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I agree rules of engagement are for pussies. The United States should stop with this half ass shit. The US can destroy civilizations with the power of suns. If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies. Of course, the standard for such attention should be astronomically high.
Grant_us_eyes
2d ago
Realistically, I can't complain. Like you, I pay off my credit card every month, and in an emergency, I've built up a disturbingly large line of credit I could use to buy a great deal many things should a serious need arise.
Given that I get cash back on purchases, said company is basically paying me to use their card.
But, y'know... I wouldn't really cry if I had to give it up. Yeah. I could make that sacrifice. Easy.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I think the core message of the play is it's not stupid if it works.
Grant_us_eyes
2d ago
Bold of you to think that I had the cash on hand at the time to just buy a car off-hand.
Mind, the only reason I was purchasing said vehicle was due to a truly amazing set of circumstance that wrecked the engine of my previous one.
I'm still salty about that, as well.
Pro-tip kids - always, always manage what maintenance you can yourself, and not rely on others.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
There's an obvious potential confounder, and it seems to be present. I checked the first American study showing 208ms (Thompson, H. B. (1903). The mental traits of sex. An experimental investigation of the normal mind in men and women. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.) and the subjects it used were University of Chicago students.
I checked a later American study (Anger, W. K., Cassitto, M. G., Liang, Y. -X., Amador, R., Hooisma, J., Chrislip, D.W., et al. (1993). Comparison of performance from three continents on the WHO-recommended Neurobehavioral) showing 275.9ms. It used subjects living in working class and entry-level white collar housing. The University of Chicago is an elite university and in 1903, universities in general were considerably more elite than today (or 1993). These are different populations.
Grant_us_eyes
2d ago
I'd rather live in a society that I don't need to borrow to function, thanks.
dragonfly
2d ago
I would want to see them, of course, as a matter of due diligence. But I think for me "no credit score" is the highest possible credit score. Then again most things about the US feel slightly dystopian to me.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information. I don't see why that's a big deal. Fuck credit cards.
anti_dan
2d ago
I think that there exists a set of rules of engagement that are reasonable, that is not the set of rules of engagement that have been issued to American troops over the last 3 decades.
The creeds are, definitionally, an attempt to set a boundary of some kind. The function of the Nicene Creed is to define, as the 4th century councils understood it, the true faith over against heresy. One is free to disagree with the creeds, but surely to use the creeds as setting the boundaries of acceptable faith is simply to use the creeds as they are designed to be used.
I don't think the 60 IQ's person's belief system can be both creedal Christianity and Mormonism in the absence of some sort of deep confusion, at least insofar as we agree that creedal Christianity and Mormonism are mutually exclusive. I grant that deep confusion of this kind frequently occurs in real life, and in practice people of many religions often believe in idiosyncratic fusions unique to themselves, but the fact of human confusion and vagueness does not seem to me to be a reason to abandon the project of clarification entirely.
When it comes to belief, I think that people can implicitly assent to positions that they are not consciously aware of. A person who recites and assents to the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass does, in sense, believe the content of the creed, even if he or she cannot articulate the meaning of every line. If you read much catechetical material, even across different religions, I think this is understood. I have read, for instance, both Catholic and Islamic books that frame themselves as "explaining your faith". As (presumably, for I am neither) a good Catholic or Muslim you have assented to this large body of doctrine, some explicitly (e.g. by reciting creeds), some by extension (e.g. "I assent to everything that the church holds necessary for salvation"), and some only implicitly (e.g. as logical corollary of something explicitly assented to), and I see how there is value, catechetically, in exploring and spelling out what that means.
The Trinity is, in principle, something like this. I think the average Catholic or Protestant knows that the Father is God, that Jesus Christ is God, and that the Spirit is God, but is probably less than wholly clear on what that means or how it's possible. They know these things in the same way that the New Testament states them. The developed doctrine teases out and says explicitly that which is necessarily implied by the top-level beliefs, so when a theologian of the Trinity presents the doctrine, it is not being presented as something additional for belief, but rather as an explication of that which the church already believes.
I think something like this is the case when we consider ignorant Joe Catholic and ignorant Bob Mormon in the pews. Probably neither of them are capable of defining the fundamental differences in doctrine between them. But Joe believes that developed Catholic theology expresses, in a more refined way, that which he holds in his heart; and likewise Bob for the leaders of his own tradition. The difference is that if I ask Joe what all these doctrines he believes really mean, Joe will point at the bishop or the pope or someone and say, "Ask him, he knows", and if I ask Bob, he will point at a Mormon authority. And at that point it is certainly meaningful to compare the mature doctrines that those authorities will explain.
They are, in other words, members of communities of faith. They assent to what their community presents for belief - and levels of personal ignorance, however lamentable in practice, don't remove that sense of communal loyalty and identification. In some cases we say this holds even in cases of individual defiance or disagreement - I think it's meaningful to say "Catholics hold that contraception is morally wrong" even though most individual Catholics (in the US at least) observably don't. In the same way, it's meaningful to say "Christians believe X about God, Mormons believe Y about God, and these are not compatible", even if particular individuals in each tradition may be ignorant or even defiant of those particular beliefs.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
I am aware that they are well-regarded. I stated (correctly) that they are bad.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Oh if only that were true. I found out the hard way that my bank would happily let transactions through that my checking account couldn't cover, then charge me a $50 fee on top of having to bring the account positive. There are some very predatory banks in the US.
Yeah, and if you use a credit card that won't happen. (Since 2009, they can't even charge you an over-the-limit fee unless you specifically opt-in).
Celestial-body-NOS
Supra tumulum tuum, astra nobis.
2d ago
Uh, phrasing?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
I mean, it largely comes down to just realizing that the "Doesn't completely fuck up your entire life" use case for credit cards is narrow, and the "Completely fucks up your entire life" use case for credit cards is unbounded.
But it's not. 82% of American adults use credit cards. More than half didn't even carry a balance.
You hear stories all the time of people having to put essential home repairs like a water heater or an HVAC system on a credit card because that's all they had. And yet, I have literally never heard that story end with "And then next month I scrounged up the money to pay it off".
There's no story if that happens.
yunyun333
2d ago
The beard issue is silly ;what's more concerning is Hegseth saying that rules of engagement are for pussies. He advocated for trump to pardon men like eddie gallagher and the blackwater operators at nisour square. At least for now the military is limited to blowing up narco boats and standing around federal buildings.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2d ago
The day before I went to move out to an apartment for the first time, my credit union creatively applied charges and deposits to drop me into the negatives, then charged me $35 per transaction. They functionally stole $1500 from me, and then raided my mother's and sister's accounts when mine ran out. Then stonewalled, insisting that there was just nothing they could do about it before I had to leave to be two hours away at college, now broke.
When I set up my daughter with her first account, I went on a very nasty rant about overdraft protection, right in front of the banker lady, until we clarified 10 different times that there was absolutely no overdraft "protections" set for her account.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2d ago
It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.
Future shock is already here. The number of people who freak out at being asked to send an email is disturbingly high.
I have never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but my closest friend once described it as being at least partially about the transition from pre-Modern society, where everything a man might encounter was basically comprehensible, to Modern society, where a stroll down the road would reveal behemoths of concrete and steel and chained lightning that the average man could not hope to understand well enough to effect repairs on.
This is incredibly stark with cell phones. How many of us here have ever repaired a cell phone? Have you ever tried to coax, say, an elderly Chinese man though a non-standard use of their phone, with all the text in Mandarin? It is sufficiently advanced technology, and it is indistinguishable from magic.
Tenaz
2d ago
That 60 IQ person's belief system is both creedal Christian and Mormon. I contend that this "minimum viable Christianity" is in fact the definition you should be using. If a person can be fairly described as Christian, then their belief system can (outside of irrelevant edge cases, such as when identifying someone based on what they used to be before cognitive decline) be fairly described as Christian. Thus, it is not necessary to believe in the Nicene Creed to be Christian, nor do those who believe in a belief system that lacks such creeds believe in some other non-Christian belief system.
This is why I said "I don't think ideas exist outside of people's heads". If Christianity is a belief system, then nobody besides God himself believes in it. Every single human's individual beliefs will, to some extent, in some (possibly insignificant) particular, deviate from the true belief system to something adjacent and nigh-identical. Is someone Christian if they are Christian in every respect but think that putting a star on the Christmas tree is a commandment? Yes, of course. And if we want words to have useful meanings, then their belief system is still Christianity.
Do the ignorant majority of Christians who fail to understand the Nicene Creed believe in something other than Christianity? Do they follow a different belief system, besides Christianity? I contend that they still do follow Christianity, and therefore the Nicene Creed, and the Trinity, are not core, essential parts of Christianity as a belief system. Nor for that matter is the LDS concept of the Godhead--we will still accept you as LDS so long as you are exercising faith in Christ. You still meaningfully follow the "LDS belief system" if your attempts to follow Christ are within the bounds of our organized religion.
Corvos
2d ago
It’s interesting to me that this is exactly what certain reasoning LLMs will do. Not making any strong claims, just noting it.
Corvos
2d ago
Kind of. All of these are serious beliefs that a huge number and I think an actual majority of Muslims hold. Being a Muslim and taking your tenets seriously pretty much requires this.
Likewise, if you are a serious non-self-contradicting Christian then you pretty much have to wage culture war on some fronts. That’s why it’s called a culture war - it’s a battle over whose culture can be expressed, when, and how, as well as a battle over whose culture dominates when there are clashes.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2d ago
Unless you exaggerate greatly, Hassan sounds like he has quite a low IQ on top of his "schizophrenia". Mentally, he's close to an 8-10 year old White or Asian kid.
No, that's a fair and accurate recollection of his speech patterns. It's a bit odd to characterize him, unlike other mentally dysfunctional people I've met who did seem to be mentally aged 4 or 7. In mannerism, nothing about him codes as "childish", and that stream of free association comes quickly enough that it doesn't automatically flag him as stupid. But his thoughts seem constrained to a very narrow range that seems far more limited than even an 8 year old, like he's partially making up for an even more extreme limitation by sheer brute force of computational cycles, spending hours talking to himself about activities that most people here would cover in a few seconds.
And I've met plenty of other people like that (yes, disproportionately black), and they tend to be even more disordered than Hassan. People who will take ten pages of paperwork and spend 30 minutes going over it, sorting it, then confusing themselves, starting over, and repeating the cycle multiple times. Hassan at least usually has a clear sense of what he is doing and why, even if he's burning outrageous brain time on minor errands.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
As a civilian my impression of the military is that it is made up of mostly literal cuckolds, 4’10” fat latinas and idiots that had absolutely zero job prospects outside of what amounts to a government make-work program. They would certainly do well to start combatting that perception because I doubt I’m alone
Out of curiosity (I feel like that phrase requires a disclaimer that I do not mean it in any way sarcastically), do you distinguish between officers and enlisted? Or non-commissioned officers and grunts? Or different branches of the service?
hydroacetylene
2d ago
I don't know, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Italian, and Greek food all seems pretty well regarded.
That's because if we do, it's a nonissue and not something we talk about.
Last year, my car needed some repairs. As I tell the story, I paid for them - with some grumbles, but I paid it.
To tell it with some more detail... I didn't have a lot of money in my checking account at the time. But that was a nonissue: I just put the repairs on my credit card, and then a few weeks later I transferred enough money to my checking account to pay off the bill when it came due. So a credit card was rather handy then. Except I don't tell that part of the story, because it was rather a nonissue in my life.
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