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9d ago
Spoilers for the movie Saltburn
Especially after we found out Oliver lied about being, it completely flushed any little narrative they had going on down the toilet.
That reveal was actually pivotal to the narrative. I think this isn't translating well across the Atlantic because most wealthy American families tend to be "new money," but people like Felix are descended from people like Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. They're called the owning class because they own vast swathes of land that have been handed down for generations and they can just live off the rent and never have to work. It's a very different kind of wealth from, say, Donald Trump or Jeffrey Bezos.
There's a big contrast between the owning class and middle class people like Oliver (who come from comfortable, privileged backgrounds but ultimately are still expected to work for a living), and there's another big contrast between the middle class and the working class. Especially at universities where students are a long way from home, you get a lot of middle class people pretending to be working class and exaggerating about how "poor" they are, because being working class carries some social capital whereas being middle class is just boring.
Correct, I first heard Abagnale's story on Focus on the Family when I was a child. I saw him speak in person in my early 20's. While I didn't peg him as a fabulist back then it took zero convincing that he was a fraud within a fraud when I first heard the allegations.
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9d ago
Who are some people that you strongly suspect to be fabulists that the general populace has not identified?
I made a comment in the context of Jason Arday about fabulists and I used Jordan Belfort, Marcus Luttrell, Chris Kyle, Greg Mortenson, Frank Abagnale, Jr. as examples. I called out or was suspicious of all of them other than Abagnale and I chalk that up to me hearing his story as a child and then not thinking about it. Took 0 convincing.
The surprising thing is that Petra De Sutter hired him in the first place and seemed to defend the initial hiring.
I'm not trying to brag - maybe I am - but it was very clear to me while reading Lone Survivor that Luttrell was at best exaggerating. I called BS on the voting immediately.
I did some searches to see if I documented my disbelief of Luttrell. Looks like I asked a friend who was going to an event Luttrell was speaking at if he'd call Luttrell a liar. In another conversation I commented "now not like lone survivor where they're doing summersalts down a cliff dropping guys right and left"
I guess having myself careened down a mountain at 13,000 feet desperately trying to regain control of my ice axe made me skeptical...
I think many to most were not fully cognoscente of the likely outcomes. They desperately wanted to believe him. Just as demand for racism outstrips supply and people believe crazy made up racial attacks.
Taking it beyond culture war millions of people believe fabulists that in retrospect should have been glaringly obvious from the get go. E.G. Jordan Belfort, Marcus Luttrell, Chris Kyle, Greg Mortenson, Frank Abagnale, Jr.
I'm a drone skeptic, in that I think they are a major advancement but not as big a deal to an S-tier military. The USSR/Russia has been a C-tier meant B-tier military since at least the mid-80s, and while lessons are important, they are not decisive. Drone dynamics are very different against air supremacy. The test case here will be around Israel in the coming years. Who I would put at S-Tear for air-force and electronic warfare within it's immediate vicinity.
The US should have pretty extreme electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. EA-18 Growlers, destroyer based system should offer almost complete suppression of remote drone operation.
AWACS should be able to spot drones almost immediately upon launch. Drone launch should be at a minimum of 30 miles away, and I would think quite a bit more because the US should have fairly thorough counter-suppression within a few miles off the coast. If you want to live after you launch the drone, you better be pretty far inland. This should also limit the ability for fiber-optic flying; if you have to fly the thing for 30 miles, you're dead before it gets there. Hence why I think I have not heard of fiber piloted drones happening.
My impression of the drone hits on US bases is that these are known fixed targets, so the drones are flying completely autonomously. This is a temporary issue, in that military bases should be able to be hardened against such threats. Put everything important behind reinforced concrete and nets, turns drone sophistication into more like planes, and thus makes suicide capabilities much less economical or you're just launching cruise missiles, which does not seem to be economical for Iran.
Thus, it feels like it should be doable with AWACS, EW from aircraft and ships coupled with loitering mentions over the UAE for very effective suppression long-term.
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14d ago
It's minor but my biggest annoyance
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14d ago
Expanse was my go to example of how you can do diversity and even girl power (not quite as consistent as they should have been but that was probably asking too much) in a way that makes since in contrast to the forced diversity in Wheel of Time which had some built plot to actually explore diversity if they show runners were just patient.
Finished Ivan and Phoebe which I kind of stalled out on. The ending, last two pages annoyed me. It was fine up until that point, maybe even would recommend it for my wife's reading group as it could have some interesting "feminist" incites but that ending...
Asked an LLM to pitch me something super fun and it suggested Kings of the Wyld. And I am reading it at a good pace (for me), but I'm 30% of the way through and it's kind of meh. I was told it was funny, but the humor just isn't landing for me. It's got progressive stuff but not too progressive... Like one of the band is gay, but there are no women and no they/them (screw you American Hippo - one of the very few books I haven't finished).
Minor spoiler:
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18d ago
When society indulges someone's insane fantasies and privileges them beyond what reality can bear, tragic things happen.
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19d ago
I think this is true of many denominations. Most of the congregations (and most of the wealth) in my denomination are Red Tribe. For my last baby's dedication I was a tad nervous that the pastor would say "it takes a village" like he did for an earlier dedication while my and my wife's families were in attendance (increasing attendance by 25%). The dynamic in my denomination was progressive theologians and elites actively undermining the denomination but would play Motte and Bailey very well. Red Tribe would screech about the Baileys. The Blue Tribe PMCs at the universities would sit down with the progressives, who would retreat to the Motte, and they were clever and would play semantic games asking exactly what they said was so bad. It took quite a bit of work, but eventually the smarter Red Tribers were able to amass enough evidence of the professors playing in the Bailey.
The PMC Mormons I know had a distinct distaste for Trump's aesthetic. They are also very trusting of the Deep State, probably largely because they all know someone deep in the Deep State. Like in my denomination, they take the Motte of the progressives hook, line, and sinker.
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19d ago
I'm not UMC; I've quipped for some time that instead of trying to turn our denomination into the UMC, the heretics should just go be United Methodists... which some did when they had their credentials stripped.
It's of course multi-factorial, but yes: I would assert that the Blue Tribe ethos curated in the last 30 years within the pastoral pipeline contributed to his inability to function in a Red Tribe environment.
Does the UMC even materially believe in hell anymore?
I'm focusing less on sexual immorality because several of the most well known theologian and pastors who were driving inclusion of homosexuals into the clergy were defrocked.
I agree that 1 Corinthians 5 probably doesn't apply to many political differences. I'm more exploring how to approach hostile people within the church and maintain a religious community.
A section I thought about discussing in the post but felt it was too far of as aside was how liberals seem to dislike conservatives far more than the other way.
liberals showed three times more bias than conservatives.
liberals overestimated how much they were dehumanized, conservatives underestimated how much they were dehumanized.
I believe that likely the UM clergy is imagined microaggression is projection of his own feelings towards the outgroup.
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20d ago
After a friend wanted to talk about it, I listened to Smarter Every Day on the problems with capitalism stemming from his trying to "manufacture" something 100% in the us. One of his lament is the lack of metal stamping. And while of course there are many sneaky hard things, I strongly believe that there are plenty of smart technical people in the US that could figure it out in relatively short order with the incentives were there. Especially at the level of stamping BBQ scraper handles.
Love Thy Neighbor Unless They're in the Outgroup
I’m told the denomination my family has been a part of for generations is “Missionary Oriented.” We support and fund full-time professional missionaries. Anyone who’s been in it for a few generations seems to know someone - if not be related to - a missionary who served in Swazila - oops, sorry - Eswatini or more recently Papua New Guinea, or PNG as the missionary kids call it.
Twenty-odd years ago I took a world religions course that had a requirement to visit other religious services. One week we went to a Hindu temple. A few of us stood in the back and observed while the vast majority of my fellow students danced and chanted in front of literal idols. The next class, one of the students who had stood with me in the backs asked how we could not feel absolute sorrow for the Hindu children being led astray in that environment. The professor berated him for being closed-minded. The man stood up and walked out of class and never came back.
The other day I had dinner with a different man who came up a few years after me. He went to seminary, took a church in a small rural community, and the Red Tribe scalped him. If he still identifies as Christian it’s only nominally: “When my faith was strongest God abandoned me.”
Then there’s this story from NPR: A queer Methodist minister didn't feel safe at an Idaho hospital; their conference won't return to Boise next year. I have always judged the United Methodist Church as a Christian denomination, but I never felt real contempt for them until I saw this kind of cowardice. Mary Moffat Livingstone died of disease at 41. Damien De Veuster’s flesh literally rotted off his living body. Countless others suffered and died in pursuit of their faith. These United Methodist clergy will not go to Idaho because of microaggressions.
I have less contempt for the actual heresies of the progressive theologians inside my own denomination than I do for the cowardly Motte and Bailey they played for decades. They helped destroy the pastoral pipeline. Modernity did most of the grinding, but those worms didn’t help.
All these bleeding hearts with endless empathy for the “fargroup” cannot stand to be near their actual neighbor. My denomination trains people to go into some of the most culturally distant places on earth, yet it could not prepare a young man to minister in the culture of rural Nebraska.
This pattern has been covered before in the classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.
For the first time in my life I look forward to going to church. Per capita, it may have the most influential and connected congregation in the denomination, including several theologians and family members of people at the highest levels of the church hierarchy. The pastor is Blue Tribe, but that’s not surprising as that’s the pipeline. The leadership of the whole denomination is Blue Tribe. And it’s worked out very well for my pastor, as he probably also pastors one of the most Blue Tribe churches in the denomination.
My denomination does not seem lost to me. Despite being Blue Tribe and bamboozled for decades by the Mottes of the progressives, the church has now stripped multiple heretical theologians of their ordinations. As a true progressive in my congregation discusses if we really need Paul, my Blue Tribe pastor politely says, “Sorry, we settled that one a long time ago.”
So I sit here enjoying my pastor’s deep sermons and going to small group at the house of one of the denomination’s theologians in the cool part of town, and I wonder if I am a detestable cowardly worm. I have harbored plenty of ill will toward the progressives - what they have done to Christianity and to the church my family has been part of for generations. It has probably crossed into hatred. Still, I keep mulling a question: is there any more convenient mission field than the outgroup? Paul says not to associate with any so-called brother who is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler… “Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.” I’m not sure that applies to disagreements over refugees and welfare.
My denomination, like many, is shrinking in the developed world. I am sentimental, I do not want it to schism and die, or just fade away. Maybe I can at least slow the fading if I can help mend some of the tears.
The Culture War is so toxic because everyone is a theocrat. An old now defrocked classmate of mine rails to his hundreds of thousands of followers about the dangers “CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM!” while preaching the enforcement of his own version of Christian morality with the dog-whistle: "Jesus says love thy neighbor." By which he means state-enforced welfare and socialism.
War is violence; we tag “culture” onto “war” to differentiate it from literal war, but the reality is we’re still trying to wield violence at arm's length. What if they gave a culture war and no one came? You can love your neighbor by actually helping them yourself. You can persuade, organize, and gather as many people as you want to voluntarily sacrifice their own time and resources for the vulnerable.
But now I’m just preaching my own political philosophy as if it were the moral one… is it my idol?
This post motivated by me planning on grabbing coffee with my pastor and chatting with him as he is taking on a bigger roll in the church
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20d ago
I'm willing to bet Zendaya is easy to work with, she's talented enough, and fills diversity requirements. I would submit she's both good and hot in Challengers.
People like me have been predicting far worse inflation for... decades. I'm fond of the quip "Peter Schiff has successfully predicted 20 of the last 2 recessions!" But hey, if the return is big enough; I'm not sure it is. Anyway, End the Fed!
Hopefully I am wrong, and I have been for decades, but I still think the time is coming where the piper will need to be paid. More and more I think it will be a slow malaise spiraling as we make worse self-reinforcing populist/socialist policy changes rather than a relatively short- to mid-term hyperinflation shock.
Hopefully the US can keep growing at a faster pace than we accumulate debt, maybe AI saves us. While food prices are going up (wages have been as well), food price inflation is still well within the bounds of frugality. So what the food discourse indicates to me - I already believed this - is that a bunch of people on the "right" don't have what it takes for real austerity. If you're throwing a tantrum over a hiccup in beef prices - a primarily example I see of "Oh you don't think it's that bad?! LOOK AT THE PRICE OF BEEF" - you don't have what it takes do do what's necessary to really address these issues, and removing 50 to 100 million people from the country isn't feasible and probably won't actually fix the problems.
We can all agree inflation is an economic problem AND also agree that we each must take responsibility for what we actually control, and change our behavior accordingly. That just pisses off people that can’t understand that the cards you are dealt may be unfair (societal problem) but you still have to play them best you can (personal responsibility.)
Often, where you should be fighting tooth and nail in the political arena to reject intolerable conditions, you should simultaneously as an individual resign yourself to reality as it currently exists and more or less just get on with it as best you can. There may be political conditions in which it’s just literally impossible for this or that group to get ahead, but that’s not true of any group in the United States of America in 2025, whatever real challenges exist.
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1mo ago
Democrats had a presidential candidate willing to nuke us cities over the second amendment.
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1mo ago
As I bring up when people talk about how they want guns to be regulated "at least" as much as motor vehicles. Vehicles are regulated when used on public infrastructure. There are virtually no regulations when utilized on private property.
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1mo ago
And a reason why one should do as much as one can to keep your kid away from that crowd.
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1mo ago
Ivan and Phoebe by Oksana Lutsysyna
On my wife and my anniversary date night we go to a book store pick out three books for the other and then pick one that we'll read. Ivan and Phoebe came out of that. I'm liking it better than I expected. An initial thought I had is that Ivan feels like a man written by a women, but then I started thinking that maybe that is how men with one foot in the university revolutionary/art scene behave. He lashes out in some weird - what I would consider feminine - ways and and then furthers what could be called Eastern European patriarchy.
Another interesting thing is how poor post Soviet states were. There's a joke about how Party members don't spreads butter on their breads but put chunks of butter on it instead.
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1mo ago
I had written up a response about how buying a foreclosed property requires way more cash up front than a normal mortgage and that seems like a rare situation where a parent is really hard up while a kid has a decent amount of money laying around, but AI tells me NJ specifically wrote this law to give a 90 day window to find a normal mortgage.
They are trying to prevent misused directly with:
With respect to the borrower or the borrower’s next of kin, the right of 1st refusal only applies if the foreclosure is due circumstances outside of the borrower’s control (e.g., financial hardship, physical or mental illness, divorce, death of borrower or borrower’s spouse/dependent, etc…)
I think the vast majority of "great" stories are embellished from a little to a lot. Which isn't a big deal when it's a small audience, but become problematic when millions believe it. After a few retailing the teller can begin to believe it.
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