domain:moultano.wordpress.com
JarJarJedi
1d ago
The whole point is to "hate the world" and constantly seek to prepare for the afterlife.
I don't think this is what Christian faith is about (obligatory note: I am not a Christian and have no authority to speak for them). There are some people in it that do that, but it's in no way an universal requirement, at least to my extent of observing many Christians.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
1d ago
My conversion therapy was done with a priest
Yeah, they're very powerful. Once you hear their message- powerful enough to be condensed into a single word- all of a sudden your clothes (and banners, and even your cars on occasion) change color and you're instantly batting for the other team.
In all seriousness, I have no idea how you'd teach a man more interested in beards and shoulders to love tits and ass instead. I get that that maybe isn't the primary driver, but then again, if it was comprehensible the mechanism of action would be more well-known to the point you'd have more people casually attempting it. Then again, I wouldn't expect people to shout such a conversion from the rooftops, so...
it stands to reason someone, somewhere, can turn them straight
But that would require a bunch of tomboys and/or cougars willing to debase themselves (for the most unattractive men available, given a traditional female standpoint) in a professional capacity, and those are in short enough supply already.
but also not something that has a justification
Do anti-blasphemy laws help keep people in the faith?
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I'm increasingly skeptical about this whole "lying to yourself" business. The reason is, we lie to ourselves in so many ways. Sometimes because we are ignorant (and the reality being so vast, most people are ignorant in a real lot of subjects), sometimes because we are lazy, sometimes because it's too hard to face the unadorned truth, sometimes because the truth would be detrimental to what we want to achieve, or maybe because it's more profitable to believe something other than the truth. Is it really that huge a deal doing it one more or less time, or this is just an inflated ego speaking - "they may have fooled those idiots, but they are never fooling ME!". And then he goes and buys stuff and drinks stuff and eats stuff because the TV told him so (one of the ways, not a personal observation).
Really, if you think about it for a while, there's a lot of self-fooling involved, and probably necessary, for normal life. True, self-fooling about "is there a God and what does he want from me?" may be a bit bigger deal than self-fooling about "is eating this fast food meal really good for me?" but is the difference in kind or merely in degree?
I do not say it's necessarily always good to be fooled. I'm just saying maybe sometimes it's not that bad, if the beneficial outcome is worth it. And also maybe when people say "I just can't let myself be fooled" it's something else than the insatiable lust for truth is speaking. Because they must know they are letting themselves be fooled already in so many ways - at least if they give themselves a time to think about it. I can imagine a person that goes radical "no fooling ever, for any reason, I'll always get to the ultimate absolute truth in every matter" and lives a life like that - but that would not be what one calls a normal life, and would likely be very unpleasant to be both in and around it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Will it harm you to believe in an ancient Levantine civilization that spread across the Americas without leaving behind any archeological or anthropological traces? No, not in itself. Nor would believing that the Archangel Gabriel dictated the Quran to an illiterate 7th century Arab goatherd. Nor would believing that the sun revolves around the Earth.
For me, anyway, epistemic hygiene is pretty close to my terminal value. Truth is the highest virtue. Without truth, no other principles are meaningful. Yes, I know, no one can ever know the truth, we're all fumbling towards the closest approximation of the truth we can perceive, but you should be striving towards it, not averting your eyes from it. You and @2rafa are basically saying "Truth is less important than other things, like living in a nice community with people who make life pleasant even if they believe silly things."
I cannot adequately express how strongly I disagree with that.
I could live in that community. I could agree to follow their rules. I could tolerate their silly beliefs. I could not lie about what I believe. (I mean, if my life depended on it, I guess I would pretend. I'd feel dirty about it, and murderously resentful.)
I understand why some people choose to believe things that are beneficial to them, or at least go through the motions of believing and studiously avoid looking behind the curtain. But I can't do it and I kind of look down on people who do, to be honest.
To take this slightly out of the religious context: I live in a very blue bubble and most of my friends and family are very woke. Despite being pretty liberal compared to the average Mottizen, I'm basically a dissident now. I have never lied about what I believe, but I do frequently stay silent when certain topics come up, because it's not worth the fight. Recently, even my silence has occasionally been noted and my inability to make convincing sounds of affirmation is probably going to lose me some friends.
I resent this, and I don't see it as being a lot different than pretending to believe in the Angel Moroni and Joseph Smith's golden tablets, if my social relationships depended on pretending to take them seriously.
On the subject of "Believing things that are convenient, or at least pretending to believe them because they are pro-social," I'm going to bring up a more pertinent example for you. I have made the point before that if HBD is true, it's going to be a very hard sell to, for example, black people, that they should just accept their lot in life (specifically, the lot that white supremacists would like to assign to them). I got downvoted and scolded for that on the mistaken assumption that I was advocating the Noble Lie, that we should pretend HBD isn't true even if it is. But that is never what I said. What I did say is that I can sympathize with people who are unwilling to believe something that might be true but which has brutal implications for them and their loved ones, and that whatever social contract we negotiate based on that is going to have to take that into account. But other people would absolutely embrace the Noble Lie. Indeed, I personally think a lot of liberals have–on HBD issues, on trans issues, on immigration–in other words, they know the truth but pretend not to, and will actively attack those who speak it. This is, from their perspective, pro-social. You, I am pretty sure, would disagree. But in the realm of religious beliefs, the Noble Lie is what you are advocating. "Even if Joseph Smith never discovered any golden tablets and the Lammanites didn't exist, pretending to believe it gives me access to a great community." Well, okay then. I understand why you would make that decision. But I don't respect it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Being an atheist doesn't make you infertile, so that's a questionable question in the first place. I really doubt that that's the tradeoff he's facing, if it is, I'd recommend getting a mail order bride or becoming a sperm donor.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though.
I guess my question is, why are they resisting this? The hardest part of making a successful social media site is building the userbase. The current Bluesky userbase consists almost entirely of people who left Twitter because it wasn’t an ideological monoculture. Owning a site with an annoying userbase is better than owning a site with no userbase.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I'm happy for your dog :)
At risk of circle jerking also fully agree LOL
I have a strong preference towards intelligent dogs but I couldn't own a Collie, Blue Heeler, or the other mega energy smart ones. It does just feel like you're committing it to a life of under-stimulation and frustration.
By contrast, looking at the happy, stable, prosperous, fecund, clean, healthy and attractive Mormon community and concluding that it would be a smart move to join them is precisely the opposite philosophical choice, the equivalent of taking up the hard work of, say, going to the gym or forcing yourself onto 20 first dates in a year because you know the outcome of a healthier body or an eventual happy marriage and family are things that will fulfil you more than your present existence.
That is a poor analogy. As far as I'm aware, while hitting the gym or going on first dates are difficult and uncomfortable, they do not necessarily include lying to yourself. Sure, maybe it might be instrumentally helpful to overestimate the gains, or project self-confidence you lack. If you're getting 20 first dates at all, you likely don't need that.
Friends, family and community do not necessarily require lies either. Though it might be occasionally helpful to claim you believe your team will win or that the casserole was delicious.
Even wireheading doesn't necessitate lying either. It well might in practice, but I'm sure there are people who would enter of their own volition and without delusion regarding the implications or consequences of their actions.
That is not to disagree completely. I won’t speak for @Hoffmeister25, but I think it would be hard for me, or most of us here, to truly convincingly become Mormons in the religious sense. There are some very smart born Mormons here who have indeed, despite being part of this largely (post-)rationalist and atheist community, resisted the urge to look behind the curtain, and I respect them for that, but I have looked behind the curtain and read the catastrophically persuasive takedown of the entire structural basis for the faith written by that one guy and widely shared online and I think I would find it hard to overcome that.
As much as I would like to claim otherwise, being smart, thoughtful and a fan of the tenets of rationality isn't a guarantee that you'll succeed at the process. It doesn't even guarantee you'll be happier. Even from a values perspective, many people just don't care about truth and internal-coherence as much as I do. There is no panacea for delusion and bad decisions, just actions and traits that make succumbing to them less likely.
But does it matter? Hundreds of generations of extremely intelligent people lived and died as true believers of the absolute sort, could not even conceive of an atheism in the way we do today. Hoff’s children will be believers, will (or had least may) resist looking behind the curtain they have known their whole lives, and so at ‘worst’ he is making a sacrifice for their happy and prosocial future.
It matters to me. That is not the same as me saying it should matter to him, or you. For what it's worth, I have plenty of respect for all the atheists who came before, who lived in a time of much greater ignorance, who still figured out the truth without the same tools at hand.
But, as I've replied to Hoff:
Unfortunately, as your nod to your future status as paterfamilias suggests, you're not just selling your soul. You're selling those of your future children.
That? Beyond the pale for me. I think religion is bad enough as is, but it's even harder to shake off when it's drilled into you from birth, and just about all of your social status and community hinges on staying within its framework. My understanding is that while Mormons aren't as hard on apostates as, for example, Muslims beheading heathens, it's still social death to deconvert. If your children wanted to leave, they'd likely lose you. And then you'd face the choice of being with them, or keeping your own standing.
Every incentive, from the Young Single Adults ward to the social pressure against apostasy, is optimized to keep people within the fold. From a systems-design perspective, it's a very neat trick.
By raising children in this environment, you are choosing to place them in a system where leaving the faith often means losing their entire social world, and potentially their family. You are trading their future intellectual autonomy for their present (and likely future) social stability and happiness. This might even be a good trade. But it is a trade you are making on their behalf.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
By raising children in this environment, you are choosing to place them in a system where leaving the faith often means losing their entire social world, and potentially their family.
My concern is that the price is higher than it appears, and that the bill will be paid not just by you, but by the family you hope to build.
But it very likely means he's having a family and children. The LDS attorneys I know are out-reproducing the non-LDS ones by a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1 (actually more given all the ones I know with zero children, such as myself). At what cost epistemic hygiene if it means no children?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
I think what's most fascinating about Blusky, is it's the only case I know of where the lefties were exiled (well, self exiled) from a supposedly "neutral" platform. Every other time it ever happened, it was because the TOS or the Trust & Safety teams came down like a brick of shit on their right wing political opposition. This caused two things. When the people who got banned went to voat.co or gab or where ever, it concentrated things and made them look even crazier than they seemed before, making the right as a whole look kind of unhinged. The second thing it did was further entrench leftism as the "default". It's just being a good persontm.
Twitter going the opposite direction has been seismic in pushing back against both. The overton window has expanded to include more rightwing thoughts, and now the left is over on Blusky acting completely unhinged.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think it’s an artifact of social media and the attention economy. The only real way to stand out in the vast sea of ordinary people posting about your topic is to be as noisy and obnoxious and name-calling as you can get away with. If Trump is just wrong you get nothing— no likes, no shares, no comments, you are not going to be seen by many people. If Trump is an evil narcissistic authoritarian Christian nationalist, you get seen. Short form doesn’t help things, because it doesn’t allow for nuanced writing, but short content displayed chronologically wouldn’t push people to that degree because doing so would not make more people see the post. It’s like all the people posting are being manipulated into being shock jocks just to be noticed and so all of them eventually realize that being shocking and mean is the best way to win, and being deleted is actually a good thing because you are then the kind of poster not afraid to tell it like it is.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
You're ignoring the fact that, according to Neilsen, about 20% of people in the US rely on OTA TV to receive local stations, myself included, and that number is in excess of 30% in some markets. This is up from 2008, when only 15% of households relied on antenna broadcasts. In 2008 on-demand and internet-based video services didn't really exist, and cable-television was bigger. Also in 2008, we were freeing up a part of the spectrum by making TV stations switch to digital transmission. This theoretically affected even fewer households, as nothing needed to be done unless your TV was several years old, but the changeover was delayed by six months, and the change was only accomplished by the government handing out coupons for free converter boxes. Telling 20% of the country that they have to pay for television or give it up is a nonstarter.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
But there's one simple phrase that makes me doubt that "causing mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation" is simply as easy as "practicing even rudimentary opsec" — and that's "parallel construction."
There are parts of the Mangione story that I doubt for this reason.
I see parallel construction on a semi-regular basis in mundane drug stops. Boy, it's remarkably convenient that a local cop happened to stop this particular 18-wheeler for a traffic violation, had a drug dog ready and got a positive alert, and immediately measured the inside length of the trailer that revealed the hidden compartment in the front of the fully-loaded trailer. Incredible odds on that one.
So there is zero question in my mind it's happening on a much larger basis, and the only question is just how much of it is going on.
It also makes it quite remarkable that the person who planted the pipe bombs on Jan 5 has never been caught. So remarkable that it some might say it glows.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Everyone is at liberty to value truth and internal coherence as much as they care to, or not at all.
At the end of the day, the cost-benefit analysis is your own. I can only lay out the reasons I faced what seems like a very similar choice, down to the church and cutesy missionary girls ambushing me on a bridge back from work, and still turned them down.
The costs are honestly not awful, at least the material ones. Giving up drinking? That's just plain healthy for you. Coffee and tea? Stupid to rule out really, but not that big a deal. 10% of your money? It also buys you a strong social-safety net.
My last driving instructor was a Mormon. Very pleasant person, hardworking, open-minded and patient with my foibles. I was a bit concerned when I learned that he didn't believe in health or home insurance, trusting the church would have his back, but that seems to work out for him. Honestly, Mormons seem decent enough, even if I sincerely believe they're crazy, more so for believing in a religion that is even more of an obvious fraud than the rest. You could do much worse by becoming a Scientologist or joining the Nation of Islam.
You’ve both expressed horror and consternation at the thought that at some point I might actually convince myself that it’s true. As if this would be some catastrophic loss for me. But I honestly have to ask both of you: why would this be bad? What actual bad effects would that have on my life? I wouldn’t get to win any more arguments against sincerely-believing Christians/Mormons? Okay, what am I actually getting out of participating in those arguments now? I’ll have a flawed/incomplete model of the cosmos? Okay, how is that actually going to negatively impact my actions? Like, I agree that epistemic hygiene is a virtue, and that reducing cognitive dissonance is good, but clearly these things are not the only terminal values a person can have. What other concerns do you actually have about this decision? Do you just find it yucky? What would you have me do instead?
No, really, that's about it. I wouldn't do what you're doing precisely because I value epistemic hygiene that strongly. I am a big fan of having true beliefs about the world, as true as I can make them as imperfect, computationally bounded entity in an uncertain world. Truth doesn't have to comfortable, and it often isn't. It is hardly the only thing I value myself, but the primary reason I see little appeal in Mormonism or any other religion is because they're false.
That's enough for me.
I suppose it is easier if you're on the fence, epistemically speaking. I have no idea how you got there, and honestly, there's no point talking about it. We know how debates about religion end on the margin. As I've said, you could do worse. You're selling your soul for a relatively low price, and getting quite a lot for it.
Your beliefs are the map by which you navigate the territory of reality. Willfully accepting a major inaccuracy in one part of the map, even a part that seems purely metaphysical, creates a kind of intellectual vulnerability. It sets a precedent that comfort, community, or spiritual fulfillment can override the process of evidence-based reasoning. The problem is not that believing ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America will cause you to miscalculate your taxes. The problem is that it requires you to build and maintain a cognitive partition, a special zone where different rules of evidence apply. Over time, it becomes very difficult to keep that partition perfectly sealed. It creates a pressure to harmonize your other beliefs with the core tenets you've accepted, which can lead to further distortions down the line.
You might not win arguments against Christians anymore, which you correctly identify as a low-stakes loss. But you might be asked to make decisions about your children's education, about medical care, or about political issues based on principles derived from a flawed foundation. A worldview is not a collection of independent propositions; it is an interconnected system. Introducing a known falsehood is like introducing a single line of buggy code into a complex operating system. It might not cause a crash today, but you have created a systemic instability that may manifest in unexpected ways later.
Unfortunately, as your nod to your future status as paterfamilias suggests, you're not just selling your soul. You're selling those of your future children.
That? Beyond the pale for me. I think religion is bad enough as is, but it's even harder to shake off when it's drilled into you from birth, and just about all of your social status and community hinges on staying within its framework. My understanding is that while Mormons aren't as hard on apostates as, for example, Muslims beheading heathens, it's still social death to deconvert. If your children wanted to leave, they'd likely lose you. And then you'd face the choice of being with them, or keeping your own standing.
Every incentive, from the Young Single Adults ward to the social pressure against apostasy, is optimized to keep people within the fold. From a systems-design perspective, it's a very neat trick.
By raising children in this environment, you are choosing to place them in a system where leaving the faith often means losing their entire social world, and potentially their family. You are trading their future intellectual autonomy for their present (and likely future) social stability and happiness. This might even be a good trade. But it is a trade you are making on their behalf.
What would I have you do instead? The honest answer is that the alternative is much harder. It involves the difficult, atomized work of building a community from scratch, of navigating a dating market full of misaligned incentives, and of finding meaning without a prefabricated script. It offers no guarantees. It is easy for me to sit here and champion the virtues of a difficult and uncertain path that I have chosen.
So I cannot tell you that your decision is wrong according to your own values. I can only report that, from my perspective, you are accepting a deal that I would have to refuse. That I recently refused. You are trading a commitment to accuracy for a suite of tangible and powerful social benefits. You may even be correct that, for the average human, this is a utility-maximizing strategy. My concern is that the price is higher than it appears, and that the bill will be paid not just by you, but by the family you hope to build.
Good luck. I genuinely respect that you are going into this with a level of self-awareness that is uncommon. I hope the trade-offs prove to be worth it for you.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
As I’ll continue to say, if Joe exotic can turn men gay, it stands to reason someone, somewhere, can turn them straight. This amounts to viewpoint discrimination in therapy, which is mostly garbage anyways.
My conversion therapy was done with a priest, and featured mildly awkward talk therapy and homework exercises that were psychological in nature. There’s no reason a therapist couldn’t have done it but there’s also no reason it needed a therapist(as indeed, I didn’t use). Restricting it to a different set of practitioners seems both small potatoes but also not something that has a justification.
Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.
The best time for Bluesky to put its foot down and set the tone was a few months after the platform received the influx last Summer. Enough time for the new users to create networks, get situated, but with enough anti-X relevancy that they can soften the reaction. Make a great big point of it, do the waffle bit, and get the 'we only moderate content on our site' policy riots over with.
Bluesky has been an ideological monoculture for as long as I've paid attention to it. Whenever I endeavor a visit, the main feed advertises this culture as the heart, blood, and soul of the site. There's a smaller, but significant slice of the main feed that is cool friggen' astronomy photos from reddit, but mostly it's Twitter resistance posting and its professional pundit version from anti-Elon diaspora. I believe the CEO when she says she doesn't like it, but the non-activist left-liberal tech networks -- which I assume she likes -- exist in quiet corners.
Does Bluesky ever plan to make money, or is it Jack Dorsey's pet project and it never needs to? There is close to zero demand for a truly decentralized social network, and this preference is no more apparent than in the stereotypical Bluesky user.
It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?
I'd argue that the heterodox platform is called X. On the platform you can find unrepentant racists of all stripes, from the deranged ramblings of black nationalist Hoteps to teenage frogposters in Malaysia. You can find content from US representatives like AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene, or you can hear from award winning economists, rocket scientists, CEOs, and lawyers.
The platform may not cater to heterodox political culture, but that's because few people demand or prefer one. The Motte encourages a heterodox political culture, but it can't conjure one.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead.
How does that make sense? Bluesky is refusing to ban this person from the platform, therefore I'm moving to a distributed platform where it's not even possible to ban someone?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Werner von Braun was Prussian, though.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
I barely learned anything reading the article.
Better article with copious screenshots
Jerry Chen: (bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??
Jay Graber: Too real. We're going to try to fix this. Social media doesn't have to be this way.
Random person: have y'all banned Jesse Singal yet or
Jay Graber: WAFFLES
I've had similar thoughts about the sorts of opsec blunders reported in cases like this. (I'm reminded of /u/KulakRevolt's Substack piece on Mangione's many mistakes and how to avoid them.) And like some here note, I find it understandable that these men make such trivially-avoided mistakes, given that we aren't talking about the most rational, sober-minded people here.
But there's one simple phrase that makes me doubt that "causing mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation" is simply as easy as "practicing even rudimentary opsec" — and that's "parallel construction."
Sure, in this, or any other particular case, the media narrative we're given for how the cops found them is probably true, and they probably did make the blunders described (again, not sane, rational sorts). But if "a lone man with a grudge against the world" was instead caught through some Three-Letter Agency's massive Fourth-Amendment-violating secret domestic surveillance program, that's not what we'd be told. No, we'll be given an alternative narrative of how this individual was found through perfectly-legal police methods, which would probably look something like, well, what we see in news reports in cases like this.
So, maybe your initial "try anonymously mass-shooting and you won't stay anonymous for long" position might still be true after all, just not for the same reason.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
The whole point is to "hate the world"
This sounds more like Gnosticism than Christianity.
So they should also be old enough to buy smokes, weed and vodka, own guns, drive cars, have full control over their finances, shoot porn, vote, enlist, gamble in Vegas, make medical decisions without their parent's consent (think transgender surgeries), supply and use sperm banks, hold political office, perform for Epstein?
In order:
They already do, they already do, this was fine in 1960 so why isn't it fine now?, they're nearly there anyway, what finances?, what else do you think 14 year olds use Snapchat for?, no taxation without representation, if they can pass for 18 they lie about it and we didn't much care in the past, welcome to Counter Strike unboxing video #99999, they already do, when they act as sperm banks they owe child support, this would be worse than the current crop of politicians... how, exactly?, meanwhile, in Rotherham...
Oh yeah, and we already try teenagers "as adults" anyway, especially when they break the above laws, so clearly this is just ageism.
we generally do not bestow rights based on how good you are at beating people up.
Rights are not "bestowed". Men have those rights because they are capable of the organized violence required to force their recognition. Every one was fought for.
TK-421
1d ago
The FCC, Trump, and Healing a Divided Nation Through Handouts
Here is the FCC Broadcast License for WCBS in New York. Broadcast Licenses were talked around a great deal during the Jimmy Kimmel situation but they weren't not talked about very much. This eventually became confusing for me. A lot of the rhetoric implied, and it makes intuitive sense, that removing a station's broadcast license is equivalent to stopping them from displaying their content. You had a license to speak, now you don't, so you don't get to speak.
But what actually happens when a broadcast license is revoked?
The answer eventually leads one to discover a fine distinction: the license permits the station to broadcast according to its specifications but that doesn't mean it's the only way the station has to broadcast. The license is covering the station as transmitter not the station as speaker. The license is really about spectrum allocation, not content. If WCBS loses their license there's no reason the station has to shut down and it's very likely that no one would even notice.
Broadcast stations have certain rights to be carried by distributors like a cable company or YouTube TV. Every 3 years they can chose to be either must-carry or retransmission: Must-carry means that all distributors must include the channel's content in their offerings but the broadcaster isn't allowed to be paid for it. This is common with public television channels or smaller market broadcasters. Retransmission is for broadcasters who have a product that distributors actually want. Local stations in big markets like WCBS-NY. This means distributors have to negotiate a contract with the broadcaster to carry the channel.
This is where we start to enter ground truth: money. Retransmission fees are a major source of revenue for these over the air (OTA) broadcasters. How much of their revenue? This is surprisingly hard to answer because all contracts in this distribution network make the numbers private. Redacted during lawsuits private. For a rough estimate, think 40-55% of their revenue.
There is one more technical aspect that it's important to understand: the distributors do not use the OTA broadcast signal for the retransmission. The OTA studios are sending their signal to the distributors digitally. At the technical level there is no difference for the distributor between an OTA channel and a cable one.
But there's a big difference in how much the distributor pays. Lots of variation but retransmission of a local channel is about 2-3x the cost of a non-sports or major cable channel. The delta is driven by two things: sports and regulatory arbitrage. Take out sports and local channels are essentially a low tier cable channel.
The details of the sports contracts are also proprietary but there are almost certainly reach clauses that a network like Fox would be in breach of if, for example, all of their stations simultaneously lost their FCC broadcast licenses. This would cause a healthy reshuffling across the entire media distribution system.
How
The FCC has the power to change or revoke licenses at any time for, among other reasons, "...if in the judgment of the Commission such action will promote the public interest, convenience, and necessity, or the provisions of this chapter or of any treaty ratified by the United States will be more fully complied with". The FCC currently has enough commissioners to form a quorum once the government reopens.
The public interest / good is a standard used throughout FCC regulations. It is also not a statutorily defined standard, it is meant to be interpreted by the Commission. The public good for allocating the spectrum has included technical and other non-content related considerations. The spectrum is a public good and there may be a better use for it even if there's nothing at all objectionable about how you're using it.
Which is how the FCC Commission will phrase it. And we know it is true because in 2017 an auction of OTA broadcaster frequencies brought in around 19 billion. Very imprecise but a rough value of auctioning off the spectrum used by current license holders would be the 25-50 billion range. This is a valuable natural resource and economically we are not being good stewards of it given technological advances.
Who Gets What
Trump: 25-50 billion, Drains The Swamp.
Democrats: No more fear of government censorship. Maybe kick some of the auction money their way.
Humble Citizens: lower cable bills, technological marvels from higher value spectrum uses, better access to the sports they desperately crave.
Economy: Redistribution of long standing revenue flows, creative destruction.
The best part - no legislative change necessary. The FCC can do this the moment they convene again following the shutdown using their existing statutory authority. The Administrative State's tools shall dismantle the Administrative State's house.
It's interesting, my earliest Santa memories were that St Nicholas was a real person, that we give gifts at Christmas because of his generous example, and that many people (including my Grandparents) liked to pretend to give gifts from St Nicholas (aka Santa Claus). But I don't remember ever spilling the beans to any other kids even accidentally.
Today my only regret is not learning about the Santa legend that he punched out a heretic (often Arius himself) at the Council of Nicaea earlier.
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