domain:philippelemoine.com
samiam
7m ago
I assure you, the women I am dating in those communities don’t have a strong opinion either way about the age of the Earth. These churches are not the kinds of churches to have lectures on things like “20 proofs the Earth is under 10,000 years old”.
If you’re making an argument that people still seriously believe the sun rotates around the earth, that kind of nonsense only exists on YouTube, and I’m pretty sure flat earth advocates are actually trolling us.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9m ago
Even for non-catholic groups, they were still Christian.
I think you substantially underestimate the intensity of Anti-Catholicism in 19th century Protestant nations. Nowadays the Protestant-Catholic conflict is pretty much dead outside of a couple of marginal weirdos, but that wasn't true 150 years ago. It obviously wasn't as spicy as it was in, say, the 17th century, but Anglo Protestants were liable to view Catholicism as backwards and politically threatening.
Also, uh, there's presently an incredible amount of animosity directed towards overwhelmingly Catholic Latino immigrants.
I think it's harder to assimilate now because people are showing up with basic values structures that are either vastly different than even the most modernized (not progressive) pop culture American values or, more commonly, without a functional values system at all.
I think the claim that contemporary immigrants are not assimilating is not really in evidence and (to the extent it's not just a gloss on general nativism) rests on an incorrect view of historical assimilation as being far less contentious amongst natives than it actually was. Intermarriage rates are high, language uptake is faster than ever, etc... I strongly suspect that most of the angst over immigrants not assimilating is not actually based on immigrants failing to assimilate but a) fearmongering from the subset of anti-immigrant types who really do just hate immigrants b) more importantly, proxy concerns over domestic culture wars. Like, Indian and Chinese immigrants assimilate superbly, but they mostly assimilate to the Blue Tribe.
The claim that many immigrants don't have a values system at all strikes me as absolutely wild - where are these deracinated sociopaths coming from?
People like to sneer at the white underclass because they're getting outcompeted by recent immigrants.
People like to sneer at the white underclass for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with immigration, but with respect to immigration they get sneered at because they've opted to use immigrants as a scapegoat for their own problems.
Same, brother, same.
Well, except I didn't opt out of credit cards because I saw people in my life abuse them; I opted out because I didn't like the complexity and I have low executive function and I am sure I would forget to pay off the balance if I actually got one; I have gone months without checking my bank account when I was depressive. But I still have managed to amass almost six figures worth of savings in my checking account just by being frugal over the years, which makes my finances better than all those people who apparently cannot afford a sudden $1000 expense. But, nope, landlady still wants to see a fucking credit score. I had to show her my bank statement to convince her to rent to us. If I ever decide to buy a new car, I'll just get a cashier's check and pay up front.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11m ago
For a somewhat lower stakes culture war topic:
The culture war aspect here is twofold:
- "The Department must remain vigilant in maintaining the grooming standards which underpin the warrior ethos" - SecDef Hegseth
- Waivers are primarily issued to black soldiers (who are more prone to shaving-related skin issues)
To the first, I have never been particularly impressed by the "warrior" posturing. Most proponents of it that I've met been underwhelming human beings (at best), but that might be forgivable if it cashed out in superior performance. However, if the performance of the Russian Army (or the IJA or...) is any indication, boring competence and logistical capability seems to heavily outweigh posturing about warrior spirit when it comes to combat performance. (These are not strictly in tension, but leaning into "warrior ethos" seems to go hand in hand with disdain for unglamorous organizational work).
It's also not really clear to me how beards compromise warrior ethos (especially since vets seem to love them), but I've also never been in the military, so it's possible there's a piece of experiential knowledge I am missing.
To the second: while I strongly doubt this is a scheme to purge the military of black soldiers, I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy. The traditional rationale is for gas masks, but that doesn't apply to special operations forces (who are presumably so high speed and low drag that they outrun the poison gas).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16m ago
I don’t think it would work unless you can seriously curtail the democracy and liberalism involved. The general conceit of democracy is that people can and should be making all of these decisions themselves. But it also means that those people will almost always vote for things that make them feel good rather than what is actually good for society. The People, it seems tend to think like teenagers when the votes are aggregated, and thus you really can’t say no to allowing stupid people to ruin their lives or no to allowing whatever dangerous, destructive, or socially harmful thing that the public has decided it really wants to do.
In the past, limitations of technology and communication prevented things from getting too out of control. In the past, you might not find out about an important bill until it had already passed. You thus couldn’t weigh in on it. If you did, you were limited to telephone calls (and you’d have to know the name of your congressman and how to find the switchboard number) or mail (which took longer and again required you to know who to address the letter to and to know the specific bill you want to pass or fail). Now you have instant access to the information and you have access to those government officials in your social media, and thus weighing in is easy.
In everyday life as well, I think limited options because of technology were a benefit. When you could only gamble in Vegas, in an actual casino, there were natural limits to how much gambling you could actually do. Unless you live there, you can only afford to go there a few times a year, for a week or two at a time, and then you had to leave. Now that the casino is in your pocket, blowing all of your money is easy. You don’t need pants, let alone to fly to another city. Anywhere you happen to be, if you have a phone with the app installed, that place is a casino. And it’s the same with other things like shopping. It’s much easier to overspend when everything on the planet is offered for sale in your pocket, any time and place you want to open Amazon.
I feel like really the biggest problem of modernity is the degree to which it allows people to engage in their Id with very few restraints and how good it is in removing both physical and social barriers that held those Id impulses in check. I think this is the thing most people have a hard time dealing with. Not that they cannot cognitively understand that some Vice is a bad idea. People know gambling, porn, overspending, overeating, and overuse of screens are bad. They just need a bit more of a natural limitation on getting access to those things. Personally I think even for high functioning people, having natural friction around doing those kinds of things is helpful. For lower functioning people, it’s a losing battle as they keep indulging in bad habits because it’s just so easy to do.
Tenaz
17m ago
You can read about it here.
- Perdition, not a kingdom of heaven, is for true monsters like Judas. People who would, with a perfect knowledge of who Christ is, choose to crucify him again.
- The Telestial kingdom is basically for bad people
- The Terrestrial kingdom is for good people who "weren't valiant" in their testimony of Jesus. "Blinded by the craftiness of men" does not refer to other Christians, though they may in large part end up in this kingdom.
- The Celestial kingdom is for people who repent and receive the necessary ordinances, such as baptism. Since we believe in proxy baptisms for the dead, this is a place anyone who exercises enough faith in Christ can end up. It's also for anyone who dies before accountability (due to age or mental capacity)
- Within the Celestial kingdom, the highest division is called Exaltation, and is limited to those who keep the "new and everlasting covenant", meaning they make and adhere to all of God's covenants. The last necessary covenant is the marriage sealing, which we also do by proxy, so anyone can end up here too.
Nobody is getting sorted into a kingdom of heaven based solely on their religion. It's all about which covenants you've made with God, or in other words, how high of a law you are prepared to keep. I've elaborated on that a bit here.
BahRamYou
20m ago
Sure, I'm not suggesting that anyone could literally look across the Atlantic and see something directly. Just that humans were always fascinated by the idea of unknown land masses, and were using some pretty extreme methods to try to find it.
I guess what I was thinking for Columbus was that he could compare the wind and currents of the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Eastern Atlantic (and maybe some vague rumors about the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans). It's enough to see that the larger bodies have stronger winds and currents. Everyone knew to stay close to shore in the Atlantic because once you go out there the storms are rough. But he might have had some instinctual understanding as a sailor like "hmm, this is rough but it's not that much rougher than the Mediterranean. if this was really a 20,000 foot nonstop Ocean all the way to East Asia, the storms would be much worse." or even measuring the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar and seeing how it seems to loop in the central Atlantic, in a much tighter loop than you'd get if it was all one big ocean.
Lizzardspawn
24m ago
Credit cards are moronic. Debit cards are great. If you have to put small ticket item on credit, it is good to have some friction in the system to think twice whether it is a good idea.
pigeonburger
29m ago
This means I need a way to remotely see the temperature and switch the heaters on until the temperature reaches 20C
Do you? I imagine the space heaters have a thermostat that can already do this task with no input from you, don't they?
I get the instinct to want to DIY it to get a feeling that I actually own my shit, I tend to do the same. But if you're not planning to expand this into a bigger system, in the end, if your smart plugs are really just smart "on-off" switches, you're probably overthinking the data leak aspect.
It's not like you're putting cameras there. Yet. Which you probably will eventually.
And, indeed, when the empirical evidence made it clear certain creeds of classic Christianity are false
And yet you’re insistent on dating women who are part of communities dedicated to those principles, and considering yourself a part of them.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
29m ago
I've been increasingly wondering at what point you have an IQ low enough, that you develop paranoid delusions in response to a society you can't possibly comprehend. If you've ever interacted with a particularly stupid person, many of them have this obnoxious personality trait of treating everything they don't understand like a personal attack.
I wonder at what point the IQ required to participate in society hits such a threshold that maladaptive mental illness in response to it increases.
I especially wonder at what point the various dark patterns of our society cause this to happen to me.
BahRamYou
35m ago
You know, before reading your comment I had the impression that Leif Erikson had only been there briefly and then his trip was completely forgotten. But apparently there were more records than I thought. Reading his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson#Legacy
I found this:
Knowledge of the Vinland journeys spread around medieval Europe, although to what extent is unclear; writers made mention of remote lands to the west, and notably the medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen directly mentions Vinland (c. 1075) based upon reports from the Danes.[note 2] It has been suggested that the knowledge of Vinland might have been maintained in European seaports in the 15th century, and that Christopher Columbus, who claimed in a letter to have visited Iceland in 1477, could have heard stories of it
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
35m ago
Mine doesn't do so by default.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
41m ago
Well, so far as heat/ammo problems, I think I just need to commit to be ER LLaser sniper with lots of double heat sinks.
As for the others, who knows. One thing I did notice was that it appeared my mouse was only registering inputs sporadically. My working theory was that a click only registered if it occurred over the span of a frame. I'd noticed it in other games, but it finally annoyed me enough to start trying shit. So I uninstalled the Logitech Mouseware drivers I put on the system to get the mousewheel to work, and it went away. I'm curious if that had anything to do with the keyboard problems too, but we'll find out.
Old hardware, amiright?
MW2 will always have a special place in my heart. Something about the ambient music, the flat shaded graphics, and the utterly alien and somewhat abstract level design felt like a perfect encapsulation of how terrifyingly other the Clans are.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
43m ago
More content like this please.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
46m ago
You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees
Most banks will let you overdraw your account.
Tenaz
49m ago
We don't believe the material universe predates God. They (and all other spirits, including us) are all eternal and have been around forever. I agree that we don't believe God is the source of being, or the uncaused cause, at least not in the sense creedal Christians do.
They start draining Tidus' ocean! They build titanic sea-walls to keep the water out, expanding their islands to hitherto-unprecedented sizes, capable of supporting unbelievable numbers of souls on these great new plains, haunted as they are by the threat of breakdown in wall-maintenance-capability (honestly English I must insist that this should be but one word).
This hit hard, as a Dutchman.
I wonder, and sincerely doubt, if those who come after us will manage to keep up the sea walls, not necessarily in technological ability but in social ability. I saw Louisiana drown. It doesn't take much.
I remember people here being like: pish posh, should've maintained the levees. Yes, you should've maintained the levees. But that's the entire crux of the matter. You need to have a society that manages to do that, and keeps managing to do that, and not (for example) steal all the dike maintenance money to benefit yourself in the short term. And if you couldn't do it then, what's to say we'll (or that those will succeed us will) do that 30-40 years from now.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
50m ago
I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just that we’re used to it and it’s been run through the commercial food chain much more so than other foods. If I want Mongolian cuisine, chances are im looking for a mom a pop restaurant, or buying the ingredients to make it myself. If I want American food, I can go get McDonald’s hamburgers and fries that are made at an industrial scale out of cheap, shitty ingredients and made with indifference by a teenager with an attitude. That’s not a fair comparison, you’d have to actually compare a top quality hamburger made in a mom and pop restaurant from high quality ingredients to the same in a Mongolian restaurant. I think other than the familiar flavor profile from the burger, they’re probably about the same.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
51m ago
You have a link to that? One of my coworkers will definitely get a kick out of it.
Shit, I’d prefer an AR15 to my bolt-actions in that case.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
54m ago
Uh, not really.
Political support for gun ownership is inversely proportional to distance from an urban center. It’s more a rural/redneck/rugged-individualist signal.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
57m ago
I mean, sure, technically you aren't wrong.
But even with everything spelled out for them, few people appreciate the reality distorting effects of 30% interest. They don't appreciate how quickly it is to get in trouble, or how slow it is to get out. They either never learned, or never really appreciated the rule of 72. They never had pointed out to them that their credit card debt doubles every 2-3 years, while a gold standard S&P500 index fund earning the historical average of 10% takes 7 years to double. They have no grasp of the fact that everything they put on a credit card that is accruing interest is eating up 2.5x more of their precious life than the equivalent amount saved in an S&P500 index fund gives them back. Closer to 10x more than a run of the mill savings account.
Math, and especially interest rates, aren't real to most people. Even explained to them, it doesn't translate into years of their life like it should. It was certainly never taught to me that way, nor I suspect to you. It was only in retrospect, in my 30's, looking at my nest egg thinking "This represents 10 years of my life" did these realizations hit.
Now imagine you never have a nest egg.
Grant_us_eyes
57m ago
There was a video on twitter recently of a PoV of someone having to shoot a charging boar utilizing a bolt-action rifle.
I couldn't help but stare at the set of circumstance and think to myself, 'In that situation, I really, REALLY would prefer a PTR-91. Or AR-10.'
Which are semi-auto magazine rifles chambered in 308. Which is a typical hunting round.
And boars have become an endemic invasive species in America as of late.
That aside... I know enough to say that gun culture overall in the US has undergone a quiet, seismic shift who's origins can date all the way back to the initial attempt at a gun ban in the 1920s, threading through the Firearms Owners Protection Act in 1986, Clinton's Assault Weapons' Ban in the 90s, up until today, where you've had a steady increase in constitutional concealed carry.
It's around this point I could probably fish around for how holders of CCWs having less crime rates than police officer, the twisted and uncertain number of defensive gun uses and so on and so forth... but there's still a very American cultural thread that basically boils down to, when the Government gets a bee in thier bonnet and tells thier citizens 'No', there's an instinctive reaction of 'Fuck you, now I want it MORE'.
As a beard enthusiast, I can assure you they get in the way and are suboptimal. I'm typing this between sets of military presses, and my fucking beard keeps getting caught in my grip between reps. To say nothing of the care I have to take when I'm in the wood shop around heavy machinery. If my daughter didn't break down in tears (and my wife grumbles a good bit too) I'd be at least attempting a clean shaven look these days.
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