domain:kvetch.substack.com
hanikrummihundursvin
29m ago
These ideas are destructive to communism, which is a collectivist ideology. Christians are saying that you should love each other, and that people are all, each, valuable individuals—communism says you should love each other insofar as it serves the emergent gestalt that sits on top of it.
I think a communist would say that the opposite is true. To that extent the dichotomy of individualism and collectivism is just wordplay.
Every communist values the individual. That's why they want communism. More freedom. More liberty. More happiness. They see the individuals freedom impeded by capitalism and, outside of catholic communists, religion. If love for our fellow men were elevated above love for money or our preferred rendition of Abrahamic religion, then we could much sooner get together and work towards a global change for the betterment of humanity.
Instead we get Christians with proclamations of moral supremacy because they believe in abstract logical concepts or capitalists with proclamations of factual supremacy since they can allege to best predict the outcomes of society. Neglecting to mention that these outcomes are derived from material conditions born from the system they support.
How are Christians being "limp wristed" because they're taking a stance about helping the poor? Jesus's teachings are very often about helping the poor and dispossessed: e.g. the parable of the good samaritan, Matthew 19:21:
Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
No, it's totally on-brand and correct for anyone that follows the teachings of Jesus to care about the poor.
Here the Episcopal church is taking a stand against the refugee resettlement program (resources allocated for the poor) being perverted to help those that are actually not in need (Afrikaners are generally not very poor); to the detriment of refugees actually in need:
It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years. I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country. I also grieve that victims of religious persecution, including Christians, have not been granted refuge in recent months.
You're just using "based Crusade Christianity" as a political tool to bash your enemies with, without any regard for the teachings of Jesus.
In fairness, this comment is itself arguing against my political opponents with Christianity, but at least I actually respect its teachings.
erwgv3g34
52m ago
I've used AI to write cover letters on job applications. One of those applications got me a teaching job which paid $20,000 more than what I was doing before, so if the cover letter made any difference ChatGPT Plus has more than paid for itself.
On the same job, I used it to generate a slogan which the administrators liked, and some images including the school mascot which had a very positive reception.
Sadly, it didn't save me from getting fired at the end of the year for failing to control the kids.
oats_son
53m ago
That first link goes to the 2nd page of your most recent posts. Is that what you intended? It will mean that if the post you wanted users to look at was there, it won't be there later as you make more posts.
VIM
1hr ago
So if some tiny isolated but culturally/ethnically distinct village catches smallpox before being wiped out in a raid by another tribe is that worse than the Holocaust? By this logic America is guilty of countless Holocausts and isn't in a position to lecture Hitler, a man who ultimately didn't even succeed in wiping out his targets.
VIM
1hr ago
Alternatively, Hitler slowly escalated in a way that let at least some Jews escape before things got dire whereas Stalin went straight from business as usual to mass starvation. Not at all clear that slowly escalating is any worse than going full hog from the get go
PokerPirate
1hr ago
You're claim that liberation theology and the social gospel movement "remove the supernatural elements from Christianity" is straightforwardly wrong. These are not evangelical theologies---and it's fine to dislike them for that reason---but they obviously incorporate the supernatural.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Why the snipe against anthropologists (the 'neurotic janitors'?) I get that many have lost all faith in academia but that seems like throwing out the bathwater, the baby, the soap, and the tub itself.
I think to design this study or studies you'd need to first sort out what you mean by "Asian." That may sound eggheaded but you would want as much precision and as little noise as possible, or you'd risk losing any statistical rigor and thus your conclusions would be suspect. Depending on how well you designed the study (accounting for as many other variables as possible besides however you operationalize the term 'culture') you'd still require replication, and replication across and into different cultures, to have any definitiveness in your conclusion.
There's a term 帰国子女 in Japanese referring to children who are taken abroad by their parents when very young, and who then must return to Japan when dad gets transferred back home, or whatever. There's an entire system of schooling set up both in Japan and abroad to cater to these children, because of the impact of cultural norms and how the kids get thrown out of whack (as it's perceived here) in that process. The changes in behavior and attitude from before and after are often dramatic. This is individual level, however, not longitudinal across generations.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
I noticed the water-to-flour ratio has changed, so I had it explain why,
I would love to hear more.
phailyoor
1hr ago
He got to 30 and people are calling it a good thing. If he started at this number people would shriek at it. If de minimis nuking is still there in the background overshadowed by all the other stuff, then he also got to kill shein and temu and aliexpress
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1hr ago
So... Trump blinked? These are the tariff numbers we would have if Trump had just imposed the flat 10% rate on China he did on every other country. What benefit did the United States get out of this pause on trade with China? I guess Trump and his inner circle probably made a killing on insider trading this announcement.
Actually, I think the nuance is lost. Social justice warriors weren’t simply inspired by Christianity. They don’t have similarities by coincidence. They are a direct evolutionary branch of mainline Protestantism. There is path dependency.
ArmedTooHeavily
1hr ago
I think phrasing it as "Progressivism is atheistic puritanical christianity" captures some nuance that "it came from protestantism" doesn't.
Hieronymus
2hr ago
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.
If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.
The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.
Pynewacket
2hr ago
While my first impulse is to deny and defend the church, with examples like these and seeing lady bishops and whatnot in some denominations, I can't really deny the reality that there is truth to that statement. Always a disappointment to see the religion of the Crusades being so limp wristed with statements like
As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins. Jesus tells us to care for the poor and vulnerable as we would care for him, and we must follow that command.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
2hr ago
Speaking just to the specific question of how one understand’s Christian love, I tend to take Brand’s stance on it.
What the world calls by that name “Love”,
I know not and I reck not of.
God’s love I recognise alone,
Which melts not at the piteous plaint,
Which is not moved by dying groan,
And its caress is chastisement.
What answer’d through the olive-trees
God, when the Son in anguish lay,
Praying, “O take this cup away!”
Did He then take it? Nay, child, nay:
He made him drink it to the lees.
Never did word so sorely prove
The smirch of lies, as this word Love:
With devilish craft, where will is frail,
Men lay Love over, as a veil,
And cunningly conceal thereby
That all their life is coquetry.
Whose path’s the steep and perilous slope,
Let him but love,—and he may shirk it;
If he prefer Sin’s easy circuit,
Let him but love,—he still may hope;
If God he seeks, but fears the fray,
Let him but love,—’tis straight his prey;
If with wide-open eyes he err,
Let him but love,—there’s safety there!
God’s love is infinitely more than our human conception of love, and it is bundled up together with his righteousness and wrath and holiness. The same God who says “Love one another as I have loved thee,” is perfectly, rightly capable of wiping out peoples and places. Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin. But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”
I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Amos 5:21-22
I make the argument that when Christianity, taken as a whole, was most adherent to God’s commands and intentions, is also the time it was riding high in the world in terms of temporal power. It was the time when it had made itself strong enough to resist outside conquest and to, from that base of operations, eventually evangelize the world, however imperfectly. At that time it was confident in itself, assertive, and had not yet fully fallen under the sway of the “The only thing that matters is love” heresy.
Similarly, the interpretation of agape gives the pre-arranged conclusion away from the beginning. Agape isn’t just for comrades in the cause, it is meant, in varying degrees, for everyone.
In theory, I should have agape for Slavoj Zizek, just like I should for a fellow parishioner. It has nothing to do with comrades in the Communist or cause-oriented sense and I would argue demonstrates Zizek’s extremely weak understanding of or an intentional misrepresentation of the concept in order to bolster an otherwise weak argument.
FtttG
2hr ago
I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
A lot of people wonder why Curtis Yarvin is taken seriously. There’s been a lot of drama lately about whether Moldbug Sold Out, or whether there is any reason to take him seriously. A lot of this comes from an overfocusing on his monarchy prescriptions, but this really misses a lot of the deeper intellectual content. Social justice came from American Mainline Protestantism. They are the same thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I think for a lot of genre fiction, an AI book edited by a human would probably be just fine for the median reader. Most of the published books in genre fiction are written to be read quickly and forgotten just as quickly, written more for people who want to read in transit between places (say on a bus, train, or plane) or as a pastime on vacation. It’s not nor was it ever intended to be serious reading. And while I don’t think AI at present can write well enough to be read as a beach read, it can produce something that would be publishable with a reasonable amount of developmental and line editing.
The advice for producing such novels is actually pretty cookie cutter. There are known plot development tools (save the cat is the most common), character development sheets, and style advice. Training an AI to use the beat sheets and other advice would produce a reasonable rough draft of a novel. Editing those novels might still require a human touch, but it’s probably not prohibitively expensive.
Britain and the EU won't buy beef from hormone-fed cattle. The way they talk about it, this probably won't change.
Sounds like they may align with RFK Jr.'s stance. It'd be interesting if that creates enough of a market for hormone-free cattle that it shifts U.S. production as a whole.
I don't have any specific insight as to intentions there, but I assume markets will respond to shifted incentives like that.
As discussed previously this is a nothingburger, but if it makes Trump happy, good job Zelensky.
I'm pretty sure the main goal of that particular provision is to give the U.S. a "stake" in Ukrainian independence that falls short of bringing them into NATO, but justifies them having some kind of presence in country to act as a deterrent.
Like holy cow, your own article points out:
“There are four slightly bigger deposits: Yastrubetske, Novopoltavske, Azovske, and Mazurivske. All but one of them seem to be now within or near the zone that the Russians control, as far as I can tell”
So if the U.S. has an official agreement granting an interest in those deposits, even if its not mineable now, its a decent deterrent to future Russian incursions into the border areas that Russia would have to cross through to drive into Ukraine. It gives a future U.S. president some basic cover to drop some troops or similar in, if needed.
The U.S. keeps finding deposits of rare earth elements and other resources within its own territory (whether they can be extracted economically is a different question).
There is no SOLID reason the U.S. should have any stake in the security of Ukraine, but contriving one that's enough to give plausible cover for future actions is helpful towards leveraging a peace agreement.
This is what I'm trying to get across, if you assume Trump is JUST trying to secure the first order goal, getting more minerals for the U.S., rather than using that as leverage to work towards a lasting peace agreement, you're severely underestimating the man. Hell, he's apparently gotten Ukraine actually paying for U.S. weapons now. A second step seems to be using American companies to rebuild Ukraine, but I'll go on record saying that rebuilding probably won't solve their their population nosedive so in the longer term it'll be a bit pointless.
Motte and Bailey. Maybe Christians should hold everything in common, selling property and possessions to give to anyone in need. Is that how Zizek lives or does he need to remove something from his own eye? Nowhere does the New Testament call Christians to advocate the violent redistribution of the fruits of non-believers’ labor.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
2hr ago
I might take a stab at guessing which countries might try calling his bluff and letting the timer run out
I expect Canada to call the bluff; I also expect this one to, uniquely, be a bit less of a bluff than it is for everyone else. I think a lot of the onshoring is, or could be reasonably expected to, come from factories and personnel in Ontario- it might legitimately be easier for the US to increase the size of the US and onshore manufacturing that way. Fortunately for him, the people who are working in those factories just lost an election to a bunch of welfare queens (and the losers know it); all Trump need do now is stay the course and have the Premiers sue for peace on their own terms.
I continue to think my Model of Trump is far better at predicting his actions than virtually any pundit out there, and he's far more of a rational actor than even people here credit him
The problem is just that the negotiations are, unusually, public; everyone else just has to wait (and get their panties in a twist, and complain on the Internet). It's only been 4 months.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
That's a different question. You asked what made the holocaust worse than the holodomor. Afaik the holocaust was more intentionally sadistic and drawn out, intended to maximize suffering for every victim.
If you want to take the argument towards this direction, killing one person is worse than killing multiple people because one person was the only representative of their specific genotype.
It falls apart because no one cares about one person's specific genotype except possibly that person. A few more people care about a tiny no-name village's distinction. A lot more people care about the Jews as an ethnicity and culture.
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