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.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
I took a look at politicalcompassmemes on reddit, and even they are going insane. Usually there's a mix of views and a lot of sanity, but the comments seem to be 3/4 people saying it's obvious he did a Nazi salute and people are going to concentration camps. I knew reddit hated Elon Musk, but this is something else.
When the ADL is telling people to chill out about the Nazi comparisons, perhaps people should listen.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Alternatively, they looked at the full context and are reassured that Elon Musk's intent was not what the memes are suggesting.
I realize that saying activists are sometimes sensible is unpopular, but this should be a "thank goodness, my opponents aren't as bad as I thought" moment.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Someone can be exuberant and joyful while also being awkward; people of goodwill extend generosity of spirit to people like this and just say they're being joyful.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
The official speech was a teleprompter speech, was pre-written, and as usual Trump hated every second of giving it.
The 2.0 speech was largely impromptu, involved Trump talking from his head, and had his actual energy.
Trump is an engaging off-the-cuff speaker, and a terrible, terrible speech reader. And he knows this, which is why he hates pre-written speeches.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Could be lying, but I don't believe she is.
This certainly makes the complaints that she's 'mansplaining' quite hilarious!
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Watching Biden during the innaguration, I felt bad for him. He looks terrible.
There's no way this man has been running the country. I'm just glad he's out -- for his sake -- so his wife and his son and his handlers can no longer pour piss on his reputation in his name. Watching him leave the ceremony, I just wanted to give him a hug. May God have mercy on him, and may his sickness and his humiliation in public life be unto him a participation in cross of Christ, a call to repentance that leads to eternal life.
Oddly, I had a dream last night: that in his final speech Biden closed by saying something like I "resign myself," or I "recuse myself" or I "deny myself" or something like that. The man was a senator forever, and the VP to a president popular with his party and a large segment of the country; now his reputation will forever be that of a sick old man pushed out by his own party and his own president.
He could have retired after Obama, and just coasted on the reputation his association with Obama gave him. But politicians are like TV shows: they run until they're cancelled, not until they're finished. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword, and he who lives seeking power will be destroyed by power.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Therefore, it would be inappropriate to expect them to form an opinion on constitutional matters or to provide historical examples for judicial proceedings.
Wow, “trust the experts” applied to the literal law. How (D)emocratic!
Let’s just abolish the whole “representation” thing if our legislators are going to be this dense.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Thank you for the explanation, I was extremely confused by what was going on here.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Oh, absolutely. But it doesn’t have the overriding reputation among zoomers that this is all that’s there the way instagram does.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
And zoomers think TikTok is fun and Instagram is for hot girls™ to post alluring images.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Ok, challenge question: Indians?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Women don't deal well with outright rejection as a rule of thumb, since their conception of sex is 'I am the gatekeeper and at any time the rapacious male presence will go through there'. If they open the proverbial gate and the rapacious hordes shrug and defer from entering, egodeath ensues.
You might think this would give women more empathy for how rejection feels for men, but of course it doesn't, in most cases. Though IME women who have dealt with romantic rejection are more likely to be sympathetic towards lonely men. So this is perhaps a case of the necessary experiences not being experienced.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
What does the Bible actually command about spending your own time in service of the poor?
It says that it's a sign of predestination to salvation (Matt 25):
Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
And what do white people like?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
They're common, but still nerdy -- it's explicitly a subculture that's into them, even if it's a big one. I simply don't see how nerddom has been destroyed, I just believe we're dealing with a dark-matter-parallel-universe thing where Motte users are profoundly and disproportionately male, tech-adjacent, and West-Coastal.
Despite a thousand attempts to erase or abolish the fact, nerdery leans male, and in general the women into it (as well as the men) are... a little out there, typically pretty 'alt', unlikely to be the "popular girls." I expect talking about your interest in Dungeons and Dragons to be a net-negative on Tinder, for example. And what is mainstream is defined by what the hot girls think is cool to be into, sorry.
Gaming is a different story, but it depends on the game. Sports games are as mainstream as sports. Complex CRPGs are still wildly nerdy. Some popular games are in the middle, like Assassins Creed (leans mainstream) and The Witcher (leans nerdy). Minecraft is a kid's game now.
Go talk to the frat boys and the sorority sisters about "fantasy dice games", and if they're into it, I'll concede the point.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I don't understand why it was Starbucks workers, whose work, frankly, seems not that demanding, and not Amazon workers or McDonald's workers or Walmart workers or Target workers who unionized. It feels like a gentrified unionization. I mean, their logo is a clenched fist holding a starbucks cup. That just feels insulting to the generations of burly, hardworking men who worked with tools and fought against actual dangerous conditions by unionizing.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
but Germans voted in Hitler
Did they? My understanding was that the Nazis got much less than a majority, but the votes led to a plurality Nazi bloc in the legislature, and in the hopes of throwing them a bone in order to control them and assuage street violence, the President offered the chancellorship to Hitler as part of a theoretical pseudo-coalition. Then Hitler used the chancellorship to orchestrate extraconstitutional "emergency" power-grabs after the Reichstag fire, enabled through threats of violence to Reichstag members.
This would of course not be the last time someone thought "let's just give Adolf what he wants to satisfy him." But I would not describe what happened as "the German people decisively voted that they wanted the Nazis to have full control over society and Hitler to be a dictator." It's much more like a large group of Germans, some out of passionate love for Nazism and some out of desperation amid economic crisis, voted for the Nazi party, and then they used the first tiny, slight grip on power to establish a dictatorship through violence.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I believe you, but this is counterintuitive to me and I really want some theories about why it happens that way. Simply college statistics? Or do women believe they have more to gain from moving than men do?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
The choice has largely been engineered out of my environment.
I'm not so sure this is true.
I don't use Instagram, I don't use X, I don't use Snapchat, I quit Facebook a few years ago, I have never installed TikTok. Facebook is the one I miss the most, as it's an easy way to access information on small businesses, and Messenger is an easy way to keep in touch with people you know in real life. WhatsApp is similarly useful outside of the US. But I have no regrets over my abstinence from the other platforms.
I do use YouTube, but not because anyone has engineered me to use it -- I just get net value out of it, and rarely watch shorts.
So I don't see why you'd say that these addictive apps are required. Sure, you won't be able to participate in "the so called town squares of the digital age." But in almost all cases, the actual net value of participating in the so-called town squares is negative. I can confidently predict that you will accomplish nothing of true value on X unless you're profoundly lucky, and even then the harm will exceed the benefit. Your voice will be drowned out by a billion other voices, all nonsensical, and your greatest triumphs will be forgotten in an instant.
There are absolutely choices that have been realistically taken away by the environment, like not having a smartphone or not reading messages on the go. There may also be careers where some level of networking online is necessary. But none of that requires anyone to use Instagram or TikTok or X, unless you are a social media manager. And the job of a social media manager is emphatically not to watch shorts, any more than the job of a bartender is to drink alcohol.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
That's hilarious. It's like paying protection money.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
The real challenge would be finding a woman who doesn't want you reading Harry Potter to her children.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
I've read numerous books and articles on depression, and the best explanation I've found wasn't that it was a chemical imbalance, or a lack of daylight or physical exertion. It's that depression is a natural reaction to the repeated failure to achieve a goal.
In the literature, this is called the "behavioral theory of depression" and it's supported by studies that suggest the behavioral components of psychotherapy -- like looking at maladaptive behaviors, setting goals, seeing how things that are satisfying in the short term actually distract from things that are more important in the long term -- are equally as effective as therapy with cognitive components. I tend to agree with this view, although daylight, physical exertion, and sometimes, yes, even thoughts can play a role. The "chemical imbalance" theory is obviously silly, but I would note that each person has a different tendency towards depressed states that has significant genetic factors, so obviously something biochemical has an influence.
I conceptualize depression as a "stuck" state, like a program trapped in a loop. Like you said, lots of things can "unstick" someone from that state: behavioral changes, deliberate changes in thought, removing yourself from an environmental condition that's causing stress, but also tweaking neurotransmitters or even just a shift in mindset from "I'm stuck" to "I'm going to be unstuck" can be enough to somehow break the cycle. To me, this explains why antidepressants work miracles for some people while doing little if anything for others; I think of antidepressants as "shake up the neurotransmitters" pills, and like a vending machine, sometimes a little percussive maintanence makes things work again -- and sometimes not. In particular, the blunting caused by antidepressants appears to help anxious people, and reducing someone's anxiety slightly might be enough to unstick them from the stuck state and get them moving again.
All of our treatments for depression are just varied ways of trying to shake things up enough that a patient will happen to become unstuck and fall into a positive feedback loop. IMO, that's why all forms of psychotherapy work about the same -- just for different people -- because we know the stuck state can exist but there's no agreement on what's actually going on psychologically or biochemically. Like you argue, it may be that depression is adaptive, but that modern lifestyles make it more likely to occur than is adaptive. It wouldn't be the first time!
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
For starters, I don't know what kind of sexism they've been teaching you in the UK, but the kind of sexism I know would have me slap that girl in the face, and drag her back home kicking and screaming, even if the parents are abusive alcoholics. As for classism, it's supposed to come with some amount of noblesse oblige.
Both of these are pretty high-rent versions of sexism and classism. It seems to me you hold to very principled beliefs that your outgroup often describes as sexism and classism, such that when the real deal, the big salami, the whole enchilada, the motte-of-mottes, appears, your instinct is to insist that it's not real. Are you sure that UK beat cops have such principled views?
In particular, noblesse oblige strikes me as similar to "I treat my slaves very well, thank you" -- a rhetorical cope, a play pretend, an attempt at justifying power by arguing it's wielded appropriately. Whenever someone makes reference to noblesse oblige with one side of their mouth, they typically talk about "miserable wastes of human garbage" with the other. I'm not sure there's ever been a society where the elite holistically believed it had obligations to the lower classes while retaining basic human respect and compassion for them.
I don't have a strong opinion on the Rotherham issue, though I do abhor all the crimes that happened as any feeling person would. But it appears like you're intent on pinning blame squarely on the outgroup and attributing it to outgroup beliefs, without considering whether parts of the ingroup or ingroup beliefs could have contributed to the neglect that happened. Is it really out of the question that police beliefs in underclass girls being incorrigible sluts contributed to their actions?
Just from what I've skimmed of this discussion, it seems to me you can believe the findings of the report while also opposing the ways in which left-wingers contributed to it. In fact, there's a possible right-wing interpretation in there: the police were so jaded because they were dealing with an underclass community incredibly neglectful of their children and unconcerned for their basic welfare, such that even "drag[ging] her back home kicking and screaming" wouldn't have even done anything. This speaks to the need for strong family values, no?
And then, there were men from a cultural background that influenced them to see these neglected girls as prey for the taking. The system wasn't set up, nor were police prepared, to deal with criminals so depraved that this would even occur to them as a good choice of action. This speaks to the cultural incompatibility of this culture with Western values, no?
My partner makes this case regarding how criminal justice in the US deals with psychopaths and serial rapists: our justice system is designed for a far more culturally and morally homogenous society than what we have, and so even our tough-on-crime advocates often pursue shorter and less effective penalties than what someone designing a new system from the ground up for our society as it stands might choose. Our policing is built for peaceful towns where a murder is a once-in-a-decade event, but our societies are far more violent than that. Perhaps it isn't possible to police the Anglosphere in a first-world way. And once we start considering non-first-world methods... we go down the deep, dark rabbit hole of classism and sexism pretty quickly.
In a sense, that's what's happened with the UK police: the utter depravity and cultural incompatibility of these rapists and the hopelessness of these girls' cases in the face of their parents' total indifference was so shocking, so incomprehensible, so outside of what the UK's "policing by consent" system was intended to deal with, that all their instincts towards a rigorous pursuit of justice shut down, and they had to find some way in which it was the girl's fault. Perhaps this happened for the same reasons that feminists are often driven to find some way in which the suffering of struggling men is their own fault: the need for a just world where the ingroup is nothing but good and the outgroup is nothing but bad. If nothing can be done, then it's psychologically much easier to say that nothing wrong is happening. After all, I treat my slaves well.
It seems to me that the left and the right often agree on what the problem is, but differ profoundly in their understanding of the causes of that problem, and moreover the solutions that would fix it. The Rotherham scandal strikes me as a situation where both the left and the right accurately perceive different areas of the problem, but stubbornly refuse to acknowledge their opponents' points because that might involve serious reconsideration of one's own worldview.
Even if their analysis is dead wrong, my opponents very often have different experiences from me, and thus perceive different things in the world, even if "seeing, they do not see" and "hearing, they do not hear" -- nor do they understand. It's because of this belief that I value discussion spaces like this.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4mo ago
Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.
I think you missed the other possibility: that many people who come out hot are trolls deliberately trying to rile people up. I’ve seen people clearly trying to do this with both left and right wing personae. We have a strange overlap with rdrama, after all. I don’t get it, but some people love that kind of thing.
I don’t doubt some are sincere, but I doubt most ever intend to engage on any level other than useless mockery and I would argue that engaging with them as though they have pro social intentions is a waste of everyone’s time and feeds the trolls, like trying to deter violent assaults with a counseling session. There are new posters who have the ability to make a good argument but just need a little guidance in following the rules, but posters like OP clearly aren’t that.
Yeah, and it's not showing up in my mainstream news feeds -- it's only a social media thing, especially on reddit. The news is talking about the actual things Trump has been doing.
It's a good reminder that reddit has a ubiquitous userbase, particularly in terms of age, and you won't find much real political diversity there, even in places that claim to have it (the conservative sub is mostly libertarians). I agree with you that this is another couch-fucking social media propaganda meme, and I have an eerie feeling the reddit algorithm is being gamed or manipulated to put it in front of as many zoomer eyeballs as possible.
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