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FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
33m ago
As someone who came from a Protestant backwater (evangelical non-denominational, essentially) I can attest to that! We didn't have Acquinas or Augustine or Calvin (and we didn't want them either!) but we had Lewis. We adored Lewis!
Why here's a potentially appropriate bit of Lewis now, on how non-Christians often view the idea of sin:
Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. This has struck me more forcibly when I spoke to the R.A.F. than when I spoke to students: whether (as I believe) the proletariat is more self-righteous than other classes, or whether educated people are cleverer at concealing their pride, this creates for us a new situation. The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.
It is generally useless to try to combat this attitude, as older preachers did, by dwelling on sins like drunkenness and un-chastity. The modern proletariat is not drunken. As for fornication, contraceptives have made a profound difference. As long as this sin might socially ruin a girl by making her the mother of a bastard, most men recognized the sin against charity which it involved, and their consciences were often troubled by it. Now that it need have no such consequences, it is not, I think, generally felt to be a sin at all. My own experience suggests that if we can awake the conscience of our hearers at all, we must do so in quite different directions. We must talk of Conceit, spite, jealousy, cowardice, meanness, etc. But I am very far from believing that I have found the solution of this problem.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
35m ago
I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche.
That's interesting that you say that. I'm incredibly lucky to have some male friends where we have essentially no secrets (or close to it, at any rate). But I recognize that that's unusual and most friendships (regardless of gender composition) never get to that level.
There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship. I'd like to tell them they're being overly cynical, but I also can't say that their fears are entirely baseless either.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
43m ago
I like to use neoliberal to refer to things about the establishment domestic policy I don't like, and the more I dislike them the more neoliberal they are. For the establishment foreign policy I use neoconservative.
Crowstep
47m ago
90% coincide with what makes men lust after me
I'd say it's more like 60-70%. There's definitely a percentage of women's fashion that is just signalling taste/wealth to other women. Septum rings and baggy mom jeans aren't sexy but they've still had their fashionable moment.
phosphorus2
just now
You are misconstruing
Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right.
as
one time said something in a speech
If Mamdani did actually did actually give a speech at an event for socialism, in which he described himself as a socialist, while approvingly quoting foundational socialist texts - that is very obviously not "one time said something in a speech".
Corvos
5m ago
Humans naturally imitate those of higher status, which means that de facto aristocrats (/celebs/billionaires/influencers/sportsmen) will continue to lead by example whether they want to or not. What we abandoned was requiring them to put some thought into it.
That's funny, it's the inverse of a common Revisionist joke about why people are so upset over the good news that ~3 million Jews weren't gassed inside shower rooms. "Rabbi, good news..."
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6m ago
Safe Injection Sites. And the provenness of their effectiveness is certainly disputed. As is that of enforcement, as the 80s drug war showed. And rehab is a joke.
Zephyr
9m ago
I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
What type of developer are you if you'd rather be talking than coding? /s
More seriously, the situations I find AI is really useful is when I need some information, but have enough knowledge to fine tune it after the fact. I've tried to use it to write code, and it always produces code that is kind of messy and bad. I asked it to produce some builder interfaces from a set of DTO interfaces, and it would do weird things like put in defaults that I didn't intend, or return the wrong field occasionally*. What worried me about it is that the junior developer I was working with at the time was copy-pasting them into the codebase as is, and didn't have any comprehension about why they wouldn't work.
*For reference, the type of implementation I was talking about would be something like:
interface IAddress { function line1() : string; function line2() : ?string; function city() : string; function province() : ?IProvince; function country() : ICountry; function zipCode() : IZipCode; }
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( ?string $line2 ) : static; // you get the picture }
It would give me something like:
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( string $line2 = '' ) : static; function setLCountry( ICountry $country ) : static; function setProvince( string $province ) : static; }
Which was just not very useful.
ChickenOverlord
9m ago
One of the times I was most proud of my dad was at scout camp. They had a bellyflop contest for all the scoutmasters and other adult leaders at the pool, and my dad had the smallest belly by a massive margin. And my dad isn't morbidly obese or anything, but he's certainly no beanpole either.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
13m ago
Men will bitch about their wives, but these same men would be eating a take-out sandwich over the sink without them.
I don't know, sure, some wives certainly make some men miserable. Any man with children (except in very rare circumstances) will say it's easier to have a wife.
faceh
13m ago
I mean, no accounting fully for taste. Lower back tattoos had their moment, those hair hump things, Jeggings. None of which did anything for me, my thing was pleated skirts. I assume there are guys who did get into mom jeans and might enjoy septum piercings.
Hence my point elsewhere that I rarely see women doing fashion trends that are completely repellent to men as a class, outside of direct political statements.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
17m ago
I suppose that hasn't been the solution, no. I do on occasion feel guilty about being spiteful, jealous, cowardly or mean. But I do not seek to fix those flaws so that I might not be judged as harshly by God. The closest thing to it is that I would not feel just in judging God, as Lewis describes, for allowing war, poverty and disease, if I myself allow it in my small ways.
There's also the entire thing about framing sin as sickness - if I am sick, I might seek remedy for my own good, but why in the world would I feel guilty about it? Least of all before God, who is often described as the one who sends sicknesses down on people to test them, humble them etc.
Maybe all that compulsive society-scale guilt tripping is good for society in the long term, but I do not see why I should willingly submit to it where my own conscientousness suffices.
I have some really good male friends too. They know a lot of things about me that could be used to destroy me if they wished. But I trust them to not.
And vice-versa.
But you see, what happened is they all got married and so acquired a partner that could serve that role better than I could.
Which has left me with not many options aside from finding a good therapist if I really want to unload. Although my brothers (as in, actual biological brothers) are still very good for commiseration.
There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship.
Yep. And that's one hell of a tradeoff to make to achieve reproductive success. I'd want to have a partner who I could occasionally vent to with the understanding that I would always get back to work and make shit happen, but had the basic, I dunno, decency, to get that part of their role was to help take the edge off the stress every now and again so I can be the person they need me to be.
(also, from very direct experience, I have much less need to vent about emotions when I'm getting laid on the regular. Almost no issues feel overwhelming when that primal urge is satisfied)
I'd also gently point out that it was safer to do this when divorce laws weren't as lenient.
aceventura
27m ago
Relevant comment from Jeremy Carl:
Despite the fact that they were not born or raised in America, Zohran Mamdani's mother was welcomed as a student at Harvard and his father is a professor at Columbia, two of the most elite American institutions. His father originally came to the U.S. as a sponsored college scholarship student from East Africa in a program that was funded by wealthy American foundations, with it's principal funding arranged by then Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.
His maternal grandfather, Amrit Lal Nair, was a member of the ultra-elite Indian Administrative Service, perhaps the most important and prestigious job in India during his era-- it was a merit-based product of British rule. He had to flee Pakistan at partition in 1947 because of Hindu-Muslim communal tensions.
HIs father's family was able to go to Uganda to make their fortune thanks to the cosmopolitan nature of the British Empire. After Ugandan independence, his father's family was dispossessed and expelled from Uganda by the radical black nationalism of Idi Amin (they would ultimately return years later)
His father gave Zohran the middle name "Kwame" after Kwame Nkrumah, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, and friend to Communist China, who turned Ghana into a one-party state and fostered a cult of personality around himself that would have made North Korea blush.
And Zohran Mamdani, by his own admission, grew up, largely n America, the privileged child of two affluent and famous parents.
At every stage, Mamdani's family, for multiple generations, benefitted enormously from the generosity and openness of the West. And at every stage, his family has spit on that generosity, allying itself with third-world socialist and communist movements, even though those movements were directly responsible for the oppression of their family.
Speaking intellectually, Mamdani's warmed over socialist/communist third-worldism is totally uninteresting.
Speaking psychologically, his family's deep-seated hatred for their benefactors and love of their oppressors would make a fascinating study.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
31m ago
I would like to meet these women, for research purposes. I know well some guys who would have sex with probably any woman who paid them even the slightest bit of attention. I also know guys who have absurdly finicky standards (or claim to.) I don't doubt your claim here but I've personally sailed through many siren-populated (if not infested) waters without earmuffs and been able to get through without diving overboard or crashing the vessel. Reflection suggests you're probably right, though. Maybe I've just been fortunate or the Matas Hari I'veet have been either insufficiently charming or insufficiently motivated.
I'm just saying. Women have almost universally settled upon their conception of what 'looks good' by way of what makes men pay them greater attention. In the west, at least, nobody holds a gun to their head to make them wear tight clothing that emphasizes curves and shows strategic amounts of skin, even when those outfits are less comfortable to wear. But they do wear such outfits.
Pull up photos of women attending music festivals. And I mean, regardless of genre, from (warning: Semi NSFW) Metal to EDM to Country, and see that while the aesthetics are different, women generally converge on outfits that are revealing and eye-catching and tight and emphasize the secondary sexual characteristics. (yes, admittedly this is prone to selection effects).
I don't think they 'feel' the biological basis, but its the rare woman who can ignore their own impulses and dress in a way that is actively repellent to men and feel truly satisfied and healthy about it.
Yes, there's some large amount of culturally-transmitted information about what is 'attractive' in the other sex as well, but we haven't seen so much divergence between humans as you'd expect if it were solely culturally informed.
Anyhow, humans are just responding to impulses and they don't really think a lot about where those impulses come from. If you're hungry, eat, if you're thirsty, drink. If you're horny, put on the standard mating display and see if you get any takers.
But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
33m ago
Speak my name, and after a week or so I'll probably appear!
hooser
37m ago
The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway.
You're right, it's not all NYC apartments, just half of them.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
42m ago
This is an interesting take. I've no idea how accurate, but certainly interesting.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
43m ago
Haha, I didn't think about it that way but you're absolutely right!
Srlsy, tho, it's a pretty straightforward fantasy setting that has some development and big battle stuff and some stuff I think of as setting things right. At $5 a pop, I've enjoyed them more than enough, though my usual caveats of being a cheap date on Kindle still apply.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
44m ago
: men don't care if you're smart and fun (though that's nice), they care if you have the requisite sexy figure
Pushing back on this slightly. Yes you're probably very correct if we're just talking about sex and sexual attraction. A pretty face also helps. Smart doesn't come into it too terribly much except perhaps at that level of kink. But past just sex and at the relationship level, smart and fun are absolute requirements, at least for most every man I know who would stick around. (And of those two, "fun" is considerably harder to gauge and maintain).
A woman whose sole offering is a sexy figure will find herself ignored, or at least not really attended to, post-coitally. But sure, she'll get laid as much as she cares to, no doubt about it.
The term 'attractive' itself implies there's at least two entities involved, being compelled to move towards each other by some force or other.
i.e, you can't be 'attractive' unless there's something towards which the attraction is directed, no? So it feels good to be 'attractive,' but you can't judge what is or is not attractive in the vacuum of your own singular mind.
Evolution doesn't provide us the chain of reasoning, we have to infer what logics of fitness and survival brought us here, but the co-evolution of the sexes means almost any behavioral feature of one sex is inherently determined by millennia of interactions with the other, with several feedback loops involved as well.
I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche. Intimacy, as you say.
For that, you want a partner that has some buy-in and is committed to sticking around for the long term and thus has a greater familiarity with your personal foibles and hangups and struggles, and has accepted you 'in spite' of those. i.e. they make you comfortable enough to be open.
So in that case yeah, you'd want somebody who is emotionally mature and a decent communicator, which would be rarer to find among 18-20 year olds.
But it also doesn't take too much experience to just let someone put their head in your lap and talk about their inner world while providing the occasional constructive response or affirmation, and remember enough of the details that they can build on it as you go.
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