domain:parrhesia.substack.com
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
just now
I’ll combine my response to you with my response to @Amadan, since you’re both basically making the same point here.
So, let’s take epistemics totally out of the equation for a second (since that’s all just stuff happening within my own head) and focus on the material tradeoffs here. Cost-benefit analysis. Supposing for a moment that the theology is all total bunk, let’s assess what I’m likely to get out of it, versus what I will be asked to sacrifice.
I’ll start with the sacrifices, as they are substantial. Obviously I will have to give up alcohol, coffee and tea; those are all things which have featured heavily in my social life at various points in my life, and all things which I enjoy consuming. (Others would probably also struggle with giving up tobacco, vaping, or drugs, although fortunately I never got seriously into any of those.) Tithing ten percent of my income will be a significant financial outlay, and will likely considerably reduce my discretionary spending, at least in the short term. I will likely be asked (although not forced) to take on duties to support church functions, including things like periodically performing baptisms for the dead. I will likely lose some friends who will be outraged by my joining a church whose stance on homosexuality and transgender issues they find repellent/offensive. Probably most notably, I am removing from my potential pool of romantic partners any woman who would not be comfortable converting to the church in order to be with me; this means closing off a great many possibilities and massively reduces my options. (There are also epistemic questions in terms of how I will explain/justify my beliefs to others, including my future children, but I’ll put those aside for now.)
Okay, so what do I get in return, materially speaking? As you’ve both noted, I get access to a pool of chaste young women with good values, who come pre-selected for being interested in children and family. (This is not actually the primary reason I’ve made this decision, although given my complaints about dating on the Motte in the past, I can understand why you both zeroed in on this topic.) I become enmeshed into a social network of upwardly-mobile people who may provide employment opportunities. I get to be around people — women, even! — who haven’t elected to make their entire personality about how queer they are and how much they hate anybody to the right of Hasan Piker. I get to feel (and to be perceived by others as) useful, respected, and necessary as I’m guided toward a position within the church that can utilize my talents. I get a good, airtight excuse not to even be asked to engage in behaviors that could be harmful or addictive to me. And, if necessary, I even get access to the church’s housing assistance program and other pieces of the famous “Mormon welfare”.
Again, this is all leaving aside questions of whether or not any of the religious claims of the church are true. I’m becoming far more comfortable with the proposition that at least the stuff about the afterlife (and the pre-mortal life, which is another cool aspect of LDS theology) is true. As for my other concerns about the church? I’ve been very transparent with the missionaries about those, including the guy who did my “baptism interview”, and it hasn’t been a problem.
The thing is, religious practice, for the vast majority of human beings who have ever existed, has probably always involved a delicate dance between public and private beliefs. It’s not like I’m getting constantly grilled to make sure that I really super seriously believe and know that ancient Levantine Jews sailed to America and built a continent-spanning civilization that lasted for centuries. That’s not actually very important to me, and doesn’t have any tangible effect on my behavior in the here and now. It could potentially pose an issue later on when I have to be a proper paterfamilias and spiritual teacher and guide to my future children. This is something I’ve already thought a lot about and will continue to figure out how to navigate.
You’ve both expressed horror and consternation at the thought that at some point I might actually convince myself that it’s true. As if this would be some catastrophic loss for me. But I honestly have to ask both of you: why would this be bad? What actual bad effects would that have on my life? I wouldn’t get to win any more arguments against sincerely-believing Christians/Mormons? Okay, what am I actually getting out of participating in those arguments now? I’ll have a flawed/incomplete model of the cosmos? Okay, how is that actually going to negatively impact my actions? Like, I agree that epistemic hygiene is a virtue, and that reducing cognitive dissonance is good, but clearly these things are not the only terminal values a person can have. What other concerns do you actually have about this decision? Do you just find it yucky? What would you have me do instead?
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
7m ago
You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't.
I am literally the guy writing the posts on 4chan that make you think “that guy wouldn’t make a good mottizen”.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
8m ago
LOL, perhaps you'd like to hear about Werner von Braun instead?
I don't think the average immigration restrictionist has many objections to letting more Anglos or Saxons in.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
8m ago
Labs are a lot more chill than collies in my experience (my dog is actually part Lab). I think your dog's life sounds excellent.
This is obviously tempered by bias and the fact I don't know these dogs. But Collies have this seemingly profound need to work. It actually seems like there's a pretty strong correlation between dog intelligence and "desire to work" in general.
When my dog plays fetch, it feels like play. The way he runs, the tail wagging, the fact he'll stop to chew on the ball or roll it around a bit before bringing it back. Whereas every collie I see playing fetch seems to have it optimized down to a science of how to get and return the ball as quickly as possible, and then to grind out as many repetitions as possible as fast as possible.
Maybe they're actually having a ton of fun doing it, but it just feels very serious in a way other dogs playing fetch doesn't.
One Malinois at my dog park (not a Collie, but another smart working dog) has figured out it's actually much more optimal to just attempt to jump and catch the ball immediately once it's thrown (the owner was sitting) which is indeed a lot more efficient but totally defeats the point of the game. Although it was pretty cool to see the problem solving.
ChickenOverlord
17m ago
and look at a 4channer
There are a decent amount of anons here, actually. /pol/ is where I go for a fun roll in the mud (and to add to my edgy meme collection), this place is where I go when I want some actual substance and intellectual stimulation.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
18m ago
I wanted to challenge you on the spanking opinion thing but holy shit, North Americans have 50%-60% approval towards statements like "parents should be allowed to physically discipline children" or "it's sometimes necessary to spank your child"
Western Europe is more like 20-30% acceptance.
I had no idea it was that high.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
22m ago
I will say all the Mormons I know are very pleasant people and if I were to consider a church and could overlook not having a speck of faith in me, I'd consider the LDS strongly. (Honestly the greatest trial for me in terms of adhering to their rules would be giving up coffee.)
A paragraph I could've written myself. Never been a smoker and giving up alcohol wasn't too bad, but my morning coffee is often the best part of the day.
Corvos
27m ago
This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume the worst)?
Gee, I wonder why they don't want their current userbase?
More broadly, I think that there was a time when a) the grey tribe thought that they had more in common with the liberals than they did, and b) thought that queer liberalism was the future and opposing it was just asking for damnatio memoriae. They were therefore inclined to allow/enforce progressive political orthodoxy.
As this arrangement broke down, tech leaders have become increasingly aware that a) they don't have much in common with this faction and b) having a solid bloc of very queer very trans very liberal users makes your userbase incredibly volatile, aggressive and hard to please. See for example:
Furthermore, while I don't believe that most of the tech industry or most "tech people" are outright fascists, reactionary centrism of the debate-bro flavour, or what noted race scientist Scott Siskind calls the "grey tribe", is distressingly common.
The fundamental problem with having a heterodox social media platform is that humans are very tribal and are not psychologically capable of being in genuinely heterodox environments. Even what we have here is, largely, a political monoculture with a strict set of rules and a culture that is (somewhat) orthogonal to red/blue but still very clear. You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't. Observations to this effect have been made by many posters here right before they flame out.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
28m ago
As I understand it, the prohibition comes from Words of Wisdom from Joseph Smith, not the Book of Mormon. It wasn't until 1921 that following it because a prerequisite for temple admission, so the history of following it is different than the history of following the Book of Mormon, hence some divergence on the issue.
DelendaEst
31m ago
This is why the ideological capture of places like Reddit and old Twitter was such a problem, as long as it is viewed as the "neutral" option network effects make it hard to leave and make any alternative which is founded explicitly as a refuge from the bias fated to become the opposite bias but 10 times worse. The right failed to do this several times with truth social and parlor and gab, and its why the left hated Elon buying Twitter so much as this gave the right one of the neutral spaces and the left's attempt to make a new site has gone little better than the right's attempts.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
34m ago
I personally have contempt for people that are too lazy or incompetent to train their dogs and just engage in pointless acts of cruelty directed at an animal that clearly has no idea why they're being hurt. This isn't some Piker-specific position.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
36m ago
I'll certainly take the compliment, but sadly my writing skills are limited to the occasional high-quality sentence.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
38m ago
I think most dogs that are bred to run believe that their role is to run and basically enjoy the activity. I'm sure many dogs were subject to abject cruelty in prior eras for reasons that I would personally find abhorrent and I don't think this is much of a defense of Piker. If the absolute best someone can say is that people were also cruel to dogs in the past, this does not move me one iota from the position that this is degenerate, third-world behavior unbecoming of a decent modern dog owner.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
39m ago
Ha, you must have missed my first and only post to the main site.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
40m ago
How does Amazon get away with charging like 1200x the commodity price of bandwidth of a data center provider like hurricane electric?
That's how:
I could just do it how I'd do at work and have something in like an hour
There was a point where I was questioning my own sanity about AWS / GCP / etc. prices because my calculations were showing similar price differences, but any time I take a look it does seem like they charge literal orders of magnitude more, and not just for bandwidth.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
44m ago
When we got a dog, and had it professionally trained, they used a shock collar. They also gave use the shock collar, and instructed us on it's use.
This is when shock collars are good. Professional people who actually knew what the fuck they were doing trained your dog, and then further trained you on how to be a good trainer to your dog.
Hassan seems like... 0 of those things are true?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
45m ago
every border collie I see in Toronto is autistically fixated on fetch as a replacement for herding, it's sad
This is also my Labrador retriever, but, well, she's literally a retriever so I don't think it's such a bad life for her. For a 7-year old lab, mostly laying around all day, punctuated by sprinting around fetching and indoor games of "find the stuffed animal" seems pretty good.
More broadly, I completely agree with your core point and think the contrary position seems so ridiculous to me that it's hard to see it as anything other than vice signaling. Taking animals that have these deeply engrained personality traits that they're literally bred to perform and forcing them to sit still for the sake of the aesthetic on stream is just obviously the behavior of a cruel moron.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
46m ago
I am confident most invisible fences have an allowable area greater than 3 feet by 2 feet.
theincompetencetheorist
52m ago
So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".
So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.
It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
53m ago
If you're planning on dying, and hate the world and want to extract revenge on it. Why not go to your nearest sporting event/concert and wait for it to let out? Or rent a car, drive to New York, and unload in a PACKED subway station at 8:30am on a Tuesday.
Who says they hate the world equally? Maybe they hate the people nearer to them more? Also, as a more practical matter, shooting up a local Walmart is easy to plan; you've probably been there a bunch of times. And there's no waiting where someone can notice you standing around and possibly question you.
Hitting the NYC subway is even less likely; even if they only care about body count, what do they know about the subway? I mean, I know two stations where that would work well (if you didn't mind getting killed or caught), but I use the subway regularly. Somebody from suburbia or flyoverville has no idea what the subway is like. As with "write what you know", "kill where you know" is probably "good" advice.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
54m ago
Humans have much more meta-cognition to be able to learn independent from their initial nurturing. They can also think about the cause and effect of their actions, which dogs cannot. They can also learn much more easily, and generalize that learning (dogs are so so so bad at generalizing).
But I personally am actually somewhat a fan of that argument when applied to humans who came from anti-social or otherwise extremely sub-optimal backgrounds.
The other side of that though is much like a shitty dog, I think shitty humans should be shipped off to a farm (compassionate gulag?) to be re-trained, and if they are incapable of this, be removed from regular society so they don't bite anyone.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
57m ago
Been meaning to build my own VPN again for a while, had one many moons ago but it died with the ancient blade server a got for free a decade ago.
Trying to think through how to architect it, since I want something off-prem, preferably in a different country. I could just do it how I'd do at work and have something in like an hour, but then Amazon would rob me to the tune of $.09 per gigabyte. Digital Ocean would instead want $.01 per gigabyte, plus a flat $5 or whatever, but it still feels like I'm paying through the nose for bandwidth, and the markup is still crazy.
How does Amazon get away with charging like 1200x the commodity price of bandwidth of a data center provider like hurricane electric?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
If you're not a good trainer you shouldn't use a shock collar because you're inflicting pain without the corresponding training utility.
And you could be a good dog trainer if you just googled it, so you're essentially inflicting pain on something you have a duty of care to because you are lazy or stupid, which is why everyone is mad.
I use "you" to refer to Hassan/a hypothetical dog owner, not you personally.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
Yeah the brief rash of van/car attacks into city crowds concerned me a lot. I usually have a pretty rational assessment of gun crime/terrorism (I'm not involved in the drug trade, so my likelihood of being shot is very low, and terrorism is in general so rare it's not worth stressing over especially as I'm not American).
But the van attacks were genuinely scary to me. Canada may not have much gun violence, but we have a LOT of cars. And random acts of sidewalk violence with a car was all of a sudden a quite plausible threat in my life. I stopped wearing headphones when walking around as a result of this, which while I am no longer worried about getting van'd, I still do as the additional situational awareness is never a bad thing.
That's also what got me thinking about terrorism optimization, even the van attack guy in Toronto could have probably increased his kill count by a factor of 10x if he did it down Bay Street at 8:45am, versus somewhere way out of the core of Toronto where he actually did it.
Totally agree with this. And young men taking risks is, frankly, how society moves forwards with new discovery.
Right now, however, young men are being told to take zero risk, to artificially castrate themselves, and to enjoy doing it.
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