domain:anarchonomicon.com
HereAndGone
32m ago
Look, I'm not blind, and this is the Motte, where you are allowed to just speak plainly. It just feels like needless pussyfooting.
I've flat-out called this guy a racist and sexist, and that's what I think he's getting at. He's trying to tip-toe around all that by "ha ha, you dummies fell for my cunning ploy! No, I will reveal the real meaning in a later chapter!" but uh, so far, it's "the real meaning is racism and sexism".
I think I have established my "no I am not a progressive" credentials enough that if this reeks of 19h century racist anthropology to me (and I've read cheap mass-market reprints of old texts so I can say that with some confidence), that is what is going on.
OliveTapenade
32m ago
He mentioned it here. Professional obligations of some sort. He'll be back in a few months.
Corvos
35m ago
Plausible, but it’s also just a much better political move at this time. Saying ‘Mormons aren’t real Christians’ at this time makes you look petty and unkind. Talking about ‘people of faith’ makes you look all that and mealy-mouthed.
From a pure optics POV, better to support the victims full-throatedly now and walk any problems back later.
HereAndGone
35m ago
Hajnalis aren't 'white people' and Tropicals aren't 'blacks'
Could have fooled me with all the bullshit about melanin in the skin etc. Are you going to edit that out for your oh-so-important book that will solve all our cultural and societal problems when you remind white men that they are white men and should reawaken to their ancestral superiority?
HereAndGone
37m ago
Oh and if you are just now dropping in and find something objectionable in the post below, ha ha, despair, for you have fallen for my devious and excessively-elaborate device
Oh, phew! Because it sounded way too near to "I am White Aryan Race of Kings riding around on horses waving swords conquering lesser nations Guy and I am sneaking up on A Modest Proposal: The Final Solution for all those pesky brown and black people Tropical Islanders" crossed with "The White Man's Burden, and boy do I mean White and Man".
But lucky for us, all the "them violent, dumb, criminal Tropicals, huh?" content is only a cunning fake.
cjet79
49m ago
Having some thoughts about 4 dimensional spaces.
I've heard it said before that humans can't conceive of or perceive 4d spaces.
I was thinking that this isn't a mental limitation it's a perceptive and specifically a visual limitation.
Vision is basically a 2d sense, so it is limited in that it can only accurately perceive 2d environments (like a map). Our brains are able to do some juggling and work this 2d sense into perceiving our 3d environment. And it helps to have more than one eye to convert the 2d senses into a 3d understanding.
Some of our other senses are what I might consider 1d. Hearing and smell are just intensity detectors. They aren't really for navigating our 3d environment so we don't often think about how limiting they are in that way. Hearing doesn't feel 1d because we have ears that alter the sound and allow our brain to figure out directionality.
Here is the fascinating thing: we do in fact have a sense that it is 3d. Our sense of touch or our basic bodily self awareness.
If you try to imagine 4d spaces visually they make no sense, but if you instead imagine being able to contort your body inside a 4d space it can seem a little weird but not 'my brain is totally broken' levels of weird.
Simple exercise:
Imagine a bag of holding from dungeons and dragons. It's a small 6 inch round bag. But if you reach inside there is about a circular yard of space. This is a 4d space. Visually it's confusing as all hell, especially if you imagine the outer material of the bag being see-through. But imagining reaching in their with one arm while your other hand holds the bag is not all that confusing.
So by string together multiple 3d senses, via our sense of bodily space and touch, we can perceive 4d environments. We don't really have 4d environments so our brain doesn't have any built in hardware to make this easier.
5 spacial dimensions is where things might actually go off the rails. I have no idea how to even describe such a space. Certainty nothing as simple or widespread as a bag of holding. Curious if anyone else can think of 5 dimensional spaces used in fiction?
2rafa
49m ago
I don’t think the specific nature of services, which vary hugely by culture and denomination, means much. Modern Mormon services often seem Protestant, as I understand it, but that’s quite temporal. In the 19th century assimilated Jews reconfigured synagogue services to become essentially Christian in the style of the time (adding sermons, adding organs, adding hymns), but they were still Jewish obviously, and some of those things later became less common - and were never common among the very orthodox.
zeke5123a
52m ago
Being a foodie is arguably the sine qua non of pmc membership. Matt doesn’t realize how little it actually matters because it’s the air he breathes.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1hr ago
It's a shame how all the really interesting SSCs are from more than a decade ago.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
You forgot to mention that it's from the developer of Battle Brothers, an acclaimed game in the low-tech end of the same genre. (Unlike those of Battle Brothers, the characters of Menace do have legs.)
2D3D
1hr ago
sots1 was a buggy trashmess with broken damage profiles for their laser/missile/cannon mix. Kerberos had a grand vision and simply couldn't execute. a smaller scope might have worked better but then it'd have lost its magic.
however my own winner for overambitious nonsense is star citizen. it is the quintessential space sim, combining the worst of 90s suboptimal UI with 2000s busywork gameplay loop grind and 2010s predatory monetization. If there ever was a reason why a studio exec was necessary to keep a visionary in check, its anything to do with chris roberts. he shit the bed with freelancer being way too complex for no reason, and then developed star citizen in retaliation to fulfil his luke skywalker starfighter elite pilot roleplay fantasy, a fantasy shared by many a space nerd. whether people actually LIKE flying around in a claustrophobic cockpit in space flipping around the elliptical plane nauseatingly or spending 10 minutes travelling through jump gatea for the sake of "immersion" is secondary to roberts and his fans. what matters is that they get to pretend theyre really hanging out with luke about to take out the death star. a noble enough aim, save for the fact that they made flying a spaceship not fun at all.
Hieronymus
1hr ago
(The Catholics and Orthodox consider each other's apostolic successions and sacraments valid).
It’s a tangent, but is there a clear Eastern Orthodox consensus on this? E.O. attitudes toward the Western churches seem to vary quite a lot, and I have never been able to get a handle on which takes on the issue, if any, are mainstream within their communion.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr 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"
This is a classic overthinking Trump trap.
Trump has zero "faith" in terms of a cohesive theological or metaphysical system. He might have a kind of vague conception of God or a higher power, but I'd be willing to bet he's essentially a secular humanist with a little bit of "woo" and "the Christmas spirit" thrown in. He's probably knocked on wood once or twice in his life.
He is, however, a political animal and, because of that, he is aware of the power of religious groups, especially Christians. But because he does't grok "faith" or theology or metaphysics, he lumps pretty much all political-religious leaders together as powerful wizards who know many spooky words.
Here's Trump asking the director of HUD to say grace (?) to start a cabinet meeting..
The Trump thought process after the Mormon Michigan shooting and arson was pretty clearly - "Thats some version of the Jesus people. The Jesus people tend to like me. I should say how bad it is for people to shoot at the Jesus people."
I'm not trying to be flippant or to sneer at Trump as an idiot or a clown. That's actually another failure mode of Trump evaluation. The specific point, however, is that religion is an interesting weak spot for Trump. He truly doesn't understand it deeply (where, for example, I believe he actually does understand marketing as a business discipline deeply). Yet he also fails to understand religion intuitively the way he does politics.
He has managed to create a very simple and basic heuristic, which is to be generally positive all religions, more or less, with special deference to Christians first and then Jews (but only if they aren't, like, too Jewy, ya know?). Expecting Trump to be able to discern LDS vs Evangelical vs Mainline Protestant vs Catholic is silly. Asking him to then thread the needle in his remarks by saying something like "This was an attack on Christians a community of faith" is outright laughable. He's simply going to boo the non-religious outgroup in whatever hamfisted way he can.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Superficially sure. They all know who captain America is. But that doesn’t mean they’ve accepted American culture norms about say blasphemy laws.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1hr ago
... and trolls like to sneak a P in there.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
The entire Christian religion is predicated on the assumption that Jesus would have agreed with it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
The LDS church doctrinally being "the true church" doesn't mean we have a monopoly on truth or even that in every respect we have more truth than any other denomination; it means we have the most truth and, perhaps even more important, God's authority to establish his kingdom on earth.
Critically, it is a claim that you are the only church with real priests whose ordinances (sacraments to Catholics, cleric spells to unchurched nerds) actually work.
American folk Christianity avoids the question, but the combination of scaraments that actually work, ordained ministry, and apostolic succession (as believed by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, LDS and some Lutherans) gives "real Church" vs "fake Church" a different and more significant meaning that it has in sola fide priesthood-of-all-believers Protestantism.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Thanks you for this reply. This is prime Motte advice.
Part of the reason I asked the question was to become more informed. Which is exactly what your post did. I used to have a mild to moderate fear of flying until I spent about an hour talking with a coworker who had had his pilot's license for over a decade. He walked me through everything about clear air turbulence, pressurization, and all of the checklist protocols that pilots go through in the event of any sort of emergency. It's not hyperbole to say it cured my fear of flying.
So, now, when I crash in the Alaskan Bush after unexpected turbulence, I won't be nearly as worried about rabid deer.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
Here they were simply infesting the entire countryside on sunny days and would often attack me after barely walking 10 meters from the car if stopping by the side of the road. Worrying about human or animal attacks is for noobs. Real men fear insects for a reason!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Ha. Fixed, and thank you.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
Are we saved even if we believe in "a different Jesus?" The answer, as far as most of broader Christianity is concerned, seems to be no. LDS doctrine is simply not so exclusive of those with doctrinal disagreements.
I don't think this is correct statement of Mormon theology. Mormons believe that saving ordinances (including baptism) are necessary for salvation, that only an ordained priest (in what is effectively an apostolic succession, although I don't think Mormons use the word) can validly perform them, and that the break in apostolic succession during the so-called Great Apostasy means that only the LDS Church and its offshoots have validly ordained priests. Hence the Mormon emphasis on proxy baptism for the dead - they believe that their pre-conversion ancestors are not effectively baptised, and need to be.
Protestants believe in sola fide and either that no sacraments are necessary for salvation, or that only baptism (which can be performed by anyone with no need for a sacramentally ordained minister) is necessary. The Protestant view would be that Mormons are presumptively unsaved because of a lack of the required faith. The Calvinist view would be "If God wanted you to be saved, he wouldn't have made you a Mormon."
The Catholic/Orthodox view is that only baptism is strictly necessary for salvation, and does not require a sacramentally ordained minister, but the other sacraments (including Mass) are necessary for almost everyone and do require sacramentally ordained ministers in apostolic succession. (The Catholics and Orthodox consider each other's apostolic successions and sacraments valid). So it is possible but unlikely that a baptised Protestant could be saved without darkening the door of a Catholic/Orthodox Church. The Catholic Church has stated that LDS baptism is not valid because it isn't in the name of the Trinity, implying that they think Mormons are unsaved. Also that they think Mormons are not Christian, given the centrality of baptism to the Christian understanding of the "who is a Christian?" question.
My view remains that Mormonism is a Christian heresy, and "Are Christian heretics Christians?" is an unproductive question about the meaning of words. "Can Mormons be saved?" is (assuming you believe Christianity is true) a question about the world with the answer "No" according the both Catholic and Protestant understandings.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1hr ago
Wasn't there a post recently about how bears will run away if you have the smallest firearm?
Them not being Real Muslims is the justification for why killing them is okay / moral / righteous, rather than theological fratricide. Sometimes its claimed on grounds of apostasy, sometimes that they are heathens, and sometimes qualified theological language is thrown out the door as well as any religious principles of how you should/should not treat other Muslims.
It's the same twisting of categories for why [insert denomination of Christianity] isn't Christian. Tailor a definition of the [Good Group] to some theological claim of [Subgroup], declare opponent outside the bounds of [Good Group], categorical ejection removes the target from the beneificary/protected claimed macro-group.
The Labyrinth at Hawara
In Egypt, there is an enigmatic labyrinth, greater and more lavish than even the pyramids, attested to by ancient classical sources which has attained almost legendary status in the Western world ever since Herodotus described it in his Histories:
"[T]hey caused to be made a labyrinth, situated a little above the lake of Moiris and nearly opposite to that which is called the City of Crocodiles. This I saw myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all the great works produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth, though it is true that both the temple at Ephesos and that at Samos are works worthy of note. The pyramids also were greater than words can say, and each one of them is equal to many works of the Hellenes, great as they may be; but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the North side and six upon the South, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside; and there are in it two kinds of chambers, the one kind below the ground and the other above upon these, three thousand in number, of each kind fifteen hundred. The upper set of chambers we ourselves saw, going through them, and we tell of them having looked upon them with our own eyes; but the chambers under ground we heard about only; for the Egyptians who had charge of them were not willing on any account to show them, saying that here were the sepulchres of the kings who had first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles. Accordingly we speak of the chambers below by what we received from hearsay, while those above we saw ourselves and found them to be works of more than human greatness. For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that way through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers beyond it, and from the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts. Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls; and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them, each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly; and at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of forty fathoms, upon which large figures are carved, and to this there is a way made under ground."
Herodotus describes it as a multi-tiered structure nearby a lake named "Moiris", with one set of chambers above the ground, and yet another set of chambers beneath it which outsiders were forbidden from entering due to housing the sepulchres of its kings. Just the surface level of this labyrinthine mortuary temple seems to have floored him to the extent he declared it superior to the pyramids, and in fact superior to anything built by the Greeks. This labyrinth would also be described by the Greek geographer Strabo in his book Geographica 17, writing that at Lake Moeris there was a Labyrinth "comparable to the pyramids, and, near it, the tomb of the king who built the Labyrinth."
Despite likely never seeing this labyrinth himself, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus would go on to assert that the labyrinth was constructed by a native king named Mendes, who "did not accomplish anything at all, but he did build himself a tomb known as the Labyrinth,48 which was not so remarkable for its size as it was impossible to imitate in respect to its ingenious design; for a man who enters it cannot easily find his way out, unless he gets a guide who is thoroughly acquainted with the structure. 3 And some say that Daedalus, visiting Egypt and admiring the skill shown in the building, also constructed for Minos, the king of Crete, a labyrinth like the one in Egypt, in which was kept, as the myth relates, the beast called Minotaur. 4 However, the labyrinth in Crete has entirely disappeared, whether it be that some ruler razed it to the ground or that time effaced the work, but the one in Egypt has stood intact in its entire structure down to our lifetime." So he even goes as far as to claim that Knossos was inspired by the Egyptian labyrinth.
It seems that the structure has degraded significantly from the time of Diodorus to now, because this mighty labyrinth appears to have been long stripped from the Earth, and barely anything remains. The Jesuit priest Father Claude Sicard identified current-day Hawara as the likely location of the labyrinth, drawing extensively from ancient descriptions of the location. There is a lake at that location, albeit shrunken from the original size of Lake Moeris, and sure enough, there is also a pyramid there - the pyramid of Amenemhat III, which is likely the tomb which Strabo recounts in his description of the location. When archaeologists investigated the location, things seemed to match up satisfactorily - except for the labyrinth itself. There was almost no trace of it, and few archeological remains could be found near the site. Flinders Petrie, upon visiting the site in 1889, found an enormous 300m x 244m artificial stone plateau - apparently the foundation of the labyrinth - and suggested the original labyrinth had been quarried for stone. This was the archeological consensus up until relatively recently.
The Mataha Expedition, a geophysical study conducted by the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, was carried out in March of 2008. It was done with the permission of Zahi Hawass, president of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and carried out with the support of Ghent University. They deployed ground-penetrating techniques to examine the site at Hawara, and their research "confirms the presence of archaeological features at the labyrinth area south of the Hawara pyramid of Amenemhet III. These features covering an underground area of several hectares, have the prominent signature of vertical walls on the geophysical results. The vertical walls with an average thickness of several meters, are connected to shape nearly closed rooms, which are interpreted to be huge in number." This nexus of rooms and walls that they interpret as a labyrinth is completely submerged below the water table at this point, and above it there is a much more haphazard set of observations which appear to be decayed mudbrick features - likely the remains of a Roman settlement. In between the two layers of this underground structure there is the large stone slab identified by Petrie, and the authors posit that this was not the foundation of the structure, but its roof instead. Upon presentation of the scan results at the Ghent University public lecture, Hawass requested that the team stop communicating their results, "intimidating the Mataha Expedition team members with Egyptian National Security sanctions."
In other words, the Labyrinth of Hawara may have been quietly rediscovered over 17 years ago, and this find seems to have been buried in a way where it has gotten almost no mainstream attention. As far as I can tell the original study that located the labyrinth released to nothing but deafening silence, with only a small handful of obscure tabloids covering it. The most mainstream it's ever been was when Joe Rogan hosted a content creator in his podcast who brought attention to the possible discovery, and that's pretty much the most high-profile coverage it's ever gotten. No proper front-page coverage in mainstream media outlets. Nothing that would bring it to the attention of your average Joe on the street.
Meanwhile, the results that the Mataha Expedition found have been independently reconfirmed multiple times now. In 2010, the authors of a study named "VLF-EM study for archaeological investigation of the labyrinth mortuary temple complex at Hawara area, Egypt" applied VLF-EM (very low frequency electromagnetic method) techniques to the site at Hawara, and found subsurface features consistent with descriptions by Herodotus. "[S]omewhat elongated and square filtered in-phase VLF-EM anomalies can be observed. They are approximately oriented in the SE-NW and NE-SW directions. These anomalies are produced from alternative positive (good conductors) and negative (bad conductors) peaks. These linear features may be interpreted as the remains of the labyrinth, which was described by Herodotus (II, 148–9): the visitor was guided from courtyards into rooms into galleries into more rooms and from there into more courtyards. Strabo (ca. 64 BC–19 AD) also described the labyrinth as hidden chambers, which are long and large in number and have paths running through one another that twist and turn." The location map they provide confirms this to be the very same structure the Mataha expedition analysed.
In 2023, yet another paper was written about it synthesising the results of both the Mataha expedition and the VLF-EM studies, and supplementing that with further evidence. Apparently there was even a 3d reconstruction of the subsurface features at some point, revealing at least two levels to the structure, but no accompanying scientific paper detailing their methodology was ever published, making it difficult to substantiate or check their findings. The author presents results from his studies of the site with Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar, where he finds the following: "Below the pyramid in what is believed to be a mortuary complex are at least three returns that are rectangular in shape. One of the delineated regions (B) is about 275,000 sq. feet – almost the estimated size as the rectangular area excavated by Petrie. Another region (C) may be the continuation of the above structure. A second rectangular area (D) west of the Abdul Wahbi canal is also evident in the SAR image. The lack of visible structures in Google Earth imagery over these areas suggests the possibility that these returns could be subsurface features."
It really strikes me just how possibly staggering these findings are, yet they're completely unknown by your average member of the public - at least one that isn't highly interested in archaeology or Egyptology. If it's actually the site attested to by the ancient Greeks, this might well be one of the most interesting unexcavated sites from antiquity I've seen (second only to Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum), and hopefully more work will be done to preserve and investigate it in the future. And hopefully it gets opened to the public within my lifetime. I for one would like to be able to follow in the footsteps of Herodotus and see the remains of this massive mortuary temple with my own eyes.
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