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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4711 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are your favorite examples of individuals spitting absolute truth on camera?

Whether about politics, oppression, anything.

Stephen Colbert correspondents dinner: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY

Jon Stewart in Crossfire: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

Both of these men have largely become more vanilla, but these clips really highlight their young brilliance.

I dont know how anyone can watch that crossfire clip and think Jon Stewart comes off well. All he's doing is his classic "clown nose on, clown nose off" routine where he takes jabs at people then retreats behind his comedy the second he recieves the mildest pushback.

Even if that was his debate tactic, his point came off quite clearly. His point being, shows like Crossfire and pundits like Tucker Carlson are harming political discourse in America. It’s a debate style the hosts were not accustomed to and I think it works to good effect.

Stewart's famous crossfire clip seems more a strong demonstration of the difference between statements said and points made. He made a lot of statements about 'spin alley', and 'the absurdity of the system', and lacking 'moral outrage', and he came on with the whole concept of 'nerf crossfire'. But both hosts denied them, and Stewart had no serious evidence or support for his claims beyond common knowledge; he didn't even provide serious support beyond reiterating over and over that the CNN staff can't complain about him not doing even a trivial effort.

The actual point he made was that Crossfire made a mistake: they trusted him. Which still says something interesting! But it's something rather different.

His point was a rhetorical masterstroke at the time, and continued to be for a few years after... right up until it became evident where his proposed alternative led. He and the philosophy he's advocating in that clip has done orders of magnitude more to hurt America than either of the men he criticized ever could.

Can you expand on what philosophy you think he's advocating for? My takeaway is he was advocating returning to a time where politics wasn't treated as entertainment or reality TV. Shows like Crossfire have a financial incentive to treat politics as a battle royale, a sporting event, to keep their viewers eyeballs glued to the screen. This has made it more difficult for politicians to have rational conversations and rational debates, because everything is spun and amped up and taken out of context. Politics doesn't need to be a form of entertainment or culture war; it can be a boring, grinding process, whereby serious people make serious decisions about the future of America.

I think about this pretty frequently. It's unfortunate in the US that today's politicians are those who look good or are entertaining on TV. We used to have scholars leading the country, men like Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or Thomas Jefferson. Whatever these men's faults were, they were incredibly intelligent writers and thinkers. They made their bones via fighting in war or through consistent and intelligent writing. Today's political landscape has been so changed by TV and social media, it seems impossible to return to that style of politician.

Anyway, that's a bit beside the point, but I am curious how you think Jon Stewart's political advocacy has harmed America more than Tucker Carlson's.

Crossfire treated politics as a battle royale. Stewart and his acolytes normalized politics as a joke, and the idea that the other side might have a valid argument as a punchline. They were extremely influential, to the point that many Progressives appear to have gotten a significant amount of their political news through the filter of their shows, and by claiming to be comedians they excused themselves from any expectation of using their influence responsibly. They were instrumental into solidifying Progressivism into an echo-chamber, with Stewart's morally- and intellectually-bankrupt "punching up" philosophy being a significant contribution to the Great Awokening. Their entire careers were spent dumping gasoline on the culture war, culminating in John Oliver's promotion of Trump as a Republican Presidential candidate.

Today's political landscape has been changed by TV and social media. Stewart and his acolytes are personally responsible for some of the largest and worst of those changes.

One note I'd give was that Stewart claimed Crossfire was less a battle royale, but literally "pro wrestling". I can't find the original "NERF Crossfire" gag on Comedy Central's site or YouTube, and it wasn't even a full section, but the main joke was about mainstream media lobbing softball interview questions at a variety of powerful people. "Spin alley" is a dated reference now and was failing in its original sense even in the 2000s, but it had since turned into the broader field where every head-to-head discussion would get recontextualized into a victory by its partisans.

"Where's your moral outrage on this?"

And there's a steelman where this was kinda true! The formalization of interview processes meant that anyone with a reputation for crushingly hard questions would never get to interview anyone of substance again. Especially high-profile politicians would get a handful of (ingratiating) personal questions built to humanize them, and at most a couple (sometimes pre-vetted!) softball policy ones, nearly as a rule. Rarely, you'd see absolute nobodies or politicians on their way to retirement get embarrassed as a way to generate some heat, even 'hard-hitting' direct news was more interested in talking up . Outside of directly dealing with the powerful, shows like Crossfire favored a barrage of bloodless short interactions : look at this, or this, and there's a pretty constant pattern where the show was little more than point-riposte, never any serious engagement and always swaddled with cruft and removed from concrete assessments.

"The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk..."

But then you look at the story closer, and Stewart was supposed to be promoting his book. Carlson and Begala looked ridiculous for a variety of reasons, but no small part of it is that they were trying to play straight man to a comedian who wasn't interested in that whole game. Asking what people's moral outrage doesn't even make sense: he was holding them to a fire that he didn't bother naming.

So you get stuff like this, instead, as the high point of The Daily Show. There's moral outrage, for sure! Absolutely the sort of political discussion that allows shots below the belt, with all that implies even for the trivial dorks, at least for the people Jon Stewart and his audience didn't like.

And yet, the exact same criticism Stewart brought against Crossfire applied to his own work, and to the not-featuring-after-crank-muppets conventional news media that increasingly aped him. Rather than dissolve the point-riposte of Crossfire, it simply let the riposte swallow all discussion -- no need to even state your own position in a way that might make a viewer uncomfortable.

Wtf is the drama with tpot going on right now? Like what is this about?

What is tpot?

Something short and stout: here is its handle; here is its spout.

("This part of Twitter," a social-circle which I have some sense is rationalist-adjacent and known for being weird, but even the former I'm not really sure about.)

A little over a week ago, a tpot-popular poster was allegedly linked to a criminal history sheet that's about as bad as it gets (cw: child sexual abuse), and has since deleted their twitter account after what looks to be confirmation. Along with Brent Dril showing up under a new handle (context), this has gotten a number of people who've long been critical of the most sexually-weird parts of Bay Arean culture doing 'I told you so' laps, and a number of people who were just generally critical talking up how it shows faults in the entire tpot culture, and some kinda with a foot in each. And some of it's gotten people... well, I'm hoping paranoid.

AFAICT, the vibecamp organizers are doing the ISO standard response of 'this guy was already banned' (which seems to be genuinely true!) and 'we're revising our safety procedures', but this still leaves a whole lot of people who didn't even think about those safety procedures as things that existed, for good or ill, or who believed that they were tied into relevant ones and found out they hard way they weren't.

Perfect example of how a truly abysmal top-level post brought out a great post as a reply that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

In my experience, a number of the "forget 'politics,' build parallel institutions" types — I'm especially thinking of examples like "seasteading" enthusiasts, or Balaji Srinivasan and his "network state" — tend to dismiss questions of their proposals' economic viability with vague, optimistic handwaving. Is this just due to optimism bias and wishful thinking?

It's a selection bias. Those who start thinking about these questions abandon the whole idea.

Does anyone know of any smart, young(ish) Christian thinkers with interesting perspectives? Been listening the This Cultural Moment, about being Christian in a post-Christian world. It's excellent, but I'm having trouble finding more.

How do the few motte Christians manage their faith? It's something I really struggle with. I had a religious experience where everything clicked, but my brain is not good at this sort of faith and I inevitably end up in doubt again. I hate it.

Does anyone know of any smart, young(ish) Christian thinkers with interesting perspectives?

I like Gavin Ortlund's videos. He looks like he's maybe in his 40s, so I don't know if that counts as young to you or not.

Spencer Klavan and his podcast

I struggle with faith as well, although I’m a new convert relatively speaking.

For me what I do is try to avoid intellectualizing faith too much. I’m convinced that the modern world is way over indexed on rational, intellectual thought as the means to guide our lives. Let your heart lead you, in other words.

Of course that doesn’t mean you stop using your intellect. Reason is an excellent servant but a terrible master.

Blake Giunta on YouTube (although much of his material is dated), Trent Horn, Br. Peter Diamond, Cameron Bertuzzi, Taylor Marshall, Return to Tradition, Timothy Gordon, Jay Dyer...

I'm not big into the newer crowd of Christian defenders. I'm still a fan of classic apologists like William Lane Craig, but the above has provided quite a bit of thought provoking entertainment.

How do the few motte Christians manage their faith? It's something I really struggle with. I had a religious experience where everything clicked, but my brain is not good at this sort of faith and I inevitably end up in doubt again.

I have moments where I doubt my faith, as does anyone. But I try to bear in mind that basically every holy figure in Christian history has been plagued with doubts at times. Thomas the apostle talked with Jesus, saw him do miracles, the whole nine yards... and he still doubted! And the Lord didn't hold it against him either - indeed, he praised him for believing (albeit he also said it's even more praiseworthy to believe without needing hard proof).

The way I see it is, if God didn't hold it against men like Thomas (and Moses, and other prophets, and various saints, etc) that they had moments of doubt, he isn't going to hold it against me. He knows that I'm human, and it just comes with this whole "human" thing.

I do have other things as well, but unfortunately they're kind of specific to my personal circumstances and I doubt they would help much. But if you want to hear anyways, I can share them in the hopes it will help.

The way I manage my faith and handle creeping doubt is two-fold. Some doubts require both solutions, some only require one.

  • "I could not have come to faith without God overriding my sin nature through grace and giving me a true free will choice to be saved. It would be perverse if He then would not extend the same grace to keep me in faith. God cannot lie, is not perverse and torturous, and it cost Him too much, too dearly, to buy me in the first place, therefore He will keep me in faith, sealed by the Holy Spirit, as He promised." Taking this as axiomatic helps me primarily with doubts which sneak up and try to tell me I've accidentally logically proven to myself God can't be real. (The section of HPMOR which shows Draco the genetic origin of magic is a cognitohazard for Christians. This is my antihazard, my Helmet Of Salvation, keeping me safe from such headshots.)
  • Taking each doubt one at a time, and ignoring atheist Gish gallops because I can assume they're lists the person found somewhere instead of generating themselves through logic and research. (Yes, I notice the irony.) For example, recognizing that a specific doubt/"disproof" came from reading someone else's solution to a theological cognitive dissonance I never knew existed until I saw their solution to it. Another one: looking for what is not said and what is assumed, such as assuming God is subject to time/sequence instead of its creator.

A lot of doubts were simply and cleanly handled by J.B. Phillips in his masterwork "Your God Is Too Small" (PDF link), and it's a book I return to less often than I'd like.

I was also recommended this series of classes on Faith And Reason, taught at a church in my city, and the teacher uploaded the worksheets for each class under Resources on each video. It's 68 addictive hours of practical theology and apologetics, and then he followed it up with another 30+ hours of Influencing and Engaging The Culture. A hundred hours of the most clean and incisive binge-worthy theology I've ever heard. (The class attendees are red-tribe in their responses, but the teacher is grey-tribe.)

My understanding is that there used to be fewer women in the workplace and more at home. When people say that before the 1970's, women had fewer rights than men in America, I assume that this is what they're referring to.

But it just occurred to me that there was no Jim Crow equivalent for women. Was anything stopping women from entering the workplace before? Was there anything that propelled them to do so?

Likely most of the barrier was on the part of employers. In my previous job there were zero women in a firm of about 80 people. Not an exaggeration. Of different companies across the industry, similar policies prevailed. In 18 months I saw exactly one woman doing the same job as me (she did it badly). I also had more than one person tell me they wouldn't want to work with a woman.

All of course, illegal - but despite that, the situation persisted, despite the absence of any formal barrier.

Why limit yourself to the workplace? Women's rights were limited in multiple ways. The workplace has been where I have encountered the most bumps, but my mom and grandmothers ran into serious problems with financial independence and access to education.

In the workplace, as others have said poor women always worked. My grandmother was from a wealthier class and when her dad abandoned the family and she was left without an "appropriate" introduction to a spouse, one of her brothers fortunately paid for her to train to be a librarian so she could support herself in her spinsterhood. (WW2 also meant marriageable men were in short supply for women who had been raised to be pliant and pretty.) She worked as a librarian until she met my grandfather after he got home from the war. Once married she had to leave her job (she was now to make a home and babies, who cares if she also loved her job?). Society and men exercised a great deal of control even over the relatively privileged women. If my grandmother's brother had not stepped in to rescue her she would have had no resources and extremely limited agency to establish herself. The plural of anecdote is not data but you might be surprised at the stories of your older female relatives. My mother (silent gen) was not able to establish her own financial life outside of my father until after I was born (genx). Sure, my dad could co-sign but why should that have been required? When she was in high school her parents had to assure the school she was allowed to take advanced academic courses, because she was going to go to college - and not to get her Mrs. In HS my parents had to pressure the school to let me take advanced shop classes because girls weren't allowed. Notably neither my father nor brother have similar stories. I am aging out of the carefully asked questions in job interviews about whether I was going to have or already had children, without breaking the law. My husband and I work in the same field and comparing this stuff has been interesting. Somehow there's never been a concern about any family obligations or expectations, errrr, I mean anything that might interfere with his ability to do a job. I tend to think my not wearing a wedding ring (assuming no kids) and having a gender neutral name (getting past the girl cooties resume rejection) helped me get more than one position.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men [emphasis mine - ox] – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths.

As @2rafa wrote, prole women have been working for wages since they lost the fight to the spinning jenny and later to the sewing machine. It's the middle-class women who got the chance to have a career and not just a teaching job to keep them busy until they invariably got married and became a homemaker.

They're also referring to things like women being barred from most elite colleges or being unable to open bank accounts or lines of credit without male co-signers.

I didn't know about those. Were they unable to open lines of credit because the law prohibited them, or was this something banks chose to do?

I know one dear lady who bemoaned the fact that she could not get a credit card of her own. She was a stay-at-home mom and would be relying on her husband's income to pay the bill when it came due. Knowing the context of that particular situation, it was very much a, "We want the name of the income-earner on the account, so we have suitable recourse upon default," type of situation. Unfortunately, also knowing her shopping proclivities, it was probably a responsible risk assessment. Obviously not all situations are going to be the same, and I'm not aware of details of laws that might have been in effect in other jurisdictions.

Both, depending on jurisdiction, since a lot of it was state-by-state. Once the USG passed the Equal Opportunity Credit Act of 1974, some banks tried an end run around that by simply marking women as high-risk lendees, since it was still legal to just fire a woman if she got pregant regardless of marital status.

Historically poor women have always worked, and have worked outside the home in large numbers in cities since the Industrial Revolution made the previous system of cottage industries economically untenable. In the US, single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930, so well before the sexual revolution. The archetypal Victorian factory - if in textiles, paper, pottery or a number of other industries - also employed large numbers of women. A lot of female labor force participation graphs from the mid-20th century also limit the y axis to somewhere around 45-75%, so the growth looks larger as a proportion of the starting number. Even in the 1960s, a substantial number of women worked outside the home.

People who talk about the civil rights era and women usually have no idea what they’re talking about. Equality of the sexes was inserted as a poison pill by a Southern Democrat in the 1964 act, but it passed anyway and nobody paid it much attention. Profession specific bars were dropped for a variety of reasons, while prosecution of sexual harassment in the workplace was more of a cultural shift than a legal one, since a lot of it had always been a crime under various other terms.

That makes sense. Thank you for your answer. This opens up another question, though: if not much has actually changed for women, what explains The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness?

Careers don't make most women happy in the long term, which is why you can see a trend of highly competent and successful women leaving their extremely lucrative and successful careers by the time they reach their 30s. For example, when you look at lawyers, 30% of women with JDs are unemployed from the ages of 36-40 compared to just 4% of men.

There's a recent survey of women lawyers leaving their firms that indicated that 82% of women left due to lack of flexibility and work/life balance. The article on the survey tries to paint the picture that women aren't leaving for the commonly held belief to be stay-at-home moms, but it's clear the high-stress and workload jobs at the top law firms aren't making women happy, because if it made them happy, why would they quit? The men aren't quitting, in fact, they'll gladly work 60-80 hours a week because the men in these professions are highly conscientious competitive people who find their sense of worth from dominating their chosen area of competence and will put in those extra hours to beat the guys that don't. You don't see them complain about work/life balance because to them it's one aspect they can use to win against their competition. Jordan Peterson talks about women who quit their careers in this 11 minutes video and is worth watching if you want more reasons why women leave their careers. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in that video that I don't want to bother quoting right now.

Something to keep in mind is that a lot of guys also wouldn't be happy working 60-80 hours a week. That's why most men aren't CEOs, doctors, lawyers. But there are enough men with that drive, and those men outnumber women with that kind of disposition. Men also find fulfillment in providing for their families, which is why many men deliberately choose to work overtime if they can, to earn more money for their family. Women can show their love and support for their family, but they'd rather do it in the presence of their family rather than slave away at a job where they are away from their family.

What feminism has done is tell women that they don't need a man, they don't need to do traditionally female tasks, and they can go out there and work and compete just like men in all those highly respected and sought-after professions and fields. As a result, a bunch of women pursued extremely tough and competitive careers, only to find out that it didn't make them happy. Is it such a surprise that working a highly stressful, competitive job with a lot of responsibility is really, really tough and doesn't give you time to do much else? Most men wouldn't want to do those jobs, which is why most men don't do those jobs. Feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men. And they'll be happy doing so.

Women in general would be much happier raising a family than working a highly stressful job. Women prefer to work and be with people, and properly raising a family ensures that you'll have people around you well into your deathbed. However, because feminism has pushed women to pursue a career and actively put disdain on traditional female roles, more and more women are delaying or ignoring the idea of being a mother. By the time these women realize that careers don't make them happy and that they might want children, it might be too late. And if they're lucky enough to still be able to have children, well they still have to find a suitable partner to be their husband. Women tend to date across or up the social ladder, so if you're a highly successful woman, your options become quite limited. And their success is to their detriment, as men don't care how much the woman makes, and men prefer younger women. Thus, we're seeing the rise of childless old women and as they get older they slowly lose their social connections and without having a family they become more and more isolated. As a result, we see more and more women get depressed as all they to show for their life is a career they don't care about and the bitter truth that feminism lied to them, as their now aging bodies are too old to have children.

Some women resort to freezing their eggs so that their age won't be a problem, but there are many issues related to egg freezing. If the frozen eggs no longer work, as it hasn't for so many women, then they truly have no option to bear children as by the time they do go ahead and use their eggs their bodies are too old to have children.

Other ideas may have factored into "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion, but I'm not going to explore these ideas further right now.

Great post! Thank you!

No low effort "Great post" posts, please.

Is this a new rule? I haven't been around much recently but I don't recall it from the earlier days of ssc/themotte. No judgment here, just curious.

Low effort posts have always been against the rules, though it's not one of the most strictly enforced rules. But we do want to avoid allowing one-line "I agree!" or "No" posts cluttering up threads.

Thanks for the context. I guess the ones I'm remembering being an accepted part of community norms were a little more lyrical than "Great post thanks", but the content was roughly the same.

Social networks declined, and this has a bigger effect on female than male happiness.

Also working "outside the home" was not the only kind of work - it's easy to think of being a homemaker in the 21st century as just essentially being a glorified doer-of-chores, but apart from the idle rich women who worked at home were near-constantly busy with domestic tasks. Before the advent of the commercial washing machine, laundry was an enormously labourious task. Sewing and mending clothing was the norm. Food preparation was much more involved and complicated. Work at home, depending where one lived, also involved a myriad of tasks ancillary to agriculture, or forms of cottage industry.

“Single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930” shouldn’t be surprising, though. What’s more interesting is the quality of job (front-end clerk? barista?) and what the labor force participation was for married women. It’s not like single women throughout history were unoccupied from work, just lounging around reading books.

The point is that both single and married women worked through history in ways that have and haven’t been captured by official data in various forms. And the main thing that spurred women’s work outside the home was that traditional industries (widget production, most commonly textiles etc) that women (single and married) did from home were automated by new industrial technology that required workers at a central factory instead of dispersed at home. The second thing that happened in the 20th century was that the invention of labor saving technologies at home like dishwashers, refrigerators, modern ovens and microwaves, washing and drying machines, vacuums and so on meant that once children were no longer extremely young, the task of running a household was significantly less labor intensive than it had been, and it’s this that also led to increased workforce participation.

For a specific subset of upper-middle class and wealthy women, labor participation was indeed largely cultural rather than driven by material need. But this is only a minority of women, and was itself spurred in part by the fact that declining inequality meant that a Victorian PMC lifestyle (which involved many more servants than the average modern upper middle class American has) was no longer as sustainable on one income, so the choice was more between becoming a maid for your own household or working to be able to hire help; many women still face that choice and prefer the latter.

This is actually new to me. Thanks for dropping the facts.

A couple of months ago @2rafa made the following observation:

MeToo represents an organic rebellion by a lot of women against the excesses of the sexual revolution, whether they consciously realise it or not (and most, as you suggest, do not). Is it often misguided, does it often harm innocents, does it broadly fail to present viable alternatives, is it still trapped inside liberal ideology? Of course - it represents a dynamic rage, it is largely impotent, those supporting it have little understanding of the real material causes of their suffering.

Young women raised in a climate of total sexual liberalism are rebelling with the only words they have, in the only way they can. They’re not going to become “trad” overnight, they have no understanding of what that is, they were raised without religion, they are surrounded by a media environment that means they don’t have any real understanding of what reversing it would mean. Still, they know the present situation is untenable.

This got stuck in my mind, as it reminded me of that memorable scene from the original Conan movie ("Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it."). Still, it appears to me the issue isn't that the women pushing the #MeToo message (although this whole trend appears to be pretty much over) don't have the words to express their dynamic rage, it's that they're terrified of being branded as losers by other women. What is the implication here, after all? It's that what these women actually want to shout out is "I was duped into have crappy sex multiple times even though I didn't even want it". Or, in other words, "it's unfair that we women have to pretend that men are free to have technically consensual casual sex with us without offering anything in exchange". I'm reminded of laws in many Western countries, I guess most of them still officially on the books, specifically punishing false promises of marriage made for the purpose of sex. I guess these women would prefer some sort of this law to still be enforced.

In other words, while modern Western society claims to empower women and girls in various ways, it seems to actually disempower them completely in a crucial aspect.

Am I correct about this?

That first point reminds me of the thesis of this article

For example, much of contemporary feminism actually reads like an attempt to hook the horse of the patriarchy up to the junker of gender egalitarianism. The patriarchy was bad, as the story goes, so we got rid of it and had the sexual revolution instead. Then the sexual revolution turned out to be a catastrophe of abuse, disgrace, and regret. By the time we realized it, however, “consent” was the only language of sexual ethics available to us at all, so these were problems that we largely had no name for.

[...]

Slowly, and probably unconsciously, we took the existing material of gender egalitarianism and cobbled together a jugaad patriarchy that pretends not to be one. The jugaad patriarchy is less efficient, less humane, and less conceptually coherent than the actual patriarchy it replaced. But if it affords us an atmosphere in which men are terrified of the consequences of sleeping with women they’re not married to, perhaps it’s better than nothing.

http://www.thetruthcounts.com/blogtraducciones/2018/11/14/jugaad-ethics/

Yes. I agree, and I think I get it - obviously no woman wants to be that sucker who openly says: "I was duped", "I never thought he'd dump me", "I didn't sign up for this", "the reason I agreed to have sex with him wasn't actually that I lusted after him" etc.

With respect to the article, I came across it once here already actually, and again I'd add that the entire argument hinges on a misunderstanding/falsehood. I explained it here.

I think your correct and in the culture war thread I’d make a significantly bigger contribution, but the TDLR was that throughout history seducing a virgin was literally a crime in most societies, although penalties were sometimes waived if you married her, because teenage girls are stupid and believe that sex makes commitment.

I'm not sure I understand what's the specific power that you posit was lost - the ability to extract a legally enforced costly promise (marriage) as a condition for sex? Surely contract law would still allow for something in that class, if there were actually an appetite for it.

Surely contract law would still allow for something in that class, if there were actually an appetite for it.

I'd again point to Diosdado v. Diosdado as at least hinting that, no, contract law, as currently instituted, probably wouldn't allow for that sort of thing — much as the court disallowed the pre-nuptial contract due to it being contrary to the state's "compelling interest" in no-fault divorce.

much as the court disallowed the pre-nuptial contract

Can you explain this?

Diosdado v. Diosdado.

Well, actually, in that case, it wasn't a pre-nup, but a "Marital Settlement Agreement," but AIUI, it's been cited as precedent to rule various pre-nups invalid.

Donna then brought this action for breach of contract in February 2000, seeking to enforce the liquidated damages clause of the agreement. On the first day of trial, the trial court, on its own motion, granted a judgment on the pleadings in favor of Manuel. Donna appeals from the judgment.

…

[1a] The only question before this court is whether the agreement is enforceable. The trial court found that it was not because it was contrary to the public policy underlying California's no-fault divorce laws. That reasoning is sound.

In 1969, California enacted Civil Code section 4506 (now Fam. Code, § 2310), providing for dissolution of marriage based on irreconcilable differences which have caused the irremediable breakdown of the marriage. This change was explained in In re Marriage of Walton (1972) 28 Cal. App. 3d 108, 119: "After thorough study, the Legislature, for reasons of social policy deemed compelling, has seen fit to change the grounds for termination of marriage from a fault basis to a marriage breakdown basis."

…

[1b] Contrary to the public policy underlying California's no-fault divorce laws, the agreement between Donna and Manuel attempts to impose just such a premium for the "emotional angst" caused by Manuel's breach of his promise of sexual fidelity. fn. 1 The agreement expressly states the parties' "mutual understanding that any such breach of fidelity by one party hereto may cause serious emotional, physical and financial injury to the other." The agreement then imposes a penalty on the breaching party, in the event either party chooses to terminate the marriage "because of said breach." This penalty includes "liquidated damages for said breach in the sum of $50,000," over and above any property settlement or support obligations imposed in the dissolution proceeding.

The family law court may not look to fault in dissolving the marriage, dividing property, or ordering support. Yet this agreement attempts to penalize the party who is at fault for having breached the obligation of sexual fidelity, and whose breach provided the basis for terminating the marriage. This penalty is in direct contravention of the public policy underlying no-fault divorce.

To be enforceable, a contract must have a "lawful object." (Civ. Code, § 1550, subd. (3).) A contract is unlawful if it is contrary to an express provision of law, contrary to the policy of express law, or otherwise contrary to good morals. (Civ. Code, § 1667.) Here, where the agreement attempts to impose a penalty on one of the parties as a result of that party's "fault" during the marriage, it is contrary to the public policy underlying the no-fault provisions for dissolution of marriage. (See Fam. Code, §§ 2310, 2335.) For that reason, the agreement is unenforceable.

IANAL, but the court seems to be saying quite plainly here that since the California legislature made divorce "no fault," any contract between spouses that would function as restoring "at fault" divorce is contrary to public policy and thus unenforceable.

Yes, basically.

Why are people now Writing like This with Semi-Randomly capitalized Letters?

I thought it was Kulak trying to appeal to a boomer audience, who I associate with this kind of thing. I thought Kulak also had some kind of issue with typing, he was using text to speech or something which might cause this issue.

Given the happenings in Gaza I thought it would be a good time to deep dive the last time a major westernized technologically advanced Military took on an enemy tunnelled in under third world cities and Suburbs.

The Us at the time of the Vietnam war had A population of 200 million, the Combined north and South Vietnamese population was 41 million, 1/5th.

But OSINTDefender is also doing it on twitter: https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1713559468913340546

the Group of Hamas Terrorist appear to be walking through a Settlement as they are Ambushed and Liquidated by an Unknown Gunman.

Does anyone have an explanation or theory? I personally really dislike it, it's confusing and unnecessary since it doesn't seem to have any rhetorical function either. You can play games with capitalizing or decapitalizing words as some US newspapers do, capitalizing black but not white. But that's not what's happening here, there's no clear rule.

I used to work with a girl who wrote like this. We had to co-write reports once a month, and she was constantly talking about how "the Government decisions have made a major impact on the Company's ability to do business" or whatever. I was so relieved when she left the company and I could write the reports properly.

There's a certain species of midwit who seems to think that any Noun or Adjective which seems Important in some way must be capitalised.

Criticised in one of my favourite books How Not to Write a Novel (which was published in 2008, so obviously it was fairly common in unpublished fiction even then):

Similarly, some writers, displaying either an admirable knowledge of sixteenth-century English literature or a fondness for the German way of doing things, will Capitalize Important Nouns, or Anything Else that seems Significant. (This is not a reference to those writers participating in the current vogue for self-conscious Ironic Capitalization; we are speaking here to those writers who assume that Love and Honor deserve initial capitals because they are Eternally Important.)

Criticised in one of my favourite books How Not to Write a Novel (which was published in 2008, so obviously it was fairly common in unpublished fiction even then):

Great book. I remember liking it because however bad my writing might be, at least I don't write like that.

JK Rowling's capitalizations are particularly egregious (there used to be a Potterwords blog as an aid to fan fiction writers, because the things that were and were not capitalized in the Potterverse were so inconsistent).

Not even the most glaring of all of Rowling's stylistic quirks.

That one I chalk up to the fact that she's a fan of 19th and early 20th century British literature.

Stop being so hateful and condescending. Proper "improper" capitalization can actually improve clarity. There's a reason why people do it.

What is the purpose of this excessive reaction? Stop being so belligerent.

My response is fine. People should be kinder.

If you get a red modhat comment telling you not to post something, your comment is not fine.

You asked me a question. I responded with my reasoning. And my opinion is not going to change, red modhat comment or not.

That person called their coworker a midwit. Not in passing, but as a directed insult. This is rude and I don't like it.

No ruder than calling someone a "cuck", surely. Get off your high horse.

I do not personally know Tom Scott

More comments

It's not "hateful" to say that a particular writing style annoys you. Does finding it annoying when people misuse the word "literally" make you a bigot? Obviously not.

Proper "improper" capitalization can actually improve clarity.

Sure, it can. But is "the Government decisions have made a major impact on the Company's ability to do business" any more clear in meaning than "the government decisions have made a major impact on the company's ability to do business"? No, obviously not. It's an irritating stylistic quirk that doesn't aid in conveying one's meaning at all.

You called a person you Know a certain species of midwit. I think "midwit," even in the abstract, is not nice, but it's at least excusable.

I believe that capitalizing words improves readability. This is something I'm used to seeing in philosophy. Capitalized terms denote specific concepts or ideas that are different from the general meaning. For instance, when you capitalize "Company," it signifies your specific workplace. I find it clear. I mean, even Rationalists do this a lot too.

I think "midwit," even in the abstract, is not nice, but it's at least excusable.

Of course it's not nice, but it's not "hateful". If you'll read my original comment closely, you'll notice that I never said that this stylistic choice is never justifiable, only that it's often done to no good end by people who don't understand the purpose it's meant to be used for.

You're right, sorry.

Sure, it can. But is "the Government decisions have made a major impact on the Company's ability to do business" any more clear in meaning than "the government decisions have made a major impact on the company's ability to do business"? No, obviously not. It's an irritating stylistic quirk that doesn't aid in conveying one's meaning at all.

Hard disagree. If this were some sort of essay or some excerpt from a book, I would agree with you completely. But if this is for some sort of report that's being written for work, then consistently capitalizing Government and Company like this would greatly aid in clarity and comprehension when reading the document. Now, if it's inconsistent or one-off, then yeah, that's strictly worse than just using proper capitalization. But if it's consistent, that aids in comprehension speed greatly in my experience.

To each their own, I suppose.

In those examples I don't like it, I think it's poorly used. Rationalist types tend to do it better, or DFW, or Trump, for emphasis or to elevate the word or phrase.

I can only comment on its aesthetic qualities but it very much feels like a raising, a visual bump in the text that is not as grating as italics or bold but still noticable. Kind of like braille.

Kulak has previously stated that he does it deliberately to confuse present or hypothetical future stylometry, though this always seemed like the net usefulness would be dubious and the "aesthetic choice to look like grandpa's Facebook tirades" theory is quite plausible.

Ah, good point. It does still read like Kulak to my eyes, you can still sense a part of his soul in it.

Also future AI stylometry will be based on much more deep context of stuff like word choice, sentence structure, which adjectives are overused, sentence length, rhythm and so on that are largely subconscious for most of us, including Kulak. This is like trying to fool an LLM by misspelling a prompt.

I think it’s a form of emphasis especially on Twitter where more traditional formatting options (like italics and bold type) aren’t available.

That's what asterisks are for.

I call this "constitutional writing". Only the capitalized verbs throw me off.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Very infrequent capitalization in English only for some proper nouns is very much a 20th century thing. Many 19th century texts capitalize many more words than we’d do today, earlier texts even moreso. The Wikipedia page on capitalization in English has some good examples, including the constitution, apparently it wasn’t until the very late 19th century that it really faded almost completely.

If Someone is capitalizing only Nouns, I usually assume it's a slightly-confused German.

I do occasionally capitalize things that are discrete concepts (The Powers That Be) or nouns of particular reverence (The Lord), but the examples you provided seem hastily written. Title case might be acceptable for a Tweet, though.

I see Scott Alexander do it occasionally to add emphasis to words, in a similar manner to italics or bolding, and I think it works to good effect when he does it. Nearly everyone else who does it, I do find it harder to read their writing as the capitals seem to be basically random and not actually based on emphasis.

I'm fairly certain Scott does it because Yudkowsky did, and it spread to a bunch of other people on LessWrong. Yud himself has done it since forever, e.g. here ("the Other Reality [...]") in 1997. No clue where he got it from however.

I'm not sure, but usually I'm either capitalizing for emphasis, or it's because I'm typing on something without a keyboard. My first guess would be a really dysfunctional spelling aid system on a device with no keyboard.

@KulakRevolt

Christmassy semi-culture-war question for Americans: is the Grinchification of Christmas true?

It seems really funny because the Grinch is one of the American culture things, alongside with the rest of Dr. Seuss' oeuvre, which hasn't ever taken root here. They did show the Grinch movie with Jim Carrey and the later animated one in the theaters, but I'm not too sure anyone remembers them as anything else than basic streaming fare if there's nothing else to watch. Even though he's a children's character, supposedly, The Grinch doesn't even have his name translated to Finnish.

Of course one would be expected to know the rough details of who the Grinch is through cultural osmosis from Family Guy etc., but that sort of stuff is still not enough to make him a part of our culture, unlike with Santa, who still features the most heavily in local Christmas imagery (alongside with the Christian meaning of Christmas, of course).

I think the grinch is a sort of unconscious thought of how over the top a lot of the trappings of Christmas have gotten. When I was a kid, decorating the outside of your house was a simple thing — a couple strings of lights on the gutters. Good. Done. A tree in the front room. Good. Done. Now you are pressured into huge displays (often including blow up props, lights on every tree and bush, etc.) and indoor displays (villages, Santa figures, evergreen stuff). Then there are the presents that get ever more expensive and include an ever increasing number of people, multiple parties as both host and guest, elaborate meals for not only Christmas, but the before parties and for a few days after. And of course several dozen fancy cookies.

It’s not really surprising that the culture would embrace a message that Christmas isn’t about big elaborate parties, displays, and presents, simply because it’s exhausting to try to reasonably do what the culture demands. The grinch isn’t saying “Christmas sucks” the entire message is that Christmas is about people and coming together and would still come even without all the trouble that goes into it.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Christmas is fully Grinchified, but I would say there's been a shrinkage of Santa. what's the point in Santa for people without children? For that matter, what's the point of a Christmas Day gathering when there aren't any nieces, nephews, or grandkids?

Now that you mention it, I have seen a lot of the Grinch. I'm not sure if he's outright more popular than Santa, in no small part because Santa isn't anyone's intellectual property so he can appear on generic gift wrap and cards, and in malls as a mall Santa. But the Grinch is definitely appearing in a lot of bigger corporate ads.

Anecdotally, in the very-red very-religious state I’m staying at, I haven’t seen any grinches but plenty of nativity scenes, some Santas and Reindeer. I do stay away from the blue core, though, so maybe there it’s more frequent.

The Grinch doesn't even have his name translated to Finnish.

I dunno how you'd actually translate 'Grinch' -- it's, like -- totally not a word. I can't even really think of anything etymologically nearby those sounds, so leaving it as "Grinch" in internationalized versions is probably fine.

It should be at least "grinchi" to fulfill stereotypes of suomization.

The grinch is definitely a trend, but he's nowhere near as popular as Santa. I think it's a young blue triber thing to really emphasize the grinch; the median person sees him as a negative figure regardless of how the story ends. "He's a grinch" would normally refer to someone like Ebenezer Scrooge(also notably not a figure seen very positively despite the ending of the story)- selfish, anti-Christmas, meanspirited, whatever.

As a counterpoint, the store chain with the big Grinch merchandise deal is, well, Hobby Lobby, and I wouldn't say the clientele of Hobby Lobby is young blue tribers. Also, my girlfriend loves the Grinch, has for a long time, and she's from about as red tribe a background as possible; she grew up watching the Jim Carrey Grinch as a big tradition with her rural red tribe family and they all love that version of the story.

I think he's seen as a negative figure, but I also think there's a thing where people like to think of him after his big transformation; he's still a cranky grump, but he's more open to Christmas. They're not idealizing his pre-heart-growth stage, they like the grumpy guy who loves Christmas.

Yeah, this is definitely a real trend. I wouldn't say The Grinch is more popular than Santa yet, but he seems more popular than minor Christmas characters like Rudolph and Frosty, who were big deals back when I was a kid.

Our public school did celebrate Grinch day and elf on a shelf as the main preChristmas characters. But I haven’t seen too much of the Grinch around here otherwise.

The character's definitely recognizable, and there's a certain faction that promotes him more than Santa (or does weirder stuff). But at least as far as I've seen (admittedly, away from the coasts), he's more a minor part of the season, rather than a full replacement for Santa -- you'll see a lot of Five Below or Hot Topic grinch-themed stuff, but you're not going to see a bunch of kids lining up to have photos taken in the Grinch's lap. Even among the anti-christmas set, you're more likely to run into Jack Skellington as a symbol.

The 2000 live action and 2018 3d-animated ones got mixed receptions: Jim Carrey in particular sometimes was memeable but too exaggerated (for a Seuss character!), while the 3d-animated one felt too bland. Making a full movie out of the story just requires too much padding. Most recognition today will still reflect the 1966 version, which was really well-executed for its time and played pretty often on television during the Christmas season. If that one was never common fare for your area, that would definitely explain the different awareness.

Where shall Israeli Jews go?

Let's assume Palestinians win in the end. Maybe it's the BDS movement that succeeds, maybe it's incessant terrorist attacks, but at some point everyone realizes that a single-state solution is the only option that is viable long-term. And this single state (from the river to the sea) is going to democratically become an Islamic state. A state that is unwilling to prosecute any hate crimes against its Jewish citizens (or non-citizen residents, a la Estonia and Latvia).

Will any other country agree to cede some of their land to a sovereign Jewish state? Something incredibly depopulated (to avoid another conflict with the natives), but still suitable for human habitation and with access to the sea.

Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia? Gascoyne in Western Australia (just 9000 people, you could just buy them off)? The Antarctic Peninsula?

I don't understand why, rather than doing some weird moral transference where the Holocaust conveyed a free pass to colonise and gradually displace an unrelated people, they didn't just give them a slice of Germany after WWII instead. It's not too late for that either, if all the German politicians and civil society personalities that want to insert oaths to Israel in citizenship tests and wax poetic about how its survival and well-being is part of Germany's "state raison d'être" ("Staatsräson") put their money where their mouths are. I'd vote for using a chunk of the Southwest for it, say everything starting from Stuttgart; it's maximally far from the capital, there is nothing too important there and it's strategically situated in a corner next to Switzerland and France, at least one of which is unlikely to have any of it if Germany were to somehow try the Hitler thing again. I'd expect such a move to have greatly positive EV for our gastronomy, too.

If it ever occurred to one of them, I could see an AfD member making a similar proposal. Offer to let them have East Prussia and Danzig (the true East Germany) as the new Jewish homeland. It would be a pretty bit of trolling.

Those territories has been now longer under the jurisdiction of Poland (78 years), than a part of modern Germany (united in 1871), so calling them the true East Germany is a bit of overstatement.

I was referring to the minor brouhaha that developed earlier this summer when a prominent AfD leader was accused of referring to East Germany as “Central Germany,” thus implying that East Prussia was the real East Germany. As far as I can tell, this was a smear job, and she was actually using “Central Germany” in its usual, uncontroversial sense. Still, if they’re regularly accused of being revanchist Nazis anyway, why not lean to it and troll? Tacitly accept the revanchist accusation and use it to deflect the Nazi accusation.

If the Berliners want to sacrifice any of Germany for a foreign people, they can damn well do so with their own benighted corner of our country.

I think giving them MVP and perhaps part of Brandenburg would be a fine choice too, if they would actually take that benighted corner. It would even be close to the ancestral-ish lands of many Ashkenazim.

Aren't their ancestral-ish lands located closer to your original suggestion, in Rhineland?

Shapiro means from Speyer, Dreyfus means from Trier, Galperin/Halperin means from Heilbronn, I don't know the names for Mainz and Worms, but they were important centers of Ashkenazim culture as well.

I don't think your scenario is remotely likely, mostly because the more the Palestinians actually start winning, the more support Israel would have. The only reason Palestine has so much support in the West, and even in the Muslim world, is because they're underdogs getting their teeth kicked in. If Israel started getting its teeth kicked in, a lot of international support would swing back them. But for the hypothetical, lets say America and Europe go hyper-isolationist and refuse to do anything remotely military aid related outside their borders no matter how much harm it would avert. Israel is left on its own, and the Muslim world takes the opportunity to all gang up on Israel. I don't think the Israelis would all move to anyone in particular together, they would just be refugees like Syrians or Ukrainians or any other ethnic group in humanitarian trouble. They'd be a bit different because normally such groups would go to their neighbors, but in this case all their neighbors would be participating in ethnic cleansing them. They'd probably end up mostly going to European Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, and a large portion also going to the US and Canada who usually tend to accept lots of refugees/immigrants.

At present Israel could take the rest of the Arab world by itself with little difficulty. It's no longer 1970; they've far outstripped their immediate contemporaries in ways they did not expect. If they had anticipated the economic state of their rivals they would not have ceded all the land they did for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, etc.

This doesn’t sound realistic without nuclear weapons. Israel has much superior technology but relies on America for it almost entirely as senior idf personnel openly and frequently admit. But then they do have nukes (although Iran might have them soon too)

I agree that it's pretty unlikely that the Arab world would commit to the sort of total war and mobilization that it'd take to beat Israel, but there are about 100x more Arabs than Israelis. If they were truly committed, they'd win. Just another thing that makes the scenario OP posited unrealistic though.

If we’re doing hypothetical scenarios I’m voting for Mars. We will eventually build human civilization there, and since nothing else has worked, why not. Either they’ll build a paradise on Mars or not. No one gives up their land, so nobody is put out. The land is nearly infinite as compared to Israel which is pretty small.

Nowhere. Any such situation will only lead to civil war, again - i.e a repeat of ‘47 but with a better armed and trained Jewish population, and a less willing Arab world.

Maximally offensive version: StarCraft-style base trade. They capture Mecca and/or Medina.

Slightly less contentious version: they plop down in a no-man’s land somewhere between the Donbas and the Dnieper to act as a buffer between two countries that both hate them less than they do each other.

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

Judging by the amount of Hebrew real estate ads I see every time I come to Cyprus (often) nowadays that process already started

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

That was the approach taken by Isreal in Dean Ing's novel Systemic Shock, book one of the Quantrell trilogy: when World War IV [1] broke out, America was too busy with other concerns to worry about helping defending Israel from its neighbors, and Israel eventually ended up doing a hurried evacuation to Cyprus as temporary residence while they prepared their ultimate destination colonies at the L-5 points.

[1] What about World War III? Well, that was in somebody else's book,,,

Maybe Bir Tawil, the unclaimed land between Sudan and Egypt?

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

Where will gay Israelis get married if they capture Cyprus?

A big chunk of the world.

Lesbos, obviously.

Latin American genericstan just gives them an autonomous territory with a flat tax rate? They move to Canada and Australia en masse? The Antarctic peninsula is probably too cold for large scale human habitation even under a climate maximalist scenario.

I suggest here. This is mostly federal land at present, there's something poetic about getting the West Bank of Great Salt Lake, and if you can't even get along with the Mormons, I wash myself and my country of any further obligation to help.

How likely do you think it that Jews with a desire for an actual state would be willing to settle for territory that has nothing to do with their holy land?

Reposting in the new thread, guess I posted too late on the previous one. Will take the hint and not repost further if this gets no engagement.

I want to stop relying on 4chan for the latest AI news, currently searching for some better sources. I’m a long-time reader of Zvi and followed him to substack, and his summaries on AI are still excellent and information-dense, but (hedging) either his and my own points of view on AI drifted too far apart which colors my perception, or (honest opinion) the latest kerfuffle with Altman’s firing, reinstatement and everything in between finally broke his mind, and he is no longer able to keep back his obvious doomer bias, which is infecting his every post since. I still respect him and appreciate his writing, but disentangling the actual news from the incessant doom attached to them is quickly becoming tedious.

Are there any other substacks or blogs which post on anything AI/LLM related in a similar manner? I’m mostly looking for technical insights and distillations of the current zeitgeist, I dropped out around the Altman incident due to RL things and am trying to get back in the saddle. Sources unaffiliated with the Yud cathedral are preferable but not necessary, I’m more or less a brainlet but I can read when I put my mind to it.

As is tradition, my sister and I got into a heated argument, this time about Israel and Palestine. The argument started as a disagreement about the meaning of "from the river to the sea" and then became about the conflict and history of the region generally.

Now, my sister, despite her strong feelings about the subject, knows almost nothing about the history of the region and seems to have gotten most of her information from TikTok. Nonetheless, she raised some points that I don't know as much about as I should, and I'm hoping someone can help me learn more about the following claims. These are all things she claims have been widely reported in the media (other than CNN et al.) and is absolutely certain are true.

  • Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza.
  • No babies were killed. The video evidence was faked or actually of things done to Palestinians.
  • Israel is bombing Northern Gaza indiscriminately.
  • Hamas is has not been proven to be operating out of any hospitals.
  • Israel has cut off all food, water, electricity aide (I know there was some of this, but has it continued and are they completely blockading it?)
  • Israel killed the Palestinians when they tried to leave Northern Gaza. She denied there was any evidence Hamas actually did this.
  • Israel bombed Palestinians as they left to go to Egypt.
  • The UK and the US were allied with Israel from the beginning and supported the establishment of the country.
  • Thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israelis during the occupation. EDIT: I mean during peacetime and not casualties. I'm not talking about the casualties killed during current war.

I'm most interested in any claims of war crimes. I understand Israel claims they are not collectively punishing Palestinians but are actually targetting military targets, but what I'm most unsure about is what is the actual evidence we have about how much they might have deviated from that.

By the way, these debates always remind how bad most people's epistemic habits are. She told me I had fallen for Israeli propaganda and that she was actually very well informed on the subject and had read a lot about it. You see, she had friends who were personally affected (they live in Canada but have family from there or something) and she cared a lot about it, which meant she was not biased. Whereas for me, it was just something fun to debate and I was thinking about it too coldly to form a correct opinion. This from someone who had never heard of Mandatory Palestine and didn't know what a pogrom was, and seemed to know little of even post-1948 Israeli/Palestinian history. She also thought it was the deadliest current conflict and was deadlier than the Iraq War.

EDIT: The purpose of this question wasn't just to get more unsubstantiated claims. If people could provide sources supporting their claims, that would be helpful.

This article persuaded me that Israel was accurate in its assessment that Hamas were using the Al-Shifa hospital as a base of operations.

She told me I had fallen for Israeli propaganda and that she was actually very well informed on the subject and had read a lot about it. You see, she had friends who were personally affected (they live in Canada but have family from there or something) and she cared a lot about it, which meant she was not biased. Whereas for me, it was just something fun to debate and I was thinking about it too coldly to form a correct opinion.

Jesus christ, that's so backwards it's scary. You aren't passionate enough to form a correct opinion?! In what universe does that logic make sense? Surely she must see that the overwhelming majority of advances we have made - in virtually every arena, but most certainly geopolitics - have been through cold calculation, not the fire of passion? Should we hold a contest for the most hysterical and histrionic lunatic on the planet and run all policy decisions past her?

Scott described how easily people can slip between "this doesn't affect me so I can assess it objectively" and "this does affect me so I'm better informed about it than you and my opinion carries more weight". I would not be remotely surprised if @Glassnoser's sister reverts to the former when it suits her.

You reckon? That's more what I'm used to, people arguing whichever way is expedient, but usually when people do that they just handwave away concerns about bias, and usually self correct towards reason. Outright claiming something oxymoronic like "I care too much to be biased" seems like an escalation to me, but now that I think about it I don't argue with a lot of young people irl.

Now for something out of left field - I was bitching about this to my girlfriend and she reminded me of this excellent old Mitchell and Webb sketch on the topic - Train Safety

Brilliant skit. And it makes me sad to think that both Mitchell and Webb were probably fully onboard the lockdown train.

I do remember one of Mitchell's columns was about how he thought it was dumb that covid positions were dictated by political persuasion, and I've always seen him as centre left so I remain hopeful, but Webb has been a disappointment to me since he sided with the cops re dankula even though out of the two only dankula never wore a nazi uniform or did blackface.

Edit: no wonder I couldn't find the column, it was an opinion piece in The Guardian.

I stand corrected, Mitchell is more principled than I gave him credit for.

I can’t imagine David Mitchell needs too much of an excuse not to leave the house.

This is nothing new, and, in fact, has been deemed as the correct way of thinking for at least a decade now. This is the entire basis of the whole "lived experience" thing; that the people with direct, often emotional, stakes in something are the most trustworthy for getting a meaningfully accurate reading of the situation and also for figuring out a prognosis to help the situation.

I'm sure she believes she does have reason and is using it to the correct ends that passion gives her insight into. As well as all notable heroes of history who had something they believed in and something they were passionate about that drove them. Meanwhile OP doesn't have any goal besides idly amusing himself with rhetoric and all of his logic will never lead him to the truth, only to "owning the libs".

Meanwhile OP doesn't have any goal besides idly amusing himself with rhetoric and all of his logic will never lead him to the truth, only to "owning the libs".

This is all heat and no light. Don't post like this please.

I should have made it more clear that this is how I assume OP's sister thinks.

Americans are inundated with pro-Israel propaganda.

There is a massive lobby operating in plain sight called AIPAC that basically controls the outcomes of all elections.

Huge organizations like Ivy League colleges that you'd expect to be insulated from foreign influence thanks to their humongous cash reserves are still under great pressure by deep-pocketed activists. If anything, it seems that American politicians are more likely to be impeached for not submitting to Israeli influence.

It seems to me that it takes a certain level of passion to overcome the constant drumbeat that Israel has a right to drop bombs on women and children and that American taxpayers should feel privileged to contribute to that war effort.

And who can blame passionate Americans in 2023?

How many conspiracy theories need to be fact-checked as 'mixture' by Snopes before the 'listen to the experts' poindexters learn to sit down and listen when Qanon Karen is talking?

Maybe that passion is misplaced, I've seen commenters here make convoluted arguments to still support Israel despite all the civilian casualties, ethno-nationalism, apartheid politics, genocidal statements... And perhaps they are right, and to be fair you need to have a very high IQ to understand the true moral righteousness of Israel's war on hospitals and apartment buildings.

I don't disagree that hysteria is bad. I do believe that there is little value in listening to what women are concerned about in matters of politics.

The sister is not getting drafted to fight a war on behalf of Israel, or say, on behalf of the children of Gaza (unlikely lol), so she has little stake in that story anyway.

If she does pay more taxes than she takes, then she may be allowed to air grievances regarding which children American taxmoney is slaughtering this week.

Huge organizations like Ivy League colleges that you'd expect to be insulated from foreign influence thanks to their humongous cash reserves are still under great pressure by deep-pocketed activists.

Qatar and the Saudis have been giving major funding to anti-Israeli academics for the past 30 years. Jewish donors not so much, they considered it more of a fringe issue and didn't push much until they saw how crazy things had gotten after the October 7th attacks.

Is Israeli treatment of the Palestinians much worse then the treatment of religious minorities across the Islamic world? It seems odd to complain about "civilian casualties, ethno-nationalism, apartheid politics, genocidal statements" when the muslims are so happy to impose them on others. The hysteria is one sided.

What is one-sided?

When deep state members decide that one country needs to be bombed, then we find out that the muslims there have been committing all kinds of crimes, gassing civilians, repressing protests, jailing political opponents... The hysteria was very much one-sided while it was Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...

Meanwhile billions of dollars of American taxpayer money were flowing into Israel.

Compare the press coverage of 2 wars :

[Underdog leader:] [Opponent's] bombing of maternity and children’s hospital an ‘atrocity

[Neutral observer:] The devastating [location] hospital blast is shrouded in uncertainty. Here’s what we know, and what we don’t

Can you guess which war is which?

...

You were right! The first one is about the crimes committed by the evil Russians.

Russia’s bombing of maternity and children’s hospital an ‘atrocity,’ Zelensky says

The devastating Gaza hospital blast is shrouded in uncertainty. Here’s what we know, and what we don’t

Why are the Russians evil? Oh yes, because they jail their political opponents, they have nationalist rhetoric, they target minorities and attack their neighbors...

Kind of like an Israel of Central Asia, but bad.

On one hand, we must spend billions of dollars to make sure that Israel remains an ethnostate

ADL proudly supports the right of the Jewish people, like other peoples, to self-determination. In the case of the Jews, this translates to the right to live in a Jewish, democratic state in their ancient homeland, Israel.

Jewish Democratic? What if the majority decides the state not to be Jewish?

Now what does the ADL think of white Americans' right to self-affirmation?

In a recent Facebook post, Ray Myers wrote, “I’m a WHITE NATIONALIST and very Proud of it.” Mr. Myers later attempted to clarify his post by stating, “I am Anglo and I’m very proud of it, just like black people and brown people are proud of their race. I am a patriot. I am very proud of my country … And white nationalist, all that means is America first. That’s exactly what that means. … I mean, just like Black Lives Matter, white lives matter, too … We’re all in the same melting pot. Now why can’t we say, as Anglos, that we’re proud?”

White nationalism is a term that originated among white supremacists as a euphemism for white supremacy. The implications of Mr. Myers’ statements appear to be that America is a white nation and patriotism is synonymous with white nationalism.

ADL emphasized that “the post and comments are reason alone for removal of Mr. Myers from any leadership position with the Texas GOP.”

I see, ethno-nationalism for me but not for thee.

Who should I support?

The guy who wants the right to defend himself from his neighbors he doesn't like

Or

The guy who wants the right to defend himself from his neighbors he doesn't like

with my money

while lobbying to get me jailed if I say I want the right to defend myself from my neighbors.

This post and this one are a bit too far into "rant" territory. While each has its merits, it's presented in such a blistering way as to drown the light in heat. Snappy rhetorical questions, pithy comparisons, passionate appeals, none of these things are forbidden, exactly, it's just that you've turned the rhetoric dial too high. Please dial it back.

I don't really disagree with any of this. But this isn't what motivates your average normie (like this guys sister) or your average muslim.

Your average pro-palestine protester isn't motivated by anti-white bias, you would probably find it difficult to find one who had anything positive to say about whites.

Well the average normie only sees what the media shows them.

While a lot of Middle-Eastern countries could fit into the 'bad' category of repressing sexual or religious minorities, there are 2 cases from a Western media point of view.

There's the good Middle-Easterner, who oppresses minorities, but he's an ally of the deep state like Egypt or the UAE, so the media goes soft on them to get resources or military support from them.

And then there's the bad Middle-Easterner, who oppresses minorities, but he's not an ally of the deep state, like Iran or Syria, so the media highlights the bad stuff to create support for ongoing or future military actions against them.

Then of course if we're talking to a leftist activist, they might not straight up believe all the propaganda of the State department.

In their case I could see different ways that they can justify ongoing oppressions of minorities that they actually like.

Yes I do love the gays and islamists are throwing them down buildings, but this is a result of Western oppression. The radicals are now in power because the 'nice guy' approach did not work

There is a logic to that, supposedly Hamas is currently in power in Gaza partly thanks to the work of Israeli operatives undermining more Western-friendly alternatives...

Likewise, the Arab Spring took out authoritarian governments in Tunisia in Libya only to make room for islamists, and similar developments in Iraq led to the rise of ISIS...

There is a strong tension between the two main elements taught in American colleges :

  • some identities should be privileged due to history (ie brown > white, woman > man, muslim > secular > christian...)
  • the ends justify the means (America dindu nothing in Dresden and Hiroshima and the rest of the deep state's actions up to this point) - in order to get a job in corporate America

It's no surprise that people combining these 2 ideologies together would believe that the cause of 'liberating brown muslims' is worth using such means as 'killing some oppressor-coded civilians'.

Logic/reason versus emotion/rhetoric is, for most of the West, a Star Trek fan thing, not a real philosophical dilemma they have to face themselves. For such people, the more you care, the more right you are, and it’s the unresponsive non-empathetic logicians who cause all the bad in the world.

In order but unsourced:

Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza. Yes, but it's not unique. White phosphorous is too useful to not drop; everybody be dropping white phosphorous. If it lands on you you will die one of the worst deaths imaginable; but armies generally don't directly try to land it on people.

No babies were killed. The video evidence was faked or actually of things done to Palestinians. Maybe. Most of the claims of Jr. getting Wopper'ed. have been retracted; but there is no way to know for sure and such things have happened before on both sides of this conflict.

Israel is bombing Northern Gaza indiscriminately. Yes. Any 2000lb dumb bomb on a dense city is definitionally indiscriminate; and they are going fucking crazy on the city with dumb munitions.

Hamas is has not been proven to be operating out of any hospitals. Yes and no: hamas has operated in those areas before and there is infrastructure there; but every hospital shut down or destroyed by Isreal durring this round of conflict has had +/- 0 Hammas command centers under it, and only PDWs stored in the actual hospital. That doesn't mean they weren't there before, however.

Israel has cut off all food, water, electricity aide (I know there was some of this, but has it continued and are they completely blockading it?) Kinda. They are doing as much as they can, but it's more like "throttled as much as is practical" than "Cut off totally". This might have changed since I last looked at it, though.

Israel killed the Palestinians when they tried to leave Northern Gaza. She denied there was any evidence Hamas actually did this. True. Israel has bombed sufferal safe evacuation corridors and the areas the told people to evacuate too, fairly consistently over several missions. It is basically impossible this isn't at least willfully negligent on their part.

Israel bombed Palestinians as they left to go to Egypt. True; but misleading. They weren't at the border crossing. That said, they have had at least one fragment from a tank shell hit someone standing in egypt, so they are being pretty frisky there.

The UK and the US were allied with Israel from the beginning and supported the establishment of the country. True (kinda). Part of the founding of Israel is the balfour declaration; and it was less allied at the beginning than standing aside and letting it happen. They were firmly US allies REALLY quickly after ww2 though; as a capitalist white-enough outpost in the middle east.

Thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israelis during the occupation. Ten(s of?) thousand(s?) at least; many of them by small arms at close range; cluding at least a couple hundred on the west bank where hammas doesn't exist. This is not in doubt, and is not surprising to anyone. If you want to ruin your day and your brain you can go look at the pictures, but I don't recommend it.

Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza. Yes, but it's not unique. White phosphorous is too useful to not drop; everybody be dropping white phosphorous. If it lands on you you will die one of the worst deaths imaginable; but armies generally don't directly try to land it on people.

My understanding of WP is that the "warcrimeness" is based entirely on if its being used (nominally) for smokescreens/illumination/whatnot, or if its being used as an offensive burning weapon against enemy forces in a civilian area - the latter being Bad and the former being Eh, Fine Enough.

Source?

no babies killed

I think a few babies were killed? This article says "Partial data by Hebrew media covering the civilians — killed by thousands of invading terrorists and by some of the thousands of rockets fired that day at Israeli cities — reveals that they include two infants, 12 other children under the age of 10, 36 civilians aged 10-19, and 25 elderly people over the age of 80, accounting for 75 of the 764 civilians.". It's true that no babies were 'beheaded' though, afaik.

Israel turned most of the water back on a while ago.

The formatting to that comment was confusing; the poster maybe should have used colons, or used ">" to make it a quote. "No babies were killed" was a repetition of a claim he was evaluating, not an assertion of his own.

That said, that's good information.

On war crimes, I feel like people forget that hostage taking is a war crime, and it is undeniable that Hamas has captured hostages. And then you have the complimentary war crimes of Hamas using human shields, and Israel killing "excessive" civilians because of the human shields.

I'm pretty sure Hamas does operate out of hospitals. Here is an article from a few years ago, but I'm just a guy, I can't speak for the veracity.

It wouldn't surprise me if thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Gaza claims 20,000 deaths just from this current war. Even if that's a 10x overestimate, it's still thousands.

Sorry, the part about Palestinian deaths wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to war casualties but to deliberate killings of innocent civilians by the IDF in the occupied territories during peacetime.

If she's referring to massacres, I'm pretty sure that's not true. But the IDF has actually killed lots of unarmed civilians in the occupied west bank, some with poor or no justification. Thousands might be a stretch but Palestinians in the west bank complaining about IDF brutality definitely have the bodies to back it up.

Yes, I know. It's the high number that I wanted to confirm.

My condolences. I can tell you that, re civilian deaths, the mere fact that Israel is not targeting civilians does not necessarily absolve them of war crimes, because "attacks that may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof and that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated" are also barred. How that might be determined by third parties is not clear to me.

Should I be worried about my fiance's animal love? Before she moved into my condo it was me and my one cat. I'm not going to lie here I love that cat but since she moved in she also brought in 2 cats and a dog. This isn't a huge condo just a 2 bedroom and her dog is huge. So now we have 3 cats and 1 dog.

Then she became obsessed with fostering some kittens so we added 3 kittens to the mix. Then she got a bunch of emails from the animal shelter and she convinced me to take a dog for the holidays. Then, apparently she got an email about these kittens who had no home with their mother of which there are 4 and she made an executive decision to save them. So now I have my cat, her 2 cats, her dog, 3 kittens, the dog staying with us for the holidays (which she'll probably not let me return until it gets adopted), and then the cat and 4 kittens.

She's happier than a pig in shit with all these animals posting them on her facebook and instagram. Is this normal?

I love her and plan on making her my wife. I've already told her we're not adopting any of these and they are all going to other families. Part of me loves her for her kindness and love towards beings that need help, but this is insane. Last week when I was in meetings, cats kept trying to get on the keyboard and on my compute when I was talking to the CTO of my company. I had to lock them in the room pet room to work. When she moved in she took over my "man room", but this many animals is insane. She wants multiple kids so she's not trying to replace the with animals but this pet love is insane.

We have 2 dogs and 10 cats in my condo right now. This isn't normal right? She also teaches kids math as a data scientist so she is obsessed with helping people. But I feel like there is a certain point where it's insane. Should I crack down and tell her how crazy it is with how many animals live in our condo, or should I just let it go. I'm torn on whether I love it or think she's pathologically altruistic. If I put a baby in her, maybe she'll relax.

Something no one else seems to have mentioned is that you are almost certainly in massive violation of your lease and/or condo association agreement, and very possibly local zoning and animal control ordinances. That many animals in a 2 bedroom condo isn't just unsanitary for you, it's a public health hazard. You will get evicted/cited/fined if nothing changes. It's only a matter of time before your neighbors start calling the cops on you.

I was able to get foster homes for a bunch of them soon so like half should be gone by New Years.

We have 2 dogs and 10 cats in my condo right now. This isn't normal right? She also teaches kids math as a data scientist so she is obsessed with helping people. But I feel like there is a certain point where it's insane. Should I crack down and tell her how crazy it is with how many animals live in our condo, or should I just let it go.

You've heard of or read those news stories that pop up, about people who have lots animals, in filthy conditions?

One of the paths that leads to this is that the person or family can foster four pets. Then eight pets. Then twelve, sixteen. It works, for a while.

Eventually some other crisis happens. The household can't take care of them all. But having a dozen or more pets is normalized. Stress accumulates. Quality of care drops, and drops.

Right now I don't think you folks are in a position to cope with a life downturn.

Just to give an example, what happens when one of them brings in fleas? Getting rid of fleas in one cat is a pain in the ass as it is.

The first two cats and dog make sense, since she already had them and pets are usually assumed to move with their owners, but the others sound like too much, and not compatible with living in a condo. I don't have any useful advice on insisting that it's crazy and not sustainable at all.

I suppose a baby could help. Are you in a position to ever get more land? Several friends who like animals married, had three children, and now have goats, a dog, chickens, and a garden. All of these things go really well with the children. If we ever know someone who would take care of them when we're away, we aspire to have three alpacas, which are apparently lovely, gentle with children, and only defecate in a single spot in the yard.

I am a massive dog nut, always had one. Have two now.

This is an unacceptable number of animals given your living situation. You don't smell your condo right now, anyone new to it does. It's bad.

Every dog beyond one and every cat beyond two is irrevocably degrading the living situation without specialized air filters and daily cleaning.

What happens when you both want to do a weekend trip? How much are you spending on food? How are you managing the relationship between the animals? I'd argue that having a smaller number of pets under your care will improve their QoL.

Correct. Due to irresponsibility on my end (roommate had one cat, I adopted a stray cat, didn't get one of them sterilized in time, and the female had a litter of seven of whom all survived), I wound up with nine cats in a similarly-sized condo. It was a nightmare. Once the kittens grew enough to walk the place was permanently trashed. I spent a fortune on food and litter. It was very difficult to find homes for them in a town that's overrun with stray/feral cats.

I've since gotten it down to three (still pushing it IMO; two are being babysat until roommate moves in with her boyfriend and the end goal is to have one cat) and it's a night and day difference in terms of QoL.

Happy side story though: One of my friends took the worst, most feral of the two kittens I had for barn cats, and over a period of months the worse of those two has become an adorable, fully domesticated housecat. I didn't believe it when she told me until she showed me pictures of it.

That is a happy side story, and I like barn cats being useful even if it hadn't "graduated" to house.

You can have seven dogs in a house with a fairly small yard- I've seen it before and it's a quality of life reduction but it's doable. You can have a dozen cats too.

But the key thing there is they have unrestricted access to the outside, keeping twelve animals in a two bedroom condo is just insane.

If I put a baby in her, maybe she'll relax.

More than likely, yes. My sister did. You need to sit her down and explain in no uncertain terms that you love her and want to marry her, but you can't accommodate twelve animals in a two bedroom apartment. The foster animals need to go back to the shelter by x date and we can't get new ones, there isn't space, sorry, and what's your ring size. Throw in that you think she'll make a good mom and you think her instinct to take care of things is really attractive and feminine, but part of that is accepting that you can't care for twelve animals in a two bedroom apartment.

If she doesn't want you to make the final decision then having a kid won't calm her down, she's just crazy, and you need to break up with her.

If I put a baby in her, maybe she'll relax.

Yeah, this. Women have an instinct to take care of small, cute, helpless creatures. Normally that instinct is supposed to help them raise their children, but with no kids they redirect the impulse towards cats and dogs instead, not unlike a man who masturbates to porn for lack of a girlfriend. She'll stop obsessing over fur babies once she has some real babies. Move up the wedding date and get to work.

I have a few friends, mostly female, who are similarly obsessed with animals, though perhaps not quite to that extent. It works out okay for them since they live on farms, and their spouses make clear that the chickens, rabbits, pigs, horses, cows, cats, ducks, etc., are their responsibility and aren’t allowed in the house. Since you have a condo, I assume you live in town. Is it feasible/desirable for you and your fiancé to move out to the country sometime soon? If so, it’s probably a manageable problem. If not, you might be in trouble. That many animals in a condo isn’t healthy.

This is pretty wild, but from my own experience a woman's pet love really ramps up when she starts getting 'ready for kids' and diminishes when the kids arrive.

My wife needed a dog when we got married (we had never even discussed it before). That dog was the world to her up to the day we came home from the hospital with a baby. Then it was just a nuisance to her.

My feelings towars the dog meanwhile never changed: he was always my bud and never a surrogate kid.

But in your case yeah shes going overboard, it's not normal and so I'm hesitant to tell you to shrug it off. But I'd also put money on the probability that it's related to her biological clock firing in weird ways.

Deprioritizing the dog or being annoyed is one thing. I have to admit I find it very strange to not like a dog anymore, treat it as "just a nuisance" after having a kid.

Well, I mean the former two adjectives. I didn't describe it correctly in one word. She still liked him, but in a completely changed way. The doting disappeared.

Ah that lines up a bit more for sure

My sister needed a dog from the day she turned twelve until she got married. She had a kid less than a year later and got rid of 2/3 dogs within six months, and the last one doesn't spend much time with her anymore.

No, this is not healthy. Set up a double date with @grognard and see if you can pawn her off to him.

I had to dissuade my girlfriend from stealing/kidnapping a particularly cute cat we saw on a walk in London (it didn't have a collar or tag, but it was clearly well cared for), so I share your pain. She insisted on adopting another dog when her living circumstances and finances made keeping one with her while she lives alone a stretch.

I'm pretty sure a kid will at least divert such interests, and it's a relatively small price to pay for living with someone kind and caring. Well, maybe I'll think otherwise if she goes to the lengths your girlfriend has, hell, she unironically wanted a cow, but I put my foot down and told her the only way a cow enters my future home is in pieces as a steak haha.

If I put a baby in her, maybe she'll relax.

Yes, the hormones do that, but it all comes back with a vengeance afterwards.

Man I wish my girl loved animals one tenth as much as yours does instead of having her first instinct, when presented with a cat, be how to best cook and eat it.

I got the jungle fever bad.

Is this normal?

Not really, no. That's a lot of animals in a short amount of time.

I love her and plan on making her my wife. I've already told her we're not adopting any of these and they are all going to other families. Part of me loves her for her kindness and love towards beings that need help

She's not being kind towards you, the person/animal who she's supposed to care most about in the world. Assuming you've clearly stated your preferences. I think it's time to draw a line in the sand. Pathological altruists who want to save every last animal or feed every last starving African often don't have enough room for a husband or wife in their lives. Building a family requires choosing and prioritizing your own over the rest of the world. You can't be an completely open-hearted starry-eyed do-gooder when you have husband/wife and kids.

If I put a baby in her, maybe she'll relax.

In the long term, maybe. In the short to medium term it will probably make things worse including in ways you hadn't imagined.

I always get the squick when someone asks if a baby would fix it. It’s completely unfair to the baby to put him in a situation where he’s the thing that’s going to save the marriage because quite often not only does that not work, but quite often ends up setting the poor kid up for a bad situation, either because the parents end up splitting up or because he’s unconsciously being blamed for not fixing the problem the parent thought a kid would solve.

I think at minimum some serious counseling is in order as this sounds a bit like animal hoarding. At minimum the fact that she’s bringing in animals with no regard for your feelings or the welfare of the animals involved (there’s no way that you have space for 10 cats and 2 dogs in a condo). Especially if you’re even thinking of forming a family, this is a serious issue. If she won’t be willing to rehome at least the “foster” animals and talk to a professional I don’t see this working long term. And it is ultimately just as cruel to the animals who need space and a clean environment to live in.

I get the impression from her this will change once we have kids. She just sees us as having extra and wants to use it to help animals. She just falls for those emails that get sent out about emergencies. She doesn't understand they are trying to make her feel bad and take in these pets. I honestly didn't care until we got to double digits. I didn't care until she brought in double digits. Plus she's not trying to get me to take her anywhere on an expensive vacation just adopt cats and dogs.

So, soon you'll have several kids and 20 animals in your small home. Can you live with that?

I'd put the brakes on this animal project pretty hard before marrying/having kids.

And he'd better make sure that he's resolved this issue before he puts a ring on it.

Does anyone else occasionally feel that Christianity is real and Jesus is the Lord? I grew up somewhat Christian going to church but my parents stopped making me go around 14 and I quickly became an atheist. However, throughout my life there have been moments (very short) where I believe in Christ. Tonight was one where my fiance and I watched a beautiful choir in a beautiful church and as I held her hand I felt God. I felt Jesus and his sacrifice.

Of course, intellectually I know this is nonsense Christianity has been proven to not be true and just a superstition but there is something about it that draws me back so close to almost believing it.

Yep. I had moments like that over my life, they slowly increased as I learned more about Christianity and started to take Him seriously. Now I do believe that Christ is the Lord, although I’m occasionally still wracked with doubt.

I think the key is that the intellect isn’t often the best way to live life or make big decisions. Living from the heart seems to work better, at least for me.

I've had those moments occasionally, when I was younger. Now my daydreams are filled with AGI.

Does anyone else occasionally feel that Christianity is real and Jesus is the Lord?

Yes. I am a Christian and know that Jesus is Lord, the living God, who died to save us from our sins and rose again, who was born on the first Christmas as a baby born of the Virgin Mary and is literally present in the Eucharist for the salvation of all men.

Of course, intellectually I know this is nonsense Christianity has been proven to not be true

No, it hasn't. You can claim evidence for Christianity has been brought back to unfalsifiable claims; I can point to falsifiable claims that Christians will point to, although I acknowledge that eg the tilma of Juan Diego isn't a slam dunk argument even if no one has managed to disprove it and that the core claims are unfalsifiable even if I think that the balance of evidence and arguments weighs in favor. I'm not aware of anything that has disproven Christianity, although probably a few specific sects staked their existence on falsifiable claims.

and just a superstition

That's not what a superstition is. A superstition is a specific belief about how the world operates(eg if you break a mirror you'll have seven years of bad luck) which is rooted in magical thinking.

Nope.

There's a nigh infinite number of ways to approach this. I would recommend perhaps starting at the beginning of the fabulous Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (https://shwep.net/). Christianity did not evolve in a vacuum. It's a part of western thought with roots dating back to pre-Socratic philosophy. It may benefit you to have a more complete picture of how it came to be and the issues that early Christian thinkers like Origen and Augustine wrestled with. There are as many different Christianities as there are Christians, and there is almost certainly a Christian path that is true for you.

Oh, to return to the time when delving into a site like this doesn't require engaging in countless hours of the inferior activity of listening instead of a considerably smaller time of the superior activity of reading.

Amen brother. Amen.

Does anyone else occasionally feel that Christianity is real and Jesus is the Lord?

I mean, I'm a Christian so I would say I feel that more than occasionally. ;)

Christianity has been proven to not be true and just a superstition

So far as I'm aware, no such proof exists. The general reasoning I see given for atheism isn't "Christianity is proven false", but "Christianity isn't proven true and so one should assume it is false until proven otherwise". The two positions are very different, with different implications on how you should think.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose you saw a unicorn on the street today. If unicorns are proven to be impossible, then you are probably hallucinating and should see a doctor. But if it's merely the case that we don't believe unicorns exist until we have proof they do, congratulations cause you just proved unicorns exist. That's why the distinction between "proven false" and "unproven, assumed false for now" matters. In the former, evidence for the false proposition can safely be considered faulty. In the latter, evidence for the proposition can potentially show that the proposition is true after all.

Back to Christianity, that means that if you feel you have reason to believe in it (which I'm not saying you do, only you can decide that), then you shouldn't set aside those reasons because "eh it's proven false, it's just superstition anyway". Instead, you should follow up on those reasons and see where it takes you. Maybe it changes your mind, maybe not, but it seems to me that it's worth investigating just to see what happens.

Personally, I would encourage you to continue to seek the truth as best you can. YMMV, but my own experience has led me to believe the wisdom of "seek and you will find". I spent many years being atheist/agnostic, and at times I despaired that I would ever be able to resolve the questions I had inside. But in time, God led me to the answers I wanted in a way that I could accept. Now looking back on it all, yeah the path was winding and at times dark. But given who I am, and how I see the world, it probably couldn't have worked any other way. So while the journey was long and tiring (mentally), it was my journey and I'm grateful for it. And it's not over yet, of course.

I hope you find the answers you seek, man. Even if you wind up deciding "yep it's all bunk", I hope you're able to have the peace of having found those answers. Good luck, and Merry Christmas!

But if it's merely the case that we don't believe unicorns exist until we have proof they do, congratulations cause you just proved unicorns exist.

No, you are still vastly more likely to be suddenly hallucinating in comparison to meeting mythological creature that nobody had found any evidence for hundreds of years. The same can be said about attributing internal feelings to hypothetical unseen all-powerful being and not some mundane neurological reason.

On the other hand, if I see a unicorn in the street, and the neighbor tells me yep, that’s what it is, and neither of us have been drinking, and the pack of neighborhood children run over and pet it, and they say it’s a unicorn…

Unfortunately, no.

Christianity has been proven to not be true

That would be quite a feat.

I don't. Perhaps that is because I don't go to ceremonies designed to cause such a feeling.

There are anecdotes of people who thought they were reasonable and strong-priored enough to resist cult indoctrination going to cult indoctrination sessions and buying them hook, line and sinker.

This essay of Greg Egan might help you.

I generally believe it but also fairly frequently have doubts. I still consider Christianity to be undoubtedly useful even when I’m really not certain if it’s true, so I try to keep practicing regardless.

I became an atheist around 8 at the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Then when I was a teenager, I tried to believe in God because I wanted to believe there was a powerful being I could pray to who would solve my problems, but I just couldn't get past the ridiculousness of things like Jesus walking on water of magically multiplying fish. It just seemed so stupid that I every time I tried to take it seriously, I felt like a fool. I do like the aesthetics of church and mass (though I hate standing and kneeling), but I just can't bring myself to believe things that go against reason.


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