domain:inv.nadeko.net
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
Hence the 'terrible' and the 'faith' in my post.
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
I was (by my own analysis) a pretty good catch for years. My problem was that I couldn't find any women up to my standards. It is exceedingly grim out there for anyone with expectations that would have been reasonable even 30 years ago.
Found one eventually and we're very happy. Years later we're still constantly telling each other "I can't believe no one else got to you first."
Even so I know too many other men my age and younger who can't find a decent wife for anything.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
and absolutely no second dates!
What's wrong with that? Finding your spouse is a numbers game. Get to the 'not the one' quickly to move on to the next. You just haven't found her yet.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
7hr ago
I love SwiftUI. There are a few other languages that do this as well, but SwiftUI is the one I know best.
I have a lot of trouble with XML-based layout strategies- there are way too many options to actually get right (WPF/UWP/Avalonia), layouts are fiddly and require specific boxes to be checked so your elements don't launch themselves across the screen as soon as you resize the window, and you have to move out of the layout editor to actually code anything.
With these new frameworks, you can just write and call functions directly from UI code, and the code that generates the UI (and calls the other functions you've attached to buttons, etc.) is itself just a function. Spacing/stacking is automatic (compared to XAML where you have to be explicit about literally everything).
It's an absolute joy to use, or it would be if Apple's implementations of certain things weren't so buggy. There's an Ada 2.0 a Rust implementation of this idea, but the downside to that is then you'd have to use Rust.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
There's definitely a trend of men being too timid to take the initiative in relations between the sexes.
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
So... would you have stabbed him?
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
I have a hard time believing Israel’s opening attack wasn’t the best they can do
"Best" is a meaningless term here, it's not a competition. It's a military campaign, which is not finished yet. And the supply chain to make a working nuclear weapons is long and requires multiple high-tech processes - the ingredients of which are being destroyed now. Full reports on it aren't available yet (Iranians would certainly claim almost nothing is destroyed, and Israelis may also not give you true picture in the middle of military campaign, they have other priorities). But with almost complete aerial domination Israel enjoys currently, I think a lot of things getting knocked out. Some things - like Fordow - are too deep to be easily knocked out, but I'm sure Israel thought about it for many years and they have some ideas.
thejdizzler
7hr ago
I could not disagree with this harder (+the data backs me up). Maybe it’s slightly different 5-10 years older than me, but there are so so many single men in my social circles. Sure some of them have some social skills to work on, but they’re mainly average guys with average hobbies. Some of them haven’t been on dates in years.
Are you a woman by chance? Perhaps that might explain our different perspectives.
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
As in - is it easier for Iran to rebuild, than Israel to replenish it's offensive capabilities?
No, it's not. Making a bomb is easier than making an uranium enrichment factory. Most expensive stuff on Israel's side is capital investment (like planes) which is not consumable, and consumables are relatively cheap. Certainly not free and at some point you could only make so many bombs, but you can build new bombs faster than you can build high-tech factories.
But you can't expect this gift to keep on giving forever.
If they stop being stupid, by virtue of that they'd also stop trying to invest so much money in destroying a tiny country which would gladly forget they exist if only they'd let them. Iran literally gains absolutely nothing from messing with Israel except stupidity points. It's literally the stupidest fight ever for them - they have no territorial dispute, they can gain no resources, they can not make more money or destroy a competitor - nothing. If they were smart, they'd do what Qatar or Saudis do - say "fuck them nukes", make peace with the Jews, buy American fighter planes and use the oil money to bribe half of the world into submission. They may throw a bone to the islamic terrorists to go fight Jews from time to time, just for the old times sake, but they wouldn't get into an open fight that gains them nothing. Israelis are not too proud, they know how diplomacy works in the Middle East - you can yell "death to the Jews" all day long, but if you don't do much to back it up, it'd be fine. But Iran government are stupid and blinded by their ideology, so they are.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana.
Not Materialism, the consensus materialist framework, the one that claims that there is no need to appeal to non-material explanations, and therefore any apparent evidence for non-materialist phenomena or explanations should be discarded without examination.
Briefly:
the consensus Materialist framework claims that Materialism adequately explains all observed phenomena, and that therefore there is no room for non-materialist explanations for observed phenomena.
We do not actually have a Materialist explanation for where the universe comes from; the chain of causality terminates roughly at the big bang. Okay, it's sort of a problem for "we can explain everything with Materialism" to then admit "other than the cause of the universe's existence", but that's a very long time ago and of questionable relevance to most practical questions. It's not entirely unreasonable to handwave that one.
Only, we do not actually have a Materialist explanation for the evident phenomenon of Free Will. We have a lot of evidence that either Free Will or something doing a completely seamless imitation of it exists: firstly, every one of us has an entire lifetime's experience of making an extremely large number of choices quite freely; secondly, every piece of functional social technology we have operates on the assumption that free will exists, thirdly, every attempt to develop social technology that operates off Determinist principles (and there have been many) has utterly failed: neither mind reading nor mind control appear to exist.
Materialists insist that all evidence of the existence of Free Will must be discarded, because it contradicts our Materialist axioms. But if evidence of Free Will contradicts materialist axioms, that necessarily means that it is evidence against materialism. And if one examines that evidence rather than simply discarding it axiomatically, it turns out that it is actually an enormous, heaping pile of evidence against materialism.
You are familiar with "The God of the Gaps", wherein theists made predictions about the material world based on their belief in God, and then had those predictions falsified by the march of Science, only to retreat back into smaller and smaller gaps where science had not yet penetrated, eventually retreating to claims that are completely unfalsifiable.
If you examine the history of Determinism, the exact same sequence recapitulates itself: Determinists make bold claims, and then those claims are tested to the tune of trillions of dollars and millions of man-years with the full backing of two civilizations, and the result was that their claims were completely falsified. The Determinists retreated to new, somewhat more humble claims in the gaps of the existing science, but science continues to advance and those claims are likewise falsified. This process has proceeded in this way to the present, and Determinists now make no testable predictions at all, but claim that Determinism must be accepted axiomatically, with no apparent awareness that they are adhering to Determinism of the Gaps and that this might be a problem.
"Materialist explanations are sufficient to explain all observed phenomena, except the ones we don't want to examine because otherwise they would be phenomena Materialism can't explain" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but is pretty much the state of the debate near as I can tell.
Materialism as an axiom still works as well as it ever did. It is not falsified so long as it limits its claims to being a very good solution to a very wide range of problems, not a fully general solution to all problems. But the latter is the consensus framing, and it is essentially a very large and lovingly-detailed sandcastle.
SkoomaDentist
7hr ago
Expensive guitars when they can barely string together a few chords?
Bro, why you gotta single me out like that?!
Gaashk
7hr ago
The guys I know who can’t seem to find a single woman to date… you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation.
One such man I know IRL, who I was friends with at the time, said something like "I would ask Gaashk out, but she would probably stab me," in front of me. He did not in fact ask me out), and is still single and complaining about it on Facebook.
Mushguffler
7hr ago
If Obama could make banks stop providing services to legal gunshops, surely Trump could make them stop providing services to illegal immigrants.
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
Citation needed. Or at least some kind of argument. You're just stipulating this as though it were fact.
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
If not for the quote I'd think you responded to the wrong comment. You didn't engage with the substance at all and I don't know how you got to China from "moral and religious people".
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
7hr ago
in the hopes that doing so will make sex easier and more pleasurable
I dunno, find better partners (not like I have any advice on that front; every time I write something here it's because I'm thinking about someone I think would be fun to do this with, and have some first-hand experience with someone who was kinda bad at this)? I can believe the stories of people who don't bother to look for this because they don't find this interesting, but to me it just seems like a waste.
Then again, I suspect this is just a (literally) childish way to look at sex, and literally nobody does this because rational self-interest trumps everything, or whatever. [Which comes back to "well then, if you're going to get married to do that because the sex drive isn't symmetric across the sexes, and aren't doing it because you already have that convergence-drive-love thing going on, isn't that just prostitution with a different name?"]
Porn allows your idealized image of sex to dominate, vs the actual thing which is limited by real social interactions and physical sensations
I guess so, but I'm already pretty confident that if I had my way with who I want it with it would look pretty close to what I think about. Maybe that's why I had a hard time with people who go "ur hormones make u a slave to ur passions" or finding masturbating to random attractive-enough people particularly fulfilling (imagining masturbating them, somewhat paradoxically, yields far better results).
ween
I think nofap would be more popular if they weren't all just a bunch of weeners
Mushguffler
7hr ago
That's why the American West has a culturally Southern orientation too -- white people in the South couldn't compete with slave labor, so they moved west in higher numbers than whites in the north.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
He was also a, literally, registered Republican.
Claiming that the pope agreed with democrats more on immigration is probably true(although a lot of the evidence used for that is out of context- his recent speech about ‘breaking down borders’ was explicitly calling for Palestinian rights and not about the U.S., for example). But the claim that he was or is particularly anti trump is not.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
7hr ago
Yes! I will grant you that the Perrin chapters are a slog (as they are through that whole region of the series), but the Mat/Tuon chapters are peak Wheel of Time. Honestly one of my favorite parts of the series because of that.
wayfarer
7hr ago
Democracy simply does not work.
still works better than other government systems
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7hr ago
If the user deletes them, I don't think we can undelete them. Maybe Zorba can.
C.S. Lewis remains a remarkable writer of timeless trends.
This is basically just the modern progressive Christianity that dominates many denominations in the US and Europe, with a shiny new label. (American Christianity in particular is very fond of coming up with shiny new labels for not particularly new ideas.) I would say that the majority of these congregations don't really "believe" in any serious way, either emotionally or intellectually. In the abstract, they believe in God because the universe is a big dark scary place without some supreme being giving reason to it all, and they believe in an afterlife because just ceasing to exist like a snuffed candle after a few brief years is a pretty scary thing to wrap your head around, and they believe in Jesus because he said we should all be nice to each other, which is nice. But do they have any serious expectation that they will ever witness miracles or angels, or hear God speaking to them, or really think about whether heaven and hell are real places? I don't think so.
I am more familiar with Protestantism than Catholicism, but I suspect it's not dissimilar there; the Catholic Church at least puts on an outward show of being more Serious about the whole thing, but I'll bet even the average Catholic priest doesn't really, truly believe in angels and demons and would freak out as much as any secular person if he experienced something actually supernatural.
So I remain unconvinced by this attempt to reconcile religion and reason. You might as well call it "Secular Christianity."
There are people who are very serious and sincerely believe, and on the one hand, I have a little more respect for them for really committing to the bit, and also find them a little less trustworthy.
I understand the concept of a "God-shaped hole," but I think it's mostly both a desire for a shared community (I do not doubt all the surveys showing religious people are on the whole happier and mentally healthier than secular people) and the need for Answers (see above, the fear of death and an empty, unfeeling universe that doesn't care about a speck of atoms like you).
I was never an Angry Atheist, but I did go through my smarmy, condescending Internet Atheist phase where dunking on creationists and born-agains was fun. Since then I have mellowed out and I have more understanding for the religious, and am kind of perversely fascinated with @WhiningCoil's trajectory, but while I've gone through phases where I've thought that joining a church might be "good" for me in some sense, I remain a materialist atheist and it's very unlikely anything will convince me to change. @FCfromSSC writes some very cogent criticisms of materialism and I get his point that materialists often base their "knowledge" on constructs no more inherently trustworthy than faith, but that just tells me no one can really "know" anything. Maybe for some people that leaves belief wide open as a choose-your-own-adventure, but I find myself unable to just make myself believe things. "You don't have an answer for how the universe started, therefore Jesus" is such a huge leap that I don't understand how people get there, though clearly many do.
No argument will convince me to just "reason" my way into accepting Jesus or Mohammad PBUH or the Tao. (Don't try; you do not have an argument I have not heard before.) The only thing that would trigger a conversion in me is witnessing something with my own eyes. Show me an angel, so to speak. Which means going to a church would always seem fake and disrespectful to me, even if the church somehow accorded with my beliefs in every other way and my intentions were pro-social.
So back to this "Mystical Christianity." I could get more or less the same experience at a United Methodist church. Or, stripped of even the pretense of Christianity, a Unitarian Universalist congregation. (I've actually checked them out. They are nice people but the utter lack of seriousness makes me think I'd rather become Mennonite or Mormon if I were going to go that route. At least those people really believe something. Also, UUs are the very wokest of wokes nowadays.) Freemasonry, yeah, has some of that mysticism and ritual but strikes me as sort of Boy Scouts for areligious grownups.
Does being "religious" actually change anyone's beliefs or behavior? Not really. I've long been of the opinion that being religious has almost no impact on an individual's character and says little about him. Christianity seems particularly adept at molding itself to the beliefs of the believer, but in essentially every religion, you see that kind, compassionate, charitable people say their religion tells them they are supposed to be kind, compassionate, and charitable, and cruel, judgmental, and punitive people say that their religion says they are supposed to be cruel, judgmental and punitive. That God always has a tendency to coincidentally agree with his followers' beliefs is not a new observation. That some people want to believe there is some kind of God-shaped thing that doesn't actually make any demands of them, either to believe uncomfortable things or change their behavior, is also not new. It's "spiritual but not religious" dressed up as being kinda religious because they like the costume. I think these people grasping for "mystical Christianity" or some other dressed up weak tea New Age spirituality should either commit and go to a real hardcore trad church that will make them study and do some theology, or admit they just want a social circle that will help soothe their existential angst.
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