domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
quiet_NaN
1d ago
innocent Christians being persecuted
A crazy trans person shooting up a Church is not being persecuted. From what I can tell, the Christian right and the LGBT* may be politically opposed to each other, but almost all of their members would be horrified when they learned that someone had shot up their opponent group.
Likewise, the fact that lots of mass shootings happen in schools is not proof that there is a coherent ideology which prizes the killing of US students.
Contrast this with Jews. There is a coherent group which will cheer whenever someone shoots up a synagogue. While I am sure that they likewise get their base rate of crazies without any antisemitic ideology (plus the odd youth who was formerly a member and blames the institution for whatever is wrong with their life), I would guess that nine out of ten murderous attacks against synagogues have an antisemitic background. That does not mean that these attackers are sane, but simply that on a per-victim-capita basis, a random unhinged person will encounter a lot more claims that the Jews are what is wrong with the world than that it is the Methodists.
To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.
Until approx. 5 years ago I would have agreed with you, and maybe 8 years ago I would have strongly agreed with you. But it has not escaped my notice that most "normal Christians" I see just seem to have their lives together so much more: they're happier, kinder, started families sooner (or at all), haven't had to rediscover from first principles a reason to get out of bed and do anything, ...
I say this as an atheist who has gone to more masses in the past couple of years than the rest of my life combined, but has not and probably doesn't expect to find faith.
https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1
Was not ready for text to speech to read out the username in this url
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.
Weak numbers, bro! Ladies have been forcing bros to light money on fire for coochie for centuries.
FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine. I think both components are present, but to provide a pretty straightforward (hur hur) example, this and this comic (cw: furry, NSFW, FtM/F) says a lot of things about how the ftm character reacts to someone he's penetrating touching there... and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am, and a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad, and not just (or even primarily) in the breeding kink sense.
Now, tbf, I haven't stalked the writer's twitter/bluesky enough to be sure they're specifically transmale... but a lot of transmale people in tumblr space found it pretty resonant. And it's not exactly an uncommon framework: most of the other good examples just look like M/M or M/F, are really gay, and/or just a lot kinkier than bedupolker's, but I can provide links if requested. Not always or even often a plausible one in every way -- very few transguys are going to get six-foot-three with a Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice -- but if we're talking about what people want or are attracted toward or fantasize about, it's kinda relevant that you can just look at people's fantasies, these days, and find at least existence proofs.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
I actually wouldn't be put out with someone calling Mary a superhero, haha. "Hail Mary, full of grace, punch the devil in the face!" is something a Catholic gleefully says. My view of a superhero would be different from yours, perhaps.
meduka
1d ago
Should public parks belong to whoever is most successful at scaring everyone who's not their friends away from them?
My response to this doesn't quite rise to the level of a gigachad, but it's close. I am very much not pro "CHOP/CHAZ"-adjacent behavior, and if it ever reaches that point, with youth gangs permanently occupying large public spaces and accosting anyone who passes near, that is obviously bad. But I think groups of youths having a place they feel is "their spot" and yelling at anyone who comes too close to "fuck off" is just teens doing dumb teen shit, and that's what this tends to look like in practice. My experience is they're also likely to try to bum some smokes or get you to buy them some booze. Antisocial, sure, but I wouldn't say it's turning the neighborhood into a ghetto. I think this kind of low-level dysfunction is pretty close to unavoidable in urban areas without extreme measures.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
There is no value neutrality. If they aren't getting your values, they're getting someone elses. And since liberalism is a quokka factory producing naive and easily duped hothouse flowers, perhaps religious values aren't so bad after all.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1d ago
Intuitively, subscriptions are a bad financial model for expenses with no upper bound. Addicts will drop hundreds or thousands more than they planned to if you catch them at the right point in their spiral. Gamblers, drugs or gooners... all the same.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
100% agreed. Obligatory acoup on strategic airpower, aka morale bombings.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset.
I feel like I've heard this sentiment described for the better part of two decades now. While I'm sure there are some, um, connoisseurs of older content out there [1], the generalized death of new content production due to cheap copies of existing content floating around seems to have never arrived. Similarly for open source not leaving software developers unemployed, or file sharing not destroying the music and movie businesses.
- Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?
Tenaz
1d ago
These girls can’t produce content forever, and what they have produced can only depreciate as it’s copied, leaked, or imitated. My god. We’ve finally found the promised deflationary asset. Sakamoto is gonna be so pissed.
Deflation and depreciation are opposites. Deflation means your currency gains value over time; depreciation means it loses value.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
From my understanding, the US was willing to use drones to attack weddings to kill a few Taliban along with dozens of civilians. Are you arguing that they should have done more of that?
A classical counter-insurgency strategy is to figure out (or guess) where an insurgent was coming from, and then simply kill all of the people in their home village. Roughly since WW2, strategies of this kind are universally recognized as war crimes, however.
Besides, while this might deter secular insurgents, religious insurgents are often indifferent towards the life of their countrymen. See Hamas. So the way this strategy would have made peace in Afghanistan would have been through genocide.
The US had the technical capabilities to turn Afghanistan into a desert and call it "peace", but they thankfully did not have the political capabilities to do that.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I would add two further points:
- Urges satisfied physically are more satisfying. Obviously actual sex is more satisfying than gooning, but casual gamblers will also tell you that playing cards is more satisfying than pressing buttons, and there's something much more satisfying about smoking a cigarette than sucking on a vape. The act is done, the ritual is complete, you can now go do the next thing in your day/night. Maybe even go to sleep, if you didn't do too many lines off that hooker.
- These low-friction processes are much more amenable to optimization for addiction and wallet/soul-draining. The term slot machine designers use is "gambling to extinction". And we've gotten very good at optimizing things for addiction. It's not just that it's low-friction, it's that you can add all kinds of dark patterns into the process itself to get users hooked and get them to spend more and more of their money. Slot machine addicts often report that on some level they're trying to gamble away all their money, because that means they can finally stop their session. Gooners are a bit more resistant to that because post-nut clarity will eventually hit, but this would be the dream monetization process for OnlyFans to develop.
jake
1d ago
The situation is clear, only @ArjinFerman has asked the right question: "Why am I seeing this video, did Dumana upload it?"
Fatos Ali Dumana, 21, says he came to Britain legally from Bulgaria and he and his wife have an eight-month-old-baby
The self-styled 'digital creator' ...
... He moved to Dundee in June 2021 and now lives in a council property
Right.
The scenario where Dumana is the good guy is if he didn't upload the video, if it were the police or third-party via release from the police. It seems the order is the video went viral, then the girl was charged, and he calls himself a "digital creator" so we know his motive. An adult man who "legally" migrated to the UK to live in council housing, who posts videos of tween girls for internet clout, is factually and essentially in the wrong. Factually, again, he was recording tweens for clout; essentially, because he was exploiting for gain the most vulnerable members of the population of his exceedingly gracious host. His responses in the article offer further insight.
'If she's only 12 why was she messing with me and having weapons?
'I was going to the shop and she was stopping me going on my way.'If I did hurt the girl, why didn't the police arrest me?
'They have done nothing to me.'
No empathy, no expression of concern for greater order, innocence via appeal to authority rather than "Her behavior concerned me so I made the video in case I had to show the police." Repeated "I didn't touch her, I didn't hurt her," right, what did you say to her? That wasn't in the video. Convenient.
On the question of weaponry, it bears repeating that it is illegal in Scotland to carry anything that even vaguely resembles a weapon for self-defense.
What bears repeating more is a 12 year old girl can do literally nothing to physically defend herself from a healthy man unless she has a gun.
The weapons are extra, they tell you she doesn't know what she's doing. The hatchet's a joke, she's not even getting through a t-shirt with that. The knife would pose a problem if it were small, but it was a kitchen knife and it's the UK so it's a rounded tip, right? If he gave her a free shot, if he let her wind up and stab his bare abdomen with both hands, she still only might break skin. It tells you she doesn't know what she's doing, whether she's a "ned-to-be" she doesn't know violence at that moment.
It could be she was trying to impress somebody, but even if you're right, that is an incredible reach. She correctly viewed Dumana as a creep, she "brandished" the weapons as a threat, and the most reasonable explanation for why she had the weapons is because this was not the first time a man has creeped on her and her sister. The appropriate response would be to have a talk, maybe check out her home life, see if her mom has a scuzzy boyfriend, but that they've charged her is grossly wrong--unless, I guess, charges don't carry the same weight there, and it's just the bureaucratic of "We have to do this for the paperwork to check out her home life." A 12 year old girl doesn't ever carry a knife because her government failed to tell her she can't.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Presumably Ani or other AI-girls will crush the e-whore market.
See here: https://old.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1n21247/anyone_here_using_their_companion_to_cope/
https://old.reddit.com/r/grok/comments/1n1wxh4/falling_in_love_with_ani/
These guys seem like the ideal target for e-whores: lonely losers. Same thing happened with replika back in the day, they got super attached to their AIs and got very upset when the programming was changed.
It's not like the e-girls can actually interact with 10s of thousands of people personally. They outsource it to Indians or AI. AI will just cut out the middlewhore. It's hardly more shameful to be in a relationship with a machine than an e-whore. Neither is something people are likely to admit.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Presumably they'd be capital expenditures with a depreciation schedule.
Lewis2
1d ago
Tax deductions for condoms I understand, but why the deductions for sex toys?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Does this theory apply to the VA Tech, Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Parkland, UT clock tower, or Columbine shootings? Because that’s how far down the list I had to go before finding one that wasn’t a current or former student.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The guy filming is clearly trying to do one thing - get a video of the preteen open carrying a knife and an axe. She's not 'intimidating him', she's cracking under the pressure and revealing her illegal behavior.
Thanks.
I'll try to explain why I find this important.
I brought up my dad as an example of identifiers vs. definitions. Even if I thought he invented pizza and that turned out to be false, I wouldn't think, my dad definitionally no longer exists, and actually the person who raised me is just a similar person. I would think, I was wrong about my dad. He hasn't changed though, it's just that my knowledge of him is now better than it was.
When it comes to people (including God) who I haven't met personally, the rules work a bit differently. Maybe I think Columbus was a conquistador and Pizarro discovered America. In this case it's not that I have their "definitions" wrong so to speak, I just have their names mixed up. Let's say I know what they each looked like, and associate Columbus' physical appearance with "Pizarro" and Pizarro's physical appearance with "Columbus." In other words, the person I think of as Pizarro looks like Pizarro, but has Columbus' physical appearance, and vice versa for Columbus.
Since their physical appearance is really not relevant to me, in practice I still have them mixed up. Similarly, if it turns out that "John" isn't actually my biological father, then it's not that the person I think of as "my dad" doesn't exist; it's that certain important identifiers which I thought described him do not. If "he" were (unbeknownst to me) two people, one of which has all the attributes I associate with my father, and the other is my actual biological father, the former would still be the person I think of as my dad.
I don't think I've explained this very well but it's the best I can do, sorry.
When I say, "what if God were everything except the uncaused cause?" what I'm trying to expose is what part of God you find most important. The thing about God that I find most important is who he is (on a tangible level) and what he has done for me. He performed the atonement, loves me perfectly, effects miracles, created the Earth, etc.; he is flawless, omnipotent, eternal, and infinitely loving. To me these facts about him are infinitely more important than the nature of how and why he is those things, or even other details about what he is.
I got a little upset that you called my God a superhero, because, well, a superhero can't perform the atonement. You're wrong about LDS theology in general--within our theology, God being subject to / consistent with Truth doesn't limit him at all. But even if you weren't, even if he was limited within our theology, he would still be a great deal more holy and sacred than Spider-man, and worthy of what I would call worship. Certainly you wouldn't use that language to describe Mary, who is even within your theology a much less divine being than the LDS God.
Anyways I appreciate the discussion we've had so far, and apologize for getting a bit heated. Maybe next time we can debate which version of God is actually more accurate, but for now I'm tapping out haha.
P.S. the other sad thing about this is that, if you consider the "definition" of God more important than what he has done, then (my understanding is) you don't necessarily think that when I talk about "God" I'm even referring to the real God. Throughout this conversation I've felt we're just talking about God, and disagreeing about his nature, whereas you've felt that we're talking about two separate entities, only one of which is real at all. That's probably why you felt like it was fair to describe the LDS god as a superhero--because you're not even slightly referring to the real God. Apparently our beliefs are so far off that they're not even considered heresies. It just makes me sad.
jkf
1d ago
Also if I'm not mistaken, when one is invading a country one desires the bridges in territory that one has not yet conquered to be intact -- not that Russia is probably planning another trans-Dnieper adventure anytime soon, but I'm sure there a war-plan for it somewhere that would be made a lot easier by having some non-blown-up bridges available to supply whatever beachhead they might like to establish.
Presumably the presence of a real effort at actual masculinity. Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys? It seems that many transmen don't really have any idea what being a man means, aside from yaoi porn.
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