domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Every Christian who professes the Nicene Creed does so because they do know that Jesus professed its tenets. If we didn't believe that we wouldn't profess it.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
European food is bad across the board, but my life would be materially worse if I didn't live in a city with lots of ethnic food options.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
Large horseflies are even worse in some ways. When they’re circling you they look like angry wasps and then you can’t quite know if you should smack them or run from them. And the fuckers keep following you unless you run tens of meters.
daguerrean
1hr ago
As I felt when similar arguments were had about Kirk’s assassination, I don’t even really care about the act of violence in itself but the reaction. I’m not aware of any widespread right/conservative celebration of either of these attacks. As a consequence, even if they are in some degree influenced by right beliefs there is no real danger of organized support from the right or escalation beyond a tiny group of loner lunatics.
The left’s reaction to Kirk seems to indicate there is a very large base of support liable to offer funding/material support/legal support for left leaning terrorism, which poses a risk for this to expand beyond loner lunatics into organized groups of functional people like The Weather Underground
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
A few centuries ago, there was no German state. Instead you had a bunch of larger and smaller states, which were certainly not above rent-seeking whenever they saw a profit to be made. At small state sizes, there is some kind of force unification happening: the taxman and the highwayman merge into the robber baron.
At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. [...] individual cities/local governments in the U.S.
I think that Trump has mostly done away with the air of plausible deniability, as far as the federal government is concerned. Politicians were always beholden to big donors and willing to bent over backwards to make sure they got their wishes, but Trump is pimping out the US for cheap. Trouble with the DOJ? Buy some of his shitcoins to signal that you are on Team Trump, and your troubles will disappear, after all, his DOJ is meant for going after his enemies, not random criminals.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Which isn't really true of anywhere else that I'm aware of
Lots of other examples in Latin America, lots of ideologically driven examples in the Middle East.
anon_
1hr ago
No, that’s kind of my point actually. Even employers that want to verify applicants aren’t able to do so accurately.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Puritan New England always had a substantial contingent of non puritans because it was structured to have a non-puritan and non-voting minority. Full membership in the puritan church was not guaranteed hereditarily, either, and was necessary for suffrage, so restricting membership concentrated political power, and it was probably unavoidable that New England wouldn’t remain majority puritan.
DelendaEst
1hr ago
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
I'm not sure you can code that left or right at all, but on balance to me anything with "white supremacists" as the villian is left coded, as is the fact that he said LGBTQ. I'd assume a right coded terrorists would just call them gay, fags, queers, or default to the villian of the moment and focus on the trans.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.
One might say that Mormons are Christians in the same sense that Christians are Jews. It captures both important features of self-conception and also important points of disagreement.
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
If only we had some sort of LGBT (ex-)Mormon furry who could make sense of this all...
and when the world needed him most, he vanished.
I find the attempt to define what a Christian is to be rather impossible. Think of it this way. For example, you could say that Mormons are not Christians because they do not follow the Nicene Creed. But I would guess that the majority of 1st century Christians did not follow the Nicene Creed either. We cannot even be sure if Jesus or Paul believed in the tenets of the Nicene Creed. Yet surely if Jesus was not a Christian, then no-one ever has been.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
1hr ago
Fuck it, we’ll do it live, then
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Yes. Groceries have a low elasticity of demand -- if food prices double, I might replace some brand items with knock-offs, but I still need to buy something to eat.
By contrast, restaurants have a high elasticity of demand. If restaurant prices double, people will just buy more microwave food instead.
In a way, a la carte restaurants a luxurious service: you order and someone needs to prepare your dish on demand, just for you. Sure, the specifics differ, adding toppings to a pizza or a crepe is much less labor-intensive than preparing a steak, but at the end of the day you do not benefit from the effects of scale which most industrial processes (including pre-cooked food) have.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...).
This is... tricky, I think, in terms of sensitivity.
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians. Or at least, they do not fall within any historical confession of Christian orthodoxy. They're probably best understood as a type of heretic; personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing. The point is that "Mormons aren't Christians", as a statement, is substantially true.
On the other, it is obviously breathtakingly insensitive to bring that up at this time. Mormons believe that they are Christians, even if they are, in my judgement, in error. (I realise that technically definitions can't be wrong; even so I can and do believe that they draw the line between Christianity and non-Christianity in an indefensible place.) More importantly, whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity or not is irrelevant to this particular issue. Murdering a group of Mormons at worship is obviously very, very bad. Christians ought to respond to that by condemning the crime while offering empathy, support, and compassion to those grieving. It is not the appropriate time to engage in a confessional dispute.
But to return to the first hand - a major public figure, the president of the United States, just responded to this by asserting that Mormons are Christians, and that this shooting is an attack on Christianity qua Christianity. Now I judge both of those statements to be untrue, and though many might argue the former, the latter seems pretty hard to dispute. It is not factually true that this shooting was "a targeted attack on Christians". If nothing else, ranting about the anti-Christ suggests that the shooter himself is a Christian, albeit a very delusional one. So it seems like there is value in clarifying in this moment that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong.
I suppose this is just another situation where Trump really needed to keep his mouth shut, because all his comments have done is make a tragic situation worse for everyone.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Lower-mid level clerics liked it- laypeople didn’t get a say under the old system or in the post Vatican II era. It didn’t matter what they thought either way.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Yes, they’re the same species but they’re different subspecies.
Ex-ante, one could argue assimilation into the US is easier now than ever, given everyone's Always Online, the dominance of US cultural influence, increased English adoption, and the general reduction of worldwide linguistic diversity.
However, I highly disagree that assimilation into the US (or any other country) should be the key metric for immigrants in and of itself, at least as commonly used.
Latinos (whether they be legal or illegal immigrants) are commonly proposed as a population group who assimilate well, yet they assimilate insofar as they assimilate into the bell-curve space between white and black Americans. "Not as disruptive and negative value-add as US blacks are to the rest of the US" should not be the litmus test for the immigration policy of any country.
For the modal white or Asian American, it'd be more than understandable if he or she prefers immigrants who assimilate well to the right-side of the bell-curve, as to not create more net-tax consumers, violent crime producers, or affirmative action claimants by way of the immigrants themselves and/or the immigrants’ descendants.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Pardon me if you've answered this question before somewhere else, but just for my own satisfaction:
What is the point of the euphemisms and fictionalised names? You're not writing a detailed fantasy story with its own history or anything. It is pretty clear what you're talking about - why not skip the fig leaves of Tidus, Hajnalis, and Tropicals, and just say Earth, whites, and blacks? I understand that there's dramatic utility sometimes in using different language and context to sneak past the prejudices of an audience, and invite us to consider an issue without all the baggage we currently attach to those terms, but you aren't being subtle enough for that to work. It is too blatant. All you have done is replace a handful of nouns. Why bother?
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Massive Catholic immigration irreparably changed the character, society, and government of the United States. America is lower trust because of it. The new predominantly Catholic voters in the Northeastern cities altered the political balance of the United States.
Revisiting Scott's review of Albion Seed, I agree that homogeneous Puritan and Quaker settlements were probably very high trust. But that was only two of the four groups. The Borderers were always low trust, and the Cavaliers were nominally Anglicans, which is what you get when you take Catholicism and substitute the pope with the king of England.
The Quakers were already not the dominant religion in Pennsylvania by 1750, hard to blame Irish Catholic immigrants for that. I assume that it was kinda similar for the Puritans? First you have the Mayflower generation from 1620 on: people who were willing to life a life of hardship for their religious beliefs. It is basically impossible not to get a high-trust society from that (apart from these unfortunate witch trials). But I would imagine that there is some regression to the mean over time, which is of course accelerated by religious heterogeneity, with John Adams seeming a lot less hardcore Puritan than his earlier ancestors.
I am not saying that Irish or Scottish Catholics arriving in 1860 did not lower the trust level, but simply that it would not have been so different if the US had only let in Protestant Germans of various sects. Once your neighbor goes to a different church than you, the common knowledge that you have identical moral beliefs pitilessly enforced by your community will disappear.
The world of Anglo-America that existed before the 1880s is dead and buried. [...] old WASP San Francisco,
Reading up on the history of SF, SF basically before the gold rush of 1849 was basically a village. Early SF was basically a hive of scum and villainy, not surprising if you select for "people who want to get rich finding gold" instead of "people who go to the New World to escape the godlessness of the Old World". Sure, things calmed down a bit, but I think SF was never high trust.
celluloid_dream
2hr ago
if I'm worried about being attacked by anything, it's wasps. Evil bastards. Can't see the nest until it's too late half the time, and even if someone else steps on it, they can just randomly decide it's your fault anyway
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2hr ago
I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think attempting to evangelize was part of the motivation, but an even bigger part just seems to be that this is what people liked back then, especially for poorly-catechized mid-century American Catholics who were living through a period where their religion seemed to be changing by the minute in ways that were unprecedented and unexpected. Catholics at the time didn't know how to deal with such radical change, so they defaulted to things that they knew from the outside or felt good to them. Happy clappy songs among them.
PyotrVerkhovensky
2hr ago
I'll admit to reading and enjoying these chapters. I do think you (probably intentionally) oversimplify and the conclusions to each chapter feel like a post-hoc "just so" story.
But I'll take the bait and riff on your story a bit.
Imagine there is another island that was populated by a number of different ethnic groups. These groups came to the island over different periods of time, sailing from other islands to escape famine or enemy attack. By happenstance, these groups had obvious physiological differences. By a similar process that you describe, one of these groups had better time management, better long-term planning, and greater self-control. Let's call them "Nahribs". The other groups had varying degrees of "capability", but the Nahribs had an absolute advantage in "civilization-building" capabilities.
While a similar process as you describe caused a "downward flow" of this Nahribs elite, the fact that there were distinct physiological differences meant that members of one group couldn't "accidentally" breed with a member of another group. And for religious and cultural reasons, such intentional inter-breeding was considered anathema and very little of it occurred.
Surrounded by their inferiors, the Nahribs gained expertise in coordination, administration, and (unfortunately) status games. Coordination was needed to ensure that the inferiors were working productively. Innovation was not selected for, since there were so many inferior groups who could provide manual labor. Over time, the populations grew large and administration was needed to run everything smoothly. With so much manual work performed by the inferior groups, the superior group had leisure time which they spent inventing various ways to "one-up" each other. And so society continued in relative stasis, with all the intellectual capacity focused on organization, political machinations, and navigating complex social relationships.
At some point, the Hajnalis came across this island and with their superior inventiveness quickly subdued it. However, it didn't take long (at least, not long in the way History is measured) for the Hajnalis to realize that this island had vast pools of moderately competent labor. The Nahribs didn't know how to labor, but that was ok: the few groups directly under them were not as talented as the typical Hajnali but were a tenth of the cost, and could perform repetitive, rote, tasks. Soon these workers were producing the bulk of physical goods. Not long after, they were producing much of the world's "simple" intellectual work as well.
As technology improved island navigation, more and more Nahribs were able to travel abroad. They soon discovered that the Hajnalis were living in a paradise compared to their native island. The Nahribs saw an opportunity: the productive structures of the Hajnalis were familiarly hierarchical and, as technology progressed, increasingly dependent on administrative work. This is the type of culture that the Nahribs' were bred to excel in! They quickly climbed the various bureaucratic ladders. Within decades they were highly overrepresented in leadership roles. In the new "information age", "leadership" was about spouting the right words, coordinating capital and human resources, and knowing when and who to back-stab. While much of their corporate climb was "deserved", much of it was also greased by their compatriots. Nahribs, naturally, felt closest kinship with other Nahribs. Unlike Hajnalis, Nahribs felt no ethical qualms with nepotism.
The Hajnali had laid the seeds for their own demise. The new Hajnali economy, flooded in abundant goods created by other islands, disfavored the types of capabilities that had once made their island so powerful. There no longer was the same need for innovation, industry, and individualism. In short, they became an economy eerily similar to the Nahribs' original island, and the Nahribs had many millennia of "management experience" on the Hajnalis. Elite Hajnalis, by participating in a labor arbitrage that forced their economies into rewarding "administration", had set the stage for their own replacement.
If you didn't believe that you wouldn't profess it, but how do you know that Jesus agreed with it? I'm no New Testament scholar, but from what I've read from it, I don't see how it would be possible to be sure that Jesus actually agreed with it.
More options
Context Copy link