domain:badcyber.com
There's a huge divide among "neo-pagans" between Greek/Roman interpretation and Norse paganism.
But the vast majority of the sources we have on Norse paganism are very late, post-Christian, and preserved (and thus filtered) through Christian sources. Take a figure like Odin who appears to be heavily influenced by Christianity - as is well known Odin was hung from a tree. Odin himself is a trickster, appears to be more of a (Christian-influenced) archetypical confabulation of Jupiter and Saturn. Norse paganism may have developed as a sort of temporary bridge between the two traditions.
In contrast, the proto-indo-european "Sky Father", Dyeus Phter, the seat of the gods, is very clearly transmitted in the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter. Of course Jupiter derives from the Proto-Indo-European compound Dyeus Phter- "sky-father" or "shining father". The lack of an unequivocal solar chieftain god in Norse paganism stands out here. There's also strong evidence for such tribal organization in Greek society.
My own curiosity in these questions pertains to the interactions between myth and genetic evolution. Hinduism would be an example par excellence for the extremely underappreciated interaction of the two, but it's not a good example of the preservation of proto-indo-european religion. I still think Greek/Roman paganism is the best we have on that front.
celluloid_dream
23hr ago
Yes, that is the argument. Downvoting on political allegiance is corrosive to this site. I don't want to litigate the specific value of each example. You can find something in each to downvote on, I'm sure. God forbid someone have a little fun with a turn of phrase, quoting a meme, etc. etc. but considering they are minority opinions, and we want to preserve a diverse ideological ecosystem, they should be at least left alone, not shunned. That's how you get .. gestures at the trajectory of this site over the years.
But I will say it's interesting that so many seem to interpret aldomilyar's comment as problematic. I happen to unironically hold that opinion. I think most people I know IRL would agree with it. If that is considered snark or trolling here, maybe the situation is more dire than I thought.
Rosencrantz2
23hr ago
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
Perhaps but we are talking about UK culture, which I am part of, and so I do feel fairly comfortable telling a British religious person this. Moreover there's a gradient of feelings where some religious people will be upset about even having to see parts of a woman's face or hair, and in this extreme case I don't feel too many qualms about telling them they need to get over their feelings. Perhaps that's the same in reverse as a catcaller telling a woman she needs to get over her objections to catcalling, but so be it.
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
For sure there's a theoretical debate to be had which I think is perhaps too laborious to really get into here, but part of that debate would need to get into questions of intent. The catcaller is manifestly trying to get a specific woman's attention and prevent her from going about her business undisturbed. The skimpily dressed woman may also be trying to distract a given man. But we actually don't know, and most of the time cannot know, if she is or not merely from the fact of her dress. It's just harder to establish an intent to impinge on a specific individual to the woman in this case than the man. If she actively flashes a body part at a specific man, we would have established an intent towards that particular person, and in that case, the woman's act is similarly invasive as catcalling – maybe even if another woman is showing a similar amount of skin as a matter of course, but not pushing it specifically towards a given unconsenting man. Innocence is not merely in what is shown but how it's shown.
Celestial-body-NOS
Quod non licet bovi, non liceat Iovi.
23hr ago
Was [L]emuria ever a science hypothesis?
Originally, it was attempting to provide a mechanism for how lemur fossils were found in India and Madagascar. (For today's lucky 10,000, lemurs are a tree-dwelling mammal related to monkeys and apes.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
23hr ago
I'm not sure whether this is your point, but if I were the kind of person to take that particular Biblical edict seriously, I would likely be in favor of laws that discouraged other people from behaving in ways that might tend to inspire rebelliousness in my extremities.
Yes, the end of trainspotting where Mark Renton gives his monologue.
I saw trainspotting at the end of my 10th grade, each year after the end of an academic year, we'd get a short spring break before classes for the next grade began, 11th is when people join cram schools, stop showing up to school and you "grow up" to do better in standardised tests where selection percentages are zero point something.
Trainspottings ending is cathartic, it's a funny, gritty, dreamy movie that captures north UK very well, at least from the people from that part I've interacted with.
I knew life would get worse starting next month which it did. It's a great movie, recommend it and it's sequel to everyone. Born Slippy is a fucking banger.
WandererintheWilderness
23hr ago
I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count
Well, maybe you're not but here is an appeal to authority that the devout Amish, at least, should acknowledge.
The white race as we see it has aryans as a large part of their own heritage but facial [ reconstruction itself doesn't make them look like the [blue eyed blonde haired people you would see in discussions.] (https://www.razibkhan.com/p/steppe-20-swipe-right-on-a-steppe) Not denying that they were paler than South Asians, but still swarthy.
The caste system was implemented too late.
The biggest mistake was letting the underclass flourish, castes or jatis are an indus valley thing, varna is what aryans had which is why you had similar systems in ancient germanic lands, I'll have to go through some survivethejive for references for that.
They see a religion that ultimately precipitated the degeneration of the ruling caste and the dysgenic hellscape that followed
Unfortunately the decline here has been quite steep, it would have been worse under Islam or Christianity since there would have been no castes, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan all show how bad that could have been.
Greek/Roman paganism is a way better inspiration for those people than Hinduism.
You can't pick and choose these things. The germanic faith was much closer to what we worship here than the Greek for instance. If you are of an Indo European heritage and worship your ancestors, you can never ignore the most developed faith in that pantheon, also the only alive one.
Tom Roswell who runs survivethejive shows an amazing amount of restraint towards Hindus, unfortunately the bad comments he gets are mostly from 80 iq people who hate him for bringing up the Aryan Invasion, even though it doesn't change religious beliefs one whit, beyond making the othering the upper castes. He still defends Hindus and Hinduism because he too can recognize the importance of its existence, despite sustained efforts to kill off ploythiesm.
Modern Indians, vast majority are not representative of those who are worthy of their heritage, the aesthetics around us are terrible. Which needs to change.
TowardsPanna
23hr ago
Do you have "comfort movies," or even particular scenes in a movie that you've watched an unlikely number of times?
Sometimes when I just need some emotional nutrition during low energy ebbs of the day, or when I'm just bored of how much some aspects of the current world suck, I just want to take in something I know I'll like.
One of them is Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Especially the first third. I like the brief interviews with Mizutani for some reason. And the beautiful sad music that plays from 22:30 when Jiro talks about his tragic childhood.
anti_dan
23hr ago
If you can't throw an apple and peanut butter sandwich in a bag how are you even considered a parent?
I disagree about them being good in theory, and certainly in practice they seem an epic failure. The food is either not healthy or not eaten by the target audience.
I guess I can imagine being of a puritan mindset where I would want to suppress feelings of being attracted out of shame, or out of a strong moral view on female virtue, and therefore would prefer form-fitting clothing be kept away from me wherever possible. Is that where you're going with this, or something else?
The example I provided was a picture of women in full niqab. My experience with men from countries where niqab is common is that they are often extremely distressed by the comparatively immodest dress of Western women. Traces of that remain in most Western regimes, too, though usually limited to the exposure of genitals (and sometimes breasts) being treated as legitimately "distressing" to display.
(Fun fact: Australia used to require protruding labia to be removed from pornographic displays, so even in contexts where it was legal to display female genitalia, it was not legal to do so with complete anatomical accuracy! I have seen it argued that this may have contributed to the rise of cosmetic labiaplasties.)
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
a fairly significant difference between actively getting into someone's space by catcalling them and just being seen by them as you go about your own business
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
("But you shouldn't think of something like exercise clothing as sexually provocative!" "No, you shouldn't think of something like catcalling as provocative!" Etc.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23hr ago
· Edited 23hr ago
Right. I mean, I think it would be progress if the "humans > AI" camp habitually named objectively quantifiable things that they themselves can do and they assert the LLMs can't, which aren't gotchas that depend on differences that are orthogonal to intelligence as usually understood ("touch your nose 5+8 times"). We could then weigh those things against all the things the LLMs can do that the speaker can't (like, solve IMO problems), and argue about which side of the delta looks more like intelligence.
Currently, I'm really not seeing much of that; the arguments all seem to cherry-pick historical peaks of human achievement ("can AI write a symphony?"), be based on vibes ("my poems are based on true feelings, rather than slop") or involve Russell conjugation ("I cleverly inject literary references and use phrasing that reflects my education; the AI stochastically parrots").
The aryans from the steppe were not white
The Aryans from the Steppe were white and commonly descended from Corded Ware culture along with the majority of European cultures, including the Italo-Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic languages. The Aryans are genetically closest to modern-day Northern Europeans. It's a cope from Indian Nationalists that they were not white.
This is not to say the development of Hinduism was purely white or that Hinduism is a white religion, neither of which I believe. But the Aryans were white.
The central argument is that these people, upon falling out with their Abrahamic faith, look to the past and cannot deny the appeal of the most fleshed-out aryan faith.
They see a religion that ultimately precipitated the degeneration of the ruling caste and the dysgenic hellscape that followed. The caste system was implemented too late. There are important lessons there but there's certainly not a religion to follow. Although I also have criticisms of Christianity, and there's a lot Christians who IMO don't have a lot of credibility to be hostile towards Hinduism given what they themselves worship.
Greek/Roman paganism is a way better inspiration for those people than Hinduism.
Edit: To provide some more data on the first point...
David Reich described the Aryan invading population in 2019:
... the population that contributed genetic material to South Asia was (roughly) 60% Yamnaya [my note: European steppe ancestry], ~30% European farmer-like ancestry"
And the remaining 10% was of West Siberian Hunter-Gatherer origin, a population which is similar to Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers.
That ethnic composition is nearly identical to modern Northern Europeans (note "Earthly Neolitic" == European farmers).
In comparison, even among the Brahmin, >70% admixture from the Indus Valley and the indigenous Andamanese.
iprayiam3
23hr ago
Painting anti-catcalling measures with the "feminist" brush is accurate to the point of describing that women benefit from them, but misses the fundamental truth that this behavior reinforces the position of already-powerful men, rather than dismantling it.
Yeah but basically all of feminism/lgbt/idpol works this way. Powerful people benefit from the benefits and are insulated from the social ramifications of the breakdown of gender roles in society.
'The sexual revolution primarily benefitted high status men who wanted consequence free sex, while destroying middle/low class families and communities' is not a hot take.
I humbly disagree, the view of the afterlife and the eddic texts clearly display shared ancestry with the values we deem holy. Also, most of these people are of germanic stock by definition, if you are to be influenced by another group of ancestor worshippers, you're bound to find the values of the much more fleshed out one than that which differs and is also dead. Amlteh and Achilles are two very different examples, though I have not read the odyssey so my perception might be incorrect or incomplete.
Not calling Greeks or Italians non white here, the religious perspective isn't simply limited to a sky father existing. Dayus Petr is a diety in all Indo European faiths but they still differ a lot.
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