domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
PokerPirate
3hr ago
That's certainly a common right-wing interpretation of liberation theology. And there's relevant critiques of liberation theology that it only became popular due to Soviet covert influence. But the major theologians/leaders are all card-carrying Catholics that buy into all of Catholic spirituality.
Sorry, I don't know any text versions of the songs for reading :( My guess is that you would still find it to be heavily Marxist, but that doesn't mean the people singing don't literally believe in the miracles they're singing about.
Almost all regulatory complexity is the result of closing loopholes lawyers found in earlier, simpler regulation. Congratulations to them, because all the legal specialists in each regulatory area will be poring over any new, ‘simplified’ regulation with the religious fervour of a leading Talmudic scholar to find out exactly what is implicitly allowed until enough bad news comes out that the current regime is restored.
Take two of the regulatory and legal standards that libertarians hate most - the definition of tax evasion and the definition of wire fraud. Detractors are completely correct that both are extremely vague (the former is essentially ‘anything that violates the spirit of paying your fair share of taxes’ and the second is ‘lying about anything that might lead to any gains for yourself through any medium of communication’), but their vagueness is largely organic and downstream from the fact that any stricter standards would make the enforcement of the rules pointless because any intelligent lawyer or other actor could rules-lawyer their way out of it.
Any standard of tax evasion or anti-bribery law or anti-corruption enforcement regime that does not effectively rely on ‘the spirit of the law’ (a thousand year old standard in common law anyway) is doomed to fail. This was the big tax revolution for rich people in the 90s, by the way. All those articles about how ‘despite top tax rates being 70/80/90% in the 1960s, rich people actually didn’t pay very much tax at all’ are true. What changed tax from something nobody smart paid to something most rich people pay at least some of (even if you disagree with how much) was an IRS (and other national tax agencies) that had the power to go after people solely for spirit of the law type violations.
FtttG
3hr ago
Relevant: https://youtube.com/watch?v=isafYIg0o3c?si=Ag1feI3cQNjZ8ZQM
I don't know how good AI is at generating a video of a woman pissing into her own mouth but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
urquan
I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness.
4hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
Ok, you activated an "urquan has too many theological opinions for his own good" moment, but I remember a research project I did for my historiography class in college on Anglicanism in America that gave me a decent answer to this question.
My original question was asking about how American Anglicans on the eve of the Revolution dealt with the idea of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of their Church: the British Monarch. Perhaps this was a silly question to ask, but I seriously wondered how you could deal with the cognitive dissonance of belonging to a church whose governor -- not "head", that's what Henry VIII called himself before someone told Elizabeth that calling yourself "head of the Church" sounds like usurping Jesus Christ -- was the very King you were calling a tyrant. I was aware that many of the Founding Fathers were Anglicans, so this seemed like a fruitful area of study.
I focused my research on Anglicans in Virginia (where several of the Anglican Founders were from) in the 1700s, to narrow in on that question.
And I found that, not only was the exact question "how did the Anglican Founders deal with the cognitive dissonance of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of the Church of England" had never been posed in the historical community, but that actually the subject of intense debate among scholars was the much more alarming question, Did Anglicans in Virginia actually care about their religion at all?
I recall one researcher, who wrote an entire monograph about a specific Anglican lady who had a Bible and a journal where she wrote devotional texts about God. And the researcher treated this like she'd found the Holy Grail -- look, everyone, I found an Anglican woman who seems like she had a heartfelt faith in God! It was a revelation. Stop the presses! We have to rewrite the textbooks! Maybe at least one Anglican in Virginia actually did believe in God!
That underscored to me how serious the rot was in the Anglican Church in America, even back then; it really did seem like Anglicans saw the church as a social club, and took or left portions of their faith as it served their other interests. Actually taking religion seriously just wasn't something in the vocabulary of most Anglicans at the time. That was something for those weird revivalists or those Wesleyans with their method.
Having met some Episcopalians, I really do feel like I can take their approach to faith and just push it back a few hundred years, and get a good sense of the scorn or bewilderment with which their WASP ancestors would have viewed intense religious devotion. Or worse, expelled basing your morals on an unchanging read of the Scriptures instead of just doing what's high-status.
Relevant to the subject of morals, and to the larger topic at hand -- about racism -- many American Anglicans at the time were slaveholders and it was very common for churches to be racially segregated, or for blacks not to be allowed in the church at all. So there's a bit to the Episcopal Church's posture that really is a "we know we were the epicenter of this, we're really sorry."
As far as I was able to discern, in this very limited research project (that included little to no primary source work), the only effect that the American Revolution had on the American Anglican Church was that they changed their name to "The Episcopal Church," to get rid of the whole "Anglo" thing. ("We promise we're good patriots!") Or wait, was it the Protestant Episcopal Church at that time? I think the "Protestant" got nixed at one point because it sounded too much like having a solid theological opinion.
It's also true that a huge number of Loyalists were Anglicans, and so I'm sure if I devoted myself to a more serious investigation of the time period I could find evidence of Anglicans' religious affiliation influencing their views on the American Revolution. Many of these people fled to Canada as it became clear the patriots were winning, so a true telling of the story of Anglicanism in North America (not to be confused with the "Anglican Church in North America", a modern body, that split from Canterbury over gay marriage and is essentially a missionary project of African Anglicans, because as much as Episcopalians like to talk about their tight links to Africa, the Africans think they're apostate for their strong support of SSM) would have to talk about Canada too.
I'm pretty mean to Episcopalians, but really, I guess I'm just as bewildered about them as they would be about me, God bless them.
If you really want to get me started on things that are interesting about Anglicanism, ask me about the Oxford Movement or the "Anglican Continuum." That's where the story becomes fascinating, in both the way that a plane crash and a mathematical equation are fascinating. But you have to find the Anglicans who barely want to be Anglicans before I start getting really interested. (The ACNA people I mentioned above are continuing Anglicans, they're trying to be more Anglican than the Anglicans, and some of them ordain women. Confessional Protestantism in America has had two big waves of schism, once in the 60s-70s over women's ordination and now in the past 10-15 years over gay marriage, and I'm sure at this point all the Catholics and Orthodox in the audience are going "man am I glad we have The Tradition.")
All that to say -- I think Anglicans ~300 years ago had all the seeds of their present situation already planted, in British America more than in Britain. Anglicanism to me has always seemed like the Church of the Compromise rather than a church with a strong set of beliefs, and the American Anglican Church was so eager to compromise with the prevailing winds that they changed their name to obscure their origins. There's an old quip of Oscar Wilde that seems apropos: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do."
In that sense I don't see their collapse into social liberalism as particularly surprising, in the way that I find the descent of mainstream Presbyterianism and Methodism (which, to be sure, was an Anglican revival movement at first, though it's always had a more independent nature in America) surprising, given the history of those churches in firm confession and rigorous devotion. But I'm sure that's another story for another time, one that you're no doubt more well-equipped to tell than I am.
2rafa
4hr ago
30% is nothing; reshoring manufacturing when China has better logistics, transport, infrastructure, training and labor would require much more than 30%.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
4hr ago
Your Fourth Amendment concerns are probably suffering from being somewhere in the same ballpark. Forced on you by overcomplicated jurisprudence.
There exists a series of relatively well-known documentaries of the modern judicial system published in the 1970s, featuring Clint Eastwood.
The first one of these exists specifically to posit an answer to that question.
clo
4hr ago
Practical Guide to Evil.
It doesn't exist in book form (yet) but I need a physical copy of it yesterday. Multiple times I thought I knew where it was going only to have the rug pulled out from me repeatedly, and it easily satisfies the requirement for cool characters doing cool things.
Why should we expect evolution to push for ‘getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible’?
You misunderstand- the thing mothers are failing at is not "getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible" (though admittedly this is more likely to happen given a proper education in these matters), it's "your son dies childless because he was too busy Respecting Women(tm) to ever get successfully laid even once".
In an environment of equality mothers have to look out for their sons' sexual interests (where they enable/encourage them to go from 0 partners to 1) just as much as fathers do for their daughters (and enable/encourage them to go from many partners to 1).
a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit)
They don't have much wealth. Because wages continue to increase quickly, the 30-40 year olds are sending their parents more money each year than their whole anemic pensions, while saving themselves (although what asset classes they can save substantial sums in, is questionable right now.) It's not like the US where e.g. retired UPS workers get pension adjustments over inflation while current workers don't and aren't on track to receive any such benefits. (Also, the Chinese old seem to return to/reside in the country side, living very cheaply and consuming even less than their paltry wealth would suggest, compared to the racket of e.g. US retirement homes.)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4hr ago
New executive order just dropped.
The United States is drastically overregulated. The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand. The situation has become so dire that no one -– likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations, with at least one source estimating hundreds of thousands of such crimes. Many of these regulatory crimes are “strict liability” offenses, meaning that citizens need not have a guilty mental state to be convicted of a crime.
[...]
The purpose of this order is to ease the regulatory burden on everyday Americans and ensure no American is transformed into a criminal for violating a regulation they have no reason to know exists. [...] Criminal enforcement of criminal regulatory offenses is disfavored. [...] Strict liability offenses are 'generally disfavored.' [...] Criminal enforcement of any criminal regulatory offense not identified in the report [...] is strongly discouraged.
[...]
Within 365 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall provide to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a report containing [...] a list of all criminal regulatory offenses enforceable by the agency or the Department of Justice. [...] Following issuance of this order, all future notices of proposed rulemaking (NPRMs) and final rules published in the Federal Register, the violation of which may constitute criminal regulatory offenses, should include a statement identifying that the rule or proposed rule is a criminal regulatory offense and the authorizing statute.
This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.
So a couple of things
- Anyone want to blackpill me on why this is Bad Actually because strict liability regulatory crimes are actually a major load-bearing part of how our legal system works and without it the situation will devolve to anarchy in the streets?
- Did an LLM cowrite this EO? I notice a mixture of em-dashes and double-n-dashes, which is not a pattern I normally see in entirely-human-written text. Not that I can complain about the outcome, if so.
vorpa-glavo
4hr ago
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.
Auctoritas vs. potestas, is pre-Christian (compare Potestas/Kratos the God, supporting dictatorship and advocating for random violence) although Christianity somewhat reenvisioned them. (N.b. further concepts like imperium remeasure the semantic fields in different ways in different thinkers' works.)
Moral authority (earned by correctness, selflessness and hard-earned reputation (dignitas, not yet dignity, but social standing) vs. raw exercising of power. Without moral goodness, power is illegitimate. But moral goodness without power is also lacking - although Socrates condemned to death has the highest authority of all, if it can't work good in the world, it's a tad selfish - like a desert hermit, isolated from society for his own soul compared to those monks' kenosis, who engage with the dirt and grime of humanity and lift it up, however slowly, through holy struggle and love.
A modern systems thinker, applying EA (is this now looked down upon? Well, applying financial metrics and industrial engineering) can improve the lot of thousands instead of spending their time administering aid to individuals, one at a time. To some extent, the traditional Christian image/aesthetic looks down upon this, preferring the Pope to bathe the poor's feet, Navy Devos to teach people to read etc. I at least think overall betterment's important.
I believe Christianity is fairly "aristocratic", believing everyone can be better and flourish (overcoming their sinful urges), but forgiving them for succumbing to this fallen world. (My faith is grounded in gnostic-curious Platonism, though.) The lower classes can rise beyond that station, but if they don't, they still have their own path to God. (N.b. this is not prosperity gospel, rather just... If you don't waste your time on vices and sloth, you can trivially better yourself and the life of those around you, building, learning, teaching etc.)
RenOS
Technology giveth, Sociology taketh
5hr ago
I don't think it's about denial, it's about what the basics of faith are. For a different example, If climate change is conclusively shown to not be real, old-school greens fall apart, new greens keep on chugging on social policies.
ulyssessword
5hr ago
Best case scenario, I manage to scramble and pull together enough other evidence to somehow, someway, still get a conviction. Worst case scenario, and far more likely, is that the public defender files a layup motion to suppress, all of my evidence gets tossed, and with it the case.
...
But of course, the detective in the exercise did find a baby in the basket. Any judge in the country would find exigent circumstances.
As described, you acted in line with the incentives.
If it was the baby-killer, you save the baby and secure a conviction. If it was an innocent fisherman, there are no negative consequences (at least not any listed here. I'm sure that there are some IRL. right? right??) because there is no case to sabotage. The only negative effect I can see is if he had been committing a less-serious crime that would've been caught some other way, and you had stumbled into the evidence that would've convicted him.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I'm going to start with a petty nitpick:
More precisely, in the Scriptures there are four terms for love: eros (sexual love), storge (parental/familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship), and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause)
Storge (στοργή) does not actually appear in the scriptures. A handful of words derived from it do (there's φιλόστοργος in Romans 12:10 and ἄστοργος in Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3), but στοργή itself is not in the Bible.
Now that said...
I don't think much of any kind of Christian-inflected atheism. I understand that a religion can cast a long shadow and retain immense psychological power even among those who reject its core claims. However, what I find in cases like this is a kind of sentimental appropriation of the power of Christian rhetoric even alongside the rejection or outright destruction of Christian faith itself, and I think I would prefer honest enemies to friends like that.
What I read in Zizek's essay is a kind of substitution. He appropriates the language of Christian faith but swaps out its referent, such that the Holy Spirit can become 'an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause'. What is there to say there but that the Holy Spirit is not, in fact, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause, and the substitution can only do violence to the Holy Spirit, which is, after all, not merely a linguistic flourish, but (as Christians believe) the Third Person of the Trinity.
I think this is trading one's birthright for pottage. Maybe the Christian hope is right, maybe it's a delusion, but either way it's not just the hope for a fairer world in the here and now.
urquan
I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness.
5hr ago
I have often conceived of Christianity as a belief system that replaces the hierarchy based on strength with a hierarchy based on moral goodness. "My status hierarchy is not of this world." But there still is a status hierarchy. (Just like there's still a kingdom -- just one that God rules personally.)
Of course, that's what Nietzsche said -- instead of badness, inferiority, Christianity criticizes evil, moral turpitude. But unlike Nietzche I believe this is both a positive development and a necessary one.
When I looked into liberation theology, what I found was a group of people using gospel language but assigning the terms Marxist definitions. It wasn’t that they denied the resurrection but that they rendered it irrelevant, something one could take or leave. If that’s not representative, I’ll be pleasantly surprised; I considered reading Gutiérrez, but by that point I wasn’t particularly inspired to look deeper.
I will have to check out your link.
Edit: Do you know of a link to the words of the people’s mass you linked? My Spanish isn’t great, and I will do a better job muddling through text than audio.
pigeonburger
5hr ago
Maybe the solution is Junior Assistant District Attorneys who Don't Kill the Baby, but feel tortured enough about it that they won't start imagining fake babies about to be killed everywhere just to simplify their job or justify other non baby-killing related preferences.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts
AI video fixes this. There is no way for women to compete against the outright physically impossible fetishes and perversions you can find on the /gif/ threads. Nor can they compete on convenience, speed or price when it comes to video/photos. Much of the 'texting/relationship simulacrum' stuff is outsourced to the subcontinent anyway, it can easily be outsourced to AI.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5hr ago
I am not a legal expert. I don't know the actual legal technicalities of "reasonable articulable suspicion". But at least taking a common sense definition of the words, "There is a serial killer drowning babies in wicker baskets, this man is on the marina with a wicker basket" is trivially "articulable", and seems eminently reasonable to me given the circumstances. Who uses wicker baskets? If the officer had no reason for suspicion then why did he call you in the first place? My understanding was that this was to prevent officers from searching people because "I dunno, he seemed kind of suspicious", not "I have a clear reason to suspect this guy in particular of a specific crime (and being the perpetrator of the same crime multiple times in the past) for a specific reason".
To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)
I feel like apps like Infinite Worlds are already tapping into this kind of thing. It's a relatively decent AI Choose-Your-Own-Adventure website that allows for a human creative to set up "worlds" with set plot points or details for players to play through. It's not as good as my favorite AI-powered game to date (the sadly defunct Medieval Problems), but it seems to have taken a writing forum I frequent by storm.
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
@faceh @phailyoor It wasn’t done with AI, but one guy in Latvia already managed to effectively make an academy award winning box office success from his basement. It’s called Flow
Felagund
5hr ago
I think the desire to persuade is often to some extent due to vice. See pages 16-18.
ABigGuy4U
5hr ago
What you didn’t see was mass black terrorism. It wasn’t a thing.
History didn’t end up going that way, partially because the federal government finally put its foot down, but the first five years of the civil rights era and the first five years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland are almost beat for beat the same. You even had American equivalents of Republican and Unionist paramilitary groups forming. The main difference is that in Ireland the military rolled in to protect the old social order, not to impose the new one.
There’s a saying in war colleges that you don’t notice the successful counter insurgencies, because the successful ones deflate the causes of the insurgency before it breaks out into mass violence. The civil rights era was a successful counter-insurgency. And I think had the situation been handled differently by the federal government it could have very well exploded into a 30 year long bleeding ulcer like Northern Ireland did.
This is nonsensical. When Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated for his liberation theology, he was still teaching that "the basics of faith" are the Catholic catechism. Liberation theology---whether you agree with it or not---was obviously an edifice built on top of that.
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