domain:houseofstrauss.com
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3m ago
No Pope Pizzaballa. The meme dream is dead.
veqq
4m ago
Hinduism is the equivalent of "Mediterranean religions" (including e.g. Mithraism and Greek mystery cults... and Renaissance Catholics writing about Greek mythology, besides the Greek and Roman pagans...). There are mono- and polytheistic Hindus! Yea, there are Buddhists!
Christianity is a single specific branch, equivalent in nesting to e.g. Shaktism. The Catholic Church would then be equivalent to an organization of temples adhering to Shaktism. In Hinduism, there is e.g. Mundeshwari Devi which is like a single small building, but "in operation" for about 1300 years.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
5m ago
That motherfucker needs to be a camp, anyone who mentions nukes is an enemy to humanity. If this gets me banned, fuck it.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
7m ago
The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
Just looked it up, I've been on a Scotch kick lately and I'm not eager about more price increases- there's a 25% tariff Trump instated his first term, but was suspended for five years in 2021. Supposedly the industry lost 600 million pounds during the time they were in effect.
Blueberry
9m ago
Congratulations United States, you are Pope!
Edit: Sorry if that is to short but I am currently watching the livestream from Europe and are totally baffled.
Stellula
12m ago
But my understanding is that the current leadership is pretty committed to burying anything that makes the faith stand out from the undifferentiated mass of non-denominational Christianity generally.
This isn't really possible, is it? I've been on a bit of a rabbit hole chasing down what Mormons actually think for the last few months (it's really hard to find, which is odd for a "church"), and from what I can tell their claim of even being "Christian" at all is a bit of an intentional linguistic trick.
Mormons believe in somebody they call Jesus, but they believe he was a guy who came to The United States of America about 2000 years ago and met with people living there at the time. The core of their religion is that there was a group of Jews who sailed to North America several thousand years ago, split into two groups which formed large, continent scale societies, and then went to war. There was a guy, Mormon, who wrote down some revelation on golden tablets, hid them, and then eventually an angel came to Joseph Smith in 1850 and told him where to find them.
Again, it's a bit tough to actually find what the Mormons believe. I think the mormons try to hide this on purpose because of how it comes across to people not familiar with it.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
12m ago
So, does this somewhat surprising choice of an American pope count as another instance of successful meme magic?
Cardinal Prevost, the first American. Pope Leo XIV.
It’s not exactly the RETVRN we’d been prepared to expect from this election, so I don’t know what this means. I don’t think hydro spent a lot of time discussing him.
SigurdsSilverSword
20m ago
A new pope has been chosen. Exactly who remains to be seen.
Hoping for Pizzaballa, has the most "papal vibes" of the papabili that I'm familiar with.
Skulldrinker
26m ago
I've noticed that all the "real" AI/robot characters in fiction very explicitly DON'T talk like LLMs or clippy. They use fewer words, not more, and come off as cryptic, sarcastic, or earnest. "Johnny5 alive!" "I am not a gun." "I know now why you cry." "Just something from a movie I like." "I'm coming with you too. Cassian said I had to."
netstack
Texas is freedom land
31m ago
If you think raising the kids is chilling, you might be single for a long time…
Stellula
32m ago
It is an outrageous stretch to claim that "hinduism" has existed for thousands of years in the same way that The Catholic Church has. When this claim comes up, Hindus take the same tack as Muslims and Jews do, which is trying to claim that both there is no institution (whenever obvious problems with either of these religions come up), and that also it's the oldest institution.
There is no Hindu equivalent of The Pope, or The Cardinals, or Vatican City, or the Catechism. There are some old monestaries which have a loose connection to the modern world, some of which are almost as old as The Church.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
33m ago
I think your analysis is roughly correct, but the framing is bizarre.
Is my job proxy war? Im pretty sure my employer doesn’t believe I “deserve” wages for nothing.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
35m ago
The discrepancy isn't that Rowling "doesn't acknowledge they teach defense with a deadly weapon in Hogwarts". It's that they explicitly don't teach you to defend yourself in the only reliably lethal manner.
They DO, though. Well, "Mad-Eye" does, but he is the DaDA teacher at the time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
36m ago
The UK and US have announced a trade deal.
Key terms (based on press releases - apparently the text hasn't been agreed yet):
- US continues to charge a default 10% tariff on imports from the UK
- Up to 100k cars per annum are exempt from the 27.5% tariff on cars, but still pay the flat 10%. Not clear whether car parts are included.
- British steel, aluminium, and aeroplane parts (this mostly means Rolls-Royce jet engines) enter the US tariff-free. The US announcement implies that there is going to be some still-to-be negotiated quota arrangement on steel.
- UK will be exempted from future pharma tariffs
- Both sides cut tariffs on agricultural products, including beef and corn ethanol. The tariff cuts are reciprocal but benefit the US more than the UK because of the balance of farm trade. Scotch whisky is not included.
- The US announcement says that the UK will cut non-tariff barriers on US agricultural exports, the UK announcement says that the UK is not going to relax food safety standards.
- The US is trying to rhetorically link the deal to a $10 billion order for Boeing planes that "a British company" (presumably British Airways) is going to announce imminently.
- Nothing on services - in particular the UK isn't going to cut our Digital Services Tax (which is mostly paid by US tech companies on their UK revenue).
Initial thoughts:
- This is a thin deal. Both sides are drastically overegging it in their press releases.
- This is worse for the UK than status quo ante (because of the 10% flat tariff), although given the current salience of steel in the UK Starmer has a good chance of spinning zero tariffs on steel as a big win. The US has aggressively protected its steel industry for a long time (under administrations of both parties) and US tariffs on British steel have been a long-running grievance.
- This is probably the best deal the UK could have got. It is better than any deal we could have got quickly as an EU member, but not necessarily better than the deal the EU could have got after a protracted trade war with pain to both sides.
- The benefits to the US are pretty trivial - the farm tariff cuts affect about $1 billion of US exports. The US's biggest ask in trade negotiations with European countries is on food safety standards, and they didn't get it.
- The two sides are sufficiently confident that they can fill in the details that they announced the deal before the text was finalised. I find this surprising - there are a couple of major bear pits where the two sides announcements are not aligned. The obvious one is non-tariff barriers on food. The less obvious one is that the US announcement claims a $5 billion opportunity from changes to UK public procurement, but not what they are. This is an extremely politically difficult area in the UK because of NHSism.
Thoughts on the politics:
- The US announcement explicitly calls out the US cutting tariffs on British aeroplane parts as a win for US manufacturing. I think this is the most public acknowledgement to date that tariffs are hurting American manufacturing by disrupting supply chains.
- Trump admin spin (though not the official White House announcement) is that the big win for the US is that the 10% tariff stays in place, and this represents the US collecting $6 billion in taxes on British businesses. That is what you say if you are defending a thin deal.
- Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has attacked the deal as worse than status quo ante. A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
- The Liberal Democrats are not attacking the substance of the deal - we are saying that Parliament must have a chance to approve the final text.
- The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
- Farage hasn't spoken yet.
AvocadoPanic
37m ago
I've not tried much creative writing with Claude.
Claude I use mostly for vibe coding. It's better at this than Grok.
Skulldrinker
37m ago
I used AI to refine a work of fiction and found it almost incapable of suggesting anything good; it's very much a rubber duck programming tool. I also struggled to get it to not wax soy-poetic about every passage. the phrases "Earned," "Chef's Kiss," "and that's why it matters" now fill me with rage.
ControlsFreak
38m ago
I don't know whether the common parental response to a child's, "That's not fair!" being, "Life's not fair," is considered sarcasm or not. But yeah, there's probably not a lot of reassuring things when one is approaching some of the deepest questions in life and the universe. There are, indeed, huge question marks all over the place that take time and effort to work through, and flippant takes shouldn't really expect much of a response besides pointing out that the take is, indeed, flippant. Such children almost certainly lack the perspective and ability to process context to have all that serious a conversation about the nature and purpose of fairness.
2rafa
39m ago
What happened in Rotherham occurred and occurs in every single Western country that experienced mass immigration. The only difference is that the peculiar ownership dynamics of the British tabloid press meant it achieved a degree of media attention it didn’t elsewhere, except to a much lesser extent in the Low Countries.
hydroacetylene
40m ago
Yes. I would rather the commons be shit up than used as a weapon against me and mine. I know you’re not a social conservative but surely you can see why I would hold this view.
urquan
I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness.
44m ago
And then of course there are Anglicans (and, of course, continental Lutherans), who are very insistent that they have a chain of apostolic succession, even if the Vatican disagrees and the Orthodox... don't really care either way, apostolic succesion is tied to Church communion for them.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
44m ago
Luckily the Eastern Orthodox, with a variety of Patriarchs, don't have this problem.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
46m ago
I’m curious though how you perceive ecclesiastical authority to be distinct from ideological? To me obviously they feel to be fundamentally intertwined, as “personnel is policy” as they say in the secular political world, but is it typical in either East or West orthodoxy to consider them quite distinct?
Both East and West tend to cite apostolic succession as the bedrock of their authority. Obviously Protestants tend to disagree because, well... none of them have a true chain of apostolic succession.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
47m ago
What justifies the violations of freedom that allow that material control?
They've observably gotten a lot of mileage out of material inequality and various flavors of materialist apocalypse.
The question isn't whether race is their biggest, best wedge in the American context. It certainly is. The question is whether the giant hammering that wedge ceases if the wedge were to be taken away. I'm pretty confident it does not. They will find their next-best alternative, and continue swinging.
I mean, the Book Of Mormon is freely available as an audiobook on, for example, Apple Podcasts. I listened to the entirety of it, plus the whole Pearl of Great Price and a decent chunk of the Doctrine & Covenants. It’s not difficult for a layman to access these texts.
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