Funny. I was just wondering why entire subgenres of SciFi and althistory don't work for me anymore as I get more conservative/blackpilled.
"Written with the assumptions of Star Trek in mind" captures the commonalities even across genres surprisingly well.
Tanista
6d ago
Tentatively, I would expect that one would find some folks in that sect writing within the context of the tradition that they are being heretical from. I think it likely that you would find them claiming that what they are doing is that tradition
Either that what they do is that tradition or is in fact the truer fulfillment of the essence of the faith even if it does violence to a lot of the claims the tradition they're attacking stands by. Which is why I compared it to Gnosticism. Christians would deny that Gnostics are Christians. Gnostics might not deny that they are Christians, but they certainly claim that all non-Gnostics are ignorant of the true implications of their gospels and the real ground for Christian faith.
The New Atheist claim is that you can have all of the good things about God without God and, in fact, what you think is necessary might as well be the commandments of the demiurge that prevent full flourishing.
I think you put a lot of stock in the universalist axis, and I don't think it's that load-bearing. Again, it's a bit of a superficial relation. Not quite "Hitler was a vegetarian", but yeah, I think we can find a range of views on the universalist axis across all sorts of traditions.
Sam Harris came up with a hypothetical "worst possible misery for everyone" and uses this to bootstrap himself to a justification for what is basically modern liberal Western morality.
Theoretically it could come from anywhere when a Western atheist basically reinvents hell so he can also reinvent existing moral theories I think we're significantly more justified in skepticism that it comes from the aether. Harris could have come up with a more collectivist view, or something centered more in relations than individual human dignity he didn't. He could have accepted that his hypothetical appeal lacks the sort of universalizing force of God (sure, avoiding WPM state for me and mine make sense but why are we obligated to avoid it for others?)
But he ends up in the same place. This isn't ethics as such. It's a particular form of ethics.
Tanista
8d ago
Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others
Which is why you'd say it's more likely higher agreeableness than higher empathy.
Conformity to an inconsistently sympathetic or safetyist ideology would explain this.
Sure, "Science" has been the calling card for many a scientismist for quite a long time, core to their being as atheists. One question is whether this is truly "Christian heresy", but all these atheists have, indeed, been around for a long time. Plenty stretching back to antiquity and in non-Christian societies.
I'm not sure why we'd assume a continuity of ancient atheism and modern atheism. Atheism is a rejection of God(s). How we see gods influences it.
Consider New Atheism: their moral critique of Christianity was that it was a) unnecessary and b) insufficiently universalist because non-Christians are excluded from full communion. The latter is not a critique that ancient atheists would necessarily have cared about. Ethics doesn't actually obligate you to be a universalist.
Criticisms of the morality of the Old Testament God are born of the same impulse that gave us an actual, clear Christian heresy like gnosticism: the god of the Hebrew Bible, at first blush, fails by the standards of the New Testament/NT-inspired modern morality. This is a problem that becomes acute when you're not a polytheist.
The other claim is that science can fill the role religion plays as an arbiter of truth, a moral authority and a source of meaning and the sense of the numinous. I see no reason for these to be basic atheistic assumptions. A lot of our debates are about principles. And truth doesn't have to be numinous.
To this day you find leftists who insist that progressive liberals aren't actually leftists. Nobody in the American system cares much but they'll passionately insist that America doesn't really have a left because they're all liberals.
The obscuring factor here is that progressive liberals seem to see leftists as closer to them politically than right liberals. But leftists will generally attack them even more for being more susceptible to their attacks than right libs.
Of course, when they're attacked from the outside they have no problem hiding behind the ambiguity.
But your uncle is straightforwardly right about DEI, and your denials are just inadvertant gaslighting
The uncle/"simple as" stuff really does feed my belief that it just comes down to these terms being low status.
I don't know that any of the supposedly technical or more accurate terms - like Mounk's "identity synthesis" - are actually superior in intuitiveness to "cultural Marxism" or, even worse, "gay race communism". Those other terms are just used by icky dumb people like right libs.
I see why this ideology, which is notoriously against being named at all would behave this way but I don't see what anyone else gains.
and rebelliousness/insufficient patriotism. Not a lot about it being too Jewish.
The Jews were seen as troublesome, stubborn bastards too. It was just that they were clearly an ancient people and so got somewhat of a pass. Christians not so much.
After the rebellion this association would have been even stronger. Which explains the Christian efforts to distinguish themselves in their Gospels.
Tanista
12d ago
Handing over the territory without a deal might have ended up like Gaza (which is criticized even by pro-Pals as a way to freeze the peace process*). Worse maybe.
So we have to go back to why a deal didn't happen.
* Pretty damning when you think about it tbh.
Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
They were getting welfare out of the international community via things like UNRWA regardless. I'm sure money will continue to roll in.
Because the people Lobster Daddy hates have been in control of art, universities, etc for the back half of the 20th century and all of the 21st
And are we arguing that that has yielded no fruit? All of the things people blame on Tumblr started in the academy.
Or is that they clearly aren't trying because they otherwise would have succeeded given their hegemony in those spaces?
I don't see why "they did try. They were just wrong, like their Marxist forebears" isn't an answer in this framework. There may just be limits on what you can do sometimes using those tools.
I get the theory. It's clearly just not playing out that way.
The fewer white people there are the more various goals conflict because you can't just take it all from them. Asians want meritocracy in education which squeezes out other groups besides whites, attempts to come up with some anti-crime measures that also don't annoy blacks lead to disorder that harms everyone, Latinos simply don't seem to be that interested in being auxiliaries in white progressives' fight against other whites if it comes at the expense of the economy or themselves and the in-group favoritism for random illegals is vastly overstated.
cities across the US are controlled by people who govern badly, let crime and other scams run rampant and, whether this is intentional or not, the result of this is they keep normal, functional Americans out of those cities which protects the machine politics of those cities
That part might be true but this isn't actually helping the electoral chances of Democrats or blacks as a whole. If anything, emigration to red states because of the disorder weakens their voting power and the most famous and wealthy liberal cities being basket cases just undermines the very idea of government competence.
This is basically what the Abundance turn of the party is about.
Do the people opposing ICE really believe that large scale unregulated immigration from Latin America will actually benefit the US?
Forget the US. What benefit do blacks like Johnson specifically get?
They compete with blacks for jobs (or spending in the case of cities with right to shelter) and now there's not even a pretense that they'll be a permanent Democratic client base like them to push for policies African-Americans would want. Clearly the emerging Democratic majority with a bunch of minorities all loyal to one another is not going to happen.
Hell, insofar as they do join up they dilute AA's hold on the party. And, because they're not fully captured there's more of an incentive to pander to them. As Biden said: unlike the black community Latinos are diverse.
Anyways...the bronze age, amirite?
Funny thing is the Joseph story may actually be relatively young as Genesis stories go, possibly post-Exilic. I don't know if that's better or worse since the later it is the more "Jew" becomes an accurate descriptor of the writers. If it was earlier you could maybe see it as an attempt to ride off the coattails of the Semitic Hyksos (who were also allegedly driven out and destroyed) and claim their blood made it into Israel.
Interesting conjecture:
According to Römer, Joseph in this passage could be loosely based on a governor named Cleomenes who ruled part of Egypt under Alexander the Great:
…Joseph, in this passage, also somewhat resembles Cleomenes of Naucratis, an administrator of Alexander’s, the builder of Alexandria, and the originator of a mint in Egypt. In fact, it was he who, until his dismissal, held power in Egypt. While famine raged in the Mediterranean basin, he first prohibited the export of Egyptian wheat, and then greatly increased taxes on it in 329 BC. In a certain way, he obtained a sort of monopoly of wheat, which he would buy for 10 drachmas and sell for 32 drachmas. He inaugurated the control of the wheat trade by the Ptolemies. Cleomenes also seems to have been in conflict with the priests over the question of the maintenance of the temples.
Many such cases in the Bible. Maybe the biggest sin of the writers is taking credit for shit they didn't do (like the supposed genocide of the Canaanites).
I don't see it as directly insulting as the hard R so much as...patronizing? Juvenile?
It's just a weird way for supposedly adult political consultants to talk consistently about a group they need to pander to. Trying to think of a parallel and blanking.
Tanista
19d ago
There's also just a lot of hypocrisy. I can't know for sure but I suspect things would be better if the same people wagging their finger didn't support their favored groups being assholes all the time in the exact ways they attack. The system might have at least been stable without that.
It's less a church lady enforcing the rules with an iron fist on everyone and more that teacher who clearly has a favorite and is doing such a bad job hiding it that they've emboldened their worst instincts.
Tanista
19d ago
It becomes hard when people begin to worry that your kindness is really about giving yourself license to attack the people you claim are stopping you from being kind.
I think part of the problem is that the pro-illegal lean of the party leads to them treating all citizens the way they treated Republicans who complained about being kind and nobody much liked it. The stories of Chicago and NY spending on migrants and the general "deal with it" attitude seemed to trigger black Democrats just as welfare queen stories triggered others.
It doesn't seem baffling to me. The message from Klein, Thompson and Dunkleman is that an entire branch of left-wing progressivism ( the side whose instinct to devolve responsibility and attack concentrations of power like corporations as opposed to the equally progressive tendency to make them partners in regulation and social engineering) didn't just fail, it won and then failed and is costing Democrats.
Their general argument is that systems in place that, for example, allow left-wing advocacy groups to sue and stop nearly all infrastructure or home building, are bad. Obviously some people like those systems and consider them a triumph of leftism (cynically: since they know how to use them better than the people who don't have houses or aren't educated enough to use environmental protection law to their advantage)
It's a clear broadside against an entire set of Democratic anti-monopoly, anti-government, pro-lawsuit activists.
Finally, all wordcels have is how many people value what they say. Klein is the Drake of the Democratic party: a whole bunch of people believe "They" made him successful because he's a capitalist bootlicker because it's easier than admitting that people simply prefer him. There seems to be a clear element of professional envy here. If the Zephyr Teachout's of the world were actually indigent, they'd have an incentive to listen to a criticism of their policies. But they aren't so it's all status games. It's just rappers jumping on a more successful rapper in the hopes of getting their name out/taking their place.
Some of these are amazing, thanks!
Religious movies just never capture reverence or awe well.
I truly wonder if this is it. My thinking is that the Jesus story is just...difficult in its totality if you don't already believe. Individual story beats can make great stories but the totality of the god-man and what he has to do is just...odd (the closer we get to suicide by cop the less interested I was in The Chosen). It is, after all, consciously a subversion of expectations
I guess I'll have to find some Old Testament films to compare.
Tanista
19d ago
The answer is as simple as it is impossible for the current left to even fake.
Stop using the term "white dudes" -> 50 state sweep.
I'm only half-joking. Why is it always "white dudes"?
Tanista
19d ago
The gays that won't just go along with the ideology are themselves being pushed out/see no reason to participate anymore?
Some Democrats have explicitly said they don't want black faces that don't want to toe the line. Why would gay men be any different?
Tanista
20d ago
Just finished Passion of the Christ after attempting, and failing, to get back into the Chosen. Something about the story just doesn't click for me.
Recommendations for good Jesus-centered visual media?
I don't believe people want to game or watch TV endlessly on repeat though, I certainly don't.
The fanfic industry gives the lie to this. Many of us do indeed want endless streams the same media with a few changes and wrinkles thrown in. Most of these fics are very derivative even for an inherently derivative art form even where it doesn't make sense - see Stations of Canon - and many are just bad yet we slog through them hoping to find the few that let us recapture the same feeling we got consuming the original work.
most notably in "black folks vs. niggas"
Rock stopped performing that joke
"I think a lot of people were thinking in those terms and hadn't been able to say it. By the way, I've never done that joke again, ever, and I probably never will," says Rock. "'Cause some people that were racist thought they had license to say n-----. So, I'm done with that routine."
That might be the difference. Rock was able to publicly acknowledge the issues making these sorts of jokes and how others could use them and toe the line of offering well-meaning criticism instead of validating racists
Cosby was apparently unapologetic, and was constantly lecturing black Americans despite the mother of logs in his own eye up until he was cancelled.
Tanista
1mo ago
The audience is primed to just not be outraged when they hear claims about American racism. They are not primed to behave this way when faced with attacks on this allied group. That's all there is to it.
And yes, it is an attack. Being vague about it won't change it.
Even if they were ignorant of it, there's an entire other side of the political spectrum that reacts very badly to these sorts of claims. They just don't care (or even enjoy their outrage). The same dynamics aren't at play here.
It's amazing how stacked a resume Orlando Bloom built off of a couple year span after Lord of the Rings before people realized his limited range wasn't just an acting choice for Legolas.
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