urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
I'd happily pick yes. My parents care for each other and have been married for four decades.
urquan
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1d ago
My mom's social media is like this with lots of office setups, planners, and forms of paper-based organization, in addition to street food vendors and "OMG life in Japan/Korea is like the 22nd century." Organization and orderliness appeal to the professional woman.
My girlfriend's new obsession is mechanical keyboards, which girlyTok has discovered and is now a part of the "complete the ultimate feminine office setup" social media trend rotation. Linear switches are now being called "creamy."
I have no problem with this -- women deserve good keyboards too -- but yeah, women love stationarycore and office setups. I think it's just part of the larger trend of women beautifying any space they enter into.
urquan
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3d ago
Sometimes I watch true crime documentaries with my girlfriend, and what always stands out in the rape or rape+murder situations is that many of them, even among stranger assaults, don't consist of a random guy grabbing a woman off the street and dragging her into a street corner. They often consist of date rape, or something like a group of guys and girls are hanging out after a party with some booze and one of the guys stays with one of the girls and then drags her into the figurative alley.
I think there's a feminist point to be made there that there is a group of men that believes such a situation entitles them to some sex afterward. But where I disagree with the feminist point is that I think this often goes along with innate personality traits or psychopathy, and there's no amount of education or re-education that can be done to fully eliminate their existence. Louis CK has a joke where he goes:
We're so afraid of pedophilia because it's and it's not going anywhere. That's a fact, it's not like there's a finite amount of pedophiles, and we got the last one. Now it keeps happening. Every generation there's more. Some of you have kids, and some of those kids are gonna grow up to fuck kids... So any real solution has to start with the basic reality that there will always be pedophiles.
I'd say the same is true of people who are psychopathic, and genuinely do see women (and men, and children, and animals, and everything) as inanimate objects to be used as they wish. There's another one born every minute. I think the reason some of the incel stuff sets of warning alarms is that there is some "women have instrumental value to me, redistribute the pussy-objects" language in there, especially in the extreme spaces. But the interesting difference is that these are often "someone else should give me a woman"-type complaints, which is... a pretty pathetic point of view, and not the worldview inhabited by most rapists, who are proud of their ability to coerce and overpower women on their own and often don't even see what they're doing as rape.
But the typical incel is a lonely, sad, and yeah often times angry and frustrated guy, but the very elements that cause his inceldom like shyness and seclusion are also traits that 'protect' him from attacking people. In an 'honor among thieves' sense, in the original meaning where Plato indicates that you have to have some level of real skill and mastery to pull off a heist (i.e. the Oceans films), there are often skills and traits possessed by many rapists, but not by the average incel, that would enable them to date and have consensual sex with a woman, though they choose not to. This is actually borne out by research on repeat offenders, who make up the vast majority of sexual assaults, and who are often skilled, socially competent, strategic, and careful. To me, this makes the crimes of rapists more evil -- they have the capacities built into them to do good, but choose evil.
And obviously when we talk about domestic violence, you have to be in a domicile with a woman to commit domestic violence against her. That's pretty non-incel.
I think society can do a lot to give resources and aid to victims, to prevent what crime can be prevented, and to try and catch these kinds of men early and get them the hell away from society and from women. My girlfriend's point, by the way, is that it's a horrific injustice for men who commit crimes like this to then be sentenced to something like 10 years in prison, of which he might serve 3 because of parole, and then he's out on the street again and rapes someone else. And it's often liberal and progressive groups who argue in favor of systems like parole, and in general for viewing the criminal justice system as a greater threat to safety and liberty than violent criminals.
But also alcohol is awful, and we should be screaming at young people not to go get drunk at parties, because alcohol impairs judgment for everyone who partakes and people can make decisions they never would sober, which can place even relatively normal people in a position to become involved in violence. In more ways than just sexual violence; see the persistence of the barfight as a concept, or the drunk uncles who always seem to get on the Florida news for doing something awful at EPCOT, or, say, the women's movement against alcohol because of the long, long history of daddy coming home drunk as a skunk and beating his wife and his children.
urquan
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3d ago
Wow, that's a fascinating graph. I was very confused and started writing a comment about how I'd want more recent data than 1980 before forming conclusions, but looking at the paper itself I see that's by birth year.
I guess the issues would be -- does this take account of divorce and remarriage? It's possible there are some serial monogamists here, and some situations that don't necesarrily demonstrate a continuous commitment between one couple over the course of time in which a couple would normally have children. Since we're talking about the effects on childrearing, it also doesn't necessarily take into account whether many of the college-educated women got married, but too late to have children, or more than one child. The way this data is sampled smells kind of fishy to me, because it genuinely just asks whether a woman is married at a certain point, not what the marital history looks like. I would want to see massively more data before we conclude what marriage is like.
But there are some fascinating takeaways there -- in particular, that there is a higher rate of college-educated women being married to non-college men than the rate of college-educated men being married to non-college women. Simple models of hypergamy would predict the opposite. But there does, like you said, seem to be a thing where earning potential (which itself is correlated with a LOT of other social variables) is more important than college degree in attaining marriage for men.
Perhaps I was onto something when I said:
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
urquan
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3d ago
“I could care less” annoys the crap out of me, literally. Literal human waste is being excreted due to my annoyance.
I do find it pretty funny though. “I could care less about your feelings!” almost feels triumphant, like “I could care less, but I don’t care enough to care less!” It’s a joke a competent comedian could probably spin into something hilarious. I don’t love the expression though, both because it confuses so many people and because it’s just a strange way to say “I don’t care.” Just say that.
urquan
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4d ago
I don't know that autism was ever firmly suspected in my childhood, but my mom did have several books on her bookshelf whose titles rounded off to "What To Do If Your Child Is A Weirdo" -- I believe some were about "Sensory Processing Disorder," which I understand was never in the DSM and the symptoms that were purportedly in the syndrome are understood to be more diagnostic of autism, and my social development was somewhat stunted. I was definitely a 'little professor', then and now, but my father is a professor, so perhaps that's not unexpected.
I didn't have friends as a kid, I had two friends in primary school and junior high, both of which were not great people who didn't care about me as a person. The neighbor kids tried to steal from my house. I didn't have a good friend until junior high, then only for a brief time -- a Latino guy who joked about Herman Cain with me. A nice guy, god bless him. In high school I made more friends, but it was hard, I came off as awkward and sheltered. I hung out with the math geeks but I was bad at math and I didn't like the kind of video games they enjoyed. I can't disambiguate my experiences between "neurodevelopmental problem that led to peer rejection that led to social anxiety" or "peer rejection that led to social developmental delays that led to social anxiety."
As far as I know, I don't have any relatives with either suspected or diagnosed autism. I do have first cousins with OCD, which would probably explain my excessive concern for contamination and orderliness. And I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and GAD as a teenager, and by no means are these fad diagnoses, and my answer to the miracle question would be "these things would be gone." If you actually have a mental disorder that interferes with your life and functioning, it's a source of shame and dysfunction rather than an identity marker.
My girlfriend asked me once whether I thought she was autistic, which came out of the blue and didn't seem likely to me -- she's more socially fluent than she thinks, and often notices nuances in people's communication that others don't notice. I think we're at a point where the "weird is good" millennial worldview has run its course, and social atomization has eliminated many of the ways that 'weird' people were integrated into and sustained by society, and so 'weird' people are desperate to find some kind of an explanation for why they don't fit in, when it may be partly biological, partly psychological, and partly civilizational. The fact that normies are starting to look like me scares me, a lot.
I think the autism rights people have actually won, in a lot of ways -- we're at a point where people with basic social anxiety disorder like to speculate about whether or not they're autistic, because autism feels like a good diagnosis, like unlocking a secret way of being human rather than an incapacity to engage in normal activities because of fear. It also means that the outcome is "baked in" rather than conquerable with effort: if you struggle socially because you have anxiety, it means you have all the right hardware to function normally but are afraid to use it and are behind on your software updates.
If you struggle because you're autistic, it means you're special and neurodivergent and you get to ask for accommodations instead of taking responsibility for your social development into your own hands. Unfortunately, I think there are many neurotypical people who wish to gain the compassion that the informed often feel for autistic people, without the struggle that autistic people often have to go through to function.
The "autistic people often end up with a cluster B wife" thing is funny, but more precisely I do wonder whether a lot of people who suspect they may have autism are actually people who may be closer to cluster A and C themselves. I do wonder if there are a lot of Avoidant and Schizoid folks who feel 'weird' in a way that overlaps somewhat with autism but are clinically and psychologically distinct.
If I had to say, I suspect I line up with the broader autism phenotype, and I do have concern that any children I may have may struggle neurodevelopmentally. I share your dislike of fad diagnoses, and I suppose my suspicion and dislike of people who do this is why I've written thousands of words across posts, comments, and journal entries trying to talk myself out of any conception that I might be autistic. If it's true, there are few to no adult accommodations, and autism evaluation in adults isn't a thing, and regardless of where I'd land I'd still be the same guy with the same problems; nothing would be fixed or improved by it.
I’ve found Opus 4.7 to generate better and more human-like text vs Opus 4.6 for my purposes, but I can’t indicate whether it’s any better at coding. I use a mix of LLMs for various things, and my feeling is that ChatGPT is more bland and LLM-y in its output, but much more generous with usage limits. In the limited coding I’ve done, I haven’t seen much of a difference between them. ChatGPT’s image generation model is also nice, as far as my amateur impression can tell.
But it’s a constant fight with the usage limits on Claude, whereas ChatGPT feels like it flows freely. My current pattern is to default to Chat for most informational and coding purposes and bring out Claude Opus for when I want a more thoughtful analysis of something. I don’t know how Sonnet compares to ChatGPT.
Gemini feels massively behind in both usability and tooling, and its integrations with third parties are only good for Google products.
urquan
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10d ago
Yeah, that doesn’t represent happiness, that measures how you feel you measure, literally, on the social ladder. Is there research that asks something more like, “How happy are you, 1-10?”
urquan
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11d ago
I had a... friend, I guess, in high school, who I felt was narcissistic and far, far too full of herself, and I started mildly insulting her and putting her down, because I felt like she needed to be taken down a peg and realize not everyone worshipped the ground she walked on. I rarely put people down like this, but something about her just annoyed me.
My impression was that she took this as an attempt at flirting, and started doing weird things like comparing me to her boyfriend. I just rolled my eyes at this and continued putting her down. She was cute, I suppose, but her personality was radioactive and it shocked me how much people liked her.
urquan
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12d ago
I was a trainer in a large group for a while (mostly women) and the one woman who was demonstratively affectionate toward me and the other male trainers was almost unanimously turned on by the rest of the female trainees. This was always done subtly except behind closed doors.
OH I had to re-read this a couple of times, because I was trying to figure out if you were really saying "she was turned on by the female trainees" i.e. was somehow a very loose bisexual girl who personally liked both you and the female trainees, or if you meant "she almost unanimously turned on the rest of the female trainees" i.e. they were all sapphic for her. Wow, does the sentence make more sense when I read it right.
I don't know how you could have phrased it better, but this perhaps is my punishment for skimming motte posts while sleepy.
A woman who communicates interest with a stranger even subtly is rare, outside an alcohol-drenched setting.
I've had it happen, but typically with extreme plausible deniability, in the sense that their interest could be understood platonically and their invitations to date could be understood as an invitation for a nice time with a friend. This could be an attempt not to look too eager/excessive/expoitable, unfamiliarity with how you clearly show interest to someone (women are often pretty bad at it, because they aren't forced to practice), a kind of hedging of bets in case someone isn't all that compatible, or plain simple insecurity and rejection sensitivity of the same kind that causes men to orbit sometimes instead of stating their interest clearly. Probably a mixture.
urquan
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13d ago
It was the students like me who lacked good study habits, institutional knowledge, amd networking skills who had a rough time.
Ah, the gifted kid paradox. Everything in the early years is easy, so you don't develop study skills and grit, and then when you face something actually tough it crushes you.
(Also, AMD networking skills are extremely important -- how are you going to succeed if you can't connect your Ryzen gaming beast to the internet for studying? :P)
urquan
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13d ago
Really, really cringe things that associate elements of the American civic religion with Christianity are pretty dime-a-dozen in red tribe art, such as the most hilarious painting of all time: Jesus holding the Constitution of the United States while a Supreme Court Justice weeps.
It's exceptionally gauche to make such a piece of artwork of a living politician, but I'm sure it happens on the left too from time to time. That people invest this kind of hope in politicians is pretty ridiculous to me, but they do, and silly stuff like this results.
I think most people have generated a "what would I look like as a medieval X/what would Y look like as a Christian saint" image using AI, it's a fairly common pastime. Sharing it on social media is pretty ridiculous though.
Trump is pretty narcissistic, and this may be a symptom of that, but it's far from the most insane thing he's ever done and at this point the truth is that his supporters' support for him is something that's not amenable to anything that actually happens, and the hope that many on the left/center have that some scandal will destroy his popularity among his base just isn't going to happen. Even the Christians who were outraged by this still "back the mission."
urquan
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13d ago
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Definitely getting in the field it was interesting to see how not-bleeding-edge a lot of corporate IT is, but also slightly comforting -- I often describe my own personality as the direct opposite of silicon valley: "move slowly and fix things." That's definitely the sort of thing I would put on a sticker.
The messy reality of maintenance/operations and the need to actually test things cautiously is a huge element of how I view computers; I've always related to them in an operations kind of a way and even in my youth I was only moderately interested in programming. It didn't seize me the way it often does other people. I'm not sure anyone dreams of being level 1 support, but I did dream a bit as a kid about being a sysadmin, especially once I got heavily into Linux which I've used on my desktop for about 10 years now.
That said, I do love automation, orchestration, and I suppose hyper-convergence, and I do use them extensively in my homelab. It's definitely a goal of mine to use those at some point in my career, and I know of some shops who use them. Perhaps time will bring them more into the mainstream of general IT, because IaC is awesome (and is genuinely something that use of AI makes significantly easier to learn).
I love teaching, and I've been told by people that I'm good at sitting down with someone and explaining things in a way they can understand. So the opportunity to share knowledge and help people learn/get people back to work/find a workaround or a fix that helps people move on with their day is very satisfying to me. I hate computers getting in my way as much as anyone, and it's great to get them out of people's way.
The lack of significance on the balance sheet is definitely the greatest area of trepidation for me as I look forward in my career, in the sense that I do have concern about layoffs/being unable to do the job properly because of limited buy-in from management.
urquan
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13d ago
Right, and what I'm saying is that being in the top 5% being regarded "not particularly impressive and just an OK result, specifically within the context of academic achievement" is blackpilling. I agree that's not impressive for the elite world, but no one's talking about the elite here. It is not a failure to not be part of the elite. The elite should not be the inherent frame through which we view the world, such that "he still could be [part of the elite] through other avenues" is the consolation prize, and not "he has many options for a non-elite but good life available." If being in the top 6-7% means you likely get a decent job, with some hedging there, that's pretty blackpilling as an idea. I guess it depends on what we mean by "decent"; and if "decent" is only somewhat achievable by this portion of the population, that's the starting point for social upheaval.
Again, it's not about whether specific professional areas are a good or bad fit -- and I agree law, investment banking or management consulting aren't -- it's about how we talk about people's achievement, and whether we have a world where people who aren't in the top 1-2% on any measure can expect to have a good life. Not an elite life, not a fantastic splendorous life, just a good life.
urquan
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13d ago
I wouldn’t say they’re killing it, just that there is a bit of opportunity. I don’t know how to compare.
To be clear, by IT I mean general office IT support/MSPs, I can’t tell you how programmers or infosec people are doing. This is not a very tech focused area, but there’s always a need for general IT services even in flyover country because every organization uses IT. Last I heard cybersecurity type positions were desperate to be filled, and the big issue was finding people actually qualified for those kinds of roles. But what I hear from cyber people around here is their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.
urquan
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13d ago
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
Where I am, IT seems to be doing fairly well. I know people who aren't spectacularly bright, but technically interested, who are doing well in entry-level IT and moving up into engineering positions. The hard part is getting your foot in the door, but once you do, there are opportunities available. They aren't always glamorous but they're real.
That said, success among young men in general is extremely bimodal, in ways that aren't necessarily correlated to socioeconomic background. I'd say half the zoomer or millennial men I know are unemployed or significantly underemployed, in a way that tracks mental health/functioning/grit/economic necessity more than it does raw intelligence or capability. Several are bankrolled partially or fully by the women in their lives, who have normal but not glamorous white-collar jobs that are generally higher-status or pay than what the men have. The ones who don't have a girlfriend are... pretty damn depressed, in the "repeatedly dropped out of college and lost touch with all their friends because they sleep 13 hours a day" way.
Young women have a distribution of success too, of course, but it seems to map most directly onto SES than it does individual factors. So I have a female friend whose mother was bipolar and is struggling to launch, but most of the college-educated ones are white-collar workers making median+ salaries, and it's the non-college-educated ones who seem to be stuck in the service sector.
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
In some ways I'm in the winning column, in some I'm in the not-so-good one. I don't have a lot of optimism for the future and I do feel like many of my early academic dreams died due to overcompetition and the marginalization of people like me in elite or semi-elite spaces. I suppose I'm just trying to hold on to what success I do have, but I have very little buy in for the system as it exists -- I just don't feel homicidal and find it morally outrageous that people do. Our problems are far, far more diffuse and our evils are far, far more banal than anything that would justify killing people over.
For the record, this is in a flyover state most coastal folks probably think of as a shithole. We have our problems but it's home.
urquan
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13d ago
You know, "being in the top 5-6% of educational achievement isn't good, this is insufficient" is a pretty blackpilling line of thought in itself. Imagine how screwed you'd be to be in the bottom 94%. That's almost everyone, and I guess we're just sweeping them under the rug and calling them bad dummy dumbs who don't count.
(This is independent of whether it is, or should be, sufficient to practice law or any other specific field. Law seems like a pretty horrible profession even in 'good times.')
This is where it gets interesting. I don't interact with a lot of engineers in my daily life outside of work. Most of my social group is blue collar (service industry, trades, retail), college faculty and staff, or retirees (musical connections). Someone has brought it up in every social interaction I've had in the last 24 hours, and in every case, the general sentiment was that it was a shame the guy didn't have better aim.
This is crazy to me — I’m pretty sure most of the people around me couldn’t name Altman even if asked. People use ChatGPT, sometimes Gemini, sometimes Claude, no one thinks this is going to lead to “AGI” (a term they’re unfamiliar with), and in general ai chat is viewed as very helpful and often better than a google search, ai art is viewed mildly skeptically mostly for “can we believe photo evidence now?” reasons rather than “we must save the poor artists from the horrific slop!” reasons, and most people probably couldn’t name a single major executive involved in AI.
I’m sure the blue tribers around here are angry in these ways, but the “these evil tech billionaires are destroying society!” isn’t something I hear often irl. There’s been a lot of discussion about the Iran war and some about the Epstein files, but AI doomerism or boosterism just… isn’t a thing. It’s a technology people use, no one expects it to radically reshape the world or end it, just disrupt things a bit in the same way the smartphone did.
I guess a lot of people really don’t like AI, but my family and friends, a very small sample size, like it and use the chat models a lot for everyday tasks. I guess there’s going to be some job disruption, but I suspect that’s more because executives believe AI can do more than it actually can. It’s a tool that’s useful as an adjunct to human judgment, and I wouldn’t trust this generation of AI with truly autonomous operation of any real sort.
urquan
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16d ago
As a zoomer, I'm more familiar with him via this quote than I am with his games. Though I have played a little bit of DOOM.
urquan
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18d ago
I think those are good things to think about, but it’s genuinely hard to give advice when all we know is generalities.
I don’t know what you mean by “meltdowns”, but sometimes people do have an extreme reaction to stress. How much of a dealbreaker that is depends on how serious the stress was — if your young child is brutally murdered and you writhe in fits of anguish, I don’t know that many people are going to say that’s unexpected. It depends on what the stress was, what the meltdown was, and exactly how that interfaces with your own emotional resilience. That was probably the topic of the couples’ counseling.
It’s highly common for men dating women to struggle with her emotional reactions to stress, because the way women deal with and externalize stress is just different from the way men tend to (but not always). Keeping up with the basics like engaging in active listening, supportive communication, and distinguishing venting from solutions-focused conversation is good. But you have to couple that with a sense of internal stability: often what women want from their man in an emotional crisis is a feeling of protection, reassurance, stability, and steadfastness. And knowing how to respectfully listen while guiding her away from the feeling of stress and towards that feeling of protection and reassurance is a very helpful relationship skill. You have to lead and stabilize without being domineering.
What does stand out to me in your description is that you live separately, and in fact an hour away — LDRs are always, always hard. It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with emotional struggles, because one of the selling points of a relationship is that they’re a person who provides physical affection when you’re struggling.
We talk about women getting physical affection from their girlfriends, but it is extremely common, almost ubiquitous, for women to find being held and embraced by their man extremely calming and protective in a special way, for reasons we could write evopsych stories about until the cows come home. What I’ve found in relationships is that talking helps, but only to a point, and often finding a way to laugh, a distraction, a comforting presence, is more helpful to a partner in distress. So the struggle with your LDR may be that the most helpful element of a relationship is denied you most of the time, and that degrades things over time. Relationships are fundamentally about physical touch.
Do you video chat frequently? Sometimes just seeing your beau’s face, their smile, their eyes, can help you feel more connected. If you’re both part of the blue bubble master race, you can use SharePlay to do things like watch YouTube or short videos together, which might give you an opportunity to laugh together. That’s powerful.
But the most important thing you can do is work to make this LDR into a short-distance relationship. Getting yourselves closer together in whatever way you can is extremely important. A relationship where you can just be together, casually, without counting the minutes, is a massive quality of life increase.
Another thing that I see is that you talked only in generalities about your connection, your intimacy — what brought you two together? What drew you to her? What kinds of things do you do, when you’re in that fun and playful mood? When you’re together, what makes you inseparable? Being able to understand what you like about the relationship, and what’s unique about your bond compared to other bonds you’ve had, is absolutely essential to answering the question about whether you want to move forward with the relationship or not.
I hope this helps.
urquan
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19d ago
Ah, I read the OP again, we’re talking about politicians, not voters or commentators.
Perhaps this is just the right moment for electoral comeuppance, if you back a bad horse in politics you get taken down.
The GOP needs new blood that’s neither subservient to Trump nor wacko, but I guess grifters, wafflers, and “the Jews made me do it”-ers are what we get. If either party could stop being idiotic and start actually dealing with our domestic crises like adults, that would be great.
urquan
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19d ago
I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I could never have guessed that it was comprised because {reasons}
Is “I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I made a bad decision” not an option?
Confidence and support are still falling and that's despite the selection bias that people who change their minds don't always show up as mind changers, because they retcon it to begin with.
I voted for Trump because he promised no foreign interventionism and I thought Trump 1 was better than Biden, and have regretted it immensely. Unfortunately, there aren't many people who are willing to listen to this; strong Trump supporters hold this to be traitorous, and Democrats don't provide much of a runway for people who had reasons to support Trump but feel betrayed, because they were already on the bandwagon of anyone who voted for Trump is evil. Retconning your vote is basically the only pathway to being respected, so it's not surprising people are doing it. Trump is a phenomenon that has to be survived, because he has a stranglehold on his base. Hopefully the country survives.
That said, unfortunately the anti-war movement on the right has coalesced around antisemites and undesirables like Carlson and Owens, who oppose this war, like the local antisemites, because they believe Iran is a necessary counterweight to Israel which is the country they actually care about. I'm anti-war for reasons that rhyme with leftist views; I hate the American foreign policy apparatus, I believe it is a force for evil in the US, and I believe it does damage to the world while not aiding actual American interests. So it's frustrating to see that the right's anti-war impulses are being redirected into a shape that blames the problems of American foreign policy on THE JEWS!!! and not, for instance, the military-industrial complex, the blob, and the deep state.
urquan
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20d ago
I think Trump has been uniquely bad in terms of foreign policy by a pretty massive degree, and this is absolutely the worst time for the US to have bad foreign policy. And it's not even that he's got a strategy that he's competently carrying out but it's a bad policy, it's that he seems to not have a policy and yet is doing so many erratic things that damage US foreign relations that he might as well be taking a wrecking ball to the country. Jackson was pretty bad on domestic policy, but Trump is worse on foreign policy. At least Jackson actually had a military record behind him.
I think the best way to understand modern Catholic atonement theology is by reference to "Paschal mystery theology", which has a lot in common with Christus Victor and Eastern soteriology. This is the overarching way Catholic teaching looks at the Cross since V2, and it has some criticisms among traditionalists, but it does, I believe, tie Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox views of the Cross together in a compelling way, as something mystical which is both transformative on the global level and applicable in an individual way.
Universalism and Theodicy
I am not a universalist, and I in general dislike the way in which Balthasar's "hopeful universalism" often becomes a way to justify not evangelizing. But at the same time I do believe God's dispositional will is for the salvation of all men (not the fallen angels or the devil, who are irretrievably damned), although his permissive will allows people to choose the alternative. It is important in Catholic theology that God permits rather than desires damnation, and I believe this is true to the way Scripture describes the will of God both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. God does judge and send people to Hell or to Heaven, but he does so based on the choices and nature of the person as configured to Christ by grace or not, which is described in Catholicism as infused rather than imputed righteousness. Catholic judgment is "forensic" in the sense of a finding-of-fact, not a finding-of-law.
I'm somewhere between a Thomist and a Molinist on the Predestination question, and Catholicism is famously and officially agnostic on the question. I don't hold as a firm belief that humans have effectively libertarian free-will as regards the universe, and the most motte-brained version of my view is closer to "God ran the simulation and figured out who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will, and then created the world in such a way that those who would freely choose salvation under libertarian free will would be predestined to salvation even if the world does not possess libertarian free will". I come from a line of Holiness/Wesleyan-influenced preachers, so I think there's a time and a place for fire and brimstone, and I agree with Aquinas, and not Barron, that one of the important elements of the eschaton is the punishment of the unrepentant wicked.
Obviously this leaves open the hole of how and why, precisely, evil and damnation are permitted if God does not desire them, and that's obviously where we open the Pandora's box of theodicy. For my part, I lean towards a narrative theodicy; God is in a sense writing a story, and the story is better if evil exists and good overcomes it, and it's better for the good if villains exist so that the good can be distinguished (very Thomistic of me), and it's better for the just rewards of the good if it's not a consolation prize given to everyone, and it's better if that's based on what they might choose in total freedom than if it's based on a decree. A game of skill is more rewarding than a game of chance.
I don't think any theodicy is philosophically compelling, but I think that's because a story is more compelling to the human person than philosophy. There's a reason the great teachings of Jesus are all stories and parables. Taken from that viewpoint, the stories of the Bible actually have a greater significance than the merely instructive -- the stories of God's triumph and the triumph of the righteous contained therein are actually the project of the existence of the world. Balthasar has a bit of this, in Theo-Drama.
There's also the tendency in more liberal or modernist theology to talk about "maybe suffering is a way to get close to God because God inherently suffers," which I think is really dumb for all the ways classical theists think it's dumb, but I believe orthodox theopaschism -- not patripassionism, where the Father somehow suffers, which is a straight heresy, but theopaschism in which the unity of the natures of Christ in one person is considered vitally important, where we can say things like "God suffered in the flesh," and "God died on the Cross" -- is indispensable in answering the problem of evil. I believe that one of the most important fruits of the Cross is that suffering is transformed by Christ's passion from a separation from God due to sin to a means of Christlikeness, not merely in terms of endurance training (which St. Paul compares it to), but in terms of actually sharing experiences and metaphysical/mystical closeness to Christ himself.
I believe unorthodox theopaschism, especially in modern times, came into existence because orthodoxy neglected orthodox theopaschism, and left open a hole that heterodoxy stepped into.
And that brings us to the Cross.
Substitution
I will also note that substitution theory, taken strictly, is considered heretical by Catholicism, but more metaphorical, spiritual, or allegorical interpretations of substitution are taken seriously in the Church Fathers and in modern Catholic teaching. The idea that the wages of sin is death, yet God in his mercy set aside the curse of death and sent his son, instead, to die voluntarily, has a heroic element to it, and this has never escaped the attention of theology.
I compare it less to the Son being tormented by the Father's justice and more by the Son acting like a POW who offers himself to die in place of others. The key element of penal substitution that I think is heretical is the emphasis on a division in the Trinity, that the Son was "being damned by the father," which is a phrase I've heard Reformed pastors preach, when instead the substitution of the Son is about an act of the Trinity in unity contending against the state that was inherent to man's fallen nature, where sinfulness leads to death and separation from God.
GK Chesterton has his own alarming phrase that "On the Cross, God became an atheist," not as a statement about the actual beliefs of the crucified Christ, but in the sense that Jesus voluntarily took up the cross, which took him to the place of death and as far away from God as man could go, so that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." The point is not "the Father punished the Son by sending him to death," but "the Son, in unity of will with the Father, went unto death to bring grace and truth, chasing down the 1 of the 99 by going to the limit of human experience."
This also means that you can say things like, "Christ's dying on the Cross brought God's goodness to those who are tormented or dying," as an act of solidarity with people who are cast off and rejected, but also a way to bring divinity and grace to people who are far from God. It has a mystical quality to it, that God actually himself, in his flesh, went into the domain of all those things (and even into Sheol), which means that God is no longer absent there. I've compared it before to placing a flag in enemy territory; the Cross is the flag, and one of the ancient Roman Eucharistic prayers describes it as "the boundary post" that sets the limit of death and the devil, claiming the territory for God by erecting a fence.
A Ransom for Many
I actually love this angle on the atonement, although I love most of them.
I understand that Reformed theology (also Luther?) often believes that Michael the Archangel is Christ, but Catholics emphatically do not; he's the guardian angel of Israel and now the Church. So when Catholics read in Revelation that Michael defeats the devil, they see that the final defeat of Satan takes place not by the direct involvement of Christ, but by a subordinate, even a great one. Even the final banishment of Satan to the lake of fire in Rev. 20 is often seen as something Michael does, leading to the long history of Catholic art depicting Michael stamping on the head of Satan.
I often think of this as the great humiliation of Satan. His only encounters with Christ are when he had taken flesh, was weak, fasting, in the desert, and when he is nailed to the Cross with his hands nailed behind his back, and he wins both times. The pride of the devil is he believes he could rival God, and is greater than human beings, but God defeats him in human flesh and restrained in human torment, and he allows a created angel to apprehend and damn him. In other words -- "you are not my equal, and even at my lowest I am incomparably greater than you. Know your place." The foolishness of God is greater than men's wisdom.
There's also the "two screens" effect of this: Satan believes the crucifixion of Christ is his great moment that reveals how grand his ability to contend against God is, and presumably he revels in it. But the view of everyone else is stunned horror, a person being tortured until death. His great moment is not just his destruction, but it's the revelation of the vacuity of his moral authority. He tempted man in the garden with the knowledge of good and evil, but he reveals in this moment that his knowledge of good and evil was catastrophically insufficient, and in fact he believes that evil is good. Any argument to be made that his goal is to free man must contend with the fact that his "crowning achievement," as you put it, was the torture and death of a man.
This also connects to the larger vision in the Church Fathers that Gethsemane and the Cross are the garden and the tree that undo what occurred in the original garden and with the original tree; instead of Satan tempting man with the knowledge of good and evil that properly belongs to the divinity, but which ultimately separates them from God, God instead tempts Satan with the weakness of man's flesh, which ultimately undoes him with the divinity of the God-man. Gregory of Nyssa has a great passage on this, which connects to my larger theme:
To be clear, these are my own views, not necessarily the official Catholic position on things. But they're informed by the Catholic and to an extent Orthodox approach, with my own characteristic views interlaced.
EDIT: Edited significantly to add content, and section markers because of how long it got.
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