BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
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User ID: 3614
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
Dude. I would enjoy living a luxurious life with minimal effort if that option were provided to me.
I believe you and thanks for the counter input, but this is such a vastly different way of thinking than any other man I’ve ever talked to. I have never encountered any situation that would lead me to believe that this goal is equally shared among men as it is among women. I hate to be a Redditor, but do you have any kind of evidence that men and women are both equally interested in being financially supported by the other sex? I think that might be the closest likely study question, but if you have something that is pretty specific about just lives of indolence, that would be interesting also. You could potentially shift my opinion of WEIRD men even lower than it already is!
Most men don’t want to be fuckboys, let alone a fuckboy forever.
Well, except the many examples of all the guys who do end up living lives of vast indolence and luxury, and acquire equally vast harems of women.
We’re in something of a harem lull so maybe it seems like this is not a great strategy that the average man would enjoy, but give it some time and I think our billionaires will get back around to it. Elon is blazing the trail for them.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
I understand what you’re saying, and I obviously feel similarly about Buddhism. Such is life.
But what I’m saying is that you are intellectually wrong about the dogma. You can’t have committed this sin or meet any definition for it because you’re not dead yet.
If you come from a Christian tradition that was super literal about this, okay, just know they are in the minority here and I would be very interested in what their actual dogma said, as opposed to just a rando (such as myself), opining.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
No argument there, the ancients always impress me.
notice patterns
I don’t think I’ve ever really brought it up here, but one of the things about past humans up until maybe the 1930s or so, is that they had nothing but time with which to notice patterns.
Most entertainment activities and almost all of the work ones involved interacting with other humans on a constant basis. Most of them required you to go outside to do them, and mingle amongst other humans. Even if they don’t require it, like spinning, spinning by yourself is extremely boring and it’s more fun to go outside and talk to other people. They had a lot of time to notice patterns and behavioral trends in their fellow humans.
And once we got around to the Greeks, they started writing down their notes for us.
The fact that they had so much time just spent hanging around each other inclines me to trust their observations of human nature very highly.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
Have you considered the health benefits of being leeched? I can assure you that Breaker’s House of Leeches sells only the finest leeches to temper your humours.
Buy one, get one, no returns.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
But kindly also note the double standard: women must be virgins upon marriage, and married off at eighteen (the maximum limit at which nature intends them to be single) else men will be having sex outside of marriage. That men should not be having sex outside of marriage? Well, uh, that's different.
But those who know anything about virtue in the male know that the marriage of our young men under twenty-five, to a woman with a sound body about eighteen years of age, is almost, if not the only, means of preserving the virtue of the rising generation of men.
I assume there is more to this speech than just what you provided, but he clearly expects men to be virgins at 24, at a minimum. They wouldn’t be having their virtue preserved if they were out knocking boots with girlfriends and/or hookers, and he sets the line at “under twenty-five.”
“Remain a virgin at 24,” vs “remain a virgin at 18” seems to me to actually be the higher expectation.
Everybody knows that the one child of the wealthy and highly educated couple is generally a spoiled child and has as a rule, poor health; while the six or eight children of the poor and moderately educated woman are exceedingly strong and lusty.
Exceedingly strong and lusty is hilarious, I wish we still talked like this.
But also…seems plausibly true. I’ve lived near a seven kid family before, and while I have no opinion on their strength or lustiness, they certainly seemed vibrant and not prone to sitting indoors all day. That may also have been a Mom trick to get some peace and quiet, but they were clearly not hothouse flowers.
On the other hand, we have a lot of single children these days and I have heard accusations that a lot of those kids are hothouse flowers. And there do seem to be more fragile kids around, which I believe is even born out statistically.
The 19th century might have been on to something.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
If Top Men are on it, it is my patriotic belief that all of the women are being safely stored in a giant warehouse somewhere for their own good. They may be receiving phosphate treatment, I don’t know.
Smash cut to the Sultan’s harem
I think you should review where rationalists are at nowadays. You're lumping a lot of people with views from mildly positive to actively hostile towards every position you named. I could just as easily say that there is no meaningful difference between Catholics and Mormons. And indeed, to someone completely unfamiliar with Christianity this would be true. But of course to someone who actually takes the time to examine what they believe, it is obviously not true. They share lineage, obviously. Hence my description of "intersecting Venn diagrams that have moved apart."
At least we’re getting somewhere now. What would you say the core tenets of Rationalism actually are, then? Because to me they look the same as, really, generic materialist atheism, and certainly the new atheists.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
Well, that would be flattering to Catholics, certainly
Good grief, are you so bitter about everything that this kind of snark is your response? Fine, the priest can be the elephant’s shitter and your Sunday school teacher the ivory. I don’t care, whatever you want to call them. Come at me with better stuff than this.
What I meant by "I was there" was not some metaphysical experience of the birth of wokeness, but that I actually witnessed the birth of both new atheism and rationalism
Sure, but again, that is just your opinion that they are two meaningfully different movements. They’re both headed the same direction. They both use the same tools. What is your actual, factual evidence that they are meaningfully different? Because to me, they both look like atheistic, materialist, bond dissolving, utilitarian movements.
Seriously, what beliefs of rationalists can you point to that are not shared by New Atheists? They share being pro gay rights, pro feminism, pro trans, pro redistributionist, pro liberalism, they both don’t like the Church, they have HBDers, they have people openly worrying about and discussing AI alignment, on and on it goes.
The People’s Front of Judea can tell me they’re not the same thing as the Judean People’s Front, but they look the same to me.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
As erwgv3g34 says, can’t fault your taste in Winged Hussar arrival music.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
In fairness, I missed that too.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5d ago
First, I’m suspicious of anything Mr. Lapthorn Smith states, on account of his being a Canadian. Are Canadian doctors even real doctors? Experts disagree.*
That being said, I’m just surprised to see you posting something as mostly true and eminently reasonable as this. Is his reasoning correct? Well, I’m not willing to buy that higher education sucked all of the blood into your brain and away from your organs of generation.
On the other hand, stupid is not the same thing as content. The problem did start with the, at the time, extremely small educated class, accounting for both men and women. It has only gotten worse as more people are “educated.”
Women do in fact appear to enjoy living luxurious lives with minimal effort and having that provided for them. Women are more neurotic than men.
Women are aiming upwards for the strongest mate, or perhaps the most status providing one. Nothing wrong with that, each group has its mating preferences, but from a societal point of view, it’s just as destabilizing as men who only want to be fuckboys forever, which is of course the optimal male strategy.
Wanting a mate who is already established is reasonable from the female perspective, but also means that in modern society you wind up with either 18 year-olds marrying 30 year-olds, or 30-year olds marrying 30 year-olds. It would indeed be better for 20 year-olds to marry 22 year-olds and then build a life together.
I won’t sign on to his specific take on Roistering Ralph, but the idea that a woman getting married to a much older Lothario at 27 is probably going to end badly for her and more or less fine for the guy seems perfectly reasonable. See many Hollywood marriages. Alternatively, everything about Leonardo di Caprio.
Seems to me that his beliefs were true but not justified, so I give him half credit for making the effort. Minus half credit for being Canadian.*
*This is just a joke. I enjoy seeing your best American jokes, Canadians. Please continue visiting our malls and buying our fireworks.
Edit: I agree with Substantial Frivolity. Volunteering to the degree you are able would be a good road for you.
First of all, at this point you’re halfway through your birthday, so happy birthday, please continue to stick around. Also, it’s a little late to give you direct birthday activity suggestions, so I will aim at trying to make your next birthday an improvement over this one.
General Thoughts:
You have a friend. You have a relationship with your family. Those are good things. I think it would help you to get used to being around other people and doing things with them, in larger groups, more often. And to just slowly, over time, let yourself enjoy it to the extent that you are able.
I’ll be honest, I only know of one free way to pull that off, but if you can find a free way you like more, or one that is cheap enough for you to do two or three times a month, those will help as well. I bet there probably are other places that are free or nearly so, I just don’t personally know about them. All of what follows is translatable to other types of free/nearly free gathering locations.
Okay, here’s the part you might not like. The only free version of this that I personally know of is church.
You don’t want a megachurch, because you’ll feel even more like a face in the crowd. I would say you want to ID every church in a distance you think is achievable in winter time, then go check them all out. Find one that has about 75-100 people in the pews and where there’s room to sit all the way in the back. If there’s an upper level of seating, that might be tempting, but sometimes the choir and musicians hang out up there and it can be hard to make a quick getaway. If it looks empty, you know, dealer’s choice on where you want to sit.
Bring an audiobook or something, put in an earbud, and just get used to being around a number of other people, who are basically all focused on their thing, at a cost of free ninety nine.
If anyone says anything to you, just make the usual mouth noises and disengage to get to your spot. Under no circumstances tell them anything about you that makes you sound like a potential convert. If they get pushy, just say you’re looking at churches in the area. If you don’t like the vibe, bail. Eventually, after weeks or months, the people of wherever you settle will grow used to this strange new newcomer and start trying to make actual small talk, which you can engage with or not as you please, but it will help you personally if you do it.
Eventually, you might get to feeling like part of a community and start wanting to pitch in on something. This is basically achievable without ever believing a word out of the preacher’s mouth, or doing any lying yourself, and is thus accessible to everyone no matter their personal moral code. But that feeling of being part of a community will do you a lot of good.
I’m not going to promise it will get you a job, although church folk usually do look out for each other and try to network those things once you are a known quantity.
I’m definitely not going to promise it will get you a wife and a family. But it will get you the sensation that you are part of a broader group than just your family and one friend, and that that group sort of vaguely cares about you and your wellbeing.
And you can have all these benefits for as close to free as you care to get, without ever changing your personal beliefs. You could be an atheist your whole life and still be a beloved and respected member of a church community, by just putting in the time and not being specific about some things.
If you’re still here, seriously, I am not saying you have to find a church specifically. That’s just the example that I know. If you can find something else that hits the positive points of church that I described above, do what moves you, man. Just find somewhere you can regularly be in a community of 50 or more people, and not necessarily have to talk much or ever.
Please don’t join a cult.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
as science and medicine evolve, the law must evolve with them, no?
I don’t see why that follows. The old law could be perfectly good for humans as it stands, and trying to make adaptations for improved science and medicine could wind up making the law worse.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
That might be the case in a world where modern liberalism doesn’t exist, but in this world, it’s at least the next closest thing to cosmically-preordained.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
It's a gambit obviously deployed in bad faith. It's a rhetorical tactic akin to saying "You're being emotional." You should know better.
You accuse people of this…
But I would (and am) aware that for all your magisterial apologetics, there is no meaningful difference between her and your priests.
And then you turn around in the same post and say stuff like this. I believe I grasp that you are trying to turn my own statement around on me, by implying that, metaphorically, she is the tail and Catholic priests are the trunk of Christianity. Or whatever “It’s all the same thing” metaphor you want to use.
To which I say…okay? I don’t know what big gotcha you think this is. Every Christian and Christian church at least wants to be headed the same direction, with greater or lesser success. I think she was dumb and wrong, but she’s part of the same elephant. That’s exactly the same thing I’m saying about New Atheism, Atheism+, Rationalism, The Enlightment, Liberalism, Post-Modernism, etc etc etc.
a statement of fact
I just know I'm right and you're wrong because I was there
Moving on to this part. If it is your stance that one toe and another toe are meaningfully different when the elephant is charging at you, then okay, I have nothing further to say that I think will mean anything to you. I think you are contradicting yourself, but I’m sure you will disagree.
I, on the other hand, say that the purpose of the elephant is to dissolve all the pleasant and gainful things about human society in the pursuit of ever greater and greater atomization of man. So if the one toe is called “New Atheism” and another is called “Rationalism,” well, it all looks like an elephant to me.
But then you also say that your argument is a fact based on your personal experience and your self-knowledge that you’re right, to which I say, “Why should I care what you say you personally know?”
I can tell you, right now, that I have direct experiential knowledge that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior of Mankind, coupled with a vast intellectual edifice constituting thousands of years and millions of pages supporting me in that statement of fact. Does that convince you that I’m right and you need to run immediately to the nearest church and get right with God?
C’mon man, that’s laughable. We both know that if you engaged with this, you would tell me that millions of people can say the same thing about Vishnu or the Buddha or whoever. Or some other circa-2000’s online atheism argument.
So if you are going to tell me what kind of argumentation I should be better than, then you should be better than “It’s a fact because I said so.”
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
A few questions:
- Do you live in a rural, suburban, or urban area?
- Do you have reasonable capability to transport yourself around your area? I.E., rural = vehicle, suburban = bike, urban = public transpo or your two feet?
- Do you hang out with people? If yes, small, medium, or large groups?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
This detailed scholarly analysis of insults in the cultural mileu in which Jesus taught His disciples summarizes Jesus’ likely intended meaning thus
I am very suspicious of a Jew trying to tell Christians what Jesus akshually meant.
This means social media is a moral hazard and Christians should be extra wary about opining online.
Nevertheless, no argument here.
And calling someone a retard is a highway to Hell.
This just adds to my expectation that I’ll have a lot of time to really get to know purgatory on a personal level.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
As for new atheism and rationalism being the same thing: no, they definitely are not. There is definitely some overlap, but new atheism spawned Atheism+ and was a driver of SJW/wokeness, which rationalism has always been ambivalent-to-hostile towards.
I get that you have very strong feelings about this, but that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
There is no meaningful difference between the tentacles of the octopus. The guys touching the trunk, the tail, the ears and the legs of the elephant are all actually touching the same thing. You can say that they are definitely not the same thing, but from over here it just looks you’re touching an elephant.
Calvinism is Christianity just like Catholicism is Christianity. In my opinion, it is weird, dumb Christianity that gets many things wrong and is just barely better than not being Christian, making me at best ambivalent to hostile towards it, but it’s still Christianity. It wants to save souls, its works are intended to save souls, and God willing, maybe it has seen some success doing that. Do I think it would be better if they were all Catholics? Sure, but they’re still part of the elephant.
As a kid, I once made a Halloween joke about the holy spirit being like a ghost in a sheet or something, and the Sunday school teacher very seriously read me the verse about mocking the holy spirit being an unforgivable sin.
Fortunately, in no church anywhere is dogma defined by the Sunday School teachers. I’m sorry that happened to you and I bet it was a little traumatizing, but I’m also willing to bet your Sunday school teacher was an untrained volunteer with a minimal grasp of theology beyond Bible stories. That’s why he/she should stick to reenacting Bible stories on a felt board.
This, incidentally, is a point for why I am Catholic. The kids stay in the service, and so a priest is available to catechize. Plus, when catechizing, they have to work out of the literal book of answers to dogma questions.
Maybe it’s a bit of a limb to be out on, but I’m going to trust the past 16-1700 years of Church teaching on what is considered blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, over the opinions of the Rational Response Squad or the knee-jerk reaction of Mr/Mrs Woebegone at Sunday School.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
While secular do-gooding doesn’t convert anyone, it is in a loose sense a prerequisite. Someone must think you’re a ‘good person’ before taking an interest in the more faith-oriented aspects. Any theory about Christianity making a comeback must acknowledge this, what to me seems a pretty fundamental fact.
True, but the problem here is that “being a good person” means very different things to serious Christians and to believers in modern morality.
Imagine that I am able to spend all of my time operating a Catholic soup kitchen. In my time running it, I have sourced donations, worked hundreds of long days, been a kind and welcoming source of support to many, and fed at least thousands of hungry people. Also, I adhere to Catholic doctrine that gay people are suffering from disordered desires and should not indulge those desires, and that gay marriages are definitely an invalid, sinful concept.
I would be willing to bet that locally, I would have some defenders, but what do you think the theme of any media coverage is going to be once they discover I’m actually attempting to be serious about the whole faith? Do you think anyone who doesn’t actually know me would walk away believing I am a “good person?” From the modern liberal point of view, can any of my good deeds wipe away my sin and create an opening for conversion?
I would argue no. Which is why, when presented with the opportunity of Constantine, Christianity didn’t say “No, no, the best way for us is to focus on do-gooding for conversions, we don’t need the backing of the state.” They understood in some fashion that if the state isn’t backing your morals and values, it will back someone else’s. And that having the state backing your morals and values is the optimal way to make them the sea the fish swim in, thus making it much easier to both “do good” and maintain and promote dogma.
It seems you seem to be saying that overemphasizing love for your neighbor as a PR strategy will backfire by confusing Christians themselves about their own priorities? I don’t really buy that.
This makes me seriously question your understanding of the faith and the situation in which it finds itself. The sole purpose of Christianity is to win souls away from death and to immortal life in Christ. That’s what all the do-gooding and theology and everything else is actually for. God, in his mercy, is willing to forgive everything we do against him, but people do have to understand that they need to repent and seek God’s mercy. Therefore, they need to know what is actually sinful and what isn’t. I can be a great giver of charity and beloved by all, but if I’m telling my hypothetical flock that God says it’s okay to shoplift, I’m going to have a lot of people unwittingly mired in sinful living when they die, at which point they’re in God’s hands.
On a related note, I don’t know if you’ve been in a United Methodist Church recently, but I have cause to be in a local one fairly often and they have more LGBT and Pride iconography than they do Christian at this point. And I live in a very not liberal part of the Western United States. This church has absolutely lost sight of the priority to save souls, by overemphasizing loving their neighbor. The thing you don’t buy is a real thing that is happening right now in broad swathes of the faith, at least in the West.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
The #1 best way, in this very moment, to test the willingness of either sex to stop hearts, is to look at the demographics of hunters.
As I’m sure you can imagine, the statistics on female participation in hunting are abysmal, somewhere between 5 to 1 and 9 to 1, and the statistics are almost certainly failing to account for the fact that there are plenty of female-owned hunting tags out there that are actually filled by the man. Yes, this is illegal. Surprise.
The ratios in target shooting are somewhat more equal, something like 3 women out of 10 shooters, but at the end of target shooting, nothing is actually dead.
Now, there are definitely female hunters out, there is no denying that. But, even there, we can try to observe the propensity for violence of each sex. This gets down into anecdotal information, but there are women who can take the shot but are for some reason incapable of doing the gutting and quartering, or if not incapable, vastly prefer that the man do it. War doesn’t tend to feature direct butchery, but it is pretty gruesome and I would consider unwillingness to do butchery as an indicator of an overall unwillingness to engage in aggressive, violent action. Also, if a man could shoot but not butcher, he would be relentlessly mocked by his buddies until he finally did the thing.
Nurses of course see plenty of gruesome things, but for healing and nurturing reasons, which I would argue makes it a much different experience for women.
So women are not taking Samuel Colt up on his offer in nearly the ratios we would expect if the two sexes were actually equal in matters of violence. As a result, my theory in response to your question is that women would mostly do what they have done for all of human history. That is, mostly help out the remaining men on their side with the lighter duties, with a limited minority of women actually participating fighting the fight.
If they win this disturbing hypothetical, they could be anywhere from magnanimous in victory, to as cruel as Comanche squaws. If they were to lose, 90%+ would just accept the new status quo. Women as a group aren’t ever actually going to be treated all that badly.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
If they were practically self-sufficient, I think we would actually see more abundance, and that would be a very different and very interesting world. I think that world would have a high chance of dying out in a generation or two, but it might not, and that would very interesting.
The problem is that, even accounting for the fact that practically no one is truly self-sufficient in these times, women appear to be less self-sufficient than men, on average.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
Because young women want material things for free or with minimal effort, and Democrats are, at this time, the party that is vocally for redistribution.
Also, women in general like it when men do violence on their behalf, and Democrats are vocally the party of sheltering women from consequences. Don’t be fooled by young women jumping in on “Defund the Police” and other such slogans. For AWFLs, that only ever meant “Neuter the police as a force resisting the violence of POC males. Absolutely keep it as a force protecting me personally from violence, and also resisting any violence my co-ethnic males might engage in.”
Following on from that, and I will admit that this part is purely speculation, but my experience is that many more young women have a problem with self-loathing, vs young men. And Democrats are vocally the party of self-loathing for their constituents.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
As far as I’m aware, I’ve never heard it before I invented it in my one lifetime stroke of genius while in the car with my wife.
But now I hope you hear it elsewhere, otherwise I’ll use it in public one day and everyone will know I’m merely a breaker of goats and gnomes.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
6d ago
I know people make this argument, but they are the same movement to me.
Ghostbusters is not heavily influenced by I Want a New Drug, it is I Want a New Drug with some extra cruft added. The heart of the thing is the same. Arguably, they have the same heart as the Enlightenment, which was often equally cringe as the New Atheists and rationalism.
The average age at first marriage in the US is 30.5 for men, and 28.6 for women, which is close enough to 30-30, IMO.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/371933/median-age-of-us-americans-at-their-first-wedding/
South Korea is further down the same road, at 33.8 and 31.5.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1112935/south-korea-median-age-at-first-marriage-by-gender/
This is a significant increase from mid-century stats, which were around 22.5 for men and 20 for women in 1950.
When the good professor was writing, the American average was 26 and 22.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf
Age gap marriages of 10 years or more constitute 9.3% of marriages, almost all of them an older man and younger woman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships
If you go 30 man, 24 woman, which is a big gap, that constitutes 20.5 percent of marriages. If you also include the vice versa relationship of older woman, younger man, that gets you 23.3 of all marriages.
There is a huge confounder to this statement, which is that even in the Canadian doctor’s era, forced or arranged marriages were exceedingly rare, indicating that women did in fact have choices about who they married.
Additionally, the propaganda and societal pressure that women receive advocates much more strongly for 22+ years of education for women, for having a long-term stable career before getting married, and against motherhood.
In a hypothetical world where women were just as free as they are now, but with the propaganda and societal pressure of 1905, we can, I believe, properly assume a very different age ratio and time to first marriage.
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