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urquan


				

				

				
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User ID: 226

urquan


				
				
				

				
7 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 22:42:49 UTC

					

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User ID: 226

The Yemeni sheikh's quote about everyone having guns ("no matter if you're rich or poor, you must have guns") reminds me of my favorite youtube edit of all time: "Fimif sas dad." "No matter what our beliefs are about guns, we need guns."

It would be ludicrously unlikely that the Matthew principle weren't true on Twitter, since it's true everywhere else. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Most of the conservative Christians who like Jews that much are dual-covenanters, they believe Jews also go to heaven because of the covenant with Abraham.

Dextromethorphan as an antidepressant, I had not encountered that before. Buproprion seems like it would be a good medication for a person dealing with anhedonia -- though my experience, as someone whose depressive episodes are secondary to anxiety, was it just made me more anxious than I'd ever been before. Like "have a crisis of faith because of brand-new worries"-level anxious.

Anhedonia sucks. Scott wrote once about how his patients with anxiety+depression often said that the anxiety was more disabling than the depression, and if they could just get a handle on the anxiety they could handle the rest. That's true to my experience. But anhedonia is the one thing that's worse: there is genuinely nothing as confusing and soul-destroying as not just feeling a lack of pleasure but a lack of any ability to understand what would give you pleasure.

Interesting that you haven't experienced any brain zaps. But it might actually be too early -- I only get brain zaps after about a week cold turkey off similar medications. It's possible that the brain chemistry changes that cause a lot of the (let's call it what it is) withdrawal syndrome are slow to manifest. So you may yet encounter the symptoms.

The current paradigm is "women's bodies are defective male bodies, men's brains are defective women's brains." That's not an explicit viewpoint or something that anyone intends directly, it's the outcome of the slow process of commoditizing human beings and molding them into good little workers and subjects who are obedient, pliant, and don't rock the boat. Anything that stops them from doing this is a flaw which the powers that be seek to destroy -- signal-boosting any ideology that seems likely to accomplish it. Once again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's a prospiracy, a side effect of powerful institutions doing what powerful institutions do, and of humans in powerful positions doing what humans do: endorsing ideologies that subconsciously go along with their pre-existing goals. This is the origin of "woke capital."

Women are more likely to uphold institutions and, as girls, to sit still for long periods of time (like you say), and are less likely to shout loudly about the emperor having no clothes. Men are less likely to do things that remove them from the workplace for a period of time (especially bear children), and more likely to slave away at work for hours on end while abandoning their families at home.

Institutions, especially corporations, want their employees to be male in the ways that benefit them and female in the ways that benefit them. They don't want people, they want androgynous commoditized worker bees. They want cattle and not pets, human docker containers cloned and scaled at will from the amorphous "cloud" of the "workforce." The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings. You will own nothing and you will be happy, and your storage will be separated from your compute and kept in trust by Amazon.

My girlfriend has gotten explicit advice that she should never get pregnant, it will "hurt her career." She detests these people who have established a system that expects her to sacrifice her biological and spiritual drive to bear and raise beloved children in the name of economic productivity and ruthless inhuman competition. This system sees bearing and raising the next generation of human beings, the most fundamental purpose of society, as a distraction from the more worthy goal of creating wealth for Wall Street. It asks this of men too, but because of the unchangable realities of being a sexually-dimorphic mammalian species, this requirement hurts women more than men. The entrance of women into the workforce on the same terms as men is the true systemic oppression of women. The left used to know this, like when Elizabeth Warren wrote The Two Income Trap. But it has forgotten it as its funding has shifted to corporations "woke" to their own interests, who are more likely to fund the striking of a child in the womb than to pay for the care of that which is born. And the abortionist feminists celebrate them for their avarice like good little girls.

The goal isn't to turn men into women or women into men. That's an ideological side effect, like "Communism" in Stalinist Russia. The goal of Stalin was to empower himself. And so it is with woke capitalism. (Perhaps real woke has never been tried?)

Today I asked my local mistral model "What are some alternatives to Hashicorp Terraform?" and received the best answer ever:

TempleOS: TempleOS is an alternative cloud platform that emphasizes simplicity. It focuses on providing a single, easy-to-understand interface for managing infrastructure. This makes it a good alternative for small projects where you don't need the complexity of Terraform or other tools. However, it has a smaller community and limited integrations with external services compared to more popular IaC tools.

This may be the funniest hallucination I've ever seen, lol.

Then it got better. I asked it to tell me more about TempleOS:

TempleOS, also known as the "One OS," is an alternative cloud platform developed by Terry Davis between 1985 and 2013. It was designed to be a single, unified operating system that simplifies the process of managing infrastructure and applications in the cloud.

And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.

Edit: Okay, I kept going, this just keeps getting better:

Terry Davis indeed named TempleOS as a tribute to his belief that he was building an operating system for an Abrahamic temple. This unique perspective differentiates TempleOS from other cloud platforms and adds an interesting aspect to its history.

I'm just imagining a marketing comparison sheet with "Temple for God: Yes" under the TempleOS column and Ubuntu with "Not a Divine Temple." Move over Mark Shuttleworth.

This keeps generating gems:

TempleOS was not designed primarily as a cloud platform but rather as an operating system inspired by religious beliefs to manage various aspects of a divine temple, including infrastructure resources like virtual machines and applications. Its design and features were not focused on simplicity and ease of use for cloud management per se but rather on managing the temple's operations in a unified way.

The web-based interface was just one aspect of TempleOS, which aimed to provide easy access to its functionalities from any device connected to the internet. However, TempleOS did not gain significant attention or releases until 2013 when Terry Davis started sharing it with the public as a cloud management solution due to the growing interest in cloud computing and the potential applications of its design.

I've heard of pivoting your product, but going from "temple for the God of Abraham" to "cloud management solution" is quite the change.

This thing sounds like something that could be written by a leftist, with just a few words changed. I mean, imagine something like this:

Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of Liberal people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their ghetto hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my comrades in any meaningful sense.

Actually, this sounds more believable than the original text. It's certainly more likely to be somewhere in ChatGPT's training corpus.

It's no wonder this man hates the Midwest -- he's basically a progressive activist, just with one or two ideas swapped around! The actual conservatism (and the pragmatism and realism he labels as "smallmindedness") he found there is as alien to him as it is to the woke moralist, and he rejects them for the same reason. They, in turn, reject his utopian vision -- because they're stupid and reactionary and the world is going to leave them behind. They're not on the right side of history. Don't they realize how much work there's been in academia right-wing internet forums about the systemic racism against Black people White people deeply ingrained in American society? Just do another search-and-replace of "smallminded" and put in "prejudiced."

@FiveHourMarathon and I have gotten into arguments in the past about the nature of conservatism, but regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it. This is not the writing of a conservative, desiring to hold on to the lasting traditions that have been gifted to him by his upbringing. This is an ideologue, a radical, someone animated by the same spirit of the age that motivates the Communist revolutionary or the social justice activist. And he has the same smug self-assurance that, if empowered, would drown his neighbors in a lake and call it baptism.

Everything this guy writes is just a massive argument for Hlynka's position -- the strong form, not the way-too-far version he started saying later on -- that white identitarians are schismatic progressives, not really conservatives. I know he made some very strong and silly claims that extrapolated too far from the connection he saw. But guys, this right here is exhibit A.

I do think there's an assumption that the Blue Ocean audiences being looked for are of a higher socioeconomic class. And I think there's a belief that they tend to be more monogamers, I.E. people more focused on a title or two rather than something much more broad. (My understanding/experience is the people who are upset about the double standards/hypocrisy in Progressive journalism tend to be more Polygamers, people who play a wide variety of gaming experiences...but that means that we don't spend as much on individual titles...although I'd argue there's a higher level of value sensitivity there as well) But more than that, I think they're fishing for the so-called whales. The people who will drop absurd amounts of money on a single game.

This is a really interesting argument, and I can see what you're getting at if I squint, but I'd love for you to flesh out your position here. Is your view that gaming companies believe progressivism appeals to a higher-class subset of the gaming population that is simultaneously more likely to be interested in putting big money into microtransactions? Could you spell out how that works, because I don't necessarily see the straight logic there -- my guess is that progressivism is orthogonal to monogamers/polygamers.

It seems likely to me that polygamers are more concerned about journalism and progressivism in video games because their gaming interests are so broad that they need to follow news and pay attention to new titles in order to learn what they want to play next.

With monogamers, they're just focused on their particular title so whatever new thing is going on in the new story game doesn't matter so much to them. They're more likely to be incensed by a mechanical change to balance in their obsession than the woke story beats in the new blockbuster. The number of people who care about specific balance tweaks in League of Legends are a distinct subset of the population. But the number of people who can quickly scan a character roster for skin color or can develop an opinion about the sexual orientation of NPC romance options is much higher. It might just be bike-shedding.

Someone on an earlier thread about this controversy suggested that the narrative-based games which trigger both the progressive story beats and the backlash have an outsized place in discussion relative to the number of gamers who actually play them. I actually think it's the opposite: the big story games trigger such major discussion because they're the ones played by the largest plurality of the gaming populace. Maybe not a majority, though that wouldn't surprise me, but the largest and most mainstream chunk of committed gamers.

I suspect there are two concepts that are being conflated here -- sensitivity in terms of what you feel, and sensitivity in terms of what you detect.

One is being a highly sensitive person. While I think this is a useful construct, when you break it down I suspect it's a combination of neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience in the Big Five model of personality. I don't think this is the sort of "sensitivity" that is conducive to "sensing" other people's hidden intentions, though maybe it allows you to be creative in particular ways that people with other personality dimensions would find difficult. I don't think it's a superpower. (Maybe if you want to write angsty poetry, of which I wrote much when I was a teenager.)

The other is what is often called "emotional intelligence." I don't like the term. I would prefer "cognitive empathy." This type of "sensitivity" makes it easier for someone to "read" other people's emotions and intentions because it allows you to mentally understand their perspective, modeling their behavior in your head. It has nothing to do with poor functioning, and in fact has everything to do with good functioning! It's the closest thing to a "superpower" in terms of what you're talking about.

My evidence for these being separate is that psychopaths, who are definitionally not highly sensitive in the first definition, are capable of being highly sensitive in the second definition -- that's where the ideas about psychopaths manipulating people by reading and mirroring their emotions comes from. In fact, to function at all as a psychopath, you probably have to develop a great degree of cognitive (system 2) empathy, because the more automatic emotional empathy that gives most people a head start in understanding other people's emotions is absent for you.

I suspect that the random youtube videos and quora posts are a bit of copium, combined with it being high-status and rewarded nowadays to praise sensitivity and emotionality to the high heavens.

This is like the uno reverse card of that male feminist meme where you name a male feminist and it turns out they have accusations of sexual impropriety in the closet. Apparently "name a successful male role model with a happy home life" nets you either conservatives or, occasionally, actors who just follow the Holywood culture.

Maybe we should talk about woke executives? Is Bob Iger happily married?

Why is that?

People complaining that it is hard not to say things in an online forum where they don't need to even participate is a bit mind-boggling to me.

I don’t know that this describes Hlynka. But neuroticism is a hell of a drug. I work to keep myself under control, but there’s definitely an undercurrent of subconscious screaming and threat detection that can get activated by online forums.

When young lefties talk about hate speech being violence and trying to purge the commons of hated speakers, I get it. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, I think it’s wrong, but I understand on a deep level the underlying psychological impulses that motivate it.

I think following that logic makes the problem worse, and forms a catastrophization cycle that reinforces and strengthens their distress. But I can totally see how “these terrible ideas cause me so much pain, we need to get rid of them” is a train of thought people go through.

And there is pain. I know, when I see ideas that particularly get my gourd, ideas that threaten, if taken seriously, to damage values I hold dear — I know those things can easily make me freak out, become despondent, vindictive, to lash out like a cornered tiger.

This isn’t something I can easily describe to someone not familiar with serious anxiety, not because it’s some secret knowledge or something I’m “special” for feeling, but just because the feelings are so profoundly out of place that I think many people would find it shocking anyone could react in such a way.

I think this describes some of the “I can’t help but post on this forum I hate” phenomenon. People love hate-reading and hate-posting. It’s not helpful, it’s not healthy, but it is gut-level rewarding because of the great salience of threatening ideas.

But encountering a threat, however overblown, makes anyone want to eliminate it. And thus we get censorship, and long screeds whose text rhymes with “fuck you.”

The difference between me and the cancellers, I guess, is I know my emotional response to these things isn’t helpful, and it isn’t anybody else’s problem. It’s mine. And it’s my responsibility to deal with it, and to respond to the world in an intelligent manner. To be slow to speak and quick to listen.

I know I’m an unusual case. Sometimes I like to talk like I’m typical of the zoomers because of my experience of mental illness. But if I’m truthful, I’m not. My neuroticism is way higher than the average even for my generation.

I also… and this contradicts everything I’m saying here, but I don’t think of my struggles as an identity. But I talk to some people who seem like they view themselves as a Certified Generalized Anxiety Disorder Experiencer (TM) and not a person who struggles with anxiety. I’m not a person-first language advocate (I think language games are silly) but I do think there’s a mindset difference there.

I do think we’re doing things that lower the sanity waterline, lowering all boats. And social media is ground zero of this as far as I’m concerned. I’m not sure that exposure to random strangers’ ideas is actually helpful for people who struggle with calibrating their threat detector. I also believe that facing difficult situations is the only good way to calibrate. I just think there’s a balance to be struck between engaging in things that are scary but useful and being a masochist who tries to argue with people you believe deeply in your heart are wrong, and evil.

All I’m saying is, maybe Hlynka was higher in neuroticism than he let on. At the very least, some fraction of “involuntary” posters is explained by what I described.

I truly do not understand how such a person navigates their day to day life.

If we’re talking about the neurotic ones, often not very well.

This is too bad, but I understand the decision.

I do wish we had more representation for the sort of old-school Reagan/Bush conservatism he embodied. In his advocacy for colorblindness and a sort of common-sense anti-wokeness (rather than a more complex philosophical anti-wokeness) he represented the mainstream strain of conservatism that retains a great deal of power within the West and especially in the US. Of all the posters here, he's the one whose words sounded the most like the conservatives I know in person. In an (admittedly distant) second place is hydroacetylene. Probably FarNearEverywhere is in there somewhere, despite not even being from the same country as me. On the other side of the aisle is resident liberal netstack.

Heck, even his bugbears about all his enemies being the same people sounds a lot like the conservatives I know in person, who would probably be keen to make claims about Democrats being secret HBD-pushing racists. So there's a weird way that, even in his failures, he represented a constituency in our political sphere.

I'll miss his crotchety conservatism. I think the elder realism of posters like him is necessary at times to counteract the philosophical idealism and youthful exuberance that permeate this space. We need more dad energy. And Hlynka had it in spades.

Critically, it was the very abstention of the early Christians from public life that, ultimately, led to their success -- while there were certainly some failures to communicate doctrines like the eucharistic presence (leading to claims that Christians were slaughtering and eating human babies) and universal fraternity (leading to non-Christians seeing Christian spouses calling each other "brother" and "sister"), there was also a sense in which the strength and conviction of the early Christians impressed the Romans. Later on, Christians whose theology spared them from the fear of death worked in hospitals treating the sick, which astounded the Romans who abandoned the plague-ridden. It was these things that the later Christians could point to and say, "look how impressive we are, you should adopt our belief system."

This co-existed, of course, with attempts at public preaching. You've got to do both. You can't abandon the public spectacle of St. Paul, but you must, you must, embrace the cloistered enlightenment of St. John. Any form of Christianity that embraces one while rejecting the other becomes imbalanced.

I think something like this is the authentically Christian way to approach things. The state can be helpful (see imperial aid in the ecumenical councils) but can also be a hinderance -- leading to the theological indifferentism of state churches like the Church of England (even in its heyday) and the inflitration of clerical orders by political agents (see the Russian Orthodox Church for the past several hundred years). Christian nationalists speak of using the faith to change the political order, but they refuse to see that entangling the political order in the faith often does the opposite. This is a weird mistake for a movement made up of evangelical Protestants to make, since, if I know anything about them at all, many are likely to believe that consorting with Constantine fundamentally changed the Church (I disagree, but that doesn't negate the contradiction in their views).

And this is perhaps too connected to my own struggles, but if the churches of the world want to gain the respect of voluntary converts and make disciples, not brow-beaten conversos, they would do well to focus inwardly, and to "strive for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord." As someone deeply open to Christianity, but troubled by Christianity's presence in the world, emphases like Christian nationalism go in exactly the opposite direction -- trying to change the world to solve the spiritual crisis of the Church, rather than trying to actually solve the crisis. Purify the church, then we can talk about purifying the state.

If you sold state secrets to them, they'd presumably be positively inclined towards you and unlikely to turn the police state against you.

I actually suspect the opposite. "If he'll spy for you, he'll spy on you."

I find book five meandering and confusing. I know a lot of people love it, but I think Order of the Phoenix was the point where Rowling desperately needed an editor to tell her to cut it down, but she was too big at that point to be reined in.

national Origen mythology

Alright, if the public schools are teaching the pre-existence of souls, I want a voucher right here and now.

The KotakuInAction people are all over Japan. I'm very much just not a weeb, so I don't really relate to that -- and it doesn't help that the big issue for a lot of KIA people is that they want scantily-clad women, and this is the one horseshoe-theory area of agreement between me and the woke. I don't like the weird uncanny valley female face thing, but maybe a little less cleavage and a little more practical armor for female characters is a good thing. I still don't know WTF BioWare was smoking when they created the outfits for female characters in Dragon Age Origins.

I don't buy too many AAA games, but I also didn't buy too many AAA games before wokeness. Actually, I probably buy more now, because my gaming tastes are broader. though the ones I buy are more selective, and usually older anyway. I recently bought BioShock -- never played it before. And I'm going to admit, despite my hatred of the cyberpunk genre's aesthetic, philosophy, and morality, I have enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077. (It helps that I had essentially no context before buying it, and so wasn't offended by the shift from RPG to action adventure.) For the most part, it's genuinely difficult to find a game in my library that released after 2017, indie or otherwise. I play games basically on a 15-year delay, and I only play games that come highly recommended.

It's probably the same with my film watching nowadays, I just recently watched Goodfellas for the first time. My recommendation to everyone for everything is: don't engage in stuff just to engage with it, find good stuff and enjoy that. Life's too short for bad games, bad books, and bad movies. And there's too much good stuff not to just enjoy that.

This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity.

It's the Matthew principle all over again! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I think it's probably best to see "literary fiction" as a genre, not a quality marker (TM). It's a style and set of focuses that people, even today, choose deliberately to write in -- and some don't. And, within the modern literary fiction works, few are very good, and even fewer than that will ever be remembered.

Our view of the past is colored, always, by what has survived. Sometimes things survive because they just truly are brilliant and inescapably good, and people can't help talking about them. Sometimes, however, they survive because of being in the right place at the right time. The Great Gatsby is pretty good, I enjoyed reading it. But no one today would ever have heard of it had it not had it's post-war resurgence due to soldiers reading it during the war. It was, like you said, a historical accident.

The Buddhist to Eastern Orthodox pathway demonstrates itself yet again, hah. I personally come at things from a different angle -- I find Buddhism, even in its secularized form, off-putting, especially in its denial of the self and its total repudiation of physical pleasures. Desire certainly brings about suffering, but it also certainly brings about joy.

I do definitely wonder if there's a "intellectual faith" vs "mystic faith" personality difference, that tends to define where a convert ends up in the spectrum of Christian churches -- and the latter attracts people to Eastern Orthodoxy like flies to honey. The former, of course, pulls in people to western Christianity, especially to Thomist Catholicism and confessional forms of Protestantism. I find myself compelled by the intellectual distinctives of western Christianity, even as I agree with the Chalcedonian Orthodox on many of the historical and theological issues about which they contend.

Probably no one believes me on this, but I have a stronger emotional reaction to western liturgical services than to the Byzantine liturgy. It is undoubtedly beautiful, but also Byzantine in the fullest sense of the word. Western liturgies seem to operate in a different way, even in its most accumulative forms -- there's a more easily perceptible progression towards the Eucharist and and then down from it.

Several years ago I had my come-to-Jesus moment where I took to heart Camus's assertion that an atheist who sees the absurdity of our intelligence and spirituality within a naturalistic materialistic worldview has but three options: accept the absurdity, commit suicide (The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the eerie line that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide"), or commit philosophical suicide -- and accept faith. I found the absurdity intolerable. And so I thought about these options within the context of Kierkegaard's "leap into faith", and, having rejected the choice of suicide within the confines of a psychiatric ward, I took the leap.

I began with my belief in the Bible (which I never truly lost; even as an atheist I believed it was invaluable as literature in a Jordan Peterson sense) and, on that basis, I investigated the various churches, seeking what was testable and true. During this time I wrote a 10,000-word treatise on the Biblical model of baptism, demolishing arguments against baptismal regeneration and infant baptism with facts and logic (TM). I also wrote a nearly-as-long treatise in favor of the Eucharist.

During these explorations, I flitted from Calvinism to Anglicanism, and finally found a stable place in Catholicism, where I remained in worship, if not in sacrament, for years. I met some wonderful, kind, young Catholics who were, and remain, passionate about Jesus Christ and his most pure mother. This faith got me through COVID, at least, and for that I thank the Lord.

But I had all sorts of lingering doubts about the Papacy, about the Vatican councils (both of them), about The Magisterium (TM), about Mariology, about clerical celibacy -- the details of these are painful and frustrating to me, and do not bear repeating. But suffice it to say that I found myself increasingly distrusting the claims the institutional Catholic Church made about itself, despite admiring, in many ways, the theology. I have been assured a thousand times that Catholicism cannot be separated from the Pope. But I find myself admiring the shape and form of Catholicism before the time of high Papal supremacy from the 17-1900s. Where, pray tell, are the trads who reject Vatican I?

It was in that mode that I first walked into an Eastern Orthodox church. I saw it, not as the bride of Christ, but as the homely single girl in a town where everyone else was married. I saw no other option to continue believing in the Incarnate God, one person in two natures, and I seized upon the option I was given.

If I'm being honest, I see no bride of Christ within the world: I see her in the saints beloved of our God, not in the institutions who claim to wear the mantle of their holiness. If there is anything that remains Protestant about my faith, it is that the Church in her holiness is fundamentally visible only to God, who judges all hearts.

During this time I worked with a priest, a convert, a good man, though I'm not sure we ever really understood each other. But I increasingly felt out of place: worshipping with strange music in a strange church full of strangers. There were definitely young converts to which I related quite a bit. But the one I related to the most, an argumentative but faithful young man who wanted to be a priest, seemed more infatuated with the cultures of far-off Eastern Europe than his own, and I found this cosmopolitan attitude of fascination with all-things foreign as more reminiscent of blue tribers who hate my country rather than the red tribe Christians with whom I argued, like (and literally as) family about not putting the stars and stripes within the church sanctuary.

Actually, I felt like, in some ways, I fit in all too well -- a young, neurotic, book-obsessed young man brought to interest in Orthodoxy by the internet. But, in another, I fit in poorly: the model Orthodox convert very much seems to be an evangelical Protestant, spiritual-but-not-religious atheist, or Buddhist, who would never consider Catholicism with a 10-foot pole. I have heard nearly as many bad arguments against Catholicism within Orthodoxy as I did growing up Protestant, and I have never met a Catholic-to-Orthodox convert.

Although in serious terms that term also would not describe me, I would say that my mode of thinking and praying is fundamentally Roman Catholic -- I find much to identify with in the "greats" of Catholic theology, like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and I am compelled by the Catholic view of "faith seeking understanding," of reason not against faith, but in support of faith, in favor of faith. I find the rejection of this concept with Orthodoxy off-putting, like I am being asked to cut off my nose to spite my face.

If reason is not a potential part of a healthy breakfast way to communion with God, then why was it the only thing that ever got me to knock on the door of an Orthodox parish -- and for that matter, the only thing that got most converts to do so? I was frustrated when my priest, after many meetings of saying, "reason is not the way to God," then said, "you have to look at the history, how people did things," in response to my doubts about Orthodoxy. In other words, it was tolerable to use the rational analysis of historical evidence to get to Orthodoxy, but once you're in it, suddenly rationality becomes useless. This seemed to me uselessly self-serving, and it was not long after that I walked away from Eastern Orthodoxy. I did the Orthodox endorsed (TM) thing of Asking My Priest (TM), and it led me away from the Orthodox Church, not towards it.

All this co-existed with me trying hopelessly to convince my parents and my girlfriend that I wasn't insane, or about to lose my soul. Catholicism was enough of a stretch for my parents; my girlfriend admires Catholicism, though I'm not sure she has a religious bone in her body. Our fiercest argument, and the closest we've ever come to truly splitting up, was based around my own interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and desire to bring up my children in my Christian faith. I met her in a college atheist club -- where we were the two least anti-religious people there -- and up until that point I think she saw my religious beliefs as a weird phase, which, to be fair, I am wont to get into.

(I once spent some time as a teenager engaging in "floor living" like some kind of Japanese LARP, cursing the invention of the chair as an insult against the natural ability of human beings to squat and sit without furniture. She teases me about this relentlessly.)

But at that point I think it crystalized for her that I really believed in it, that my faith in God was a real part of my life that would motivate real decisions. And, in response, she made no secret of the fact that she would never baptize her children in a religious faith before they could choose it for themselves, and that she found Eastern Orthodoxy in particular to be a bizarre religion. She expressed open and profound displeasure at their weird music, and the weird parishioners, and the overly-intense fasts, and the total foreign-ness of that faith.

To be fair, I actually think she's right about this from the American perspective -- Eastern Orthodoxy is a weird religion by US standards, and its culinary rules and cultural outlook is indeed quite foreign. Not only that, but, no offense intended, the converts are kind of weird -- there is one guy at the local Orthodox parish who wears a kilt for the Liturgy. In the United States. That sort of nerdy, male oddness is normative -- so is simple "male-ness," to be blunt. And my girlfriend, though she loves ideas, hates hates hates cultural weirdness and is a very feminine person, and in that sense she is probably more conservative than I am. (I once had her take a Big Five personality test, which said she is high in the segments of Openness to Experience that relate to appreciation for intellectual thinking, but moderately low in the segments that relate to appreciation of unusual aesthetic preferences. This explained a lot about her.)

I think my we very nearly broke up then and there, during that one tense conversation. But where in God's green earth would I ever find another woman who cares for me as much as her, or agrees with me as much as her, or holds as similar a worldview to me as her (faith excepted), or shares as many beliefs about how to run a family as her?

It certainly wouldn't be in the American Orthodox Church. Much more attractive and eligible men than I struggle there; most seem to find Protestants and convert them; it seems like Rod Dreher lost his.

I think you shared at one point that your wife is Eastern Orthodox -- this surely makes that process much easier for you, as your conversion experience hopefully bonds you to her more closely. For me, it did the opposite. My partner enjoys listening to me talk about Christianity as she does all my thoughts, but I could tell that she appreciated them as ideas, almost as fiction -- in the same way that @FarNearEverywhere likes Tolkien -- rather than as a living faith that she would care to base her life on. ("I think you're taking this too seriously, urquan," she would tell me, "faith is not about ideas, it's just what people believe.") "Seeing, she did not see; and hearing, she did not hear, nor did she understand."

It was around this time that I gave up on faith, started having sex with my girlfriend, and adopted a sort of vaguely Christian agnosticism. I knew at the time -- I knew -- that this would end up in a dark place, perhaps a darker place than I had been in even during my periods of "new atheism". And, on that matter, I was right: my time as a post-Christian has been, bar none, the darkest and least functional point in my life. Angry at the world, frustrated at myself, critical towards all, charitable towards none, eager to judge, slow to mercy, I am like the prophet of a wrathful God, bent on inventing Hell for lack of Heaven. If someone told me they thought I was possessed by a demon, I would believe them. I am as disconnected from my values and my spirit as any daemoniac, and my torments are legion. "O how unlike the place from whence I fell!"

These are just disconnected thoughts. But nevertheless they are real ones, more real than any of my actual "arguments," such as they are, against Eastern Orthodoxy. But, as I said, I am at my low point, and about to the place where I'm willing once again to commit philosophical suicide for want of the alternative. I suppose I am praying that somewhere, some way, I receive some of this "confirmation" you speak of, something to push me, or pull me, kicking and screaming, towards something, anything, some new path, that I might live, and have life abundantly. I am begging for something worth living for.

Several months ago, I was PMing with @dovetailing about the Eastern Orthodox Church; he is also a convert to Orthodoxy. I dropped the thread despite wanting to reply, because I just couldn't find the right words. He sent me a very kind PM during that radio silence, which I appreciated very much. These, I suppose, are the right words, and I would ask him to take my reply to you as a reply to him.

This is an interesting analysis of the dissident right, but keep in mind that this poll wasn't created by or for the dissident right -- the authors of it have never heard of them and would hate them if they had.

There's the mainstream right, that wants low taxes, libertarian policy, and military might. That's the "GOP Establishment," or as their enemies call them, "RINOs." There's the nationalist right, that wants more manufacturing and less foreign wars. That's the "Trumpist" right, or as their enemies call them, "MAGA Republicans." Then, and only then, there's the dissident right, that wants actual racism. That's the extremely-online version that doesn't exist among conservatives in person. Maybe at those weird right-wing parties in New York, but if you think "people at New York parties" are representative of the right, I'm prepared to offer you a sweetheart deal for the Brooklyn Bridge. I disagree with him on how far he takes it, but I agree with @HlynkaCG totally that the identitarian right in this sense is more of a sect of dissident blue tribers than anything truly red tribe. And I say this as a born and raised red triber from Jesusland (and, if I'm being honest, a pretty hardcore nationalist rightist despite my misgivings about Trump personally).

This poll was created by the mainstream right, with occasional nods to concerns of the nationalist right. The dissident right isn't even on their radar.

My recollection was that someone unbanned him at the request of someone who wanted to know how he was doing. But I may just be misremembering, or perhaps that decision was reversed.

Ordinarily I'd post this in Wellness Wednesday, but it's Sunday, so...

Does anyone have any idea when someone should walk away from CBT therapy if they're not seeing any improvement?

I've been in therapy for 12 weeks now, and we're getting close the point where CBT normally ends. I like my therapist a lot and I think she's a good practitioner of the school of therapy, but my progress tracker looks like a straight, if squiggly, line -- I've seen no improvement. I'm doing the homework every week and trying to integrate the reality checking and cognitive flexibility portions of CBT into my life, while facing my fears and being more flexible.

The CBT skills have probably taken a little sliver off the top of my negative experiences. They don't control me quite as much. But they still control me a lot -- I feel like I'm staring down an angry bull every day. This much hasn't changed since starting therapy. I don't catastrophize as much, but I definitely shake, and struggle to sleep, and feel like my chest is going to explode. And, predictably, this has a real impact on my quality of life.

I feel like the approach I've been given for dealing with physical sensations has failed. That unit was just "let's try to simulate the negative physical sensations you struggle with so you can see them subside." We were unable to replicate the physical sensations of anxiety I struggle with the most, and essentially just moved on without it doing anything for me. I guess the point of that segment of therapy was "you must have cognitive distortions about the severity of your physical sensations, so let's confront that." But, um, I don't think my appraisal of my sensations is distorted -- I struggle with them every day. I know they subside, I've seen it happen. But that doesn't mean they don't affect my quality of life severely and recur. They are powerful until they subside -- and then, like clockwork, they seem to come back. I probably spend 80% of my life in some state of moderate anxiety, with occasional bouts of more severe distress.

I determined not to go through insurance so I could choose my own therapist, so these sessions are very expensive. And I feel like I'm getting little value out of them.

My medical doctor has also run out of things to do to help -- we've tried the various SSRIs and SNRIs, as well as buproprion, with little success, and he's unwilling to go any farther. He seems to be under the misapprehension that I need to make lifestyle changes (okay, doc, what ones?) and believes that "medication is not my problem." He also seems to believe most psychotherapeutic interventions take years, not months (try telling that to evidence-based psych researchers, they'll laugh at you). I don't like this doctor, and I think he's judgmental and ignorant while thinking himself helpful. And I don't know how to find a doctor who will be more understanding.

I feel, in some sense, like all the professionals in my life who are supposed to help me deal with this serious problem I struggle with, and that makes a major dent in my quality of life, have given up on me. Or, at the very least, that the tools they're trying to offer me to help with them aren't the right fit. I feel talked down to and misunderstood by a medical doctor who refuses to refer me to a psychiatrist, and I feel like the well-intentioned interventions of my therapist are failing. I believe the medical system has failed me.

And the worst part is, I'm going to have to enter a period of no insurance soon -- so even if I did find some medical intervention that worked, I'd have to quit it.

I just don't know what to do now. I worry that, in some sense, I'm a living demonstration of "HBD for mental illness" -- nothing helps because nothing can help. I felt very optimistic about the ability of the CBT intervention to help, but it hasn't.

The screening for serious CBTers is what got you that. Until I hunted down a by-the-book CBT practitioner, the therapists I've seen have been eclectic talk therapists who followed no particular school and had no particular goals for my treatment -- and for whom, therefore, a well-defined timeline made no sense.

Things like "measurable goals," "progress tracking," "time-limited treatment," and "homework," are pretty foreign to a lot of more eclectic practitioners. I generally feel the field is utterly saturated with quackery and non-serious therapy styles that make no difference in people's lives. I get the sense this is what clients actually want -- someone to act as a soundboard without giving particular challenges. But that's exactly the opposite of what people dealing with mental illness truly need. I think the explosion of mentally well people visiting therapists has had something big to do with it.