Friday
Forgotpassword
1yr ago
I've got close single female friends. They vigorously filter people who'd frankly be good enough for longterm partnership every week for all sorts of reasons. The majority of the women I met through the apps who I still have on social media are conspicuously single and/or making no progress towards their stated goal of settling down and having kids based on their stories and these aren't clubthots, majority are UMC, educated sensible women. Their main reasons for rejection all verge more around 'he was boring' or 'I did not feel he was my soulmate and my very being was electrified to be around him'. Admittedly feminine sexuality is a lot more 100-0 than male sexuality, but the current state of affairs is a vigorous own goal caused by that.
I agree on the advice criteria since, despite being significantly more difficult to achieve, 'just clean up and be confident bro' is way more actionable advice than 'stop looking for Mr. Perfect' but on the other hand I feel like the average male would be able to solve the dating woes of most women within a week if a freaky friday situation occurred.
raakaa
1yr ago
Man, so there are still multiplayer games out there where you get to know your teammates/opponents, instead of them merely being faceless hindrances delivered up by a matchmaking system. Who knew? Thanks for the vidya recs.
since I've been on The Motte for who knows how long and it takes a while for people to care enough to call you a regular or befriend you.
Yeah, that makes sense. This seems reflected the fact that off-topic threads (e.g. this one, Wellness Wednesdays, Friday Fun Thread, etc.) are relatively inactive compared to the main Culture War thread (for contrast, I remember that on old-style forums, off-topic threads were often more active than on-topic ones, even if more effort went into the latter), meaning that the userbase here is relatively less-concerned with interacting with their fellow interlocutors outside of the context of culture war debate. I know that personally, I primarily come here to read intelligent people discuss current events, and any knowledge that I’ve acquired regarding these people qua people usually comes from someone explaining how their nationality/occupation/life story has influenced their perspective on some issue. Another possibility regarding the imbalance in activity in these threads, though, is that the framing of the off-topic threads as belonging to a specific day dissuades some users from posting top-level comments in them after that day has passed (even though I know that many users do use them as weekly threads). Well, I’m just musing here, and I am personally content with lurking The Motte as it is.
2rafa
1yr ago
Happy Friday. I think this place is really special, there’s nowhere like it on the internet and I appreciate all the regular personalities, weird special interests and unintentional comedy we have.
Wake up babe, new dumb AI toy just dropped: https://websim.ai/ (warning: google login). Perfect Friday pastime.
Type in any URL or textual prompt you want to see in the "browser" and watch Sonnet (I think?) conjure the full webpage, often complete with controls and links, out of thin air. I decided to test it with a prompt about an abstract of a scientific paper about groundbreaking research on Ligma and got pleasantly surprised to see e.g. the appearance of the renowned Dr. Diz Nuutz, made possible by the sheer generosity of the National Sugondese Foundation, and the innovative "updog" approach to integration. The acclaimed paper of Candese et al. finally has a worthy successor.
The usual suspects are having lots of fun with it as well. The generated links click through too so you can seamlessly surf the dead internet at your leisure. Go nuts (not deez).
Edit as I fuck around at work: this very thread and the main page through the eyes of Sonnet. You can almost see the gears turning in places, it's just coherent enough to be interesting - like the fun thread is posted by a certain Yvain on the first picture and a mod account on the second one, the main page not only contains a Culture War Roundup thread (unprompted!) but also links back to the actual thread I generated previously (seems to track my prompt history via context or something?). The more I fuck around, the more I find out.
Edit[2]: Some random shit I clicked through for archival purposes.
- Delayed Gratification, an absurdist comedy in three acts (I didn't actually wait an hour, it just bugged out in transition). This is honestly some bottomless pit supervisor-tier shit right here, especially considering Claude winged it from just the url and the countdown sub-links. I would kill a man in cold blood to know what system prompt they use, even though it can be improved as to my "trained" eye Claude's sesquipedalian prose is very obvious and sometimes tiresome.
- endless.horse, literally a string of horse emojis scrolling across the page in a swaying loop. Claude valiantly attempted to attach some kind of actual gif a few times, but hallucinated links do not (yet) result in pictures, so after a few refreshes it settled on moving emojis. I'll take it.
- Free Shrugs, natch. The shrugs actually change (about 7 in total) when you click the button!
- Root Systems, in which Rayon realizes there is in fact a Unicode character for an ankh. ☥
Edit[3]: Wait, you can actually set it to Opus via the small settings button on the left side of the bar! Oh, now we're cooking with gas.
- Immediate failure: I tried to get it to generate a link dump for more dumb shit, but the shoggoth mask slips and Opus' assistant nature leaks through directly. For better or worse Claude loves little reflective comments, even when he's supposed to stay in character, and not even Opus is immune.
- The next regen is much better, for some reason Opus
mind-readsinferesdecides that I want a specifically 4chan link dump and rolls with it, throwing in a hilarious subversion of a meme and another endless.horse link for some reason. The link leads to the actual KYM entry (bottom left). Yeah, that's Opus alright. - Next regen for lulz gives me a non-4chan retro style link dump, which seems normal enough until the page loads fully and I fucking die. Got me, I actually burst out laughing.
- Pointer Pointer, a "game" from the link dump where an image follows your pointer and you have to click it. I expected the image to not load (indeed it didn't); I didn't expect the "game" to actually work, the 30-second timer ticks down properly, kicks you back to this "menu" on finish, and displays the number of clicks you made on the image within that time. Difficulty changes the image's size. Actually pretty cool.
- An archive(?) of a geocities page from that same link dump. Seems fairly authentic, the webring link also works (again Claude valiantly tries linking a background image). Fuck, I can do this for hours, I gotta take a break.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
As I sit here of a Friday evening and reduce the bolognese sauce (avocado salad, a kind of coleslaw, buttered garlic baguette--these are the other parts of the dinner not the makeup of the sauce) I reflect that I have gained much from my time on the Motte. I don't know or interact with any of you on a personal level, but then I am in an environment where apart from my family I interact with precious few in that way (there's something called tatemae in Japan that means basically "outward face that you show to the world" that I keep on most always.) I probably express myself on this site more than anywhere else, in some ways. Though to be honest am probably polite here to an effete degree that belies my face-to-face persona, where I am an unremitting ass.
This to say I appreciate everyone here, even the wackadoos whose opinions I disagree with vehemently. Everyone here, regardless of viewpoint, seems really intelligent and talented at expressing themselves in writing. So thank you. And I mourn those who've left, or who rarely post for whatever reason, in particular a few people who I won't name.
Once again, not fun. But I appreciate all y'all's input and I value the active participation here. I disagree with those who've said this place has ossified.
Happy Friday, all.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Ethan Crumbley Parents Found Guilty of Manslaughter
Ethan Crumbley is a school shooter who killed four people. This does not make him unique. What makes him unique is that his parents have been found guilty of manslaughter for it. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/16/us/james-jennifer-crumbley-trials-differences/index.html
The legal theory is that the parents were extraordinarily negligent- and, TBH, at least the mom seems to have been a shitty parent who ignored her son's obvious mental illness- and provided a firearm to their son despite clear evidence he was at least a potential danger to others. I don't think this legal theory is particularly novel even if it's rarely used; when I took my CHL class in much more firearms-friendly Texas I was told that if I provided a minor with a handgun, I could be held liable should they kill someone with it. But on to some article quotes:
That witness overlap reflects how similar the two trials were overall. Both parents were convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter for their roles in their son’s mass shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan on November 30, 2021. They face up to 15 years in prison and are set to be sentenced next month.
Despite those similarities, the trials unfolded quite differently.
The case against Jennifer focused heavily on her personal life, digging into her voluminous text messages, her relationship with her son and even her extramarital affair. In contrast, the case against James largely avoided his private affairs but more closely examined how he secured the family’s firearms.
So his father was convicted under the idea that he had a positive responsibility to store firearms in a way inaccessible to a mentally ill teenaged boy. I'm not an expert on Michigan law, but I'm pretty sure that the letter of the law says something along those lines in most states, and it would be very difficult to argue that he doesn't have a moral responsibility. But maybe he was a responsible gun owner who took measures to keep his troubled son away from household guns that a reasonable person would expect to be sufficient:
In contrast, James Crumbley’s trial more closely focused on how he stored the three firearms in the home.
In August 2021, Ethan sent a video to his friend of him handling and loading a gun just after midnight. “My dad left it out so I thought. ‘Why not’ lol,” he wrote, according to messages shown in court. Both of his parents were at home around that time, forensic analyst Edward Wagrowski testified.
Further, James purchased the SIG Sauer 9mm firearm for his son on Black Friday 2021, and he later told investigators he hid it in a case in his armoire, with the bullets hidden in a different spot under some jeans. A detective said a cable lock sold with the SIG Sauer was found still in its plastic packaging.
Nevermind. While I'm leery of the precedent this sets for obvious reasons, I have no trouble acknowledging that James Crumbley deserves to go to prison and, were I a juror, I'd probably have voted to convict. On to the mom's case.
Another major difference between the two trials was that Jennifer provided a lengthy digital trail of her thoughts and feelings, while James did not. This contrast meant the jury heard more about her personal life than about his.
As revealed at her trial, Jennifer was in text conversations with several people before, during and after the shooting, providing a running commentary of her thoughts and actions.
She messaged her boss as she realized their gun was missing and her son was the shooter, then asked her boss not to fire her. “I need my job,” she wrote. “Please don’t judge me for what my son did.” Jennifer Crumbley appears in court on January 25 in Oxford, Michigan.
She texted the owner of a horse farm on the morning of the shooting that her son was “having a hard time” and “can’t be left alone,” and then later sent her reaction to the attack. “I wish we had warnings.. Something,” Jennifer Crumbley wrote.
She also messaged her extramarital lover after the shooting, reflecting on her own parenting skills. “I failed as a parent,” she wrote in a message. “I failed miserably.”
Other online posts of hers furthered the prosecution’s case. Days before the attack, she posted on her social media about her and Ethan’s trip to the gun range and his new SIG Sauer 9mm firearm. “Mom & son day testing out his new Xmas present,” she wrote in the post, alongside a photo of the gun.
Further, the day before the shooting, a teacher left Jennifer Crumbley a voicemail saying that her son had been looking at bullets on his phone in class. “Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote to her son in a text.
This does not paint a picture of good parenting. Furthermore,
The major difference in the trials was Jennifer Crumbley’s decision to testify in her own defense, while James Crumbley did not.
On the stand, Jennifer Crumbley pushed blame onto her son, her husband and the school, and she expressed no regret for her actions. “I’ve asked myself if I would have done anything differently, and I wouldn’t have,” she testified.
James Crumbley, meanwhile, declined to testify. “It is my decision to remain silent,” he said in court.
The two decisions were a reflection of their broader legal defense strategies.
A pretrial ruling in Jennifer Crumbley’s trial had barred both sides from bringing up anything about her extramarital affair with a local firefighter. But midway through her trial, Jennifer waived the ruling and agreed to allow that evidence, saying she trusted her attorney’s recommended strategy change.
IANAL, but Jennifer Crumbley's legal defense strategy sounds sufficiently suboptimal that she seems to just have generally very bad judgement, maybe the mental illness runs in the family. That being said, I'm a lot less comfortable with the legal logic here- being a generally shitty parent who has bad judgement and neglects her son's mental health problem isn't illegal. I'm comfortable calling her a shitty parent and saying she should be called out for it but it kinda seems like a novel legal theory of the sort that's generally bad.
Personally I doubt this case will be widely replicated; the Crumbleys seem to have had much-more-damning-than-average facts. But let's go to the general principle; parents sometimes being held responsible when their minor child kills someone doesn't seem terribly controversial, no doubt had they left out a gun and their five year old killed someone using it to play cowboys and indians this would be a rare scenario but not a case that grabbed much attention. And it doesn't seem controversial either that Ethan Crumbley was sufficiently crazy to be less than 100% responsible for his actions. On the other hand, parents of teen murderers getting tried for manslaughter is definitely abnormal; teen murderers almost certainly suffer from distinctly below average parenting, too, although I would expect that in the median case that's due to a single mother's weird work schedule or poverty rather than a wealthy woman neglecting her kid. I think the difference is that these parents had, at least materially, the ability to do better. His mom obviously knew her son was showing signs of being crazy but preferred horses, extramarital affairs, and booze, his dad had a gun safe but didn't store the murder weapon in it(and when I was a teen with my own guns they were required to be stored in my dad's gun safe, which seems like the reasonable policy for your teen owning guns). This wasn't a single mom working a shift that made it hard to pay much attention to her kid, which is a lot closer to the family scenario for most minor criminals and for most mass shooters.
2rafa
1yr ago
I never smoked much weed as a teenager, I typically refused it even at parties unless very drunk, certainly never smoked by myself or just with a few friends, so maybe I had a puff or two 3-4 times a year between the ages of 15 and 18? Between 18 and 25 I pretty much didn’t smoke at all, so I only really started as an adult. I’ve also never smoked cigarettes or mixed tobacco and weed (which is how most British people consume it), but I’m not sure if that has any effect on this.
The only time I’ve ever experienced the anxiety spiral was on one of the few occasions I tried cocaine as a teenager. I get moderately anxious (palpitations etc) on very high caffeine doses and once or twice on ADHD medication, which I no longer take (as discussed in last week’s thread). I suppose that makes a recommendation difficult. Do you find the anxiety sets in very quickly? Does it happen after a small amount of THC or only if you get stoned?
I’m an extremely neurotic person. The last time we did one of those five factor personality quizzes on the friday fun thread I was literally 99th percent neuroticism, so I’d say I’m pretty anxious. But weed calms me down, clears out my head, makes me think of ‘nothing’ (or just what I’m doing in the moment, whether it’s watching TV or making dinner or talking). I do think it’s different to alcohol or LSD which have a much stronger happiness effect (I’ve never been a sad drunk), weed doesn’t make you happy. But it does clear my head. What’s your experience?
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1yr ago
Brief thoughts on religion
My mother is a devout practicing Catholic. I have never once had the courage to tell her that I stopped believing in God long ago. She’s asked me a few times over the years if I still believe; presumably it’s apparent from my disinterest in the Church that I don’t. I just lie, I tell her “yes of course”, and that’s the end of it, for a time. I hate thinking of what it will be like to face her on her deathbed. I’m sure she’ll ask me again, at the very end - will I still lie? I don’t want to inflict that kind of pain on her. I can put on a boisterous face in my writing at times, but when it comes to anything that actually matters, I’m a coward. (Writing is the medium most closely associated with subterfuge, with masquerade, with the protean synthesis of new identities - in no other instance can we so directly assume a voice and a habit of mind that is not our own.)
I seem to no longer be capable of approaching religion as anything but an aesthetic phenomenon. I admire religions the way you might admire clothes in a shop window; I judge them by how well they comport with my own notions of how reality should ideally function. There is something primally compelling about Judaism; what other god has commanded such authority? What other god has commanded such, not only fear, but such intellectually refined fear, a fear that carries with it all the oceanic vastness and eerie serenity of the desert’s evening sky? Christianity too is fascinating, as possibly the most beautiful and compelling image of humility and forgiveness in world history. Here we have the physical incarnation of the Hegelian thesis of the contradiction inherent in all things (“that terrible paradox of ‘God on the cross’”). It’s a shame about the ending, though; it smacks of a heavy-handed editor, as though the Hollywood execs thought the original idea was too much of a downer for a mass market audience. Things should have ended on Good Friday - “God is dead and we killed him” - that’s how you have a proper tragedy and proper pathos, only then do you have the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate crime.
My only experience of religion now is through the collection of dictums and niceties. Lacan: “God is unconscious”. Derrida: “The only authentic prayer is one that you expect will not be heard”. Little bits of “insight porn” that make me go “ah, that certainly is how things should be! Wouldn’t it be lovely if that were true!” But can I actually believe it’s true? Probably not.
One of my favorite commentators (a lapsed Catholic himself, incidentally) on Lacan once relayed an anecdote:
”You know, I always have been kind of terrified of flying. So one time I was on this plane, terrified, and as we’re about to take off I turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘boy it would really suck if the plane just fell out of the sky and crashed, huh?’ And the guy looked at me like I had lobsters coming out of my ears and he said, ‘what are you crazy? You don’t say things like that! That’ll make it happen!’ I guess that is a pretty common superstitious way of thinking. If you say something, it’s more likely to happen. But I know that actually, the opposite is true. My God is the God of the signifier, so everything is upside down.”
Now that’s the kind of God that I could get on board with believing in! The God of the signifier, the God who turns everything upside down. Ancient commentators, in traditions as diverse as neoplatonism and Buddhism, recognized a problem: if God is perfect, unchanging, atemporal, mereologically simple, then how was it metaphysically possible for him to give rise to this temporal, dynamic, fallen, fractured creation? How did The One give rise to The Many? The orthodox answer is that “He did it out of love”. An alternative answer, whispered in heretical texts and under hushed breaths, is that it may not have been under His control at all. There was simply a “disturbance” in the force - nature indiscernable, source unknown (perhaps it’s simply built into the nature of things?). If I worship anything, it is The Disturbance. (Zizek gave a beautiful example of this - there was a scene in a horror film where a woman dropped dead while singing, but her voice didn’t stop, it just kept ringing out, disembodied. This is only momentarily shocking, something you as the viewer recover from rather quickly. But contrast this with a ballet where the recorded music stops playing and the dancers just keep on dancing, in complete silence - they don’t stop. There’s nothing supernatural about this, it’s perfectly physically realizable. But it’s far more unnerving, it feels like something that you simply shouldn’t be watching. This is The Disturbance, the Freudian death drive.)
I don’t think I’m alone in not being able to take the whole thing seriously. Statistics about declining church attendance have been cited ad nauseam; the few times I did attend mass in the last few years, the crowd was decidedly elderly. The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief. Andrew Tate’s conversion to Islam is an aesthetic-cum-financial move. Contemporary neopaganism is definitely an aesthetic phenomenon first and foremost (not to mention a sexual one - blonde 20-something Russian girls dressed all in white frolicking on the open fields of the steppe is a hell of a weltanschauung).
I’ve probably given the impression that the aesthetic is somehow opposed to the religious - that its purpose is to supplant authentic religious feelings as a synthetic substitute. Unable to believe in the old religions as we once did, we cast about and find that aesthetics is the next best thing, so we convert the church into a gallery and deify the Old Master painting (or, to use a more contemporary example, the TikTok influencer) instead of the body and blood. But nothing could be further from the truth. Authentic aesthetic feelings are, in a sense, the natural product of the religious sentiment. Art has been intimately tied up with magic since its inception, art as quite literally a summoning ritual, a protective charm to ward off bad luck, an offering to the gods. The separation of the priest, the witch doctor, and the poet is a relatively late historical development. Many of the earliest cave paintings were secluded in unreasonably deep parts of the cave, almost impossible to access, the only way to get there was by crawling on your stomach through dark narrow passageways where you could have easily risked injury or death - what would have driven people to do that, what purpose did they think they were fulfilling, why did they perceive a necessary link between art and trauma?
Attempts to give art a rational “purpose”, saying that it “teaches us moral lessons” or “provides entertainment”, all sound so lame because they are so obviously false. The purpose of art is to bring us into communion with The Beyond - that’s it, that’s the long and short of it. To make art is to attempt to do magic, and to be an artist is to be a person who yearns strongly for this Beyond, at least on an unconscious level. If the artist does not ultimately believe in the possibility of transcending this realm, he simply dooms himself to frustration - but the fundamental animating impulse of his actions does not change. The aesthetic is what remains when the vulnerable overt metaphysical claims of religion have been burned away: under threat of irrationality, I am compelled to reject God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, but you cannot intrude on the private inner domain of my sentiment and my desire.
It is here that I would like to begin an examination of the question as to whether the aesthetic feeling too, like the properly religious feeling before it, could one day decline into irrelevance; whether the conditions might one day be such that its last embers are extinguished. There are indications that this may be the case. But it would be unwise to attempt to answer this question without a thorough historiographical and empirical preparation. After all, we are far from the first to raise this question - it was already raised as early as ancient Rome (in a fictional novel admittedly, known as the Satyricon, but, fiction always draws from something real):
Heartened up by this story, I began to draw upon his more comprehensive knowledge as to the ages of the pictures and as to certain of the stories connected with them, upon which I was not clear; and I likewise inquired into the causes of the decadence of the present age, in which the most refined arts had perished, and among them painting, which had not left even the faintest trace of itself behind. “Greed of money,” he replied, “has brought about these unaccountable changes. In the good old times, when virtue was her own reward, the fine arts flourished, and there was the keenest rivalry among men for fear that anything which could be of benefit to future generations should remain long undiscovered. […] And we, sodden with wine and women, cannot even appreciate the arts already practiced, we only criticise the past! We learn only vice, and teach it, too. What has become of logic? of astronomy? Where is the exquisite road to wisdom? Who even goes into a temple to make a vow, that he may achieve eloquence or bathe in the fountain of wisdom? […] Do not hesitate, therefore, at expressing your surprise at the deterioration of painting, since, by all the gods and men alike, a lump of gold is held to be more beautiful than anything ever created by those crazy little Greek fellows, Apelles and Phydias!”
DTulpa
1yr ago
The Pandora Radio option is there mostly for car trips with other people. I'm not really a George Michael or Prince fan and wouldn't acquire their albums. But 80s pop hits are the best pop hits, and they're definitely more palatable to others than, say, Autechre. I don't mind firing and forgetting a playlist there as long as we're having a good time.
I think what made me pull the trigger years ago on setting up my own media server and foregoing streaming was deciding one Thursday that I was going to watch David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' that coming weekend. I saw it on Prime, noted its availability, played a little bit just to have it at the top of the queue, and made the plan. Friday night rolls around and it's gone; 'Unavailable in your region'.
15 minutes may seem like a lot to some folks these days. But that's all the time it took to download a blu-ray rip, fire it away, and put this nonsense behind me.
2rafa
1yr ago
Many of them know much more about what their kids do on Friday afternoons after school than they did in the 70s or even 90s, though.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
British healthcare is not run excellently: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
https://unherd.com/2020/09/lets-be-honest-the-nhs-is-awful/
https://www.themotte.org/post/829/friday-fun-thread-for-january-12/178889?context=8#context
If the country was governed well, everything would improve, health included. There are ways to do more with less. They could've managed HS2 properly for one thing. And when was the bureaucracy replaced?
FarNearEverywhere
1yr ago
I'm sure there's a doctor out there somewhere immediately jumping to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery for so-called trans kids, but I think that deviates from what even most trans activists say is the ideal course of treatment for minors.
I see you are fortunately ignorant of Dr Yeet The Teets:
Her feeds often fill with photos tagged #NipRevealFriday, highlighting patients like Michael whose bandages were just removed. On her office windowsill sits a framed nameplate with one of her best-known catchphrases on TikTok: “Yeet the Teet,” slang for removing breasts.
Dr. Gallagher said she performed top surgeries on about 40 patients a month, and roughly one or two of them are under 18. Younger patients are usually at least 15, though she has operated on one 13-year-old and one 14-year-old, she said, both of whom had extreme distress about their chests.
The surgeon said that most of her patients, teenagers and adults alike, found her on TikTok. Her online presence has drawn sharp criticism from right-wing media, as well as from some parents and doctors who say she uses the platform to market to children.
A countrywoman of my own, it seems, so I apologise on behalf of my nation that she decided the quickest way to make a buck was move to the USA and do vanity plastic surgery.
Gaashk
1yr ago
They both seem to be ranked somewhere below Pi Day, where at least people bring pies into schools, and way below Cinco de Mayo, where people not only consume taco and margaritas, but also play music and make decorations.
It's probably because they're such BS holidays that they weren't transferred to Monday or Friday. A real federal holiday would have been.
sliders1234
1yr ago
The Christians took over many pagan Holidays. Here’s a quick google summary. https://parkervillas.com/pagan-holidays-adopted-by-christianity/
Every upstart religion tries to conquor the old religion and that means incorporating the old Holidays so the plebs get their celebrations. This isn’t some accident we picked Easter it was bound to happen at some point. More a declaration of war.
If we all become trans religion then Good Friday is going under the knife day and Easter Sunday is rising a women.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1yr ago
There has been some discussion (1 2) of how the lawsuit recently lost/settled by the US's National Association of Realtors may affect real-estate transactions in that country. But what about the rest of the world? It would be nice if some of the goshdarned furriner varmints that frequent this forum could relate their own experiences with buyer's-agent-free real-estate transactions, so that we uncultured USAians know what to expect in the coming years. For example, are these articles from Britain (1 2) and Australia (1 2) accurate?
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
If you’re posting Good Friday music, why not the reproaches? https://youtube.com/watch?v=-i1VMXEMPzM&pp=ygUfR29vZCBmcmlkYXkgcmVwcm9hY2hlcyB2aWN0b3JpYQ%3D%3D
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1yr ago
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
On the archaic social technology of Good Friday
Today is Good Friday, a Christian holiday that commemorates the worst Friday ever. In a couple days, through a beautiful deus ex machina humanitas, the worst Friday becomes the best Friday. What significance did this event have in Christian Western history?
There’s an old European myth about a young prince facing punishment for misbehavior. When the boy prince committed an infraction, his tutor would discipline him. But the tutor would be disgracing the majesty of the royal seat by flogging a future king, himself only a lowly tutor. How then did he discipline the heir apparent? He would take the boy’s best friend, and in the presence of the heir he would whip the friend for the royal’s crime. Seeing his own deserved punishment transferred onto his beloved friend (the “whipping boy”), the innocent friend a substitute for his own transgression, the heir would be overwhelmed with guilt, pity, and shame. The event would change the heir’s conduct even more than if he were the one whipped. And there is more benefit to this exchange: the heir learns to identify the pain of another as occurring because of his own misconduct, seeing that his conduct affects the whole kingdom while increasing his capacity for empathy — important wisdom for a man to have.
Compare this myth to one of the oldest writings on Good Friday we have:
But when our wickedness had reached its height, and it had been clearly shown that its reward, punishment and death was impending over us; and when the time had come which God had before appointed for manifesting His own compassion and power, how the love of God through exceeding care for men did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us, but showed great long-suffering, and bore with us, He Himself took on Him the burden of our iniquities, He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy One for transgressors, the blameless One for the wicked, the righteous One for the unrighteous, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for those who are mortal. For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable process! O benefits surpassing all expectation! That the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors! (Epistle to Diognetus, 150AD)
We see that our princely myth and the Crucifixion share a similar emotional dimension. The Christian believes that “Christ bore our sins on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness — through his wounds we have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24). This doesn’t just play out on Good Friday, though. It’s an event that recurs continually in the heart of the believer. It doesn’t work intellectually, but emotionally. Consider: were you to tell a troublesome heir in our princely myth that his crime deserves whipping, he would reply “yeah, so?” If you were to tell him that someone, somewhere, at some point in history was whipped for that very crime, he would reply “uh, okay?” But if you were to take his beloved and best friend, an innocent boy, and show him the consequence of his crime by whipping him in front of him, then the significance of the crime would be apparent to our heir, and then he would repent and change.
That is close to the operation at play on Good Friday. But in the Christian story, it’s not the friend who is punished for the prince, but the prince of heaven who is punished for his friend. It’s not the tutor who administers the punishment, it is the tutor who is punished, tortured by a crowd of sinners similar to his lowly friend. It’s not the dignity of the graceful prince that is safe, it is the grace of the prince that saves the sinner. And it’s not the honor of a future king that causes this process, but the compassion of a King whose son is given over to torment, so that the goodness and honor of God could be beheld by sinners.
As the central event of the Christian religion, this is the lense through which the West understood their moral concerns. And that’s pretty interesting, because their ideas are so distant from our secular beliefs now:
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There is a serious, perfect moral standard that all must follow. The moral standard is objective, existing since the beginning of time. The failure to follow it deserves punishment, which Christ pays out of mercy.
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Corporal punishment is a valid way to inflict punishment on malefactors.
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A punishment may be deserved and yet withheld out of mercy or clemency. (Is “mercy” even a thing anymore? There doesn’t seem an interest in mercy for the contrite for social infractions.)
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Humans are not born perfect, they require serious intervention to behave morality. This intervention was first moral law, and then a dramatic intercession by the Son of God. Noble savage et al conflicts with this idea. As does the equality of cultures. This cannot be reconciled.
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Drama is used for a moral purpose. The crucifixion is intrinsically dramatic and the drama effects moral change. Our dramas no longer serve that purpose.
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Friendship, love and mercy are the primary modes of morality, in fact required to understand the Cross (and so the Eucharist, and thus to be moral). It seems like the focus on morality has since morphed into “obeying peer pressure”, and a false “loving everyone equally” which doesn’t entail love as a feeling (but more an “equalizing” absence of love for one’s own group.)
As an aside, there is great music that captures the dramatic-emotional sense of the crucifixion. From Bach: “your grave and headstone shall, for the anxious conscience, be a comfortable pillow and resting place for the soul”. From Bach again: “Behold the bridegroom! Behold his patience. Look at our guilt.” And from the Syrian Fairuz: “as at the cross she bewailed what was done, to his heart hers was so atuned, both were pierced when they pierced the One.”
Felagund
1yr ago
If it's a great post, and you want the chance of an AAQC (there's a monthly roundup of the best posts) for this month, well, you should post it before the end of the month. Thursday/Friday is plenty of time for people to comment on it; I'd mostly only consider delaying if it's Sunday, or maybe Saturday.
Also, cool username.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1yr ago
There are new top level posts made in the thread throughout the week. A new thread goes up on Monday so if you post it now we’ll have all of Friday/Saturday/Sunday to discuss it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Nah, you can put it here whenever. Monday is just when the thread gets refreshed. A lot of the engagement happens on Friday/Saturday as people check in from the Fun Thread.
Felagund
1yr ago
I assume this would better for the separate threads from Sunday or Friday.
Do you remember what belief?
I didn't do any freaking out. I think people who are still worried about it are literally insane.
People don't put mom in a home because they have too much money, they put mom in a home because living with a full grown adult that needs to be carried to the bathroom and fed 3 meals a day and taken care of, driven to all health appointments, administered drugs, entertained and bathed and who is getting worse over time is 2 full time jobs.
If you're working or raising kids you literally can't do it.
It wasn't with the opposite valence but rather in a goofy thread about bats vs knives about a month ago. The use of the word "retard" probably didn't help, but the part about not being able to vote was also quoted by the mod giving the person a warning.
And I'd say that probably should be a warnable or banable thing to say. Saying a group of people is so stupid that their right to vote should be taken away is a textbook case of "boo outgroup".
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