What I mean is that Protestants are not intellectually serious, and that most of the claims keeping people in their church don’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
“The Church is hiding the Bible from you they don’t want you to read it only WE have the true words of God!” was a convincing argument when it wasn’t easy to find out that this is just very literally not true.
As far as conversation to Protestantism being unserious: not only could I become a Protestant tomorrow if I wanted to, I could become a Protestant pastor, and so could Vivek.
Vivek Could announce tomorrow that he is starting a church, could call it a “Christian” church, and go around trying to convince people in Ohio that he’s a very serious Christian of some kind.
But this would all take 5 minutes, and be meaningless.
If he wanted to become Catholic, there’s a process to it, he’d need to get his marriage convalidated, baptize his kids, etc. If he wanted to become a priest (to contrast this with the seriousness of becoming a Protestant pastor), it would take him around a decade of philosophy and theology classes, he’d need to leave his family, etc. (Although I'm not sure The Church would take
That’s the point I’m making. It Vivek went through OCIA, got confirmed, convalidated his marriage, went to mass at least weekly, and baptized his kids, I think people would see it as more likely to be genuine.
If he showed up at some mega church or revivalist thing a few times and bought a Bible, I think it would read as performative.
Stellula
1d ago
Can you link me to an example of a church where, if Vivek Ramaswami converted to it, Americans would see this as a strong signal that he was all in on America?
Stellula
1d ago
Doesn't this prove my point pretty cleanly? The Mennonites are not using the internet.
Stellula
2d ago
I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.
If Vivek “converted” to some pointless Evangelical mega church, it would just feel hollow and unserious.
Catholics (and I include the orthodox in this) have basically just won. Protestantism isn’t taken seriously anymore, and so a “conversion” to Protestantism would similarly not be taken seriously.
Stellula
3d ago
I think you’re hitting the core here.
If Vivek moved here, converted to Catholicism, named his kids Sean and Brad, starter personally going by Jim and became an obsessive football fan, maybe I’d buy it.
Because that’s basically what my ancestors did. They changed their names, punished their kids if they tried to speak the old language, named their kids almost comically American names, and just thanked god they were allowed to be here. They wanted to be American not lecture Americans on how to be better.
Four generations from now if some Vivek descendant wants to “rediscover their roots”, then fine. But America does have a culture, actually, and if you want to be an American the good news is they you can! You just have to actually do it.
Stellula
11d ago
God knows that it is our fate to spend our lives in the darkness, and knows that we'll need a light.
C is the language which feels like it can get us out, but python is the language that will be there for us when we can't.
I just watched the preview for this, and it's funny how quickly red/blue tropes shifted.
When this was made I imagine that the family is meant to be taken as fun loving, goofy, and obviously blue, where as SJP is meant to be taken as stuffy, uptight, and obviously red. (edit: I just read the plout outline and one of the family members is a gay, black, deaf man who adopts a child with his gay lover)
But my initial read when watching the preview was that this was a story about an uptight leftist/frigid/HR/feminist type having to spend the holidays with a bunch of conservatives.
Stellula
11d ago
Central planning fails again.
Every single time. This happens every time where you try to engineer around the existence of the human soul, and it will continue to happen, forever. There is a war going on between the ensouled and the enslaved, and you can see it playing out here. The enslaved, who occupy places like HR departments, CPS field agencies, reddit moderation discords, city ordinance compliance departments, HOA boards, and Rust governance bodies, fight against the idea that an ensouled human being might have their own ideas about how to live their life, or how to manage the memory on their own computer.
C is god's language, and as counterintuitive as it may sound: so is python. All other languages exist only to build a path towards enslavement.
Stellula
16d ago
imagine the smell
If any of you are on the tech/ai/startup side of x (which I imagine is everybody here), you probably saw the following exchange:
-
A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline commented "Imagine the smell" under a photo of a hackathon.
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Indians assumed that somebody commenting on the smellyness of a hackathon (I've been to many hackathons, and nerds smell) must be commenting on Indians, and thus freaked out.
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The guy who made the comment replied to some of them saying that no, actually, he was just making a common internetism, and generally speaking to the smell of a bunch of guys in a packed room.
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The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.
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Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.
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Now the internet is imagining a lot of smells, cline has earned a ton of bad will, and the general dislike of Indians in the tech community has grown.
Here are some thoughts on this:
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I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.
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Indians specifically (and I say this as somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, consuming indian culturalisms, and interacting with Indians) seem to have a particular penchant for online drama. There seems to be a particular focus on people saving or losing some form of "face", although that isn't exactly it. It's similar to honor culture you find in other societies, but maybe just its own Indian brand of it. I think what we're seeing here are two cultures which should be separated by 10,000 miles of ocean running into each other on the internet; the clash should not be unexpected.
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"Imagine the smell" is not an anti-Indian slur, or at least it wasn't. It comes from image boards, and gets said under almost any moderately interesting photo of people. However, I think the massive freak out over this has turned it into one. Interdesting.
Stellula
27d ago
Just to further drive this point home: the narcos are engaged in what is effectively chemical warfare. They are in the process of violating the GC when they were shot out of the water.
Stellula
1mo ago
ChatGPT answered this question just find.
Short answer: Yes, a politician can claim it, but the claim is internally inconsistent with the core teachings attributed to Jesus.
Here’s the clean breakdown without soft-pedaling anything:
- What Jesus actually commanded
Jesus’s explicit moral directives include: • Radical, unilateral compassion (Matthew 5–7). • Care for the foreigner (Matthew 25; repeated in Torah citations). • Protection of the poor and vulnerable. • Refusal to use coercive force in moral disputes (“put your sword back”).
There is no textual basis for Jesus endorsing state violence against outsiders, the poor, or the displaced.
- What ICE does
ICE agents: • Track and seize impoverished people, often with guns drawn. • Separate families. • Transport and deport them by force. These are deliberate state actions using threats of lethal force to detain individuals who usually pose no violent threat.
- The contradiction
A politician who: 1. Publicly claims to follow Jesus’s teachings and simultaneously 2. Supports the state hunting down poor foreigners at gunpoint and removing them from the country
…is making a claim that conflicts with the documented ethical demands Jesus laid down.
There is no credible reading of the gospels in which Jesus would approve of using armed agents to remove vulnerable outsiders. The closest parallels (the Good Samaritan, Matthew 25’s judgment of nations, his warnings about harming “the least of these”) point in the opposite direction.
- So would Jesus be disappointed?
Based solely on the text: Yes. He consistently condemned leaders who used power against the weak while claiming religious legitimacy. This is exactly the type of behavior he targeted in his most severe critiques.
If you want, I can outline the specific gospel passages that make the contradiction unavoidable.
Stellula
1mo ago
Regardless of the specifics of handmaids tale, my general point is that debating surrogacy is well, well within the Overton window right now.
Well the first thing he is obviously trolling, and the second two are pretty benign.
Surrogacy basically the plot of handmaid's tale. It seems like there's quite a bit of resistance against that.
And as far as people with dual citizenship not being Americans - this is also self evidently true. There are some semantics that could be worked here, but there is certainly a different class of American who would have dual citizenship. Is a person in a polyamorous marriage really married in the classic sense to their husband? I mean...yes...sortof, but also not really.
Stellula
1mo ago
Why don’t we flip this.
What are some policy positions of Fuentes that you don’t like?
Not trolling or trying to be funny, but actual consistent positions?
Stellula
1mo ago
One of the crazier things to see here is the normie Jewish response.
To call us dual loyalists is an anti semetic dog whistle. Also I voted for Trump due to his support of Israel, and see Fuentes talk like this, against Israel, has got me angry. I’m not voting for Trump anymore now.
Huh?
Anti semetic tropes like the idea that the Jews killed Jesus when it was the Romans!
Yes yes the Jews didn’t kill Jesus they just lobbied the local government to do it for them, which sounds like a Larry David sketch FFS.
Eric Weinstein posted something on twitter the other day attacking the idea of dual loyalty, and pointed out that people asked the same question of Kennedy. Yes Eric, they did. Was it because they were Nazis? Or maybe this is just a reasonable question? Perhaps infinitely more reasonable to ask a Jew than a Catholic when we aren’t sending missiles to the Vatican and I can’t ever move there if I want and there aren’t any senators saying they want to the Vatican’s number one representative in congress?
And then of course there is Ben Shapiro himself, saying his loyalty to America is “backstopped” by the existence of Israel, because if America ever makes him mad he can just leave and go there - but don’t ever dare suggest that he might have dual loyalty.
The duplicity of all of this is staggering.
Stellula
2mo ago
In any case, as I've mentioned before, we don't get paid to manage stuff like this - usually go home and relax is the treatment. We get paid to manage your aunt who is on 8 medications for chronic conditions including hypertension, diabetes, heart failure and s/p hysterectomy for 3a cancer who we see every 4-6 weeks instead of once a year.
We are arguing the exact same thing now. The people who are talking to those people should NOT be the person I am talking to for a fever and a sore throat. Thats the absurd inefficiency.
I basically need to talk to a pharmacist, not a doctor.
Stellula
2mo ago
Again, I am not a doctor. The response I am giving here is essentially me echoing the response I've gotten from telling this story to my doctor friends/family. Basically: "You had a fever for a week, you tested negative for the few viral things they tested for, and they didn't want to explore it further at all or put you on an antibiotic as a precaution?"
Maybe that's wrong. I don't know! What I do know is that "the only people who should be able to tell you anything about this have to make $250k/yr at a minimum, and have to have a seemingly endless number of administrators around them" seems outrageously inefficient to me. Maybe it's not!
My insurance changed last month, my PCP is no longer “in network” and the wait to get into a new one is long, which is why I was at UC. I did go to me “PCP” (a concierge group). That was the second doctor, which I paid cash for. As the symptoms worsened I could have gone back to them again, I guess. However when I was there, they seemed almost offended that I was because my insurance wasn’t usable to them. One reason the doctor said she didn’t want to do any tests (and tried to just get me to go to CVS for the Covid test instead of doing it there) was that my insurance wouldnt cover any of them.
So; just more ridiculous inefficiency in the inefficient healthcare system.
Kind of a meta point here, but I think you’re demonstrating maybe my exact frustration. You assume I’m stupid and don’t know how the system is supposed to work, or that I’m trying to abuse it in some way. I’m assuring you: I do know how it is supposed to work and I’m trying to use it correctly. It’s just that the system does suck
Stellula
2mo ago
Patients will always ask for antibiotics even if we know in advance the issue is viral and antibiotics won't do anything, and that's not counting the goal of abx stewardship, or just minimizing side effect burden. No medications are safe, if you give everyone in the country a full course of antibiotics people are going to lose their kidneys, have joins explode, or just flat out die.
I was making a general point about the inefficiency of the healthcare system, but to address these point specifically:
I didn't ask for antibiotics. I was trying to do things exactly the way you are advocating here. I didn't just get antibiotics, I did go to the doctor four times, and the first 3 of them did essentially nothing. The first one had this interaction:
Do you have a fever?
Well yes, but I'm controlling it with tylenol every 4 hours.
So you don't have a fever?
Well if I stop taking the tylenol, my temperate goes over 102, so I keep on the tylenol and have been for a week.
Okay but your temperature is reading normal right now, it's not showing a fever.
Yes but like I said, I have been taking tylenol regularly to manage the fever, which I have now had for a full week.
Okay so no fever.
The second one was this interaction
Hi I've had a fever for a week and a half now, and the first person I saw said that if it didn't go away, to see my PCP, which is you.
Okay? You probably have a virus
Okay yes but is there anything else we could check for?
I guess I can give you a covid test if you want me to.
I'm asking you for your opinion here? I'm not a doctor, but I've never been this sick for this long before and it's got me concerned.
Okay a covid test I guess?
Sure?
The third one was a telehealth visit, literally not even a video just a text message with a doctor (maybe?)
The fourth was:
Hello I am now on week 3 of some sort of illness, the first week and a half was a 102+ fever, and now I have a sore throat that started one one side of my throat and then over a couple of days moved to both. I am having difficulty swallowing, and if you look deeply into my throat, you'll see it's covered in quite a few tiny white spots.
Those are tonsil stones
No I know what you're talking about, but to see what I'm talking about, you really would need a scope. I could only see the spots I'm talking about using a boroscope, and they're pretty deep inside my throat.
No i can see those from here, the two white spots at the back are tonsil stones
No, I mean a lot deeper than that.
Yeah I see it. Those are tonsil stones
etc.
Yeah probably a viral thing -> weakened immune system -> bacterial infection/secondary viral infection, and anti-biotics were a coincidence. My general point is that this entire escapade is only made worse by gatekeeping healthcare. Offhand I can think of 6 different doctors with different specialities in my very close family circle (either my siblings, or godparents of my kids), and all of them would easily just let me call them and give me recommendations on what do to while I'm sick. The point I'm making here is that I didn't do that, because I was just trying to use the healthcare system as prescribed, and that i was an inefficient joke.
Stellula
2mo ago
Well first of all the family member is a doctor (just not a family doctor), and second: how does the doctor know? Are they given secret knowledge that is inaccessible to mere humans?
Doctors aren’t priests. The stuff that 90% of PCPs are doing could be replaced by a flow chart. As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.
Stellula
2mo ago
The parasites in this situation are the health insurance companies, and to a lesser degree, the actual providers.
I was recently sick, and it took four different doctor visits before somebody just gave me the antibiotics which fixed whatever problem I was having. The first one, an "urgent care" told me to just rest and hydrate. The second, my PCP, gave me a covid test, said that it was negative, shrugged, and said R&H, the third (telehealth) gave me a useless antibiotic and did no testing. The fourth, another UC, gave me a strep test, a mono test, and then some steroids and antibiotics.
This is retarded. A family member, when I was first complaining about being sick, offered to just write me a prescription for the cocktail of drugs he takes when he starts feeling sick, but me being a good little boy said I wanted to go see a doctor.
This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.
As it is, with the retarded "health" cartel, there was probably thousands of dollars of useless waste spent on useless doctors and useless nurses performing useless tests (covid? Really? Flu?). Their goal is to gatekeep as many things as possible behind absurdly expensive gates, then when costs go to infinity, they demand the government subsidize them.
The couple you talk about in the beginning of this post suck, but so does the industry they're sucking.
As usual this is all made a lot worse when the government subsidises all of it.
Stellula
2mo ago
I like it! My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it, preferably so tall that you can't see the top from the bottom, and give whoever is taking a turn speaking a levitating platform to stand on that can move around the chamber while they talk.
Joking aside (although I do really like the idea at first), how would various committees work? Just equally large?
Stellula
2mo ago
I think you got it! Thanks!
Btw everybody here’s the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/themotte
I think the most depressing part is knowing that your TOTAL lifetime tax liability is around $1M.
These people stole the LIFETIME tax output of around 10,000 people.
Taxes are a huge burden on people. They’re one of the major things our politics are decided on. If I don’t pay these, or even if I mess them up, I’ll go to jail. CPAs are an entire, large, industry.
We’re all paying these things, and 10,000 peoples lifetime of burden to the government just gets robbed.
I pay taxes (a LOT of taxes), I obey the laws, drive the speed limit etc. and then I turn on the internet and see stuff like this, people just openly robbing stores and filming themselves do it, see violent criminals released into my neighborhood etc.
Kindof hard to stomach honestly.
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