumper sticker. Yes, this is incoherent.
It's a fairly small group, and the general tenor of American Christianity in recent years is toward greater traditionalism -- I know southern baptists who are endorsing structured liturgical prayer -- but if someone told me "the Bible is the literal Word of God, but I'm not like those Christians," well, this is what pops into my head.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Most of the "good" culture war topics (Dobbs, immigrants, LGBT, gun rights, free speech issues, climate change, Gaza) which are really toxic are not about "how should we divide money between interest groups?" It is always that there are conflicting underlying principles by the different participants.
I don't agree with this -- the culture war is absolutely about dividing power between interest groups. At its very core! I think you saw the reference to pensions and got sidetracked by economic theory, which currently mostly resides in the "boring policy discussions" category because opposition to liberal free trade has few major proponents among the elite.
But think about Dobbs -- like RandomRanger says, it's ultimately about power. In the feminist formulation -- what they actually say themselves -- abortion is about "a woman's power to control her own body." Stripping away the philosophy of it, the conservative viewpoint is that the state has the power to stop abortions. The interest groups are "women who don't want to bear a child" and "children who are not yet born."
Immigration? Of course that's about the division of power between interest groups! What should a native's labor be worth -- that's about relative power and status. What should the language people speak be -- that's about the power of different linguistic groups, and particularly of monolinguals vs multilinguals. Should there be a pathway to citizenship? Voting rights? That's literally about dividing power between interest groups, between constituencies!
LGBT? Again, division of power between interest groups. Should the religious baker have to bake the gay wedding cake? What are the relative powers of the LGB and the T -- should lesbians be required to accomodate transwomen?
Gun rights? Division of power between interest groups. What is the relative importance of people's desire to own a gun and people's desire not to live in a society that has many guns? How do random acts of mass gun violence -- sometimes perpetrated by people with little to no background that would impede their ability to legally buy a gun -- affect this calculation? What are the rights of mentally ill people to self defense? What are the rights of society to corral others' right to self defense for its own safety?
Freedom of speech? You mean the issue where the deciding factor for most people is "my friends can speak all they want and my enemies should keep their dirty mouths shut?" The issue where the right says "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" and the left says "criticism of immigration is racism"? Where "hate speech" is offensive and defamatory statements made against racial groups -- except white people, because they deserve it? (And don't exist, by the way: "white people have no culture." This is not hate speech.)
Climate change? The issue where a leading activist said, to a crowd of older politicians, "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words?" Where the young activists feel energized because they believe baby boomers stole a healthy planet from them to lower gas prices? Where the rich jet-setters can fly all over the world announcing the Green Gospel but vacations for the hoi polloi are ecological sins? That's not about the division of power between interest groups?
Gaza? Really? The issue where if you support one side you're calling for Shoah 2.0, and if you support the other you want to firebomb children? The issue that's about, quite literally, two interest groups who both want to live on the same territory? The issue where both sides of the conflict engage in war crimes that endanger or hide behind civilians, but both sides of the debate plug their ears to the horror of the whole thing because My Side Is Oppressed? Isn't that the interest-group-power-struggle par excellence?
I know you're sincere in what you say. And I admire the focus on conflicting principles -- there are indeed a lot of those. But your thesis about the culture war strikes me as precisely wrong. The culture war default, and its cause, is conflict theory. Maybe it's not always about money. But it's definitely about power.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
satirized by the right as "do not cum"
This wasn’t a satirization — it was just a very silly meme, especially when juxtaposed with Trump saying “I’m gonna cum… woooah.” (And then brought to new levels of hilarious with “oh yeah, he did score!” from Boris Johnson, and “we must cum together” from Bernie Sanders.)
Obviously I don’t have statistics, but I’m guessing this was a meme that a fairly broad (if generally male) segment of the population found funny.
Not every joke about a thing a politician says is a form of political speech.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
Power will always go to those who want to seize it, while it exists.
I'm certainly no libertarian, but isn't this the essence of libertarianism -- that power is so seductive and so oppressive that the only way to deal with its abuse is to limit it to just what's absolutely necessary, so there's less power to abuse? It seems to me like you're just growing in your convictions rather than having to learn a hard lesson.
I believe the libertarian solution to "people are abusing the power of the public library" is something like "abolish the public library." (This is also one of the reasons I think the American right and left are closer to each other in terms of general views on liberty than they think -- the right-wing solution to corrupt US government agencies is to abolish them, the left-wing solution to corrupt police departments is to abolish defund them.)
(I may have misunderstood you, and you were saying that your "cold dead libertarian heart" became that way because of this lesson, rather than saying that it startled you and you had to figure out how to square it with your libertarianism. If so, disregard.)
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Your first line reminds me of a famous political speech, which seems oddly relevant to the topic at hand:
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
(Not trying to make an argument here, I just had a memory lightbulb light up and I thought it was funny.)
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
It is unclear what the cardinals will do about it- his cartoonish corruption was a scandal for Pope Francis in his pontificate, so it's not like he's popular, but who's going to actually deal with him is unclear.
This prompts an interesting question for me -- who's actually in charge? If some sort of major crisis happens, or some terrorist incident happens that disrupts the conclave, or something especially dire, who coordinates the response? Who is empowered to make sure things run properly?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
It feels like this is the second or third time just this week you’ve presented an argument, had that argument horribly mangled and one element of it (that sounds bad if you don’t pay attention to its place in your argument) blown up into the entirety of your point, and then been accused of being evil and immoral on the basis of that grievous misinterpretation of your point. For what it’s worth, I think you’ve made some good arguments lately (even if I don’t always agree with them) and I encourage you to stay the course.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I fully agree with this. I’m a zoomer, and many of my friends, including me, waited a long time to get drivers licenses, or be independent, or live outside the childhood home, etc. Seeing this as entirely or even mostly the result of restrictions put on by parents just doesn’t reflect what I’ve seen in my generation — it was voluntary, not imposed. The internet supplied enough pleasure to make leaving the house feel like a chore rather than an exciting prospect.
I think older generations find this hard to understand — why don’t you want to rebel? — which means that it’s easy to misattribute it to rules. I don’t doubt that this has had an effect. Maybe more so on gen alpha, I don’t know. But the internet has been for my generation what the car was for older ones — it’s the means of freedom and exploration. Why go through all the trouble of driving when the glass Skinner box gives you all the pleasure you could ever want?
It just so happens that the freedom and exploration it offers doesn’t actually make people connected to others.
That, rather than anything boomers did or conservatives did or geotracking did or the woke did, is the cause of stunted interpersonal development among the younger generations. We didn’t get rid of the sex and drugs and rock and roll but keep the social connections — which is what social conservatives wanted — we got rid of the social connections, which got rid of the sex and drugs and rock and roll. That the kids are unhappy in a situation where the sex and drugs are gone doesn’t say a single thing about whether social conservatives were right — the variables aren’t controlled. And the social conservatives definitely didn’t get what they want.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Sure. Fully agree that a positive vision is needed. But I disagree strongly that social conservatives didn’t have one, or that they aimed entirely to eliminate vice rather than supply virtue. That’s a caricature that could only be written by their enemies.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
This is simple to understand: it’s because the reason the kids are having less sex and doing less drugs is that they’re less healthy, socially connected, and happy — not because they’re following the social conservative model of being healthy, socially connected, and happy. The ideology of social conservatives is not “the kids must do less drugs, and I don’t care about anything else.”
We could solve drug abuse by just shooting anyone who’s addicted to drugs, but somehow I don’t expect that this would make anyone very happy.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I'm glad it resonated!
If you're the sort of person who wears your heart on your sleeve (as I am), then it can be very easy and tempting to pour yourself out in the environments you find yourself, like the internet. That can be incredibly useful, and powerful, and there have been times when exposing some of my most intense concerns to internet discussion has made my life better. But there have also been many times where it's made it worse.
I always like to remember the parable of Jesus where he says "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." If your treasure is in internet respect, then internet disrespect will be like wounds to the heart. And the more you invest yourself in internet discussions, the more of yourself you share, the more you're putting your treasure there.
While sometimes I enjoy internet discussions and even arguments, I've come to realize they're incredibly limited, and need to be entered into and continued carefully. I've started and chosen not to post more posts than I've ever published, because I realized the post would be fruitless, or lead to unnecessary dispute, or was excessively disagreeable, or simply would expose a vulnerability that shouldn't be exposed to the internet.
I think older nettizens find it easy to create a barrier between the internet and real life, understanding the boundaries appropriate to both. In particular, the old-school attitude of the net (which the motte participates in in some ways) was always that disagreeableness was inevitable and everything was under debate rules.
And under that framework, you shouldn't expose a weakness in your worldview any more than your defense attorney should make an argument for the prosecution. In part this represented the initial population of the internet -- male, educated, systems-oriented, academic. And in part it represents the reality that the internet is simply a cacophony of strangers. I don't know you. You don't know me. We have no relationship, no ties, I could insult you and swear death and devastation on you, and unless I crossed a legal boundary so severely that it got the real police involved, this would have no impact at all on my life outside of the net. I might get banned, but what is a ban? Nothing.
I'm not sure how old you are. I'm fairly young. Young enough that the internet has been real life for about as long as I've been active on it. But old enough to find online dating new-fangled, fr fr. (Did I use that correctly?) I think younger generations are having to re-learn the wisdom that the net is volatile and operates under debate rules. It's an important lesson. And like the law -- anything you say can and will be used against you, and the consequences for the misuse of that power are minimal.
Like everything, the internet is about risk vs reward. That's different for everyone. But hopefully, from the discomfort of seeing just how freely personal attacks flow on the internet, you can help yourself judge where the risk-benefit line stands for you. It obviously varies by context. But my personal view is that the places where discussing important aspects of your worldview, especially ones you're not sure about, has benefit outweighing risk is almost 0. But that's for you to decide. And I wish the best for you in deciding it.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I apologize for my irritated tone, I just hate when there are such beneficial policies that have been tried and tested in lots of other places, that get shot down for stupid reasons in the US because they threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you.
I agree with you that, in a vaccum, limited cars in cities would be fantastic. I love the way European villages work. I think, as an ideal, cities with strong public transportation and limited congestion are a great place to live. In theory, I'm rah-rah urbanism.
But no discussion of transportation and suburbanization in the US can happen without a co-equal discussion about crime and safety.
The reason Americans cling to their cars and their commutes is simple: the cities are not safe. I personally know people who lived the urbanist dream, living downtown in a city, and then fled to the suburbs because they watched a man die from a gunshot out their window. I've ridden the train and had to make decisions about how to deal with a clearly psychotic man with no understanding of reality, and thus posed a real danger to himself and the people around him. I've seen and walked by the tent cities. I've seen, with my own eyes, the fentanyl zombies whose presence in our greatest cities can be described only as seriously-discomfiting, as human urban blight, as the broken windows of man that reveals and invites immense public disorder and ugliness. I've read the crime stats.
The right perceives this danger profoundly and seriously, and it shapes many of their political priorities, from gun rights to car rights. They want the ability to live without fear, while still being able to have access to the centers of economic activity that are our cities. Having a car means having a physical, metal, lockable bubble that separates you from exterior threats, while being able to easily and autonomously navigate yourself out of the urban center without having to share a means of transportation with people who may mean you harm.
Your post seems to reveal that your concerns about cars are the mirror image of conservative concerns about crime: you see them as dangerous to public safety, and ugly. And you're not wrong! I have serious and real concerns about the size of our vehicles and the number and behavior of them in cities.
But the American right has judged that the danger to them from automobiles -- which indeed is massive, grave, and serious -- is less important to them than the massive, grave, and serious risk posed to them by urban crime and disorder. They would rather be hurt accidentially by a driver than intentionally by a robber. You can find this wrong, or seriously misguided, or silly, but nevertheless it means that their political views on the issue are shaped by actual concerns about the world rather than "advanced car-brain virus." It means that you might have to engage with their concerns realistically, and maybe make concessions, rather than accusing them of harboring a mental parasite. It's much easier to just handwave them away, just as it's much easier for the right to say that anyone with concerns about the Trump administration has a terminal case of TDS.
The urban problems in the US are mostly US-specific, shaped by US concerns. For that reason, your opponents reject that these are beneficial policies based on being tried and tested in other places. The US is not other places, and has unique problems. The US is not Europe, as my liberal friends delight in reminding me.
Left-wingers want to get the cars out of the city, and right-wingers want to get the crime out of the cities. Both have their ebb and flow, as one side of the argument gains more power, but the Democratic strongholds in most US cities ensures that things flow mostly in one direction.
For that reason, Republicans will cling to their cars as a fundamental part of their identity, because it's the only thing that secures them the ability to participate in the economic activity of society while permitting them and their families to live in the suburbs, where they can have greater security for their possessions and families. And where they can offer to their children a chance at an education in a school where bullies and criminals are disciplined, and children aren't smoking weed in the bathrooms -- a real set of concerns expressed by a family who left Oregon to move to the rural, delapidated town in flyover country where my girlfriend grew up. We're actually at the point where it's safer and better for your children to live in bumfuck nowhere than in our most prominent states.
If liberals want conservatives to be hands-off and support restrictions on car culture, the first thing to do is to clean up the cities and make them temples of safety, security, and prosperity. What is needed is to support policies that arrest, convict, and incarcerate (for long periods) drug addicts, criminals, and other beacons of public disorder. In other words, to stop opposing policies that "threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars criminals that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you." Once we keep people who intentionally do harm out of our cities, then we can talk about keeping machines that accidentially do harm out of them.
But until that day: "haha car go vroom vroom."
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
This is an incredibly condescending post that misunderstands the nuanced point about social incentives that's being made by FCfromSSC. In particular, you're responding to a claim that even the Republican-appointed judges are shaped in their judicial philosophy by the social mileu and ideological influence of Democrats in positions of cultural authority, like the mainstream media, by simply restating that they're Republican-appointed. You're not even engaging with his point!
You're making an argument from authority, and FCfromSSC is saying that the authorities themselves are compromised, or driven by social and ideological incentives and beliefs he disagrees with. He's saying the Pope is the antichrist, and you're quoting him from the first council of the Vatican.
That suggests to me that you're not engaging with him in good faith. He knows what you're saying. Your argument, and the constitutional provision you're posting, are within his grasp. He doesn't need a refresher on the constitution any more than a Catholic who doesn't believe in God needs a refresher on ecumenical councils. You're quoting the Bible to an atheist.
You can disagree with his point, and you can even make strong arguments against it, many of which I might disagree with. But to actually answer it substantively, you'll have to look at the belief systems of the actors in question, their overall judicial philosophies, their social environments, their incentives. You'd have to address the point.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
And when you read that comment, inside your brain you know that it is bait, and more importantly you know you are right, that's why you argued in the first place.
I think this is actually the crux of the issue -- I can't speak for @thejdizzler, but the bait that hurts the most is the bait that appeals to areas where you're not certain you're right. Like @Southkraut says, ad hominems have their appeal because they bypass any attempt at actually engaging with the issue substantively. The intent is to make someone doubt their judgment, not by criticizing the judgment itself, but by imposing doubt on their ability to make a judgment at all. If that hits at the right place at the right time, it can hit a sore spot, where someone already doubts their ability to make a judgment or even fears that they've made a dangerously wrongheaded one.
Obviously the solution is to find a firm footing for yourself and place some trust in your own judgment, but that can be very hard, especially when the issue in question is as intense, emotionally charged, and hard to answer as the sorts of questions that are summoned by the culture war. That's why you see so many ad hominems that target people's relationship with the opposite sex -- relationship length and satisfaction is cratering, sexual mores seem to change by the hour, and there's a sense that the bottom has fallen out of all the stable norms that allowed people to understand themselves as good and worthy partners. That moral vaccum enables malicious actors to exploit uncertainty by claiming the 100% guaranteed, certified, free range moral high ground, a kind of moral arbitrage in a market that's not sure what the price is. There are whole twitter threads now where progressive and conservative men shout slurs at each other, both implying that their ideologies are so pathetic that they alone make them repulsive to women. ("Incel!" "Cuck!")
I also get the sense that jdizzler is pretty agreeable, and agreeable people find it very hard to stomach people not liking them for reasons totally outside their control because of their drive for social harmony. There are also a lot of people who don't so much argue as think out loud, and if someone's earnest thinking-out-loud prompts an ad hominem, that can be pretty destabilizing, like kicking someone when they're trying to get up.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I hate both extremes of the obesity conversation. One extreme -- of which there are examples -- is people who just flat out hate fat people, hate looking at them, have no compassion or understanding of any obstacles that have kept them in that state, and desire to shame and bully them for its own sake. I recall one motte user said something like, "people don't like fat people, don't want to be around them, and don't want to be friends with them."
I used to hold the view that you do, that nobody held the extreme form the obesity activists complain about. But when that post happened, I had to update in their direction. I had to update in the same way that seeing tumblrinaction posts that went "KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN." forced me to update my views on feminism, and started my turn from feminist-sympathetic to anti-feminist. There are certainly some people who hate the obese enough to segregate away from them.
The other extreme, of course, says that CICO is wrong not only as the sole guidance, but as the biochemical explanation of what's going on at a basic level. That's obviously false.
But I'm convinced there are more in the anti-obese extreme than in the pro-obese extreme, which is why I consider myself a moderate anti-fat-stigma person. Not in the sense that I believe being fat is good or healthy, but in the sense that I believe the shaming doesn't do the job, and just makes a bad situation worse, isolating people who need support rather than helping them take agency and affect their choices in whatever ways they can.
Health positivity, and not fat shaming, is the way to go. We should be promoting healthy, delicious meals that provide balanced nutrition, and socially boosting drinks that aren't drenched in sugar while providing the social and psychological appeal soda has. (Right now, soda is one of the only beverages you can get everywhere at a consistent quality. That should change.) Insofar as the fat activists oppose that, I oppose them.
The point is that people's desire for the obese to lose weight should be based in a concern for their health and a desire to see them live long, healthy lives, not from an aesthetic revulsion or contempt. The point of a lot of the discussion about set points is to encourage the view that "but for the grace of God go I."
The reality is that the cause of the obesity crisis is directly related to sedentary lifestyles, easily available cheap, calorie-dense food, and more sweets on store shelves than in a Wonka factory. They're social factors. We've put the human organism in an environment where our instincts -- like craving sweet fruit, which is relatively uncommon and seasonal in nature, or prizing meat, which was always the result of a bit of cleverness or a bit of strength -- backfire on us. What was once rare, and thus craved and hoarded, is now commonplace. And so like a dragon in a treasure vault, we hoard and we hoard. We're built for an environment where the most rewarding food takes the most work, but we live in a world of convenience foods and candy. Of course many people are going to lose control! (I believe the same about pornography. It should not be possible for millions of strangers to see Belle Delphine's vagina.)
The solution has to be social changes -- I think liberals are right and car culture is a big problem -- coupled with regulation, and medical marvels that help shift the needed willpower into a range more people have, as we're seeing now. But the big problem is that people's emotions, aesthetics, and experiences are getting mixed up with the data, and it seems impossible to talk about the ability of personal choices to improve health without getting called 'fatphobic', or to talk about the real and enduring social, biological, and psychological barriers that make it hard for many people to use willpower to control the problem without getting accused of using 'fatty logic'.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
A car is a system.
Dreher has always struck me as the kind of guy who desperately needs to stop reading the news, but can't help himself. There's something very tragic about a guy who wrote a book about setting up islands of peace away from the mess of the world, but whose output is mostly hot takes on current events.
More options
Context Copy link