domain:apollomindset.substack.com
BahRamYou
3m ago
There's been a suspiciously long pattern of US leaders thinking "we can solve this problem with strategic bombing, no ground invasion necessary." But then it turns out the strategic bombing is actually not that powerful, especially in a country as large and mountainous as Iran. This is a country roughly the size of the entire US west. It seems like they will always, inevitably be able to hide an enrichment facility somewhere. North Korea and Pakistan certainly did.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
4m ago
That you view children as a punishment rather than a blessing is why secular liberalism is suffering (or perhaps enjoying) a collapse in fertility.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5m ago
have better outcomes on a whole host of relevant metrics to the people yearning for Christianity
Unless you were a powerless woman, or a powerless minority, or a powerless person of slightly the wrong proclivity for various things including but not limited to sexual orientation and opinions on celestial mechanics (at relevant times).
I'd posit that if Christianity was the ideal human ideology that caused maximum flourishing, it wouldn't have declined. Or at least the places where it didn't decline would then be much better places (and presumably out-compete) than places where it did.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
8m ago
I will take your word on the timing of events. But after the genie was out of the bottle many other things changed, too, which are all now reasons for any random individual to stay in the current cultural equilibrium. If you want to push them and together with them whole of society to other equilibrium, you need to a path from here to there. Propaganda at schools for abstinence sounds like a joke which it is when it is an insufficient level of push: teacher lecturing an abstinence sex ed curriculum will appear detached from reality in an environment where everybody expects the current marriage pattern of no marriage at all or it's decades away when you are closer to middle-aged than teenager.
Getting married is something people can plausibly do. It will be easier if there is a push for other changes that make it easier to become and be a young married couple having young married life (including married sex that results in kids).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10m ago
Frankly, I believe my lying eyes more than I believe a collection of blackpill-curated stats from places like the Institute for Family Studies.
I actually endorse this approach 100%, but surely this implies a general rejection of social science?
I'm sorry you are having such a struggle, and honestly, the dating landscape does look kind of awful right now (speaking as a guy who was pretty awkward and had a number of other strikes against me in my youth) and I am glad I'm not on the market.
Wait what? Why are you glad you're off the market, if your eyes are telling you things are fine?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
11m ago
Again I'm really not whining, I didn't come here expecting it to be a "agrees with me" paradise.
It seems to me like right-leaning ideas are more popular here, which I took a stab at demonstrating. There's also at least enough right-leaning support here to go +15 while espousing violent right-leaning thoughts. If you were at +1, I'd assume ideological balance in the group, if you were at -15, there would clearly more left-leaning voters clicking than right-leaning.
your disapproval genuinely means nothing to me
I expect nothing less! No offense taken :)
I post because I like to hear myself speak, and I like bickering. If I wanted approval for my ideas I'd be on reddit, which I am not. Have a great day!
roystgnr
11m ago
You yourself got +15 upvotes saying things that I thought were quite uncool, and very right coded.
I know "they were asking for it" is a cliche of an awful thing to say, but I have to point out: you literally were asking for it, and @Hadad was wise enough to remind everyone of that in his first sentence of that comment. The line between a debate and an opinion poll is a bit of a blurry one on a forum, but I think it's clear enough that the distinction matters. If he'd presented those sentiments as if they were supposed to be a persuasive argument, I'd absolutely have downvoted them, but giving an honest (and bookended by caveats!) expression of his sentiments in response to an explicit query for general sentiments was fine. I still couldn't bring myself to upvote it, sorry @Hadad, but half of the point of this place is seeing what people say when they're not being squelched, and avoiding the squelching is important for that.
I'd say your own top comment's vote score (currently +18 -24) would be more clearly deserving of complaint (except that that would go over even more poorly, as "people can't downvote me!" always does). There are problems with your comment that should have been fixed, but I could surely find comments here that had bigger problems but got a pass because they were right-leaning rather than (in context) left-leaning.
hydroacetylene
13m ago
I’m pretty sure the cases of actual surgery are not cases in which the parents don’t know or approve.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
15m ago
Why does regular bombing campaigns leaving the country unable to create the necessary infrastructure not a viable path forward?
You don't need the US to be directly involved for that. Israel can handle it all on their own.
I see no particular reason we can't just annihilate them.
"Annihilating" Iran, Carthage (or Circassia) style, isn't on the table.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15m ago
Doesn't that mean you're that much more screwed if you end up changing your mind later?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
17m ago
It was a widely distributed meme when it came out, I didn't generate this. Fair enough though.
I thought it was relevant as it actually does a shockingly good job at illustrating why common folks with AR-15s can still exercise power, despite not having access to tanks or airplanes.
I'm also not kidding, as a Canadian who's always sneered at US gun culture/shootings, reading this a few years ago, especially the final line, "Government is scared of you" basically flipped me from "mildly pro gun but unbothered by new gun restrictions" to "profoundly anti-gun restrictions".
Government should be scared of us, and it's not scared enough these days.
TitaniumButterfly
17m ago
I think 'personhood' in this context is mostly nonsense and everything gets circular fast.
Comes down to something like "It's okay to kill him because he's not a person, and he's not a person because it's okay to kill him."
pigeonburger
18m ago
Tangent, but I always wondered if a big part of the persisting popular perception of Love at First Sight and True Soulmates and stuff like that is just couples/parents downplaying their struggles after the fact to strengthen their bond and/or to reassure their children. Maybe I'm an outlier, but for me attraction (in a romantic sense) was never a 0-to-100 flash of inspiration, it was always me gradually growing interested in a person as I learn about their life and language, not noticing it sinking in until at some point the realization hits out of left field.
Maybe some people really find someone where everything is effortless. Maybe those people also embody the work advice "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life". Maybe those people are lying to themselves, or maybe they aren't. I have to work at my career and I have to work at my marriage. I didn't make the maximum effort and maximum difficulty choices for both, but I'm not sure the unicorn effortless ones existed for either, at least for me.
ControlsFreak
18m ago
Do you think it was unlikely for rates of smoking to decline after society had shifted HARD toward embracing it? ...with a side of "don't tell me what to do"?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
19m ago
You have repeatedly heard from men (I will add myself to that pool) who can tell you from their observed experience that this is not true, that most guys around them don't have insurmountable problems either dating or getting laid, and that those who can't are not perfectly decent, fit guys with good jobs and stable personalities who are being rejected by the entire female population because they are all alpha-widows, but because there is something wrong with these guys.
Frankly, I believe my lying eyes more than I believe a collection of blackpill-curated stats from places like the Institute for Family Studies.
I'm sorry you are having such a struggle, and honestly, the dating landscape does look kind of awful right now (speaking as a guy who was pretty awkward and had a number of other strikes against me in my youth) and I am glad I'm not on the market. But the blackpill is not going to do you any favors. Even if your pessimistic assumptions are true, you ask, "Now what?" Now go out there and get in the game and stop making excuses, that's what. No one is going to hand you pussy or a relationship, and if you have to work harder at it than grandpa, well, every era has its challenges. You probably don't want to deal with the other things grandpa had to deal with.
No, the game is not rigged against you. No, there are not zero acceptable single women in your city. No, the solution is not to contrive reasons why women should not have agency to choose.
hydroacetylene
19m ago
Sex Ed doesn’t prevent pregnancy in general- teen pregnancy is dictated by population factors.
Owlify
20m ago
I am using person to mean the general fuzzy concept of personhood and the rights associated with it. Most of us would agree that a single cell fertilized egg is not a person yet. The concept is fuzzy so you can't really draw a line on at what point the fertilized egg becomes a person.
hydroacetylene
22m ago
It’s utterly unsurprising to me that Hispanics assimilating led to big drops in teen fertility.
Owlify
24m ago
Yes, but a bad father is much worse than no father. In the vast majority of cases, the worst fathers abandon their children so stats aren't enough to determine if in this situation having the parents be married would be good or not because they would be skewed by functional families. If the woman has little confidence in the other parent than that's a signal that they might not be good. Isn't it better to make it optional for people to be married in such cases? And if the father actually wants to be present then court can decide custody.
gattsuru
25m ago
To steelman, let's start with a different hypothetical law: African-Americans are prohibited from using metformin, and whites from using topiramate, for the treatment of weight loss, and for the sake of the hypothetical, assume that both formulations are off-label. In one sense, these are neutral laws, where both are prohibited from using a drug for a given diagnosis. In another sense, they aren't: one race is prohibited from using one drug, and another from another entirely different one. Recognizing them as 'similar enough' risks a bunch of absurd arguments, like banning one from doing something very common and the other from doing something that's facially similar but never actually desired. Similarly, it'd be nonsensical for it to be perfectly okay to do these laws as one unit, but consider them discriminatory if the state enacted them piecemeal.
That doesn't necessarily make them good or bad policy. Hence some of the specificity in my hypothetical: there actually are some reasons you might want gender- or race-specific restrictions on those two specific weight loss drugs. But because the aftermath of Caroline Products is such a clusterfuck, almost everything passes rational basis scrutiny, and the exceptions are so unusual that they're usually treated as some special not-really-just-rational-basis example. Heightened scrutiny is necessary before courts even consider whether a law's motivations are more than pretextual.
((This distinction is kinda what nara_burns is complaining about as a distinction between Kagan and the other left-leaners on the bench: Kagan recognizes that this is still an early preliminary injunction hearing and SCOTUS has had relatively little briefing on the facts, so it's should still be plausible for the state to present support for the bans that would survive intermediate (or even strict!) scrutiny.))
There's a lot of flaws to this steelman: the Caroline Products footnotes are completely unmoored in actual constitutional text, what types of discrimination and categorization gets protected is a result of arbitrary coincidence or political demand more than real analysis, courts routinely put their thumbs on whether a particular law is analyzed under one framework or another, so on.
((It doesn't help that the majority in this opinion is muddled, even by the low standards of a Roberts opinion. Whether a particular patient can be diagnoses with "male-pattern hair growth" is absolutely tied to biological reality, but that biological reality is a result of sex. And that's the example Roberts picked!))
Christian understanding does not end at the Bible. Indeed the Bible says not to use itself that way (2 Thessalonians 2:15). This would seem to be quite a problem for Protestantism but that's beside the point.
The point here is that for a couple thousand years Christians have understood God's relationship with Israel to have been transferred, in a sense, to the Church. Early Christians understood themselves to be part of the fulfilment of the Jewish religion; that Judaism has become Christianity and gentiles have a place in it. They didn't understand 'Judaism' to be a separate thing from Christianity.
However, especially with the destruction of the second temple, the Jews who rejected Christ underwent a radical shift in their beliefs and practices, leading to what we today call "Rabbinical Judaism" -- not the same religion that (partly) transformed into Christianity and, indeed, a younger religion than Christianity, which fairly heavily and consciously defined itself against Christianity.
Within this rubric, what we today call 'Judaism' is rather a Christian heresy and no, there's no expectation that its adherents have any special role that Christians need to worry about. The Church is the 'True Israel'.
For non-Protestant Christians, having so many Protestants in political power is bemusing, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying. This case is all three.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
30m ago
Something's gotta give between
-
Abstinence until marriage
-
Marriage driven by choice and random chance relatively (25+) late in life.
-
No fault divorce.
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A healthy sex drive in an individual.
I'm not accusing you of hypocrisy, I think I know what you'd choose. But at core those four can't, in general, live together. At least one has to go.
phailyoor
31m ago
If you're just trying to keep your boot in their face, then it doesn't matter. Blow up their economic and military centers and keep them from building up. Sadaam was begging for a deal in 2003 but Bush was too stupid to make one.
It certainly becomes difficult if you seriously want a regime change or occupation.
I understand the covenant as God having had a relationship with the righteous Hebrew nation. He did not have a covenant with those outside the righteous nation. Not with gentiles, obviously. But also not with Hebrews (= pre 70 AD descendants of Abraham) who abandoned the Law and adopt gentile worship and customs. If having the tiniest shred of Abraham's DNA made you one of the Chosen, there should be more consternation in the Bible about the Babylonian captivity or the children of kidnapped Hebrew women, but those people are just treated as gentiles AFAIK.
I think God probably gave the Hebrews living after 33AD a grace period, but the He really underlined His point in 70AD, after which AIUI it was no longer possible to continue the traditional Hebrew religion as commanded by God. So, after a brief period, the Hebrew diaspora (=Jews) created a new tradition partially rooted in the pre-70AD religion. I don't think God recognizes this new tradition as legitimate, and the NT says that the Christian church is the new Israel. There's the question of the 144,000 in Revelation, but I don't really know what to make of that, maybe some special mercy for descendants of Abraham of good conscience. Or some people say it means Christians. I don't know.
Edit: IIRC God promised the Hebrews: land, descendants, a relationship (one god/one people), and a messiah through the line of David. The land is now the whole Earth (evangelization), the Hebrews have myriad spiritual descendants, the God/people relationship remains intact, and the Messiah is Christ.
This is exactly the bit I was riffing on.
I'm firmly in the camp of "both Marxism and Christian ideals have been tried and found lacking". If you think Chesterson is right, but the Marxist fanatics are wrong, I would be curious to see how that gap is bridged.
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